Speaker 1: As media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
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Speaker 2: Hi, everyone, and welcome to it could happen here. It's
Speaker 2: me James, and I'm joined today by Kevin McDonald, who
Speaker 2: previously served as a senior officer in the Irish Defense
Speaker 2: Forces with Special Forces experience and has significant experience working
Speaker 2: all over the world after that with United Nations and
Speaker 2: other organizations. And Kevin, welcome to the show. I'm glad
Speaker 2: to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, hopefully I've
Speaker 2: done a good job introducing you. I'm always terrible at that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what we thought we talked about today, Kevin is you
Speaker 2: have significant experience in Lebanon with UNIPHIL and I think
Speaker 2: obviously when we've spoken about this before, we've spoken about
Speaker 2: it from a sort of looking at it from above,
Speaker 2: strategic level. But what we've not spoken about is what
Speaker 2: it looks like on the ground. So hopefully you can
Speaker 2: give us some insight into that, especially having been there
Speaker 2: both as like an enlisted soldier and as an officer.
Speaker 2: I think ye, can you explain at first? I think
Speaker 2: there's been a lot of the confusion or misinformation about
Speaker 2: like how did these Irish If we look at the
Speaker 2: Irish soldiers, that's the one you've obviously the most experienced with,
Speaker 2: how do they end up deployed to Lebanon. Is it
Speaker 2: a voluntary thing? Do they sort of say, put a
Speaker 2: hand up a sat I want to do this, or
Speaker 2: is it your units going so you're going, okay?
Speaker 3: Well, just I suppose as a brief reminder to your listeners,
Speaker 3: UNIFIL is the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, and
Speaker 3: it's been interim since nineteen seventy eight. What it started first,
Speaker 3: the Irish were one of the first countries to sign
Speaker 3: up to deploy a battalion there, and we had a
Speaker 3: battalion in Lebanon nineteen seventy eight until two thousand and
Speaker 3: In two thousand, the Israelis withdrew from what they called
Speaker 3: a security zone about like a ten kilometer buffer zone
Speaker 3: in southern Lebanon.
Speaker 2: So when they did that and.
Speaker 3: Retreat to the frontier between the two countries and a
Speaker 3: part of its battalion, it left a few staff officers there,
Speaker 3: but it didn't supply a battalion anymore. It was concentrating
Speaker 3: on the missions in Syria and other places. And then
Speaker 3: after the two thousand and six war they were asked
Speaker 3: to come back with a battalion and we've been there
Speaker 3: ever since with an infantry battalion. In relation to your
Speaker 3: question about it, is it a volunteer mission, it is
Speaker 3: for most people. However, there have been people who will
Speaker 3: be what's known as mandatory selected if they have certain
Speaker 3: skill sets, whether it be a doctor, whether it be whatever.
Speaker 2: Happens to be.
Speaker 3: If you know, if the army can't get sufficient volunteers,
Speaker 3: then they will mandatory select. But generally speaking, certainly in
Speaker 3: the early years, it was actually quite difficult to get
Speaker 3: to become a volunteer for Leblon because so many people
Speaker 3: wanted to go there because there is, you know, there's
Speaker 3: a bit of a financial incentive to do that as well.
Speaker 3: I deployed there as a private soldier in nineteen eighty four.
Speaker 3: I wasn't even twelve months in the army at that stage,
Speaker 3: and within two months I was made in acting corporate.
Speaker 3: So then I went back as an officer in nineteen
Speaker 3: ninety three where we had a seven day war operational accountability.
Speaker 3: I was back in ninety ninety six as an officer
Speaker 3: for another seven day war, operation Grapes of Wrath, and
Speaker 3: I ended up there with my family as an unarmed
Speaker 3: military observer in two thousand and six for a full
Speaker 3: thirty four days of carnage. So yeah, Lebanon was always
Speaker 3: well regarded by the Arish Defense forces because it did
Speaker 3: the couple of things. It exposed troops to not just
Speaker 3: new cultures and new areas, but it'll exposed them to
Speaker 3: danger as well. And it also gave a chance for
Speaker 3: young NCOs and young officers to to physically lead their
Speaker 3: troops in a challenging environment, which you don't always get,
Speaker 3: you know, when you're at home in Ireland or with
Speaker 3: the UK or whatever, you don't always get that type
Speaker 3: of leadership experience.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Plus you're exposed to other cultures, whether it be the
Speaker 3: Nordic countries or you know, you're exposed to different ways
Speaker 3: of operating and yeah, all in all, it's been it's
Speaker 3: been a positive experience. But I would find out that
Speaker 3: since we started there, we've lost far to get troops
Speaker 3: killed in Lebanon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's because not an insignificant amount, especially considering like
Speaker 2: the Irish Defense Forces are much smaller when if people
Speaker 2: are more familiar with the US military, right, which is
Speaker 2: more than a million people, you know, forty eight is
Speaker 2: a significant amount. You talked about how it exposes you
Speaker 2: to look at other cultures, and obviously one of them
Speaker 2: is like the Lebanese people. But it's a very international deployment, right,
Speaker 2: It's you're not just sort of sitting there on your
Speaker 2: Irish based with Irish Defense Forces. People are not interacting
Speaker 2: with other military So can you explain like some of
Speaker 2: the other country bees that have this long history there.
Speaker 3: When I went there in nineteen eighty four, there was
Speaker 3: a battalion from Fiji, Finland, France, Ghana, ourselves, the Netherlands,
Speaker 3: Norway and Senegal with a strength at the time of
Speaker 3: about six thousand. When I was there as an unarm
Speaker 3: Military Observer with UNSO, which is a different mission, the
Speaker 3: strength had dropped to two thousand in two thousand and six,
Speaker 3: which just two battalions, a Caname battalion and an Indian battalion.
Speaker 3: And now essentially since after the war in two thousand
Speaker 3: and six they started building up, there's probably about ten
Speaker 3: thousand troops there at the moment. There recently huge interaction
Speaker 3: at the battalion level between different nations. In other words,
Speaker 3: a battalion will have its own area of responsibility, it's
Speaker 3: responsible for patrolling.
Speaker 2: In that area.
Speaker 3: Now with the likes of unso that you're much more
Speaker 3: exposed to other armies, other nationalities because essentially every time
Speaker 3: you go patrolling, you can't, like two Irish officers couldn't
Speaker 3: patrol together because if they see an infringement, whether it's
Speaker 3: a firing clause, whether it's one side sending drowns into
Speaker 3: Lebanon an the other side sending controcial rockets in Israel,
Speaker 3: they are all violations. Yeah, but to record it as
Speaker 3: a violation, you can't have two people from the same country,
Speaker 3: So okay, you're you're much more exposed as as a
Speaker 3: foreign nationalities.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and there's certainly a lot of national I know,
Speaker 2: the Indonesians are there now and the contingent from India.
Speaker 2: When people talk about UNIFIL now a lot you'll see
Speaker 2: one of two accusations, right, You'll see that they're either
Speaker 2: like they're as allies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, which is
Speaker 2: not the case, or you'll see that they're there as
Speaker 2: observers for the IDF or spies for the IDF. And like, obviously,
Speaker 2: the fact that they're being accused of both probably suggests
Speaker 2: that they are neither, because it would be fairly obvious
Speaker 2: if they were. But can you explain the tripartite agreement?
Speaker 2: It seems to me like that might make it difficult
Speaker 2: to do the things that uniform is supposed to be doing.
Speaker 2: Is that fair?
Speaker 3: It's I think it's I think it's a fair assessment.
Speaker 3: And if you're if both sides are complaining about you,
Speaker 3: as you say, it probably does indicate that you're you're at.
Speaker 2: Least doing something right.
Speaker 3: So UNIFIL, it's it's a peacekeeper mission and they're there
Speaker 3: with the agreement of both parties. So, in other words,
Speaker 3: the Lebanese government and the Israeli government have agreed that
Speaker 3: UNIFIL be established in Lebanon. That's the first thing to
Speaker 3: point out. The second thing, which is kind of contentious now,
Speaker 3: especially with the extent of hes Budus Tunnels is being exposed.
Speaker 3: Is that there's a lot of generally misinformed chatter about
Speaker 3: what UNIFIL can and cannot do. So after the two
Speaker 3: thousand and six War Resolution seventeen oh one was enforced
Speaker 3: or was brought in to develop more thoroughly the mandate
Speaker 3: for what UNIFIL can and cannot do, and one of
Speaker 3: the stated paragraphs is that UNIFIL will assist the Lebanese
Speaker 3: and forces in taking steps towards the establishment between the
Speaker 3: Blue Line and the Latanian River of an area free
Speaker 3: of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than those
Speaker 3: of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFUL deployed in
Speaker 3: this area. And this is one of the failings. But
Speaker 3: it should be pointed out that it's the responsibility of
Speaker 3: the LAUGH of the Lebanese armed forces to instigate it,
Speaker 3: supported by uniform right, not UNIFIL going in looking for
Speaker 3: arms and weapons supported by the LAUGH.
Speaker 2: It's the other way around.
Speaker 3: And one of the difficulties that you're always going to
Speaker 3: have is that Lebanon has a divided society. It's an
Speaker 3: extremely rich and significant society, and I've lived there quite
Speaker 3: a lot and have great respect for the people and
Speaker 3: their traditions. However, the sectarianism is kind of baked into
Speaker 3: how the government works, and that kind of works its
Speaker 3: way down. So the president has to be a Marianite
Speaker 3: Christian speak of the House has to be Shia, and
Speaker 3: the Prime Minister has to be Sunny. And that division
Speaker 3: was based on the last time there was a census
Speaker 3: in Lebanon, which was nineteen thirty two, and since then
Speaker 3: the dynamics have changed. So Hesbela is not just a
Speaker 3: military organization. It's a political organization, and it's a wealthier organization. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people don't get that. And
Speaker 3: it's Shia and the majority of the people in the
Speaker 3: south are shere and you know a lot of them
Speaker 3: get their schooling and their medication from Hesbulla. So it's
Speaker 3: not just a military organization. And there's various estimates, but
Speaker 3: you could be looking at them. But we say, prior
Speaker 3: to the present conflict, maybe seventy thousand Hesbela in south
Speaker 3: of Beyrootsa. We say, yeah, And some of them are
Speaker 3: full time, some of them are part time, some of
Speaker 3: them are just sympathizers, helpers, friends. You know, it's difficult
Speaker 3: and another factor that has proven extremely difficult is so
Speaker 3: when UNIFIM patrol with the Laugh, there is certain restrictions
Speaker 3: that even the laugh have in terms of entering certain areas.
Speaker 3: And what has Bullet have done is that they have
Speaker 3: designated certain nature reserves and generally speaking, the laugh won't
Speaker 3: go win there. And if the laugh won't go win,
Speaker 3: Uniful can't go win. So the laugh for kind of
Speaker 3: you know that they have a balancing act to do
Speaker 3: in terms of retaining the trust of the people in
Speaker 3: the South and also not causing a sectarian divide within.
Speaker 2: Their own ranks. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 3: And also they have another problem in terms of equipment.
Speaker 3: They're sort of relying on other countries the UK, the US,
Speaker 3: France to supply them with equipment. But like they have
Speaker 3: no tanks, they have a few helicopters. They're very much
Speaker 3: like there's no way they will take on.
Speaker 2: Has Bullet no way, right, yeah, or the idea and
Speaker 2: Uniful itself.
Speaker 3: Is lightly armed, you know, it's not gone round in
Speaker 3: tanks anything armored carriage.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 3: The only time the last time UNIFAL had tanks in
Speaker 3: Lebanon was just after the war when the French deployed
Speaker 3: with the La Clerq.
Speaker 2: Tanks, which did not please.
Speaker 3: The locals because the Clerk tanks driving up and down
Speaker 3: the roads was nearly doing as much damage as the
Speaker 3: Marcava tanks during the war, and plus Lebanon isn't a
Speaker 3: very tank friendly area to be operation against what we.
Speaker 2: Say, right, Yeah, was that when the IDF came in
Speaker 2: in then Macava tanks and the French like physically blocked
Speaker 2: them with their own tanks. I can't remember when that was.
Speaker 3: And I'm not aware of that, but it could will
Speaker 3: happen because I know certainly back in the nineties.
Speaker 2: That may have been.
Speaker 3: When it was when Israel was operating the security zone.
Speaker 3: We the Irish and our colleagues from Finland and Norway
Speaker 3: had had numerous standoffs with Israelis trying to enter certain villages.
Speaker 2: And yeah, but.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I saw the day before yesterday the two I
Speaker 3: think two bulldozers in the Marcava or I said, yeah,
Speaker 3: two d nines broke down a U and watchtower and
Speaker 3: a un fence at the un had Unifild headquarters in
Speaker 3: the Cura, which is a few k from the from
Speaker 3: the frontier with with Israel. Yes, I should I note
Speaker 3: as well for your listeners that Israel and Lebanon have
Speaker 3: been at a state of war since nineteen forty eight.
Speaker 2: Yes, they've never had a seattler or a peace agreement,
Speaker 2: and the Triparte Agreement is the only place where they
Speaker 2: actually meet, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there is a UNIFIL post a meeting normally
Speaker 3: right at the frontier where you can cross between one
Speaker 3: country and the other. And I keep using the word
Speaker 3: frontier because it's not a border. It hasn't been officially demarketated.
Speaker 3: The blue line which I mentioned earlier on simply verifies
Speaker 3: that the IDEF have withdrawn into Israel, but it's.
Speaker 2: Not the border.
Speaker 3: Right However, going back to your point about the Tripartheid Agreement,
Speaker 3: and that's where the senior Israeli officials senior Lebanese officials
Speaker 3: under the chairmanship of UNIFIL meet and they discuss items
Speaker 3: of concern that maybe UNIFIL can help or no between
Speaker 3: the two of them. And in twenty twenty two they
Speaker 3: managed to organize a maritime boundary okay between Lebanon and Israel,
Speaker 3: which was kind of fascinating because on the western side
Speaker 3: of Lebanon and the northwesterns coast of Israel, the huge
Speaker 3: gas fields. Yeah, so the two countries actually they've agreed
Speaker 3: their maritime boundary onto the auspices of UNIFORM. This is
Speaker 3: still han't agree their land, but it's the first time
Speaker 3: that a peacekeep mission has arranged and courage developed and
Speaker 3: led successfully discussions about a maritime boundary. So the Uniform
Speaker 3: does have some successes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no, I think it would be wrong to
Speaker 2: overlook these. We'll take a quick break for adverts, then
Speaker 2: we'll come back. We're back and Kevin, you'd mentioned that
Speaker 2: you were in Lebanon in two thousand and six. I
Speaker 2: think you said you're an unarms observer at that time.
Speaker 2: Is that right, Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 3: Yet, so one of the oldest missions in the world
Speaker 3: is one so the United Nations True Supervisory Organization, and
Speaker 3: that essentially was established I suppose after the forty eight war,
Speaker 3: and it had well say, offices and observers in Egypt, Israel, Syria,
Speaker 3: Jordan and Lebanon. You know that they were quite effective
Speaker 3: in certain ways, Like certainly the eventual peace agreement between
Speaker 3: Egypt and Israel was very much helped along by the
Speaker 3: presence of Onso in Cairo and Shamer Shehak. The peace
Speaker 3: agreement between Jordan and Israel again was very much assisted
Speaker 3: by by Onso. So they have a kind of a
Speaker 3: fairly good track record. And what they bring to the
Speaker 3: table is that first of all, they're unarmed military observers,
Speaker 3: which which takes some of the sting out of heaven.
Speaker 3: You know, a heavily armed guy with a helmlets and
Speaker 3: sunglasses walk around, you know that. And and some some armies,
Speaker 3: as you know, can tend to be more intimidating than
Speaker 3: others in how they how they carried themselves. So I
Speaker 3: went there. I went to the region in two thousand
Speaker 3: and five and I was working on the occupied Golden Heights,
Speaker 3: living in the in Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee
Speaker 3: with my wife and two kids who then were four
Speaker 3: and five. And in February zero six, I was transferred
Speaker 3: to Lebanon and we were living in the city of Tier.
Speaker 3: The kids were going to a local English speaking Arab
Speaker 3: school and Lebanon was absolutely thriving. It must happened. We
Speaker 3: had the kids in bear Rouge, we had them in
Speaker 3: a man doing what they run and my normal routine.
Speaker 3: We had four observation posts along the frontier with Israel. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Staft by five guys who spent a week seven days
Speaker 3: up there, and then you come.
Speaker 2: Down for four or five and then go back up again.
Speaker 3: And each team had its specific area to operate with,
Speaker 3: and we say a specific battalion that we would interact with.
Speaker 3: And also quite importantly, we had liais and assistants who
Speaker 3: were locals, like translations, but they're a lot more important
Speaker 3: than that. And based on the sectarian nature of the area,
Speaker 3: you know, you'd always have a Christian, you'd always have
Speaker 3: a Shia, but you could have the Jews. If you
Speaker 3: were further up to the north, you could have Sunneny.
Speaker 3: And each team had four or five of these because
Speaker 3: we used to send two patrols out each day. So
Speaker 3: we had huge interaction with the locals and armor, with
Speaker 3: the mayors and the mucktars, and we were very much
Speaker 3: a force multiplier for UNIFIL because we could get information
Speaker 3: from people. You know, we used to stop and have
Speaker 3: lunch in some of the little restaurants, and we were
Speaker 3: always talking to people, and you know, it was the
Speaker 3: window down, waving out, having a chat, learning a bit
Speaker 3: of Arabic. Whereas UNIFIL by its nature goes around the
Speaker 3: armor cars and even if you stop and you get
Speaker 3: out and you take off the sunglasses, people will just
Speaker 3: react differently to two guys with a local that they
Speaker 3: know in the car.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as about someone in full battle rattle again. Now,
Speaker 2: we definitely were.
Speaker 3: But the or kicked off on the twelfth of July
Speaker 3: two thousand and six and I was I had done
Speaker 3: on patrol to pick up or Christian liaison assistant in
Speaker 3: her village and literally we were heading off on patrol
Speaker 3: and over the radio, all stations go to the nearest
Speaker 3: uent position immediately. The nearest U went position tours at
Speaker 3: the time was an Indian platoon position on top of
Speaker 3: a hill. From my past experience, I had reckoned that
Speaker 3: there was a bit of stuff going on either in
Speaker 3: shape the farms, which is a disputed area in the
Speaker 3: southeastern part of Lebanon, up in the mountains. So I
Speaker 3: said to the guy that was with me, I said, look,
Speaker 3: this could be over a couple of hours. Let's go
Speaker 3: straight back to our patrol base. And you know, we
Speaker 3: knew we had a food the facility, and we also
Speaker 3: knew we had a good bunker in the place, so
Speaker 3: we had it back at a fair age of nuts.
Speaker 3: Shall we say, and normally when we would have two
Speaker 3: patrols out, there'd be one guy left in the patrol
Speaker 3: base and he'd be responsible for radio checks and all
Speaker 3: that kind of stuff. But what we do is, when
Speaker 3: we were about maybe a kilometer away, we would inform
Speaker 3: our headquarters in the Kura that were closing down at
Speaker 3: our final destination, which would give this guy time to
Speaker 3: come out and unlock.
Speaker 2: The gate to let us in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and just as I had transmitted that, he comes
Speaker 3: up on the ear and said, don't come in, don't
Speaker 3: come in, we're getting hit up. So we at that
Speaker 3: stage we were restigate, and about maybe two kilometers away
Speaker 3: there was a huge IDF position and they were just
Speaker 3: banging with pine fives and gpmgs, not directly at us,
Speaker 3: but kind of in the general area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, explain those weapons systems for people who aren't familiar,
Speaker 2: Like what's a GPMG if as somebody is.
Speaker 3: Not, okay, sorry, So you've everyone's familied with, well, say
Speaker 3: in AK forty seven or and M sixteen, which would
Speaker 3: be known as small arms. In other words, that caliber
Speaker 3: is five point five six or seven point six two.
Speaker 3: Then you have medium machine guns, which are generally belt
Speaker 3: fed and there are seven point six two and then
Speaker 3: you have heavy machine guns again belt fed and they're
Speaker 3: twelve point seven or fifty caliber. So we were getting
Speaker 3: a fair bit. But it took us maybe an hour
Speaker 3: of listening to various news channels both in Lebanon and
Speaker 3: in Israel to realize that Hesbela had carried out a
Speaker 3: cross border attack, hit up an idea of convoy, kidnapped
Speaker 3: two who were seriously injured and subsequently died and killed
Speaker 3: initially four and then against their own orders, and Israeli
Speaker 3: Mcalva went into Lebanon to have a kind of commanding
Speaker 3: view over where they thought that Hesbal, we're bringing these guys.
Speaker 3: Hesbala knew that that's what they do, and big anti
Speaker 3: tank mine and killed four guys inside the Murcava. So
Speaker 3: Israel had lost eight and two kidnapped in the space
Speaker 3: of maybe maybe an hour.
Speaker 2: So the reaction was was was fast and furious, and.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it took us nearly six days to get our
Speaker 3: liais and assistant back back to her village. It took
Speaker 3: the un nearly two and a half weeks too, have
Speaker 3: actually with the families, because at that stage once it
Speaker 3: was a family mission. And where I was, I could
Speaker 3: see the jets dropping bombs into Tier, and my wife
Speaker 3: could look up on the skyline, knowing where I was,
Speaker 3: and see the same thing happening. I was sort of
Speaker 3: used to being under fire, but it's a different thing
Speaker 3: to see your family under fire as well. And eventually
Speaker 3: when the charter the sort of a cruise bliner from
Speaker 3: Cyprus to come over and stand offshore and sending its
Speaker 3: lifeboats to bring the families out. So when this has
Speaker 3: been planned and so had tried to organize that an
Speaker 3: armored convoy would bring those onmos that were deployed on
Speaker 3: the four posts down to Tier to say goodbye. But
Speaker 3: where I was, we were getting hamored with artillery fire and
Speaker 3: tank fire. So I was the only one with family
Speaker 3: that couldn't get out. So when my wife and two
Speaker 3: kids that were five and seven at that stage were
Speaker 3: getting into the lifeboat to bring them out to the ship,
Speaker 3: I rang her and I said, look, I'll say you
Speaker 3: want to see you, which is not.
Speaker 2: A great way to end the family mission. Let me Retalia.
Speaker 3: And then in the space of the next three days,
Speaker 3: we had a strength of fifty two officers and in
Speaker 3: about three days we lost over ten percent. We had
Speaker 3: one Italian captain shot in the back. He's now in
Speaker 3: a wheel chair. We had another Australian captain seriously injured
Speaker 3: when the convose she was in was I suppose target
Speaker 3: It is probably the way to explain it. But she
Speaker 3: she was thrown up against the inside of the armored
Speaker 3: car and essentially her back was broken. She was evacuated
Speaker 3: with my wife and kids. And then I think it
Speaker 3: was the day later or two days later, the Israeli
Speaker 3: dropped the Jadam, which is a bunker busted missile into
Speaker 3: the post just up for me, killing four very good
Speaker 3: friends of mine. So yeah, two thousand and six was
Speaker 3: a bit rough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if you're comfortable, could we talk about that last
Speaker 2: one a little bit, because I think it's one of
Speaker 2: the ones that, like, there's no mistaking that un position, right,
Speaker 2: it's you don't and you don't accidentally disco dropping jadeams
Speaker 2: left right in center all over the place. Like.
Speaker 3: The first thing I should say is that twenty one
Speaker 3: years previously, that observation post was completely destroyed, but there
Speaker 3: was no one in it at the time, so when
Speaker 3: it was rebuilt, it had the best bunker in Lebanon
Speaker 3: so that they dug down first and had like a
Speaker 3: lot of the the bunkers currently in Lebanar are overgrown
Speaker 3: to bunkers, but this this was dug down into the
Speaker 3: into the rock essentially and it had its roof was
Speaker 3: about a measure and a half of reinforced steel and concrete. Yeah,
Speaker 3: with the two story concrete building on top of it. Now,
Speaker 3: so without doubt it was the best bunker in Lebanon.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So that on this this happened on the twenty fifth
Speaker 3: of July, and on that particular day we'd already lost
Speaker 3: the patrol base in Maruna Ras when when Roberto was
Speaker 3: shot and they had to I have to say in fairness,
Speaker 3: but on the are liais on branch that kind of
Speaker 3: liaises between IDF and UNIFIL okay, and UNIFIL couldn't launch
Speaker 3: one of the helicopters to do a medevac. So the
Speaker 3: decision was made that the guys would get into an
Speaker 3: armored land cruiser and follow Israeli tank tracks back into Israel.
Speaker 2: Where they couldn't decafflict the air space to launch it
Speaker 2: or what was stopping them launching their helicopter to evacuate There.
Speaker 3: Was too much kinectic activity at that we wouldn't have
Speaker 3: been able to land it like it was.
Speaker 2: It was a battle long ago, okay, Yeah.
Speaker 3: So they essentially followed Israeli tank tracks that had come
Speaker 3: into Leblon. They followed those tank tracks back into Israel
Speaker 3: where they were met by an Israeli patrol and Roberto
Speaker 3: was flown through Rambam Hospital. But yeah, gone back to
Speaker 3: going back tom on the twenty fifth of July, as
Speaker 3: we were all taking a fair bit of incoming where
Speaker 3: I was. It wasn't targeting. It was more sort of
Speaker 3: harassment fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, like that. The house next door.
Speaker 3: Took three direct tank rounds and it was five meters
Speaker 3: away Jesus from our post, and our post was tiny. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but in the guys in Kam were taken a coup
Speaker 3: bit of artillery, but there was a lot of air
Speaker 3: strikes coming in close. And again for your listeners, the
Speaker 3: UN has a designation what it calls a firing close.
Speaker 3: So we'll say a firing close from a sixteen is
Speaker 3: I know, something like fifty meters or something like that.
Speaker 3: Firing close from an artillery shell is five hundred meters,
Speaker 3: and a firing close from an aerial bomb is a kilometer,
Speaker 3: So if glands within a kilometer, it's officially designated as
Speaker 3: a firing close and it's orders and you know, both
Speaker 3: sides get you know, it's it's an official account of
Speaker 3: of what's happening. So the guys who are getting the
Speaker 3: you know, a good few firings close from area bombs
Speaker 3: and there was three distinct weights of attack in the
Speaker 3: general area. So naturally force commander uniful, chief of staff on.
Speaker 3: So you and a quarters in New York were screaming
Speaker 3: at the Israelis, you know, stop targeting disposition. Yeah, what
Speaker 3: was there hes bull in the area? Of course there
Speaker 3: was kemp Is a has been a stronghold. But eventually
Speaker 3: that that evening the decision was made that the patrol
Speaker 3: bus is going to be evacuated. But because of the
Speaker 3: level of kinetic activity that evening, it was going to
Speaker 3: be done at.
Speaker 2: First light the next morning.
Speaker 3: And since the war started, we had all been on
Speaker 3: the twenty four to seven twenty minute radish, so every
Speaker 3: twenty minutes you had to respond to a radio check.
Speaker 3: So the last transmission from the post was from Canadian
Speaker 3: friend of mine x special for horse is really really
Speaker 3: cool and I could hear it in his voice. He
Speaker 3: was requested a luck in time for a firing close.
Speaker 3: It's danger close, it's danger close, get them to stop.
Speaker 3: And that was the last transmission. So when they missed
Speaker 3: the next radio check, we presumed another shell had come
Speaker 3: in and blown all the aerials of the.
Speaker 2: Of the building.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so myself and an assie friend of mine requested
Speaker 3: permission to take our armored land cruiser and try and
Speaker 3: drive up and see what was happening.
Speaker 2: That was refused by UNIFILM.
Speaker 3: So they sent a patrol from the Indian battalion, which
Speaker 3: was kind of in fairness that it was nearer. So
Speaker 3: we switched on to their radio frequency to hear what
Speaker 3: they were saying. And so they approached the base. They
Speaker 3: had obviously had to break down the gate and said
Speaker 3: the base had taken a direct hit by an aerial bomb.
Speaker 3: And at that stage we were still thinking maybe they're
Speaker 3: trapped under the rubble or something like that. And then
Speaker 3: the one of the transmitters we have found the body
Speaker 3: of a Chinese officer, so we knew the four guys
Speaker 3: were were were killed. And the Indians found three bodies
Speaker 3: that night and brought them to the Marchary in marja Un,
Speaker 3: which is.
Speaker 2: A large Christian town.
Speaker 3: So the next morning there was I think five of
Speaker 3: us tasked to open identify the bodies.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So the first guy was Chinese, was over pressure killed him,
Speaker 3: so that that was an easy one to identify. The
Speaker 3: next guy had no arms, no legs, and we head
Speaker 3: Jesus and where his head should have been was the
Speaker 3: chain of a dog type and I went down into
Speaker 3: his his body Paris, yeah, and the other guy yeah.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it was a difficult different procedure, and then
Speaker 3: we had to try and arrange to get the bodies
Speaker 3: transferred into Israel to where you and colleagues from Jerusalem
Speaker 3: so they could go to Rambam Hospital and have have
Speaker 3: you know, a proper identification and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, eventually be returned to their families, I suppose.
Speaker 3: And that was a difficult procedure because where the IDEF
Speaker 3: said they could meet us, there was a minefield in
Speaker 3: front of us, and where we said we could meet them,
Speaker 3: they thought it was too exposed. So eventually we went
Speaker 3: into an old, small, tiny Indian platoon position and about
Speaker 3: one hundred meters away there was a gate that the
Speaker 3: Israelitis used to use to come in and out when
Speaker 3: the security's own was there. But the area between the
Speaker 3: UN position and the gate hadn't been mind swept in
Speaker 3: six years. But we had no choice. We couldn't bring
Speaker 3: the guys back to the marcher because it had resorted
Speaker 3: to using refrigerated trucks to store.
Speaker 2: Bodies because the marcher was full. Yeah, so there.
Speaker 3: Was an IDEF company there under a I think it
Speaker 3: was a full brigadier, and there's a war going on naturally, Yeah,
Speaker 3: all the time, gunships and katouoscha's passing each other over
Speaker 3: our heads. So when we had the three lads transfer
Speaker 3: over to our colleagues from Jerusalem, I stood in front
Speaker 3: of the IDF brigadier and I lined up all the
Speaker 3: uent troops and it says, we're not and have a
Speaker 3: minute silence and memory of our friends who were murdered
Speaker 3: on the cause of peace, and no having a minute
Speaker 3: silence them in the middle of a battle is not
Speaker 3: a no experience. In fairness to this guy, he stood
Speaker 3: to attention, and because I lived in Tiberias, I had
Speaker 3: a small bit of Hebrew, and I went over afterwards
Speaker 3: and thanked them for his respect. And we didn't find
Speaker 3: the fourth body on the laughter sease fire Jesus.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, that's rough. Sorry, that's terrible to think about.
Speaker 3: So the obvious question is, I know, what the one
Speaker 3: you want to add? Why I should have said that
Speaker 3: at the start? Anything I say here, it's it's my
Speaker 3: personal opinion. So it can't be construed as being the
Speaker 3: views of the Irish Defense Forces, yes, of course, are
Speaker 3: certainly not the views of the Niger nations. Are my
Speaker 3: personal views. So you know, people should just take it
Speaker 3: that it's it's Kevin McDonald describing what happened to him
Speaker 3: and what his personal views on it are. So why
Speaker 3: did they do it?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 3: I think there's a couple of things. Hubris is one.
Speaker 3: I think at that stage they were like a schoolyard
Speaker 3: bully who got better and wanted to lash out of
Speaker 3: anything and everything. A second, probably more tactical reason is
Speaker 3: that the village of kim Is on a ridge, would say,
Speaker 3: at the end of the Redge Ridge, closest to Israel,
Speaker 3: because it's only about four miles away, is where this
Speaker 3: op was. And that's the reason that was there. And
Speaker 3: between Kam and we say, the frontier with Israel is
Speaker 3: the Hula Valley, which is the biggest maneuver space. If
Speaker 3: you want to maneuver armor and stuff into Lebanon with
Speaker 3: plenty of space, that's where you do it. In fact,
Speaker 3: beside it is an old Vichy French airfield from the
Speaker 3: Second World War, so it's low space and I think
Speaker 3: they didn't want eyes on the ground seeing what they
Speaker 3: were doing. And like one of the things.
Speaker 2: For mility observers is you observe in your report. That's
Speaker 2: your task.
Speaker 3: So was there Hesbola in the area around the around
Speaker 3: the op, Yes, there was, But as you probably know,
Speaker 3: if you want to attack true in the open, you
Speaker 3: use airburst artillery shells, which the Israeli is dated in
Speaker 3: nineteen ninety six when they fired fifteen of them into
Speaker 3: a UN battalion head quarters, killing one hundred and six
Speaker 3: eleven these men, women and children. See Conceultu shelter in
Speaker 3: the UN headquarters. Yeah, what you don't fire a bunk
Speaker 3: or bust and missile into a UN post to attack Hesbulla.
Speaker 2: The's subtle difference. Yeah, there's a huge difference. Yeah. I
Speaker 2: suppose what people will ask is like it's I think
Speaker 2: it's important to explain this from the point of view
Speaker 2: of someone on the ground, it is obviously un troops
Speaker 2: are not there to fight, they're there to keep peace.
Speaker 2: But they are an armed presence, and so they'll wonder
Speaker 2: how or why the un can or can't defend itself
Speaker 2: the uniform troops specifically in these positions. So, like, can
Speaker 2: you explain how your rules of engagement and how that
Speaker 2: works for from the sort of on the ground perspective.
Speaker 3: Okay, Well, the rules of engagement we said for a
Speaker 3: peacekeeper mission, like we pack on so to onside because
Speaker 3: they're unarmed, but for.
Speaker 2: A peacekeeping mission.
Speaker 3: So peacekeeping is generally based on three principles consent, impartiality,
Speaker 3: and the use of force in self defense of the mandate.
Speaker 3: So naturally, like the guys there at the moment aren't
Speaker 3: going to try and take on through or former KAFA tanks.
Speaker 3: First of all, they don't have the capability.
Speaker 2: To to it. Yeah, that's an interesting Do they not
Speaker 2: have the guinances? That's fine? Do they have for instance,
Speaker 2: javelin and things like that? Do they have those weapons
Speaker 2: systems available?
Speaker 3: I'm not sure what they have currently. Certainly we didn't
Speaker 3: have okay, and it wasn't ever going to be an
Speaker 3: issue because that's kind of not our job.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 3: The sole responsibility to protect the people of Leblon is
Speaker 3: the Lebanese government. Uniful is there to assist. It's not
Speaker 3: there to say, okay, you step back, we stemmed up
Speaker 3: and protect you. That's not what Uniful or any peacekeeping mission.
Speaker 3: The only peacekeeping mission that eventually had enough offensive capability
Speaker 3: built into its mandate was the mission that's now closing
Speaker 3: down in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo
Speaker 3: and it's MENUSCO, and they specifically changed the mandate to
Speaker 3: include an offensive capability to go after them twenty three
Speaker 3: rebels in the Kivus in sort of the northeast and
Speaker 3: when they did it, like you know, attack helicopter special
Speaker 3: forces a lot. Yeah, it was quite effective. But which
Speaker 3: kind of brings me to another point because I just
Speaker 3: last year I completed a Masters in Peace and Conflict
Speaker 3: Studies and mandates was the evolution of mandates is what
Speaker 3: I sort of looked at, and having wrote bus mandates
Speaker 3: is all well and good, but the TCCs, the true
Speaker 3: contriping countries have to have the ability, the capability of
Speaker 3: the training and the will to carry out the robust
Speaker 3: nature of the mandate. So you know, we were saying
Speaker 3: in Ireland paper never refuses, inc. You can put whatever
Speaker 3: you want into a mandate, but you have to be
Speaker 3: able to effectively implement the mandate. Yeah, and I think
Speaker 3: and that's that's the reason that that maybe people are
Speaker 3: kind of broad in how mandates are written, but that's
Speaker 3: that's that's for someone we're further up to food chain
Speaker 3: the moon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So for those like the people on the ground
Speaker 2: then and now that's not a great deal. They can do, right,
Speaker 2: They can attempt to ask the idea have to stop,
Speaker 2: which they did, which has historically not work. And they
Speaker 2: can take shelter in their bunkers, which they did, which
Speaker 2: it's only helpful that they're not going to use bunker
Speaker 2: busting missiles to to des try that bunker. So, like
Speaker 2: it must be terrible. Like it's one thing to be
Speaker 2: engaged in combat with someone, especially if you're a soldier,
Speaker 2: bro it's another thing. And I found myself in this
Speaker 2: situation last year to be effectively like I'm able to respond.
Speaker 2: I'm thinking here of the Turkish drone bombing and fighter
Speaker 2: jets and as in Syria where I was, but it's
Speaker 2: a horrible thing to be in that situation, and is
Speaker 2: it for those peacekeepers? It must be a really difficult
Speaker 2: place to be.
Speaker 3: Well, it is, yeah, and of course you know that
Speaker 3: they're all conscious of the fact that their families back
Speaker 3: in Ireland are fully.
Speaker 2: Aware of what's going on.
Speaker 3: And yeah, shortly after the invasion, the IDEF decided that
Speaker 3: they're told usually for the want of them out essentially,
Speaker 3: and not just the Irish, but but what other nationalities
Speaker 3: that were not going, you know, So the idea if
Speaker 3: everywhere they go in Lebanon, the first vehicle is a
Speaker 3: dena in Bolthozer because that is more robust than a
Speaker 3: marcava and it can also very quickly throw up earth
Speaker 3: and ramparts to sort of you know, protect from direct fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the idea of troops.
Speaker 3: So they decided that they would literally conjoin an IDEAF
Speaker 3: position to the Irish position, hoping that they could intimidate
Speaker 3: the Irish into leaving. And the position's name was six
Speaker 3: ash five two, very close to the frontier. Ironically, when
Speaker 3: the Israelis withdrew in two thousand, they recognized that this
Speaker 3: particular area was what we in the minute would call
Speaker 3: key terrain because that area overlooked a vulnerable part of
Speaker 3: northern Israel, villages like Avavem and a few others. So
Speaker 3: the idea to requested UNIFIL to put a position there
Speaker 3: which would say stop has bulletin put in the position there,
Speaker 3: and then suddenly they're up close and personal, trying to
Speaker 3: intimidate the Irish and other nationalities as well. Yeah, so
Speaker 3: it's one of the things, and I think one of
Speaker 3: the reasons that they didn't want unifilled, and there's about
Speaker 3: twenty small of these small positions, mainly close to the frontier.
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons that they and again
Speaker 3: this is a personal point of view, I think one
Speaker 3: of the reasons that they didn't want UNIFIL in any
Speaker 3: of these positions was eighty turn it into a free
Speaker 3: fire zone would be. One of the things that UNIFORD
Speaker 3: is supposed to do is to monitor and report, monitor
Speaker 3: and observe, and of course if you're not there, you
Speaker 3: can't do it. That's actually one of the things that
Speaker 3: the Uniform, even though they're hunkred in their bases, would
Speaker 3: with very little mobility, they can still monitor and observe
Speaker 3: what's happening in the general area.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, I would say in the case of Disposition six
Speaker 3: A five to two, if the ideas ultimately gain our
Speaker 3: goal was to take a major has been a stronghold
Speaker 3: which is called Binchabael, that's a good further north than disposition,
Speaker 3: so that the focus of attention would move on from
Speaker 3: with the our guys and go a wee bit further north.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So that's sort of where they find themselves now, right,
Speaker 2: is these can you explain like you've got these positions
Speaker 2: along the frontier and then you've got the headquarters that
Speaker 2: you just mentioned two days ago have been infringed by
Speaker 2: a bulldizer attacked, depends how you want to say it.
Speaker 3: Well, it makes a change from having a tankerun fired
Speaker 3: into an op which they didn't yeah a few days previously.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they've done consistently right for for a month
Speaker 2: or so. Now is firing directly into these observing positions?
Speaker 2: Are these positions that are now? Are they left isolated
Speaker 2: as the idef wull advance passed and around them and
Speaker 2: in addition to biring directly at.
Speaker 3: Them, there's somewhat isolated. Now all these positions would be
Speaker 3: well stocked with water and emergency rations and stuff like that.
Speaker 3: And as I mentioned before, UNIFIL do have a liaison
Speaker 3: branch which I'm sure are talking to the idea IF
Speaker 3: on an early basis, and they will coordinate the movements
Speaker 3: of UNIFIL with say, supply their positions or I think
Speaker 3: last week they had a convoy went into the city
Speaker 3: of Tier, which is probably twelve k from the headquarters,
Speaker 3: to distribute aid, especially medical aid, because tiers getting fairly weacked,
Speaker 3: like all of the self, I suppose, so there is
Speaker 3: engagement to make sure that these posts are like completely isolated,
Speaker 3: that that there is a means of doing resupply.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's real, stopped one of those at some point,
Speaker 2: didn't it, Like was it a resupply and movement.
Speaker 3: The stop things that are on a regular basis. As
Speaker 3: I said, there is interaction, like nothing happens in the vacuum,
Speaker 3: like we said, Yeah, the Irish Italian headquarters would not
Speaker 3: send a convoy to Sixtas five two without it being
Speaker 3: communicated to the Israelis and saying we're going to go
Speaker 3: on three vehicles that or seven hundred hours blah blah blah,
Speaker 3: and and and get the confirmation back that yeah, that's okay,
Speaker 3: because you know, they mentioned the foul the war, and
Speaker 3: that that's all from the fairly real as you can
Speaker 3: imagine yourself.
Speaker 2: It's a fairly real.
Speaker 3: Thing that happens, you know sometimes you know, yeah, instructions
Speaker 3: don't get passed down, or sometimes instructions are ignored for
Speaker 3: whatever reason. So it's it's a bit of a delicate,
Speaker 3: delicate balancing act. But from what I understand, it's working well.
Speaker 2: That's good. Yeah, yeah, And I think it's working well
Speaker 2: in terms of like what's happening in Lebanon is bad
Speaker 2: and it'd be better if it wasn't. But it's not
Speaker 2: at the same tier as it has been in Gaza.
Speaker 3: No, you're looking at maybe three and a half thousand
Speaker 3: compared to forty three and a half thousand kild.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so many of those being civilians, right, people
Speaker 2: who absolutely no business targeting, and like that genocidal violence
Speaker 2: that we've seen in Gaza hasn't come to Lebanon, and
Speaker 2: in part I think we can attribute that to their
Speaker 2: being observed. Is there is that fair to say? I
Speaker 2: think it's a fair point.
Speaker 3: Of course, there's no real the UN footprint in Gaza.
Speaker 3: My understanding is it's extremely extremely light. Yeah, and as
Speaker 3: you know that would say banished genre, Yeah, whereas I
Speaker 3: mean unifor the ten thousand troops in southern Lebanon. So
Speaker 3: there's very much more, maybe a more consciousness, but they're
Speaker 3: still flattin in the place. But it's in terms of
Speaker 3: civilian casualties. As we said, it's not going on as
Speaker 3: long as Gaza either, but on the we'ld say the
Speaker 3: combat front, but not exactly having things the wrong way either.
Speaker 3: They've been trying to take the village of Kian for
Speaker 3: the last I think two weeks, and my understanding is
Speaker 3: that haven't have destroyed it, right, but they haven't taken it.
Speaker 3: And it was like in two thousand and six they
Speaker 3: claimed that the town of ben Chebail was the Hesibla
Speaker 3: capital of the South, which and suppose't the way it was,
Speaker 3: but the turn of then draws me.
Speaker 2: But they never controlled it. They were still getting.
Speaker 3: Attacked, you know, days after they had seized it.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've never really established like control or like monopoly
Speaker 2: and on violence in the area. And yeah, they've not
Speaker 2: done that this time. And I think I suppose the
Speaker 2: last thing I wanted to ask about is like we've
Speaker 2: just talked about like why this mission is important, and
Speaker 2: we've spoken about for like you had your family there
Speaker 2: when they were being bombed, and like this investment in
Speaker 2: being there in Lebanon, being alongside the Lebanese people in
Speaker 2: your case with your own family, like it's it's one
Speaker 2: that island has had for a long time. Ireland has historically,
Speaker 2: amongst European nations, been much better on the rights of
Speaker 2: Palestine and Palestinian people than most European nations. How is
Speaker 2: this peacekeeping mission perceived in Ireland? Like, are people proud
Speaker 2: that they're there?
Speaker 4: Oh?
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh, hugely proud.
Speaker 3: And and you know, the Irish have always been extremely
Speaker 3: proud of what our defense forces have achieved, despite us
Speaker 3: being a very small defense forces. Like I think at
Speaker 3: the moment between the Navy, the Army and the Air
Speaker 3: Corps were probably looking at in total.
Speaker 2: Total, well, yeah, very small.
Speaker 3: And then we're overseas in a lot of places as well,
Speaker 3: so like the doc Dad from the nine, you're probably
Speaker 3: down to eight. Yeah, but we do tend to punch
Speaker 3: up over with internationally. We obviously had no colonial baggage,
Speaker 3: which affects some other countries. Yes, and I think generally speaking,
Speaker 3: we're seeing as a I'm not sure if annest Brooker
Speaker 3: is the right word, but certainly not as threatening and not.
Speaker 2: Coming with an agenda, right yeah.
Speaker 3: Whereas other other countries might have a certain agenda for
Speaker 3: whatever political reasons at home. And it's certainly in Ireland
Speaker 3: s caes As I said, we were there from seventy
Speaker 3: eight two thousand and now from two thousand and six
Speaker 3: to present day, and a lot of it has been
Speaker 3: in the same general area, so people would know Irish soldiers.
Speaker 2: Some Lebanese talk with an Irish accent. I've heard that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: it's mad. Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 3: And depending on what part of Ireland the troops were from,
Speaker 3: you could even go further down, like some of them
Speaker 3: talk with a very broad Dublin accent. Some of them
Speaker 3: would talk with a very broad Cork accent. Because of
Speaker 3: that interaction. And I know one of the first big
Speaker 3: projects the Irish did, certainly from the early yearies, was
Speaker 3: to build an orphanage in a provincial capital coll tip name,
Speaker 3: and they've been doing that even when we know troops there,
Speaker 3: guys were still sending money and toys and everything. That's
Speaker 3: been demolished last week.
Speaker 2: For Jesus An Orphanage. It's like storybook evil stuff, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Like, Yeah, well, you know, it's just there's a lot
Speaker 3: of evil stuff going on in the Middle East at
Speaker 3: the moment, unfortunately.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean I've personally seen hospitals bombed
Speaker 2: and all that kind of stuff myself, and it sometimes
Speaker 2: doesn't even make the news. I mean that Orphanage evidently
Speaker 2: didn't really make my news. Diet Kevin, thank you very
Speaker 2: much for sharing some of your experiences over there, and
Speaker 2: I'd love to have you on again to talk about
Speaker 2: the things you've the work you've done in Africa and
Speaker 2: the line after leven. And you've written a book right
Speaker 2: about your experiences peacekeeping and other things. Where could people
Speaker 2: find that?
Speaker 3: Okay, So this initially starting off as a lockdown project
Speaker 3: during the COVID lockdown in the Central African Republican And
Speaker 3: initially it was just from my wife and family. But
Speaker 3: as it starts writing, you kind of started remembering and
Speaker 3: it's not just your typical military guy tell us about
Speaker 3: how Bravey was. I have a separate career in mountaineering
Speaker 3: and a separate career in archaeology. As well, So it's
Speaker 3: a kind of a much more different missimash of of
Speaker 3: stuff going on. So that the book is called a
Speaker 3: Lifeless Ordinary and it can be purchased online at male
Speaker 3: Books Dot.
Speaker 2: I m a y orb Orchas. Yeah, I like that balance.
Speaker 2: I've always thought that, like, I'll go somewhere and I'll
Speaker 2: write about the worst things I saw there and the
Speaker 2: worst days I had there, and that'll be my story.
Speaker 2: But I've always wanted to write about the mountains of
Speaker 2: Kurdistan are beautiful and I really loved being there, and
Speaker 2: there are other places that people think of them as wars,
Speaker 2: not countries, and I think it would be I'd love
Speaker 2: to write about mountaineering back acting in these places where
Speaker 2: often it's really sad that you don't get to share
Speaker 2: that part. Read. I'll write about this in the book.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, I've lived a few times in Lebanon,
Speaker 3: and I've lived and worked in Jerusalem a few times,
Speaker 3: and it's a fascinating region. Oh yeah, and the people
Speaker 3: on in both countries some I have some really good
Speaker 3: friends in Israel and have some really good friends in Lebanon,
Speaker 3: and I've been treated extremely well by people in both countries.
Speaker 3: Certainly if you've an interest in archaeology to be else
Speaker 3: could put ship not want to be? You know, like
Speaker 3: the Phoenicians in Tier, and no matter where you go
Speaker 3: in Tier, you can pick up Roman partially or you
Speaker 3: can see all these amazing sights, whether it's from the Phoenicians,
Speaker 3: from the Romans, from the Crusaders, it's just it's all
Speaker 3: there in front of you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, cratile of civilization there. Well, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for showing your experiences, Kevin, thanks so much. Okays,
Speaker 2: about twenty years ago, maybe thirty, a circus fitted to Majoro,
Speaker 2: the largest island on the Marjorro Atoll, in the capital
Speaker 2: city of the Marshall Islands. They came to Majoro, as
Speaker 2: almost everything that isn't breadfruit, pandanas or fish does on
Speaker 2: a boat. After performing, they couldn't find a boat to
Speaker 2: take them to the next destination, and so the resident
Speaker 2: of this tiny island, which at times is no wider
Speaker 2: than the single road which travels its whole length, decided
Speaker 2: that they'd have to share the food that they themselves
Speaker 2: had imported a great cost, and they set about gathering apples, bananas,
Speaker 2: and anything else that they thought an elephant might like
Speaker 2: to eat while it waited for a way off an island.
Speaker 2: The belly has enough for im for his own people,
Speaker 2: let alone the largest land animal on earth. The people
Speaker 2: of the Marshall Islands, for whom hospitality is as natural
Speaker 2: as the tides are to see, greet each other the
Speaker 2: same way they do strangers, by saying your quay. The
Speaker 2: word has several meanings, but I'll let David Kabua explain them.
Speaker 2: He's the President of the Republic of the Marshal Islands,
Speaker 2: so he seems like he'd be a good source.
Speaker 5: I would say the word yuppet, yuppe, our greating word yaguey.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of several meanings, and you can't say
Speaker 5: when you meet someone first time, you say yagoehe when
Speaker 5: you greet someone, and when you also say goodbye, instead
Speaker 5: of saying goodbye, you also say yape, so you can instead. Also,
Speaker 5: like the weekend, there was a tournament, fishing tournament, and
Speaker 5: if you were fishing and you got it. You have
Speaker 5: a big fish on the land and you really you're
Speaker 5: about to land the fish, but the land snap. So
Speaker 5: what do you say?
Speaker 6: Say?
Speaker 5: Oh, yeah, way and hello to the fish.
Speaker 1: But you just say yeah, because you lost the big catch.
Speaker 5: So it can't be used that way, like when you
Speaker 5: lose someone or someone passed away.
Speaker 7: You've missed that prison.
Speaker 5: Yup way, so and so he was here but no
Speaker 5: one could hear, so we can said yeh way.
Speaker 1: So it has several meanings.
Speaker 5: But the deeper meaning of yuppay is you are beautiful
Speaker 5: like the rainbow. Yeah means rainbow and ways, so we
Speaker 5: combine the two words, you are a rainbow and you
Speaker 5: are beautiful as a rainbow.
Speaker 2: On the map, the Marshall Islands looked like the little
Speaker 2: dots that appear in my photos of the beach at Margie.
Speaker 2: But unlike there's little of dust that managed to slink
Speaker 2: their way onto my camera center, Marshall Islands belong here.
Speaker 2: Here is a pretty vague turn. The twenty nine coral
Speaker 2: atolls and five islands that allow fifty four thousand Marshalies
Speaker 2: to live on one hundred and eighty two square kilometers
Speaker 2: of land span an oceanic territory of two hundred thousand kilometers.
Speaker 2: It's like you took a small American town and scattered
Speaker 2: it across an area more than a half times the
Speaker 2: size of Alaska. Even though the Rami is ninety eight
Speaker 2: percent water, every inch of land is precious to the Marshalies,
Speaker 2: whose matrilonial society ensures that land passes from mother to
Speaker 2: daughter and ties families to the remote islands that make
Speaker 2: up the low lying atolls of the Republic. It was
Speaker 2: on one of the bigger chunks of land that I
Speaker 2: recorded the music you heard a minute ago. Marjorro is
Speaker 2: an atoll that's a coral ring that encircles the lagoon
Speaker 2: and its biggest islands, about thirty miles long but often
Speaker 2: less than one hundred yards wide. There's one road that
Speaker 2: runs the length of it and sometimes also spans the
Speaker 2: width of it. It's also home to about half the
Speaker 2: Romised population. The highest point on the atoll lies just
Speaker 2: three meters above sea level. If you want to get
Speaker 2: higher than that, then you're only options are houses or
Speaker 2: palm trees. From the top of the fifth floor of
Speaker 2: the NAPA Auto Parts Store, which also houses the UNDP
Speaker 2: and the Marshal Arwns Olympic Committee, you can see the
Speaker 2: whole island for Marshallese people, these tiny pieces of paradise
Speaker 2: that barely poke their heads out. From the top of
Speaker 2: the ocean are everything. Their land and their ties to
Speaker 2: it defined them. Without their place, they can't be themselves.
Speaker 2: Even though many thousands of marshal Leise live in the
Speaker 2: diasper of the United States, they're still important handicrafts made
Speaker 2: from little shells and the outer islands and coconut husks.
Speaker 2: Many of them come back to the islands to retire,
Speaker 2: but slowly the ocean is taking those islands back. Rising
Speaker 2: sea level and more extreme tidal surges have placed this
Speaker 2: tiny Pacific nation on the front lines of climate change.
Speaker 2: There isn't an exact estimate as to how long the
Speaker 2: Marshall Islands have or what they can do to halt
Speaker 2: the creeping advance of the ocean. They've always existed on
Speaker 2: just a few square kilometers of land among millions of
Speaker 2: square kilometers of ocean, and they depend on that ocean
Speaker 2: for everything. But now it's threatening to take everything away
Speaker 2: from them one day. They fear their islands will become uninhabitable.
Speaker 2: A salt water invads of water table, and their trees die,
Speaker 2: while storms bring more and more frequent floods that sweep
Speaker 2: away their homes and their possessions. They don't want to leave,
Speaker 2: but they can't stand alone against climate change either. But
Speaker 2: the marshally Is are resilient people. They've weathered many storms
Speaker 2: to get to where they are now. The tiny museum
Speaker 2: in Madro hosts artifacts of several crises that would seem apocalyptic,
Speaker 2: a nuclear bomb, the Second World War, but in the
Speaker 2: end these did little decressing incredible kindness of the tenacity
Speaker 2: of the Marshalise. The islands that make up the Rami
Speaker 2: have been inhabited by indigenous people for thousands of years.
Speaker 2: They've been variously ruled by the Spanish, German, Japanese and
Speaker 2: United States governments before becoming an independent republic. Before they
Speaker 2: were named by a British sailor, the islands had their
Speaker 2: own name. I Let Jeff, a Marshal's renaissance man who
Speaker 2: was at one s driver, the head of the World
Speaker 2: Health Organization's EMT program on the islands, a registered nurse,
Speaker 2: and the Custodi uns. An incredible collection of marshalse music
Speaker 2: explained what they were called before that, or before he
Speaker 2: used to call la la la larli like.
Speaker 8: L or l.
Speaker 9: N l o lpluck lap lap.
Speaker 2: That's before it turned out turns into Marsham. Does this
Speaker 2: work Marshalls.
Speaker 9: Capes from this bad oh A found these islands.
Speaker 2: Captain Marshall undeniably, the Marshall Islands are not a bad
Speaker 2: place to find yourself on a summer afternoon, and in
Speaker 2: the time I spent there, I took several trips to
Speaker 2: the smaller islands around my dro atoll. They look like
Speaker 2: the Platonic idea of a tropical island, complete with coconut palms,
Speaker 2: vibrant coral reefs, white sand, and turquoise water. I love
Speaker 2: free diving and dropping down onto a wrecked aircraft and
Speaker 2: dozens of brightly colored species of fish in almost infinite
Speaker 2: visibility without even needing to put on a wet to
Speaker 2: or a weight belt. Might be the closest I'll ever
Speaker 2: get to flying. But I wasn't just here for a
Speaker 2: dip in the ocean. I'm actually here to tell you
Speaker 2: a story of incredible resilience. Much of America, both on
Speaker 2: the left and on the right, spends much of its
Speaker 2: time and money preparing for its own imagined version of
Speaker 2: the crisis. For some, that's the unimaginable destruction of duke
Speaker 2: a War. For others, it's the encroaching of the ocean
Speaker 2: on it's a land and the resulting loss of places
Speaker 2: to live and grow food, and for others, it's a
Speaker 2: collapse of basic services like power and clean water that
Speaker 2: we take for granted. These are all storms. So the
Speaker 2: tiny island nation who hath already weathered, and it hasn't
Speaker 2: done so in the atomized and individualistic way that so
Speaker 2: many American preppers fantasize about online. It's done so as
Speaker 2: an incredibly strong, optimistic, and welcoming community. There's a lot
Speaker 2: we can learn from the people of the Marshall Islands
Speaker 2: and their story, and so this week I'll be doing
Speaker 2: my best to share the stories that they shared with me.
Speaker 2: If you're familiar with the islands, it's likely because of
Speaker 2: the history of one of the other atolls in the group,
Speaker 2: Bikini Atoll. The name is the German bastardization of a
Speaker 2: Marshal lease word pikini pick meaning plain surface, and knee
Speaker 2: meaning coconut tree. It's a flat based where coconuts grere,
Speaker 2: but you likely don't know the island for its coconuts,
Speaker 2: and those aren't safe to eat anymore anyway. If you've
Speaker 2: heard of Bikinia Toll, it's because of what the United
Speaker 2: States did there after the Second World War. On the
Speaker 2: eighteenth of July and nineteen forty seven, the Marshall Islands
Speaker 2: were placed in a Strategic Trust Territory by the United Nations.
Speaker 2: This territory was administered by the United States, which are
Speaker 2: supposed to administer the islands in the best interest of
Speaker 2: their inhabitants out of international peace and security. But a
Speaker 2: year before the trust territory was created, the US began
Speaker 2: nuclear testing and the lagoon at Bikinia Toll, a site
Speaker 2: that would over the next fifteen years become the most
Speaker 2: heavily bombed place on Earth, with some islands entirely removed
Speaker 2: from the map and much of their population left dead, sick,
Speaker 2: without the land that defines them and their ability to
Speaker 2: thrive on these ti iny islands amidst the endless ocean.
Speaker 2: As far as possible, I want to let the Marshal
Speaker 2: Lease survivors of the nuclear tests and their families tell
Speaker 2: their own stories. They call what happened and don Bikini
Speaker 2: In and Awatakatoll the nuclear legacy of their country. Talking about
Speaker 2: the nuclear legacy is a difficult topic for the Marshallese,
Speaker 2: especially the time when none of them have been paid
Speaker 2: the compensation they were allotted, and the US was negotiating
Speaker 2: a new agreement with the Marshalise government. It was very
Speaker 2: far from settled and the numbers of the US were
Speaker 2: offering were very far from sufficient. I was very fortunate
Speaker 2: to join a few other journalists on the tiny island
Speaker 2: of boken bowten, a short boat right away from Mitro
Speaker 2: and home to perhaps most beautiful coral reef I've ever seen.
Speaker 2: We had lunch, walked around the island and then had
Speaker 2: a talk on the nuclear legacy from descendants of some
Speaker 2: of the survivors. I'll let them introduce themselves.
Speaker 10: My name is Zakabekibion. I'm from the Marshall Ellen. I
Speaker 10: am a student at CMI College of the Marshall Ellen
Speaker 10: and I am currently the president for the CMI Nuclear Club,
Speaker 10: which we mostly work under National Nuclear Commission with with
Speaker 10: our director Mary Sock and now our Commissioner Arianna.
Speaker 6: Allreat.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Well, once again, my name is Ariana. I work as
Speaker 11: a Commissioner and Nuclear Justice Envoy for the RMI National
Speaker 11: Nuclear Commission. Him once again, thank you very much for
Speaker 11: having us this afternoon.
Speaker 12: Yael, Welcome to the Marshall Island.
Speaker 1: My name is Evlin Ralpho.
Speaker 11: I'm the director for Education and Public Awareness.
Speaker 12: Once again, welcome, enjoy the rese of your days here.
Speaker 12: My name is sincerely in Pernet. I work with the
Speaker 12: National Nuclear Commission as an headman and physical officer. I'm
Speaker 12: not sure if it's necessary for me to come, but
Speaker 12: since the post that we all go so important, support
Speaker 12: the post go work on the same poet, Welcome to
Speaker 12: the Partial Islands.
Speaker 11: She's from Mayatta, She's from Yeah. The three of us
Speaker 11: are all descendants of nuclear survivors. They were exposed to
Speaker 11: fall out. Her mother was exposed to fall out. Her mother,
Speaker 11: Grace's mother was also exposed to the radioactive fallout, as
Speaker 11: well as my great grandfather. I think that's what really
Speaker 11: drives us to share this with you.
Speaker 2: Almost everyone in the RMI has a family member directly
Speaker 2: impacted by the testing and the decades of mistreatment that
Speaker 2: came after it. Although we know the name Bikini A Toll,
Speaker 2: the entire Republic was impacted by nuclear fallout, including Mardro itself,
Speaker 2: thanks to the elevised decision to drop bombs on a
Speaker 2: day when the populated atolls were downwind of the test site.
Speaker 2: In fact, right next to our hotel, showing the same
Speaker 2: parking lot. There's the US Department of Energy office. Hou's, Jeff,
Speaker 2: what that was doing there? Yeah? I saw there's a
Speaker 2: diary office health office on the street here.
Speaker 9: The one in the next to the autel, that's the
Speaker 9: office where they do the radiation testing. And there's the
Speaker 9: one near the AMI. R. Marshall that's the planet for
Speaker 9: those survivors. Now, the survivors, there's few of them, like
Speaker 9: maybe less than fifty. Wow.
Speaker 2: The RMI is saw fighting in the Second World War.
Speaker 2: It's memorialized in murals across Marjorro. In nineteen forty three
Speaker 2: and early nineteen forty four, the USA bombed and then
Speaker 2: fought the Imperial Japanese military who have been occupying the
Speaker 2: island since nineteen fourteen. US soldiers and Marines, along with
Speaker 2: marsh Lea's scouts, landed on Marjorro Quadulan in anywhere, took
Speaker 2: on Higgins boats that were virtually identical to the boat
Speaker 2: we took across the lagoon to Bocan Boten. The fighting
Speaker 2: was fierce and the scale of the destruction was a mets. Overall,
Speaker 2: the Americans lost six hundred and eleven men and suffered
Speaker 2: two thy three hundred and forty one wounded, two hundred
Speaker 2: and sixty one were missing. Meanwhile, the Japanese lost over
Speaker 2: eleven thousand men and had three hundred and fifty eight captured. Today,
Speaker 2: the Bikinia Toll Lagoon still holds the ghostly remains of
Speaker 2: the ships and plains that fought that battle, alongside the Nagato,
Speaker 2: the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy, and the ship
Speaker 2: from whose bridge Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Speaker 2: It was a shadow of this war that was evoked
Speaker 2: in nineteen forty six when one hundred and sixty seven
Speaker 2: of Bikini A Tolls inhabitants were forcibly relocated by the
Speaker 2: United States. They initially accepted this settlement quote for the
Speaker 2: good of mankind and to end all wars, in the
Speaker 2: words of the US commandant at the time. Assisted by
Speaker 2: US Navy seabees, they disassembled their church and moved to
Speaker 2: different atolls. Nine of the eleven family heads from Bikini
Speaker 2: elected to be transported one hundred and twenty five miles
Speaker 2: to Rohngerikatoll, an island, with about one order of the
Speaker 2: land mass of Bikinian. Many believed the island to be haunted.
Speaker 2: By the time the navy left them with a few
Speaker 2: weeks of water and food, they had every reason to
Speaker 2: be afraid. I let Ariana explain what that removal process
Speaker 2: was like.
Speaker 11: They had asked the people if they were willing to
Speaker 11: give up their homelands for the good of mankind and
Speaker 11: to end all wars. And because our people are people
Speaker 11: of faith in Christianity, they the and they were very afraid.
Speaker 11: They did not want to leave. But because of the
Speaker 11: amount of power that the that the military showed up
Speaker 11: with with their big ships compared to our small canoes,
Speaker 11: and the amount of troops that were on that island
Speaker 11: on that morning, it was very hard for them to,
Speaker 11: you know, fight against what was being asked of them.
Speaker 11: And if you have time to look through documentaries of
Speaker 11: the nuclear like you will see a certain part where
Speaker 11: the commander a commodore, his name was Ben Wyatt. He
Speaker 11: was sitting down and asking the chief at that time,
Speaker 11: can we use this island for the good of mankind?
Speaker 11: And in response the people all respond in unison elman
Speaker 11: which means okay. And from their testimonies they had to
Speaker 11: take that shot over forty times to make sure that
Speaker 11: you know, they all said mmin at the same time,
Speaker 11: to get the best shot they could for you know,
Speaker 11: maybe for reports to the UN, but it was a
Speaker 11: very frustrating time for them.
Speaker 2: Following their removal, the testing began. The idea was to
Speaker 2: test nuclear bombs on ships, so the US bought ninety
Speaker 2: five ships fully loaded with weapons and fuel. At this time,
Speaker 2: this would have ranked the navy of Bikinia Toll just
Speaker 2: out there the top five biggest fleets in the world,
Speaker 2: but those boats didn't stay afloat for long. Now. You
Speaker 2: might think that, given the testing was on ships, the
Speaker 2: atoll's navy would be some kind of mid century Mary Celeste,
Speaker 2: but you'd be wrong. Three hundred and fifty experimental rats, goats,
Speaker 2: and pigs died in the service as its strange nuclear experiment,
Speaker 2: some of them after being subjected to the great indignity
Speaker 2: of being covered in sunscreen, which bizarrely scientists thought might
Speaker 2: be useful in alleviating the impact of radiation. It's rather
Speaker 2: staggering that this research was being done three years after
Speaker 2: the United States dropped nuclear bombs on whole cities full
Speaker 2: of human beings. But as you've maybe already picked up
Speaker 2: in this story. The possibility of unintended but entirely predictable
Speaker 2: human suffering does not seem to have been top of
Speaker 2: the priority list. The first test of the island somehow misfired.
Speaker 2: The gathered press were disappointed, and many of them went home,
Speaker 2: But the second code, named Baker didn't. Chemist Glen t Seborg,
Speaker 2: the longest serving chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, called
Speaker 2: the Baker test the world's first nuclear disaster. It drove
Speaker 2: a two thousand foot wide pillar of water into the air,
Speaker 2: It sunk the USS Arkansas, and released massive amounts of
Speaker 2: radiation across the islands of the atoll, which at the
Speaker 2: time the residents had been expecting to return to. Just
Speaker 2: five days after the first bomb went off, Louis Road,
Speaker 2: a French mechanical engineer who was working as manager of
Speaker 2: his mother's lingerie shop in Paris, introduced a new swimsuit
Speaker 2: designed named the Bikini after the atoll. It was one
Speaker 2: wright equipped the atom bomb of fashion. The people of
Speaker 2: the atoll, however, gained little from the outfit or the testing.
Speaker 2: In January of nineteen forty eight, just two years after
Speaker 2: their removal, doctor Leonard Mason visited the Bikinians on Rongerick
Speaker 2: and was appalled to find the people there had almost
Speaker 2: starved to death. We were dying, but they didn't listen
Speaker 2: to us, one of them said to him. Mason, an
Speaker 2: anthropologist at the University of WAYI asked that food and
Speaker 2: water be bought immediately. The US built houses for Bikiniatol
Speaker 2: residents on Ujilangatoll, but it decided to use these for
Speaker 2: the residents of Aniwata Katol, where it was also about
Speaker 2: to begin conducting nuclear experiments. Instead. The Bikini Islanders were
Speaker 2: placed in tents alongside a runway before they eventually chose
Speaker 2: Kille Island, a line of less than one square kilometer,
Speaker 2: as their next home. Also evacuated were Anewatak, Wrongalap, and
Speaker 2: Warthaw Islanders. They too, thought this was a temporary arrangement
Speaker 2: and that they could go home in a short period
Speaker 2: of time. They too, found out later that this was
Speaker 2: not the case. Over the course of their exile, they've
Speaker 2: been moved several more times, staffed half to death, cheated
Speaker 2: of their compensation, and stripped of their ancestral homeland. For
Speaker 2: the next twelve years, the United States would drop increasingly
Speaker 2: large bombs, culminating in nineteen fifty four with the Bravo
Speaker 2: Shot of Operation Castle, also known as Castle Bravo, the
Speaker 2: biggest nuclear device that we know of the US ever deploying.
Speaker 11: Within those twelve years, there were sixty seven known devices
Speaker 11: that were tested here. There could have been more, but
Speaker 11: all we know of is sixty seven. One of them
Speaker 11: was the Castle Bravo shat that yielded fifteen megatons, which,
Speaker 11: when scientists calculated the equivalent of the Bravo shat, would
Speaker 11: have required testing the Hiroshima bomb one and a half
Speaker 11: times every single day for twelve years.
Speaker 2: That fifteen megaton Bravo shot yielded more than two point
Speaker 2: five times the estimated six megaton explosion. When it was
Speaker 2: detonated on an artificial island in the Bikinia Toll, the
Speaker 2: device's mushroom cloud reached a height of forty seven thousand
Speaker 2: feet which is fourteen hundred meters, and a dam of
Speaker 2: seven miles or eleven kilometers in about one minute. Eventually
Speaker 2: it reached a height of forty kilometers and a diameter
Speaker 2: of one hundred kilometers. This took less than ten minutes,
Speaker 2: traveled more than one hundred meters per second and covered
Speaker 2: seven thousand kilometers of the Pacific Ocean and everything in
Speaker 2: it with nuclear fallout. On the eve of the Bravo shot,
Speaker 2: weather reports indicated that the quote conditions were getting less favorable,
Speaker 2: but nonetheless the decision to go ahead with the first
Speaker 2: test was taken by to Alvin C. Graves jointed task
Speaker 2: for seven ships located thirty miles east of Bikini and
Speaker 2: what was thought to be an Upwin position began detecting
Speaker 2: high levels of radiation just two hours after the test.
Speaker 2: Very soon after, they began traveling south at full speed
Speaker 2: to avoid the fallout, but directly downwind of the blast
Speaker 2: and unable to travel were wrong. Alap and a Lingene
Speaker 2: Atolls Ariana explained the impacted to four there which residents
Speaker 2: were not warned about. American service people there want to
Speaker 2: stay inside, not eat or drink anything, but no such
Speaker 2: warning was given to the local residents.
Speaker 11: Some said it looked like the guy was changing colors
Speaker 11: from red to yellow to orange. It was just a
Speaker 11: very very bright morning and then they started hearing like
Speaker 11: thunderous roars a couple of minutes later, and it was
Speaker 11: just like roars after Wars, and it was a very
Speaker 11: frightening time because this was just not something you know,
Speaker 11: does not happen every day. And then around ten am,
Speaker 11: the fallout had started to arrive. And these are accounts
Speaker 11: from ronlap at All, which is the closest to Bikini.
Speaker 11: The fallout had started to arrive and they were not
Speaker 11: sure what was going on. There was men out fishing.
Speaker 11: There was also stories from these witnesses that prior to
Speaker 11: this test, the military had gone to rout and they
Speaker 11: had movie nights and they would show the community of
Speaker 11: movies where it's snowing.
Speaker 2: Tomorrow we'll hear more about the consequences of the Bravo
Speaker 2: show for the people who, despite never having any quarrel
Speaker 2: with the USA, with the recipient of the largest nuclear
Speaker 2: bomb it's ever decimated.
Speaker 1: Ho Ho, Merry Christmas. Robert Evans here, and we had
Speaker 1: been planning to make a Newcome episode to give you
Speaker 1: all a white Christmas this year. But you know what
Speaker 1: I didn't wind up wanting to do right during the
Speaker 1: holidays when we didn't have to work, is spend hours
Speaker 1: researching some other weird Come conspiracies on the Internet. So
Speaker 1: we're just going to play the old Come episode for
Speaker 1: you as a rerun. I know that's not the most
Speaker 1: effortful version of our job that I could have done
Speaker 1: this year, but also it's been a real shitty year
Speaker 1: for everybody. So let's just listen to an old Come
Speaker 1: episode and pretend we gave you a new Come episode.
Speaker 1: Merry Christmas, everybody, dearly beloved, Welcome to it could happen here.
Speaker 1: We are gathered here today to get through this thing
Speaker 1: called life. Electric word life. It's a thing that only
Speaker 1: happens with the addition of a couple of ingredients, and
Speaker 1: one of those ingredients is the subject of our episode today.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you guys like that? Everybody really happy with that?
Speaker 2: I love that. Yeah, I'm feeling not at all like
Speaker 2: I want to kind of shower.
Speaker 8: Okay, can you can you can hear the moment where
Speaker 8: we're all simultaneously questioning every single decision.
Speaker 2: We higher lives.
Speaker 1: Now we're all bonded together. So how's everybody doing today?
Speaker 1: We've got Miil Wong, Garrison Davis, James Stout, and I
Speaker 1: should let people know I wasn't joking about the Come thing.
Speaker 1: So those of you who are too online will know this.
Speaker 1: Those of you who are not online enough. This is
Speaker 1: one of the online things that you will want to
Speaker 1: know because it's very funny. And the gist of it
Speaker 1: is that like four days ago, doctor Jordan B. Peterson
Speaker 1: got sent a link to a Twitter account that is
Speaker 1: that purports to be spreading like hidden news about the
Speaker 1: evils of the Chinese communist regime, and they put out
Speaker 1: a video that was a segment from a British milking
Speaker 1: fetish pornography video. Now, if you're not aware the milking,
Speaker 1: as far as I can tell, I believe it kind
Speaker 1: of descended from the long lineage of like rubber fetishists, right,
Speaker 1: and there's like a lot of medical fetish stuff it
Speaker 1: tied into it. But the idea is that men are
Speaker 1: entirely wrapped up on hospital gurney's and giant pumps sucked
Speaker 1: the sement out of them.
Speaker 2: So it's like a cow milka. The machine is very
Speaker 2: like milk.
Speaker 1: This Twitter account put this up claiming that it was
Speaker 1: the Chinese government stealing the semen of young men, and
Speaker 1: Jordan Peterson shared it saying it was an unbelievable act
Speaker 1: of evil and then everyone had the best day of
Speaker 1: their lives and an hour of two later he deleted it.
Speaker 1: Now I have been continuing.
Speaker 2: Coward, coward, coward. Yeah, so strange, so strange that he
Speaker 2: left the world of pay reviewed academia.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's wild that he's no longer professor. It's very funny.
Speaker 1: We're continuing to give him shit for it online. But
Speaker 1: it set us off down an interesting road. And because
Speaker 1: some other stuff fell through, we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: the wide world of weird right wing come conspiracies. Most
Speaker 1: of them are leased, are going to be right. There's
Speaker 1: a surprising number of semen based conspiracies. Everybody did research
Speaker 1: on their own special thing. I wanted to start by
Speaker 1: talking about this this Jordan Peterson cum video and given
Speaker 1: kind of some of the some of the background on it,
Speaker 1: so I believe it was. Last July, the Chinese Human
Speaker 1: Sperm Bank of Shanghai announced that it was hosting a
Speaker 1: competition for college students to find out whose semen was
Speaker 1: the best in terms of, like, you know, a number
Speaker 1: of modal sperm per milli leader I think is the
Speaker 1: way that they judge it. And basically the idea was
Speaker 1: that they were trying to find like people with sperm
Speaker 1: concentration greater than sixty million per mili leader, and if
Speaker 1: they visited a sperm bank a set number of times
Speaker 1: in a six month period, they could receive a prize
Speaker 1: that was equivalent to about twelve hundred dollars right now.
Speaker 1: The reason this is happening is that China, for the
Speaker 1: first time, as a result of a number of different policies,
Speaker 1: had negative popular growth very recently, and this is a
Speaker 1: thing that can cause a problem for a country for
Speaker 1: a variety of reasons. So the government is trying to
Speaker 1: shore up birth rates, and there are a lot of
Speaker 1: couples in China that have had issues conceiving, and so
Speaker 1: there's a huge amount of demand for sperm in the
Speaker 1: country right now. So this is not a weird story.
Speaker 1: It is actually a thing that happens all around the
Speaker 1: world regularly. But right around the time that this happened,
Speaker 1: a little bit after that, it came out that a
Speaker 1: Japanese company started selling what is called in the articles
Speaker 1: I Found an automatic sperm extractor to Chinese sperm banks.
Speaker 1: Now this is I'm going to send you all the link.
Speaker 1: I was hoping you would oh yes, good friends, thanks,
Speaker 1: but yes, we're all going to see this. So the machines.
Speaker 1: Price listing on ali Baba, where it sells for about
Speaker 1: five to six thousand dollars, describes it as a device
Speaker 1: that quote merges modern digital technology, automatic control technology, and
Speaker 1: simulation technologies with seamen collection and premature ejaculation desensitization training function.
Speaker 1: So it has a number of purposes including just to
Speaker 1: help guys stop coming too early, which no shame. It's
Speaker 1: funny that someone built a machine for it.
Speaker 2: It's extremely funny, and that you can buy on Ali Express.
Speaker 2: It's like, I personally, I'm not attaching anything. I bought
Speaker 2: an ali baba to sensitive part to my body makes
Speaker 2: thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: It's not cheap. Now, the primary these are not being
Speaker 1: used for people who are coming too quickly.
Speaker 2: Is like the worst every are to detwo this it is.
Speaker 1: It is weird.
Speaker 2: What's the orientation? Does it stand on the ground and
Speaker 2: you just approach it? You you have to stand up? Yeah?
Speaker 2: But what if you're a shot king.
Speaker 1: I say, I'm sure they have options. It has like
Speaker 1: the rough shape of like by a handheld massage device,
Speaker 1: but it's kind of like formed like almost an art
Speaker 1: deco robot vagina And basically from what I've read. Kind
Speaker 1: of the reasoning is that, like, hey, we need people
Speaker 1: to donate sperm. Some people feel weird about just masturbating
Speaker 1: in a clinic, and we hope this is a more
Speaker 1: pleasant experience for them. So again this we're laughing because like, look,
Speaker 1: a machine designed to capture semen is kind of a
Speaker 1: funny thing. That's okay, no shame on anybody for that.
Speaker 1: But the fact that you have both the government trying
Speaker 1: to encourage people to donate sperm and this weird machine
Speaker 1: kind of created fertile ground for a bunch of right
Speaker 1: wing weirdos to start making the grounded, I know, fertile
Speaker 1: ground to to make the completely un ungrounded claim that
Speaker 1: like the government was trying to steal people's semen, right,
Speaker 1: And that is the basis of doctor Jordan B. Peterson's
Speaker 1: fun little freak out on the internet. And I will say,
Speaker 1: you should try to find the videos of the automatic
Speaker 1: sperm extractor, this amazing Japanese machine, because it is fun.
Speaker 1: Its fascinating.
Speaker 13: On the cosign account, do they have to like like
Speaker 13: like change like I assume.
Speaker 2: They yes, the chang Yeah, you can't clean that. If
Speaker 2: you watch a video, there's like a there's a rebapod
Speaker 2: that like, uh, comes out like let's see it.
Speaker 1: The thing that the penis goes in is also the
Speaker 1: captured device, so it is removed with the sperm donation
Speaker 1: when you take it out. So again this is you know,
Speaker 1: funny because come, but there's nothing sinister here. It's just
Speaker 1: in the same way that literally everything is. People have
Speaker 1: like spun it up into a nonsense thing. But because
Speaker 1: of this beautiful, beautiful story, which I hope we've all
Speaker 1: gotten to enjoy, I got to do a lot of
Speaker 1: work on the some of you. If you live, if
Speaker 1: you've worked in agriculture, you're not going to be surprised
Speaker 1: that stealing come is a massive industry, like it is
Speaker 1: a There is a lot of money to be made
Speaker 1: in stealing semen. There's enough money to be made in
Speaker 1: stealing semen that there are two different official terms that
Speaker 1: I have found for seamen theft. The first is sperm jacking.
Speaker 2: How could they get better? How could they get better
Speaker 2: than that?
Speaker 1: It gets better because the second the second is spurgling.
Speaker 13: These are like professionals who like come up with these terms. Huh,
Speaker 13: these are a genius.
Speaker 1: There actually is. I did find in my research there
Speaker 1: is one actual Chinese based sperm conspiracy. It's just not
Speaker 1: a very sinister one. There's this Chinese businessman, Jesse jabet Zoo,
Speaker 1: who stole there. There's this I think it was a
Speaker 1: Canadian company. It was a US company who had So
Speaker 1: this is for like bull semen. And one of the
Speaker 1: things that you want for bull semen is you don't
Speaker 1: want if you're inciminating cows, you want all of the
Speaker 1: babies to be female generally, right, because bulls are not
Speaker 1: very with outside a certain specific If you're like trying
Speaker 1: to make more breeders or whatever, if you're in industrial agriculture,
Speaker 1: you don't want any of the boys, right. You just
Speaker 1: want to keep making those sweet, sweet lady cows that
Speaker 1: are you know, more useful to you in a financial sense.
Speaker 1: So there's a US company that developed a method of
Speaker 1: before insemination looking through the sperm and like sorting out
Speaker 1: the sperm that will make female cows. And that is
Speaker 1: apparently hard to do. I mean, it sounds like it
Speaker 1: would be hard to do, right, And this this this
Speaker 1: Chinese businessman was like reverse engineering there. It's kind of
Speaker 1: actually it's basically the same story as Jurassic Park and anyway,
Speaker 1: this guy has has gotten sued for a bunch of money.
Speaker 2: He got checked down.
Speaker 13: I hope, I hope it works out just as well
Speaker 13: as Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's very funny. I will say there's a couple
Speaker 1: of really wild lines from this the CBC story I found.
Speaker 1: I'm just going to read one to you. Zoo's activities
Speaker 1: could best be described as machiavellian. At various points he
Speaker 1: outlined a plan to make x Y that's the American company.
Speaker 1: Quote feel all the time, the sort of damocles is
Speaker 1: on their heads and brag the law is strong, but
Speaker 1: the outlaws are ten times stronger. Okay, look Jesse Jabez,
Speaker 1: my hero, the sperm Bandit incredible sperm jacker, one of
Speaker 1: the best spur layers in the business.
Speaker 2: This man lives on an island with his cow raptors.
Speaker 1: What a hero. There was also a case of a
Speaker 1: Japanese man who illegally took wagyu cattle sperm to China
Speaker 1: to try to give them sperm, and like the Chinese
Speaker 1: government immediately caught him and was like, no, this is
Speaker 1: actually incredibly dangerous, Like you're not allowed to just take
Speaker 1: animal breeding material into the country. Without because you know,
Speaker 1: there's a wide variety of reasons that that could be
Speaker 1: in horribly so he got in a shipload of trouble.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, that's my that's my stories. Everybody.
Speaker 2: Thank you for rob.
Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you, thank you for spurgling my knowledge. Garrison. Oh,
Speaker 1: we're back, and James is here to talk to us
Speaker 1: about the kind of sperm jacking that you do when
Speaker 1: you don't jack. I'm talking about jacking your own sperm
Speaker 1: by keeping it inside of you semen retention.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's how is that Jims beautiful? Unscripted? Did you
Speaker 2: just yeh didn't even write that, garrisons on the back
Speaker 2: of his hand. He had a brain wave at two
Speaker 2: in the morning and I got that down.
Speaker 1: But those are the kind of things you can do
Speaker 1: when you've been podcasting as long.
Speaker 14: As I cum space for several years.
Speaker 1: I've been in those soggy trenches for a long time.
Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, we are, after all at work, so
Speaker 2: let me continue. So I'm going to talk about what
Speaker 2: happens when you keep your home inside you. Uh okay, yeah,
Speaker 2: this is the thing. What are we doing today?
Speaker 1: This is this is critical journalisten.
Speaker 2: We are making content, doing talking of content. Let's talk
Speaker 2: about the content of some Reddit posters. So the what's
Speaker 2: called the seamen retention movement, and this will this will
Speaker 2: shock many of you began on Reddit dot com.
Speaker 14: Oh my god, yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, like
Speaker 14: so many one.
Speaker 1: I feel like on Reddit, I feel like if you
Speaker 1: type that endo your phone, it would have finished the
Speaker 1: sentence the same.
Speaker 2: What has auto directed to Reddit? Believe me, we're gonna
Speaker 2: go there, Garrison, because when you google sperm retention, you
Speaker 2: do indeed find some stuff on Reddit. So now they've
Speaker 2: spun off from Reddit, right, they now have their own organization,
Speaker 2: which is no FAP dot com uh and No fat
Speaker 2: dot com is a community centered sexual health platform. I'm
Speaker 2: I'm using, I'm allowing them to define themselves here, I
Speaker 2: guess designed to help people overcome poor addiction and compulsive
Speaker 2: sexual behavior, which is is not necessarily like like the
Speaker 2: this isn't the like not all cemen retention, as we're
Speaker 2: going to learn, is based in helping people become addiction
Speaker 2: to porn, but so far as that is a thing
Speaker 2: that that people actually have. And if someone was accusing
Speaker 2: Robert of being addicted to porn on on his timeline,
Speaker 2: this weekend.
Speaker 1: That would be because I eat ratio and Jordan Peterson
Speaker 1: with the Yeah, the pornography video that he mistaking the
Speaker 1: post that's correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: I just want him to respond so I can ask him, Jordan,
Speaker 1: tell me in your own words, what you thought was
Speaker 1: happening in that video.
Speaker 2: I really hope he thinks it's like milking, Like they
Speaker 2: have rfi D collars and they get fed based on
Speaker 2: their production level. That would be great.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And what did you you're you're medical doctor, did
Speaker 1: you think that cum actually worked that way? Just stick
Speaker 1: a sucker.
Speaker 2: Anyway, Yeah, just get it out. Okay. So after after
Speaker 2: this movement began, I read it dot com. It quickly
Speaker 2: pivoted to kind of offering all kinds of weird physical
Speaker 2: and mental health benefits, and that's where it was adopted
Speaker 2: by friends of the podcast, The Proud Boys. Luckily, we
Speaker 2: do have a bit of insight into why and into
Speaker 2: the exact nature of the no fat fascism that the
Speaker 2: Proud Boys practice thanks to Kyle Cheney, who's a Politico
Speaker 2: reporter who was reporting on the trial of one of
Speaker 2: the Proud Boys accused of tradition on January sixth, called
Speaker 2: Zach Rell and that trial for reasons that I'm not
Speaker 2: exactly clear on the proud boy. I guess it's like
Speaker 2: the handbook like that, the kind of prowdboy Bible was
Speaker 2: introduced and into the record.
Speaker 1: Yeah's in there.
Speaker 2: Yep, it's in the court record, buddy, because on the
Speaker 2: lawyers decided that it was.
Speaker 1: To the case.
Speaker 2: So a proud boy may not ejaculate alone more than
Speaker 2: once in every thirty days. That means he must abstained
Speaker 2: from pornography during that time. And if he needs to ejaculate,
Speaker 2: this is really weird, it must be within one yard
Speaker 2: of a woman. Fascinatingly spec yeah, yeah right, And I
Speaker 2: like that they've they've gone with imperial measurements with her consent,
Speaker 2: so that's nice. The woman may not be a prostitute,
Speaker 2: so that that's the proud poison nature. There no fat fairstuism.
Speaker 2: But I think I think the way of understanding why
Speaker 2: some people practice this perhaps best is to is to
Speaker 2: go on to reddit dot com. So I found a
Speaker 2: post by Reddit user u slash monk one nine one
Speaker 2: eight one seven. It seems like a nice guy, and
Speaker 2: there are four hundred, four hundred hy up votes on
Speaker 2: What I did was I went to seaman retention and
Speaker 2: I looked at you know, sorted by popular posts, found
Speaker 2: this one from a bunch of numbers. And so this
Speaker 2: guy has nine years of experience with semen retention. So
Speaker 2: I'm just going to read I'm presuming oh.
Speaker 1: Boy, yeah yeah, yeah yeah, him and some months off
Speaker 1: the coast of fucking lind Sparring.
Speaker 2: That cannot be healthy. Yeah no, I don't think it is.
Speaker 2: There is I will get to this evidence that you
Speaker 2: shouldn't do this. Uh So, in his nine years of experience,
Speaker 2: he has experienced the following things. Semen, when retained in
Speaker 2: our bodies, has healing, rejuvenating effects. Loss of seamen has
Speaker 2: the opposite effects. This may not be scientifically proven, but
Speaker 2: it's proven by experience. That's a red flag. That's interesting
Speaker 2: getting Reddit medical advice. While attempting any task that demands
Speaker 2: high physical, mental, or intellectual abilities, if we are semen
Speaker 2: retention powered, we would actually enjoy the task, which would
Speaker 2: otherwise seem dull. This is called sexual energy transmutation in
Speaker 2: layman's terms.
Speaker 8: Oh no, wait, that's the layman's what's the non laymen term?
Speaker 2: It's got even more. I have no idea spermozoic fucking fission.
Speaker 2: So for peak performance it's always necessary to be powered
Speaker 2: by semen. It would be best to use semen only
Speaker 2: for regenerating purposes, since nature originally intended it for regeneration,
Speaker 2: and not use it for sexual purposes apart from the
Speaker 2: create a child. If not serving that purpose, Master whatever
Speaker 2: teach techniques are useful in not letting the seed out
Speaker 2: while having sex. At the end of the day, don't
Speaker 2: let your seed out like a worthless thing. There's more so,
Speaker 2: just contain yourself great great, which is exactly the reason
Speaker 2: why core religions are based on celibacy, because opposite of
Speaker 2: regeneration is degeneration, which will cause a man to fall
Speaker 2: into a lower state controlled by his lower nature, rather
Speaker 2: than when he's subduing it. We should let semen retention
Speaker 2: be part of our lives, not something that is done
Speaker 2: for superpowers. For superpowers are in my experience, it's the
Speaker 2: sudden ecstasy that we feel once we transition from the
Speaker 2: degenerated to the regenerated state, and that will stabilize after
Speaker 2: some time, similar to how a flight maintained stable altitude
Speaker 2: after take off. Very very similar. Actually, yeah, that's that's
Speaker 2: what you can hear when the when the engine are
Speaker 2: spinning up. If just a do track really hard not
Speaker 2: to nut and it makes that noise.
Speaker 13: So excited for the next Marvel film where the where
Speaker 13: the superheroes.
Speaker 1: Not come so he can get tiny.
Speaker 2: No fat man. So yeah he didn't. I should add
Speaker 2: that this person confesses to having lapsed at some point
Speaker 2: in the nine years. Yeah it's.
Speaker 1: Armstrong was on steroids. It's just disappointing.
Speaker 2: No one would have seen it coming. See what I
Speaker 2: did there. Okay, So this person then urges other posters
Speaker 2: on the Semia retention subreddit to not use streaks to
Speaker 2: outperform others or look better about ourselves or bring others down.
Speaker 2: The battle with luster is a lifelong fight, and then
Speaker 2: we get better at finding victories. Yeah yeah, buddy, finding
Speaker 2: victories over internal battles, the better we become as high
Speaker 2: valued men.
Speaker 1: Hell yeah, I've often wished that, you know, if the
Speaker 1: if the pandemic hadn't been a thing, and I could
Speaker 1: force you all to work in a central location, I
Speaker 1: could have like a wall of murals where I put
Speaker 1: under each of your faces a quote from an episode
Speaker 1: that you've participated in, and James that that would be
Speaker 1: your quote the battle it's lusts a lifelong struggle.
Speaker 2: Yeah that, I'll get some T shirts knocked up and
Speaker 2: we can do a fund.
Speaker 13: Would we eventually get the cools on media offices? But
Speaker 13: you have a portrait hanging on the wall if you
Speaker 13: one quote underneath.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, on a plaque with a yeah, let
Speaker 2: me get the cools.
Speaker 1: When we when we take over the meta offices three
Speaker 1: weeks from now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there is a marketing company that has been emailing
Speaker 2: me for about six months telling me how cheap it
Speaker 2: is to buy a billboard by the side of a
Speaker 2: road and send a message to a loved one. So
Speaker 2: maybe great, maybe doing bang array Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: Well there will be until I put my positive messages
Speaker 2: about the controlling lust and holding semen inside our bodies
Speaker 2: true and return men to their former glory. So a
Speaker 2: lot of the a lot of the Reddit posts rely
Speaker 2: on a couple of different studies, right, and one of
Speaker 2: these studies measured participants. A lot of what they're doing
Speaker 2: is are claiming to increase testosterone right right at the bat.
Speaker 2: Testosterone does have Aslan's Armstrong can tell you some performance
Speaker 2: enhancing benefits so yeah, you know, increases your muscle growth,
Speaker 2: your your coverage from exercise, all that stuff. One of
Speaker 2: the studies measured participates testosterone levels baseline before masturbation and
Speaker 2: then in ten minute intervals after masturbation, right, And then
Speaker 2: they were asked to abstain for three weeks and they
Speaker 2: came back and they did the process again. Testosterone was
Speaker 2: higher in the baseline measurement at the at the end
Speaker 2: of the three weeks of abstinence, right, But the sample
Speaker 2: size was pretty small, and there's some theorizing that the
Speaker 2: boost was actually caused by the anticipated masturbation that they
Speaker 2: were about to do. At the second it was so
Speaker 2: ready to go. Yeah, yeah, he's guns. Yeah, you're just
Speaker 2: ready to pop. After three weeks, the second study looked
Speaker 2: at a forty five percent intury, so after a few
Speaker 2: days seven days of abstinence. But even the study showed
Speaker 2: this was a temporary peak that returned to normal even
Speaker 2: with continuing abstinence. So there's there's just these two studies.
Speaker 2: They're pretty they happened a long time ago. We'll post
Speaker 2: them all in the show notes if you guys want
Speaker 2: to read more about novap science. But we should just
Speaker 2: point out that there is, in fact a multitude of
Speaker 2: evidence this is a bad idea that having sex is
Speaker 2: actually good for you. Having sex will toward trying not
Speaker 2: to ejaculate. It's probably not for you, probably not good
Speaker 2: for your relationship either. One would surmise, there are that whatever, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: well yeah, if that's your thing, you do you do you.
Speaker 2: There was a study that investigated the motivation for semen
Speaker 2: and retention among semen and retainers, and a lot of
Speaker 2: it it seemed like it people were people who felt
Speaker 2: that like either sex or masturbation was unhealthy or wrong
Speaker 2: or sinful. And there is evidence to show that like
Speaker 2: feeling like guilty about yourself or like living with stress
Speaker 2: and self learning like that is bad for you, right,
Speaker 2: and that will reduce your test asterone level. There's also
Speaker 2: some evidence to suggest that not ejaculating can give you
Speaker 2: prostate issues.
Speaker 1: Which yes, yeah, there's there's and this is like pretty debatable,
Speaker 1: like most things that people talk about with in regards
Speaker 1: to coming and health, like you can find some studies,
Speaker 1: like the studies on testosterone. Some of them are kind
Speaker 1: of sketchy anyway, Yeah, I don't think oh, come or
Speaker 1: come either way, you know it's whatever, but if you
Speaker 1: do have a chance to fuck one of those Ali
Speaker 1: Baba robots, I recommend it keep out.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about cum demons.
Speaker 13: Hell yeah, wait, okay, okay, hard, hard pivot here from THESS.
Speaker 8: So, okay, we we are not going as far afield
Speaker 8: from the no fat.
Speaker 2: People as as as as you would think.
Speaker 8: Okay, but all right, now, the year is twenty twenty.
Speaker 8: Everyone on Earth has collectively gone insane. This is this
Speaker 8: is this is the summer. This is the summer of
Speaker 8: twenty twenty. So this is the part of twenty twenty
Speaker 8: where fun stuff is happening. This is like late July, oh, Garrison,
Speaker 8: that's when we met.
Speaker 13: So yeah, we were getting just incredibly poisoned.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, we sure we're that'll be fun in like
Speaker 1: twenty years.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 15: Well, while life or death struggle for the sort of
Speaker 15: the life for death struggle for the fate of the
Speaker 15: United States and whether or not people are going to
Speaker 15: be conducing murdered by the cops is being waged in
Speaker 15: the streets.
Speaker 8: Uh, Donald Trump, but Donald J. Trumpron, Donald J. Trump, Wow,
Speaker 8: Donald Trump Junior. That one, that's that's that's the Trump
Speaker 8: little Trump here. Yeah, Trump we're you know, looking for
Speaker 8: looking looking for their their their their curre to COVID
Speaker 8: nineteen on Twitter. And okay, so as we probably all remember, right,
Speaker 8: the thing that they found was hydroxy. Okay, so one
Speaker 8: of the first ones that they found before before I've
Speaker 8: remact him, this is, this is before we found much.
Speaker 2: Yeah, was it inside of them all along?
Speaker 8: Mayn No, this is this is this is hydrogy chlorically
Speaker 8: the thing that was probable.
Speaker 2: I hope they weren't full of hydrocic I thought it was. No.
Speaker 8: No, Well we'll get to that where there there's a
Speaker 8: The road is long, but it ends with cum demons.
Speaker 8: We first must walk the road. So the road here
Speaker 8: is Donald Donald Trump Junior posts to tweet saying like this,
Speaker 8: saying this is necessary watching about this video from this
Speaker 8: doctor named doctor Stella Emmanue. Now, okay, who is this person?
Speaker 8: She she is part of ah okay, I say part of.
Speaker 8: She runs this thing called Firepower Ministries, which so you're
Speaker 8: going great, she's also part.
Speaker 1: Of I know, broadly Yeah, okay, cool.
Speaker 8: She's also part of America's frontline doctors who are yeah, yeah,
Speaker 8: I've forgotten. Yeah, these dipshits, Oh my god, Okay, so
Speaker 8: this is this is very very very much in the
Speaker 8: same vein as architect nine to eleven Truths. They found
Speaker 8: a bunch of people who technically have medical degrees or
Speaker 8: like nurses who were like, no, no vaccines are bad
Speaker 8: and hydroxychloricalleine contractor corn clean is we'll covid cork with
Speaker 8: that one. Yeah, it's it's, it's been, it's it's been
Speaker 8: a long day. I've slept for eight hours, but in
Speaker 8: like several distinct parts of the day that were not continuous.
Speaker 2: It's been.
Speaker 8: Things are going, things are going great.
Speaker 2: Fact, if you've taken some horse medicine first.
Speaker 8: Quite possibly, I mean it's not like it could have
Speaker 8: gone worse, all right, right, So so that this person's
Speaker 8: from the very sketchy doctors who are trying to sell
Speaker 8: like a bunch of random ship to to cure covid.
Speaker 8: And okay, so who actually is this person? She is
Speaker 8: from camera Rooon and doctor Stella. Meant Immanue was caught
Speaker 8: up in uh, the unbelievably sort of like i mean right,
Speaker 8: like yes, objectively right wing, also very very weird wave
Speaker 8: of Pentecostalism and charismatic Christianity that been sweeping across that
Speaker 8: part of Africa and as part of sort of a
Speaker 8: you know, sort of like a very sort of long
Speaker 8: range of coordinated effort by by right when Christian missionaries.
Speaker 8: So okay, So for for people who don't know your
Speaker 8: Christianity very well, the Pentecostals and the charismatic Christians are
Speaker 8: like firmly in the very very weird camp of Christians.
Speaker 8: Like these are these are the people who do faith healing.
Speaker 8: One of the very common sort of Pentecostal things is
Speaker 8: this belief that like like you just you talk to God,
Speaker 8: like God's in your head and you just have conversations
Speaker 8: with Him. Now, unfortunately for like all of us, and
Speaker 8: this is you know what a thing that is a
Speaker 8: non insignificant contributing factor to why the last I don't
Speaker 8: know ten years have been so bat shit is that
Speaker 8: like this originally was kind of an isolated Pentecostal thing,
Speaker 8: and like the broader evangelicals were like, no, no, no, God
Speaker 8: only talks to me like your pastor like it's probably
Speaker 8: not like you're you're not like having a conversation in
Speaker 8: your head with but like change that's changed. Yeah, this
Speaker 8: shit has, this shit has fucking taken over everywhere. It's
Speaker 8: really bad. And these people believe a lot of very
Speaker 8: very weird stuff. So well, I mean, okay, so, like,
Speaker 8: you know, she she has like some of the sort
Speaker 8: of standard like really really hardline like David iike shit,
Speaker 8: Like she believes that the world's being run by aliens
Speaker 8: and like reptiles, and like the vaccine has like alien
Speaker 8: DNA in it to like take over your data.
Speaker 16: You know.
Speaker 8: It's just like sort of kind of Facebook moments Alex Jones, Shit,
Speaker 8: yeah right, okay, but okay, I'm gonna read this quote
Speaker 8: from will Sumner. This is a quote from one of
Speaker 8: her her sermons. They, which is, demons are responsible for
Speaker 8: serious guynecological problems. And Manuel said, we call them all
Speaker 8: kinds of names, and Tromesus and Travisius, we call them
Speaker 8: molar pregnancies, we call them fibroids, we call them cysts,
Speaker 8: but most of them were evil deposits from spirit husband.
Speaker 2: God.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 8: No, they are responsible for miscarriage's impotence men that can't
Speaker 8: get it up.
Speaker 2: So all right, immediately we we have like we have
Speaker 2: there are.
Speaker 8: Several kinds of cum demons here that we're dealing with.
Speaker 8: So there are like there, there's, there's there's Okay. So
Speaker 8: a lot of this is drawn from what is a
Speaker 8: very like a genu widely.
Speaker 2: Unbelievably dubious piece of theology.
Speaker 8: So when I was researching this, right, I saw, I saw,
Speaker 8: I saw someone there there was there was like a
Speaker 8: religious scholar who was writing this. He was like, oh,
Speaker 8: I immediately recognized the theology of this. This is from
Speaker 8: this is from Genesis six.
Speaker 2: So okay.
Speaker 8: So I was like, Okay, what what the fuck are
Speaker 8: they talking about? So I went back and I read. Okay,
Speaker 8: So I went back and I read the Genesis, and
Speaker 8: I'm going to read the two this is. This is
Speaker 8: from Genesis chapter six, verses one and two, and I
Speaker 8: am just going to read these two sentences, and I'm
Speaker 8: going to see if you two can produce cum demons
Speaker 8: from this.
Speaker 2: Okay, happy, I.
Speaker 1: Mean I could produce com demons from almost anything. That
Speaker 1: is that is the power.
Speaker 2: With the right machinery.
Speaker 1: You know what, I think we know exactly what the
Speaker 1: right machinery is.
Speaker 8: Look, we know that we can produce com demons mechanically.
Speaker 8: Our challenge here is to produce them theologically. Okay, try
Speaker 8: I will, I will use all of all of.
Speaker 2: My claim knowledge.
Speaker 1: We must we must find a way to evacuate the
Speaker 1: vast deference of the soul.
Speaker 8: Okay, so I'm using I'm using the King James translation
Speaker 8: because that's the translation that all these psychos use. And
Speaker 8: it came to pass when men began to multiply on
Speaker 8: the face of the earth and daughters were born onto them,
Speaker 8: that the sons of God saw the daughters of man
Speaker 8: that they were fair, and they took them wives of
Speaker 8: all which they chose. Okay, so I I do know
Speaker 8: where they're I do know what they are doing. So
Speaker 8: the sons of God those would be what like fallen
Speaker 8: angels that have been procreating with women.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I think.
Speaker 13: This ties into like the Book of Enoch stuff, which
Speaker 13: was made a little bit like after Genesis but kind
Speaker 13: of like retconned a lot of like the creation story.
Speaker 13: So I can see where they're they're pulling cum demons from.
Speaker 13: But it is it is a bit of a stretch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they're kind of you could say cum demons in
Speaker 1: the way that like God seed. Yeah, you could see it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that's it is a stretch.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 8: Okay, my my my analysis, because I I think I
Speaker 8: I think they're pulling this out of their ass.
Speaker 2: And I think they're pulling this out of their ass.
Speaker 2: It's also about cum demons. So yeah, okay.
Speaker 8: Like I I I have it is well known for
Speaker 8: people who follow me on Twitter that I have an
Speaker 8: immense and powerful disrespect for theology. But what what part
Speaker 8: of the sons of God? What what part of that
Speaker 8: gets you to demons?
Speaker 2: And not?
Speaker 6: Like?
Speaker 8: Because again, isn't the whole point of Christianity that we
Speaker 8: are all God's children? Like, isn't it?
Speaker 2: Is this not a thing that they tell you in
Speaker 2: every single fucking sir?
Speaker 8: How do you read that and not think they're talking
Speaker 8: about people and immediately jump to come to you a
Speaker 8: bit like, here's what's going on?
Speaker 13: I could, I could explain this because this is the
Speaker 13: King James version. So this was made in a post
Speaker 13: Book of Enoch world. Around the around the alleged birth
Speaker 13: of Jesus, the Book of Enoch got very popular and
Speaker 13: this this introduced the idea of a fallen angel. The
Speaker 13: fallow fallen angel isn't really in the Bible at all,
Speaker 13: It's only it's only in like non biblical Abrahamic texts.
Speaker 13: So this this idea then kind of got planted into
Speaker 13: a lot of like Catholic mythology as well. So when
Speaker 13: they're there caused they have a distinction between like the
Speaker 13: like the sons of like the sons of God versus
Speaker 13: what was the what was the thing they used to
Speaker 13: refer to the daughters.
Speaker 8: The sons are the daughters of men exactly, So the
Speaker 8: daughters are human, where the the the sons are like
Speaker 8: came from God.
Speaker 13: So that is some type of fallen angel that has
Speaker 13: been asked down to earth. They are doing a specific thing,
Speaker 13: but it's it's it's it's a result of a whole
Speaker 13: bunch of like mistranslations and a whole bunch of various
Speaker 13: various like Christian and Gnostic texts that been that have
Speaker 13: been misinterpreted for thousands of years by the Catholic Church,
Speaker 13: and it creates a really weird theology that is indistinguishable
Speaker 13: from like Castlevania.
Speaker 8: So yeah, I blame I blamed Martin lud This is
Speaker 8: Martin Luther's fault, like like, here's.
Speaker 2: The thing, here's the thing. Keep it in high latins, understand.
Speaker 8: This, this is this is this is what Martin Luther.
Speaker 8: I'm specifically because okay. So this was already happy. The
Speaker 8: cath the Church was already doing this right. But Martin
Speaker 8: Luther had a chance to fix this ship. And she
Speaker 8: was like, do you know what I'm gonna do and say,
Speaker 8: is that I am going to I am going to
Speaker 8: turn against the peasant revolts and I'm going to do
Speaker 8: a lot. I'm going to bring about a level of
Speaker 8: anti Semitism that is going to allow me to outflank
Speaker 8: the Inquisition on the right. She could have been fixing
Speaker 8: this bullshit no anti seven is I gotta keep my
Speaker 8: patron lords and down he was.
Speaker 1: He was German, like, there's only so much you can ask.
Speaker 2: That's true.
Speaker 13: Yeah, well I'm happy that we can all go to
Speaker 13: sleep at night worrying about the sons of God implanting semen.
Speaker 2: There's okay.
Speaker 8: So that that's that's com demon type type one, right,
Speaker 8: That is okay. So though those are those are the
Speaker 8: demons that like they they have they have sex with
Speaker 8: women and they produce nephilim from or sometimes also nephelin.
Speaker 8: There's there's a lot of sort of conflicting sort of theology.
Speaker 13: All that stuff comes from the Book of Enoch, All
Speaker 13: that stuff is non canon to the modern Bible, but
Speaker 13: it's where it's where it comes from.
Speaker 1: Sucking Council of nicea.
Speaker 8: Okay, but there's also there's also a second there's also
Speaker 8: the second kind of cum demon, right, which is these
Speaker 8: are the these are well okay, so so succuby and
Speaker 8: incuby are based here.
Speaker 2: We go, I do it.
Speaker 8: I was it was counting down the the other kind
Speaker 8: of of demon. So you have your incub by, right,
Speaker 8: who are another type of sex demon, and the incuby
Speaker 8: fuck men so they can steal their semen and they're
Speaker 8: they're they're you know, there's some statements are reasons that.
Speaker 8: There's another thing that she talks about, which is that
Speaker 8: there are witches who have like astral spirit sex with
Speaker 8: men in their sleep. And if you're like having a
Speaker 8: sex stream, it's because you're having actual spirit sex.
Speaker 4: No.
Speaker 1: No, yeah, I mean like I like Bill Murray, I've
Speaker 1: I've experienced that. Oh no, that was Bill Murray. Sorry,
Speaker 1: my mistake.
Speaker 8: Oh wait, yes, okay, okay, the cloud the fog is clearing.
Speaker 8: I've I've had I've had sex with too many sex demons.
Speaker 8: It's it's a real issue.
Speaker 2: Okay. So, so all right.
Speaker 8: So we have the sex demons who are like trying
Speaker 8: to pregnant. You have the sex demons, you're trying to
Speaker 8: steal your cump. We also have the actual we have
Speaker 8: the actual projecting projecting witches, right, and the actual projecting
Speaker 8: witches are trying to steal people's come as part of
Speaker 8: an Illuminati plot to create like an even more powerful witch.
Speaker 8: And the even more powerful witch is going to use
Speaker 8: gay marriage and children's toys to like destroy the fabric
Speaker 8: of Western civilization. That does bring about sort of jen
Speaker 8: general new World order, ETCA have heard this.
Speaker 1: Honestly, Lan Witch meetings, Yeah, it is not as far
Speaker 1: from the backstory to Warhammer forty thousand as it should be.
Speaker 8: That's very sadly true.
Speaker 2: I didn't want Warhammer forty thousands coming to our com
Speaker 2: episode if I'm honahed, No, it's.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, there's a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: interested in both Semen Retention and Warhammer forty thousand.
Speaker 2: That's a tight vendram.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, they all play Ultra Marines. That was ah,
Speaker 1: that's yeah, pretty good Warhammer forty thousand joke for those
Speaker 1: of you who play.
Speaker 8: I also learned a couple of days ago that I
Speaker 8: one of the many crimes of the Emperor forty K
Speaker 8: was passing off in a Miri Bakara quote as his own.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that that is that was That was a
Speaker 1: good bit. That was a really good bit. It's little
Speaker 1: pieces like that that let you know that Dan Abnetz
Speaker 1: pretty bass. That was my favorite part of the book.
Speaker 2: So funny. That's like, that's literally cannon.
Speaker 13: I do have like three pages written on Tanning. So yeah,
Speaker 13: little bit. That's that's that's the end of the same
Speaker 13: stems go off. Well, okay, I The one thing I'll
Speaker 13: add on is that one of the more funny modern
Speaker 13: versions of these, if you go on the betted drill
Speaker 13: subreddit the recreational pedetul subreddit, you can fight pop who
Speaker 13: try to take enough beta drill to have sex with
Speaker 13: the hat man, which is another.
Speaker 2: Another form of trying to sum a shadow people. Maybe
Speaker 2: you have to you have.
Speaker 1: To explain your terms for people here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm a man.
Speaker 1: The man is a tall, thin man wearing a hat
Speaker 1: who appears when you take hallucinogenic doses of ben a
Speaker 1: drill because you can't afford better drugs because you're seventeen.
Speaker 2: Yes, we're younger, and there's some people the hat man.
Speaker 13: Some people find the hat man extremely attractive, or some
Speaker 13: of like the female shadow people variants and they try
Speaker 13: to I have read multiple reports of people explaining their
Speaker 13: sexual experiences with shadow people.
Speaker 8: Anyways, the President of the United States and his son
Speaker 8: were promoting this, so this is great.
Speaker 2: This website, by the way, absolute adventures on here. I'm
Speaker 2: just reading about how to use Christ's blood as a weapon. Amazing.
Speaker 1: Oh that's good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, no problems here. Yeah. Do you know who
Speaker 2: won't steal your semen? Everybody?
Speaker 1: We can't promise that.
Speaker 2: I can.
Speaker 13: I can promise any advertiser on this show. I've personally
Speaker 13: approved to make sure they will not come into your
Speaker 13: bedroom and steal your semen.
Speaker 2: Wow, how do you do? How's the approval? Press work
Speaker 2: is out of interest. I cannot divulge privately.
Speaker 1: Since Garrison for.
Speaker 13: We are we are going to close off by talking
Speaker 13: about a an testosterone, two of our favorite topics for
Speaker 13: this episode. For some reason, about a year ago, a
Speaker 13: trailer on Fox News dropped for a new batch of
Speaker 13: Tucker Carlson originals, titled The End of Men. It opens
Speaker 13: with the text that reads, in the current year.
Speaker 1: The cycle continues.
Speaker 17: Once a society collapses, then if you're in hard times, well,
Speaker 17: hard iron sharpens iron, as they'd say, and those hard
Speaker 17: times inevitably produce men who are tough, men, who are
Speaker 17: resource for, men who are strong enough to survive, and
Speaker 17: then they go on to re establish order, and so
Speaker 17: the cycle begins again.
Speaker 13: Now there's a few funny things about this video, from
Speaker 13: the ripped shirtless dudes milking cows, to wrestling each other
Speaker 13: and shooting bottles of canola oil. There's had a hundred
Speaker 13: inche that is shooting like ten bottles of canola oil
Speaker 13: for some reason.
Speaker 2: Maybe the Mussolini's leg there into the Mussolini staff.
Speaker 13: He was bye by far the most bizarre.
Speaker 1: I suspect they're shooting the canola because it's like a
Speaker 1: seed oil thing. They think that like a right wing thing.
Speaker 1: Oils are like sucking out your testosterone.
Speaker 13: Anyway, it's something very silly, but by far the most
Speaker 13: bizarre thing in this trailer is a shot of a
Speaker 13: naked man with outstretched arms like Jesus on the Cross
Speaker 13: of style, standing in front of a lake at dusk,
Speaker 13: with a white machine shining a glowing red light on
Speaker 13: his Dick. What and again powerful image at the clibax
Speaker 13: of the music from two thousand and one Space Odyssey. Uh,
Speaker 13: there's this there's this man facing balls first in front
Speaker 13: of this large red light at the end of this trailer.
Speaker 1: I there should never have been any cause on our
Speaker 1: podcast or on Fox News for anyone to save the
Speaker 1: line after the end of the climax of the music
Speaker 1: from two thousand and one a Space odysty.
Speaker 8: Oh, that's the thing we're objecting to from this episode,
Speaker 8: that's the line.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because it shouldn't a climax. It lost its
Speaker 2: power in that moment. Considering both like the No.
Speaker 1: One second James, that was a very good joke.
Speaker 2: Thank you, thank you, thank you for seeing me, buddy.
Speaker 13: Yeah, So considering both like the text at the beginning
Speaker 13: and then some of the narration that we just heard
Speaker 13: in the trailer, they're kind of doing this weird like
Speaker 13: Cali yoga thing, right that is that is a bit
Speaker 13: of a bit of what's going on here.
Speaker 1: Because again you can listen to our episodes on Savitri
Speaker 1: Devi for a little more information about this. But it's
Speaker 1: like this weird right wing con like quasi apocalyptic concept
Speaker 1: that evolved during an in between some of the early
Speaker 1: Nazis and some of the people who are currently behind
Speaker 1: the present leader of India. It's it's way too esoteric
Speaker 1: and weird to get into, but it's one of the
Speaker 1: things that.
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, it's the real fun like it. We're not
Speaker 2: going to get into it too much. But I think
Speaker 2: the previous.
Speaker 1: Wound up adjacent to at Tucker Carlson episode because it's
Speaker 1: some like weird esoteric Nazi wizard ship.
Speaker 13: Yes, and that previous November, Joe Rogan posted a Cali
Speaker 13: Yuga meme which went viral. It's it's about how hard
Speaker 13: times creates strong men, which create good times, which lead
Speaker 13: to weak men, which create hard times. It's a fucking
Speaker 13: silly his, his, his, the h The accompanying text on
Speaker 13: the Instagram post that that Rogan did said, civilizations move
Speaker 13: in predictable cycles. We are in the Kali Yuga, the
Speaker 13: age of conflict. All of the chaos we're seeing right
Speaker 13: now is predicted in Hinduism thousands of years ago. Rogan
Speaker 13: was probably just like parroting something that he heard from
Speaker 13: one of his many Fashy or new ag friends, which,
Speaker 13: considering Rogan's social circle, that could very well, just be
Speaker 13: the same person.
Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, yeah, one of his fucking sparring buddies is
Speaker 1: either friends with the Nazi or just stumbled upon a
Speaker 1: fucking the wrong podcast and then told him that when
Speaker 1: they were smoking weed. And you know, yes, I mean
Speaker 1: that's honestly to it's problematic because of his platform, but
Speaker 1: that's how I learned. Everything about esoterica that I learned
Speaker 1: when I was in my twenties was some I was
Speaker 1: smoking weed with some sketchy dude who was going places
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have been on the internet.
Speaker 13: So a few months after Rogan posted this meme, we
Speaker 13: have Tucker Carlson making this whole mini series surrounding this
Speaker 13: Hard Times Creates Strong Men kind of trend. It's taking
Speaker 13: cues from the online manosphere, and Tucker posited that weak,
Speaker 13: unmanly men are leading to the collapse of civilization and
Speaker 13: a hardening of men is necessary to save it. According
Speaker 13: to according to Tucker, one of the one of the
Speaker 13: threats to manhood is a quote unquote total collapse in
Speaker 13: testosterone levels amongst men in recent years. And the solution
Speaker 13: goes beyond just your typical like anti soy crusading that
Speaker 13: Tucker has done in the past. Now, Tucker has turned
Speaker 13: to the cutting edge science of bromiopathic medicine as advocates.
Speaker 18: God damn it, as advocated for by a quote unquote
Speaker 18: fitness professional named Andrew McGovern who touts that infrared light
Speaker 18: and testical tanning is this disex marketa for plummeting tea
Speaker 18: levels in men.
Speaker 4: So obviously half the viewers right now are like, what,
Speaker 4: that's testical tanning.
Speaker 2: That's crazy.
Speaker 4: But my view is, Okay, testosterone levels crash and nobody
Speaker 4: says anything about it. That's crazy, So why is it
Speaker 4: crazy to seek solutions?
Speaker 2: It's not crazy to seek solutions.
Speaker 7: And I think I was recently exposed to a term
Speaker 7: called bromeopathy, and I think there's a lot of people
Speaker 7: out there right now that are don't trust the mainstream information.
Speaker 13: This TV special is constantly referred to as a documentary,
Speaker 13: so surely you would expect Tucker to try and like
Speaker 13: interview scientists or like anyone with expertise on this topic.
Speaker 13: Of course, not actually not the case. Andrew McGovern are
Speaker 13: our bromeopathic hero. Works as a personal trader at Lifetime
Speaker 13: Fitness in Columbus, Ohio, and he hasn't even been a
Speaker 13: trader for very long. About a decade ago. About a
Speaker 13: decade ago, he was the manager of an Abercrobie and
Speaker 13: Fitch store in Miami.
Speaker 1: Perfect now descriptions from works at the Grumby and Finish store.
Speaker 2: Wait, but in Miami.
Speaker 1: Hey, if you want to get trim that's where you
Speaker 1: get trimmed.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that is That type of dude is emerging here.
Speaker 2: As of twenty seventeen, he was the director of operations
Speaker 2: for Petland retail stores.
Speaker 6: He's getting funnier.
Speaker 2: But this guy's resume is finally amusing.
Speaker 13: But Tucker, being a competent journalist, did not just interview
Speaker 13: one person. However, Kid Rock was brought on to be
Speaker 13: the sole voice of reasons.
Speaker 1: You know, Garrison, you left, But Kid Rock is the
Speaker 1: other person. I've gotten prescription drugs from so.
Speaker 2: Real bastion. In the platonic cave of men stands Kid
Speaker 2: Rock and a guy from Abercrombie and Fitch. We must
Speaker 2: only beat their shadows.
Speaker 16: Dude, stop testicle Danny, come on, I mean, yeah, I
Speaker 16: haven't heard anything, Bobby. I'm starting a punk rock band
Speaker 16: and it's called Testical Tanning.
Speaker 2: That's the end of it.
Speaker 4: I mean, don't you think at this point, when so
Speaker 4: many of the therapies, the paths they've told us to take,
Speaker 4: have turned out to be dead ends that have really
Speaker 4: hurt people, why wouldn't open minded people seek new solutions.
Speaker 2: I don't know what the hell is going on in
Speaker 2: this world. I'm not even sure if I understood that question.
Speaker 2: But some days I just want to stop this planet,
Speaker 2: let me off.
Speaker 13: Like Kid Rock was not did not buy into testical
Speaker 13: tanning the same way Tucker seems to.
Speaker 1: How, oh God is kid.
Speaker 8: What I said?
Speaker 2: I said he was brought out to be the sole
Speaker 2: but we thought you were joking because it's Kid.
Speaker 1: You were joking.
Speaker 2: No, he's the only kid Rock stands with science.
Speaker 1: It is indeed sweet Home, Alabama all summer long.
Speaker 13: Tucker was not the first person to advocate for testicular
Speaker 13: tanning as the solution to an allegedly problematic dip in
Speaker 13: testosterone levels. Dating back to twenty fifteen, you can find
Speaker 13: articles online such as quote former MLB player Gabe Kapler
Speaker 13: says men who want to get stronger should tan their
Speaker 13: testicles from complex and quote I put a giant red
Speaker 13: light on my balls to triple white testosterone levels from
Speaker 13: a Men's Health twenty seventeen.
Speaker 2: Is that written by Ben Greenfield Benny Johns because he
Speaker 2: normally pops up with these things, which one the Men's
Speaker 2: health one.
Speaker 13: Me Let me see a guy who injected to have
Speaker 13: a dick to make it bigger. I have it in
Speaker 13: my show notes here. This was written by someone named
Speaker 13: Ben Greenfield.
Speaker 2: Pot this balland has one games.
Speaker 1: So proud of you today, buddy.
Speaker 2: I'm so happy we have you on our team.
Speaker 1: Dates are you taking? Are you taking performance enhancing drugs?
Speaker 1: For this podcast?
Speaker 2: Should be Robert I'm not. This is so funny. We
Speaker 2: have stepped into a gold mind of contact with Ben Greenfield,
Speaker 2: the guy who injected his own dick with stem cells
Speaker 2: to make it bigger. That's so funny. Then you compel you.
Speaker 2: If you have any free time in your day, just
Speaker 2: google Ben Greenfield penis. There will be several articles. It's
Speaker 2: supposedly reptible outlets. It will just fucking make you unwell. Well,
Speaker 2: that's that is great to hear it.
Speaker 13: But despite not being the first person to talk about
Speaker 13: testicular tanning, Tucker was certainly the most impactful. After the
Speaker 13: airing of the End of Men testicular tanning showed a
Speaker 13: seven thousand increase in relative search interest on Google and
Speaker 13: thirty five thousand increase in tweets on the topic. Now,
Speaker 13: surely some of these things are stuff like making fun
Speaker 13: of it right some weeks, I'm sure, yeah, but a
Speaker 13: lot of it also a lot of it's also people
Speaker 13: who are just talking about it genuinely. To quote a
Speaker 13: study published in j M I R, a dermatology publication, quote,
Speaker 13: the promotion of testicular tanning generated significant public interest in
Speaker 13: an evidence lacking and potentially dangerous health trend. Dermatologists and
Speaker 13: other healthcare professionals should be aware of these new viral
Speaker 13: health trends to best consultations and combat health misinformation unquote.
Speaker 13: So like in terms of actual data, a twenty seventeen
Speaker 13: meta analysis of studies on sperm counts found that in
Speaker 13: North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, men's sperm counts
Speaker 13: have declined by about fifty percent between nineteen seventy three
Speaker 13: and twenty eleven. Now, these results have not been enough
Speaker 13: to really cause broad concern unless you're like a right
Speaker 13: wing influencer for men, because there doesn't really seem to
Speaker 13: be an equal drop in testosterone levels compared.
Speaker 1: To previt problems mankind has had on the whole, not
Speaker 1: enough seamen comshot.
Speaker 13: It's not one of the yes and like compared to
Speaker 13: previous decades. There is this maybe like a twenty percent
Speaker 13: decrease in total testosterone levels amongst adolescent and young adult males,
Speaker 13: but that's highly fluxtual and it's packed it heavily by diet.
Speaker 13: It's suspected that pollution environmental degradation are also suspected of
Speaker 13: being contributing factors, with plastics like a thighlight being known
Speaker 13: to interfere with the production of hormones like distosterone. But
Speaker 13: this area of research is still heavily contested. But still
Speaker 13: that has not stopped fitness YouTubers and conservative influencers from
Speaker 13: tying this to like the soy boy feminization of men
Speaker 13: and drumming up panic to grow their social media followings,
Speaker 13: sell their supplements and advertise affiliate products. The krem Dela
Speaker 13: creme of red lights for testicular tanning is the Juve
Speaker 13: Light A Light. Juve is a light therapy panel company
Speaker 13: which sells these LEDs. They're like this, They're like this
Speaker 13: upscale wellness brand. The smallest model they have costs over
Speaker 13: one thousand dollars, with the full body ones going for
Speaker 13: around ten grand.
Speaker 2: This is when you know it's a grift. If someone
Speaker 2: is telling you that they need to sell you sunlight,
Speaker 2: they are having a fucking laugh.
Speaker 13: Our friend Ben Greenfield advocates a quote that advocates that
Speaker 13: you spend the big bucks on juve lest do you
Speaker 13: quote fry your balls to a crisp with a cheap
Speaker 13: knock off.
Speaker 1: You wouldn't want to do that, would you.
Speaker 2: Wise, Yeah, it seems like it's maybe a bad idea.
Speaker 1: I can teach you how to how to how to
Speaker 1: cook your balls safely without spending any money at all.
Speaker 1: Get a pair of double A batteries, take them right
Speaker 1: out of your out of your uh, your your your
Speaker 1: your remote control. You stick the active in in a
Speaker 1: bottle of water, and then you put your hand on
Speaker 1: your testicles and you're a it'll it'll complete the circuit
Speaker 1: and power your testicles up with electricity, which you can
Speaker 1: then ejaculate instead of come.
Speaker 2: They'll probably give you superpowers too.
Speaker 1: Almost certainly, Garrison.
Speaker 8: Legally, this is not a recommendation to do this. If
Speaker 8: you do this, that shit's not on us. You did
Speaker 8: that your olation yet, please do not connect batteries to.
Speaker 13: You dick to quote that JMR study evaluating the public's
Speaker 13: interest into secular tanning quote. The interest in this topic
Speaker 13: may be partially explained by the men's attention and advertising
Speaker 13: men's of sexual health on hormone replacement or homone enhancing
Speaker 13: therapies receive in the US. Although subsequent media coverage largely
Speaker 13: disfavored testicular tanning due to lacking evidence and potential dangers,
Speaker 13: other health influencers came to defend and encourage the practice
Speaker 13: of testicular tanning, specifically by using UV light as an unquote.
Speaker 13: As an example, here is a clip from fitness YouTuber
Speaker 13: Elliott Hulsey's Strength Camp with one point seven million followers.
Speaker 19: Blast your balls with sunshine to increase the stosterone. Now,
Speaker 19: you can drop your draws and let your balls get
Speaker 19: kissed by the sun, or you can try one of
Speaker 19: these light panels to roast my nuts and be more manly.
Speaker 19: Nineteen thirty nine studies suggests that you UV light exposure
Speaker 19: to your testicles increases testosterone by two hundred percent. If
Speaker 19: you want to join me in this experiment, you can
Speaker 19: find one of these bad boys a Hoseyhealth dot com.
Speaker 19: Then just go to personal labs dot com, get your
Speaker 19: blood tested, get your testosterone. Then after eight to twelve weeks,
Speaker 19: check it again and find out if the nut rusting
Speaker 19: really works.
Speaker 13: So this whole idea goes back to this one nineteen
Speaker 13: thirty nine. Studies eighteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now let's of goot schied to nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty nine. Man.
Speaker 13: And if there's one thing I trust, it's science from
Speaker 13: nineteen thirty nine.
Speaker 2: Yep, got any comments on or on race in this study.
Speaker 13: So this study was published in the journal ender Chronology,
Speaker 13: and it found that frequent UV irritation to the genitals
Speaker 13: increased urinary and drostererone, a metabolite of testosterone. It increases
Speaker 13: levels by nearly two hundred percent quote unquote. Now you'll
Speaker 13: be shocked to learn that there may be problems with
Speaker 13: this study. Guess how many test subjects were included in
Speaker 13: this In this study.
Speaker 2: I'm gonna be generous and say eight. So Mia says eight.
Speaker 2: James and Green failed just one. One. You say one, Robert,
Speaker 2: how many? How many do you think you're in the study?
Speaker 1: Geez I think like seven was sacred to the Nazis.
Speaker 13: So I'm going to say that five, a grand total
Speaker 13: of five people are in the study.
Speaker 2: Wow, I give the too much credit.
Speaker 1: They had to pick this sacred discordion number. Bullshit.
Speaker 13: Three of them are fifty four years old and have
Speaker 13: manic depressive psychosis.
Speaker 2: The other two are twenty.
Speaker 1: Honestly not a bad apparently representative sample for Tucker's audience.
Speaker 2: I was about to say the same thing, is actually
Speaker 2: who watches his show?
Speaker 13: The other two are twenty eight and forty five and
Speaker 13: have a quote psychopathia with depressive features.
Speaker 2: Which is a very old timey term everyone on Twitter,
Speaker 2: et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 13: But I think what actually and is I think they
Speaker 13: did this study at an asylum. I just found people
Speaker 13: with depressive psychosis to do the study on it. It's
Speaker 13: just these five, these five rand people. No, no individual
Speaker 13: graft results were produced. It only showed the quote unquote
Speaker 13: typical reaction and there wasn't even a control group for
Speaker 13: the study. That not to mention, there's many problems with
Speaker 13: like measuring distosterone in the first place, because it changes
Speaker 13: broadly day to day and by age, and it's very
Speaker 13: kind of unreliable to quote the JMIR study again. Quote
Speaker 13: Beyond this questionable study, research has shown that exposure to
Speaker 13: UV radiation may increase sex steroid hormone levels. However, these
Speaker 13: studies either do not include human participants or do not
Speaker 13: specifically evaluate UV radiation exposure to the genitals. There is
Speaker 13: there is not a single other study since then that
Speaker 13: has done anything resembling like peer reviewed science.
Speaker 1: You know what why everybody go to go to go
Speaker 1: fund me, help cool zone determine whether or not testical
Speaker 1: tanning works and we'll get that control group.
Speaker 8: Okay, so what my my other question about this, aren't
Speaker 8: aren't all these people getting fucking ball cancer?
Speaker 2: We are? We are. Okay, we are about to get
Speaker 2: to that.
Speaker 13: Because yes, you may think that shining you for you
Speaker 13: lights on your balls might have some long term problems.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's great, a lot of sound. Sturt's come back
Speaker 2: to the episode again.
Speaker 13: So uh Vice interviewed Seth Cohen, a urologist and the
Speaker 13: director of the sexual Dysfunction Program at n y U
Speaker 13: Langdon Health.
Speaker 2: Quote.
Speaker 13: I'm not aware of any science or data or any
Speaker 13: journal publications proving that red light therapy improves male testosterone.
Speaker 13: End quote, we change recommendations on medical therapies based on
Speaker 13: a double blind, placebo controlled randomized trials, large studies with
Speaker 13: thousands of patients. That's where you'll find if there's any
Speaker 13: really cistical significance between red light therapy and a placebo
Speaker 13: Could these men who underwent red light therapy and came
Speaker 13: out and felt stronger and more manly, could that have
Speaker 13: been a placebo effect?
Speaker 2: Of course it could.
Speaker 13: Unquote so and as Mia mentioned, we have not really
Speaker 13: even gotten into the potential dangers yet. Close direct heat
Speaker 13: to your testicles actually damages sperm count on top of
Speaker 13: the risk of giving yourself ball cancer by blasting concentrated
Speaker 13: UV light on your genitals for twenty minutes a day,
Speaker 13: every day of the week, which is what is recommended
Speaker 13: to quote that study one last time quote research shows
Speaker 13: that excessive exposure to UV radiation may lead to higher
Speaker 13: rates of genital tumor formation and decreased sperm counts, as
Speaker 13: spermo to genesis is temperature dependent. Thus, given the current
Speaker 13: obsession with optimizing mail hormone levels, the high cost of
Speaker 13: red light therapy, and misleading information labeling of testicular tan
Speaker 13: by prominent influencers, there may be an increase in men
Speaker 13: exposing themselves to UV radiation and developing associated complications. Unquote
Speaker 13: great heroic, So guys, almost done here. But man, it's
Speaker 13: pretty it's pretty funny that all of the worst people
Speaker 13: you know are going to get ball cancer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, don't stop them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I you know, there was a period of time
Speaker 1: in my life when I said where I will never
Speaker 1: rich cancer on anybody. But if you are deliberately exposing
Speaker 1: your testicles for the sun, to the sun and the
Speaker 1: hope of getting superpowers because of Nazi science, it's okay.
Speaker 1: It's it's okay, Like I'm not going to warn that.
Speaker 2: To be fair, the nineteen thirty nine study was from
Speaker 2: the United States, so it.
Speaker 1: Be talking about the other Nazi science.
Speaker 13: Yes, yeah, yeah, well yeah, And I think I think
Speaker 13: a part of this whole narrative of like the total
Speaker 13: collapse of men's to stosterone levels, as as Tucker puts it, man,
Speaker 13: I fucking wish.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's so much easier.
Speaker 13: But I think this is more about men in power
Speaker 13: feeling that their position of assumed superiority is being threatened. Really,
Speaker 13: all of our quack science and conspiracy theory stories today
Speaker 13: all revolve around this like subliminal dog whistle. It's no
Speaker 13: mistake that Tucker titled his program the End of Men.
Speaker 13: In all the stories we're covering today, it is the
Speaker 13: fear of emasculation that is the hook used to drum
Speaker 13: up fear and anger about how liberal feminism is eroding manhood.
Speaker 13: It targets some of young men's sexual insecurities while promoting
Speaker 13: this like anti woke return to the old ways of
Speaker 13: rugged masculinity.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I might add, because I think you're missing one
Speaker 1: aspect of it. I think you're identifying what he's signaling
Speaker 1: to his listeners and what they get out of it.
Speaker 1: But I also think that what he and the other
Speaker 1: folks who are kind of in positions of power and
Speaker 1: influence in the right get out of this because they're
Speaker 1: not they don't believe this, they're not actually motivated by that.
Speaker 1: Now what this is, and because we do not know
Speaker 1: specifically why, like testosterone rates, maybe lower white sperm counts
Speaker 1: are definitely lower, but it likely has to do with
Speaker 1: a massive variety of industrial pollutants in the environment, and
Speaker 1: with the fact that industrial agriculture and the process nature
Speaker 1: of a lot of our foods is having a negative
Speaker 1: impact on all these things, like it's consequences of capitalism, right,
Speaker 1: and because the consequences are getting increasingly hard to ignore,
Speaker 1: the thing that people like that need to do is
Speaker 1: find either a cure for them or another way to
Speaker 1: blame or another thing to blame them on.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 1: And so if the aspect the things that are horribly
Speaker 1: unhealthy about the society that we have built is causing
Speaker 1: men to suffer consequences in their bodies, the thing to
Speaker 1: do on the right is to blame that shit on
Speaker 1: the liberals and masculating men. And the solution is whatever
Speaker 1: kind of shit we can sell you, right, Like, that's
Speaker 1: what's going on here, that's the motivation, and it happens
Speaker 1: outside of like manshit too, Like that's all the right
Speaker 1: has anymore, Like their economic theories have been proven disastrously wrong.
Speaker 1: They have no actual ability to govern in a meaningful
Speaker 1: way other than by causing harm to people. So it's
Speaker 1: entirely about taking the consequences of the world that they
Speaker 1: advocate and blaming them on someone else and selling you
Speaker 1: snake oil to deal with it.
Speaker 13: Yeah, exactly, and so is that is most of the
Speaker 13: of the Testicular Tanning Fund that I got into.
Speaker 2: We haven't covered all the things that bank Greenfelt did
Speaker 2: to his dact in twenty seventeen.
Speaker 1: We'll get back on this subject, but it is time
Speaker 1: for us to end. This is already over an hour,
Speaker 1: so I want to leave you all, all of you,
Speaker 1: all of you beautiful. First, I want to thank all
Speaker 1: of our beautiful correspondence for their research, and I want
Speaker 1: to leave all of you with this simple piece of advice.
Speaker 1: If you feel like your testicles aren't getting enough solar radiation,
Speaker 1: simply purchase a glass cutter in an old microwave, cut
Speaker 1: a circular hole in the microwave, and you bag it
Speaker 1: while it's on. You'll be okay. That is our legally
Speaker 1: binding health advice. That's the end of the episode. Welcome
Speaker 1: back to It could happen here the podcast. That's happening
Speaker 1: here in your ear. And one of the things that
Speaker 1: we love talking about here is a critical ingredient towards
Speaker 1: creeping authoritarianism, towards growing corporate control and surveillance over all
Speaker 1: of our lives, which is of course technology that makes
Speaker 1: it even easier to monitor you than it already is.
Speaker 1: We're not talking primarily about like the government monitoring you
Speaker 1: because they can, you know, do stuff like just pull
Speaker 1: your phone data from a uh you know what which
Speaker 1: cell towers is pinged. We're talking about the kind of
Speaker 1: stuff that allows basically whoever can get an app on
Speaker 1: your phone to track and stalk you. And uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna first introduce Mia Wong Miya. Welcome to the
Speaker 1: show that you also host.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm here.
Speaker 1: So what are we what are we talking about today?
Speaker 1: And who are we talking with?
Speaker 20: Yeah?
Speaker 8: So we are talking about stalker wear, which is the
Speaker 8: sort of broad name for the category of software that
Speaker 8: Robert's been talking about. And we are talking about someone
Speaker 8: who hacked well a stalker where stalker Yeah, one of
Speaker 8: the stockerware companies my arison Crime, the Fame Hacker, the
Speaker 8: No Fly List, yed returning guests, always happy to.
Speaker 6: Have you on, Yeah, always happy to be on. Yeah.
Speaker 8: So I think I think, I don't know. I think
Speaker 8: there's a real tendency among and I see this among
Speaker 8: leftists a lot, for kind of good reasons and kind
Speaker 8: of not good reasons, to really only focus on state
Speaker 8: and like large corporate actors in terms of surveillance. And
Speaker 8: that's a mistake. Yeah, totally yeah, and so I guess
Speaker 8: I guess the place where I want to start before
Speaker 8: we get into the specific company that you do do.
Speaker 1: Is it still called owned?
Speaker 2: I kin't.
Speaker 6: It's fine to call it owned or pond or whatever.
Speaker 6: I still do that sometimes people get confused.
Speaker 8: But yeah, yeah, But before we get into that, I
Speaker 8: want to I want to ask you a bit because
Speaker 8: you've done a lot of sort of I guess you
Speaker 8: could call it research, both actual research wise and then
Speaker 8: in terms of poking around their servers.
Speaker 6: Research and journalism and whatever you want to call it.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, So I wanted to just start off by
Speaker 8: asking if you can give sort of like a brief
Speaker 8: summary of what stalkerwaar is.
Speaker 19: Yeah.
Speaker 6: So stalkerware, like as a category, encompasses like a number
Speaker 6: of different types of apps. Most of them, like on
Speaker 6: the service, advertise themselves as like parental control software, which is.
Speaker 2: Already bad enough.
Speaker 6: Just to be clear that there's like advertised for like
Speaker 6: spying on your children's phone, like seeing their location in
Speaker 6: real time, seeing their messages that they receive, any photo
Speaker 6: they take. Ostensibly this is to like prevent bullying and
Speaker 6: help with them when they get depressed because they don't
Speaker 6: trust you. And talk to you for whatever reason. But
Speaker 6: obviously a lot of these are then furthermore, because that's
Speaker 6: like that, sure, that's a like target audience, that's a
Speaker 6: demographic you can advertise too. But then there's this even
Speaker 6: bigger potential target demographic of people who are insecure in
Speaker 6: their relationship, mostly men, not only men, but who are
Speaker 6: then solved this idea that they can use software like
Speaker 6: this for stalking their partner, for finding out if they
Speaker 6: are eating on you, things like that, which is obviously
Speaker 6: an even bigger problem, which once again not to discount
Speaker 6: the problems that's spying on your children's already like bad enough,
Speaker 6: But yeah, this lead, this leads to this whole like
Speaker 6: big industry of these apps being used by partners against
Speaker 6: each other, like also just by people, like against anyone
Speaker 6: in the in their surroundings that they suspect might be
Speaker 6: doing something shady, might be like talking behind their backs.
Speaker 6: It often kind of turns into like it obviously turns
Speaker 6: into this obsessive thing, especially if you solve this idea
Speaker 6: that this this app can magically solve like interpersonal issues
Speaker 6: like with anything that sells you this magic idea of
Speaker 6: being able to solve any problem that these people start
Speaker 6: kind of spying on everyone in their like circles. To
Speaker 6: some of them like not everyone. Most like a lot
Speaker 6: of people only spying like their partner or like their
Speaker 6: child or whatever. But it often like spirals out of
Speaker 6: control into this like controlling everyone in their surroundings, knowing
Speaker 6: what everyone is up to where they are, and spend
Speaker 6: like hundreds of dollars a month on doing so.
Speaker 2: And yeah, that's pretty fucked up if you ask me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, one of the things that's interesting too. It's
Speaker 1: also in a lot of cases illegal. This is going
Speaker 1: to vary, you know, from country to country, in state
Speaker 1: to state, but in the US there are states like California,
Speaker 1: which gets pointed out in the very good tech Crunch
Speaker 1: investigation on truth Spy, where there are really strict laws
Speaker 1: that journalists like you have to abide bias to when
Speaker 1: you can record someone that these these apps absolutely break.
Speaker 6: Yes, it's specifically a thing that doesn't. Most of these
Speaker 6: app will have like a disclaimer at the bond that
Speaker 6: it is like this might be legal in your jurisdiction
Speaker 6: and please ask for consent before doing this, And then
Speaker 6: they have lots of tutorials on how to install this
Speaker 6: in someone's device with out there. Yeah, but it's like
Speaker 6: always like a we do not take andy like we
Speaker 6: we it's not our fault if you break the law basically,
Speaker 6: which obviously, like it's so far not a lot of
Speaker 6: this has been challenged in court, but I don't think
Speaker 6: this would hold up too long. But I think just
Speaker 6: saying we make a product to do crimes with, if
Speaker 6: you do crimes of it, it's not I mean, it
Speaker 6: works for the gun industry, so yeah.
Speaker 1: The difference is that, like the with the gun industry,
Speaker 1: it's a product where there is a legal and an illegal,
Speaker 1: like clear way to do it.
Speaker 6: The thing with Stocker we are as well is that
Speaker 6: like a lot of them will also explicitly say the
Speaker 6: only real use of this we allow you to to
Speaker 6: use it for is to surveill your child, which unfortunately
Speaker 6: is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of
Speaker 6: their parents.
Speaker 2: Yeah quo, it's because I do not agree with that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's one of those things where people using it,
Speaker 1: like someone installing an app on their exes or their
Speaker 1: their partner's phone or whatever without consent, could very easily
Speaker 1: would lose any court case, whether or not the company
Speaker 1: would get in trouble. I think is going to rely
Speaker 1: a lot on the stuff the videos they're posting about,
Speaker 1: like how to put how to get these apps on
Speaker 1: people's phones without them knowing, but like they do have
Speaker 1: that out with like no, it's just for surveilling children.
Speaker 6: Is green for anyone else you need consent or whatever.
Speaker 6: But I think it is important, yeah, to point this
Speaker 6: out very early for anyone who's listening to this because
Speaker 6: they think they might have stock Aware on their phones,
Speaker 6: or because they know they have stock Aware on their phones.
Speaker 6: You can use this in a domestic abuse case. This
Speaker 6: will immediately this is explicit proof that abuse is happening
Speaker 6: and no matter anything else, because like that's the thing
Speaker 6: generally with domestic abuse cases, it's really hard to prove
Speaker 6: abuses happening. Stalkerware and any other type of spying device
Speaker 6: like also physical GPS device trackers and stuff that is
Speaker 6: immediate proof that there is a there's controlling behavior going on,
Speaker 6: that you are being spined on. This it cannot only
Speaker 6: be used and it is explicit admissible evidence. This is
Speaker 6: also usually like makes cases worse, like not for you,
Speaker 6: like it just yeah, it like can potentially add charges
Speaker 6: and make it more serious, and that it can help
Speaker 6: making cops give a shit about like abuse, which yeah,
Speaker 6: I hate that I need to say that, but yeah,
Speaker 6: it's like it makes it more serious because there's like
Speaker 6: spyware and whatever.
Speaker 1: It's easy evidence first off, like you can prove they're
Speaker 1: spying on you, and second, if you are in one
Speaker 1: of the states where that violates the law, then you
Speaker 1: can immediately say this person is breaking the law like
Speaker 1: this is we don't have to debate whether or not
Speaker 1: they've they've crossed the line.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and even if it doesn't directly break the law
Speaker 6: to spy on someone on a partner like it, depending
Speaker 6: on the on the on the region, it can be
Speaker 6: kind of a hazy like thing, especially if it's a
Speaker 6: device you might co own, if it's like a state
Speaker 6: where you were with like cod possession or whatever. In
Speaker 6: the US, I do not know US law very much
Speaker 6: around this, but yeah, there's like laws like that. But
Speaker 6: usually still the fact that you're being spied on can
Speaker 6: be used as proof for other abuse things you might
Speaker 6: be alleging because it's like hard proof that something is happening.
Speaker 6: And also usually these companies will somewhat have to respond
Speaker 6: to some point us, so they will have to give
Speaker 6: out like who the account on there is behind like
Speaker 6: the spine on your phone. For some of them, we
Speaker 6: can also there's also tools that help you find out
Speaker 6: who is spying on you, or there's like someone with
Speaker 6: forensic background can.
Speaker 1: Help, yeah, and I think people. One thing we should
Speaker 1: note is that if you're kind of curious, has my
Speaker 1: device been infected by some of these tools, the one
Speaker 1: that we've been talking about most truth spy. If you
Speaker 1: go to that tech Crunch article.
Speaker 6: Or to my article that also has a link yet.
Speaker 1: Or to you to your article on your website, there's
Speaker 1: a tool you can use where you it'll tell you
Speaker 1: how to get your IMSI I think, I am I yeah,
Speaker 1: which you just dial a thing on your phone and
Speaker 1: it gives you that number. It's basically how you identify
Speaker 1: specific bones and you plug that in. It will let
Speaker 1: you know if your device has been compromised.
Speaker 6: Now like December last year, up until there is the
Speaker 6: data and if you yeah, it can pretty much tell
Speaker 6: you if you've been spying on using this specific tool
Speaker 6: until then. For other stuff, there's also guides, usually on
Speaker 6: tech Crunch and otherwise also on Stop stockerwear dot ARC,
Speaker 6: which is the US coalition against stocker where and also
Speaker 6: just generally, I think a lot of like more local
Speaker 6: anti stocking, anti abuse works are not as informed yet
Speaker 6: as they should be, but there's still a good like
Speaker 6: point also to reach out to or like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. One of my questions about truth Spy that
Speaker 1: I'm hoping you can answer is, I know that you
Speaker 1: can like text messages get transferred via it, your call records,
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff, get and who you were calling.
Speaker 1: Does that include messages for like encrypted apps like Signal
Speaker 1: or is that not accessible through this?
Speaker 6: It depends, Like for some of these, it will like
Speaker 6: get signal messages, what's the messages and everything, generally by
Speaker 6: reading the notification content because like from notifications, you know,
Speaker 6: like what messages are have been like received. Sometimes it
Speaker 6: will only then have the received messages and not the
Speaker 6: send messages. Often these also include like a key logger
Speaker 6: component that maps messages then sent back as well. Depends
Speaker 6: a lot what these apps collect, but for most of them,
Speaker 6: also the collection for other texting apps is usually kind
Speaker 6: of broken. None of these apps are really well maintained.
Speaker 6: They're mostly just quick cash graps. Yeah, are there to
Speaker 6: maintain features usually don't really work.
Speaker 1: And it seems like based on that, one thing people
Speaker 1: can do outside of checking to see if their device
Speaker 1: has been compromised, is do stuff like turn off notifications
Speaker 1: for apps sling signal, right, like, and that's that's actually
Speaker 1: just generally good advice. Notifications are a compromise of the
Speaker 1: security that that signal offers. Don't have them enabled, you know, yeah, or.
Speaker 6: At the very least disabled them on the lock screen
Speaker 6: on Anthros. Yeah, I don't know how. I think that's
Speaker 6: also possible on iOS, but I think I doesn't show
Speaker 6: message content on the lock screen anyways. I'm not sure anymore,
Speaker 6: but yeah, it's just also small things like that. And also,
Speaker 6: like one of the key tells that someone probably tampered
Speaker 6: with your phone, especially for Android, is if Google play
Speaker 6: Protect is the disabled and you do not remember disabling
Speaker 6: it for something else, it was almost definitely disabled because
Speaker 6: someone installed something on your phone. Just try re enabling it.
Speaker 6: Then they will probably tell you something. The thing also
Speaker 6: to keep in mind, if you find starckaware on your phone,
Speaker 6: please get professional help. Do not just delete it. Do
Speaker 6: not like necessarily confront whoever you think might be your
Speaker 6: abuser about it unless you're very sure that that's the
Speaker 6: situation you can handle, because like, yeah, that is one
Speaker 6: of those things that like bringing it up or just
Speaker 6: deleting it can very quickly lead to like yeah, yeah,
Speaker 6: complicating the situation a lot.
Speaker 8: You know what else complicates the situation These ads and
Speaker 8: we are back.
Speaker 1: So when it comes to the actual fight against this stuff,
Speaker 1: obviously what you're doing is a big part of it.
Speaker 1: Getting inside these companies and finding out like what they're
Speaker 1: doing and their capabilities is huge for in terms of
Speaker 1: like what regular people are people who are interested in
Speaker 1: becoming activists about this can do? What is the what
Speaker 1: is the struggle to actually fight this stuff? Look like?
Speaker 1: Like how do we how do we put a bullet
Speaker 1: in this industry's head?
Speaker 6: I think one of the biggest things. And also like
Speaker 6: why I do the work I do with like hacking
Speaker 6: and with encouraging others to like send me data, be
Speaker 6: that insiders from these companies sending it I do to
Speaker 6: me or like tech Crunch specifically currently because like me
Speaker 6: and tech Crunch are like the only people really doing
Speaker 6: like journalism on this like regularly. And the important thing
Speaker 6: with like journalism and all of this is like awareness.
Speaker 6: It's very important to create awareness about this. That's also
Speaker 6: why I do the media work with like being on
Speaker 6: this podcast and things like that. I think the most
Speaker 6: important thing is to make people aware, like talk about
Speaker 6: this in your feminist circles or whatever, things like that,
Speaker 6: especially bring it up just also in general info things
Speaker 6: about abuse or how to detect abuse. I think the
Speaker 6: most important thing to do against s soccer whereas demastify it,
Speaker 6: because most people don't even know that this is a thing,
Speaker 6: that this is, like that there's just commercially available spyware
Speaker 6: anyone can install on your phone. It's as important to
Speaker 6: not like give in to some sort of paranoia as
Speaker 6: with any of these things. It's just important to like, yeah,
Speaker 6: generate awareness, talk about it and like spread these articles,
Speaker 6: let friends know that this is a potential thing, and
Speaker 6: then yeah, I I The hard thing with this is that, like,
Speaker 6: obviously it should will probably help if there was some
Speaker 6: sort of legislation against some of this, It's going to
Speaker 6: be very hard to get any proper legislation that ends
Speaker 6: this industry because in most Western countries, which are the
Speaker 6: only countries which unfortunately they would have enough power to
Speaker 6: like actually get these apps shut down, because that's the
Speaker 6: world we live in. But the problem there is usually
Speaker 6: that like this notion that children are owned by their
Speaker 6: parents is too strong to really make a full case
Speaker 6: against these apps. And at the very best what I can,
Speaker 6: like the very best time kind of hoping for from
Speaker 6: from legislators is just a ban on advertising these apps
Speaker 6: on use against other adults, which would be big already,
Speaker 6: but that doesn't really solve the issue because there's still
Speaker 6: going to be enough people who know of their use
Speaker 6: for use against adults, and there's going to be enough
Speaker 6: people on like credit threads talking about, hey, well yeah,
Speaker 6: you oh you're not sure if your government is cheating
Speaker 6: on you, look you can just use this app, you know.
Speaker 6: That's also how most of this marketing for this works.
Speaker 6: It's just yeah, at the end of the day, this
Speaker 6: is like a patriarchal issue. So yeah, I think that's
Speaker 6: also why like I am so focused on like the
Speaker 6: hacking and the like blowing these companies up and showing
Speaker 6: like who's behind them. It's because at the end of
Speaker 6: the day, the most effective thing we have against these
Speaker 6: companies is like the grassroots movement of making them too
Speaker 6: scared to run in this business, making it not profitable
Speaker 6: enough because as I said, most of this is like
Speaker 6: quick cash grabs from like web design studios and outsourcing companies. Yeah,
Speaker 6: that a're just making a quick buck from this because
Speaker 6: otherwise they don't get paid enough. Like that's the sad
Speaker 6: thing really is how much of this industry is in
Speaker 6: all of these countries. Western companies outsource their IT too,
Speaker 6: because there's lots of IT companies there and they are
Speaker 6: entirely reliant on like Western companies giving them very underpaid tasks.
Speaker 6: And you have this problem that you now have a
Speaker 6: bunch of employees and not enough money to always pay them.
Speaker 6: And what do you do, You like find some weird
Speaker 6: niche of like a tech product you can quickly build. Yeah,
Speaker 6: and this is like one of those easy niches. It's
Speaker 6: like always the scummy stuff and like yeah, it's that's
Speaker 6: also why like so many of these companies are like
Speaker 6: based out of Vietnam, out of Iran and whatever. It's
Speaker 6: just companies that already have it hard enough to do
Speaker 6: business globally, where the IT industry is like falling apart
Speaker 6: because there's not enough like local customers and anything that's
Speaker 6: international you're just the cheap workforce, right, So yeah, it's
Speaker 6: it's once again also like a class problem. I don't
Speaker 6: like most people working in this industry know that they're
Speaker 6: working in a like scummy industry.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course, but like, yeah, you got to get
Speaker 2: paid and that's yeah.
Speaker 6: And that's like why I think making it more scary
Speaker 6: to operate in this industry is like, yes, the way
Speaker 6: to go, because like with just like these like four
Speaker 6: hacks that have happened against these companies over the last
Speaker 6: like half a year or so, two of them, three
Speaker 6: of them, three of them have shut down completely. Others
Speaker 6: seem to be slowly moving towards just building other software primarily. Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's just like, yeah, it's it's it's like with any
Speaker 6: other like shady industry that the best we can do
Speaker 6: is just do not make it profitable to run the software,
Speaker 6: because at the very best, anything else we will get
Speaker 6: it's just pushing them more into the shadows, which is
Speaker 6: not going to solve the issue at all.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think a lot about like strategic thinking, which I
Speaker 1: do believe is kind of often in part because of
Speaker 1: how rightfully negative most people on the left think about
Speaker 1: the military. There's a tendency to ignore some of like
Speaker 1: the theory around how to actually win a conflict and
Speaker 1: all of it all strategy really when you're talking about
Speaker 1: like defeating an opponent, revolves around denying and taking operational
Speaker 1: area from them, right, And that's what you're talking about
Speaker 1: when you talk about, well, we need to stop this,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the first things we can do
Speaker 1: as part of fighting this is to stop them from
Speaker 1: being able to advertise certain places.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's making sure that they're not able to operate without
Speaker 1: being seen. It's basically cutting down their area, their space
Speaker 1: to maneuver, their ability to profit, which cuts down their money,
Speaker 1: their access to people, their ability to actually operate.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Like, that's what we're looking at in terms of how
Speaker 1: do you kill this stuff. It's not one single really.
Speaker 1: I use the comparison of like a bullet, but it's
Speaker 1: never going to be one bullet. These things are too durable.
Speaker 1: There's too many countries in lay to do that.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's also why I put so much emphasis on
Speaker 6: doing media work about this and getting more people to
Speaker 6: talk about this and getting more awareness of this out there,
Speaker 6: to the point where I'm willing to work with more
Speaker 6: conservative newspapers on this because everyone needs to know about this.
Speaker 6: At the end of the day, this is how we
Speaker 6: like stop people from falling victims to this. Most people
Speaker 6: who are a victim of stocker apps have never heard
Speaker 6: of stocker apps before, and I think that's like one
Speaker 6: of the biggest ways to tackle this. And on the
Speaker 6: other hand, we also have I think another big leverage
Speaker 6: point with how many of these are getting hacked because
Speaker 6: none of these apps are very secure. That's another thing
Speaker 6: is this can also be leveraged against like the abusers
Speaker 6: in this scenario. I think just pointing out to them
Speaker 6: that all of these apps get hacked all the time
Speaker 6: and that this is how they get found out, that
Speaker 6: that this is how their data of them as abusers
Speaker 6: ends up landing on the internet. I think it's also
Speaker 6: like a very important angle at the end of the day.
Speaker 6: It's just to make it clear like yeah, no, not
Speaker 6: even you are like secure from this having consequences for
Speaker 6: your life, like beyond like direct interpersonal or legal consequences.
Speaker 6: This can and in the past has result in like
Speaker 6: your email adders being on a list of people who
Speaker 6: have du abuse to people online. You don't want to
Speaker 6: be on such a list. I think that's also important
Speaker 6: just to like point out there isn't one stock of
Speaker 6: a app that's not eventually going to get hacked. There
Speaker 6: is a big war against these apps. They're all like
Speaker 6: there's so many different hacking groups that keep sending me
Speaker 6: data from these Like I'm already working on another article
Speaker 6: that already once again affects like the data of like
Speaker 6: I think like eighty thousand more like abusers, and it's
Speaker 6: just the abuser data this time. But I'm still going
Speaker 6: to report on it, like it's it's it's this is
Speaker 6: not going to stop. It's even also not going to
Speaker 6: stop when I stop reporting on this myself, like I've
Speaker 6: that there's been work before me downe on this. I
Speaker 6: also the first time I got involved in finding stockover
Speaker 6: was back in twenty twenty. People have been hacking these
Speaker 6: apps forever and will keep hacking them, Like just look
Speaker 6: at the Wikipedia page for Stockover. There's an ever growing
Speaker 6: list of these apps that have been hacked, and I
Speaker 6: think at this point that like official count being kept
Speaker 6: by one of the people at TechCrunch is at like
Speaker 6: thirteen apps, a few of which have been hacked two
Speaker 6: or three times. Yeah, these are not these are not
Speaker 6: secure apps for any.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, of course not. Yeah, and they yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it makes sense that like an app dedicated
Speaker 1: to violating people's privacy for money would also basically violate
Speaker 1: the privacy of the people using it.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and also they don't care. Like I said, of
Speaker 6: course it's a cash crap. It's nothing else. There's a
Speaker 6: few apps that are like a little more than a
Speaker 6: cash crap, but it's usually just because they're made, Like
Speaker 6: there's still a cash grap, but they're like more well made.
Speaker 6: But it's because they're a cash graph from a company
Speaker 6: that has better developers or more money to do the
Speaker 6: initial investment. The thing is also like most of these
Speaker 6: companies don't have a lot of initial investment, And I
Speaker 6: think the important thing to consider as well. Here is
Speaker 6: one big area of this that I have not yet
Speaker 6: started tackling, but I do want to like look into more. Sometimes.
Speaker 6: Is a big reason this industry is so big and
Speaker 6: most of these apps have a lot of users despite
Speaker 6: there being so many of them, is the affiliate marketing industry.
Speaker 6: Once again, our very beloved friend. Yeah, all of these
Speaker 6: apps are parts of various affiliate marketing networks. Some of
Speaker 6: them started by stocker Ware company, and some of them
Speaker 6: just other like things to advertise all the shady things
Speaker 6: like all those phone number locator apps or whatever that's
Speaker 6: also part of those same affiliate marketing networks. And there's
Speaker 6: lots of money flowing here, and there's lots of money
Speaker 6: flowing to very big tech YouTube channels, and I might
Speaker 6: soon have some proof for some of that. But that's
Speaker 6: how these are advertised. It's everyone who advertises stock Aware
Speaker 6: to you, who has a big platform, is doing that
Speaker 6: because they're getting money, not for any other reason.
Speaker 8: We need to do more ads. We will be back shortly,
Speaker 8: and we are back.
Speaker 1: Well that's all I had, Miya, What do you got?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess there's there's another thing I wanted.
Speaker 8: To ask a little bit about, which Zach Whitaker, who's
Speaker 8: been one of the journal journalists at tech Crunch doing
Speaker 8: a lot of the research, is great. One of the
Speaker 8: things that he brings up that I think is another
Speaker 8: I don't know. It's kind of a plane with fire
Speaker 8: angle on them. But one of the issues that these
Speaker 8: companies seem to have is payment platforms, because a lot
Speaker 8: of payment platforms look at this and go wait, hold on. Yeah,
Speaker 8: so that's yeah, we've talked about that a little bit.
Speaker 6: That's an angle. We've also been fighting on a lot.
Speaker 6: Like me and Sick, we work on most of these
Speaker 6: stories together. Like it's kind of funny. We both got
Speaker 6: each other into the stockow thing back in twenty twenty.
Speaker 6: As I mentioned, that was the first time I stumbled
Speaker 6: into a stockerware app with a security issue. I reached
Speaker 6: out to some random journalists that tech Crunch about it.
Speaker 6: And now he is the only one talking about this
Speaker 6: forever because I reached out to him that one time
Speaker 6: and he got sucked into this horrible, horrible world of spying.
Speaker 6: But yeah, Like one of the things we focus on
Speaker 6: a lot is reporting these companies to their payment providers,
Speaker 6: to their server hosters, to the point where sometimes like
Speaker 6: for weeks, Sack will just wait for them to switch
Speaker 6: to a new provider after we got them taken them
Speaker 6: from like PayPal, and then from their other PayPal account
Speaker 6: where they're just using like the checkout experience from one
Speaker 6: of their completely unrelated software projects, which they will later
Speaker 6: claim is not related at all the different companies and whatever.
Speaker 6: But then like eventually they get taken down from that
Speaker 6: as well, and usually we can get them taken them
Speaker 6: from most like Western hosters, like especially US housters, will
Speaker 6: immediately take them down. You do not want to risk
Speaker 6: being the company hosting spuywire on US grounds.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's just like same with EO hosters. Like the
Speaker 6: few companies that we've seen that were on Headsnerd, they
Speaker 6: immediately react because it's like yeah no, like under EULO,
Speaker 6: you don't want to like risk that, and also just
Speaker 6: because you don't want to host that, like there's no
Speaker 6: reason for you to host shit like that. It will
Speaker 6: have like image consequences, and that's an important thing that
Speaker 6: is maybe also something you can do as more like
Speaker 6: a grassroots thing. It's also like if you find one
Speaker 6: of these apps and if you see, oh they're using
Speaker 6: like PayPal or whatever, just reach out. I think PayPal
Speaker 6: is even harder to reach as like just an average
Speaker 6: LA person. Don't expect them to reply. They might still
Speaker 6: take action. You will have to manually check PayPal doesn't
Speaker 6: really reply. Two things ever, but yeah, same as like
Speaker 6: hosting company. If it's either hosted on like a European
Speaker 6: or American hosting company, I just just reach out and
Speaker 6: be like, hey, there's someone running spyware on your thing.
Speaker 6: Also use the word spyware, not stocker, where they will
Speaker 6: not know what that is, and it is spyware. So yeah,
Speaker 6: and that can usually get them taken down. And often
Speaker 6: they don't have proper backups and we'll have a few
Speaker 6: months of data missing and it's like, yeah, that's how
Speaker 6: you slowly grind them to a halt. Yeah. And also
Speaker 6: once again, like if you have tips about any of
Speaker 6: these companies, be it having found a vulnerability just or
Speaker 6: insider info especially I'm always very happy about the insider info.
Speaker 6: You can reach out to either me or Sack White.
Speaker 6: We're both very happy to talk about this.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's something that's been used really effectively by right
Speaker 8: wingers to target sex workers.
Speaker 2: There's been a huge.
Speaker 8: Thing, there's been a bunch of campaigns to get platform
Speaker 8: companies and yeah, so it's.
Speaker 6: It's interesting that for once we can use the very
Speaker 6: restrictive and conservative rules of payment providers for our good.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 6: But yeah, basically, any of the big payment providers will
Speaker 6: not respect something like this. Some of the small regional
Speaker 6: odd ones probably won't really give a shit. They have
Speaker 6: no reason to. It's like revenue for them. But yeah,
Speaker 6: it's generally worth trying. And I'm always glad like if
Speaker 6: someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't
Speaker 6: have to do that ourselves. I think me and second
Speaker 6: to few other people like actively working on this are
Speaker 6: doing more than enough work currently. But yeah, just if
Speaker 6: you find one of these things that don't go digging
Speaker 6: too deep. It's a depressing world. But if you stumble
Speaker 6: upon one of these somewhere or whatever, just just report them.
Speaker 6: It's it's it's going to disrupt their operations and if
Speaker 6: it happens often enough, they.
Speaker 2: Might just give up.
Speaker 6: Yeah, And I mean, like in cases like the truths by,
Speaker 6: they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to
Speaker 6: get to money easily because they like started with like
Speaker 6: mostly just in like with the market they could get
Speaker 6: with their Vietnamese payment providers, right, Eventually they realized, well,
Speaker 6: the US is like this really big market, right, but
Speaker 6: for really easy like US stuff, we need like a
Speaker 6: paypoal thing, right, So they might like over twelve fake
Speaker 6: American identities with fake passports and fake addresses and sign
Speaker 6: up to PayPal a whole bunch of times and had
Speaker 6: various employees that the company move money around. Yeah, that's
Speaker 6: obviously not a thing the US government will like if
Speaker 6: you do that. Generally speaking, they moved like millions like that,
Speaker 6: so yeah, which is pretty crazy like that. The amount
Speaker 6: of money that's moving in this industry is crazy. Like yeah, actually,
Speaker 6: like most of these app apps will be half broken,
Speaker 6: which no one ever complains about because like it's shady,
Speaker 6: like you don't expect like if you go online and
Speaker 6: you search for something shady like anything like be it
Speaker 6: piracy or whatever, you don't expect it to be the
Speaker 6: best experience ever. Like you know, you're getting some weird
Speaker 6: service and it's probably going to be half broken. But yeah,
Speaker 6: like most of these talkover apps started like forty dollars
Speaker 6: a month and more, and in some days for more
Speaker 6: features you pay like up to sixty or seventy or so,
Speaker 6: and then all of these have like tens of thousands
Speaker 6: of users, sometimes hundreds of thousands of users. Yeah, you
Speaker 6: can do them at yourself. It's crazy. This is a
Speaker 6: really big industry, which makes it so crazy to me
Speaker 6: that it's like not a thing that's talked about more,
Speaker 6: especially in like feminist spaces and things like that, because
Speaker 6: this is such a big angle of like modern tech
Speaker 6: enabled abuse that they really think should should be more
Speaker 6: of a topic, especially on the left, like this this
Speaker 6: is bad.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, this is like critically bad. I agree entirely.
Speaker 6: And also like that the whole thing with like all
Speaker 6: of this data being so easily accept your data can
Speaker 6: end up getting sold on some dark web forum. You're
Speaker 6: both as the abuser and that's the target, right and
Speaker 6: the corter government can find these like I have no
Speaker 6: like this. This is not me making a statement of
Speaker 6: that's a thing that's happening, but there's nothing preventing from
Speaker 6: hacking these companies and getting yeah, like like I sometimes
Speaker 6: like when whenever I get these data sets, and it's
Speaker 6: always hard to work with data sets that include like
Speaker 6: non consent essentially collect the data of people, right, Yes,
Speaker 6: but like I do always like do some due diligence checks,
Speaker 6: like mostly trying to find if the government is using
Speaker 6: a specific app. Sometimes yes, there's always like the odd
Speaker 6: correction law of facility officer who has signed up for
Speaker 6: one or two of these apps or like education people
Speaker 6: and whatever. But then I also only search through the
Speaker 6: text message just for just some code words and the
Speaker 6: amount of people moving drugs have stockerware on their phones.
Speaker 6: It's you know, yeah.
Speaker 1: And it's it's one of those things where there are laws,
Speaker 1: Like technically, if I if my understanding of the laws
Speaker 1: around this are correct, it is illegal for an organization
Speaker 1: like the FBI to utilize these apps.
Speaker 6: But yes, but we have an organized and called the
Speaker 6: NSA who.
Speaker 1: And it is it is on paper illegal for them
Speaker 1: to do this with a third party app. But one
Speaker 1: thing that often gets done, particularly by the FBI, but
Speaker 1: but you know, not just by them, is it's not
Speaker 1: illegal for law enforcement agencies to contract with private agencies.
Speaker 1: And if those agencies you don't you just don't check
Speaker 1: in on what they're doing, you know, what they're using.
Speaker 6: But like, yeah, or like if an inform or like
Speaker 6: if an informant like sends you to state that, like
Speaker 6: you're not going to say.
Speaker 2: No exactly exactly.
Speaker 6: And also you don't really need to disclose that because
Speaker 6: it's information from an informant. You do not need to
Speaker 6: disclose an informant in court ever.
Speaker 2: So yeah, it's.
Speaker 1: It's it's very there are there are ways around you know,
Speaker 1: the laws that we put up, not that we shouldn't
Speaker 1: continue to extend those laws, but you shouldn't like just
Speaker 1: because well they're not allowed to use this doesn't mean
Speaker 1: they can't get access to the info.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 6: And also there's all this important thing like there's more
Speaker 6: like also globally, like there's other governments that can just
Speaker 6: be using this. Like for one of the apps I.
Speaker 1: Got, the government, the Russian government doesn't give a ship.
Speaker 6: That was also like another thing where I's like for
Speaker 6: one of the apps I got data for. There was
Speaker 6: some indication that at some point the Colombian National Police
Speaker 6: did a bigger evaluation of using commercials spyware for their use.
Speaker 6: Because you're in the country with not that big of
Speaker 6: a like police budget in comparison, you cannot afford like
Speaker 6: all the coolest Raeli tools everyone else has. So what
Speaker 6: do you do? You just look for random apps you
Speaker 6: can find, you know, yeah, you find the Walmart, the Kirkland,
Speaker 6: the wish to conversion, I guess.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah Ali baba spyware, right, yeah.
Speaker 6: I don't think most of them moved forward with this
Speaker 6: because these apps fucking suck, Like they're bad, Like that's
Speaker 6: that's the other thing, Like they don't even really do
Speaker 6: their jump. Well, they're bad, and you don't know who
Speaker 6: is behind them. You cannot even go up to someone
Speaker 6: and be like, yo, don't do this. You also kind
Speaker 6: of go to the cops and be like, this company
Speaker 6: is scamming me, because yeah, I assume some people have
Speaker 6: probably done that before, but it does involve admitting to
Speaker 6: a crime. So yeah, it's like, yeah, these companies just
Speaker 6: get away with not giving a shit about their product
Speaker 6: because like.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well I think that's that's all we had.
Speaker 1: Thank you Maya for both the work you're doing and
Speaker 1: for talking to us. Yeah always, is there anything you
Speaker 1: wanted to plug before we roll out here?
Speaker 6: Just just my blog I think where we're like, I
Speaker 6: do this journalistic work and also more, there's about to
Speaker 6: be another cool investigative piece out soon which tincantually involves
Speaker 6: more tracking and whatever and also involves like Hollywood and more.
Speaker 6: It's it's it's it's a crazy big story. I promise
Speaker 6: that will be out like hopefully in a month or so.
Speaker 6: But yeah, my blog at Maya dot CRIMEU dot gay crime,
Speaker 6: you as in crime w yeah and kay yes and
Speaker 6: gay yeah yeah. Just check out my blog At the
Speaker 6: bottom of the blog, there's all my links to my
Speaker 6: social media for anyone who's like listening to this and
Speaker 6: has been wondering where I am. I am back on
Speaker 6: Twitter as well.
Speaker 1: Yeah for now, for now, that's for all of us
Speaker 1: these days.
Speaker 2: That's always like now this point.
Speaker 6: But yeah, I am back on twether. I'm posting there
Speaker 6: sometimes yeah m hmm.
Speaker 1: All right, well, thank you and thank you all for listening.
Speaker 1: We will be back tomorrow, unless this comes out on
Speaker 1: a Friday, in which case we'll be back at some
Speaker 1: other point but soon.
Speaker 2: Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh.
Speaker 21: If Robert can do his atonal shreaks, then I can
Speaker 21: sing off key yo, I'm back. Help me all up
Speaker 21: in your feed. Wat these raps get all up in
Speaker 21: your feed. That's a wu tang reference again to the
Speaker 21: Black delegation. Shout out y'all showing up on the in
Speaker 21: the subreddit. You feel me, Black folks showing up and
Speaker 21: showing out. I appreciate y'all.
Speaker 20: I was wrong. It's more than five of us. I
Speaker 20: shout out to you, man.
Speaker 2: I love y'all.
Speaker 21: Thanks for showing up, and shout out all the Latinos
Speaker 21: who tapped into and le puez.
Speaker 20: Hey, gontodo me hint ben at guy When.
Speaker 21: Valilo listen, we gotta really invite our Latino brothers and sisters,
Speaker 21: our Theos and diaz and also our Asian black people,
Speaker 21: the penoise and pen eyes, our athes and Quias. You're
Speaker 21: all a part of our delegation here, all of our usos.
Speaker 21: We love y'all, the whole diaspora of people who seizing
Speaker 21: their chicken and wash their legs. I love y'all, and
Speaker 21: to this whole delegation. Once we add it all together,
Speaker 21: it is about twenty of us to you. I say,
Speaker 21: y'all want something from the gas station. I got you
Speaker 21: so today. I don't want to ruin your breakfast. I
Speaker 21: don't want to ruin your coffee. I'm just gonna ruin
Speaker 21: your music. This is about the death of the music festival.
Speaker 21: It already happened here all right now, y'all know I'll
Speaker 21: be playing. I'm playing about all this like I'm only
Speaker 21: talking to the melanated folks.
Speaker 2: Y'all.
Speaker 20: Y'all know I'm playing right.
Speaker 21: I mean, this is why I while I slowly wink
Speaker 21: at brown folk, I'm just playing, y'all. I'm sorry, I'm
Speaker 21: messing around. It's called opening. You know, you guys got
Speaker 21: a great sit to you right here, all right, let's
Speaker 21: get to it. Festivals, like, am I right? You know,
Speaker 21: if you're anywhere within a five to ten mile radius
Speaker 21: of my age, I mean, festivals is like these are
Speaker 21: like a write of passage. You know, I am not
Speaker 21: only a goer but a festival performer and as an artist,
Speaker 21: it was like festivals were kind of in a lot
Speaker 21: of ways how I marked the years. There were people
Speaker 21: that I really only saw like once a year when
Speaker 21: I was at that festival, whether it was other acts,
Speaker 21: other bands, or even a lot of times the volunteers
Speaker 21: or the people that like put the event together, like
Speaker 21: you believe it or not, you kind of make friends,
Speaker 21: you know. And he's again these people, You're like, dang,
Speaker 21: I can't believe it was a whole year, you know.
Speaker 21: And it was a good way to make sure as
Speaker 21: an artist that you were making new music and had
Speaker 21: something new to perform. Oh and make sure you had
Speaker 21: some new merch because you know, if you played your
Speaker 21: cards right, if you've listened to my show, I've talked
Speaker 21: a lot about, like, you know, the science of festivals
Speaker 21: and as a performer of like this could either be
Speaker 21: a complete waste of time and money, if you're on
Speaker 21: at like the main stage at like twelve noon when
Speaker 21: it's like a trillion degrees outside, you know, but if
Speaker 21: you can get that right as the sun set, like
Speaker 21: if you're not the headliner, if you could get that
Speaker 21: right at sunset, right where the sun just breaks the
Speaker 21: horizon line coming down on that golden hour set. The
Speaker 21: crowd isn't shitfaced yet, you know, they're at the top
Speaker 21: of their MOLLI you feel you're riding the high. It
Speaker 21: is just settled in or whatever drugs that these people
Speaker 21: are on. They've kind of just settled in right there.
Speaker 21: They're relaxed, they're willing to sing along. Nobody's getting trample jet.
Speaker 21: It's not like the frenzy that kind of happens at
Speaker 21: the headliner situation, where like somebody might die. Shout out
Speaker 21: astro world. I say that not as a joke. I'm
Speaker 21: saying things can go wrong, but oh the experience. Man, Like,
Speaker 21: I don't know how old you are, and obviously you
Speaker 21: can't answer me. Do you remember the last like big
Speaker 21: festival you went to, you know, back when your knees
Speaker 21: were good and it was okay for you to stand
Speaker 21: for twelve hours and there's somebody, you know, having sexual
Speaker 21: intercourse in the porter potty. You know, you're stepping over
Speaker 21: barf right, and you just paid thirty dollars for a
Speaker 21: bottle of water, you know that you could stuff into
Speaker 21: your clear backpack because you weren't allowed to.
Speaker 20: Bring anything else in there.
Speaker 21: But man, that's probably a euphoria, especially if it's a
Speaker 21: group or a band that you really like that you
Speaker 21: saved up all year to go see. You know, some
Speaker 21: people were like festival operas, like that's their thing. They
Speaker 21: spend their summer going to music festivals. Since twenty twelve
Speaker 21: up to twenty fourteen, like the music fest has been guys,
Speaker 21: we've kind of been on borrow time. We've we lived
Speaker 21: through a music festival renaissance. According to NPR, since twenty thirteen,
Speaker 21: everything sold out, the four mega giants, right, so, Coachello, Bataru,
Speaker 21: Lolla Palooza in Chicago, Austin City Limits Music Festival in Texas.
Speaker 2: It was like this never.
Speaker 21: Ending flow of amazing, amazing events, and you know what,
Speaker 21: they were kind of affordable. In the next five years,
Speaker 21: you had things taken forth like Pitchfork in Chicago, Hangout
Speaker 21: Music Festival on the Beach, and the Gulf Shores, Outside Lands,
Speaker 21: Bali Music Mount o Asis Electronic Music.
Speaker 2: Festival, Forecastle Festival.
Speaker 21: Right, and I'm even gonna add in this before all
Speaker 21: this for hip hop stuff.
Speaker 2: Dude, we had rock the bells.
Speaker 21: Like we lived in a time where you could see
Speaker 21: all of your favorite artists in the most epic locations.
Speaker 21: You'd see people who if you were to try to
Speaker 21: buy their tour ticket, it would cost the same amount
Speaker 21: if they were headlining the thing. But you could see
Speaker 21: all your favorite acts. Part of this was because we
Speaker 21: listened to radio, you were exposed to more things. And
Speaker 21: it was probably the fun part about a lot of
Speaker 21: times about music festivals because you probably saw that act,
Speaker 21: your favorite band, your favorite rapper, you saw them at
Speaker 21: a Hole in the Wall five years ago, which was
Speaker 21: like ten bucks to get in, and you might have
Speaker 21: snuck in or got on the list because you knew
Speaker 21: somebody that knew the DJ. And now you're like, I
Speaker 21: followed this crew from when they were like playing a
Speaker 21: hole in the wall with ten people, where there was
Speaker 21: more staff at the bar than on this and now
Speaker 21: you're like, dude, you feel like you were a part
Speaker 21: of their evolution, Like you saw Chance at the subterranean.
Speaker 21: Now he's headline at Bonnarou. What a feeling. You're part
Speaker 21: of the story. Well, that's probably a relic of the past,
Speaker 21: and let's talk about it. So festivals for most of
Speaker 21: the last decade have been everywhere, like, whatever type of
Speaker 21: music you like, whatever subgenre, whatever part of the world
Speaker 21: you want to go to, there's a music festival that
Speaker 21: you can show up at.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 21: In twenty twenty four, more than half of them across
Speaker 21: the world were canceled. I lost count on this page.
Speaker 21: I'm about to read to y'all from musicfestival wizard dot com.
Speaker 21: Festival's canceled so far in twenty twenty four. Okay, you're
Speaker 21: ready for this. Shindig twenty twenty four, Melt twenty twenty four,
Speaker 21: Sideways Festival, Nostock, Field Maneuvers, Tower z The Quintinine, Big Slap,
Speaker 21: Electric Zoo, Peach twenty twenty four. All the Music Festival
Speaker 21: Life Is Beautiful Festival, Country Thunder Florida, Swanee Roots Festival,
Speaker 21: edc China, Lucidity Festival in Santa Barbara, Desert Days in
Speaker 21: Lake Paris, Pinefest in the UK, Good Vibes Festival in
Speaker 21: Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Siattra Nevada World Music Festival in Booneville,
Speaker 21: El Dorado Music Festival in the UK, Sudden Little Thrills
Speaker 21: in Pittsburgh, Big Ridge Rock Fest in Virginia, Lollapalooza, Paris
Speaker 21: Music Midtown Atlanta, Lovers and Friends Fest in Las Vegas,
Speaker 21: which I was really sad about. Riverside Festival, Glasgow in
Speaker 21: Where Glasgow, Soul Bloom Sacramento tw Classic twenty twenty four
Speaker 21: in Belgium, Kaylamijas in kay Lamijas, Spain, Caldoora Music Festival
Speaker 21: in Queensland, Made an America Festival Philadelphia, Oblivion Access Austin, Texas,
Speaker 21: Meadows in the Mountains twenty twenty four in Bulgaria, Imagine
Speaker 21: Festival in Rome, Georgia. Splendor on the Grass in Byron Boy, Australia.
Speaker 21: Body and Soul Festival in Ireland, Moon Rose Festival. I'm
Speaker 21: tired of I'm not even done yet, I'm not even
Speaker 21: halfway through this thing. Festivals died in twenty twenty four.
Speaker 21: Digital News reports that sixty festivals in.
Speaker 2: The UK alone canceled.
Speaker 21: Ashley King wrote this article on August twenty third, twenty
Speaker 21: twenty four for Digital Music News, and in that she
Speaker 21: says the United Kingdom has lost one hundred and ninety
Speaker 21: two music festivals since twenty nineteen, according to the Association
Speaker 21: of Independent Festivals the AIF, which is a not for
Speaker 21: profit trade festival association that represents the interest of over
Speaker 21: two hundred independent UK music festivals that range from five
Speaker 21: hundred to eighty thousand people. The AIF estimates that the
Speaker 21: UK lost ninety six events during the COVID pandemic, thirty
Speaker 21: six festivals and in twenty twenty three, more than sixty
Speaker 21: to date in twenty twenty four. That brings the total
Speaker 21: number of festival closures either due to cancelation or postponement
Speaker 21: up to one hundred and ninety two since twenty nineteen,
Speaker 21: one hundred in ninety two festivals. Some may argue that, well, damn,
Speaker 21: you shouldn't have had that many festivals, Coachella, Lollapalooza, and
Speaker 21: of course the infamous Burning Man with the most on
Speaker 21: brand people that go that call themselves Burners. Now, I
Speaker 21: don't want to sit here and make fun of you burners,
Speaker 21: because I'm pretty sure a lot of y'all listen to
Speaker 21: this show.
Speaker 20: Number one and number two.
Speaker 21: I don't know if there's anybody more free, anybody more
Speaker 21: comfortable in their own skin. Listen, this might sound like
Speaker 21: a joke, Okay, I'm dead serious. It's like the white
Speaker 21: guy with dreadlocks. I mean, white people with dreads are
Speaker 21: just most of the time. Okay, Like this may sound
Speaker 21: like a joke, I'm deadly serious. They be so okay
Speaker 21: with themselves and will do whatever they got to do
Speaker 21: to continue to stay present and be cool with themselves.
Speaker 21: No notes, it's the guy doing hypostatic breath work, freestyling
Speaker 21: for way too long and the digital do section. You
Speaker 21: know what I'm saying, Like he's super okay with himself anyway.
Speaker 21: Burning Man, for the first time since twenty and eleven
Speaker 21: did not sell out for the first time, And the
Speaker 21: tickets are usually released in tears and some go on
Speaker 21: sale in the beginning of the year, and then this
Speaker 21: part I'm getting from the Guardian, but the main starting
Speaker 21: in April right, which typically gets snapped up in minutes,
Speaker 21: like Burning Man sells out in minutes. Seventy three thousand
Speaker 21: people are able to attend Burning Man, but this first
Speaker 21: time since twenty eleven, they did not sell out. Coachella,
Speaker 21: saying they saw a fifteen percent decline in tickets. It's
Speaker 21: the biggest festival in North America. Coachella is fifteen percent
Speaker 21: ticket decline. Festivals were a way for you to discover
Speaker 21: new music, to meet new friends.
Speaker 20: It's like camp for like your twenties.
Speaker 21: You know, you get to wear your dumb ass outfits, right,
Speaker 21: You get to stand out in the sun, You get
Speaker 21: to drink, you get to day drink, and you get
Speaker 21: just lose your mind for a little bit.
Speaker 2: This might be the end, the endling.
Speaker 21: You may have attended your last music festival as we
Speaker 21: know it. So the question is why who killed the
Speaker 21: music festival? Why is the festival not festiving? Why is
Speaker 21: it not festive? Why can't y'all sell no tickets? Do
Speaker 21: we not like music anymore? Do you like music still?
Speaker 21: I thought I still like Do you like music still?
Speaker 21: What the hell happened in y'all?
Speaker 2: Oh oh oh oh oh oh.
Speaker 21: Weird back back back back yack back uh uh. To
Speaker 21: understand the future as to what the hell happened, we
Speaker 21: have to ask ourselves how we.
Speaker 20: Even got here such a nerd?
Speaker 1: I am.
Speaker 21: I don't think I need to tell you what a
Speaker 21: music festival is because I mean, I think you know
Speaker 21: what it is. It's an incredibly overpriced concert that features
Speaker 21: maybe four groups that you like. Where you are going
Speaker 21: to stand outdoors somewhere brave the weather day, drink and
Speaker 21: then get to lose your mind for the last like
Speaker 21: three hours and just really enjoy, you know, a moment
Speaker 21: that you'll really never forget. Depending on how nasty and
Speaker 21: ratchet you are, how outside you are, you might look up.
Speaker 20: You know what I'm saying. I don't look.
Speaker 21: It's none of my business. I suggest you don't. That's
Speaker 21: just me being an old head. But either way, man,
Speaker 21: they're a great time. But please understand that festivals. Music
Speaker 21: festivals go like back to get this five eighty two
Speaker 21: b C. At least according to white people's history, because
Speaker 21: you know, silly you, nothing happened anywhere else except for Europe.
Speaker 21: There was no music festivals in Africa, Central South America, Asia,
Speaker 21: no nowhere else.
Speaker 20: You don't history started in Greece. We were too busy
Speaker 20: building pyramids.
Speaker 21: Right anyway, I'm gonna lead out put oh what every
Speaker 21: crack of you up. They'd be like the first music
Speaker 21: festival on record in ancient Greece. During the Pytheon Games,
Speaker 21: which is fine, it's it's fine, it's fine, but understand,
Speaker 21: ain't no way in the world, just the only one
Speaker 21: that ever happened anyway, So five eighty two BC, right,
Speaker 21: And like the Olympic Games, the Pytheon Games took place
Speaker 21: every four years and included poetry reading, a speech, right,
Speaker 21: and other musical game like competitions. People gathered to enjoy
Speaker 21: like hymns and instruments instrumental performances at the Apollo at
Speaker 21: the Apollo I'm So Black, dedicated to Apollo, which was
Speaker 21: the god of arts and music. Now fast forward to
Speaker 21: like the seventeenth century where you have like classical music
Speaker 21: festivals and like the type of like exclusivity right where
Speaker 21: like when in the seventeenth century when like classical music
Speaker 21: just basically ate Europe and music festivals originally were like
Speaker 21: supposed to be a gathering where people could, like what
Speaker 21: you think, gather and celebrate music.
Speaker 20: However, here's where it starts coming in a focus.
Speaker 21: The wealthcat was widening across Europe, so festivals gradually became
Speaker 21: kind of like out they are where they're a little
Speaker 21: bit exclusive, catering primarily to more higher educated upper class,
Speaker 21: and the shift became apparent as events became more exclusive
Speaker 21: and had increasingly restricted access. This is from ndlbeast dot com.
Speaker 21: They have a whole section on like the history of
Speaker 21: music festivals. One could argue like this like the prototype
Speaker 21: of like the VIP section. You know, I'm saying, like,
Speaker 21: you know, you can get the pit tickets or you
Speaker 21: could stand outside with the pores and just listen from
Speaker 21: the outside. So this trend kind of continued for centuries,
Speaker 21: where like elea class I think almost like was the
Speaker 21: beginning of the breaking of music in general. They were
Speaker 21: control the access to culture. I have a friend that
Speaker 21: wrote a book called Don't Be Precious. Now, me and
Speaker 21: this friend differ in a lot of ways, but he's
Speaker 21: just a punk rock dude, and his approach to making
Speaker 21: art is like you can't have this like restricting access
Speaker 21: right because it becomes It's just like upper class art
Speaker 21: is this creation of the leisure class because one they
Speaker 21: have the patron to pay for them to be able
Speaker 21: to sit down and contemplate the stars, like you got
Speaker 21: all precious about it, you feel me? So some of
Speaker 21: that has to do with again the wealth gap. So
Speaker 21: when you restrict access to hearing music. It draws deeper
Speaker 21: into the divides between like the educated upper class and
Speaker 21: then the traveling folk musicians who performed for the commoners.
Speaker 21: And that's like the stuff you see on you know,
Speaker 21: corny little movies. Then the world wars come right, and
Speaker 21: there's like a music revival, right. So when the First
Speaker 21: World War broke out, obviously change of lifestyle, meaning everything
Speaker 21: went to like, you know, war effort. So this is
Speaker 21: a really interesting quote. It says, I'm the same MDL beast.
Speaker 21: As society focused on wartime efforts and staying safe, the
Speaker 21: exclusivity of music festivals to the upper class disappeared. In
Speaker 21: a turn of events, the working class population was now
Speaker 21: turning to music more than ever. Jazz and folk emerged
Speaker 21: as popular genres right to avoid the scrutiny of the elite.
Speaker 21: Groups of musicians with similar tastes would gathering died bars
Speaker 21: and underground clubs. By the time the war had ended,
Speaker 21: jazz cemented itself as the genre of the era. So
Speaker 21: now we're talking Harlem Renaissance juke joints and the emergence
Speaker 21: of like again this we're black people come in a
Speaker 21: lot of times the role that just the all out
Speaker 21: anti black racism has unintentionally because of it, created some
Speaker 21: of the most dopest things, some of the most dopest
Speaker 21: American experiences. Well, I just read up on how with
Speaker 21: HBCUs which are historic black colleges that now white people
Speaker 21: trying to attend. They like your school of fund well,
Speaker 21: because we wasn't allowed in yours anyway, So let me continue. So,
Speaker 21: World War two played a pivotal role in creating the
Speaker 21: Newport Folk Festival, organized by Lewis and Elaine Lauryland, a
Speaker 21: couple met during World War Two and came together to
Speaker 21: revolutionized Rhode Island's music artistic community by promoting jazz. With
Speaker 21: the foundation in jazz and blues and country and pop music,
Speaker 21: they expanded to attract over eleven thousand people in nineteen
Speaker 21: fifty four. Then the sixties the birth of the modern
Speaker 21: music festival. Right obviously Woodstock, which was the invention Monterey
Speaker 21: International Pop Music Festival. This is the rock festival as
Speaker 21: we know it, Jimmy Hendrix, Janis Joplin who it was
Speaker 21: the place to be a cultural experience as we know it. Again,
Speaker 21: is that then you got like the Berlin Wall and
Speaker 21: the music revolution. This is where festivals become political and cultural.
Speaker 21: They become a statement, and a big one was in
Speaker 21: the nineties when they did the Berlin Wall tearing down
Speaker 21: music Festival, which was an amazing thing, right where underground stations,
Speaker 21: power plants, World War Two bunkers and abandoned buildings all
Speaker 21: started to serve as makeshift concert halls. This is why
Speaker 21: Europe became such a place for music festivals. It became
Speaker 21: a sign of free beat them in solidarity, and then
Speaker 21: the music festival took a shit They just.
Speaker 20: Died in the nineties.
Speaker 21: After this all can be explained in when they tried
Speaker 21: to redo Woodstock just a shit show with like Limp
Speaker 21: Biscuit and all them you a shit show. There's a
Speaker 21: documentary on Netflix about the absolute disaster that that new
Speaker 21: Woodstock was, y'all. I'm talking like y'all thought Astro World
Speaker 21: was bad where them kids was raising so much and
Speaker 21: people die. You talking about understaffed y'all think Firefest was
Speaker 21: a disaster, my nigger, Well, nah, I don't think anything
Speaker 21: was worse than Firefest, so far a good thing. It
Speaker 21: didn't happen like y'all remember Firefest. Oh lord, honestly, I
Speaker 21: can't believe I made it almost twenty minutes into this
Speaker 21: and then mentioned Firefest because it is the perfect example
Speaker 21: of what went wrong in the music festival world. Because,
Speaker 21: like I said, this disaster in the nineties to two thousands,
Speaker 21: if you were able to survive, like I said earlier,
Speaker 21: like the Bonnarous Coachella's Austin City limits, if you were
Speaker 21: able to survive Lollapalooza, then you came out the other
Speaker 21: end and became the go to places right tell your
Speaker 21: ride for folk music, you became the go to places
Speaker 21: that if you were going to try to have a
Speaker 21: career as.
Speaker 20: An artist, you have to play one of these festivals.
Speaker 21: No matter how much money you don't make at these things,
Speaker 21: you have to do it because this is where not
Speaker 21: only do you get the necessary co sign, you also
Speaker 21: get discovered. Like as far as fans like, you make
Speaker 21: new fans, you sell merge people, walk away with the
Speaker 21: T shirt. You're on the T shirt that says Bonnarou
Speaker 21: twenty twenty one and your name is so like even
Speaker 21: if you're way down on the bottom, grab your little screenshots,
Speaker 21: take your little Instagram photos, because now you're in the game.
Speaker 21: And the game it was which leads us to what
Speaker 21: went wrong because this was not only a money making endeavor.
Speaker 21: This was a money making endeavor in twenty fourteen.
Speaker 20: Are y'all ready for this? I don't think you ready
Speaker 20: for this?
Speaker 21: In the boom years, According to an analysis done by
Speaker 21: a Finance Buzz, in twenty fourteen, general emission prices for
Speaker 21: major and music festivals increased by fifty five percent. That
Speaker 21: outpaced just inflation period. Y'all jacked up the price.
Speaker 2: So listen.
Speaker 21: So if your jaw rule head ass, of course I'm
Speaker 21: gonna build a festival. You're looking at Burning Man, You're
Speaker 21: looking at Bonnarou, You're looking at all these things.
Speaker 2: You're like, bro, let's just get an island and make
Speaker 2: a festival. There's so much money to be made.
Speaker 21: But you know what, capitalism being a capitalism, it's gonna
Speaker 21: keep capitalism.
Speaker 20: Let's talk about what killed the festival?
Speaker 2: Oh oh.
Speaker 21: Oh, you see, I just did my own fade out
Speaker 21: and fade in music. Y'all see that. No, don't ask
Speaker 21: me what note that was? So what killed the festival?
Speaker 21: There well number of things. First of all, yo, ask
Speaker 21: for not going I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. We're
Speaker 21: not blaming the victims here. Some of these answers are
Speaker 21: pretty obvious, like again, you know Astra World like, but
Speaker 21: astral World is just a good picture of everything that
Speaker 21: went wrong in the concept of a music festival.
Speaker 20: So the first problem is, yeah, capitalism.
Speaker 21: Sometimes you are led to believe that what is will
Speaker 21: always right. That's what a stable economy lulls you into believing.
Speaker 21: But anybody that knows how money works, it's booms and busts.
Speaker 21: The bubble will pop, and how a bubble pops is
Speaker 21: almost always our own fault in this sense. The housing bubble,
Speaker 21: you know of two thousand and eight when your mama
Speaker 21: and him lost their house because the reality was they
Speaker 21: shouldn't have never got that loan in the first place.
Speaker 21: These people knew good and well that you was not
Speaker 21: able to keep up with that mortgage. But we were
Speaker 21: selling too many houses. It was going too good. So
Speaker 21: the thing was for almost the you know, almost a decade,
Speaker 21: you couldn't make enough festivals. The industry couldn't keep up
Speaker 21: with the demand. And yo, this the blog error. This
Speaker 21: the two Doe Boys, Yeah, Pitchfork like this the blog error.
Speaker 2: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 20: When Fader was like a thing that you would want
Speaker 20: to go suit.
Speaker 21: So like it all kind of worked together around this
Speaker 21: time before all these spots got bought out hip Hop
Speaker 21: d X, like all these pages.
Speaker 20: Got bought out.
Speaker 21: Like I said before, it was like this boom in
Speaker 21: twenty fourteen of a trillion festivals that started happening. Now
Speaker 21: what happened was ticket prices. This is the first one.
Speaker 21: We're making so much money. You realize, Dang, if I
Speaker 21: charge a hundred, I bet you I could charge two hundred.
Speaker 21: If I charged two on it, I bet you I
Speaker 21: could charge foe hundred because if you charge foe hun
Speaker 21: and then I could argue I'm getting bigger acts. So
Speaker 21: in the boom years, according to this analysis by Finance Buzz,
Speaker 21: ticket prices since twenty fourteen for most music festivals increased
Speaker 21: by fifty five percent. Like that's super outpacing even inflation
Speaker 21: in the same time period. This isn't like cost the
Speaker 21: living type shit type beat.
Speaker 20: No oh, I'm raping y'all.
Speaker 21: Do you know that Burning Man costs five hundred and
Speaker 21: seventy five dollars to go to If you was going,
Speaker 21: you was probably gonna make some sort of like art
Speaker 21: installation to destroy you doing that all your own money,
Speaker 21: which meant what.
Speaker 2: Same thing happened in the seventeenth century.
Speaker 21: It just becomes a place for the elite because can't
Speaker 21: nobody else afford to go. You know what else happened
Speaker 21: to a lot of festivals is corporation's bottom. You know
Speaker 21: who bought complex BuzzFeed, and you know who bought it
Speaker 21: from BuzzFeed n Work nt WRK.
Speaker 2: It's an investment firm.
Speaker 21: You know who owns the Pitchfork festival, condy Nast a
Speaker 21: media company. They bought the blog and folded it into GQ.
Speaker 2: It's just a corporation. Capitalism.
Speaker 21: Capitalism broke the festivals under the banner of capitalism, not
Speaker 21: so much the cost of the ticket and the soaring
Speaker 21: cost of living. It also costs too much to make
Speaker 21: the festival. According to John Roston, he's the CEO that AIF,
Speaker 21: the Independent Association of Festivals. He says, the toilet higher
Speaker 21: I just need to buy Porter potties. In twenty twenty
Speaker 21: one was twenty eight thousand dollars for the exact same
Speaker 21: amount of toilets at twenty twenty four is fifty four
Speaker 21: thousand dollars. That's just the toilets. You know what happened
Speaker 21: at Astro World. He can't have enough security. It costs
Speaker 21: so much, you honestly cannot afford to put together a
Speaker 21: festival that will be alluring enough to consumers to justify
Speaker 21: spending that much money. So what do you get? A
Speaker 21: gang of corporate sponsors? And you know what, a gang
Speaker 21: of corporate sponsors at a music festival is whack. It's
Speaker 21: a horrible ass experience because you're just watching a gang
Speaker 21: of commercials. Sometimes it just be labels who be putting
Speaker 21: on these artists that they trying to break. And then
Speaker 21: the artists be trash. They don't be trash because they trash.
Speaker 21: They be trash because they're not ready for this size stage.
Speaker 21: They ain't put in the work. They didn't do the
Speaker 21: you know Gurney Illinois experience that I think I've told before,
Speaker 21: what is the most terrifying experience I've ever had on tour?
Speaker 2: You don't had him experiences.
Speaker 21: You ain't played shows when it's more people at the bar,
Speaker 21: or it's more people that work there then come to
Speaker 21: see you. You're not ready for no festival stage, so
Speaker 21: it's just not fun for the concer.
Speaker 2: So I'm not gonna buy it. You can't justify this price.
Speaker 21: If I'm gonna spend that much money, I need to really,
Speaker 21: really really.
Speaker 20: Really like this man. This need to be my favorite artist.
Speaker 21: I'm not gonna stand around twelve hours pay this much
Speaker 21: money to really only see one act I like.
Speaker 7: That.
Speaker 20: Don't make no damn sense.
Speaker 21: And we'll talk about why they only like that one
Speaker 21: artist a little bit later.
Speaker 20: So remember this point I'm making.
Speaker 21: The second and most obvious one is COVID, which leads
Speaker 21: into the third and fourth. You had to cancel stuff.
Speaker 21: Nobody knew this was coming. Like the el's companies took,
Speaker 21: I took person answer the tour. Not only I canceled
Speaker 21: the tour, I released the poetry book that I couldn't tour.
Speaker 21: I mean I personally lost tens of thousands, maybe even
Speaker 21: hundreds of thousands of dollars in touring revenue, in book sales,
Speaker 21: in merch sales, and all of it. Like I lost
Speaker 21: so much because you just had to, and I'm still
Speaker 21: trying to get that money back. A lot of festivals
Speaker 21: just have never been able to make their money back
Speaker 21: from what they lost, so there's not enough money now. Obviously,
Speaker 21: when the pandemic ended. There was a lot of pent
Speaker 21: up energy to be like, I need to go outside.
Speaker 21: But that's because me and you didn't spend two years
Speaker 21: of our high school experience, our two first years of
Speaker 21: college stuck at home. Remember that's the time when you
Speaker 21: get the taste to go outside, when you start finding
Speaker 21: your drinking buddies, yo outside friends, your music friends. You
Speaker 21: have to remember those years, dude, dude, those years are
Speaker 21: when you're discovering. All research says is like your taste
Speaker 21: in music happens in those years.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 2: If I were to ask you, what's your favorite area
Speaker 2: of music?
Speaker 21: Most likely it's not always, but most likely it was
Speaker 21: like the music you listened to in the eleventh grade,
Speaker 21: it's probably your favorite era. Whatever you was listening to
Speaker 21: the n is probably still your favorite era. Now, obviously
Speaker 21: that's not true for everybody, but hey, if you were seventeen,
Speaker 21: you were discovering new music, you want to go to
Speaker 21: like the Cornerhouse of Blues, right, you know this is
Speaker 21: obviously I'm California centric.
Speaker 20: You wanted to hit the Glasshouse.
Speaker 8: Man.
Speaker 21: Could you just heard about this new band Little Stings
Speaker 21: like that, The Dragonfly Whiskey of Go Go the viper room.
Speaker 21: All these like smaller spots that when for us out
Speaker 21: of La these were like rights of passage.
Speaker 20: This is how you get to say I.
Speaker 2: Saw them win.
Speaker 21: I knew who Will I Am was for the Black
Speaker 21: Eyed Peas because I saw him at the little temple
Speaker 21: which is now called the Virgil when he did a
Speaker 21: beat battle. They were at the corner. You know what
Speaker 21: I'm saying. And it was fun. I knew Foster the people.
Speaker 21: They're in San Diego. You would just drive down like
Speaker 21: just at the gas lamp, like Leon bridges Hell he
Speaker 21: opened for us, you know what I'm saying. Like again,
Speaker 21: like we said in the earlier these these bands that
Speaker 21: you was passionate about.
Speaker 20: You was seventeen with your little emo hair swooped over
Speaker 20: your eyes.
Speaker 21: This is you was crying over you understand what I'm saying,
Speaker 21: Like hugging onto your little iPad, you know, doing that
Speaker 21: MySpace picture when you looking down. You know it's the
Speaker 21: white people think like this is when you went to
Speaker 21: go see them. If that era for you was a pandemic,
Speaker 21: you didn't acquire a taste for going out like that.
Speaker 21: You saw concerts inside a fortnite. So what I'm saying
Speaker 21: is one of the biggest things about gen Z is
Speaker 21: they don't go out.
Speaker 2: It's just it's just the reality. Not only do it.
Speaker 2: Ain't got no money.
Speaker 21: They ain't got no money because again inflation and finances,
Speaker 21: the cost of living is insane. But look it, gen
Speaker 21: Z don't drink like we used to drink. They do
Speaker 21: fewer drugs, they have less sex. Part of that is
Speaker 21: because one they Hella anxious and I.
Speaker 20: Don't blame them.
Speaker 21: I'm looking at my daughter now and I'm like, I'm sorry, baby,
Speaker 21: you probably not gonna buy no house ever.
Speaker 2: I don't even know when you're gonna move out. I
Speaker 2: don't know what to tell you. I'm not mad.
Speaker 21: I ain't gonna push you out of this house because
Speaker 21: where you're gonna go, you're gonna get seven roommates.
Speaker 2: I don't know what to tell you. I'm sorry.
Speaker 21: They do fewer drugs, they drink less, and they don't
Speaker 21: go nowhere because one, they anxious as hell. They nervous
Speaker 21: around being around that many people. And if they are
Speaker 21: gonna go out, if you ask them, the number one
Speaker 21: thing they say.
Speaker 20: Is like, I ain't got nobody to go with.
Speaker 21: I mean I could go I ain't got nobody to
Speaker 21: go with you, cause you ain't got no friends.
Speaker 2: You don't go nowhere, right.
Speaker 21: I've been looking at my own child, like why you here, Cuz,
Speaker 21: like don't you You're a go nowhere.
Speaker 20: She's starting to now, but listen, you gotta.
Speaker 2: Really really, really really really want to see this person
Speaker 2: that you're going to see.
Speaker 21: She bought Billie Eilis tickets in February the concert next month.
Speaker 21: She decided, if I'm gonna spend this money this one,
Speaker 21: I'm gonna spend it on right, because it's worth her money.
Speaker 21: She loves them, she loves her. She got the album.
Speaker 21: She went to the listening party. She's like, this is
Speaker 21: who I'm gonna go see. They don't look and see
Speaker 21: who's playing, or just pull up an adult music spot
Speaker 21: and just be like, oh, Wane, who's play. I'm gonna
Speaker 21: discover new music now that don't happen. You can't put
Speaker 21: on no festival if people ain't willing to come, which
Speaker 21: leads me to one of the other problems they did,
Speaker 21: which is the music industry itself is shocked themselves in
Speaker 21: the foot because the big dogs, just like I said,
Speaker 21: happened in the seventeen hundreds are doing fine. If Live
Speaker 21: Nation and ticket Master own every venue, they only gonna
Speaker 21: put the artists that they won't own their it costs
Speaker 21: too much.
Speaker 2: So they're like, oh, I don't understand what's going on
Speaker 2: with y'all festivals.
Speaker 21: I know we doing all right, because if you are
Speaker 21: an industry artist with the machine behind you, number one,
Speaker 21: you don't need a festival. You booked the Greek Theater yourself.
Speaker 21: Why would I allow myself as an artist for you
Speaker 21: to pay me. Guess who turned down Coachella next year?
Speaker 21: Rihanna and Kendrick. Why would either of them play that
Speaker 21: when they know they can be the only artist and
Speaker 21: sell just as many tickets. Kendrick played Staples. I'm calling
Speaker 21: his Staples because I'm from La. I know it's just
Speaker 21: a corporation. He played Staples four nights in a row
Speaker 21: where the Lakers played, but that was after doing four
Speaker 21: nights at the Honda Center in Orange County. These are
Speaker 21: eight Southern California shows, sold them all out. Why the
Speaker 21: hell would I give that money to Coachella when I
Speaker 21: could do it myself. Live Nation already taking a huge
Speaker 21: ass cut, Ticketmaster already taking a huge ass cut. Scalper's
Speaker 21: already taken a huge ass cut. There's no reason for
Speaker 21: me to give my time and my ticket draw to
Speaker 21: you when they can all go to myself. You did
Speaker 21: this to yourself music industry by locking out all the
Speaker 21: small venues. You know what else the music industry did
Speaker 21: to itself, streaming the algorithm that also killed the festival.
Speaker 21: You know why because you're fed the same music. Algorithm
Speaker 21: says you like this, you probably don't like that, which
Speaker 21: means we know all people be like music all sound
Speaker 21: the same because it does. Because the goal is to
Speaker 21: play music that feeds the algorithm. You create music that
Speaker 21: gets your streaming numbers up. This is the point I
Speaker 21: was making earlier. While you like, I don't know nobody
Speaker 21: else on this thing, and I'm only really concerned about
Speaker 21: the headliner.
Speaker 20: This is the point I was making earlier.
Speaker 21: Algorithm, you create music that works on TikTok so music
Speaker 21: has this formula. They did the same thing with coffee shops.
Speaker 21: You know why coffee shops look like brutaliss mid century modern,
Speaker 21: all of them Instagram. We're all looking at the same aesthetic,
Speaker 21: So therefore all coffee shops look the same. The same
Speaker 21: thing happened with music the algorithm. So you have these entire,
Speaker 21: very specific niches.
Speaker 2: But can everyone in your weird niche?
Speaker 21: Are there thirty artists in your very weird niche that
Speaker 21: can bring ten thousand people out to a field. No,
Speaker 21: because there's only forty of y'all that like this music
Speaker 21: that's online streaming. There's no human editorial, there's no DJ
Speaker 21: that's saying, yo, dude, lo, look at this.
Speaker 20: No, look at this.
Speaker 21: You're stuck to doing it yourself and hopefully you can
Speaker 21: climb out your algorithm.
Speaker 11: Right.
Speaker 21: J McDonald says, a genre unfocused festival poster lineup starts
Speaker 21: to just look like a playlist that has been made
Speaker 21: and personalized for somebody else. Okay, you want to do
Speaker 21: a genre specific one, let's just say, okay, k pop,
Speaker 21: you're finna fly on him acts from Korea? How much
Speaker 21: you're gonna sell all these tickets for? How many K
Speaker 21: pop acts do you get? You don't book nobody local?
Speaker 21: Do you how much money that would cost? Or you
Speaker 21: say I'm gonna do a K pop day?
Speaker 2: All right? So you do a three day festival.
Speaker 21: One day's k pop, one day's DM, one day's hip hop, Uh,
Speaker 21: nobody's boy a three day pass, so one day might
Speaker 21: be trash, And how do you build it? What does
Speaker 21: the flyer look like? I don't know half of these people.
Speaker 21: I ain't never even heard of that. No single act
Speaker 21: can sell a festival. And if you try to do
Speaker 21: a multi different act thing, it's just gonna.
Speaker 2: Confuse the consumer.
Speaker 21: So if you're putting on the festival, your only option
Speaker 21: is to just go big. This has to do with money,
Speaker 21: So you are going to overspend, right, because it's like,
Speaker 21: how are you gonna get people here? You you get Taylor Swift?
Speaker 21: Do you know how much money you got to offer
Speaker 21: somebody like a Taylor Swift for her to give her
Speaker 21: performance to your festival rather than just to do her
Speaker 21: own show. And the consumer says, again, is this worth
Speaker 21: my money? I'm willing to throw this money at this
Speaker 21: big act because that's what the algorith that's who I know.
Speaker 21: They're not gonna risk no more because music discovery is
Speaker 21: now algorithmic. You're not just gonna go pull up at
Speaker 21: a spot and be like, who's this open? Or they're dope.
Speaker 21: The industry did it to itself. You killed your own
Speaker 21: performance market. And because Live Nation brought up all the
Speaker 21: small venues where artists really get their chops and really
Speaker 21: create fan bases and really you get to discover and
Speaker 21: make connections with it. There's no places for them to play.
Speaker 21: All that's left are the big industry artists, and why
Speaker 21: again would they give their ticket sales to a festival.
Speaker 2: And lastly, climate change. It's hot as hell.
Speaker 21: The last two burning bands poured rain and flooded. Before that,
Speaker 21: it was like one hundred and twenty nine million degrees.
Speaker 2: It's hot. It's too hot to be out there like
Speaker 2: this climate, y'all. And enough water.
Speaker 21: It's hot as hell. It's hot as hell, or it's floody.
Speaker 21: It's hot or its floody. Ain't no more nice days outside?
Speaker 21: I find the stand outside all day. You crazy? You
Speaker 21: gonna make me pay extra for shade. It's an extra
Speaker 21: one hundred dollars so I can have a humbrother.
Speaker 2: I'm good. Just hold on.
Speaker 20: We're staying home.
Speaker 21: Staying home, Okay, now again, let's rebuild the world.
Speaker 20: What can we do better? That's in our control.
Speaker 21: So festivals might be done, but it doesn't mean we
Speaker 21: don't still love music. If you're a music lover, here
Speaker 21: are some suggestions I can give you that would keep
Speaker 21: your favorite bands in the game. The first is the
Speaker 21: easiest one for you, which of course is buying or
Speaker 21: streaming their music. If you're gonna stream, here's the thing, dude,
Speaker 21: I'm not an old guy to say that, like your
Speaker 21: release Radar or your New Music Friday, that algorithmic playlist
Speaker 21: that's like customized just for you, it's great.
Speaker 2: My request that I think would help is this.
Speaker 21: If a song pops on and you dig it, save
Speaker 21: it number one and then too, go to the album,
Speaker 21: go to that artist's page and give them a follow,
Speaker 21: and listen to the album. You heard the song, the
Speaker 21: song was dope, and if it really resondent, I'm not
Speaker 21: begging you to do something that you don't like, listen
Speaker 21: to that album, you know the whole Like artists blowing
Speaker 21: up on TikTok. That's why Universal was just like man
Speaker 21: tried to dead all that, you know. So if artist
Speaker 21: blows up on TikTok, you you really like that sound,
Speaker 21: like yo, like, go to that artist page, go to
Speaker 21: their music, like, you know, instead of just like shooting
Speaker 21: video like that stuff short lived. If you're artists, like obviously,
Speaker 21: you hope that one day that happens. But that's not sustainable.
Speaker 21: You can't tour off that. That's what happened to a
Speaker 21: lot of ours. Why I Spice cancel half her tour
Speaker 21: is because there's not songs.
Speaker 20: There's TikTok audios. You feel me.
Speaker 21: That helps the artists know when they try to go
Speaker 21: get a show, that they can prove that, like, hey, listen,
Speaker 21: these are listeners. When you go to my Spotify page,
Speaker 21: we go to any Spotify page, the first number you
Speaker 21: see is monthly listeners. But that don't mean followers. I
Speaker 21: have this weird upside down thing. Most people have more
Speaker 21: monthly listeners than followers. I'm the opposite. I have three
Speaker 21: times more followers than monthly listeners, which means these people
Speaker 21: are going to be alerted when I drop music. Why
Speaker 21: I have that is because I toured so hard. I
Speaker 21: played every possible dumb, ugly venue I possibly could, like,
Speaker 21: gotted out the mud, shook hands, stayed after, stayed at
Speaker 21: the merch table, took pictures, got email addresses, got phone numbers,
Speaker 21: came back, you know, signed everything. I would stay after
Speaker 21: the show for an extra hour until everybody got their
Speaker 21: picture and everybody got their stuff signed, hard fought, so
Speaker 21: that way, You're right, I'm not cranking out music that
Speaker 21: feeds the algorithm.
Speaker 2: You're right.
Speaker 20: But when I drop an album, they know.
Speaker 21: So my request as the consumer is follow that artist,
Speaker 21: like close to the album. And secondly, the most obvious
Speaker 21: one is like, dude by merch. Oh my god, y'all.
Speaker 21: I'm saying like merch has been the difference between car
Speaker 21: insurance and not. For me, merch has been the difference
Speaker 21: between can my daughter stay in her you know, dance
Speaker 21: class her after school, like ballet class. Merch Like merch
Speaker 21: is how we paid for our daughters. So during the
Speaker 21: pandemic hell merch it paid our rent Kasai had. Now,
Speaker 21: as an artist, you need to have dope merch.
Speaker 20: That's what I mean.
Speaker 21: If your merch sucks that, I mean, it is what
Speaker 21: it is. I can't ask you to, you know, purchase
Speaker 21: something that's trash. Artists make don't merch. You know, I
Speaker 21: have vinyl. Vinyl costs a lot, but you can go
Speaker 21: to my website there's vinyl like that stuff.
Speaker 20: Those make a difference.
Speaker 21: And then I'd also ask, like, if you really dig
Speaker 21: an artist, this is on the artist's job to like
Speaker 21: sign up for their newsletter, find out when they're touring,
Speaker 21: and just and go to their shows. And when you
Speaker 21: get there like another game. I think I told this
Speaker 21: on the Politics podcast too, where it's like most of
Speaker 21: the time as the artist, I keep the door, like
Speaker 21: meaning the ticket sales, and then the venue keeps the bar.
Speaker 21: So their thing is like, well, they're gonna make a
Speaker 21: ton of money on the bar. But that's how I
Speaker 21: get to come back is if this venue says, oh, yeah,
Speaker 21: he brought you know, three hundred people here. They respected
Speaker 21: my staff, they bought drinks, and me as an artist,
Speaker 21: my team, i'd be silly on stage, but we're very
Speaker 21: very professional.
Speaker 20: Can I take my reputation very serious? We make sure.
Speaker 21: That like the talent buyer, the venues, everybody taking care of.
Speaker 21: We're not yelling at the sound man, you know, we
Speaker 21: keep a clean green room. Like those are things you
Speaker 21: could do as an artist, but as a consumer, like
Speaker 21: I know, the algorithm's fighting against you. But like, if
Speaker 21: you really like a group, go out of your way,
Speaker 21: even if it's on the Discovery things. Again, the big
Speaker 21: people is easy. Beyonce's tickets are gonna come find you.
Speaker 21: You ain't gotta go find him. But Johnny swim but
Speaker 21: the hot shakes, right, that's what they call go find
Speaker 21: them because at the end of the day, it's your presence.
Speaker 21: If you're gonna stay in music, you have to get
Speaker 21: butts in seats. Is this for us to save music festivals?
Speaker 21: I don't care they did that to themselves. I'm just
Speaker 21: trying to save live music because truly, truly, there is
Speaker 21: nothing like it.
Speaker 1: Oh oh oh oh oh oh.
Speaker 2: Hey.
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat death of the universe.
Speaker 2: It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.