Episode 162: The Olympics, Part 2

Yes.

Thank you so much.

We're going to have to cut all of the bit where you're talking about legal stuff.

It's not, hey, whoa, that's legally a gray area.

You guys are, I don't know what you're talking about.

I don't know what you're talking about.

As this podcast is preeminent legal expert, please ignore the fact that Nova literally went to law school.

Let's not oversell that.

I saw a very, very funny comment.

I don't remember where it was, if it was in the YouTube comments or if someone just messaged it to me, but they're like,

like two professionally qualified engineers and an almost lawyer.

And I'm like, I dropped out.

I'm not, that's not a thing that

you can't make me out to be as qualified as these two.

You know, I'm here for

James not an engineer.

No, and I have to tell people that every time.

They're like, oh, you're an engineer.

I'm like, absolutely the fuck not.

I majored in economics, which is not real.

Yeah.

Dismal science.

Dismal science.

Yeah.

The dismal science.

It's not even, it's not even.

dismal's right.

Science is pushing it a little bit.

Gambling for white dudes.

Yeah.

I just, I was thinking about the categorization of sciences, right?

Economics, dismal science, boxing, sweet science, Marxism-Leninism, immortal science.

What else we got?

I think that's it, right?

That's all of them.

That's just all the ones you need.

I studied civil engineering, but my concentration in my senior year was in construction management, you know, which is the easy one.

Yeah.

Civil engineering, we need to we need to know that about you.

We need to name it.

We need it to be a the blank science, you know, like

the concrete one.

The lethal science.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Don't fuck this up, kids.

Um, Madam X, what did you major in?

If you're willing to reveal that, well, I was majoring in

chemical engineering and chemistry until I realized that if you take two years off from doing calculus between high school and like sophomore junior year of college, it comes back to bite you in the ass.

And then I switched my major to German.

Oh, cool.

Roz's dad majored in Russian.

Russian, yes.

Your dad was a spy.

So I should also say,

I do think about going back to law school sometime, but right now, I'm doing, still doing in the last year of a criminology degree, the cop science.

I have have a friend

who I will not name publicly, who has a criminology degree.

And every time he brings it up, he's just like, why did I have to be a nice fucking liberal who thought I could reform this goddamn office system?

I was like, oh, buddy.

That's why I started doing the criminology degree, as you may remember the sort of the discourse when I became like Twitter protagonist of the day or antagonist of the day, because I was like, having a slightly manic episode and I was like, I should be a cop.

I could be the only good one.

Well, part of the reason why I ended up doing a criminology degree was like, if I can't excise this feeling by getting yelled at, which I couldn't, none of that worked,

then surely like learning more about it, learning like the theory of like, you know, penology and like abolitionism and all this, that's going to change my mind.

I'm not going to want to be a cop anymore.

And two years in, no fucking change?

I don't know.

I think criminology would be better if they taught you how to do crime.

Yeah.

I mean, they kind of do, to be honest like basically the answer is that like a huge amount of crime is legal and we just kind of like the stuff that we call crime and categorize as crime is a very narrow subsection of all the harms and even all the textual crimes that occur in order to create and maintain a social underclass um so you know

that i mean that tracks that god that sounds grim it's called paradigm i was gonna say depressing i i was hoping i could

i could take bank robbing 101 and do like,

you know, sort of

Oceans 11 as a final body.

You would be the shittiest bank robber in the whole world.

There's some interesting

shittiest bank robber in the whole world because I will have taken bank robbing 101.

Roz, you could get research funding to interview bank robbers about how to rob banks.

You could fully do that.

You know what they call the guy who graduates bank robbing school with the lowest grades?

The Calva bank robbery.

The Calva bank robber in jail?

Look to your left.

Look to your right.

One of you will not graduate bank robbery school.

A bunch of guys in striped shirts with huge sacks with dollar signs on them.

I don't know.

Again, I have an economics degree, which is basically learning how to rob poor people, I guess.

Yeah, one of those things that's like a societal harm and sometimes a societal crime that just isn't a crime a lot of the time.

Yeah, you're correct.

It's interesting because criminology as a discipline might be dying.

Like there's a kind of not insubstantial movement to kind of reconceptualize it as something called zemiology, which would be like the study of harm.

That sounds fascinating.

Do you have any, if, if you, if, sorry for, for...

diverting here.

Do you have any like reading on that?

Because I want to check that out.

I will just straight up copy and paste over a reading list for you if you want.

Thanks, Nova.

Yeah, you're so welcome.

I learn a lot on this show because I have to.

Oh, I may have a reading assignment for y'all for the next episode.

Oh, not more reading.

I just got done with one reading list.

We can call it an optional reading assignment.

Okay, that's fine.

All right, you guys want to talk about this woman who looks frightening to me?

Hello.

So I'm welcome to

whiler's your problem podcast it's a podcast about engineering disasters with slides i'm justin rozniak i'm the person who's talking right now my pronouns are he and him okay go i'm november callie i'm the person who's talking now my pronouns are she and her yay liam yay liam hi i'm liam mcanderson my pronouns are he and him i'm the person who's talking right now i finally remembered to say that It's been 160 plus episodes, and I just remembered to say it.

And we have a returning guest.

You know her.

You love her.

The one and only named Redacted.

Yes, I'm a feral goose in the body of a human waiting for my time as a real person.

My pronouns are DLC that will be released around the time that we get Half-Life 3 out.

If you're thinking of that you know me and that you want to come up to me and talk to me about this or talk about it with my parents, with my boss, anything like that that you know from my real life, let's not do that.

Also,

a shout out to the person in the comments from the fashion episode that I was on earlier who was asking why I sound so exhausted.

It's because I am.

I can't get any good sleep these days because of woke.

That makes sense, actually,

when you phrase it that way.

That does track.

Hang on, I need to keep going.

I need need to look for a micro-USB cable because I have a wife who's very needy.

And I found one.

I am the undefeated cable champion of the world.

Incredible.

I am so fucking good.

Just

the tempo of your domestic life alone is incredible.

I am so fucking good at finding cables that I definitely didn't forget about.

Shut up.

You're going to have to go buy yourself

a mug now that says world's greatest husband on it.

No, tell her to buy me water.

Oh, that's a good point.

Yeah, Corinne, go buy Liam a mug that says World's Greatest.

That's just me.

She's dead.

What if she listens to the episode?

Oh, she killed him.

She killed him.

He's dead.

Wow.

R.I.P.

Liam.

World's deadest husband.

Yeah.

Like the beginning of an action movie.

You get like a couple of shots of him laughing and like.

What the hell was that USB cable plugged into?

Well, I found one.

It just happened to be the cable that goes directly to all the audio devices.

Yeah, it's running from my microphone to my mixer.

I'm probably not going to need it.

Yeah, you're just like trying to, you're trying to like,

you know, quickly swap the cable between

the mixer and whatever Corinne needs it for.

Just like over.

She's also, she's starting a competing podcast.

It's in a sort of Looney Tunes fashion.

They've the guy.

Oh, God, what's the other guy who does like the stuff that's kind of like us plainly difficult, maybe?

That guy is like, I don't actually watch any of the content.

So I don't know if it's good or not, but like, yeah, that guy's like head-hunted Grin.

Uh-oh.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, sometimes I see his videos and I'm like, wait, didn't we just do something like that?

And then other times, other times I do a video or we do a video that's similar to something he put out a few days earlier.

And it's like, oh, no one's stealing each other's content here, but we could pretend and get mad at each other.

Yeah, that's true.

We could do like a stage run.

I'm not trying to get this one.

I mean, the thing is, I've been trying to avoid the content, not because I dislike the guy or anything like that, but because like the less, yes, the less the less I know about it, the like it's like it's if it's firewalled off, it's impossible for me to like steal it unintentionally.

I actually do the same thing.

Yeah, this is gonna be a mess for Devin to edit.

Sorry, Devin.

I disconnected my mic and a bunch of other shit while I was looking for a USB cable for my wife you just you just like saw cable and like a like a bird or a dog you just kind of retreat

listen here's the thing right so my wife makes fun of me a lot as she should as she's right she's right to

marriage is yeah however when it's do you have a micro usb cable by any chance because that's what correct sounds like I uh I do.

I just have to upset my very delicate mess of wires.

My internal cable management, Nova, is much better than yours.

My external cable management could make grown men cry.

Thank you for providing me with the opportunity to actually use my German degree for the first time in a very long time.

There's a fantastic German word for a mess of wires and cords, you know, up under your desk, and that is kabelzalot, cable salad.

It's cable salad.

Okay,

what you see on the screen in front of you are a variety of images related to the Olympics.

Except they legally can't be.

So if you look closely, you'll notice

we have a leotard from a company called Motionware.

We've got some products from Oriental Trading Company, and we've got an ad for hotel tickets from a site called 14SB.com.

and all of them are very distinctly avoiding actually using the olympic rings or mentioning the olympic games by name because they can't because the olympics are kind of a dick about their intellectual property so just to keep our asses out of hot water nothing that we're doing in here is claiming to represent the um the views of the Olympic organization or be in any way

associated with them.

And if you happen to know me, happen to know where I work, this also does not in any way represent the views of my employer.

I am speaking off the clock out of my own opinions.

The Australian sketch comedy group Auntie Donna had the funniest run on this where they just called it the Limpics and got away with that.

That's magnificent.

All right.

We will be referring to it as the Olympics.

We will be in brazen.

Yeah, Olympics.

The Olympics.

The Olympics.

I was going to say we do brazen violations of copyright but yeah we'll do your thing

well it's not copyright it can't be copyrighted because uh the logo is to considered too simple it's just geometric shapes and you know for the um for the actual logos for each host site there's sometimes some text included but like london 2012 lisa simpson sucking a guy off yeah yeah yeah what the what

you can remember that yeah that is what it looks like devin can you can you just flash up London 2012?

It looks like Lisa Simpson sucks your guy off.

What do you want me to tell you?

Oh, it does.

Oh, that's a good thing.

Please tell me we're going to talk about the fucking mascots, right?

Wenlock and Mandeville?

Because

I don't have that in here, but

we can put it in.

It's fine.

I'm just going to kind of make people aware of the fact that Olympic Games usually have like the city, the year, usually has a a mascot and that mascot is usually terrifying why do they only have one i saw a video about how the one for paris looks like a clitoris yeah

the frisian caps yeah yeah yeah which absolutely look like two clitorises yeah you should you should just like i don't know instead of like making up a new logo they a new mascot they should just go with pikachu or something like i don't i don't just

keep using misha the 1980 moscow olympics bear for every olympic subsequently it's the best one Anyway, so they can't copyright it, but they can trademark it, and they come very hard after people who misappropriate their trademarks.

So one thing we do have to say before we get started here is that we are, when we mention the Olympics, we're doing it as commentary on them.

We are not trying to act as a representative.

We are not trying to put ourselves out as some kind of officially Olympic-sponsored production.

That's not what they're doing.

Parody, parody, parody, parody.

This is parody.

Redaction is for transformative use.

As much as we mentioned on the previous episode that we'd love to be on the Olympic committee, we are not.

Can you fucking imagine?

Hang out with guys called Dick Pound and like Tokyo Sexwell.

Yeah.

Basically.

But before we talk more about the Olympics, we have to do the goddamn news.

Oh, boy.

Now,

I don't know

how careful you want me to be.

Because the thing is, knock yourself out, November.

It's like 11-30 your time on the bottom.

I don't often say this, but I feel grateful and lucky to be in the United Kingdom.

Because there's a trade-off, right?

Like, you guys can say whatever you want about beloved children's author J.K.

Rowling, who I think is a lovely woman.

But, like, you guys can't say shit about the fact that some guy, some chud,

took a shot at Donald Trump and missed it.

Missed.

One shot.

He took like eight shots.

He went Brawny James.

Yeah, no, he did extremely poorly.

This was a poor show.

You know, for what could have potentially been the funniest day in American political history, ruined by poor marksmanship.

You know, again,

I'm trying to avoid breaking U.S.

code 18875 or 115 here.

I don't know that you will is the thing.

Like, this is the thing.

This is the most likely news segment to get you, like, door knocked by the Secret Service.

I mean,

and if you do, like,

those guys got a lot on their plate right now.

They got, like, a huge backlog of jokes about assassinating the president.

Year and a half, 18 months' time.

We're finally, like, you know, we're recording Shinobi.

A knock on the door comes in.

Like,

here's the thing, right?

I think that ultimately they're going to have to go through a hiring spree like the census does every 10 years.

Okay, I mean, here's my question, right?

So, registered Republican, demolition ranch t-shirt.

I don't purport to know what goes on in any person's particular head just based on their external appearance, but I think we can make some educated guesses here.

Justin, Justin?

I think I just heard your door.

Is your door?

FBI, open up!

Oh shit!

Jesus Christ!

Remove quick.

All those new violence

dropped so much.

The moot's not mine.

No, officer, it's not mine.

I'm going to get a

text with my wife in a second.

Anyways, so what I'm asking is, how many times do you think, you know, this guy in all of his infinite wisdom made a post where he called somebody on the left some variation of, oh, this pussy who wouldn't know

which end of the gun to point at the target?

I mean, honestly.

And then you go out and you end it like this.

There was a detail that really struck me as they're looking into this guy and who he is and what his deal is, that he got rejected from his high school's rifle team for being like so bad of a a shot that it was no for being too bad of a shot that it was dangerous oh my god

jesus

oh

man and the thing is the thing is right

if this guy had killed trump he would have like trump first of all would have experienced the like most american death of all time right um

But also, like, imagine being that kid, right?

The intrusive thoughts win.

You're going to fucking, like, do the thing.

you're gonna violate a bunch of like us codes um and you actually hit the guy and kill him right

even like in the moment before the secret service kill you how do you even process that you know well he's not tiger woods fist pump my my yeah my understanding fortnite dance he was a zoom born 2003 it's why he fucking missed all he knew was fortnite build mode It's like, oh god, I'm going to make a really risque joke here, and I feel bad about it, but you remember the Virginia Tech shooter killed like 33 people.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And they were like, it was because of Counter-Strike, and he used something like a thousand rounds of ammunition to do it.

And it's like, if he had done Counter-Strike, he would have understood, he wouldn't have needed a thousand rounds.

If this kid had been into Tarkov or something, different headlines completely.

You wouldn't be worrying about this guy's ear or whatever.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like

you want to be the Texas A ⁇ M shooter, not the Virginia Tech shooter.

University of Virginia,

no, just Texas.

Oh, just excuse me.

He did technically do a mass shooting because he killed like two audience members.

And

one of those guys is getting the kind of like heroic edit where they're like, oh, this guy who's like a volunteer fire chief, whatever.

But he had Twitter, right?

And you could look at his Twitter.

I'm not going to like that.

Whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like one of his last posts before he got fucking shot was

about Gaza.

where he was like, oh, they'll get over it like Japan did.

And then he got killed by one of his own guys.

So I don't know what to tell you.

America's the greatest country in the world.

Yeah.

And like the Biden campaign has like fucked up their response to this so badly.

And then so has Trump, weirdly.

Yeah.

Trump's decided to take on certified y'all star JD Vance as his vice president.

Don't say those words to me.

Just like a guy everyone hates.

And this is the thing, right?

Like I keep seeing it seven twitters that these are the only two guys who could lose to each other.

Like you change any variable here, and like the result becomes immediately obvious.

Um, but like, everything is maintained in this weird stasis of fuckery, um, where it's like no one learned anything from this.

There's nothing really to be said from it, uh, other than just, wow, this was a moment in history.

It happened, it's crazy that that happened.

Uh,

and you know, what can you say?

He led an amazing life.

Um,

I mean, you know, the worst case scenario did not occur, which is where Trump gets a cool eye patch afterwards.

Yeah, I mean, he got to, like, kind of get up on stage and look cool for a bit afterwards, right?

And everyone was like shitting their pants about how, like, oh, the election's over, you know, because this is the like coolest image ever taken.

And I'm like, I, I, I sympathize with the, with the fear, right?

I think I was there too.

But, like,

then when we found out, oh, it's just some guy who looks like one of the kind of like redneck characters from Preacher and is probably like a groper.

It just doesn't really have any like political valence to it.

Yeah, I mean, there's not a lot of data to suggest how the assassination bump works.

I think the main thing that's going to benefit Trump is that Biden doesn't have a brain.

True.

He came out to say that as Americans, we settle our differences at the battle box.

We can do that.

Andrew, the battle box.

Yeah, shit.

All right.

I'm down for that.

I'm always down for battle box.

It sounds like a better system, to be honest.

Motto and motto.

Yeah.

Dude, let's go, man.

But yeah, no, I.

Choose your weapon.

I thought for a while that, like, the worst possible outcome was somebody attempts to assassinate Trump and like fails.

But that was predicated on the idea that it would be like, I don't know, some kind of liberal crime squad or like worse than actual leftists.

The liberal driller.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like a guy who like listens to Keith Olverman too much and is like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, like, lock in and kill the president.

Right.

Um,

but, like, no,

instead, it just turned out it was something weirder and more American than that.

It was some guy.

Like, like many assassins, just a crank.

Yeah, for real.

And, like, I, I, I don't know what to make of that.

I just, I'm glad that he wasn't like, mostly glad he wasn't trans, but like,

you know, glad he wasn't fucking Antifa or whatever the fuck.

And

I don't know what ramifications this is going to have.

Yeah, it's very confusing.

Weird is how he walks.

You remember after Columbine, how all of the attention from that being plastered on every news channel 24-7 for like months straight led to a bunch of people doing

actual copycat shootings and since then with school shootings they've had a policy of like they don't really put out a lot of information about the guy who did it because they don't want people to think they can get famous by doing that

and they're not doing that kind of prudence right now oh so you think like assassination is back in a big way as like a trend well I mean we we have now had two major political assassinations and or attempts in the space of when did Abe get assassinated like two years ago that guy knew his business though.

Like, I think this is the thing, right, that really stunned me about this is the United States of America, the most guns country in the world.

Very, very easy to get a gun.

Crucially, very, very easy to practice with a gun.

Find a lot of, like, insane YouTubers who this guy was clearly already watching who will teach you how to zero the sight on a gun.

And

whereas this Tetsuya Yamagami, the Japanese guy, built his shit out of electrical parts and like plumbing pipes

and absolutely vanished Shinzo Abe and his legacy from the face of the earth.

And I guess at that point, you just have to say that they wanted it more, you know?

Yeah, I was about to say.

Yeah, a bunch of the Eagles in the Super Bowl fit to tail.

You know,

you can't be successful in these things unless your motive is pure of heart.

Like,

you know, screwing with the movie.

Yeah, exactly.

Or impressing Jody Foster.

Or.

Who amongst us?

Well, no, because impressing Jody Foster is an impure motive because Reagan lived.

Yeah, because Reagan lived.

I feel so bad for laughing at this.

Well, I mean, the thing is, you can tell that no one has any clue how to spin this on the right, because now that it's not a woke, soy, gay, BLM, Antifa member,

the thing that they're going in on is the Secret Service, a woke, soy, gay, BLM Antifa members.

No, well, actually, what I've seen seen is just we shouldn't allow women to be on the Secret Service.

Come over here and I'll punch you in the face.

I mean, it does seem like the Secret Service dropped the ball in a big way on this one.

Not just the Secret Service, but local cops.

The thing that the other thing that came out was like...

The butler PD did you?

Yeah,

the Butler PD.

Because this guy was outside the Secret Service perimeter, just on a roof.

Oh, hang on.

Can I read y'all a Tumblr post?

It's going to take me a moment to find this.

But while you do, this local cop like climbed up a ladder to check the roof and the guy pointed a gun at him and the guy and the cop in that moment was like in absolute like blue wall solidarity with like every cop in uvalde and was like okay well don't need this job anyway

sort of slide back down the ladder and that's what allowed us like homer simpson yeah and that's that's what allowed i mean in fairness that's maybe the like more relatable to be like, I will not give up my life for Donald Trump.

But like,

still, though, this is what allowed us to see Donald Trump get the Claire's ear piercing.

He's got the.

I guess it's, it went through the top of the ear, so technically it's an industrial, I guess.

He put like a cool bar in there.

He's got the cool, he's got the cool scars like the German officers like to give each other.

Oh,

is it called a schmiss?

Yeah, I think that's just blood, though.

I don't think that's an actual cut.

I think that's just like bits of his ear that have been like thrown for.

The thing is, he didn't actually get shot.

It was

the teleprompter.

I mean, he got shot with a teleprompter or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's teleprompter glass just hit him in the dark.

The bullet grazed his ear.

No.

Well, he said that it did, but like, apparently, the Secret Service think that it was the teleprompter.

We'll have to wait for the slow-motion replay.

All right, found it.

Oh, God.

Not the slow-mo replay, the Tumblr post.

All right.

So, um, Tumblr post from user bipolarist.

Okay, but for real, why is Trump coming to my town to speak directly outside where I work?

You're literally in the farmland area of town.

Um, comments from various people in the replies, we have an opportunity here.

You should plant a bomb.

You have the opportunity to do something great.

Bipolarist response to this, I'm going to end up on a watch list.

Bipolarist next reblog.

You're never going to believe this.

They were on top of my office.

Of course.

So

the attempt to assassinate the once-in-future president went poorly.

I think he's still going to win.

I don't know if it's going to be because of this.

Yeah, I don't think this has had a super meaningful effect.

I think the main issue is that Biden doesn't have a brain.

It's going to complete the sort of fall of the Secret Service, which is going to be cool.

I want to do an episode about that soon.

Yeah, we're going to do the open search.

Time to do that.

Time to do some counterfeiting.

Yes, ma'am.

The last guy who tried to kill Trump was British.

He was like this

Robot Wars autism guy.

What?

He tried to.

His plan, I shit you not his plan was to like grab a cop's gun.

Um, oh, I remember this, yeah, it didn't work out for him.

I don't know why you wouldn't use your Robot Wars robot

if Trump got like flipped off the stage.

If if you ran hypnodisc into Trump, I think that that would swing the election for Biden pretty strongly.

In other news,

oh boy,

Oh boy.

Oh boy.

So

what you don't currently see in front of you is a power outage map.

We had a hurricane hit Houston,

second one in less than a decade that's, you know, significant.

So what happened was our wonderful electricity provider in Houston, Center Point,

had some major issues start happening with their system after the Duray show that we had back in, I think it was May,

and their outage map went completely offline.

So a real like map and territory situation with the outage map, you know?

Yes.

They were not able to provide any outage information to any customers for several days after the hurricane blew in.

And until they finally got an alternate solution going

sometime on late Tuesday, if I remember correctly,

what they were doing was people in Houston were using the Whataburger app to figure out what areas did and didn't have power.

Because if the Whataburger is closed, there's no power.

And if the What's Open, there is.

Once again, resetting to zero the number of minutes since obsessively thinking about the pronunciation of Whataburger in the Brock Hampton song Sweet.

This is.

Well, you hear about Whater all the time, but never about Dartburger.

Is there some sort of like text and equivalent of the California In-N-Out Sonic situation where it's like...

I actually like the smaller local chain because I'm more authentic.

I mean, Whataburger is the only good fast food burger out there.

Oh,

I don't know about that.

What's your suggested alternative?

Well, I can't have five guys anymore because my wife is allergic to peanuts, Rod, so I get nothing.

Oh, that's a good point.

Five guys isn't fast food, five guys is sit-down.

Yeah, five guys does usually take a pretty long time.

Like, there's no five guys with a drive-through.

Drive guys.

Drive guys.

Buck, buck, buck, buck.

I've got the rebrand for you right there.

I will take my payment immediately.

You can't find the five guys.

Do you have a Smash Burger?

Like, is Smash Burger like

a piece with final?

The last time I went to a Smash Burger, I saw someone cough directly onto the griddle and then throw my burger on top of that.

So I was like,

I like the loaded fries.

This is why I weigh 900,000 pounds.

Shake Shack's too expensive for what do you get?

We don't have Shake Shack.

The thing is, Glasgow, Glasgow, because we eat so many fried foods and we're so unhealthy and have like a 20-year lower life expectancy than the rest of the UK.

We get American chains and Canadian chains.

We got Tim Hortons before London.

We get chains before, we got Wingstop before anywhere else, and we just got our first Popeyes.

So I'm kind of, I'm, I'm hopeful for burgers also.

You gotta get a smoke spoutinery.

Yeah.

So the thing about Texas is that, like, and those of y'all who live here will know this,

for

whatever reason, you know, because we are

the state where the state government is like, we should not exist and we're actually going to go ahead and just blow up everything about ourselves that would allow ourselves to be effective in any way.

We wind up

in

some sort of kind of

I don't know whether to call it a dystopian nightmare or the rare example of what conservatives think the private industry doing things actually working would look like

in that you know if you think back to the pandemic or the freeze and you'll remember that HEB were kind of the only ones who had their shit together and were doing a better job of

local grocery chain

stands for Howard Earl Butt anyway

I got my groceries in my HSTS very good very good grocery store I understand

Yes, very much so.

But they were kind of the only ones who had their shit together at all, much more so than the state government, and were doing a much better job with like communicating to the public about preparedness, about availability.

And so my kind of running joke has become that the closest thing we have to a real government in this state is the Howard Earl Butts Grocery Emporium.

I mean, and

this is also a symptom of like how how they, you know, ultra-privatize the electricity grid in Texas

to the point where it's on like a separate interconnected grid than the East Coast and the West Coast, except for the Gulf Coast oil refineries that actually need reliable electricity.

No, because Houston is where a lot of the Gulf Coast oil refineries are.

The areas that

that are part of the interconnection is I think there's a bit towards Beaumont and then kind of of the western portion of the state on the other side of the mountains.

And maybe the panhandle too, but I don't have a map in front of me.

But the other thing that I was working on, the last time this happened, you know, which was I think when it, when, when it snowed, the, the, um,

you know,

they blamed renewable woke energy for causing the problem.

Which is like.

Oh, do you know how many people I've had the argument with about like, it's not that the wind turbines froze.

there are wind turbines in Antarctica that operate without issue all of the time it's that

all of the sources of power generation were not properly winterized because they're not required to be winterized and capitalism will do anything to make a quick buck if they are not my brother in Christ you deregulated the power industry

and they installed renewables

which obviously again aren't the problem but if they were the problem, it would be your fault.

It's because of woke.

Yeah, no, it's because of woke.

It's because of woke deregulation,

which I assume is going to be

the next

battleground.

Deregulation is going to become woke.

Oh, yeah, battle box.

JD Vance is 5'7, and I find that kind of embarrassing.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

That's the same height as me.

That's hilarious.

And me, yeah.

Actually,

now,

thanks to Trip Torellin, he's an inch taller than me.

I so I saw the picture that uh KGB posted uh adapts of your live shows and my first oh fuck, yeah, let me plug those

Jesus Christ.

Let me plug those.

I've been going absolutely insane about them.

Um, yeah, you're now a member of the KGB, absolutely, and as a member of the Committee for State Security, I should also say that the podcast Kill James Bond has three live shows in London, August 9th, 10th, and 11th.

Um, and we're going to watch the Johnny English film.

So if you go to killjamesbond.com/slash live, you can get tickets.

We're selling tickets to the live streams as well.

So you can watch those, even if you can't make it to London.

Please, God, buy tickets.

I am panicking about this.

Yes, please buy tickets for

tickets.

But also, if you do go to the show, say hi to her for us and then laugh at her for being so short.

I saw that picture and I was like, damn, Nova's short.

I felt real bad, but I was like, oh, she's tiny.

Yeah,

I'm like pocket size, you know?

Yeah.

Also, Devin is 11 feet tall somehow.

Oh, yeah.

Devin and Abby are huge.

They're giants, and I'm like slightly under average height.

Brutal.

All right.

Moving it along.

Yes.

So Nova can go to bed.

That was the goddamn news.

Yep.

I mean, rise like a fiscal message.

First, we must ask ourselves, what are the Olympics?

Bad.

They're bad.

Sort of Nazi projects of sports washing

not initially but yeah very very quickly very quickly occurred and and let me tell you some of the people involved were open nazis or proto-nazis because fascism predates the nazis i do want to also note while i'm sort of monopolizing the the microphone that the guy who first introduced the idea of sex testing into olympic sport or indeed sport generally was a german nazi who ended the letter where he asked the ioc to do it with heil hitler so guess Guess what we get to talk about in episode three

at length?

So,

anyway, this is not episode three.

This is episode two.

Last time we spoke predominantly about

last time we spoke predominantly about how the process of planning and preparing for the Olympics leads often to bad outcomes for the host cities.

This week, we are going to be talking about the actual Olympics themselves.

And a lot, but not all of our focus will be on how that affects the

people who attend the Olympics and how they kind of get shortchanged, the spectators actually both watching from at home and attending in person.

So let's go ahead and talk really quickly about a little bit of the history behind the Olympics and how we got to the situation we're in today with them.

Next slide.

So the Olympics began as

an ancient Greek competition.

There were actually four original Pan-Hellenic games.

They were kind of on a quadrennial cycle, so you would have a different one each year, the Olympics, the Pythian Games, the Nemean Games, and the Isthmian Games, and those are all just named after locations in Greece.

Each one of these honored a specific god.

They were held at religious sites in those cities

that were

relevant to the god that they were meant to honor.

The Olympics predated the other threes by about 200 years as best we know and ran from around 776 BC to 393 AD.

It consisted of athletic contests such as running races, predominantly the stadion, but there were also other distances, wrestling, boxing, pancration, which is also a martial art, pentathlon, which consisted of wrestling, stadion, long jump, discus, and javelin, as well as chariot races.

And sometimes there would be

local events at each one of these Panhellenic games that were specific to the site where they were being held.

Rap bass, things of this nature.

Yes.

But do you guys not do that, Rap?

You guys don't.

Did we used to have

poetry?

What happened to poetry?

It's still going

to be the last I had.

Trail.

Unlike the modern Olympic Games, or at least the current iteration of the modern Olympic Games, there were also religious elements and artistic competition that were held as part of the Olympics.

It was more of a...

cultural festival and not specifically focused on the sport.

Unlike a lot of other sports festivals in ancient Greece, because there were many of them, the winners only received an olive wreath.

They didn't receive any prizes or money or anything like that.

It was seen as, you know, a more.

Sort of.

Once you get back home to your polis, once you get back home to your city state, then you get like, you know,

it's much like Wimbledon now, right?

Like the prize money doesn't compare to the fucking like endorsements.

What's the right name in it?

Yeah, you fucking sell some like.

Exactly.

You sell the fucking like sandals where you're like, these will make you as good a discus thrower as me or whatever.

Yeah, the air Hercs from Hercules last year.

Like usually like that.

Exactly.

Oh,

this is my extra virgin olive oil, and it's an extra virgin because I'm a eunuch.

I mean, I mean, like, a celebrity is not a modern invention, particularly for sportsmen.

Sorry, I was just, I was, I was winding up to talk about Roman gladiators.

I didn't think,

I didn't think eunuchs was a Greek thing.

Shut the fuck.

God damn it.

Oh, I'm not sure.

I do also want to address the dick allegations implicit in the slide as well, because like

So you may notice that these guys are naked, right?

Which is the kind of correct, manly, honorable way to like compete, right?

It's more hygienic in the sense that it honors hygiene or whatever.

However, one of the things that you do, right, is because the Greeks

model of like what is kind of like seemly is it's okay to have your dick out, but like it should be small dick because like big dick is like barbarian and savage.

You have a don't Google this, a thing called infibulation, right?

Um, which is essentially like tying your dick up into the side, like it's like kind of um dick ponytail, it's kind of side tough, it's basically

the dick ponytail.

It's basically these guys were talking, right?

Um, because that's an important element of not just from stopping your shit flopping around and hitting you in the thighs where you're trying to like throw the discus, but also because like it honors the gods more.

Um, so naked is like it has a different kind of like uh sort of cultural implication, I guess

these are not problems i have in my life um

well i'm trying not to have them too but you know

not anymore

starmers america

um yeah no and i'll while we're here fuck labor for their selling out oh thank you yes i i i i i've been kind of going back and forth and putting in the in the news myself because i go insane anytime i talk about it

don't blame you gosh yeah all right Well, the good news is we're about to re best.

I almost said about to rescue Rishon.

Mount a rescue mission to get me to the United States.

Yeah, sorry.

It's not a very good rescue mission.

But then we all have to do that.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, we could run to Canada.

Get over the border in Canada and a doctor's like, have you considered killing yourself?

They did it to a Paralympian.

They're doing it to a Paralympian.

They'll do it to fucking anybody.

They'll do it to me and and Roz.

We're just fat.

I'm fat too.

What do you want me?

Oh, fat and tread.

Oh, buddy.

We're going to form a human chain.

Destroy, huh?

I think you're very lovely.

But yes, thank you.

Anyway,

so

some facts about the...

The competitors in the Olympics.

Originally, it was pretty much only wealthy men that would be able to do this just because the cost of training all the time, traveling around to all of the different competitions was too great.

Eventually, it got to the point where there were enough local competitions that you could kind of work your way up through that until you were, you know, sponsored, I suppose, enough to be sent to one of the Panhellenic games by somebody who was not yourself.

But it was also seen, you know, this wasn't just we're dicking around with this because it was fun for us.

It was also culturally important because it was seen as the warrior's duty to be fit to fight.

And during the times that the games were occurring, there was the Olympic truce.

It was primarily military, not political.

In fact, eventually the time of the games would become when they would announce a lot of political alliances and such because so many people from all around would be there.

But the point of the Olympic truce was to allow safe travel for the athletes and the spectators to go between

wherever their home base is and where the games are actually being held.

We don't have a fantastic record of the time,

but it's possible that women participated in some contests, particularly chariot racing.

And everything except the chariot racing, as already mentioned, was pretty much done dick out.

So, you know, that's cool.

The actual origin of the word gymnastics is exercising naked.

The chariot races, you know, they have to wear the fire suit with all the sponsors on it.

Those are things.

Dude, except, oh, but under here I'm naked.

Yeah.

You have to paint it on the horse, too.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like nominally stock chariot, so you have to make it look a bit like a chariot that you can buy.

And it shares the name, you know.

And at the end of the race, the number doesn't fit under the cutout form, form, then you're disqualified.

Here goes the number 34 yogurt car.

What else is Greek?

Remember when Dale died?

Oh,

when Dale was run over 45 times like that guy in

Ben Hur.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It would be like Dale Opoulos.

Dale Earnhardtopoulos.

Just think about the time when Marsh could fully full people.

Before he got really bad when Biden introduced himself as I'm Joe Bidenopoulos at a Greek American thing.

He really.

God, this fuck guy.

Look,

I think it's okay to make fun of Greeks.

much like it's okay to make fun of Italians.

Settle down there, Poland.

It's never racist.

No, it's never racist.

No, you can't make fun of Polish people because we do it better ourselves.

Half Polish, half Norwegian.

Yeah, that's true.

I don't know.

No, I'm American.

I'm from America.

Yeah, I know, but

there's a Norwegian flag in your apartment.

Yes.

Get suspiciously no Polish flag.

I don't know where I put it.

Interesting.

You need like a half and a half, you know.

What are those house dividers?

I have a pride flag in mine, but I'm definitely not of pride ancestry.

Next page, please.

I got a new California Republic flag in there because, you know, my loyalty to that country is never going to die.

All right.

So, um.

Pierre de Coupatin.

Um.

Great caption.

The title I have for this slide is just, oh, goddamn it, not another bellipoque French culture victory.

French cultural victory so it keeps happening

they did so good they did so good in that like decade it's like incredible

i have a have a whole idea for a podcast about the bellipoc on the on the back of this uh yeah oh yeah the architecture was so good yeah for real they invented shopping yes and war um two things we love to do yeah absolutely could you nascar probably yeah probably oh no i think the greeks invented nascar

well much like uh the olympic games the french revived NASCAR.

Yes.

But what they imagined NASCAR to be.

It was actually a bunch of people bootlegging Bordeaux.

But like in amphora for some reason.

Yeah, yeah.

And they're just like screaming down the road, and the police are chasing them.

And

they throw something special in the engine and they go, ha,

speed away from the cops.

One of my favorite accounts on Twitter used to be like illustrated like French crime news from like early 1900s late uh 1800s like periodicals and stuff and it's all these really luridly but like kind of well-composed uh illustrations of like you know a woman torn apart by wolves or like uh robber like shoots two gendarmes as he makes his escape or whatever and it's always very theatrical i'm a big big fan i think it's called old french crime but it's only doing reposts now which is a shame barber i'm gonna check that out yeah there's old french crime there i go hasn't posted since 2023, but yeah, it's

uh great stuff.

Here we go.

A 1914 movie operator is mauled by a lion.

That's God poorly.

Anti-Semitic, anti-Drefe sympathizers throw bundles of food to their besieged friends.

If it were up to me, I would have shot all of these people dead.

I'm actually rooting for the cops in this illustration to murder these

anti-Semitic people.

Gruesomely.

The anti-Dreyfuss are

party anti-Satism.

Yeah, go on.

All right.

So, this is Pierre de Coupaton.

He was a French aristocrat intellectual who focused on education and particularly on the role of sport in schooling.

This was, you know, mid to late 1800s, a time when organized sport as we know it today was sort of in its infancy.

He really romanticized ancient Greece and looked to the gymnasium as the model for how he thought modern education ought to to be in that.

If you were a PPA tin, you would have loved high school gymnasiums.

Yes.

Oh my god.

We're already at naked kids.

Rob for gut rods.

Man, buddy.

All right.

You know what?

Fucking leave it in for all my

YouTube's not going to like that one, but that's fine.

Go ahead.

We'll just cut everything YouTube's not going to like.

It's going to be like six minutes long and it's going to be entirely Madame X X talking.

That was like an actual thing back then, I think.

Next episode, we're going to have a real fun time for Devon where they get to bleep just like two solid minutes of me talking.

And my instruction is just going to be, you know, bleep this in whatever the way you find funniest.

But right now,

He saw this kind of triple unity between the old and the young, unity between the different disciplines, and unity between theoretical and practical work in the Greek gymnasium system that he felt was kind of missing from education as it existed in Europe at the time.

He also saw that there was a practical concern.

France had just kind of had a big loss in the Franco-Prussian War, and he felt it would be helpful to prepare more of their young men as, you know, adequately physically and mentally fit soldiers for that task.

His push to integrate this school of thought into the schools more or less failed, but it did lead to the idea of reviving the Olympics.

There had been some low-key discussion of this among a bunch of different parties kind of across Europe since the mid-1800s.

There were folks in France, folks in the UK, folks in Greece who were all kind of talking about this.

Coupatan organized a Congress in 1894 at the Sorbonne, and from that came a plan for the first two modern Olympic Games, that being the one held in 1896 in Athens and the next one held in 1900 in Paris, as well as the nascent organization that would eventually become the IOC.

There were some major early struggles with the Olympics and their organizations.

The 1900 Paris and 1904 St.

Louis Olympic Games were both kind of overshadowed by the world's fairs that were being held in the city at the same time.

Even to this day,

people who keep track of this stuff have a bit of a challenge trying to differentiate between what's an official Olympic event versus what was something that was just kind of being held by the World's Fair and shouldn't be counted as an Olympic victory.

And they also just were generally very poorly organized.

The 1904 marathon is a really good example of this.

Number one, it was held during the hottest part of the day in an area that was very dusty.

There were no water stations set up.

So the contestants were going most of the route without the ability to stop and drink any water.

Less than half of the people who entered the marathon wound up completing because they were, you know, collapsing from exhaustion and dehydration and from the heat.

The original winner crossed the finish line and then it came out that he had actually accepted a car ride for a significant portion of the distance.

And so he was no longer allowed to be considered the winner.

And a quote I have here is that the actual winner, Thomas Hicks, was near collapse and hallucinating by the end of the race.

A side effect of having been administered brandy, raw eggs, and strychnine, which is rat poison, by his trainers.

There's a lot of this in like the early history of the lazar, motherfucker.

There's so much of this in like the early history of the Tour de France and cycling, as well as guys giving, like, having like entire bottles of red wine and cocaine thrown at them and shit.

John Boyce does a great video about

to recommend that.

Yeah, John Boyce does a great

episode of Pretty Good about the 1904 St.

Louis Olympics Marathon, but the whole entire Olympics that year was just a complete shit show.

I believe there's also

stolen.

They stole it from Chicago.

I I believe there's also a citation needed episode about the 1904 marathon for the Tom Scott enjoyers in the audience.

But other things that happened during this marathon, there were competitors who stopped and took a nap because they ate like apples that had gone bad.

There were competitors running without shoes.

There were multiple near fatalities.

There were dogs that were chasing the runners off course.

It was a shit show.

And after all of this chaos,

the 1906 intercalated games got the movement back on track by actually being a well-organized and planned event.

The original idea had been that every four years that match

for lack of a better way to put it, that matched the U.S.

election year, those would be the ones that would move the site around the world and be held in different places.

And in the opposing two years like 1906 1910 so on and so forth they would have a version of the games in Athens that would stay at that site and the idea was to be similar to the Panhellenic cycle that we mentioned earlier

but it wound up being because of just the way things worked out with organization and then World War I hitting and everything that 1906 was actually the only time they had this

additional cycle going in Athens.

But it still deserves some credit because, like I said, that was kind of the event that saved the Olympics as a concept.

As for Couberton himself, I don't know what kind of pilled this dude was, but he was definitely something pilled.

He had this whole idea of what the Olympic philosophy ought to be that the games should push in all of its competitors.

And that was, number one, a major focus on amateurism rather than on professional athletes.

Number two,

which as we've emphasized is not entirely borne out historically.

Indeed.

Number two, a sacred truce, which is

a similar carrying on idea from the Olympic truce of the ancient games.

And the games should be used to promote cross-cultural understanding and peace.

And a quote from him that's kind of germane germane to this is, the important thing in life is not the triumph, but the struggle.

The essential thing is not to have conquered, but to have fought well.

And you see, that sounds like some loser shit.

Me when I crash into 11th place in the speed skating or whatever, it will break every bone in my fucking body.

That's how that's.

More than that, they use that now to like...

glorify like Carrie Strugg going out and vaulting on an extremely fucked up ankle and all that sort of thing.

And it's kind of like, you know, I, on some level, I get it, but on the other hand, like, what are you encouraging here?

Next slide, please.

Great hats.

Those are some good hats.

The next thing that happens in the history of the Olympic Games is that you move kind of from a more military mindset about it to civilian.

A lot of the Olympic sports, especially the ones that were present in the early games, have a military background.

You know, there's athletics, there's gymnastics, there's shooting, there's fencing, there's modern pentathlon, there's equestrian, there's a lot of different sort of martial arts and fighting sports.

Modern pentathlon is like meant to be the like the like five skills that a like a sort of a military officer needs to get back from behind enemy lines, you know, like riding an unfamiliar horse that you have presumably captured or stolen.

That sounds like hell.

Or like, you know, shooting or whatever.

It's certainly hell for the horses.

There was a major scandal in 2020 where

like one of the pentathlon riders coaches smacked one of the horses when it was misbehaving and oh is this the one who punched the rider trouble i just i just i just learned about this because i listened to milo special

and and so as a result it you know instead of doing something sane like instituting some rules about conduct for coaches and athletes when involved with the animals like like the very strict ones that FEI sports have.

What they've done instead is they've said,

the IOC said to Modern Pentathlon, get rid of the horseshit.

And after 2024, Modern Pentathlon will have an obstacle course instead of a show jumping portion.

So

if you want to see...

the show jumping version of Modern Pentathlon at the Olympics, this is your last chance.

Anyway, this kind of goes hand in hand with the traditional conception of sport as preparing soldiers for war.

But after World War II,

we, a term which here means Europe and the West, start having, I say, fewer wars, citation needed on a

smaller scale, citation also needed.

And there is a shift as society demilitarizes.

A better way to put that might be that there are fewer wars fought on the European continent within these countries' own territory.

But the upshot of it is that

you get a lot fewer people who are members of the military.

You get less presence of military life just kind of in the public consciousness.

And so you start to see things like the sports such as equestrian, which had previously limited participation to military personnel, become open to everyone.

The Olympics starts including more women's events, and Mexico 68 in particular is kind of a landmark shift in the concept of amateurism that makes it something of a demarcation between the traditional form of the 20th century Olympics up until then and then the path towards the more corporate and professional Olympics we now see.

This is a a reappearance of our buddy Avery Brundage, but for Mexico 68, he kind of made the decision that instead of the way things had previously done been done, where athletes could only take about a month off of work before the games to

be in high-intensity training.

Yeah, like you're supposed to be like a roofer 11 months and two weeks out of the year and then also

independently be the like third best in the world at like sprinting.

Yeah, sure, yeah.

Yep.

Although, like, to be fair, I think it was

the U.S.

cricket team that after they were

general.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like,

they won the game and everyone went crazy.

And it turns out that, like, everyone on that team is, like, a dentist or some shit.

There's not really a lot of full-time professional cricket players in the United States.

A dentistry kind of a profession that does leave you with a fair amount of spare time.

The thing about cricket in the United States is that if you actually fully learn the rules, they show up in a black van and take you away.

You have to be on the team.

We did a whole bonus episode about it.

It's like they take you away, and they're like, no, play baseball instead.

Rounders, why not?

With Mexico City, in particular, like there had been some research that just came out that made it clear that if people who were going to compete in Mexico City did not get enough time to

adapt to the elevation by training at that kind of elevation, be it in Mexico City or somewhere else in their own country with similar mountainous region, they were going to be struggling really hard at the games.

And so that was kind of what led the IOC to say, okay, y'all can have some extra time off of your normal day job to train.

for Mexico 68.

And, you know, it's kind of one of those things where once you let the cat out of the bag, it just keeps growing and growing and growing helps when you have superpowers who are like willing to invest either so many dollars formally on a state level or like in a kind of more arm's length way into like something that is technically a job but like in practical terms means you're training all the time

uh-huh to always really cool to me when you get into the like really elite sports like fucking like snowboarding or whatever where every like athlete is insanely wealthy going back about like 15 generations and their job is like snowboarding.

Do you remember that woman who what did she bought her way onto an Olympic team to do?

Yeah.

God.

I forget what country and what sport, but yeah, she just was like,

I'd like to do the Winter Olympics and just bought her way on.

And she was just like a totally normal like skier or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And like she was fine, but she was like a league behind everybody else.

Elizabeth Swaney

is an American born and raised freestyle skier who competed for Hungary in the 2018 Winter Olympics in the women's half pipe based on her Hungarian household.

Post post-nominals.

So you said cat out of the bag and it was very funny because Milksheka just jumped up on the desk and is sticking his face in a bag because I think cat is so goddamn dog.

One of the other fun things you can do once you have these programs of like nominally amateur athletes who are training all the time to represent you is you can just dope the absolute fuck out of them.

Oh, yeah.

This is all stuff that we're going to get more into in episode three where we talk more about the athletes.

But for now we can go ahead and go to the next slide.

Ah, the miracle on us.

So as you get kind of into the yes, as you get kind of into the 70s and 80s,

the Olympics starts to become sort of a symbolic Cold War in the American and I assume the Soviet public conscious.

You know, if you can't send your 18 to 35 year old young young men out into a war zone to fight for your country, why not have them do it in a sports arena?

Women too, but don't let them get to manish because part of how we're selling capitalism is that we have hot babes and they don't.

Yeah, as opposed to the press sisters who are being called the press brothers and sort of like American press of the 50s kind of thing.

What's that?

Oh, so there was a pair of,

I want to say,

I'm not sure if they're Soviet, but definitely like Eastern bloc

athletes,

track and field.

Yeah, both Soviet.

And because they were perceived as looking quite masculine, and also possibly because the Soviet Union was shooting them full of testosterone and HGH.

Oh, geez, okay.

The entire Western press was like, oh,

these, these are like secretly transgender

and

are being used to cheat.

Like, the history of neurosis about female athletes is a very storied one.

You get the grim Soviet judges who, you know, the other judges give everyone, like, give a guy a nine and a nine point four and an 8.9 Soviet judge is like six.

Well,

there is a story

about the 1988 Olympics where

there was an East German judge.

The American team during qualifying in gymnastics, women's gymnastics, had placed third

and it was looking like they were on track to get a bronze medal over East Germany in particular.

And the East German judge

comes up at the beginning of the team optional and is like, well,

Two days ago, and we didn't tell you about it then because we didn't think about it or whatever, y'all had somebody up up competing and you had another athlete go up onto the podium to pull the springboard out after she started her routine.

And that athlete, after she pulled the springboard, didn't leave the podium.

And that's a deduction.

And that deduction is just the right size to put you back into fourth place behind East Germany.

So how do you like them, apples?

Yeah.

I think every set of judges should have a designated hater on it is the thing.

There should be just many of them do.

Her name is Nellie Kim.

Anyway.

Hope you like your four asshole.

Let's see you do the hobby horse shit.

Oh, my God.

No,

that would go poorly for me.

This East German judge of whom I speak is named Ellen Berkner.

I'm just thinking if

you're at the top of the game professional amateur athlete,

you know, you should be able to get past one hater judge.

Yeah, you're the best in the world.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.

There was a big problem with gymnastics judging back in the 80s and early 90s, where like a lot of the biggest stars

would get these scores, and the other coaches would protest, why are these scores so high?

And the judges would be like, well, we didn't give this score to her based on what she did, we gave it to her because we know she can do it.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

The whole gymnastics thing is weird because, they're all like 15-year-olds now.

That's actually changing.

There were a lot of young girls between when Nadia became like the big star in the 70s up until about 10 years ago.

But these days, most of the gymnasts competing at world champions.

championships and in the Olympics are over the age of 20.

Ah, okay.

Okay.

Because I think it'd be unhealthy for their self-esteem if they have to go against the hater judge.

What if they get their braces stuck in their tutel?

It's very scary to me.

I don't know how gymnastic.

That's a figure scanning joke.

My bad.

Yes, yes.

What I was going to say is that

the minimum age for competition in gymnastics has been raised twice, from 14 to 15, and then from 15 to 16.

And both times, that was kind of the rationale is that.

Athletes that young should not have to put up with the stress of international competition.

And then the FIG after doing this win and was like, we're going to start a junior world's competition anyway.

And I'm like, fuck you.

But.

Past your prime at the wisened old age of 17.

But anyway, so

as the games kind of become representative of the Cold War, the U.S.

versus Soviet medal tally, the direct head-to-head matches such as the Miracle on Ice, which is what's pictured here.

That was the 1980 Winter Olympics hockey final.

And the overall first World versus Second World medal tally kind of becomes the symbolic battlefield.

It comes to a bit of a head when the U.S.

and their allies boycott the Moscow Olympics in 1980 in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

And then the Eastern Bloc turns around and responds with its own boycott of the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984.

I have to say, I wonder how the Hungarians and Czechoslovaks felt about all of this because

they had both at various times been invaded by the Soviets within the past couple of decades, and you didn't see a lot of boycott of competitions being held in Russia going on in response to that.

But

my Russian teacher in high school competed in the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

She was also a PE teacher.

And

yeah,

you could tell when you were in her PE class that she was in the Moscow Olympics.

She was a Soviet-ass girl.

She was a Soviet-ass PE teacher.

Anytime you were doing reps of any kind of...

Why are we playing dodgeball with guns?

No, we played dodgeball with frisbees, and someone threw one at my face, and it busted like my jaw, and it was very unpleasant.

And then we didn't do that afterwards.

Now, that being said, I love Vera Zieriman.

She is a wonderful woman,

but also she was a hard ass.

She would make a hill.

She would talk about it.

She would only throw frisbee at bottom health of body.

Do not throw it hid.

Yeah, she would,

if you were doing any kind of workout with reps like a push-up or something, or

squats, she'd be like okay now we're gonna count in hungarian now we're going to count in ukrainian now we're going to

i feel so validated because i do this to my students too

we we rotate between uh english german french russian and romanian so and spanish the worst part was when when she you know,

I think one of one of the rowing coaches was like, let's get Mrs.

Ehrman to

do some fitness workouts for the rowing team.

And now she was like, comes in and it's like, all right, the gloves are off now.

Now we're going to do the hard workouts.

I was like, no, no, we're not just at home.

I want that.

Just like slinking away as you're being screamed at in Russian.

I just, you grew up in infinite jest with the sport change.

No, she was great.

Another kind of factor that becomes important here is that because the athletes for these countries are some of the very few citizens who are actually allowed to travel outside of the communist bloc,

a lot of there are some several famous cases of athletes and coaches from these countries defecting.

And the West loves this.

In particular, kind of the most notable case in gymnastics, which is where the majority of my expertise lies.

Bella Caroli was the famous Romanian gymnastics coach of Nadia Komenech

in Romania in 1976 for the Montreal Olympics.

And after they come back to Romania,

after those Olympics, they take Nadia and a couple of his other athletes to the national training facility and have them training there instead and

he doesn't appreciate the way that they the Romanian government kind of comes and gets in his business and won't let him train his athletes on his plan anymore which frankly probably a good move on the Romanian government's part because he was pretty abusive

but

the The upshot of it is that in 1981, I think it was, he decides to defect to the United States during travel for a competition and brings his wife with him.

And they kind of have this almost perfectly designed for the media American dream story where they're living in poverty for a couple of years, not

working as gymnastics coaches, learning English off of Sesame Street, sharing a single soft pretzel for dinner because Bella can't get any work doing anything other than like sweeping floors because he doesn't know English.

And then suddenly he finds a coach who like knows who he is and offers to take him in and give him a job.

And suddenly he ascends to this kind of

godlike status where he's got, you know, Olympic athletes training at his gym.

Mary Lou Retin is the most famous one, but over the next 10 to 15 years, he had several more go through there.

He's got, you know, this huge house and this huge ranch that he's able to buy off of all the money he's making um and he kind of turns into this american cowboy because he goes and buys a truck and buys a horse and runs cattle around his ranch and all this kind of stupid stuff and there are so many fluff pieces from the late 80s and early 90s that are just following him around while he does all this stuff and then kind of yells incoherently at the camera in a barely understandable accent for five minutes

I mean,

the poverty thing seems like weird to me because it's not like there's

an especially small Eastern European expat community in the United States at this point.

Like, you know, I could point you in the right direction.

As far as defections go, there is a Soviet joke about the sort of countermeasures that they did about this, not in sports, but about the other big thing, which was like sort of like cultural tours, right?

Which is that, you know, the third violinist in the Soviet orchestra is like always terrible because he's a KGB guy, you know.

So I do wonder for a moment if the like, you know, the Soviet hockey team in forces are like, you know, just there for the hockey kind of thing.

Just there because they really like boarding people.

Yeah, I mean, the joke is that the guy, you know, has like never seen a violin before.

He's trying to play it like a rifle, you know.

Well, I don't know about that with the athletes, but it wouldn't surprise me if they had someone like that among the coaches.

But

so, yeah,

especially during the late 80s, early 90s, right as the wall is falling and all of that, the American media machine is just milking this for everything they've got.

But another kind of interesting thing that happens during this era is that

this fellow that you may know of by the name of Ted Turner.

I've heard of that guy.

Yeah.

For those of you who haven't, the founder of CNN

creates this thing called

creates this thing called the Goodwill Games

which in the years opposing the Olympics.

So

for summer, that would be your non-election years and for winter that would be your election years.

We're going to have an extra competition very similar to the Olympics, but more focused on like being positive and friendly and creating goodwill between the two superpowers and not about

wanting to prove who's the best as much.

No, it just got me thinking.

You know, what other Soviet athlete defected was my Russian teacher.

The Russian PE teacher.

She ran the border in a VW micro bus.

That false paper.

That's pretty impressive.

It was like 1989 or something.

She got out while the getting was good.

Yeah.

Oh, but

she missed her chance to be an oil oligarch.

You know, so

limit to the transferability of skills there.

Yeah, speak for yourself.

R.I.P.

to your PE teacher, but I'm different.

I think she's still alive.

Shut up.

Anyway, next slide, please.

I've just seen how many more slides there are.

Do you want to drop?

You can.

Many.

I'll see how I get on.

All right.

So,

you know, the wall falls in 89.

The Soviet Union kind of falls apart in 1991.

We kind of arrive at what some people have termed the end of history.

I don't agree with that.

But anyway, over the course of the 20th century, especially the second half, the Olympics grew in both their size and their cultural cachet of being, you know, something that everyone kind of tuned in to watch and not just people who were into sports the rest of the time.

I gotta watch the curling.

I gotta watch the uh women's beach volleyball.

I gotta watch the uh

watching the women's beach volleyball at the Winter Olympics is a great bet.

Do you guys know what this is gonna

happen here?

Yeah, it's just like

a bunch of women like freezing.

What's the opposite of a beach?

What's like the

beach volleyball at Nagano?

Women's Glacier volleyball.

There we go.

Dude, trying to play volleyball in ski pants would make me want to kill myself.

Playing volleyball normally.

I imagine the sound.

You know the sound of like the kind of like technical fabrics like going

exactly like that, but like when you spike a volleyball, incredible.

So so the Olympic sports have kind of reached this critical mass where they can't just get by on the doctrine of amateurism that they had had before

while still providing the level of spectacle that the audience is looking for.

We'll discuss the effect on the athletes more in episode three, but in 1985, the then president of the IOC,

Samaratch, begins this program called the Olympic Partner Program that allows certain companies exclusive sponsorship rights to the games.

And boy, howdy, has it had some effects.

Next slide, please.

coca-cola the official uh carbonated drink of the olympics is that is there men's beach volleyball

there is oh they wear like just regular swimming trunks oh you know i think there's also men's regular volleyball you have like a sort of uh you know they're playing highway to the danger zone in on repeat in the back

shirts

come on

this is so wrong they're like wearing baseball caps and shit

that doesn't make sense that that i want to objectify the men

i want to see the hunks i want to see these hunks the real the real the real gay sports at the olympics are diving and like any of the swimming events but especially diving like that's that's your gay sport yeah moving on to the next slide please so the olympic partner program as we mentioned um has brand exclusivity um they get yeah if you try and get a pepsi in the olympic partner they show you

oh my god they they have four-year contracts of what is called categorical exclusivity, which means that if you're the official soft drink partner of the Olympics, then only your soft drinks can be sold, advertised, anything in relation to the Olympic Games.

And that means that your national federations and your athletes cannot make deals which contradict.

uh against that um so like if the usoc

wants to get a little bit more money they cannot go out and add pepsi as a sponsor.

It's Coke or it's nothing.

And you, the hapless spectator,

you, the hapless spectator, if you're going to the Olympics, you cannot buy anything with a non-Visa credit card.

Incredible.

Inside the boundaries of the game.

Stupid.

Yeah.

So another L for American Express.

Chris Costco, now this.

And Diners Club and JCB and whoever whoever else is out there master card all right next slide please so the next thing um logistical nightmares and actual nightmares

and i i should state with regards to this that you know some of these are nightmares for the organizers some of them are nightmares for the citizens of the wherever the olympics is being held some are nightmares for the athletes it kind of depends on the specific situation i'm not making a value judgment about any of this stuff by calling it a nightmare.

So go ahead and next slide.

During the Olympics in London, there was an ad campaign that McDonald's ran that was like, we all make the games and it went through and went, like showed pictures of people in the crowd and like the photo snapper, the loud cheer, so on and so forth.

It was like this little poem and

this video that we're not seeing was a parody of that that was talking about problems people were having with the Olympics, like, you know, the person who's about to get fined £135 for driving in the lanes,

the protester, the overworked security guard, the person running the gun on top of the building

to shoot him.

It was a terrible time to be a photographer, particularly.

Why is that?

Well, I mean, so since the Terrorism Act 2000,

like it became not, I mean, there was a lot of legal grey areas where stuff was like, or well, not even grey areas.

Well, I mean, there was, let me take that again.

Since the passage of the Terrorism Act 2000 and a lot of other legislation, there were some places where it became illegal to take photographs, but there became a lot more places where, even though it was legal to take photographs, the police would become very, very upset with you and try to stop you, even though they had no grounds or like legal power to do that.

And the Olympics was like, as with anything where the British security state, really

showed up on this specifically.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay.

So

some other examples of just kind of clearing the undesirables to the IOC, for lack of a better word.

For the Rio Olympics, when they went to build the Olympic Park, they did some serious slum clearance on this place called the Villa Altodromo, which was a favela in Rio de Janeiro that was demolished.

The residents in it were relocated, but the government had also, you know, promised some things like there were some community facilities that also got demolished and they were like, we're going to rebuild these where we've relocated y'all to.

And then they didn't.

And, you know, this is very common with slum clearance in general, but particularly with.

Important to say that in Brazil, like when we talk about like slum clearance, it's not just the kind of slum clearance that you might think of in like the sort of the government like, you know, politely asks you to leave.

This is the, you know, the army and the marines come through with APCs.

Right.

Yeah.

And you are like kicked out of your house at gunpoint situation.

That also did kind of happen in the United States as well.

But, you know, the fafellas.

Oh, yeah.

No, I know.

You know, the thing is, like, fafellas are a bit more developed than

you might expect.

I mean, people have like, people have running water and electricity in those places.

People have lives that

nothing else, like that aren't, that have more value than watching our, you know, beach volleyball team kick the absolute shit out of Ecuador.

Yeah, but you got to see a bunch of, like, you know, military helicopters flying around and people, like, you know, shooting at people out of them.

So, you know.

And another thing that you hear about very, very regularly in advance of the Olympics is the social cleansing of homeless people and sex workers from the city.

As like, since Montreal, which is what I've been able to find news articles about,

I have not been able to find one host site that didn't do this, including Paris.

So, yeah, absolutely.

And especially if you're selling the kind of like Olympic legacy part of your bid is like, we're going to like have all of these

redevelopment things we're going to build on top of and regenerate deprived areas.

What that in practice means is we're going to kick all the people out of them and then build a stadium no one's going to use on top of it.

Well, exactly.

I mean, it's fun because like sometimes there'll be, as people have become sort of like more aware of this, sometimes bids will include stuff about like affordable housing or whatever and this is something that like uh the the london 2012 bid had was that like uh as part of this like regeneration uh we're gonna have like yeah there's gonna be this stadium that no one uses but there's also gonna be like say i don't know a thousand units of housing of which ten percent will be affordable um and then the affordable housing is immediately allocated

120 of variable mean income exactly and and And usually you have to access it through a separate door of shame.

Yeah, I have to

go through a lottery process

to even apply.

I think it would be nice if 100% of housing were affordable.

Yeah.

Be a nice idea.

We can only dream.

All right.

Next slide, please.

So the next Zillanes.

Zillanes.

Yeah.

I call them Zillanes after the, well, they were called that after the manufacturer of like limousines, luxury cars in the Soviet Union, because parts of central Moscow had and still have designated lanes for like VIPs.

Yeah, but like every street in Moscow has like 45 lanes.

So you have some despair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the lane that like, you know, has like 50 like blacked out armored G-Wagons coming down it.

Oh, God.

You imagine what it was like when it was the Soviet Union and then like

three guys had cars and like, you know, they had all this road available.

Yeah, I really feel like, I mean, it's like the,

I keep telling old Soviet jokes on these.

The guy who comes from his rural village to Moscow and, you know, comes back and they ask him how it was.

I think I've told this joke on this podcast before.

And he says, oh, it's wonderful.

Everything there's for the betterment of man.

I even saw that man.

So yeah, with any Olympic Games, you get a lot of additional people coming into the city, both your athletes and your spectators.

And understandably, this creates traffic issues.

Um, in London 2012, in particular, a lot of these a lot of the roads had these temporarily designated Olympic lanes with a 135 pound fine for driving in them.

Had to really work hard there to not accidentally say $135 pound.

Anyway,

a 135 pound fine.

Oh, God.

Dick pound.

Dick pound.

So this

pound exchange rate is terrible.

This severely affected the capacity of the roads for normal people.

There was a lot of confusing and contradictory signage that got

folks like one of the news articles I was looking at where there were two lanes of normal traffic and then they merged into one lane and that lane became the Olympic lane.

And there was nowhere for people in those normal traffic traffic lanes to turn off and not be in an Olympic lane.

Yep,

driving in London, you roll a dice, you receive a £135 dick pound fine.

But

the other thing is that

they did build, to take the pressure off, the single dumbest public transport thing in London.

I need to know what this is.

They built

the Salbon, right?

The cars over the

river.

Yes, they built the cloud car, the cable car over the River Thames that goes from like nowhere to an empty stadium no one uses.

I want to go to the O2.

Yeah, I mean,

there's absolutely no reason ever to take this thing anywhere,

including the O2, because it's all better served by the tube or even by buses.

And it's like this weird blight, exceptional case on every public transport map.

And it's just like,

it's one of the things.

If I am mayor of London, right?

Two things that I'm doing

day one to satisfy my like OCD specifically.

I am dynamiting the cable car and I am deciding.

Yeah, yeah, and I am deciding which zone Battersea Power Station tube station is in.

That's it.

That's another ancient Tom Scott video I could so pull out of the archives right now.

But

municipalities love gondolas because it's like,

you know,

it looks like transit, even though it isn't.

Very, very low capacity generally.

The good news about these is that they did encourage people to try, you know, biking, walking, taking the tube, stuff like that that they might not have done normally to get around London.

And, you know,

long term, that may

question mark, question mark, question mark have led to

an easier transition into the ULAs and everything else that's going on in London now in terms of pedestrianizing streets and that sort of stuff.

And the LTM.

You know, that's questionable.

Yeah.

It needed like woke Sadiq Khan to do it.

But

many of the cities which have hosted have beefed up their transit as part of the deal.

And again, that's a positive.

But as we discussed in the last episode, sometimes it's not finished in time.

Rio de Janeiro in particular, like there was an entire metro line that they were supposed to build that they just didn't.

Yeah.

Oops.

All right.

Next slide, please.

So here we have some tickets to upcoming, well, they won't be upcoming by the time this goes out, but to preliminary matches for soccer at the Paris Olympics.

And if you look at where they're actually located down at the bottom, you can see that we have them in Bordeaux, in Lyon, and in nice uh which

you may if you know anything about french geography recognize as not being anywhere close to paris i was gonna say um

that's not even in the ile de france yeah um

so this is very common with the tournament style sports that have to have prelim matches because for most countries uh it's just you know you don't have enough stadium space in whatever city the games is happening in to handle all of these little preliminary matches.

So you have to put it where you do have stadium space.

A more compact Olympic Games is considered preferable both for the benefit of the athletes not having to travel a lot between each of their matches and for the benefit of the spectators in that they're not having to

travel a lot to go to other matches as well.

Or, you know, if you come to Paris for the Olympics, you're in Paris for the Olympics.

Unless you want to see surfing, in which case go to Tahiti, asshole.

Yep.

Yeah.

Throw one of the games inside there.

But again, it's just often not possible to actually do that.

And the organizers are kind of stuck with what they have to work with because they don't want to take on the debt necessary to build a whole bunch of different stadiums to handle this and then not have them usable afterward any more than the main ones are.

Paris with like 64 tournament stadiums ringing the outside of it, like the giant tower blocks and Le Corbusier's plan for the thing.

We've rebuilt the Maginot line.

All 100% empty

all of the year.

You could build like 40 football stadiums on top of each other.

You know what?

That's the thing.

If they put another deck on every stadium, you halve the number of stadiums you need.

You can play games simultaneously.

I have read

Sideways Stories from Wayside School.

I say we do it.

What if we just double up?

We change a couple of the shirt colors around and we just play two games of football on the same pitch at the same time.

And

we just like pay attention to the scoring.

You have an interdimensional foul.

You committed breach like city in the city.

November, I think you've just invented a new sport there.

I'm so proud of myself.

For efficiency, we have one elevator that only goes up and one elevator that only goes down.

I'm just doing the like Elon Musk, I find chess too simple tweet, but for football, you know, just like 22 men, I find that too

basic for me.

Like, what about 44 players?

So, you know, kind of the result that you get from this is a lot of these non-metal events that are first round preliminaries out in the middle of bum fuck nowhere don't really get a lot of spectatorship, which can be discouraging for the athletes and also just kind of you're spending a lot of money to host this game and not getting in much revenue from the crowds coming in.

So, I mean, listen, this is the thing.

You do get to see Messi play against Iraq, right?

Like,

yeah.

There's one Iraqi guy in there who's fucking pissed.

Damn it.

To waking up on a Sunday or Saturday and just be like, oh, good.

The clear solution to this is you just get everyone in the world insane about high school sports, and then you have anecdotal facilities for the Olympics.

Yeah.

Just the Texas cultural victory.

Yeah.

I mean, you've got to be halfway there with everybody wearing jeans.

There'll be a Buckies.

There'll be a Buckeys and Kathmandu.

And what a surprise.

It's like the Marines on Iowo Gima planting a heb sign.

Big Buckeys flag.

Next slide.

Avery Brundage, you Nazi fuck.

Yep.

So, boycotts and protests.

1980 and 1984 are the best known boycotts.

There are other smaller ones that have occurred

over the history of the Olympics.

In particular, Taiwan boycotted boycotted several Olympics because the

Olympic committee was insisting that they compete under the name Formosa to be nice to China, and they wanted to compete as Republic of China.

And at the same time, China was also not participating in those Olympics because they didn't want to associate with any

organization that recognized the existence of Taiwan at all.

So, you know, kind of shooting yourself in the foot twice there.

But with regards to the 1980 boycott in particular, because that's the one that there's a lot of English language media about,

you get a lot of athletes who were kind of talking about, you know, the politics involved didn't really apply to them and it was a very unfortunate and disappointing situation for them to miss their one opportunity to compete on that stage when, you know, four years later, who knows if they're going to be injured, if they're not on top form or at the top of their game anymore, if they've had to retire for some reason, you know, the list goes on.

Listen,

we're in a more evolved and progressive society now.

Now, when a bunch of Russian troops invade a country and commit unspeakable war crimes there, we just make the Russian athletes like sort of perform under the Olympic flag and a little like Russian Olympic Committee thing.

Actually, if I remember correctly, the rules that they're going to have for this Olympics is the Russian athletes who are allowed to participate

are not allowed to use the ROC or any sort of like representation of the country.

They are completely neutral athletes

and they have to be like there's a lot of bona fides they have to verify to prove that they are not in any way associated with the war movement

like with gymnastics it those rules came out so late that there wasn't really any opportunity for anybody to qualify anyway, but it would have been like

the 14th team athletes because so many of the sports clubs in Russia that people train gymnastics at are associated with the military.

So even if the person training at them isn't in the military per se because their sports club is associated they're not allowed to participate um

they could they're not going to

they

yeah you know i i i would prefer to see that one um

but there's also you know national abstention from the olympics that isn't really a boycott per se

and an example of that is like

China during the Cultural Revolution.

They pulled out of

why are you as a Chinese communist competing in like the bobsled team when you could be manufacturing pig iron?

Well, they didn't just pull out of the Olympics.

They kind of pulled out of international sport in general.

They disbanded most of their national teams.

And the few that remains did not participate in events that were sanctioned by organizations with with Taiwan-friendly policies until on into the 70s, and they only rejoined the Olympics in 1984, which was interestingly when the rest of the communist bloc decided to boycott.

The USSR, after the Soviet Revolution, also did not join the Olympic movement until the 50s.

I believe there was an attempt briefly to try and create a kind of like parallel Soviet or like sort of

like Comic-Con Olympics,

like the proletarian games or whatever.

It exists, it's called the Sparta Kead.

Um, oh, hell yeah, of course it does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And um, then in China, they also have the national games that were started during that period of extension as kind of a way to make up for that.

Um,

so and then the picture that's actually on this slide, um, is about protests from the athletes.

Uh, this is kind of the most famous one.

In 1968, John Carlos and Tommy Smith are up on the podium.

They take their shoes off.

They split a pair of gloves between them and protest the U.S.

anthem with a black power salute.

This is one of the most iconic pictures from any Olympics ever.

And as a result of this, they were expelled from the Olympics, thanks to Avery Brundage.

I believe

they both planned to do the black power salute, but then they realized they only had one pair of gloves.

And who is it?

The guy here in second place

was like, Well, why don't you joke?

Yeah, he was like, Why don't you both wear one of the gloves?

Um,

and that worked.

And I think he also was wearing something

protest because he was there at his uniform.

He's got a badge on that is in support of the Black Power guys.

And for that, he also got blackballed by his

federation.

So, so

yeah damn you know this is this is this is uh

this is a racist society that even an australian gets kicked out um

hi it's justin uh so this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

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Someone whose politics are like priority number one, like peace, justice, freedom for Palestine, priority number two, Palestinian Winter Olympics team.

Yeah, like priority number two, really good Palestinian

hot runnings.

Yeah.

So

our next topic here is kind of the biggest nightmare that's possible to have at the Olympics, which is terrorism.

Two major examples of this happening in history.

First off, excuse me, in Munich in 1972, there was an attack on the

Israeli athletes.

Militants from Black September stormed the Olympic village, killing two, taking nine more Israeli athletes hostage.

They demanded the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, and Israel refused to negotiate with them.

And the remaining nine athletes, along with five of their captors, were killed in a botched rescue attempt by the Germans.

We then get onto the timeline of counterterrorism, and this is the reason why a lot of stuff like...

GTSG exists, GSG9.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

This is literally the reason why GSG9 exists.

Everyone looks at this and says, well, that didn't work.

Better keep trying.

Yeah, instead of negotiators, we're like, we need guys who are

even better at shooting hostage takers.

Yeah,

we need some operators.

If we just have the best operators, we can reach them.

It works for a while.

like um

a lot of like sort of thwarted hijackings and stuff um but yeah um it's sort of like real sort of like um

timeline moment there you know

and then the other big one is the olympic park bombing in uh atlanta in 1996

Eric Rudolph, yes, left a pipe bomb in the stands

that were set up for an after-hours concert in the Olympic Park.

A man by the name of Richard Jewell, who was the security guard for that area, found it with a short amount of time, about 30 minutes left on the clock.

The bomb squad was called, evacuations were begun,

and shortly after that, Eric Rudolph actually called in a threat.

from a nearby phone booth.

Unfortunately, the bomb detonated before they were able to finish evacuations, and it left two dead, one who died from their injuries and another who died from a heart attack as they were fleeing the scene, and 111 people with various levels of injury.

There were problems with the investigation.

Jewel wound up becoming a suspect because of some things on his record from a previous job he had had,

and officials thought he might have planted the bomb so that he could fake finding it and play the hero in a similar manner to some recent incidents that had happened.

But

no good deed goes unpunished.

Yeah.

But they had actually kind of come to the conclusion that he wasn't their guy and they were going to wind that investigation down.

And right as they were about to do that, the Atlanta Journal Constitution did some really irresponsible journalism and ran with that unsupported story.

And this huge media circus ensued.

The FBI kind of felt like at that point they couldn't just give give up the investigation they were going, like they were going to,

because it would look like they were, you know, dismissing their top guy in the name of the public.

So it wound up taking 88 days to clear his name.

And the reporter who was responsible for all that failed upward.

She got a promotion shortly after that, which is really frustrating.

Yeah.

I think they harassed the guy's family for like years afterwards, just like weirdos who weren't convinced that the FBI was right in clearing the guy eventually in like 2003 i think it was um eric rudolph was found convicted and sentenced to four consecutive life sentences in supermax after he committed three additional bombings um so abortion i hope he was abortion clinics yes yep he was a very much far-right nut job kind of person um

and i hope he's enjoying being bffs with sted Kaczynski and whoever in there.

Well, Kaczynski's dead now, so like, this is just because of his corpse.

This is back in the day before the incarceral state when you could do like a

bombing so that no one could do anything to it.

It's a grim but fascinating case.

And then another thing kind of worth paying attention to is that across the 2010s, there have been, you know, several terrorist attacks on large crowds that were gathered at stadiums, the November 2015 attack on the soccer match at the Stade de France,

the May 2017 attack on the Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena.

And so with that in mind, I am sure that this particular facet of security is like something that the Paris organizers are

absolutely going out of their minds over.

They're looking at Butler, Pennsylvania, and like, ooh, let's not do that.

Yeah, this slide was written before that happened.

So, yeah, I guess I should have included that too.

Next slide, please.

So,

now talking about

the way broadcasting affects spectators who are watching from home.

And

next slide, please.

It's fucking personal now because one of the two people you see in front of you on the slide is somebody I know.

Oh.

So

this is actually about the Olympic trials, but it is kind of related to what goes on with the Olympics.

These are two athletes, both

competed with USA Gymnastics.

On the left is Brenna Dowell.

She was invited to the Olympic trials in 2016.

On the right is

his real name is Aiden, but he goes by Fuzzy Bennett,

who was invited to the Olympic trials in 2020.

The deal that the USA Gymnastics has with NBC is that after a competition happens that NBC broadcasts, USA Gymnastics is also allowed to film all of the routines that happen there.

And they can take all of those routines and upload their own footage of them to the USAG YouTube page.

The rights to the Olympic trials are owned by the Olympic Committee, and they don't have the same arrangement with NBC.

And so if NBC chooses not to air a specific routine at the Olympic trials, then you miss it.

It's gone forever and,

you know, you cannot watch it anymore.

anywhere unless somebody like snuck a camera into the stadium and took a really gross looking toaster video of it.

So these two athletes in particular, Brenna finished finished 10th out of like 15 or 16, I think.

She could have been tied for six if she hadn't fallen off the beam on one of the two days.

And her other three events, she had competitive scores with the gymnast who did make the team.

Fuzzy was in a very similar situation.

He did hit all of his routines and he finished sixth.

He did not have difficulty that was quite competitive enough for the main team, but there was a chance he could have been named as an alternate.

And neither of them had a single routine shown at any point in the entire broadcast.

Like, Brenna got her name mentioned as, you know, this is one of the athletes who's here, but we're not going to be showing them because we're more focused on the athletes who we think are going to make the team.

And Fuzzy,

they showed like a clip of his dismount in a recap after the commercial.

And that was it.

And come on, man.

Yeah, it's very, very frustrating uh as a spectator who's interested in the sport as you know someone who watches it seriously but also

as someone you know watching from home hoping to see the person you know on the biggest stage of their life so far it's like why don't i get to watch my my person that i know doing this um and so next slide please

I actually can't have things to say, but before we get started, anybody got some actionable actionable threats they want to make.

So I am sitting this one out as I have to.

Please note

the following opinions are not that of Liam Anderson Incorporated or his wife, Red McAnderson Wife Enterprises Incorporated.

Nor can I condone any actionable threats made at this time.

I will say that Comcast is a lovely cable company who never drops my fucking internet for no reason, say in the middle of a torrent session or in the middle of a game.

I pay for 1.2 gigs of internet and of that i see not that uh and by the way yes i am hardlined into the router i i cannot believe that in in the city we live in philadelphia pennsylvania that i have to endure this and at my old house i had verizon bias which i was perfectly happy with now i get comcast which is just like you want hey you want cable Fuck you.

Suck my ass in balls.

It's fucking horrible.

I do not condone the above opinions.

I have Leah McAnderson.

I'm speaking independently and not under duress.

I also have a peacock opinion, which is when

I had an internship at the city, they gave me a do-nothing job at the Philadelphia Zoo.

And while I was doing nothing, sometimes a peacock would come and hang out with me.

He was number 53.

Shout out to Peacock number 53.

What's a peacock's lifespan like?

And how many years ago was this?

I don't know.

I mean, your average bird doesn't make it more than 10 years.

16 to 20 years, up to 40 in captivity.

40?

Jesus.

You can't have a middle aged peacock in the

Soviet Union.

I gotta, I gotta go, I gotta go back to the zoo.

I gotta hang out with 53.

I saw him, I saw him snatch a hot dog from a kid.

It was great.

It was hilarious.

All right.

Next slide, please.

They were so mean to the kids.

It It was funny.

It was really funny.

I love when they hit the peacock noise, you know, the

peacock noise.

Fantastic.

Yeah.

Oh, that's wow.

That's a really good peacock.

That's pretty good.

That's a good peacock, yeah.

I will not give any information about whether or not it is a hobby of mine to call out to any peacock that I see just wandering on the street.

That's funny.

But such an incredibly posh Victorian, like

my dad's parents lived in a part of town that used to be next to,

what is it called when it's nuns and not monks?

Convent.

And one of the things the nuns at that convent did was raise peacocks.

And when they kind of all died out and the convent closed, the peacocks were just kind of let to wander.

And so my grandparents' neighborhood had a ton of peacocks just kind of walking around.

Yes.

I mean, you think it sounds like a joke, and then they roost on top of your car for the night and take a massive shed on top of it, and you realize it really is an infestation.

The next slide is the one we're skipping.

Okay.

Yeah.

This was the one we're skipping.

All right.

Yep.

Not really

related to the concept of broadcasting, but this is just where it was easy to stick it in.

So

why are the Paralympics a separate event is a question that I have kind of...

So they can hold it in Toronto and kill all the athletes.

Yeah, that actually tracks.

So why are the Paralympics a separate event is a question that I had asked a lot

over the course of my life.

And while doing research for these episodes, I found some answers.

It turns out that they're actually organized separately by a separate group, the International Paralympic Committee instead of the International Olympic Committee.

This group has its roots in veterans who were recovering from World War II looking for ways to stay active.

It's only been held in conjunction with the Olympics since 1988.

Prior to that, it was often held at a different site at a very different time of the year, stuff like that.

And they've only officially been bid for together since 2001.

And the unfortunate result of this is that the Paralympics don't enjoy the same media attention or worldwide following that the Olympics get.

I personally think holding the two events closer together in time or even like, you know, make the whole thing three weeks long and put both of them kind of going on simultaneously would help this out because people who were traveling to or watching the Olympics would be more likely to go ahead and add the Paralympics events to their schedules versus how they do it now where there's several weeks of break between the two.

You're probably not going to get somebody making two trips to France from the USA to watch both or whatever.

It does create logistical concerns in terms of more people being there, more athletes you have to house, all that sort of stuff.

But I think if you're careful about how you plan, you could work around that.

I don't know.

Thumbs just my two cents.

Next slide, please.

I mean, just don't hold it in Canada.

You know?

Oh, boy.

Look at the.

Oh, my God.

It's like that.

That's like, oh,

I'm on the next slide after Olympic Agenda 2020 and it's irritating little friends.

I love that joke.

And I'm just, I accidentally skipped to slide 30, and I, I, you, you folks are in for a treat.

But yes,

yeah, we're, we're getting there.

All right.

Um, so next slide, please.

Uh, we're now talking about the Olympic Agenda 2020, which was a lot of different recommendations that the IOC had made kind of to itself in the 2010s with the idea of modernizing the Olympics, help making it more sustainable.

And a lot of them were good or at least decent ideas, but excuse me, some of them were not.

And one of those is the event-based program, which is that previously the IOC had allotted spaces to 22 sports federations.

And in starting with the 2024 games, what they're doing instead is they are allotting 310 metal events that are not necessarily split up among the sports federations the way they used to be.

And that in and of itself isn't so terrible, but the idea is to take unpopular metal events as determined by the TV ratings and replace them with new events that they consider to be more appealing to young people.

There are some problems with this that are pretty clearly evident to me.

First off, a a lot of people on the IOC wouldn't know a young person if one ran over them with a monster truck because they're all like fucking Septuagintarians.

Yeah, Septuaginarians who only hang out with other Septuagenarians.

And

by appealing to young people, they mostly mean, you know, extreme sports, stuff like BMX, skateboarding, parkour, breaking.

The thing that I...

The thought I have about that is that extreme sports kind of already have their well-known Olympic-like major event in the X Games.

The less popular events and disciplines that compete at the Olympics will lose their one moment in the international sporting spotlight and

their main opportunity to get more attention and grow their sport.

And instead, they only have their world championship as their major event, which is likely pretty poorly covered.

And so you go right back into that feedback loop that we've been talking about this whole time.

And with regards to the TV ratings, given that the American right bids have by far the most money tied up in them, what probably happens is that what NBC sees from the American public starts taking the controlling interest in who is actually being catered to by these ratings, or at least has, you know, a disproportionately large influence where maybe, you know, the sport is super popular in Europe or in China or whatever, but because they're not the ones paying the IOC the most money, they don't get to make the decision and it gets cut.

And

so it's all gonna turn out

another issue with that is that NBC tends to only promote the Olympic sports that it already knows will make money for it.

And it continuously makes it more and more difficult for people to even access coverage of the others.

You know, it used to be that you would get those often covered on their other cable channels that they owned during the day, and then you wouldn't really see them in the primetime broadcast.

But now it's kind of moved to where it's online and you have to buy a subscription in order to see that.

So it's just getting more and more convoluted.

But to the IOC's credit, they do seem to at least be paying attention to the social media response on a worldwide scale as part of this.

But any metric requiring the use of a specific technology will disadvantage or count out those who have limited access to it, which is, you know, a large part of the world's population.

Sure.

Next slide, please.

Yes, okay.

So this here is a graphic that was

kind of the end result of a video released by the Gymnastics Federation

showing how different teams would would qualify to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

This was a qualification process that had not previously existed in this format.

Why is it done in like coloring pencil?

Because it was drawn on a whiteboard throughout the video to make a cool little video, but yeah.

What the hell is this supposed to be?

Remember that military PowerPoints episode we did?

This is

defense charts.

Building state capacity in Afghanistan with this shit.

Zoom in and out.

If y'all will give me a moment, I will explain what I what I can do for three hours.

No, we spent at least 45 minutes of that talking about people trying to shoot Trump.

But anyway,

anyway,

down here at the bottom, this whole qualification process was put in place as a response to the Olympic agenda 2020 and the new like goals for Olympic qualification that they put in place.

So, what you see here is three teams, bottom left, qualify directly to the Olympics

from the 2018 World Championships, and that's 24 athletes.

Nine teams qualify directly from the 2019 World Championships, that's 72 athletes.

And then there's five different ways that individuals can qualify.

You've got your continental championships, you've got your all-around qualifications from worlds.

You've got your World Cup events for apparatus specialists.

Your World Cup events for individual all-arounders.

And you've got your

additional stuff like, hang on just a second.

I got to zoom in enough to see this.

Yeah, you've got people who got an event medal.

at the world championships who were not part of a qualified team.

And so all of that, plus spots for the host country, spots for an athlete from an

underrepresented country.

And the other thing that they did was they

changed how team qualifications work to be instead of previously you would have five member teams and that's what they've gone back to for this Olympics.

But what they did was they knocked the number of team members down to four

and gave each individual team the opportunity to qualify an individual athlete or two that would not compete to be part of the team score.

They would only compete for themselves.

And this was so hackneyed and complicated and impossible to understand that basically immediately after Tokyo, they said, yeah, we're never going to do that again.

And they changed it back to a system more like what they had had prior to the 2016 olympics uh next slide please so uh potential solutions for all of this uh next slide please i don't know at this point uh all i have to say is

uh the love of money is the root of all evil and until we find out a way to do this without being so focused on the money we're going to keep having problems like this uh probably stop bulldozing people's houses though i do like that you put that in there yes all right right.

Generally, a good idea, no matter where you are.

We have a segment on this podcast called Safety Guard.

Shake hands with danger.

Fantastic timing.

Hello, Justin, Liam, November, Devin, and possible guests.

Gonna go out on a limb and guess it's Gareth Dennis.

That'll be real.

Nope, no.

That'll be real me if I get it right.

Yeah.

This is a story from the early days of my my career in picture making.

I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, right after college to work in the movie.

Is this picture directed at me?

Because sadly, there's no November's restaurant.

We're going to run.

No, and unfortunately.

Following some friends who got jobs on the Avengers movies.

Six months later, the novel coronavirus shut the country down.

Not a great start.

One of my first production assistant jobs after the shelter-in-place order was lifted was when a friend hired me for a commercial for a brand of strawberries.

It was produced by a small production company and was run on a budgetary regime one might call skin flint.

Oh boy.

Corners would cut, but no one really complained because none of us had worked in six months.

One area that the production skimmed on was garbage.

No.

Oh boy.

It may not be intuitive, but even a small film or TV or commercial production generates a lot of trash.

Yeah, after we're having a TV.

Yeah.

After our two days of shooting for this strawberry commercial.

What the fuck do you mean?

Strawberry commercial.

Like, everyone's aware of the existence of strawberries.

Yeah.

No, that's why you're aware of Coke and Pepsi is because of all the advertising.

I'm aware of it.

I see it in the grocery store.

Shut up and keep going.

We We were left with about 350 pounds of garbage, and I and the other PA asked our producer when the trash pickup was set for and answered, there isn't one.

Figure it out.

When I asked for clarification, I was given...

I was just 350 pounds of garbage, the same question I asked myself in the mirror every morning.

No.

When I asked for clarification, I was given the following parameters.

We couldn't take it to a dump because the producers were unwilling to pay for it.

And we had to get it done in about 75 minutes because we had to

return to our box truck by 11 p.m.

And I had never heard of a dump that was closed on Thanksgiving.

That was an addition for me.

The producer told us to just find a dumpster.

All right.

Yeah, I've done this.

Yeah.

Into the open bed of a waiting cyber truck.

Oh, Lord.

If we had more time, we could have taken the trash to my apartment complex, but the time limit precluded doing that.

So myself and the other PA loaded up and set out to find a secluded dumpster to

illegally dump the trash in.

Oh, yeah.

We naively selected a liquor store and started unloading.

This was a grave mistake.

About five minutes later, the liquor store owner and his armed security guard approached us, screaming at the top of his lungs alternating between threatening us with the police and threatening us with his guard and implicitly his guard's gun the other pa makes the bewildering choice to start arguing with him i interceded and told him to shut the fuck up and begin apologizing profusely to the owner he screams at me to get in the dumpster and take out our trash and I jump straight in and

toss each of the 11 bags that we had put in in there back out.

I mean,

of all the things to get like all the reasons to get told to get in a dumpster at gunpoint, you could do a lot worse.

Yeah, that's true.

I climbed out, and the owner shoves me and insists that six more bags that were already in there were also ours.

I'm in no position or inclination to argue with them, so I jumped back in the dumpster to throw those out as well.

You have wronged the small business warlord.

This guy is going to like,

When A24's Marvel Civil War 2 starts, like, society is going to fracture into like 300 million of this guy.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

I mean, he probably took 27, 8x10 to color glossy pictures with circles and arrows.

You know,

anyway.

Wait, what?

We loaded the trash into the back of the truck, and I apologized again, and we speed away.

We arrive back to the house where

we had been shooting the commercial in.

I was pissed.

I was tired.

and I fucking stink thanks to crawling around in a dumpster.

I shoved the keys to the truck in the producer's hands until I told them to figure the trash out.

My friend who hired me asked what happened, and I explained what had occurred.

She was immediately pissed off, told me to go home, and she would handle it.

I went home, I showered three times, and I went to bed.

A month later, I cashed the check from the job and go on about my life.

That Christmas, I received a card from the production house that produced the commercial,

thanking me for going above and beyond for them on the strawberry commercial.

I noted that there was no money attached.

You have a formal strawberry commendation.

Yeah.

I've since settled comfortably into production office work, which allows me to work in the movies, but crucially, doing so while mostly sitting at a desk and sending emails.

Love the show.

It's something I set my calendar to during the sometime long stretches between jobs.

Keep up the good work with regards from Jacob.

Thank you, Jacob.

All right.

End it.

Now we have no next episode.

It's over.

There is no more development for him.

Our next episode is on Chernobyl.

Does anyone have any commercials before we go?

Killjamesbond.com/slash live.

Kill James Bond live show.

If you survive today, Kill James Bond live show.

You must.

Yes.

If you want four more hours of me, get a Patreon subscription and watch the fashion episode.

Otherwise, let's go.

That was a good one.

I I enjoyed that one.

Yeah, I like that one.

Okay.

Okay.

And that was the podcast.

Right.