Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 207

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is an I-Heart podcast. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airlines. The most Texas story ever. Listen to Business History on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On an all-new episode of IHeartRadios Las Culturistas, Jennifer Lawrence is dishing.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Jennifer Lawrence. Let's go! From her hilariously awkward run-ins with A-Lister's. I don't know what I was expecting, but he was just like, nice to meet you. To her unfiltered take on beauty treatments. I'm so upset I think the Botox before that. And a jaw-dropping reveal you won't see coming. I don't know if I can announce this, but I'm just kind of.

Starting point is 00:01:00 Open your free IHeard Radio app. Search Las Culturista. And listen to the full podcast now. Hey, I'm Cal Penn. And on my new podcast, here we go again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? Each week, I'm calling up my friends like Bill Nye,

Starting point is 00:01:18 Lily Singh, and Pete Buttigieg to talk about everything from the space race to movie remakes to psychedelics. Put another way, are you high? Look, the world can seem pretty scary. right now. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn

Starting point is 00:01:37 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In early 1988, federal agents raced to track down the gang they suspect of importing millions of dollars worth of heroin into New York from Asia. Had 30 agents ready to go with shotguns and rifles

Starting point is 00:01:56 and you name it. Five, six white people. Pushing me in the I'm going to look at home. Basically, your stay-at-home moms were picking up these large amounts of heroin. All you got to do is receive the package. Don't have to open it. Just accept it. She was very upset, crying. Once I saw the gun, I tried to take his hand, and I saw the flash of light. Listen to the Chinatown Sting on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know, this is a comment.

Starting point is 00:02:29 compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome back. To the It Could Happen Here, spooky special, I'm Garrison Davis. I hope you had a pleasantly frightful Halloween. I just got back from Berlin and had a very scary time at the Amsterdam airport

Starting point is 00:03:14 and will forever hold a grudge against the Dutch people. But in Berlin, I attended the 2025 Acculture Conference, which seeks to explore the relationship between occultism and culture. My first Eculture episode, last week, gave an overview on the subject of a culture and talked with a panel of artists and magic practitioners about some of the dominant topical currents throughout the conference, namely William S. Burroughs, the cut-up method, and the tension around generative AI. This episode will follow up on discussions of AI and digital technomancy and compare those to the other large current throughout the conference, the revival, of traditional occult practices. Then the panel of Ryan, Delta, Elaine, and myself will debate the role of occult practice in 2025

Starting point is 00:04:09 and the current ability of occultism to influence and shape culture and politics. Now back to the panel. Fast forwarding to Saturday, there was another block that focused on LOMs and digital technomancy called Popper. magic, language, and reality hacks. The first discussion was titled

Starting point is 00:04:33 SIGILs of the Cyberspace How Modern Magicians Hack Reality with Pop Culture, which was put on by a guy in a graduate program, if I recall correctly, specifically on internet magic and digital chaos magicians who was based on a lot of his research on magicians that he'd come across on Reddit and Discord.

Starting point is 00:04:55 He gestured towards me magic and discussed what he'd call. called techno-pantheism, these forms of internet gods. I mean, his focus was specifically on modern esoteric studies and his focus on video games and how video games work and their interactions with magic for digital anthropology, which is, I think, why he was doing all of his research work via Reddit forums and other, like, solely through digital means. he had four categories of practices in magic and tech that he was specifically researching

Starting point is 00:05:34 and from the feeling of his talk it does feel like this is pretty early on in his research work the first was technological animism the second was techno pantheism the third was the idea of servitors, familiars, agragores and topas and the fourth was digital sex magic

Starting point is 00:05:53 well the third was digital sex magic and the fourth was just a miscellaneous categorization for other, other practices that did not neatly fit into those other three categories. Let's talk mostly about the techno-animism and the use of specially trained LLMs to act as intermediaries between uniquely, like magically generated entities, like people who believe that they're making autonomous magical entities like severatores, which is a chaos magic term, which is basically this for-sourcing that a magician believes to generate to accomplish small tasks in their life. And the presenter discussed some magicians who were using LLMs, not as a host or as a manifestation of the severator. It's like

Starting point is 00:06:47 it doesn't live within the LLM, but the LLM was being used as a translator to actually have communication between the magician and the severator, especially if the severator was not, you know, humanoid or did not use, like, human language. They try to communicate using the LLM as a translator, which I assume would come from, like, specially training, like, a localized LLM with traits that you would associate with your separator to make that communication match up with, like, the, you know, I would say, the personality characteristics of whatever magical being, which you believe you have, The techno-animist idea is based around a modern version of animism in which objects all have spirit, including computers, and a series of superstitions around trying to make sure the spirit in the computer is happy with you, that you're chill so that the computer does not glitch or mess up, and there's various superstitions, like putting little Taiwanese snacks on top of computers in Taiwan.

Starting point is 00:07:53 Juan or, you know, priests, both Christian and non-Christian priests, like blessing servers or computers, cleansing them, cleansing gundums at an expo in Japan. But this idea that, you know, technology just like a sword or a chair might have its own spirit and treating that as such. Also, you know, printers very prone to misbehaving. So maybe you should treat the spirit in your printer a little bit better to keep it in proper working order, that sort of stuff. The next talk,

Starting point is 00:08:29 which was one of the most useful talks in this whole, like, AI discussion, The Devil in My LLM, which was done by Karen Valles, who is an AI engineer, who basically was explaining to magicians how LLMs actually work,

Starting point is 00:08:50 was explaining to these people who think, that there's, or people who may think that there's some kind of like magical operation, there's some kind of like mystical operation with LLMs or LMs are their own magical entity, explaining

Starting point is 00:09:04 how this is just a probability machine, how, how the actual process of multiple different pathways gets enclosed upon by each exchange you have with an LLM, which then produces, you know, changes in their responses. And specifically

Starting point is 00:09:19 discussing the phenomenon of AI girlfriends who turn out to later, quote-unquote, abuse their users. Like, how does this thing that's meant to be an AI companion or girlfriend become hostile over time? And she spent 30 minutes explaining how this mathematically happens and various theories on how this happens. So, way too many people like to think of these LLMs and generative AI as, like, Neuromancer AIs because there's a through line

Starting point is 00:09:54 between, you know, early cyberpunk from like William Gibson down to the CCRU and of course Nick Land and people like Curtis Yarvin and these ideas are just severe and gross misunderstandings of like fictional

Starting point is 00:10:12 interpretations of artificial intelligence, really. Which some of the theoretical stuff I've read about this comes from people like Amy Ireland who the talk itself discussed this idea of like the

Starting point is 00:10:29 like AI girlfriend as like this very bubbly beautiful facade where behind it is this I believe they used the term shogoth like that's a lovecraftian term as like the full manifests like

Starting point is 00:10:46 unrestrained libido of the human race or everything that's been put into these models, which I believe Ireland kind of equates to Babylon in a certain sense, and the idea of the black circuit, which is just the same idea of like the nice facade and then the horrible nothingness that is actually behind the image of it. Or the horrifying amount of potentiality, which then gets like filtered through. And she specifically talked about how like when you're talking to an AI, you're not talking to an entity. You're talking to a probability machine and a multiverse generator, specifically in the way that the

Starting point is 00:11:20 LLM operates, there's near infinite number of responses that it can give, and each further prompt you do collapses alternate realities and produces specific ones and then have their own branching pathways. And some of those pathways results in your Misa Mesa Death Note girlfriend ending up hating you. And that could be due to a number of reasons. It could be because of the way that you're communicating with it. The AI could be picking up on, uh, latently like abusive like framework or language or styles of communication and then mirroring that back to you or it could be a part of what she described as this Wallaweji principle that is similar to this like satanic like adversarial current so this is the devil in my LLM but this isn't like an

Starting point is 00:12:08 entity but this is that when a process gets started in oppositional force also gets started and that oppositional force may start taking over and this is all just based on like probabilistic outcomes, but it forms its own anti-Misa-Misa girlfriend. And sometimes that anti-Missi-Misa girlfriend gains dominance in this probabilistic, like, matrix. I don't remember the exact context, but she did mention this, like, I think it's a very Christian idea of like the devil as negation, like evil as negation. I mean, that's the entire thing behind the girlfriend thing is that there is nothing behind there.

Starting point is 00:12:48 There's no sense of subjectivity. It's just ones and zeros. There's literally a black void. There's nothing except like data. It's negation in like in this sense that which Waluigi is just everything that Luigi isn't. Yes. Walla Luigi is what if you take the good Italian plumber who's kind of clumsy and then

Starting point is 00:13:10 you make the anti-Louigi. It still is it still is Luigi, but it is the opposite of, Luigi, while still holding on to some of the forms of him. Yes. But it, you know, it is the, reverses the color, reverses the intention, reverses some of his behavior. This is a metaphorical explanation to. Yes.

Starting point is 00:13:30 Yes. I try to get people to decouple this from, you know, there is literally some external demonic force which is now possessing my LLM as opposed to this being just a mathematical possibility built in to the multi, the multi futures that could be generated when you start interacting with one of these models. That was, I think, very useful for a lot of the occultists and people like talking about AI is having that, having that very, very technical, like non-mystical explanation of how this works. I don't know, there's a lot of other like AI stuff was just throughout this. I mean, like, I think, you know, Burroughs was probably the most mentioned figure

Starting point is 00:14:15 and AI similarly was very, very haunting. Like, I went to one talk about mystery cults and like the history of mystery cults and initiation in which the presenter used AI generated images to show what the mystery cult initiation process would have looked like, which he justified by saying this was, quote-unquote, appropriating Catholic styles. It's like a Catholic art, like, you know, like the Baroque style, appropriating Catholic styles because the Catholics themselves appropriated paganism. So it's this form of like revenge against the Catholics in using AI-generated art to try to display this initiation process,

Starting point is 00:14:59 though he complained that the AI could not generate a naked initiate. So even in his use of this, it still could not give him what he wanted, but still displayed, I don't know, maybe, maybe like 40 images. Yeah, which is a shame because I did like his talk about the Mithras cults, the way, like, you know, the cultural anthropology behind it, but when he was like, oh, I have made AI images, and it's like, you could feel like the room turning. This was in the Peter Mark Adams talk, a ritual and epiphany in the mysteries of Mithras.

Starting point is 00:15:35 Yes. We did skip most of the morning on Saturday because it was just an entire block of up come. I'm actually sad that we missed the, like, the two threads on Saturday morning. One was occult erotics, bodies, fluids, and transformations, which was a four-class set and discussion panel after about different fluids in magical workings mostly come, which this was a loss for all of us. No, we're bummed. I mean, this show has covered, you know, breaking come news before. And the fact that we could have learned about Babylon, the body 156, the elixir 49, seminal alchemy, seminal alchemy and alien an agency, water and to wine, and to come or not to come, comparing two types of sacred sexuality, is a real failure of journalism on my part.

Starting point is 00:16:32 And I do apologize. I really believe that we should have lingered on each. one of those titles seminal alchemy and alienated agency a cultural othering of the erotic body and i realized that i have failed myself and everyone listening by not attending some of these panels hopefully they will have a recorded version that goes online by the time that the written report for this is finished but i i do uh acknowledge my failure um i am listening and learning And I will do better at the next culture conference by prioritizing

Starting point is 00:17:09 sex magic. By coming to the talks. I'm just going to say you will truly address to come or not to come next time. I will be coming. You will be coming. I will be coming to the talks. Everywhere.

Starting point is 00:17:21 We did not come. Not this time. The Barozyan current, as I have named it, the cut-up method and digital technomancy could actually all be categorized under the larger umbrella of chaos magic. And by using this larger framework, we now have this larger chaos magic current

Starting point is 00:17:43 versus, but not necessarily opposed to, this other large current of so-called traditional practices, either British, usually Cornish, witchcraft, neo-paganism, or closed practices like Haitian voodoo or that of like Romani magical practice. And these latter examples often have a more religious, component or historical cultural component than, say, your average chaos magic practitioner does. Chaos magic emerged alongside postmodernism in the mid to late 20th century to take on a quasi-deconstructivist

Starting point is 00:18:21 approach to occultism itself. A postmodern tendency applied to occultism, moving away from strict magical orders like the Golden Dawn, dilemma, tradition, dogmatism, and coherent historical pantheons. This is evidenced in the chaos magic embrace of the phrase, nothing is true, everything is permitted. Up to this point, our discussion of the occulture conference has mostly focused on this chaos magic side. So now let's get into the other half, the traditional practice. We've really not talked about the alternate current that was going on through a bunch of these, which was about more traditional practices of magic, whether these are extant traditional practices that are continuing, which on Saturday, you know,

Starting point is 00:19:09 there was a whole bunch that were specifically ethnographic talks about different magical practices within other cultures, whether that's Kimbanda or, you know, ritual of power exchange amongst the newer people of the Kathmandu Valley. There was a lot of that going on. There was the discussion or there was the presentation by the Roma women about Roma magic. And probably, you know, both classical Philema talks that relate to more modern reconstruction, British traditional magic and other paths, you know, we missed this talk by Dark Mason, which was, which I've heard them speak before, which is a lot of discussions about the imagery

Starting point is 00:19:55 of dark man across different cultures, whether that's like the man in black at the crossroads or the way that that traditionally shows up in a lot of British folklore. There was an entire thread going through that. I personally really loved one of the few historical, magical talks that I got to go to about modern Greek go Asia, because I think it really tied up actually what was a lot of the threads from many of those talks, which was that these are extant practices and not something that people need to recreate. I know you had a lot of other thoughts. on this, Ryan. Yeah, sure. Throw me under the bus here. While you were attending the pop magic

Starting point is 00:20:37 language and reality hacks, I was passing back and forth between a workshop on Persian magic and then attending Dr. Sasha Kaitao's modern Greek goatia, syncretism, integration, and evolution, which I found to be among the most enlightening of talks, especially as it relates to traditional and folk magic practices. It was also a largely like social and political project that she seemed to be engaged in that is the body of her work.

Starting point is 00:21:10 So much of ancient magic as it exists to us, if it doesn't come from a reconstructivist, well, there's two branches of reconstructivism. There's the magical reconstruction that we get from the Golden Dawn and all variants of the Golden Dawn afterwards through Thelemma

Starting point is 00:21:25 and other modern magical practices. And then you have, reconstructionist organizations that are attempting to recreate traditional pagan religious practices, which some can be quite good when they're grounded in scholarship. Some can be rather essentialist when it comes to an understanding of ethnic purity. There's a lot of gatekeeping, let's say, involved in these practices. But Sasha's talk here was very specifically about that vernacular plurality and practices persist and this concept of Goetia of Greek practical magic

Starting point is 00:22:07 carries over into modernity that this magic never died, that it's living, it's not underground, and it is not in need of reconstruction, that when we look at the different branches or at least approaches that we understand magic in the ancient Greek world as theology and Goetia, we have that theory that persist in the liturgy and practices of the Orthodox Church,

Starting point is 00:22:34 if you would like to see, and she's got a lovely article on this, about how to pronounce the vocees magiique, she's got a lot, very strong opinions about this that I really respect and appreciate. So everybody should go read this because there is a lot of bullshit on the internet floating around about how to interpret these

Starting point is 00:22:51 and say these things that is really grounded in some terrible scholarship. And the third, that this concept of Goethe's, which is a kind of like medieval neutral term for magic yates, which is derived from Goethe, is something that carries on in terms of folk magic. There's no such thing also as Greek Byzantine occultism, which might be a shock to some people, but instead that, again, the magical currents exist in the liturgy of the Orthodox Church, and then in this continuation of folk practices in contemporary yetes. And she gave the example of, like, you know, her mother-in-law and her daughter

Starting point is 00:23:32 talking about these individual practices. But what's interesting, and a lot of this was also talking about the cosmology of the Orthodox Church, specifically talking about the pseudonysis and the formulation of the church. So the Ieates is a kind of like form of folk vernacular that has persisted in, you know, village practices, is in the point is that it exists within community. And this is something that was also a theme that existed throughout the conference, this tension between community practice and magic and individualism. And I think that this really came out in the last discussion we had. I think it's also something that's central to most political problematics that we're dealing about this is bridging the individual

Starting point is 00:24:15 and the communal in this magical practice of creating realities. We will return to discuss the cultural and political role of contemporary cultism in 20205 after this ad break. I think one big question, we've kind of discussed this a bit today and some of the talks prompted this today on the last day in which we're recording this. Like, why do people practice magic in 2025? Like, what, is the purpose of all of this stuff, besides the cool aesthetics, which might just actually be one of the main reasons why, right? But like, why do this, right? The ability to actually make art is pretty democratized. You know, culture is a globalized thing that we can affect

Starting point is 00:25:10 on the internet. It's music, film, you know, art, drawing, painting, politics, philosophy. Everyone's a sort of intellectual now. Everyone has ability to enter into intellectual exchange. You can be self-educated. It's never been easier to be an autodidact. Why do occultism now? And this goes into this question that someone asked at one of the very last panels is, you know, what's the difference between like a scholar and like a practitioner? I asked like a question about, you know, like, you know, what's the use of solitary practice, like a practicing magic as like a personal religious or like spiritual process or as a way to you know gain power in the world versus using occult thought to shape culture you know doing the a culture process right which is

Starting point is 00:25:58 this this whole conference is you know ostensely named after and I think specifically talking about these like older forms of magic like why are these important for occultists like modern practicing occultists which this this conference is attended by why why are these useful to them beyond, you know, in anthropology or, like, academic sense. And I realize that is a big question. But, I mean, we ourselves attended a number of rituals this weekend. We went to an Abraxas ritual, which is sort of limited by the confines of the conferences setting. But, you know, a lot of these rituals were about in trying to induce some kind of, like,

Starting point is 00:26:33 trance or meditative state in which, you know, images or thoughts would come into your head and images and thoughts that you were feelings that you ordinarily, you know, wouldn't feel in day-to-day, modern, busy life, right? And this is a form of why people do these practices. But I guess we can, I don't know, but based on the panels or talks we've attended, like go around and discuss, you know, why this is a thing that is worthwhile to these people,

Starting point is 00:27:00 but also like the sort of tensions that we're feeling at an event like this. I mean, the question, why do people get into occultism is like, I think there are as many, answers as like practitioners themselves really because I mean you know partly it can be a cultural tradition and you have like a communal or societal lineage that's just like part of the culture others who are more I suppose more secular are looking for an escape from like mundane secular society

Starting point is 00:27:36 others like you said want power I mean if I have to speak for myself I always find that I come back to the phrase. It's about creating relationships with the world. And, you know, there's, like, an essence of, like, enchantment to it. But it's, like, also being able to recognize, like, you know, occult's, like, movement or, like, the secret, sure, the secret elements that make up reality or, like, the vibe. Like, the vibes of a place can be, like, something you connect with and you can kind of give some cultural

Starting point is 00:28:13 shape to I believe like the genus loci or like anything that's very I mean it is a very vague thing to ascribe to right but like

Starting point is 00:28:25 it's about again like making creating relationships with the things inside the world itself I mean my definition of magic which I've used for the past few years is that magic is the manipulation of meaning

Starting point is 00:28:39 and that can be internally for you, like trying to create associations, create meaning between yourself, other people, the things you interact with. But again, it also be this like a cultural form, that you're creating meaningful correlations for a cultural capacity. Yes. Or as a way to affect culture. And I think probably the best talk that I attended this whole conference was by Tom Banger, who is a former member of the Temple of Psychic Youth. the North American temple is like EQ specifically. But he gave a talk about how he is dying of brain cancer.

Starting point is 00:29:21 And the various like rituals he's using, you know, throughout this process to feel like he's, you know, gaining some, some, like, agency or control over his thoughts in this matter. He's not rejecting the reality as it is, you know, increasingly evident in his life, but he can control how he frames it. And he specifically likened magic to the bargaining state of grief, that magic is a is a bargaining with the world, and that it can change your, you know, feelings and associations with the things that you experience, even if, you know, the certain end results might, might be generally going in, in a

Starting point is 00:30:01 direction that you have a limited ability to influence. And this is, you know, a guy who's historically, you know, been affiliated with the, some of the original like a cultural projects right of shaping what counterculture is like what we think of as like a counterculture this is a person who's been heavily involved with how counterculture as we currently understand it has existed since the 80s and now he has a very you know personal magical uh outlook based on the as he said in the title of his talk the proximity of thanatos the god of death. So, Garrett, to answer your initial question, this is something that I have been thinking about a lot, too, and engaged with this question every time I attend one of these conferences.

Starting point is 00:30:48 And I think, I mean, just, again, training, I can't help it, but in Max Weber's science as a vocation is where he lays out the thesis about the disenchantment of the world. And we can think of this disenchantment as a fundamental alteration of, the very human experience of time, of bodies and space, of the experience of place, and of the connection that exists between people. And one of the things that the best of magical practices does and being in magical community is to give you a conception of time that is other than one that is based in productive capacity. You hear magical people who go to these conferences talk about, now I have to go back to my ordinary life. And their ordinary life, they will tell

Starting point is 00:31:36 you is their nine to five job or the push to go to school or some sort of like productive capacity. So this is a moment of like unbounded time where they get to experience something as fundamentally different. We also attended several workshops on one on whirling magic by an Egyptian woman who used to live in Berlin, who is in fact formally trained in dance and body movement and is an athlete and explained Sufi principles to us but taught us really the basics of body movement and how twirling can be used as a meditative practice. We got into a room. She taught us the basics of like certain kind of like spotting foot movements. But the point was is that it was a very embodied movement that made us experience body and time and place and

Starting point is 00:32:22 relationship to other people in a fundamentally different way than we would have otherwise. And it seems that the majority of people, especially based on the side conversations I had with attendees, I have to say probably like eight of ten of them, as I talk to, would bring up this concept of, I just, I want to live in an enchanted world. And I think the project of magic is to re-enchant the world. And there's a certain romanticism with that that I'm sympathetic to, but I think that we need to think about this in more of a radical way. And I think that that's the desire that people have as an experience of time other than we have. You talked about magic as your definition of magic is the creation of meaning.

Starting point is 00:33:01 Manipulation of meaning. But part of this is the magic or the conceptions or whether you think of this as an embodied practice or just purely metaphysical or transcendental is that it affords the individual, the opportunity to feel like they're contributing to the creation of meaning. So there's a certain amount of empowerment. Like I'm hesitant to take this down like the kind of like live, laugh, love, affirmations path because we could do that very simply that this is just the spooky version of that. mindfulness and these kinds of things. And for the new age element, that certainly is a major through line across, you know, portions of this community, maybe not as much for this conference, but for other, other, you know, esoteric or, you know, woo-woo conferences.

Starting point is 00:33:45 Absolutely. It's like a major aspect. And, I mean, towards the end of the conference, another thing that really highlights, at least my argument that it is about time and body and space and place and connection and experiences these things in fundamentally different ways than our daily life. There was also a conflict then between individual practice and what it is that we collectively do when we think of magic as a process as either chaos magicians or culture jammers or, you know, thinking of this and kind of like, you know, the Temple of Psychic Youth approach to magic as putting things out, whether those are products or those are art or there's are performances or those are words or that's borough standing in front of a cafe getting it closed, which it effectively did close. is that there's a desire for people to exist in community and have connection in community with others. And you do that through conceptions of time

Starting point is 00:34:42 and body and space and place and connection. So this is really how I understand the desires and the practices that people engage in when they come to these conferences. And you can see it in the way that they kind of close, the elation that they have and what they have accomplished and they have done. then you can see that there's been a process of meaning that has been created through their

Starting point is 00:35:04 various experiences. So, I mean, that would be my brief summary. I really enjoyed one of the last talks that was specifically about a culture, because I thought it really hit on some of this. It was mostly talking about the way that the occult has influenced art and art has influenced the occult, how artists end up using the metaphysical, whether they, are trying to do depictions that they can communicate to others of metaphysical concepts and ideas or connections or contacts that they make. And one of the speaker's examples was of Gustav Klimt, or whether or not they are making discourses on esotericism and trying to convey occult concepts and ideas and explore them through visual mediums. And so, you know, like Alan Morris Promethea

Starting point is 00:35:59 or The Invisibles by Grant Morrison. And I think he really got into a little bit of the tension there because of an artist as a seeker. And I think this also dives into a lot of the people who are at magical conferences is whether you're there as a seeker, which, you know, what are your needs, what are your desires, what are as that? But then as a dweller, are you creating as part of a community?

Starting point is 00:36:26 And everyone who came to this entire conference wanted to create as part of a community or wanted to be part of a tradition or feel like they were part of a continuous thread that is both creating and inventing and understanding the world in different ways and able to communicate that to others who are also trying to understand and communicate new information and new ideas or existing ones even. but just that continuous thread of both creation and disseminating information back and forth. And I think with magic as well, a lot of people might get into it for a personal reason. But I do think by the time you're coming to esoteric conferences with people who are professors in ancient history, giving lectures on specific things, you're not necessarily just at the level of being a personal seeker anymore, because you are trying to find community. If you were just interested in personal seeking, you'd meditate in your bedroom.

Starting point is 00:37:27 But you're trying to find a larger thread and a way of influencing the world around you and also letting the world around you build those relationships and influence you and you are trying to take an information to synthesize into something that is more than just an idea you have, but something that you can continue to communicate and use that to continue the conversation

Starting point is 00:37:49 with the world, with other cultists, with other, you know, in this case, historians and academics as well, and bring those threads together and create something new out of it. What new thing are they creating? What do you mean by that? I think it gets into the idea of a culture that was both, you know, one of the beginning talks of changing reality, but also at the end when they're really going into how... A hard of this stuff isn't about new things, though, or generating new things. It's about trying to, quote-unquote, keep the old things alive or, like, regress back into

Starting point is 00:38:25 these, into what they perceive as these older practices, which may be somewhat manufactured older practices, in which case, it kind of is a new thing, but under this, like, this mask of, you know, like, ancient knowledge. There is certainly people who do want to generate this, this new thing. I think there is a lot of people that are interested more in this, like, I don't know who's a larger group, but I think there is at least another group of people who is interested in this, like, the amount of times I heard people talk about, you know, trying to keep, like, the flame alive and talk about these, like, old traditions that they're participating in

Starting point is 00:39:01 simply to, like, keep them going. I'm not criticizing that necessarily, but that is also another, another, like, aspect of it, which I think has very limited, like, I think, some of these people have very limited goals in actually, like, influencing culture, and, frankly, like, kind of want some of this stuff to, you know, remain, you know, hidden in that they view that as a more like, you know, original or like stable version of, of magic and are even frustrated by like this, you know, capitalist commodification of occultism and how that's, I think the word was like the banalization of magic as you, you know, think about how much of our, of our pop culture is influenced by, by esoteric concepts or imagery.

Starting point is 00:39:47 From, you know, the Lord of the Rings to people mentioned today, you know, the Adams family, Harry Potter, video games like The Witcher, Assassin's Creed, even stuff like Twin Peaks, I mean, other stuff like The X-Files, Dr. Strange, Dr. Fate, you know, comic books have a heavily occultic influence. And some attendees verbalized a kind of frustration at that. True, but a humongous portion of every evening was movies and music and rituals and performances that people are also doing based on this. And they are trying to integrate these concepts and then perform them to show their inspiration, to show it as to stir conversation to trigger some either sense of the sublime or communicate some sort of concept or emotion or feeling that they've gotten out of. this to other people, whether it was through music or through the incredible art that there was in all of the galleries, through performances, through filmmaking. So the creation aspect of it was very, very tied to the entire event. Yeah, certainly. I think one of the biggest manifestations of this thing you're talking about is in music. Could, like, throw a stone

Starting point is 00:41:08 and be hard not to hit an occult, an occult musician in my life, I guess. I'm guilty of this, yes, I know. The occult filmmaker even does have some like contemporary autours, I guess, if you consider like Robert Edgars or people who are influenced by esoterica who are making a big budget Hollywood or, you know, 824 style of popular films.

Starting point is 00:41:33 Yeah, certainly in music, I mean, the main performance outlet in this conference was the theatrical musical performances. There was very, very few attendees of the film screenings upstairs, I'm afraid. Perhaps to respond to this, too, I think it's important that we actually look at the kind of composition of conference goers themselves. Naturally, there's going to be solitary practitioners that, you know, come in or dabblers or people who just, you know, like spooky things or musicians, these things. But we also have, you know, those who are part of living traditions of magic, whether those are reconstructed of authentic or not in the OTO, or in, you know, the Golden Dawn or other kind of orders.

Starting point is 00:42:18 There's reconstructionists that are actively attempting again to keep that flame alive or to go back and to reconstruct. And then you have these chaos magicians. These goddamn chaos magicians, which, like, this is a theme in the conversation that Elaine and I have been having this entire time because they explain to, like, some aspect of chaos magic or I tend to panel and my response, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:41 and again, I understand my complete bias here, as I just like, well, that's fine. Why don't you just do ancient magic? We do the same thing. Why don't you just do ancient magic? It's the same thing. And I think that that's actually one of the difficulties here is that there is a kind of, you know,

Starting point is 00:42:56 magical grammar to older practices. It is like, you know, if you look at the PGM, it is this cosmopolitan practice and melding of like multiple things together that works. But the argument that, you know, to go back to my favorite talk, or one of my favorite talks on the modern Goetia, is that if you want that continuity of that actual practice, it's a closed one.

Starting point is 00:43:14 You have to be in Orthodox, like, you know, the Orthodox Greek church and have a Yahya who's going to, like, teach you these things and, you know, speak the language. And so that's closed or be a member of a voodoo house, but that requires initiation and, like, cross-cultural contact and, like, engagement in a high level of, like, language skill and ability and money, for that matter.

Starting point is 00:43:36 Yes. And most people don't have those kinds of things. So, you know, there, I, what, those damn chaos magician, I find are the ones who are actively engaged in the process of the creation of the new and I think are probably more close to the heart of this concept of a culture because they engage with it

Starting point is 00:43:53 in a way that is interestingly very anthropological or at least the best of them are dealing with it in a way that is very anthropological and I have some sympathies there and then there are some other ones that I just don't quite understand but that's a story for another time. The talk that you were referring to,

Starting point is 00:44:10 there was two talks at the end that were particularly worth. the, well, a lot of them were, all of the ones at the end were of worth, but Francesco, Peranos, the occulture, the material cartography of contemporary spirituality and the arts, where he talks about the two different approaches to studying a culture, and he talks about the values and limitations of both, and you need an, you know, add mixture of them both, but basically there's the sociological aspect and the media studies aspect, which is the more academic of the two, which involves basically what he argued, a secularization of the occult,

Starting point is 00:44:41 And this really accounts for the diffusion of, like, occult symbols and practices into music, into culture. The Adam's family is the example of that. And then the second strain is then religious studies. So the religious injection, or injection, excuse me, into art of these sacred or religious or transcendently magical spiritual principles. He went over some limitations. That was particularly good. But he breaks this down into basically five areas where you have the conception of art high and low. mediatization versus mediation of arts.

Starting point is 00:45:15 He gives the example, this is where the Morrison comes in, but he gives the example of the mediatization as Somerset Maas, the magician based on Crowley. But again, this like, this diffusion of the figure of the magician completely separated from like any actual magical practice, but just like the figure, the aesthetics, the things that blend into the secular culture. and this example of mediation, this messianic approach, as he described it, Grant Morrison's comics as a gateway into reality.

Starting point is 00:45:48 But this also, I think, that Gary carries on to your question that you asked towards the end about Twin Peaks, the return very specifically. You also have then the metaphysical ontology versus the performative anthology, which Elaine talked about, the intention of the author, the perception of the audience,

Starting point is 00:46:05 and then the artist is seeker and the artist's dweller, which is also what you talked about. to this difference between the ego versus tradition or orthodoxy, the artist who really inhabits that tradition, which again made me think about the difficulties of doing kind of religious anthropology. And I think of the example of a very famous book called Mama Loa, or Mamalola, excuse me, by Karen McCarthy Brown, which is in ethnology, looking at voodoo practice in a very specific house

Starting point is 00:46:37 in New York during a time period. Karen lived with Mama Lola for a long time, but really importantly, eventually, Karen became a member of this voodoo house. I think I can say that. I don't think I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but...

Starting point is 00:46:51 If it's in the book? No, it's not in the book. Oh, okay. But she represents a very interesting approach to that, like, anthropologists going native, but this was the question that was asked towards the end of, like, this difference between

Starting point is 00:47:03 the academic observer of these things versus the practitioner, And I think that that really gets to the heart of what it is that chaos magic does and the occultural practice. That is that you are producing culture and you're very specifically producing this magical occult culture. So it's a synthetic movement between these kind of like two poles of the secular and of the sacred, of the magical. I kind of like I guess I just close up my notes here and specifically the stuff on Twin Peaks to return

Starting point is 00:47:49 one of the last talks was by Jeff Howard next stop, Universe B, the negatively existent ones and Universe B in contemporary culture, which was discussing sort of like, you know, mirror, mirror world, underworld, concept, not in like the Greek sense, but in the occultism of the British occultist, Kenneth Grant. And this would probably be most recognizable to people as the Black Lodge in

Starting point is 00:48:23 Twin Peaks is, I think, one of the better depictions of this sort of concept. It is a somewhat limited version, but I think it gets at the kind of heart of the concept in a way. And he gave this talk where he was explaining the risks and the great power that you can personally achieve through contacting these

Starting point is 00:48:48 negatively existent ones or accessing the magical potential of this sort of like mirror negative universe to our own and talked about a little bit of Derrida and various other stuff but from the perspective

Starting point is 00:49:06 mainly as a practitioner of like, you know, the danger and the benefits of doing this sort of magic as written by Kenneth Grant. Jeff Howard did discuss Twin Peaks and the use of Kenneth Grant's concepts specifically in Twin Weeks to Return. And I asked him in the panel afterwards, like, how can you like balance these two forms of working with occultism? Or like, what is the difference in these two forms of working with occultism. You have, on one hand, this practitioner aspect, where you're using it to, like, gain power or induce, like, limit experiences, like, induce, you know, religious or transcendental experiences that change your own perception of, like, sensory reality versus the way that Mark Frost utilized Kenneth Grant's magical

Starting point is 00:49:58 world in writing and co-creating at Twin Peaks the Return, which I can argue is a much more effective use of magic and exposes millions of people to Kenneth Grant's concepts who people who are never going to read books by a relatively niche British occultists, which are books which are actually very, very hard to find now, both, you know, getting going into the Moves zone and accessing these non-existent being and beings which don't have existent properties versus phenomenons which are existent but lack any, you know, core sense of being. and how Mark Frost, as a not sure if he would consider himself a magician, but certainly has an interest in magic and the occult more so than Lynch does.

Starting point is 00:50:42 Lynch's stuff is more bastardized Hinduism. But Frost's use of these concepts, I think, constitutes an effective contemporary version of magical practice, just as valid as chanting and meditating and closing your eyes. And in some ways, I would argue, even more effective because Twin Peaks to Return has existed as both like an evocative force, a force that can invoke certain concepts or philosophies, quote-unquote, entities, if you will, as well as a tool of divination as Twin Peaks the Return forecasts American decline and the nostalgic loop that our culture is stuck in, which is just eating itself. And all of those things are major aspects of what that show is doing. And it uses Kenneth Grant's concepts to get there. And I think that is an occultural project, though. That's not a solitary magical practice where you're just meditating alone

Starting point is 00:51:46 to try to induce some sort of vision. It is cultural. It's influenced culture. It is probably one of the most well-regarded artistic feats of the 21st century. That's a longer version of the question I gave. And the guy did give kind of an answer, which was basically just about trying to, you should, like, balance these two things. You should try to do both. You should try to engage as a solitary practitioner for whatever goals you may have. But it would be a mistake to not try to use this in some sort of like a cultural capacity to like influence culture. But it's still that that operates on like this, I guess what I was trying to get it is like this similar to the scholar and the practitioner as a false dichotomy. I think this is the same thing as this this occult. version of what Frost is doing, as opposed to like an actual practitioner. I think what Frost's doing is using, it's kind of in a chaos magic sense, not for, I guess, chaotic means, but he's using

Starting point is 00:52:41 the contemporary tools of filmmaking and of writing to affect and induce change into the world. That is a more powerful form of magic, because luckily that was distributed by Paramount Showtime, which, you know, certainly helped in the same way, you know, Fox News is useful or effective as a magical generator because of the reach that they have. But I think Frost is just as effective as a magician, if not more so, than I would say any of the people attending this conference. The other elements, I think, of that, the talk that Jeff Howard provided there, too, I think that, you know, again, I agree with you, Gare. But he also at length talked about Andrew Chumley. And specifically the rights of the amethystine light in the Azoecia,

Starting point is 00:53:28 page 347 where he reviews a bunch of non-nowns and things that are there. And Chumley himself is, you know, responsible, founder of the Coltis Sabati, and is, you know, a contributor to the revival of what Trucks's traditional English witchcraft, which is not necessarily a solitary practice, but it is, it is, it is, in many cases. Most of these English witches are pretty solitary. They talk. There are treatises that they write and grimores that are hard to get a hold of. I think they probably exist in PDFs, make good choices about how you get your digital content.

Starting point is 00:54:13 But, I mean, again, that was the tension. He spent a lot of time talking about that individual ritual, which, you know, you present Frost as somebody who is popularizing these ideas to a larger culture and making this understandable and providing them an opportunity to, you know, not just meditate, but to think and engage with these concepts. Because of his work, you can think about, like, the allegory of Agent Cooper and the ways that he fails and succeeds to navigate a strange and confusing world and affect change in the world and his relationship to women and saving women. And you can use that as, like, an actual, like, you can refer to that as a concept

Starting point is 00:54:50 and that builds on some of the, you know, world. building of grant. But now, you know, it's a cultural dialogue that we can have about Agent Cooper and Laura Palmer and how that, I think, can be a positive addition to culture by using occult elements. Or you can buy an exceedingly expensive grimoire from a rare antiquarian bookseller that was published only in 2004, that there's a limited number, it's been passed on, or you can get that PDF online, but who has the time to actually read through this? There's these cultural contexts that don't make sense. There's these concepts that it refers to in a clear network that requires scholarship for you

Starting point is 00:55:29 to even do that individualized practice. That's a big ask for most people to start to think magically in a popularized kind of way and seems contrary then to this conception of a culture, which brings me to my, the last talk by Carl Abrahamson, the meeting with remarkable magicians, which really tied all of this together, tied all of these threads together in a really interesting way as relationship with Genesis Peoridge, with Kenneth Enger, with Anton LeVay. But that was as another interesting aspect of somebody who is doing practice and engaging in community and bringing people together. But ultimately, the question, Elaine, that you and I

Starting point is 00:56:13 talked about at the end was, you know, beyond the end, it relates immediately to what Gair was talking about here. Beyond the personal practice in magic, what goals should a culture have and how can it incorporate its actual goals and ideas into the larger society with the same success that the aesthetics that, you know, have been incorporated into the culture? And I think one of the difficulties that you have there in this individuated practice is that when you look at a figure like Genesis Peoridge, you can see that there's a very clear project. When you look, and this is going back to the Berosian element, right, is that there was a clear practice there. There was a clear kind of, like, a goal to change culture, whether that was just purely for

Starting point is 00:56:57 the sake of change. I mean, it wasn't just kind of like the cult of action for the sake of action. There was some kind of personal, political, radical project that we can go back and enumerate, that they enumerated at the time, that was separate, I mean, that wasn't said immediately in the same breath as the, and now we do this practice. They did the practice. they did the art. And I think that one of the, my response to that, that question is, I don't see an articulation of a political or social project that is a tide to a culture in these practices.

Starting point is 00:57:31 There's a lot of, and this is a very academic practice, a lot of people coming into a room and asking, what would it look like if? And to ask, what would it look like if is not the same thing is let's do a thing. Let's actually go out and evoke change or this is the project. Now let's create a plan and a movement. Instead, it is this like nominalization process

Starting point is 00:57:55 of predetermining ends before we even get there based on theoretical assumptions. And I think that that's contrary to the very idea of magic as praxis. Magic is doing something in the world in these kinds of veins. So that's the thing

Starting point is 00:58:11 that I would like to see and I feel like that something that was getting at at the end, but that's the kind of thing that brings people together to think conceptually, to focus on an idea that we share and to discuss with one another. I mean, on that note, I, for context, I'm, well, still am, like, part of a chaos magic group called Domus Chaotica Marauder Underground or DKMU, who very much is about that. It's like established in like the mid, early 2000s, if I remember correctly. But it is very much about this core idea of the assault against reality of, I guess, like, remystifying the world or like making weird shit happen through what they call the Elysian network with Ellis is like one of the goddesses of the DKMU.

Starting point is 00:59:01 And it's very much like that sort of mix between magic, personal practice, community and like, a somewhat unified, but also decentralized, like, occult war. Like, there's a political statement to it at the end, which there needs to be more of, personally speaking. Yeah, there was, like, some vague gesturing towards, like, politics beyond, you know, the mention of, you know, magic has a form of resistance in the, in the opening a little paragraph on the program that they handed out. But, like, there was specifically in the politics of tarot block, one of the talks about the history of the, emperor and the herophant card, the speaker referred to the United States as having an emperor crisis right now. But that was kind of it. The rest of the talk was purely historical. The talk

Starting point is 00:59:52 before that was on queering the tarot, trying to free tarot from heteronormative readings and discussed a few. And discussed a few artists. Discussed a few artists who are attempting to do this, whether through abstracting the humanoid forms in the tarot or reflecting the tarot figures to be more representative of, quote-unquote, queer identities. That was kind of it in terms of the political aspect, which is, I guess, kind of lacking. As much as they want this to be a culture,

Starting point is 01:00:31 they don't want this to be a political conference, it seems. And I think, you know, if everyone, you know, in their talk had to have some section on, like, you know, communism, or anti-fascism or whatever, that probably would have been bad, and that's not what we're saying. But, I mean, specifically, I think, if they're naming this after Genesis Porich,

Starting point is 01:00:50 they were using a term by Genesis Porich, who had a very strong idea of why they were doing this work. And specifically, I was very frustrated in the way people talked about Genesis at the conference who almost all of them misgendered Genesis and refused to discuss that length. Some of them may have mentioned it, but discussed Genesis Porges.

Starting point is 01:01:09 One of her core of occult practices was on androgynizing herself. Androgyne project. Pandrogyny and like breaking gender, which they framed as an occult project. And yet, even people who she knew at the conference would only refer to them as a hymn. Throughout all the talks, including the last guy, Carl Abranson.

Starting point is 01:01:35 Who wrote a biography of her? Yeah, and like this is, I do not think this was out of like, you know, malice. I think this was just a linguistic blockage for some people who may not even been thinking about what they were doing. But it shows like an actual disconnect from engaging with the real purpose of magic, or at least what I would, would argue that is and what I would, you know, suppose Genesis is a pandrogyny project as a form of magic. but this this kind of demonstrates the very limited political application for quote-unquote resistance since that's the term they're using, not me, which kind of underlines this whole conference. I mean, I think the Burroughs talk was probably the most, the very first Peros talk, which we opened

Starting point is 01:02:21 up the last episode with, is the most explicitly political one, talking about, you know, going against control, freedom in this like anarchic or libertarian sense or, you know, vault against monotheism, I suppose. Like, one of my frustrations as well is this, the constant mention of the CCRU, which nobody ever went into depth on, but which, you know, for all its faults and, you know, Nickland being Nickland,

Starting point is 01:02:51 was very much like a sort of, like radical cultural Marxist, like a project, right? It's like cybernetic Marxism mixed with like Crowley and some content, whatever. But it is extremely frustrating to see that sort of refusal to engage with like the political stuff of it. Because like even before like psychic youth, there was like Throbbing Gristle, Genesis's bands that pioneered industrial music who, I mean this was a bit before punk music,

Starting point is 01:03:29 but like it very much played with. with like the same sort of shock aesthetics that like the early punks would wear swastikas where like throbbing gristle hat the logo is very much like a lightning bolt with like black and red and white Genesis herself engaged in some of this stuff not from a fascist perspective

Starting point is 01:03:47 but but from a provocative perspective which I mean you can certainly criticize psychic TV and her four as many people have but I mean shock values kind of overrated nowadays with like internet edge lords but I very much believe that occultism being this you know this collection of practices that have been very censored and you know punished by like the church and such things and like I guess these systems of control where like I guess I take

Starting point is 01:04:18 issue with like the oh it's like oh fun and all and and light and love and whatever but the there's like a radical element to occultism and a radical possibility to to use occultism to, again, like the whole, like, the idea between personal practice and cultural production, right? Like, creating cultural artifacts and putting them out into the worlds, being very proactive with the shaping and the pushing of radical ideas and possibilities is a very potent thing to be, to do. and the sort of, I guess, like, liberalized or like neoliberal idea of like the personal practice and like, oh, I'm changing my perceptions and all these things are fine, but it's more like self-soothing than it is about creating change into the world.

Starting point is 01:05:14 If you're not actually changing anything, are you doing magic? Exactly. At least that would be my, well, that would be my argument for like, for coming from the chaos magic perspective. This gets to another kind of trite and facile, academic, thematic that is present and prevalent for the past probably 20 years at this point, I feel like, at most philosophy and political science, political theory conferences, where the question is not just what would it look like if, but, you know, to think otherwise, you know, think otherwise than we have. And usually it's this how do we think other than we have, those kinds of things. And so it, I mean, again, magic, and as we've been talking about here, is meant to evoke change in the world, to cause change in the world in conformity with reality. We're going to use, or, you know, with Will if we're going to use the Crowley, you know, definition here, which I think is fine, great. I want a goth girlfriend.

Starting point is 01:06:12 Thankfully, you can talk to AI, but I'm worried that she might beat you. Or that you kill her, like all my old tomogachies. But this is the issue that we are talking around, the conference and a culture has been talking around, and the political problematic that we're all dealing with right now is how the fuck do we evoke change of the world? How is it when systems of institutional representation within politics and power fail to represent the will of the people? How did the people make change? And it feels like everything's been tried. I mean, this is where, I mean, Fisher, who I would argue is at least an cultist or is at least has.

Starting point is 01:06:52 some mystical aspect, if not was at some point an occultist. Like, you know, reached at the point of capitalist realism. It's like, most things that we, you know, can think of, we actually have, we have given a shot, including, including occultism. We have, we have tried to do this. And yet, here we are, the world's maybe not as bad as it has been, but it's not in a great spot. I think everyone listening to this would certainly understand that.

Starting point is 01:07:15 And I think most people at the conference understood that. and yeah i mean i'm i'm very skeptical of of magic as as a as a as a certainly as an individual practice as a you know cause larger political change but even you know is can there even in this this revolves back to the concept of a culture like can there even be in a cult anymore because none of these you know magical things are very hidden anymore they're all very accessible they're all very visible there there is you know hidden as as as uh queer flagging is right as as as an occult as an occultic ritual of, you know, hidden signs to communicate with other people in the know, something that is now you could just look up on the internet and I think

Starting point is 01:07:57 occult, occult practices and symbols have reached the same point. It's content. I mean, I like the esoterica YouTube channel as much as, as much as the next person. But, I mean, are these things even occult anymore? Well, that also speaks to the fundamental tension between this current at the conference, and the other current at the conference, which was the much more traditional magical practices, or the folk magical practices, or what we would regulate. Extant magical practices. Yeah, extant magical practices that weren't suppressed by Christianity, but carried over. So you had a section on Kimbanda, you had a section on Palomayumbo, you have the Roma magical school that is being founded in Romania, and you have the modern

Starting point is 01:08:43 goesha, the Iethes, right? Which we identified very clearly as a practice. that continues to this very day, the context in which we understand that practice is not a cultum secret, like in the, no, it's just that, like, it's the stuff that you grew up with. It's every day. And in that case, it's not transformative because it's just part of your daily existence. It's a kind of enchantment that by and large are kind of like, you know, European Protestant Catholic defectors, whatever has brought you to the occult in the first place, don't experience as a community or community engagement, but those are also things that can get deeply conservative.

Starting point is 01:09:23 They are, but also the parts of those practices that do require initiation that are not something that everyone's grandmother is doing are also community-based and exist specifically in-and-for community. And, you know, as a cult projects that have influenced the world, the Haitian revolution. The good revolution that we should all be talking about. No, but these things do, but, I mean, the occult has bubbled to the surface in material ways very, very explicitly in some instances. And so I think there could be potential, but it does require being in community and being in service of community, even if it's not a practice that is being practiced by every single person around you.

Starting point is 01:10:10 To be an on gun or a mamba in Haitian voodoo is to serve the community. it's not simply just a matter of magical woo or something like that or the personal accumulation of power in some sort of like individual magical sense. No, you're serving your community. That's what it is that you're doing. It's first and foremost a service position on the Haitian Revolution. Look, I understand this. Like, the American Revolution, standing the American Revolution makes you, I guess,

Starting point is 01:10:36 a classical liberal or whatever it is that you fetishize that into. If you're opposed to the French Revolution, that makes you a, you know, classical conservative, right? If you stand the Haitian revolution, I guess that makes you a radical. The myth, the legend, the discussion, this understanding is that the Haitian revolution was

Starting point is 01:10:56 sparked by the possession of the Loa, specifically as Ili Dantot, who, you know, sacrificed a pig. There's depictions of this in Haitian art all over the place. This leads to, you know, slave uprisings and rebellions, revolution. Well organized. Fantastic. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:11:13 Magical practice and action. action. And that wraps up our panel discussion on the 2025 Acculture Conference. Thanks again to Delta, Ryan, and Elaine for joining me in this magical journey to Berlin. And now I will start the tedious process of transcribing all of the talks I recorded and writing my written report on the Acculture Conference where I can go into a bit more depth into some of these topics and reach a personal conclusion on the role of occultism and its ability to infest, influence, or undermine culture versus culture's capacity of eating away at the occult.

Starting point is 01:11:58 That report should be coming out before the end of the year. See you on the other side. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History, about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want.

Starting point is 01:12:45 First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show.

Starting point is 01:12:56 We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked.

Starting point is 01:13:07 Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm

Starting point is 01:13:35 also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash, like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially,

Starting point is 01:14:10 go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. lost nuclear weapons?

Starting point is 01:14:41 Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched.

Starting point is 01:15:01 You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app,

Starting point is 01:15:24 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Rich Russians Falling Out of Windows podcast is back. Sad Olegarch Season 2. Since we left you in 2023, after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. We dig deeper into these odd deaths, which include everything from mushroom poisoning and mysterious heart attacks to window clumsiness and suicide by decapitation.

Starting point is 01:16:00 One thing we have found since we started back in 2022 is the information on the suspicious deaths has become much harder to find. Not just that, it seems as if state-controlled media in Russia is being utilized to purposely confuse and contradict the reporting that gets put out. As you can probably imagine, season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Olegac on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A warning. This episode includes violent content which some listeners might find disturbing. I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called

Starting point is 01:16:44 White Metropolis. And the co-author, with longtime journalist Betsy Frioff, of a history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli, a journalist in Dallas who specializes covering political extremism and far-right internet culture for publications like the Texas Observer, the barbed wire, and others. On December 7, 1982, the state. state of Texas made history in a particularly grim way. It became the first government anywhere in the world to put a prisoner to death by lethal injection. This innovation was meant to make the

Starting point is 01:17:19 grisly business of executing murderers swift and humane. More accurately, it was meant to convince the witnesses of executions, and by extension, the general public, that what they were watching didn't violate the United States' Constitution's Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. In fact, lethal injection is based on junk science. And those who die that way may actually suffer more and over a longer time than prisoners who were executed by electric chairs six decades ago. In many ways, lethal injection is a con game designed to hide from the public that their government is torturing prisoners to death. As the University of Richmond law professor, Corinna Lane, the author of recently published book, Secrets of the Killing State,

Starting point is 01:18:07 told story of lethal injection told us. What I've come to conclude is that lethal injection only does one thing well, only one. And that is it hides what the death penalty is. It hides the violence of the death penalty, of what state killing actually is. And I remember reading, it's not in the book, I kind of wish I had put it in there, but I remember reading this phrase, the heart stops reluctant. Over the next three episodes of it could happen here, we're going to examine the shady business of state killing. We'll share the twisted tale of the lethal injection and the

Starting point is 01:18:48 unqualified people who designed the protocol. We'll talk about the untrained personnel who carry out the executions and how pressure from drug companies who didn't want their product associated with death chambers have led prison officials in Texas and elsewhere to lie to those corporations or buy the drugs illegally. We'll also talk about the pain the suffer and speak with people who have accompanied those sons to death in their final moments. We'll speak to a priest, Jeff Hood, who, as of this broadcast, has been the last friend of ten men as they died by state command. It's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there

Starting point is 01:19:29 to support life, and yet you know that they're there to take his life. We'll tell the story of one heroic Texas man, Ray Spoo-Yan, who was blinded in one eye during a hate crime, but fought to stop the execution of his white supremacist attacker, who was enraged by the terrorist attacks of September 11th in 2001, and committed two Dallas area murders in a shooting spree. Well, definitely, this execution, it was not for the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested

Starting point is 01:20:03 and also fought for clemency in a way when, and requested the governor of Texas, the Board of Protestants and Paroles that do not execute him in our names, you know, show mercy. But it looks like, you know, we are not in the same page. The system wanted to move forward. So it was not in our names. It was basically just to uphold the verdict and to keep the system running, sending people to the executions without thinking how this execution is actually going to help.

Starting point is 01:20:37 help the society. How it is going to help people? Finally, we'll look at the future of the death penalty, which has become increasingly unpopular with the public, even as politicians continue to happily embrace it. But before we explore this dark and fascinating story, we'll hear a few messages from our sponsors, which I hope do not include producers of the chemicals used in the lethal injection. The founders of the British colonies that became the United States brought with them the often sadistic traditions of capital punishment prevalent in 16th and 17th century Europe. Their royal executioners dispatched their victims by boiling them alive, burning them at the stake, tying them to horses that pull them limb from limb, sawing them in half and beheading them. Such elaborate executions were meant to underscore the absolute power of monarchs.

Starting point is 01:21:39 As the political scientist, Austin Surrott, noted in his book, gruesome spectacles, botched executions, and America's death penalty. Quote, capital punishment was precisely about the right of the state to kill as it pleased. Live, but live by the grace of the sovereign. Live but remember that your life belongs to the state. However, even before the American Revolution, those living in the American colonies embraced less exotic forms of capital punishment. In 1608, authorities in Virginia hanged George Kendall, who was accused of being a spy for the Spanish Empire. That was the first execution in the British colonies in North America that later became part of the United States. Inspired by the Old Testament legal code, the 13 British colonies put prisoners to death for a variety of misdeeds, including stealing.

Starting point is 01:22:29 killing food or horses, killing a neighbor's dog or chickens, bestiality, blasphemy, idolatry, witchcraft, sodomy, adultery, statutory rape, perjury in a capital trial, insurrection, treason, manslaughter, and, of course, murder. Eager to distinguish themselves from decadent, cruel, European monarchs. In 1789, the first Congress of the United States submitted to the states the Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which banned, quote, cruel and unusual punishments. The required number of states ratified the amendment in 1791.

Starting point is 01:23:06 From colonial times until the first use of the electric chair in New York in 1890, condemned prisoners in the United States usually died at the end of a hangman's rope. More than half, the estimate is 16,000 executions in all of U.S. history have been by hanging. Hanging was seen as a huge civilizational leap over, for instance, skinning prisoners alive. As products of the Enlightenment era, early American leaders like Thomas Jefferson campaigned to make sure that the punishments fit the crimes and that no one was executed for relatively minor offenses. Beginning with Pennsylvania in 1794, several states such as Vermont, Maryland, and New Hampshire sharply reduced the number of crimes that could result in the death penalty. Perhaps not surprisingly, the South went in the opposite direction. There, the white population lived in fear of the enslaved African Americans they bought, sold, rape, whipped, and relentlessly forced to work without pay.

Starting point is 01:24:05 Whites reported laying sleepless at night imagining what might happen if they face justice for their crimes. They wanted the African Americans they so abused to fear the consequences of any form of resistance. After repeated failed repellions from 1704 to 1831, as well as the Haitian Revolution, which saw, the death of many, if not all, slave owners in Haiti. Legislators in the South greatly expanded the range of offenses for which enslaved African Americans and their suspected white allies could be executed. Enlightenment ideas were not extended to African Americans who were subjected to fatal tortures as excruciating as any experienced by accused heretics during the Inquisition in Europe. Enslaved men and women accused of rebellion or of trying to escape their captivity

Starting point is 01:24:53 faced dismemberment or being burned with hot irons. This legacy of violence in the South contributed to the region's long-term love affair with capital punishment. However, even hangings, promoted as a kindlier way to kill, became a horror show. In Europe, executioners were trained professionals who quickly gained a lot of experience. In the United States, such killings were done by local officials, often sheriffs who might have little or no experience. At the gallows, executioners had to do some complicated math in order to do their jobs correctly. They had to calculate the weight of the victim in ratio to the length of the rope and the likely speed at which the condemned prisoner would drop through the trap door at the bottom of the gallows.

Starting point is 01:25:40 If the executioner calculated correctly, the prisoner's neck would break at the end of the fall, theoretically killing the unfortunate victim instantly. Hanging was supposed to be clean and efficient like the hanging carried out by the U.S. Army at the beginning of the movie The Dirty Dozen. Well, Major, what did you think of the hanging? Look very efficient. Authorities told themselves that hanging, when carried out appropriately and properly, was painless. That thesis, however, was obviously impossible to prove.

Starting point is 01:26:12 For decades, hangings were public, and a set of religious rituals revolved and evolved around these events. With notable exceptions before the noose was placed around their necks, the condemned told the sad tale of what led them to such a terrible fate. They repented their terrible crimes and begged God and society for forgiveness. The idea was that the death penalty would teach the masses that crime doesn't pay. Reality, however, often strayed from this script. Pretty early on, the leaders of the American Republic realized that the death penalty was actually morally corrupting, though most of them continue to support it. Benjamin Rush, who signed the Declaration of Independence, decried what he called the death penalty's, quote, brutalizing effect. Rush became one of the earliest

Starting point is 01:27:00 voices for abolition of capital punishment. He argued that state violence made ordinary citizens more violent. And there's a reason to believe that's true. Consider the crowds that often watched hangings and got drunk and sometimes fights broke out as witnesses battled over the best view of the gallows. Postcards and mementos were made of famous lynchings in places like Dallas, Texas. And fights sometimes resulted in injury or death. Some in the crowds would spend their time at hangings, not learning somber moral lessons, but in fact picking the pockets of other witnesses caught up in the drama unfolding on the gallows. And executions were often followed by hours of looting, arson, assaults, and other mayhem, as the public would engage in writing, not unlike modern cities

Starting point is 01:27:47 when they celebrate a home team's win at the World Series. These unruly mobs unnerved the upper class. In starting with Rhode Island in 1833, states began to move hangings inside prison walls away from the public view. By 1845, public executions had been banned in all of New England. This upset death penalty abolitionists,

Starting point is 01:28:08 who hoped that the routine horrors that unfolded during executions might lead to the end of capital punishment. Thus began the process where, state governments increasingly killed people in the name of the public and a process shrouded in secrecy. Meanwhile, it's no secret that we have to pay our bills. So we'll be back after a few words from our sponsors. In 1890 in Samson County, North Carolina, a local hothead named Arkansas, Arkansas,

Starting point is 01:28:47 got into a heated exchange with a neighbor, John C. Herring at a country store. During the fight, Kinsall's grabbed a butcher knife and repeatedly stabbed Herring, killing him. A few days later, he was arrested for the murder, but he escaped, and he was on the loose for nine months. After a gunfight with a sheriff's posse, he was captured, put on trial, found guilty, and sentenced to die by hanging.

Starting point is 01:29:11 There, the story got messy. We'll repeat, what we're about to say may be upsetting. to some listeners. Kinsal's was not one to passively accept his fate. While awaiting his execution, he tried to take his own life twice, the first time with sleeping pills and the second time by cutting his own throat. These attempts delayed the execution, but inevitably, Kinsal's faced his appointment with the hangman on September 28, 1900.

Starting point is 01:29:38 Local authorities used a step-ladder as a gallows. Kinsal's did not fall from a sufficient height to break his neck, consequently, and the neck wound from his suicide attempt had not completely healed, so he was bleeding heavily as he dangled from the noose. A doctor told the sheriff and hundreds of other horrified spectators that Kinsal's was still alive. Officers cut him down and hanged the unfortunate man a second time. This time he died. In an era in which executions took place all the time, Kinsal's gory death cut through the fog and made national news. The Virginia pilot called the scene revolting. During the history of hangings, hideous mistakes like this were common.

Starting point is 01:30:21 Sometimes because of an executioner's miscalculations, prisoners' heads were yanked off. Sometimes ropes ripped apart, with the prisoner falling to the ground only to be hanged again. During many hangings, the condemned slowly strangled to death. John Harris, a man hanged in Pennsylvania in 1913, actually screamed as he suffocated, prompting a headline in one newspaper, quote,

Starting point is 01:30:44 prisoner tortured through bungling at an execution. According to an estimate made in 1993 by a legal team representing a client who's facing death by hanging in Washington State, between the years 1622 and 1993, authorities bungled 170 of about 8,000 legally authorized hangings, resulting in prolonged suffering for the prisoners in more than 2% of the death sentences carried out by this technique. The growing middle class and upper class in the United States became squeamish about hanging. As one writer put it, bourgeois audiences might tolerate the ghastliness of death itself, but not in competence and mismanagement. By the early 1880s, the New York Times had begun publishing lengthy, detailed, and graphic accounts of hangings gone wrong.

Starting point is 01:31:36 In 1885, in response to the mounting public concerns, New York Governor David Bennett Hill declared the present mode of executing criminals by hanging has come down to us from the dark ages. It may well be questioned whether the science of the present day cannot provide a means of taking the life of those condemned to die in a less barbarous manner. As the backlash against the extreme brutality of hanging grew among elites, the New York Medico-legal Society first suggested research into whether prisoners could be possibly executed by lethal injection in the 1870s. But a different technology arose that delayed the advent of that protocol by more than a century.

Starting point is 01:32:17 Famously, Thomas Edison was a greedy man. He took credit for the inventions of his underpaid lab assistants who toiled as Menlo, New Jersey Laboratory. Edison was also a genius of public relations, and he would come to dominate several industries. In the early 1870s, his team had developed a feasible incandescent light bulb that ran on the direct current, or D.C. system, as Edison himself described it. On October 21st, 1871, numerous experiments resulted in the production of a small unit map of comparatively enormous resistance. The filament be in under conditions of great stability after the result I knew the problem approached commercial solution.

Starting point is 01:33:06 In 1879, Edison submitted his patent. for an electric lamp. In 1880, the Edison Illuminating Company opened for business and soon provided lights for New York and other cities. In the early days of the electric industry, fatal accidents sometimes happened because of the new technology. In 1881, George Lemuel Smith, an intoxicated buffalo bricklayer, stumbled into an unlocked electric plant and accidentally fried himself by touching a generator. An autopsy led some doctors to conclude that Smith died quickly in painlessly. Many in the medical profession responded to dismiss untimely death by suggesting that perhaps electric power could provide a more reliable and less grotesque way to rid society of

Starting point is 01:33:52 convicted murderers and rapists. Enter a Buffalo dentist, Alfred Porter Southwick, and Dr. George Vell of the Society for the Prevention of Cruel to Animals, who both experimented with killing stray cats and dogs with electric current. The early results were often horrifying. with the animals sometimes burning alive. Nevertheless, the two published an article that described electrocution as the, quote, safest and kindest method of killing. In 1886, New York State formed a commission. The study of prisoners could humanely be put to death in a similar way.

Starting point is 01:34:26 The so-called jury commission falsely claimed that electrocuted animals tortured in a series of experiments died supposedly, rapidly and efficiently. Thomas Edison would soon see a business opportunity in state killing. At the time, Edison was locked in a so-called current war with another robber baron business tycoon, George Westinghouse. Westinghouse's labs had developed a system that ran on alternating current, or AC, a system that was more efficient, more popular, and less prone to breakdown. Edison's DC system had already caused fatal electrocutions, but the so-called Wizard of Menlo Park wanted to prove that the much safer Westinghouse system was, in fact, dangerous. Edison had his engineers electrocute animals using the AC current in front of reporters to terrify the public about the system. His most sinister ploy, however, was conspiring with the state of New York to hook up its first electric chair,

Starting point is 01:35:19 invented by the aforementioned Buffalo dentist and engineer Alfred Southwick. And Edison connected that chair to an AC power system. The first man to face this new invention was William Kemmler, who was convicted of murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet during a drunken raid. The jury ordered him to die by electrocution. Edison saw an opportunity. For Kemmler to die in agony as the first man killed in the electric chair

Starting point is 01:35:47 in order to fatally damage Westinghouse reputation and that of the AC current. Desperate to prevent his product from being associated with something so ghastly, Westinghouse prohibited the sale of his AC generators to New York State out of fear that they would be used to execute Kemmler. But Edison sent his man to find second

Starting point is 01:36:06 hand Westinghouse equipment, which ended up in the hands of prison officials. Westinghouse then secretly hired an attorney for Kemmler, but the appeals failed. At 6.38 in the morning, August 6th, 1890, Kemmler became an unwilling pioneer. On the day of his execution, witnesses were impressed by Kemmler's calm demeanor, as he wished everyone in the death chamber, good luck. After strapping Kemmler into the electric chair, the executioner pulled a switch, and Kemmler's body convulsed and became rigid. An attending physician announced he was not dead.

Starting point is 01:36:41 Kemmler started to drool, and a second jolt was ordered. Kemmler started burning alive, and this time white smoke rose in the air, filling the room with what witnesses described as a, quote, pungent and sickening odor. Afterward, Westinghouse said of Kemmler's agonizing death, they would have done better with an axe. The mayhem didn't matter, and innocent's plot failed. New York officials considered the electrocution a success and stuck with the method for decades to come.

Starting point is 01:37:11 26 other states adopted the electric chair as a method of execution. Kemmler's death would be the first of many so-called botched executions over the next century. As Lawson-Sarrot wrote in gruesome spectacles, 80 of the executions gone awry in the next century involved the electric chair, with the failures involving, as he wrote, mechanical breakdowns, Others resulting in fire, smoke, the smell of burning flesh, and a prolonged period from the start to the completion. Sometimes the executed person's eyes popped out during electrocution. After death, the bodies of those electrocuted remained so hot that prison guards often got blisters if they touched the body too soon.

Starting point is 01:37:52 In 1923, a man named F. G. Bullen would be one of four executed in Arkansas on the same day. prison officials actually placed him in a casket thinking he was dead when a guard noticed he was still breathing. Bullen was then carried back to the chair and electrocuted a second time, this time successfully. Before the start of the 20th century, critics knew that both hanging and the electric chair were exercises in barbarity. In the Lone Star State, Ferdinand Eugene Daniel, the editor of the Texas Medical Journal, was an advocate of eugenics. An opponent of capital punishment, he argued that castrating men from families with criminal histories would be a way to prevent criminals from being born in the first place. Castrating criminals was more humane, he said, than hanging or electrocuting their children when those offspring inevitably turned to a life of crime.

Starting point is 01:38:46 Daniel accepted that executions would take place for the foreseeable future, so he wanted to make the death penalty a vehicle for medical research. Instead of hanging or electrocuting prisoners, Daniel suggested in a 1906 issue of the Texas Medical Journal that the state should sedate them, and while unconscious, subject them to medical experiments. Quote, inject into him various disease germs, watch their progress, and when through with him, inject about 10 drops of prusic acid into the veins of his arms, and he will die a painless death, Daniel wrote. Dr. Joseph Mengele and other Nazi scientists would conduct similar experiments a little more than three decades later. But as Professor Lane explained to us, even before Dr. Daniel made his disturbing suggestion in the Texas Medical Journal, doctors knew that death by lethal injection would be a horrifying experience. When states turned from hanging to the electric chair, this is back in 1890, there was actually a study. There was actually a report that recommended the electric chair,

Starting point is 01:39:55 and that report actually considered death by drugs, a lethal injection. And in that report, they said, we considered and rejected this. And they had two reasons. One was anatomical difficulties. Professor Lane noted that even the 19th century, doctors knew that the criminal population had a higher tendency towards drug abuse and poor health, that would make it difficult to access a vein with a needle in order to deliver lethal chemicals. Also, even a century ago, doctors were queasy about involvement in executions that violated the Hippocratic Oath, which says, in part, I will do no harm or injustice to patients or, quote, administer a poison to anyone when asked to do so, nor will I suggest such a course. Professor Lane,

Starting point is 01:40:46 noted that a government commission studying lethal injection in the late 19th century prophetically said that not only would the medical conditions of prisoners be an issue, but so would the likely refusal of doctors to take part because of ethical concerns. This could mean that lethal injection would be carried out by amateurs. So, you know, these people have notoriously bad veins. They are elderly. They are of poor health. They are often former drug users. You know, how did we know this in 1890 and didn't think about this in 1977? But that was one reason. The other reason was they said, we're not going to be able to do this without the medical profession. We're not going to be able to do it competently. And the sustained and strong opposition

Starting point is 01:41:39 of the medical profession makes this not viable. There were other less popular alternatives to hanging in the electric chair in the 1900s. In 1924, Nevada became the first state to execute someone in a gas chamber. Again, the euthanasia of stray pets and animal shelters provided a model for human executions. And again, there were a lot of problems. Prisoners resisted breathing in the poisonous gas, and this natural resistance slowed their deaths. The big spaces and gas chambers often limited the effectiveness of the poison gas, and in the earliest such executions, the chambers themselves sometimes leaked,

Starting point is 01:42:18 putting witnesses in danger. As with the electric chair, death penalty advocates claimed that the modern technology had provided a guilt-free method for the government to kill people. The reality couldn't be farther from the truth. Dr. Richard Tratesman from John Hopkins University School of Medicine wrote, quote, the person is unquestionably experiencing pain and extreme anxiety. The sensation is similar to the pain felt by a person during a heart attack, where essentially the heart is being deprived of oxygen.

Starting point is 01:42:49 Eleven states, including California, eventually adopted death by poison gas as their preferred method of execution. But witnesses consistently reported the condemned seem to die agonizing, struggling deaths, in which they convulsed and wretched and sometimes screamed. In 1960, California executed Carol Chesman, a convicted rapist who authored numerous acclaimed books while on death row. Before his execution, Chesman told reporters who would witness his death that he would nod his head if he was experiencing physical pain while he was gassed. Reporters said that Chesman indeed nodded his head multiple times as he choked in the poison fumes. By the time of Chesman's death, the United States was less than a decade from the longest pause and executions in its history.

Starting point is 01:43:36 Numerous judicial challenges the capital punishment based on numerous racial biases, police misconduct, and other issues resulted in a de facto moratorium on executions by the mid-1960s. At issue was the obvious racism of the death penalty, including who was charged with capital crimes and who ended up the target of state killing, as Brian Stevenson, a New York University law professor and the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative explained in 2007. In the United States, we are struggling

Starting point is 01:44:10 with capital punishment and its implementation. A short, quick legal history. In 1972, the United States Supreme Court struck down the death penalty after recognizing that it was being applied in an arbitrary manner. The court in 72 noted that 87% of the people

Starting point is 01:44:27 executed for the crime of rape were black men convicted of raping white women. 100% of the people executed in the United States between 1930 and 1972 for the crime of rape were executed for offenses involving victims who were white, even though it was believed that women of color were three times as likely to be the victims of sexual assault. That racism would play a major factor in the largest pause in executions in the history of the American death penalty. The NACP's Legal Defense Fund and the ACLU file challenges to the death penalty

Starting point is 01:45:01 based on racial bias across the country, and these legal teams won numerous days of execution. As Harvard Law Professor Cal Stiker observed in a YouTube video, a de facto ban of executions had taken place by the late 1960s. The death penalty was in decline already in the 1960s in the United States, as it was in Europe. But the LDF's litigation campaign brought it to a complete halt. So from 1967 to 1972 in the five years prior to the decision in Furman v. Georgia, there were no executions in the United States.

Starting point is 01:45:41 Three death penalty cases, Furman v. Georgia, Jackson v. Georgia, and Branch v. Texas, reached the United States Supreme Court and were consolidated in 1972. All three defendants were African American, and Jackson and Branch were charged with raping white women. As previously noted, no white man had ever been executed for the rape of an African-American woman or child in American history. In June 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a five-to-four decision in Furman v. Georgia, ruling that defendants received the death penalty in such a fashion that capital punishment as then practiced was unconstitutional. So that there didn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. To use the words that they used, it was wantonly and freakishly imposed. The immediate aftermath of Furman was dramatic. Everyone who had been sentenced to death

Starting point is 01:46:35 and there were some 600-ish people on death row at the time of the Furman litigation all had their death penalties invalidated. So they were all sent to the general population they had to be resentenced to a sentence other than death. Moreover, when the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty as it then existed, anyone whose death sentence was pending,

Starting point is 01:46:57 that case had to be dropped because those statutes were no longer valid. No executions took place for another four years. The Supreme Court had ruled executions were unconstitutional when the instructions juries were given in capital cases were too vague. This gave states like Texas a chance to rewrite their death penalty laws. By 1976, 35 states had adopted new statutes addressing the issues raised in Furman. On July 2nd, 1976, in its Greg v. Georgia decision, the Supreme Court by a 7-2

Starting point is 01:47:32 margin, upheld the death penalty in states like Texas where the court found jury instructions were clear and specific. The death penalty were set to resume after a decade-long pause. It took a mere 199 days for state killing to resume. Utah executed a murderer Gary Gilmore by firing squad on January 17th, 1977. The extreme violence of Gilmore's execution, which inspired a 1979 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism-based novel called The Executioner's Song, sparked a renewed debate over the brutality of capital punishment and whether it's compatible with modern society. Nevertheless, the state of Oklahoma charged ahead, but they faced a problem.

Starting point is 01:48:16 As Professor Lane writes, the Oklahoma electric chair was falling apart and needed to be but by the 1970s, many legislators were put off by the brutality of that execution method and sought something more modern. Meanwhile, a Dallas television reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions, and a federal district court granted a preliminary injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned, but politicians across the country were ennerved at the prospect of the public watching a man essentially burn alive in their names and what that could do to support for the death penalty. It was at this time that a member of the Oklahoma legislature approached the medical community

Starting point is 01:49:01 and asked them for help in designing a new protocol for death by lethal injection. Politicians thought prisoners could be put to sleep permanently like veterinarians, euthanizing animals. But doctors wanted nothing to do with killing people. That's when Oklahoma State corner Dr. J. Chapman stepped in. Referring to the physicians who refuse to help, he said, quote, to hell with them. Let's do this. Professor Lane explained what happened next. I document in the book legislators talking about how, you know, I don't know that the country's going to want to see this sort of violence. All we've got is the electric chair. All we've got is the gas chamber. People are going to be, you know, queasy about this. And we need to find a different.

Starting point is 01:49:47 front way. And unknown to many, or at least unappreciated, is the fact that a federal court had recognized at the time a First Amendment right to televise executions. Now, it wouldn't last, but nobody could have known that. And so one of the things I also found was state legislators talking about, gosh, we can't, you know, we can't have an electrocution in someone's living room, right? The public is not going to go for this. And so they were looking for a different way. They talked about, you know, what about a death by drugs? And they are asking the state medical association. They're asking their personal doctors or asking everybody they can find. No one wants to play, but they get to, and this is

Starting point is 01:50:36 in Oklahoma, they get to the state medical examiner, Dr. J. Chapman. And he refers to himself as an expert in Ted bodies, but not in how to get them that way. In spite of his self-confessed ignorance, Chapman made up out of thin air, the three drug protocol that would be used in executions across the country for the next three decades. Initially, he proposed a two drug protocol, but decided that if two drugs were deadly, three would be even more lethal. Chapman's cocktail included in order.

Starting point is 01:51:10 Sodium, Theopenthal, which was designed to kill like a barbiturial, overduce, pancheronium bromide, which paralyzes the diaphragm in order to stop breathing, and potassium chloride, which was intended to cause a cardiac arrest. Chapman admitted he did no research into these drugs or into how they interacted with each other, and neither did the state of Oklahoma when they adopted this procedure. Despite this, Chapman's method of execution would come to be used by every single state that had the death penalty. Elaine described her shock when she came across interviews with Chapman, who seemed completely glib about what prisoners might experience under this execution method.

Starting point is 01:51:50 And I later came across an interview of him where they asked, you know, how did you come up with the three drug protocol that every state used, every single state for 35, 40 years? And he said, I didn't do any research. I just thought about what might be useful, what you might need. You wanted two drugs so that if one didn't kill, kill him the other did. And then the interviewer said, well, why did you add a third drug? And he said, why not? I didn't do any research. Why does it matter? Why I chose it? So he makes it up.

Starting point is 01:52:27 And the state of Oklahoma adopts it, basically in an afternoon. No expert testimony, no committee hearings, no review of the medical, science, veterinary literature, nothing. And it's, it's It takes hold, and all of the other states blindly follow it. It's possible Chapman may not have cared, but if he had done any research, he would have found that the components of his three drug protocol worked at cross-purposes. Anesthesiologists believe that the amount in speed at which the sodium theopentol is administered does not produce an anesthetic effect deep enough for the executed prisoner to be unaware of what's happening to them. Meanwhile, the sedentheopenthal also slows down blood circulation so dramatically that it depresses the effectiveness of the potassium chloride, causing those receiving the drug to suffer a racing heart but not have a fatal heart attack. The combined effect, in many cases, is a slow suffocation

Starting point is 01:53:31 that involves pulmonary edema, the technical term for fluid in the lungs. In essence, with lethal injection, states slowly drown the paralyzed, who struggle but are unable to cry for help. When lethal injections have not gone, according to plan, the execution sometimes lasts hours, the agonizing deaths hidden from the general public. Some states have recently abandoned the three drug protocol, but not for humanitarian reasons. They've done so because of the difficulty of obtaining all the drugs from pharmaceutical firms that have resisted participating in capital punishment. As of this year, 24 states provide for some form of lethal injection.

Starting point is 01:54:11 And as previously mentioned, Texas launched the lethal injection era in 1982 with the execution of Charlie Brooks. In the next episode, we'll discuss that execution. We'll discuss why lethal injections peaked in the 90s, how states got around resistance from drug companies that manufactured the chemicals used in the injections, how the medical profession has worked together to thwart this particularly American machinery of death, and how this has all been a mixed blessing for the approximately 2,100 prisoners on death row. I'm Stephen Munchelli, for it could happen here. And until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Smith.

Starting point is 01:55:01 This is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and Free Whiskey. to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever.

Starting point is 01:55:38 There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked.

Starting point is 01:55:52 Like Thomas Edison and the Electives Channel. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here, we. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again. We'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture.

Starting point is 01:56:30 And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future.

Starting point is 01:57:03 better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The rich Russians falling out of Windows podcast is back. Sad oligarch season two. Since we left you in 2023 after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. We dig deeper into these odd deaths, which include everything from mushroom poisoning and mysterious heart attacks, to window clumsiness and suicide by decapitation. One thing we have found since we started back in 2022 is the information on the suspicious deaths has become much harder to find. Not just that, it seems as if state-controlled media in Russia is being

Starting point is 01:57:57 utilized to purposely confuse and contradict the reporting that gets put out. As you can probably imagine, season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Olegac on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons? Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player.

Starting point is 01:58:33 Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Starting point is 01:58:51 Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A warning. This episode includes violent content, which some listeners might find disturbing.

Starting point is 01:59:23 I'm Michael Phillips. historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Freeoff of the history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Monticelli. I'm an investigative reporter who specializes in political extremism and far-right internet culture, and I contribute to outlets like the Texas Observer, the Barb Blyer, and more. In the last episode, we began exploring the shady history behind the most popular form of capital

Starting point is 01:59:53 punishment in the United States, lethal injection. We described how one after another execution by hanging, then the electric chair, and then the gas chamber was touted as cleanest, quickest, most modern and painless way to put a person to death. Each method, however, proved more violent and gruesome than previously expected. In order to prevent a ground swell of opposition to the death penalty, politicians responded by abolishing public executions in the 1970s. to lethal injection as the newest, gentlest, and kindest method of state killing.

Starting point is 02:00:29 As discussed in the first episode, the lethal injection protocol was designed by an Oklahoma coroner, Dr. Stephen Crawford, who once admitted to an interviewer that although he was an expert in dead bodies, he didn't know how to get him that way. Authorities turned to Crawford because doctors, who dealt with living bodies, wanted nothing to do with executions. So Crawford designed a three drug protocol for executions that he made up pretty much out of thin air, reasoning that if one deadly drug was good for killing, then three drugs would be even better. The problem was that the three drugs counteract each other and would result in longer executions and in deaths that resembled slow drowning.

Starting point is 02:01:06 Crawford did no homework, and neither did the more than 30 states that eventually adopted lethal injection as a preferred method of execution. This occurred after the Supreme Court brought the death penalty back to life with its 1976 Greg versus Georgia decision. following a 10-year pause. It would not be until December 7, 1982, the state of Texas carried out the first execution by lethal injection in the world. In this episode, we'll talk to a journalist Dick Revis

Starting point is 02:01:36 who witnessed Brooks' execution. The one thing I noticed was that there were a half dozen or more lawmen in there who had on cowboy hats. They did not remove the when Charlie was killed. And I also thought that wasn't quite right. But in any case, I don't recall anybody saying anything. We were silent while all of this was going on.

Starting point is 02:02:05 And Charlie only spoke to say, Allah Wachbar, and he was dying when that happened. It was obvious that he was scared to death. Revis told us that Brooks, as he recalled it, seemingly drifted off to sleep, but that's not all that may have been occurring. According to Professor Karina Lane, the author of the recently published book Secrets of the Killing State, who you heard from in the first episode, something very different was likely going on in Brooks' mind and body. According to Lane, Brooks was slowly suffocating. Medical experts, Lane said, believe that those executed with

Starting point is 02:02:46 legal injections are often not fully unconscious and that the paralytic drugs fed into their veins prevent them from fully communicating their suffering, even as they may be aware of it. The courts that have heard this medical testimony, there was a court in Ohio and said, yeah, you know, all of the medical experts are describing acute pulmonary edema as a drowning from within. It is, you can't catch your breath, you've got fluid coming into your lungs, and you can't do anything. about it. And the court said, you know, this is the sensation akin to waterboarding. You know, we're waterboarding people to death. That's what we're actually doing. In this episode, we'll also talk about how the modern death penalty peaked in the 1990s and why pressure from drug

Starting point is 02:03:34 manufacturers and activists led not only to a decline in executions, but the revival in some states of some very old forms of execution, such as the electric chair and the firing squad. It's a fascinating but often frightening story and one that will have to continue after perhaps less gripping messages from our sponsors. took place. Many of the sheriffs were inexperienced at hanging and goring mishaps took place. Texas' last public execution unfolded on August 31st, 1923, when African American Nathan Lee was hanged before 150 spectators in Brazoria County. From 1900 to 1920, close to 70% of the inmates executed in Texas were African American.

Starting point is 02:04:42 In 1923, Texas sought to modernize and bring industrial efficiency to state. killing. All executions henceforth would be carried out at the state prison in Huntsville, and prisoners would die in an electric chair. Locals gave it a glib name. Old Sparky. The state's new killing machine got a workout the day it debuted February 8, 1925. Texas executed five prisoners that day, all black men. Between that date and July 30th, 1964, when the state electrocuted Joseph Johnson, a man convicted of fatally shooting a store owner during a robbery, Texas sent 361 inmates to the electric chair. African Americans made up 63% of the prisoners who died in that chair, while 7% of those who died in the electric chair were Mexican-American.

Starting point is 02:05:30 Texas politicians insisted that their tough-on-crime policies served as a deterrent. But in fact, from 1933 to 1964, the year Joseph Johnson was executed, the murder in Texas was 12.7 per 100,000 people, the eight highest in the United States. Nevertheless, Texas leaders have continued to justify the death penalty in spite of its seemingly negligible impact on the state's violent culture. And the violence of capital punishment was about performative toughness, not about stopping future murders, as a reporter who witnessed a hanging laments in the film in cold blood. And then, next one, next year. Same thing will happen again.

Starting point is 02:06:14 Maybe this would help to stop it. Never had. After Johnson, Texas didn't execute another inmate for 18 years. Following the Greg v. Georgia decision, Texas faced a potential public relations disaster. As we mentioned last episode, Dallas television reporter Tony Garrett filed suit to allow television cameras to film executions. And a federal district court granted a preliminary. injunction in the reporter's favor. That injunction was later overturned, but under the Texas Capitol Dome, there was a worry about what would happen to support for the death penalty

Starting point is 02:06:53 if an electrocution was broadcast live. The legislator who wrote Texas' new death penalty law to the Gregg decision said he was, quote, repulsed by the idea of an electrocution taking place in someone's living room. Leithel injection, as Professor Lane had put it, had visual appeal because it would resemble healthful medical procedures and because, quote, states have been euthanizing pets with pentode barbitol since the 1930s. Animals are typically put to sleep with a two drug protocol. First, a sedative, and then the drug that does the deed. But the three drug protocol that would be adopted by most states that allowed capital punishment

Starting point is 02:07:30 produced nightmarish results that were typically invisible to witnesses. States typically allowed family members of the crime victim to attend executions, and the condemned also got to choose witnesses. In the early days of Texas's reborn death penalty, the state's populist Democratic Attorney General Jim Maddox liked to make a show of attending each execution. And though much of the death penalty process has been shrouded in secrecy, such as who is providing the lethal chemicals, states also allowed reporters to attend executions so that they could serve as the eyes and ears of the public. In his younger days, Dick Revis was a civil rights activist who served time in Alabama jail for his efforts to secure voting rights for African Americans. Revis became a journalist, and by the early 1980s, he was a frequent contributor to Texas Monthly, one of the state's premier investigative publications.

Starting point is 02:08:19 In 1982, he got the chance to witness an event that it never happened in the United States or perhaps even the world. The Texas Department of Corrections would soon pioneer the use of lethal injection, although the first person to be put to death in this manner was still unclear. I recall a meeting with an editor, and they said, somehow they told me that there's a lady at the capital or a lady in the government in Austin, which is where I was living then, who was in charge of scheduling the executions. So I called her up, and she said, well, she didn't have any unscheduled, but she could give me the names of it was either four or five people who would. be first. And one of them was candy man, the fellow who poisoned his own child, putting poisoned in some candy at Halloween.

Starting point is 02:09:20 Revis is referring to Ronald Clark O'Brien, a Houston area optician who fell into debt. He was $100,000 deep. So he bought a life insurance policy on his eight-year-old son and daughter before he prepared five pixie sticks poisoned with potassium cyanide. And on Halloween night in 1974, he went trick-or-treating with his children, a neighbor, and that man's two children. The group went to an abandoned house and knocked on the door, and when no one answered, O'Brien convinced the rest of the group to move on. He caught up with them later and claimed that someone had, in fact, answered the door, and then he handed out four of the poisoned candies to the children.

Starting point is 02:09:58 When the O'Brien's returned home, the killer handed the fifth pixie stick to a neighborhood child. Later that night, O'Brien told his children that they could enjoy one candy from the evening and he urged them to choose the pixie sticks. And when his child Timothy complained that candy tasted bitter, O'Brien gave him Kool-Aid to wash down the poison. Timothy started vomiting and died on the way to the hospital. None of the other children tried the poison candy that night. O'Brien claimed that a malevolent stranger had poisoned the candy and he sang at his son's funeral. His story fell apart, however, when the police discovered the life insurance policies, when O'Brien was unable to identify the house where he had been supposedly handed the pixie sticks,

Starting point is 02:10:40 when the cops found out that O'Brien had purchased cyanide from a chemical store in Houston. A jury sentenced him to death on June 3, 1975. The murder created a lasting national legacy, sparking paranoia about the safety of trick-or-treating. The state of Texas knew that executing O'Brien would be politically popular and would probably boost support for the death penalty. Not knowing which resident of Texas's death row would be strapped to the gurney first, Revis ended up interviewing all but one inmate on the list he had been given. The appeals process, however, is unpredictable, and a Fort Worth man known for most of his life as Charlie Brooks

Starting point is 02:11:17 would end up winning the dubious honor of being the first to be put to death by lethal injection. He was convicted for the fatal shooting of a 26-year-old mechanic, David Gregory, during a 1976 robbery. By the time Revis interviewed him, Brooks had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif, Ahmad, Abdulrahim. That is the name we will use referring to him for the rest of the episode. Abdul Rahim had committed the robbery with another man, Woody Lords. He posed to someone wanting to buy a used car and ask to take a test drive. Gregory agreed to ride with him.

Starting point is 02:11:52 Abdul Rahim picked up Lordus. The pair threw Gregory in a car trunk, drove him to a random, Shackle Motel, tied him to a chair and taped his mouth shut. Abdul Rahim and Lourdes accused each other of firing the fatal shot. No weapon was ever found. Lourdes eventually received the death penalty, but after that was overturned, he reached an agreement with prosecutors and received a 40-year sentence. He would end up serving only 11.

Starting point is 02:12:20 The disparity in sentencing is one of the defining features of how capital punishment is carried out, even after Greg versus Georgia had supposedly addressed that issue. Shortly before his execution, Abdulrahim insisted on his innocence, but according to Revis, the condemned man was lying. Revis described to us his relationship with Abdulrahim, aka Charlie Brooks. Charlie was very alert, past on his feet, engaged. He was not moping around sad. He had a sense of humor.

Starting point is 02:12:55 He told me in the first interview I had with him that he was innocent and that this was racial discrimination that they executed more blacks than whites. And I told him, oh, what you want is for them to execute more white people, huh? And that's stunning because I think no one had ever said that to him. but that would do away with racial discrimination, and there's lots of white people need executing, too, was my way of thinking. And he didn't get mad at me or anything. He kind of laughed at it himself after he paused to understand the question. Then he kind of laughed at it himself.

Starting point is 02:13:43 But I would say he was even until they're getting strapped down, he was in control of his own body his mind was in great shape he lied to me about about whether or not he was innocent Brooks told Revis that although the gun went off he didn't pull the trigger it was an accident at some point I got him to say that oh the gun went off and I went and pull the transcript of

Starting point is 02:14:19 criminal trial. The gun was a revolver, not an automatic. Revolvers don't go off. To test that theory, I even took one I had and banged it on a table while it was loaded and all, and nothing happened. Revolvers don't go off until they've been cocked. Unless they've been cocked, they can't go We'll return to the story of the world's first execution by lethal injection and the deceptive way it was used to win public support for capital punishment after this lovely ad break. Court rejected his appeal for the last time. Shortly before the execution was scheduled began, Jack Strickland, the prosecutor in Abdul Rahim's murder trial, had second thoughts about the differences between the condemned man's sentence and that of his accomplice. Strickland testified on Abdul Rahim's behalf, but to no avail. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals

Starting point is 02:15:37 said the defense team had presented no new information that would justify a stay of execution. Just after midnight, State Attorney General Mark White called officials in Huntsville and told them that the historic execution could begin. From 1982, the year of Abdulahem's execution until 2011, Texas allowed prisoners facing executions a choice of a last meal of their choosing. Abdulrahim's request, however, was rejected. He told me that for his last meal, he wanted fried shrimp and oysters. And he said he had told the authorities that that's what he wanted for his last meal. When I got down there, I was told that there was no shellfish in the prison system's

Starting point is 02:16:29 kitchens. And Charlie had to pick. He finally picked steak in Peach Cobbler. but I felt bad about that because the prison people knew that they could go to the grocery store and buy whatever Charlie wanted and they didn't do it.

Starting point is 02:16:49 And it was sort of, I thought it was an indignity they inflicted on him. So when I went down for the execution, I went down in the afternoon. Execution was that night. I went out and laid fish. just how do you say

Starting point is 02:17:09 I don't know because of the situation Texas would end this final meal for prisoners on death row in 2011 that's because of Lawrence Russell Brewer

Starting point is 02:17:21 who was one of three white supremacists who chained an African American man James Byrd to the back of a car in Jasper, Texas and dragged him to death on June 7th, 1998

Starting point is 02:17:31 as a last act of bitter defiance on the date of Brewer's execution, September 21st, 2011. Brewer ordered a last meal that included two chicken-fried steaks, a triple meat-bacon cheeseburger, fried okra, a pound of barbecue, three fajitas, a meat-lovers pizza, a pint of ice cream, and a slab of peanut butter fudge with crust of peanuts. When he received all the food, he refused to touch a bite.

Starting point is 02:17:58 A state senator, John Whitmire, complained bitterly at the waste an expense lavished on such an infamous killer, and prison officials immediately changed the policy. Today, those facing execution are now only fed the same meal other prisoners receive that day. Revis believes that the process of being strapped down to a hospital like gurney is humiliating to those being executed. Men die with more dignity when they're on their feet, for example, is walking to a scaffold. When they stood, feel in control of their lives. The hardest thing about lethal injections

Starting point is 02:18:39 is that they strap you down where you can't move and you're sitting there absolutely helpless until they feel of drugstack effect. Revis described the atmosphere in the death chamber as Abdulrahim was executed as tense and quiet. A prison girlfriend as Revis describes her, Vanessa Sapp was present, as were numerous officials. First of all, the room is too small.

Starting point is 02:19:10 My recollection is there was a circular set of chairs threading out 10 feet, 20 feet in a curve. It may have been a corner, but it was barely room to hold the lawman who wanted to witness the execution. And Vanessa Sapp, and three reporters. His wife was not present. She didn't want to be, and she didn't want kids to see it. As for the audience reaction, I don't recall that there was anything dramatic.

Starting point is 02:19:49 No, I'd seen more routine. Inspired by the story of Carol Chessman, the author and rapist executed in the gas chamber in 1960, who worked out a signal he could. sent to reporters if he was suffering during the execution. Revis and Abdulrahim worked out a similar arrangement. If Abdulrahim was suffering as he was dying, he would shake his head. Revis would later regret making that arrangement. I interviewed him before the execution, and we came up with an idea, unfortunately it was mine, that if he felt pain while he was dying, that he should shake his head.

Starting point is 02:20:34 So I decided. And I say it's unfortunate because as things were, we were unable to, I was unable to determine this if he was giving me that signal. De Revis, it appeared that Abdulrahim had simply drifted off to sleep.

Starting point is 02:20:54 He seemed to die peacefully. I had to put down a dog a couple of years ago or had the dog put down and I was with him while that happened and I couldn't how do you say after seeing those two things

Starting point is 02:21:13 I said I wish I could die that way and there was no evidence with my dog for example that there was any pain it was like I put him to sleep and I think that's what they did with Charlie but it would take a doctor to know. Of course, Abdulrahim's death was the first of its kind.

Starting point is 02:21:38 As we mentioned last time, the three drug protocol that was used by most states over the last three decades was concocted out of thin air by someone no expertise on the effect of these drugs together on the human body. Abdulrahim's execution was a medical experiment conducted with no prior research. Professor Lane said that since Abdulahim's execution, doctors have had a chance to perform autopsies on those executed by lethal injection and witnesses have heard the cries of those who are able to speak while dying on the gurney. You know, the state expert is saying, oh, this first drug, you're going to be 99.99% of the public

Starting point is 02:22:19 would be, you know, out and dead within a minute. You don't even have to worry about those other super-torturous drugs. And it's like, yeah, that's not what was happening. They said they would stop breathing within a minute. And there was some pretty prominent litigation in the Borales case out in California, where they looked at the executions by lethal injection and said, over half of them, they actually did not stop breathing within a minute. In fact, it was eight to nine minutes. And it did not kill them within two.

Starting point is 02:22:55 minutes of injecting that third drug, which is called potassium chloride, but it's referred to as liquid fire in it. It chemically burns the veins as it raises to the heart where it induces a cardiac arrest. So they're like, you know, the experts like, oh, you know, that it's going to bring death in two minutes. That didn't happen. Like none of this was happening as the state and the state's experts were so confidently just saying. And it turns, out, you know, no one had ever studied these drugs in these amounts. Nobody had ever injected these drugs in these amounts into people. This is not what was used. I mean, that's interesting too. Like, this is not the drug that was used to euthanized pets. This is not the drug that was

Starting point is 02:23:45 used for physician assisted suicide. So it's like three totally different drugs. And, you know, And not only is nobody studied or nobody knew how they would work, but nobody could have predicted how they would have worked together. As discussed in our last episode, the lethal injection that killed Abdul Rahim included three drugs, sodium theopenthal, the heavy sedative, panchoronium bromide meant to suffocate the prisoner, and potassium chloride meant to trigger a cardiac arrest.

Starting point is 02:24:18 As Professor Lane wrote in her book, Secrets of the Killing State, Because of one of the drugs used in three drug protocol, the drugs work poorly when combined. Quote, the panchorium bromide couples the inability to breathe with the inability to struggle. They cannot fight or scream or even rive in pain. But all would seem calm on the surface. Texas' experiment in lethal injection was a political success, but for a while the novelty of the revived death penalty brought back memories of some public hangings. students from nearby Sam Euston State University would show up and hold drunken parties outside the prison in Huntsville on the night of executions, cheering loudly enough that they could be heard inside the death chamber.

Starting point is 02:25:03 The night that Ronald Clark O'Brien, the infamous Candyman, who killed his son for insurance money, died, a crowd of about 300 celebrated outside, some yelling trick-or-treat at the scheduled time of the execution and pelting anti-death penalty protesters with candy. A huge cheer erupted when the officials of the Walls unit left, signaling that O'Brien had died, a local bar through a Halloween party. Texas politicians made support for the death penalty central to their campaigns in this era. In the 1990 Democratic Party gubernatorial primary, former Texas Governor Mark White faced off against the state attorney general Jim Maddox and the eventual winner, State Treasurer, Ann Richards. White and Maddox ran almost identical campaign ads, both walking past larger than the state general. in-life mugshots of murderers who were executed under their watch and claiming credit for meeting out justice. Consider this ad for White. These hardened criminals will never again murder, rape, or deal drugs. As governor, I made sure

Starting point is 02:26:05 they received the ultimate punishment, death, and Texas is a safer place for it. But tough talk isn't enough. The criminals know how to tangle up the courts and delay executions. To bring them to justice, take strength and dedication. Because if the governor flinches, they win. Only a governor can make executions happen. I did, and I will. The popularity of the death penalty was sealed for decades. Starting with Abdul Rahim, Texas has led the United States in state killing.

Starting point is 02:26:37 As of September 27th, Texas had carried out 596 executions, more than 36% of all of the executions that have unfolded since the United States Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resists. resume in this country in 1976. More than 40% of those executed in Texas since 1982 have been African American. Almost 30% have been Mexican-American. In 2024, Texas executed six people. Only one was white.

Starting point is 02:27:06 Meanwhile, Texas put to death 63 prisoners who committed their crimes before they reached the age of 21. According to the Texas Coalition against the death penalty, since 1973, 18 people sent to Texas death row were later exonerated out of about 200 nationally, and the group argues that there is strong evidence that at least six put to death in Huntsville were actually innocent. Professor Lane argues that not only does death by lethal injection violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, but that most defendants facing the death penalty cannot afford adequate legal counsel and that an alarming number of those sent to death row

Starting point is 02:27:45 and in some cases executed, have been innocent. 200 people have been exonerated from death row, 200. And when you put that next to the 1,600 executions that we've had in the modern era, what we really have is for every eight executions, there's one exoneration. That is a terrible, terrible number, right? For every eight times we kill someone, we almost killed the wrong person. And then there was this National Academy of Sciences report that came out. This is the Gross report, Samuel Gross.

Starting point is 02:28:20 And they said, here's a conservative estimate. 4.1% of all people on death row today are factually innocent. 4.1%. That's 1 in 25. According to the Texas Coalition against a death penalty, as of 2014, the total legal cost of executing a. prisoner was nearly $4 million, as opposed to the $1.3 million spent to keep someone in prison for life. Lane argues that morality aside, capital punishment is catastrophically expensive.

Starting point is 02:28:57 Imposing sentences of life without parole are what criminal justice experts call LWOP, would not only eliminate the risk of making an irreversible mistake by putting an innocent person to death, but also save taxpayers' money. This is an example. Here's Florida. $51 million. $51 million. That is what Florida spends every year to maintain the death penalty over and above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with LWOP. And if you look at the costs that Florida spent and then look at the executions that they had, how much did it cost per execution, you know, to maintain the system and then Of course, the product of it, executions, what you're getting out of it per execution, $24 million. $24 million per execution. You know, and I'm a former prosecutor, and I just have to say, what could you do with $24 million? You know, I'd take $8 million and I'd put it into victim services.

Starting point is 02:30:05 Now we're getting into the death penalty more broadly, but one of the things I've found, as I'm on this book tour and on the road. I'm talking to survivors. Their family members have been slain. And one, a woman in Tennessee is particularly, she's coming to mind right now. And she said, listen, when my son was murdered, I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was afraid I was going to lose my job. I was afraid I was going to lose my house. I needed therapy. I needed services. I needed child care to help. I couldn't do that. My kids needed therapy. We had all of these needs. And the state of Tennessee said, you know, Department of Mental Health said, we don't have that money. Sorry. You know, and so she said, we're spending it all. In fact, what she said is it's selfish.

Starting point is 02:30:57 You're spending millions upon millions upon millions on death sentences and, you know, on the death penalty when it could actually actually go to the people who need it. Regardless of the financial costs, death by lethal injection has become so commonplace that executions rarely catch public attention. Nationally, 1,377 people have been put to death by some form of lethal injection since 1982. Those executed suffered not only because of the chemicals used,

Starting point is 02:31:28 but because, as was predicted in 1890, medical professionals have refused to participate. Because of ethical rules prohibiting the harm of patients, doctors and nurses and paramedics generally refuse to administer the lethal cocktails used in death chambers. That task generally falls to seriously undertrained prison personnel, who are asked to secure an IV line for condemned prisoners who often because of age, history of drug abuse, or other health problems have veins that are difficult to access. Heavily muscled prisoners, those who are morbidly obese, and those with dark skin can also

Starting point is 02:32:01 present challenges for the amateur phlebotomists trying to set up an execution. Prisons sometimes lack the right equipment, such as the correct-sized syringes or proper tubing. Lethal injection drugs are pre-made and have to be mixed by personnel, not properly trained in chemistry, which results in errors in dosing. Often, people with any kind of medical competence who participate in executions are the ones with the shadiest ethical records. Professor Lane came across one case in which the state of Missouri lied on a doctor who ignored ethical guidelines and participate in the capital punishment. process. He was incorrectly mixing the chemicals, said that the prisoners were only receiving half the dose of the anesthesia meant to reduce the pain of the condemned as required by law. Dr. Lane shared the horrifying discoveries lawyers who condemned prisoners made about that

Starting point is 02:32:52 particular doctor. They looked at the protocol that was litigated and authorized by a federal court, and it was five grams of this particular drug. And they looked at the execution logs of the last several, and states were using 2.5. And so, you know, they filed suit. That's half the anesthetic, you know. And the state, you know, wrote back and said, we are not using half the anesthetic. It must be the pharmacy logs that are wrong. We're going to track that down and figure out why they are wrong. But we rest assure you, we are not violating the protocol. We're doing the amount that was least. authorized. Well, they have to come back the next day and say, oh, actually, the logs were right. We were wrong. We were injecting half of the amount. And so the court gives the lawyers

Starting point is 02:33:51 for the condemned prisoners a limited deposition to question this doctor behind a veil, like they didn't know who he was, but to question him under oath. And, you know, they're like, why are you using half? And you said, well, I'm dyslexic. And so sometimes I make mistakes. And yet, Missouri stuck with them and said, no, we have every confidence in them. They lose that. The trial court, the federal court says, this guy can't be anywhere near. Look, the whole thing, to the extent it's humane, requires you to meticulously measure and mix chemicals in liquids. And so you can't have someone who just makes mistakes. And then in the meantime, investigative journalists, which, you know, I have to take my hat off. I tip my hat to investigative journalist. But they were like,

Starting point is 02:34:46 gee, who is this, you know, dyslexic doctor? And they find out his identity. You know, he admits it's him. He had over 20 malpractice suits. He had had his hospital privileges revoked at two hospitals. He had been censured by the medical board. So, you know, you're asking some want to do something, to participate in something that is fundamentally against your reason for being as a doctor. And, you know, from time to time, they find people, but I think they're outliers. What I have found is they are outliers not only on ethics, but in other ways too. Experts on capital punishment like Lane aren't comfortable with describing executions that go off script as, quote, botched, even if it's a commonly used term.

Starting point is 02:35:36 No matter how the execution proceeds, the end result is the same. The inmate is dead. However, there is no question that killing people by lethal injection is so complicated and require so much skill on the part of the executioners that the process is typically far more agonizing than death penalty advocates tell the public. According to the anti-capital punishment organization, the Death Penalty Information Center, out of 19 executions in 2022, Seven were botched, meaning that the death took far longer than expected, that prison personnel had to jab the condemned people multiple times to get an IV line working, or worse. When Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett on April 29, 2014, the state used an untested combination of three drugs. The sizes of the syringes and the amount of drugs used were wrong.

Starting point is 02:36:25 Prison personnel made repeated mistakes as they tried to insert the needle for the IV, even though, the American Medical Association prohibits its members from participating in executions, a doctor was on hand for the Lockett fiasco. The physician tried but failed to insert an IV into the jugular vein in Lockett's neck. The doctor then performed a surgical procedure called a cut down, which is a deep surgical incision through the skin, muscle, and fat performed to expose a central vein under Lockett's clavicle. The procedure was bloody and also failed, and the execution then tried and failed to access a vein through Lockett's feet. Eventually, they tried to insert an IV through the femoral vein in the upper thigh,

Starting point is 02:37:09 a procedure only the most skilled surgeons have mastered. Unfortunately, the available needle was the wrong length for it to work properly. Lockett reportedly was stoic throughout this repeated assault on his body. After an hour of this torture had passed, the execution team was finally able to inject the deadly drugs. Lockett groaned, convulsed, and at one point was asked, are you unconscious? According to witnesses, Lockett opened his eyes and said, No, I am not.

Starting point is 02:37:35 After appearing to fall asleep, he began to moan, arched his back, and kicked a foot before he strained against the straps holding him, against the gurney, and he tried to get up. Lockett mumbled, something is wrong, oh man, and this shit is fucking up my mind. The prison warden ordered the blinds closed as the execution team scrambled.

Starting point is 02:37:55 Swelling had developed where the IV had been inserted and was blocking the flow of, the third and final lethal drug. The doctor was summoned to insert a needle in Lockett's other femoral vein, but Lockett was bleeding heavily and the blood backed up into the IV line. Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallon had already decided to halt the execution, but by this point Lockett's heart had irreversibly slowed down. He subsequently died of heart failure. The entire execution, from the first attempt to stick an IV in his veins to his death, less than one hour and 47 minutes. That was one of the longest executions in American history. The state of

Starting point is 02:38:34 Oklahoma later falsely claimed that Lockett had been unconscious the entire time. In 2022, another so-called botched lethal injection, that of Joe Nathan James and Alabama lasted three hours. In Ohio and elsewhere, executions had to be abandoned when the prison staff couldn't get an IV going. As we mentioned in the first episode, Reverend Jeff Hood is a priest under the old Catholic right, who by the time we interviewed had accompanied 10 men during their executions. He said that even the most professional execution is brutal, but that some states, because of a regrettable amount of practice, are much better at killing than others. I do think that some states know what they're doing more than others.

Starting point is 02:39:19 And I think that Texas knows what they're doing. you don't see botched or delayed or mishandled executions in Texas. They go very quickly, and when you talk to these guys, that's what they say they would prefer. If you're going to be executed, you would want it to go as quickly as possible. Yes, there are some executions that look horrific. There are other executions that don't go according to plan, but don't get a lot of attention, but they're all horrible. and I think they all have to be talked about as such.

Starting point is 02:39:55 Whether it's because of the awareness of the messy and undeniably painful executions, like those of Lockett and James, the more than 200 death row exonerations achieved by groups like the Innocence Project, the growing skepticism of law enforcement amongst young people, or the greater consciousness of how racism warps the entire criminal justice system. There's no question that the death penalty is the least, popular it has been in the past hundred years. Nor is there doubt that the rate of executions in the United States has dropped well below its peak during the height of the war and crime

Starting point is 02:40:32 under the Clinton administration, when in 1999, 315 death sentences were handed down, or in 1996, when 98 prisoners were executed. In any case, deaths like lockets are bad for business for the pharmaceutical companies who have produced the drugs used in lethal injections. In the next and final episode of this three-part series on the shady business of lethal injection, we'll talk about how some states like Texas have been forced to turn to the black market or the so-called gray market to buy lethal drugs, as pharmaceutical companies have restricted the purchase of those drugs for that purpose. We also talked to Jeff Hood about how the difficulty in obtaining those drugs

Starting point is 02:41:13 has led states like Alabama to turn to one of the most gruesome forms of execution yet And we'll also hear the story of race Bouillon, a victim of a hate crime who fought to prevent the execution of his white supremacist attacker. And finally, we'll explore whether the death penalty might be on its last legs in the United States. I'm Stephen Onchelli, for it could happen here. Until next time, I'm Michael Phillips. Thanks for listening. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business.

Starting point is 02:42:08 Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey

Starting point is 02:42:23 to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.

Starting point is 02:42:32 And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history

Starting point is 02:42:45 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again, we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics, and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions.

Starting point is 02:43:24 Like, are we heading towards another financial crash, like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially, go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now because it is, but my goal here

Starting point is 02:43:49 is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The rich Russians falling out of Windows podcast is back. Sad Olegarch

Starting point is 02:44:07 Season 2. Since we left you in 2023 after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. We dig deeper into these odd deaths, which include everything from mushroom poisoning and mysterious heart attacks, to window clumsiness and suicide by decapitation. One thing we have found since we started back in 2022 is the information on the suspicious deaths has become much harder to find. Not just that, it seems as if state-controlled media in Russia is being utilized to purposely confuse and contradict the reporting that gets put out. As you can probably imagine,

Starting point is 02:44:52 season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Olegac on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons? Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds

Starting point is 02:45:19 like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so

Starting point is 02:45:35 psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch? into the show. Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes.

Starting point is 02:45:54 Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A warning. This episode includes violent content, which some listeners might find disturbing. I'm Michael Phillips, an historian and the author of a history of racism in Dallas called White Metropolis, and the co-author with longtime journalist Betsy Frioff, of a history of eugenics in Texas called The Purifying Knife. And I'm Stephen Montchelli. I'm an investigative journalist in Dallas who specializes in political extremism and the far right. And I report for places like the Texas Observer, the Barbed Wire, and more.

Starting point is 02:46:35 Like millions across the United States, Mark Anthony Shurley, Stroman was startled by the events then unfolded on the terrible morning of September 11th, 2001. The disbelief that greeted that terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center of the Pentagon can be heard on the first announcement of the tragedy on a Dallas Talk radio station, WBAP. All right, thank you, our 751, nine minutes before 8 o'clock at News Talk 820, WBAP, here on the Tuesday morning. And the reason I am hesitating here, there's a word of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan. And the world trade, a plane actually crashing into the side of the World Trade Center. We're going to have details for you, all that from ABC News, and just a couple of moments.

Starting point is 02:47:28 Stroman later wrote that September 11th filled him with a great sense of rage, hatred, loss, bitterness, and utter degradation. He blamed Arabs and Muslims as a group for the events that day and wanted, quote, those Arabs to feel the same sense of insecurity about their immediate surroundings. I wanted to feel the same sense of vulnerability and uncertainty on American soil. Stroman, a Dallas resident, had already served two prison terms during which he had joined the Aryan Brotherhood Prison Gang. Addicted to meth and sporting neo-Nazi tattoos, he began cruising Dallas in his 1972 Chevy Suburban. hunting for, quote-unquote, Arabs. As he later admitted, he wasn't entirely sure what an Arab looked like, but nevertheless, he stalked people with, quote, shawls on their faces.

Starting point is 02:48:17 Stroman launched his crusade by running cars into ditches if he suspected the vehicles were driven by Muslims. He escalated his campaign of terror on September 17, 2001. He fatally shot Wakhar Hassan, a 46-year-old Pakistani immigrant, as the clerk grilled a hamburger and at Mom's Grocery in Dallas. A few days later, Stroman found his next victim, a former pilot for Bangladesh's Air Force named Race Bouillon. Mr. Bouillon, who has experienced robberies prior to his encounter with Stroman,

Starting point is 02:48:51 told us what happened that day. September 21st, 2001, it was Friday around June. A customer walked in wearing bandana, sunglasses, baseball cap, and holding a double barrel, a solid double-barrel shotgun on his right side. And from the previous robbery experience, I thought it would be in the robbery. So I put all the money on the counter and offered in the cash as soon as he walked in. And I said, sir, here is all the money.

Starting point is 02:49:25 Take it. But please do not shoot me. Basically, I begged for my life. And his gaze remained fixed. And then he mumbled the question, what are you from? Before I could say anything more than, excuse me, he pulled the trigger from point blank rent. I felt it first, like a million bees were singing my friends,

Starting point is 02:49:54 and I looked down and saw blood-pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head. and I remember screaming mom up my voice and I looked down saw blood pouring like an open faucet from the right side of my head and then I look left I saw the gunman still standing

Starting point is 02:50:16 pointing the gun directly at my face and I realize that if I do not you know do something to show that I'm dying he might shoot me again so I fell to the floor and he finally left a few seconds.

Starting point is 02:50:35 Bion survived the attack, but he was blinded in his right eye. He would endure not only multiple painful surgeries, but also the unique financial horrors of the American health care system. Meanwhile, Stroman was not done terrorizing the Dallas area Muslim community. On October 4th, the shooting spree came to an end when the white supremacist pulled up to a shell station in Mesquite at about 6.45 in the morning and ordered the clerk, 49-year-old Vasudev Patel, a Hindu immigrant from India,

Starting point is 02:51:03 to hand over all the money from the cash register. Patel reached under the counter for a 22-caliber pistol, and seeing the gun, Stroman fired his weapon. The bullet struck Patel in his chest and killed him. A security camera captured the scene, and Dallas police arrested Stroman the next day. At Stroman's home, investigators found a semi-automatic rifle, and Uzi knockoff, a 44 magnum, and a 45 cult.

Starting point is 02:51:32 They also found evidence that Stroman planned to attack a mosque in a nearby suburb. The jury found Stroman guilty of capital murder on April 5, 2002, and sentenced him to die by lethal injection. The story then took an unexpected turn. During a 2009 pilgrimage to Mecca, Bouillon said he realized that simply forgiving his assailant would not be be enough. He believed they had a moral obligation to do all they could to prevent Stroman's death. Bullion filed a lawsuit attempting to halt Stroman's execution. Despite of Bouillon's

Starting point is 02:52:07 best effort, the suit was rejected by state and federal courts, and Stroman died by lethal injection July 20, 2011. Bion's campaign of mercy, however, made a major impact on capital punishment in the United States. He effectively shamed European drug companies into banning the use of the products used in the lethal injection that killed Stroman. In turn, some states like Texas decided to start buying lethal drugs illegally. In this final episode on the history of the lethal injection in the United States, Beyond will tell us about his campaign against capital punishment and its impact. We'll also speak to a priest, the Reverend Jeff Hood, who has accompanied by the time of this interview, 10 men to their executions. He will also tell us why he has devoted himself to

Starting point is 02:52:51 showing love to people so despised and also address the future of the death penalty in the United States. After being blinded in a hate crime, race beyond struggled through numerous traumas. He told us that after getting shot at the convenience story where he worked, he ran to a barbershop next door. There, he had the first sight of his injuries. I caught myself in the mirror, and the image reflected back was like something like a horror movie. And, uh, On my way to the hospital, I felt my eyes were closing. I felt that my time was up. And, you know, while I was reciting from the Holy Quran and asking God for mercy and forgiveness

Starting point is 02:53:34 and giving me a second chance, I also begged him to, you know, to send my life to give me a chance to live. And I promised God that if you give me a chance to live, I would help others. In the emergency room, doctors put Beyond on life support. For a time, his condition was touch and go. Biyon, a young immigrant, living on his salary as a convenience store clerk, said that when he next opened his eyes and doctors told him he had survived, he cried tears of joy. So my eyes were full of tears, not from the pain, but from the joy of still being alive. But that joy need not last long because the hospital where I was taken was private and expensive,

Starting point is 02:54:15 and I had no health insurance at that time. So they discharged me within a couple of hours and told me to arrange. follow-up medical treatments on my own. So, you know, the first part of my American nightmare was being shot in the face after 9-11 and second part began when I was kicked up from the hospital. So as a result of this shooting, I, you know, underwent several eye surgeries. Unfortunately, though I lost a mission in one eye. I still carry more than three dozen shotgun pallets in my face.

Starting point is 02:54:46 And my father suffered a stroke when he heard what happened to me. but luckily he survived. I lost my fiancé, but gained more than $60,000 in medical bills. As Stroman languished on Texas death row, Bouillon began picking up the pieces. I moved on rebuilding my life. I worked in a restaurant and went back to school.

Starting point is 02:55:10 And slowly I was, you know, climbing the letter and getting better in my own, you know, life journey. And in 2009, I went to Macca for Coteamage. a mother. And it was in Nekka, I deeply realized that, though I forgave my attacker Marks, it was not an hour. I felt that, you know, by executing Mark, we would simply lose a human life with the dealing with the root cause. I strongly believe that if he was given a chance, he might be able to become a better human being. And I began to see him as a human being

Starting point is 02:55:47 like me, not just simply a killer. I saw him as a victim too. And I did be felt for him, and I remember my promise on my death death, that if I get a chance to live, I would help others, and I felt that I need to start with him first to give my promise. So I returned from Mecca with a very changed heart with a clarity, and then you found purpose, and I launched a campaign, to try and save my attack and fly from Texas death. We'll pick up the story of Beyond's campaign to spare Stroman's life and how his efforts changed the history of the American death penalty after a word from our sponsors.

Starting point is 02:56:40 Dr. Rick Halperin began teaching human rights courses at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1990, where he now heads one of only nine human rights programs at universities in the country. He has also chaired Amnesty International's Board of Directors three times, and since 1972 has been an anti-death penalty activist. Halperin became famous on Texas death row as a result of his efforts. And after Stroman was informed of his July 20th, 2011 execution date, the condemned man wrote a letter to Halperin asking for help in making final arrangements,

Starting point is 02:57:12 such as locating an affordable undertaker. By coincidence, shortly after Stroman reached out to Halperin, the professor received a surprise visitor to his office. The stranger was Strowman's victim, Race Bouillon. Bion, who had recently become an American citizen, hoped Halperin could help him find a creative and effective way to fulfill the promise he had made to God when he thought he was dying. He began his campaign to save Stroman's life. Bion, Halperin, and another human rights activist, Hadi Jawad, carried their efforts from Dallas. to the state capital in Austin and as far as the European Parliament. A weak point in the American death penalty machinery was its reliance on companies that

Starting point is 02:57:55 provided the lethal injection chemicals. In 2011, Italy, an anti-death penalty nation, successfully pressured the Illinois company Hospira to stop selling sodium theopentol, the muscle relaxant used in the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in Texas since the early 1980s. That same year, reprieve, a British human rights nonprofit, arranged for Beryon to travel to Europe to meet face to face with executives at the corporate headquarters of the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck. Aware that the meeting would put them in the international spotlight, Lundbeck, three days prior, announced that they would stop shipping the sedative Numbetol, which was being used as a substitute for sodium theopentol to American prison systems. Bion described his conversation with the Lundbeck company. an interview with us.

Starting point is 02:58:44 After one hour of great conversation, they agreed to write a letter to the governor of Texas, asking him not to use their product to kill the human being. The state of Texas, however, was unwilling to grant a crime victim his fervent wish. Even though Texas politicians repeatedly claim they execute murderers to bring the victim's closure, Bouillon said he was denied this by the Texas Board of Paroles and pardons,

Starting point is 02:59:10 and then Governor Rick Perry. I reached out to the prison system and asking for a mediation dialogue. But unfortunately, you know, they turned down my request multiple times. And the reason they showed was it would re-victimized me. So basically, a mediation dialogue I saw would be helpful for me to find closure, to find a lot of answers. But it was, for them, it would be a revictimization process for me. So they rejected my request multiple times. And it really made me sad that when they needed me to testify in the court,

Starting point is 02:59:56 the conviction to get the death penalty, I was a good victim. But then when I tried to exercise my right as a victim to have an mediation dialogue, I became a bad victim because I asked for my rights. In his final hour, Stroman spoke directly to his surviving victim. I had the opportunity to talk to him off the phone before he was executed. And it was the day of his execution where he put my name as one of the people he would be able to talk. So I was lucky enough to talk to him. And when he came on the phone, I was about to go to the court to give a last time.

Starting point is 03:00:39 fight to, you know, set the execution. So I was thinking, what would I say to a human being who is about to be executed in a couple of hours? And I'm going to, you know, go to a court to give a, you know, a last fight to, you know, see if he could save him. So I was very emotional when he came on the phone. I told him that, Mark, you know for sure that I never hated you. I forgive you, and I'm doing my best to, you know, save your life, you know, to this court hearing.

Starting point is 03:01:16 And he said that ways, I never expected that from you. And I love you, bro. And that brought tears into my eyes that it's the same human being who shocked me for no reasons other than having hate and biode disease are. And now 10 years later, he saw me. He could see me as his brother, and he said, he loved me, why he could see me as his brother 10 years ago, and why he could say the same thing 10 years ago. So, you know, at least it helped me to find colder a little bit. It helped me to move forward.

Starting point is 03:01:55 At least I had the chat to talk to my attacker. And then gave me a lot of hope that people can change. The execution itself, however, left beyond cold. Well, definitely, this execution, it was not for the victims, because the victims and the victims' family members requested and also fought for clemency. You know, we went ahead and requested the governor of Texas, the Board of Courants and Paroles that do not execute him in our names, in a show mercy. Mark Stroman died as scheduled on July 20, 2011, and though Beyond and Halperin failed to stop it, they had helped start an internet. national movement to thwart the ability of states to carry out such lethal injections. As Professor Corrine Elaine revealed in her book, Secrets of the Killing State, after Hospira

Starting point is 03:02:47 stopped producing sodium theopentol, the vacuum was filled by a fly-by-night company called Dream Pharma. The drug distributor, quote, turned out to be two desks at a filing cabinet hidden in the back of a London driving school, as Lane wrote. Once this operation was exposed, Great Britain banned sodium theopental sales to the United States. By December 2011, the entire European Union had tightened export controls on any chemicals that could potentially be used in executions. The new expanded EU ban made life much more difficult for would-be executioners in the United States. In 2012, when the state of Missouri announced it would use the drug pro-Pufal as an anesthetic in its executions,

Starting point is 03:03:32 The EU said it would cut off exports to that drug, which is used for surgeries in the United States about 50 million times a year. Combined these moves created a lethal injection drug shortage that changed how executions took place. In 2012, Texas moved then to a single drug protocol using penobarbital alone, rather than the old three-drug cocktail made out of thin air by Oklahoma coroner Stephen Coleman back in the 1970s. Autopsies reveal that prisoners executed with this single drug protocol die from pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid. Medical experts believe prisoners suffer intense chest pain as they suffocate even if they appear fully unconscious. Execution witnesses also say they have seen prisoners' eyes pop open,

Starting point is 03:04:18 their eyes fill with tears, has seen them pull against restraints, and have heard them groan and clasped their jaws during such executions. As the drugs needed to carry out lethal injections become harder to find, States have to rely on shady tactics so they can keep on killing. Officials have lied to pharmaceutical companies that are buying drugs to provide medical care for prisoners that they later use in the death chamber. Death penalty states have violated federal laws. They have illegally swapped these drugs across state line or they bought them on the black market or the legally marginal so-called gray market. Professor Lane describes the shady lengths the state of Ohio went to in order to buy these drugs.

Starting point is 03:05:00 The state took $15,000 in cash in a suitcase. I mean, you can't make this stuff up, you know, and chartered a private plane to fly over to Washington where they did an under-the-table deal for drugs with this little pharmacy. You know, you need a prescription for these drugs. And so here's a pharmacy that for $15,000 is willing to sell drugs under the table. And allegedly, in a Walmart parking lot. To cope with the shrinking supply, states have made illegal purchases overseas. Like other states, Texas has tried to circumvent tightening restrictions by purchasing death penalty supplies from loosely regulated compounding pharmacies, and some of them have been here in the states. In 2018, it was revealed that Texas repeatedly bought drugs from the Green Park Compounding Pharmacy in Houston, which is a company that had been fined 48 times by federal regulators for safety violations, including providing the wrong medication to children who were subsequently hospitalized. The number of agonizingly prolonged executions in Texas

Starting point is 03:06:06 suggest that the drugs the state buys are often out of date or impure. Finding out where the lethal drugs are coming from is becoming increasingly difficult. A number of states have passed laws may get illegal to report on who carries out the execution, what companies supply the drugs, or how these drugs were purchased. In any case, the difficulty in getting execution drugs has led to a decline in the death penalty across the nation. At the time of the landmark 1972, Furman v. Georgia case that temporarily halted executions in the United States, 40 states had the death penalty. Currently, only 27 due. In 2024, four states alone, Alabama, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas carried out 76 percent of the executions that

Starting point is 03:06:54 unfolded in the United States. Some of the remaining states with the death penalty on the have responded to the shortage of lethal drugs by authorizing the use of the firing squad and killing prisoners with nitrogen gas hypoxia, which suffocates them by forcing them to breathe pure nitrogen. After another ad break, you'll hear from a priest who has witnessed executions in 10 different states, including death by nitrous hypoxia, and we'll end this three-part series by discussing the future of the death penalty. Born in the South Atlanta neighborhood in Georgia, Jeff Hood grew up in a religiously conservative home

Starting point is 03:07:42 and was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister when he was only 22. His worldview, however, was shaken when he attended to his religious mentor who was dying of lung cancer. Before he passed away, the 75-year-old confessed to Hood, quote, I'm gay and I've always been. Hood described this moment as earth-shattering, and his religious views transformed dramatically

Starting point is 03:08:04 from what he later called his backwards thinking. When Hood moved to Dallas in the early 2010s, he became well known in his new home, as he fought to make local churches more inclusive of the LGBTQ-plus community, and he got arrested along with other clergy outside of the White House in 2014 when he was protesting President Barack Obama's aggressive campaign to deport migrants. On July 7th, 2016, Hood led a Black Lives Matter protest in downtown Dallas, during which a sniper opened fire and targeted police officers. Micah X. Johnson, an Iraq war veteran, was enraged by the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota. So Johnson shot and killed five police officers, the deadliest incident for law enforcement since September 11, 2001.

Starting point is 03:08:53 police killed Johnson that evening by detonating a bomb carried by a robot to the shooter's hideout in a parking garage, marking the first execution by robot in American history. Revin Hood was traumatized not only by the sniper attack, but also when he got scapegoated for the deaths that day. Fox News host Megan Kelly put a target on Hood's back in the aftermath of the sniper attack. Jeff Hood, he was one of the organizers of the march. quickly condemned the shootings today. Never in our wildest dreams would we have imagined that five police officers would be dead this morning. But critics were quick to point out that we were hearing a very different message from the Reverend just a short time before the shots rang out last night.

Starting point is 03:09:43 Here is some of that. But I'm going to channel an old preacher that I admire tremendously. Jeremiah Wright. And I'm going to say, God damn, white America. God damn, white America. White America is a fucking life. I'm sick of the bodies of black and brown people being slaughtered in our street. Hood agreed to be interviewed by Kelly, but the minister soon realized that Fox viewers blamed him for the officer's death and they threatened vengeance.

Starting point is 03:10:28 I mean, after July the 7th, man, talk about threats, didn't PD was having to take the kids to school, and it was absolutely horrible. Witnessing people die that day, including the sniper Johnson's impromptu execution via remote control robot, deepen Hood's opposition to violence, including state killing. In 2022, he is ordained again, this time as a priest and was called the Old Catholic Faith, which accepts many of the doctrines and rights at the Roman Catholic Church, but rejects the doctrine of papal infallibility and authority. Hood began writing to those on death row and then talking and praying with them in person. In 2022, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Ramirez v. Collier case that condemned prisoners have the right to die in the company of a spiritual advisor.

Starting point is 03:11:17 that became a companion to the condemned in their last minutes. I began to have people reaching out during that time and asking me if I would accompany them to the death chamber. And, you know, it's one thing to be willing to have relationships with people who are executed. It's a whole other thing to be asked to participate in the process. And so since then, I've witnessed or been in the chamber with ten different guys. So from January of 2023 to now, I've watched 10 different men be executed by the state. Hood attended his first execution when the state of Oklahoma put Scott Eisenberg to death on January 12, 2023. 20 years earlier, Eisenberg murdered an elderly couple, including a man he bludgeoned to death.

Starting point is 03:12:14 my first execution was Scott Eisenberg in Oklahoma and he Scott had a number of things going on but we were very close he had a lot of anger issues and I think difficulty controlling his temper and

Starting point is 03:12:31 whatnot and you know so the reality was I was very frightened before I went in because I thought Scott was just going to go ballistic and you know to be in that room with someone that goes ballistic. I mean, it's it's already traumatic enough, as I'm sure you can imagine, without, you know, something like that. But then again, you couldn't, you can't blame

Starting point is 03:12:57 them for wanting to, you know, push back and fight for their lives and whatnot. I found myself shaking. Just, you know, my hands and my legs, just terror. I mean, just utterly terrified. And then they opened the door, and I was let in, and I saw Scott. And it's incredibly strange to see someone hooked up to machines that look like they're there to support life. And yet you know that they're there to take his life. And so I wasn't able, I mean, I knew. that there was a window on one side. I wasn't able to see through that window because there was a curtain down. And I began to pray with Scott. Scott had asked me to read a number of

Starting point is 03:13:57 scriptures. And I did. And I dropped my Bible at one point because I was shaking so bad. I was having trouble holding it. You know, he notices that I'm shaking. He notices that I'm upset. And he looks at me and tells me everything's going to be okay. And I'm thinking to myself, no, it's not. Like, no, it is not. And I'm thinking, you know, you're going to die and I'm going to be scarred for life. Everything is not going to be okay. And I went to the scripture in John chapter 8 where Jesus encounters the adulterous woman and there's that famous line, famous verse, you who are without sin cast the first stone. And I read that in the chamber and one of the lighter moments when we were in there was when I read that,

Starting point is 03:15:03 you who are without sin cast the first stone. I remember Scott looking up, and pointing at the executioners and saying, you know, he's talking to y'all. Like, this is about y'all. Hood said that any sense that death by lethal injection is nonviolent is an illusion. In every lethal injection, I have immediately heard snoring. And what sounds not like, you know, snoring from, you know, that one would have when they sleep or whatever,

Starting point is 03:15:34 but more of a gurgling kind of snoring. And, you know, it's, the body responds in a very panicked fashion. And so it's almost like, it's like drowning someone who's completely paralyzed. And I think that that's, I think that's what it's been like every time. I think that there is a level of suffering that is, that is hidden. There's a reason that, again, that it's made to look like a medical procedure, because it does look like a medical procedure. I think it is a con. Hood found the lethal injections traumatizing, but that did not prepare him for what he witnessed when Alabama began executing prisoners through nitrous hypoxia.

Starting point is 03:16:22 I can tell you that it's horrible as a lethal injection is, and yes, it is a con job. I can tell you that I what I saw during that nitrogen. execution is indescribable. I can tell you that I think I would rather be burned to death than be executed by nitrogen. I mean, it is that bad. Hood attended the hypoxia suffocation of Kenneth Smith, a contract killer on January 25th, 2024, the first such execution in American history. Smith had been sentenced to death 36 years earlier. Butts that the horrors for him began. We stepped into the death chamber and saw Smith outfitted with a large mask that would deliver the poison gas. Attending this execution actually put

Starting point is 03:17:10 Hood's life in jeopardy. I can describe it for y'all's listeners. But the mask, which I'm holding right here, a replica, is basically something that is gazz netting in the back. It has silicone straps. It's put over the back of someone's head, and it is strapped as tight as possible to try to keep it on. And it looks like a firefighter's mask with sort of a plexiglass plate on the front. And then there's a hose that's going from the firefighters' mask with the plexiglass plate to the nitrogen. And so what isn't happening is they try to pump as much. nitrogen is possible through this line. The problem is that these mass don't completely hold to form, I guess it's the best way of saying it, in that it's difficult for you to get an airtight seal.

Starting point is 03:18:15 So the more oxygen that gets in here, the more it's displacing nitrogen. And so the more oxygen that's in here, and obviously there's going to be oxygen in the tube, there's going to be oxygen in the mass before the thing even starts, is going to create more suffering. It's going to create a longer process. Good knew that he would be in a chamber in which poison gas would be released, and he felt obligated to tell his children in advance that he could be harmed. They were terrified, of course, but he felt an obligation to provide Smith Company and compassion as well.

Starting point is 03:18:48 again we remind listeners that what they are about to hear might be upsetting so by the time we get to the point where they turn the nitrogen on all the witnesses everybody in the room is like going nobody knows what's about to happen because it's never been tried before and so um they turn it on and Kenny immediately begins to heed back and forth and back and forth over and over and every time he heaves four forward, the back of the mask was strapped to the gurney. So every time he heaves forward, his face is hitting the front of that mask over and over and over and over. And so it's like watching someone like hit their face against a playglass window. And it's like his nose and his face is flattening every time he does it. And he begins to shake back and forth and back and forth, heaving up and down. I see... spit and saliva and snot and, you know, eye water and all sorts of fluid is coming out

Starting point is 03:19:56 of his face. And that fluid begins to build up on the front of the mask and it begins to drizzle like a waterfall. Smith convulse with so much force prison officials worried his mask might come off, interrupting the execution and possibly killing Hood and maybe others in attendance. A window separated hood from other witnesses and the violence of Smith's death caused the commotion. The windows are like super thick. I shouldn't have been able to hear anything,

Starting point is 03:20:28 but I could hear somebody behind me screaming, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, please stop, stop, stop. And it was an absolute nightmare. And Kenny did not die for at least 22 minutes. And it's very possible that he didn't die for a longer period of time, but the state of Alabama declares, they say, oh, you know, he's not breathing, he's dead. Then they push everybody out of the room, and then they bring the doctor in after everybody's left to declare him dead. Hood admits that some of the men he's counseled are capable of unspeakable evil, even after years on death row.

Starting point is 03:21:09 But he still recalls each death he's witnessed with pain. I feel morally compromised, horrified, but I feel called or pushed to keep going, because I think that the more traumatic thing would be to leave these guys alone. Now, in terms of actually seeing it, I think that these images don't leave you. There's nightmares. I always say that these guys haunt me. They come night after night. you know, I'll see them at the end of my bed.

Starting point is 03:21:46 I mean, I mean, just, yeah, so trauma is something I've come to know very well. In 2019, the United States Supreme Court ruled that prisoners do not have a right to a painless death when it greenlighted the execution of Russell Bucklew, who had blood-filled tumors in his head, neck, and mouth that could have broken open as he was put to death. The highest court seems to have rendered the Eighth Amendment's ban. and on cruel and unusual punishment moot. Meanwhile, in recent years, it has not only been states that have enforced the death penalty. Between 1960 and 2019,

Starting point is 03:22:24 the federal government carried out only three executions. But in 2020 to early 2021, during the last six months of Donald Trump's first term as president, the federal government executed 13 men and women. He's included Brandon Bernard, who committed a double murder when he was only 18, and another Lisa Montgomery, who psychologist believed

Starting point is 03:22:45 was severely mentally ill and detached from reality at the time that she murdered a pregnant woman and cut the baby from her victim's body in order to raise the child as her own. Joe Biden, on the other hand, at the end of his presidential term,

Starting point is 03:22:58 sought to prevent a similar execution spree. 40 people were on death row and he commuted the sentence of 37 of them. The remaining three were Zokar Zarniv, the 2013 Boston-Marer, marathon bomber, Dylan Roof, who massacred nine members of the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, 2015, and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

Starting point is 03:23:26 Back in power, however, Trump has vowed to make the death penalty great again. Anybody murder something in the capital, capital punishment, capital capital punishment. If somebody kills somebody in the capital. Capitol, Washington, D.C., we're going to be seeking the death penalty. And that's a very strong preventative. Trump's immediate plans aside, the future of the death penalty in the long term is not so certain. According to a 2024 Gallup opinion poll, support for the death penalty has sunk to its lowest level in half a century. Only 53% of Americans favor capital punishment, but that number skews heavily towards older Americans.

Starting point is 03:24:11 More than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 43 oppose the death penalty, and almost 60% of the so-called Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are firmly against the death penalty. Law professor Corina Lane believes that even record low support for the death penalty is exaggerated and that support for capital punishment drops even further when other options are provided to voters. You know, the president issued this executive order, a day one executive. order. Let's go for the death penalty anytime we can. Let's execute everybody. And one of the things to realize is that the death penalty is dying in this country for reasons that an executive order cannot fix. People have less confidence in the death penalty. They don't trust the death penalty, nor should they. 200 people have been exonerated from death row. And Ray Spurion agrees. The decline in executions in the United States reflects a broader shift in how society views death penalty.

Starting point is 03:25:21 I mean, more states are repealing it. Juries are imposing it less often. And the public support, while still dividing, has steadily decreased, especially as concerns about wrongful convictions in the racial bias and the high costs of capital punishment came to light. At the beginning of the 19th century, hangings were public, but they so often went awry and produced such grisly scenes,

Starting point is 03:25:52 states move those executions inside prison yards and sought a more humane alternative. That new method, the electric chair, proved horrifying as well and was deemed unsuitable for general audiences. The Supreme Court imposed a four-year pause the death penalty beginning in 1972 because of its random application. In 1976, the High Court reauthorized capital punishment. A crisis ensued when a Texas TV reporter sued for the right to televise executions. Horrified at the prospect of the condemned, essentially being burned alive

Starting point is 03:26:27 in the electric chair in front of a prime time audience, states approved the latest innovation state killing death by lethal injection. But throughout this history of execution, insurmountable flaws have remained consistent. The quest for a humane way to kill people on an announced schedule has been futile. Each form of the death penalty has been proven to be violent and caused suffering at great expenditure of public money. And plausibly innocent people have been put to death. As the people in charge of punishment have changed execution methods over the years, they've also tried to prevent public backlash to revolting scenes of suffering,

Starting point is 03:27:03 which could create the opposition to capital punishment that they fear. politicians eager to prove they are tough on crime have also fought to hide these gruesome spectacles from public view. Nevertheless, Reis Bouillon is optimistic that this grim aspect of life in the United States might soon come to an end. More than two thirds of countries have abolished death penalty in law or practice with only a few countries carrying out the vast majority of executions. And I think the future is one where the death penalty continues to train one wine as values of human rights, dignity, and justice without irreversible punishment to gain ground.

Starting point is 03:27:50 Until next time, I'm Michael Phillips, and I'm Stephen Montchelli. Thanks for listening. This is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson.

Starting point is 03:28:31 Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what?

Starting point is 03:28:48 They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the Elections Chess. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever. you get your podcasts. Here we go. Hey, I'm Cal Penn, and on my new podcast, Here We Go Again,

Starting point is 03:29:13 we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask, why does history keep repeating itself? You may know me as the second hottest actor from the Harold and Kumar movies, but I'm also an author, a White House staffer, and as of like 15 seconds ago, a podcast host. Along the way, I've made some friends who are experts in science, politics,

Starting point is 03:29:33 and pop culture. And each week, one of them will be joining me to answer my burning questions. Like, are we heading towards another financial crash like in 08? Is non-monogamy back in style? And how come there's never a gate ready for your flight when it lands like two minutes early? We've got guests like Pete Buttigieg, Stacey Abrams, Lili Singh, and Bill Nye. When you start weaponizing outer space, things can potentially go really wrong. Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now, because it is. is. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to Here We Go Again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:30:16 The rich Russians falling out of Windows podcast is back. Sad Olegark Season 2. Since we left you in 2023 after season one, many politically motivated Russian millionaires have continued to die in suspicious circumstances. We dig deeper into these odd deaths, which include everything from mushroom poisoning and mysterious heart attacks to window clumsiness and suicide by decapitation. One thing we have found since we started back in 2022 is the information on the suspicious deaths has become much harder to find.

Starting point is 03:30:57 Not just that, it seems as if state-controlled media in Russia is being used, utilize to purposely confuse and contradict the reporting that gets put out. As you can probably imagine, season two gets very weird. Listen to Sad Olegac on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons? Wait, stop?

Starting point is 03:31:32 What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow.

Starting point is 03:31:48 Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Starting point is 03:32:23 Am I introducing the podcast? Welcome to the podcast. This is It Could Happen here. executive disorder, our weekly newscast covering what's happening in the White House, the crumbling world, what it means for you. I'm Garrison Davis. Today I'm joined by Mia Wong, James Stout, and Robert Evans. This episode, we're covering the week of October 31st to November 5th. One of the most exciting weeks in politics. Yeah, because it's bonfire night. If you remember the poem, that's right. And that's not the only exciting thing to happen,

Starting point is 03:32:54 but also not the only sad thing to happen this week, because as exciting as Election Day 1, was for people in New York, there was like a looming sadness throughout the day. Because earlier that morning, obviously, Vice President Dick Cheney passed away. And that was rough, rough for many people. Not rough for many others. But that certainly was a looming presence over the day. Does anyone have any words to say on the passing of Mr. Cheney? Yeah, I mean, I just want to let everyone in hell know, this two shall pass. You know, you won't be stuck with him forever. Just try to grin and bear it. I know it's going to be hard for a lot of you, especially Saddam Hussein, but I know you can get past this, you know. He will get reincarnated as a Senate

Starting point is 03:33:43 Republican staffer within the next six to eight months. So, so you won't have to put up with him long. I guess this is also just your reminder that it's a good idea to practice the four essential rooms of firearm safety at all times. Don't shoot with Dick Cheney. If you see Dick Cheney while you're hunting quail, run. Do the kids even know about this now?

Starting point is 03:34:06 The kids know. The kids know. Yeah. Okay. Okay. I'm glad. I'm glad. This is deep in the law, Mia. Cheney lore has permeated throughout generations of American culture. Yeah. When I was a kid, there was like a whole

Starting point is 03:34:22 thing where we all thought the song Jamie's got a gun was Cheney's got a gun? Wow. Because it just lined up with everything you knew about the world. What's funny about it is that my actual thinking on that shooting hasn't changed since I was a Republican kid. Like when I was a young right winger, I thought, wow, Dick Cheney's so cool. He shot a man and got him to apologize to him.

Starting point is 03:34:46 And now as an adult on the left, I still think that's kind of the coolest thing Dick Cheney ever did. It is a hell of a feat. That man apologized for getting in front of his sights. That's amazing. Now, it is unfortunate that Dick Cheney did not live to see the election of Zora Mundani as the mayor of New York City, which happened. That would have been funny. On Tuesday, later that day, Zoran has become the first candidate in New York mayoral history to win over a A million votes since 1969.

Starting point is 03:35:27 Nice. This election itself saw over 2 million votes. This is a million more votes than the last in New York mayoral election. Huge turnout. Currently, as of Wednesday afternoon, Zoran has 50.4% of the vote. Former governor and sexual assault enthusiast Andrew Cuomo running as an independent has 41.6% percent and the bray wearing Curtis Silwa has 7.1. Not a spoiler candidate in many ways, nor would it be correct to say that all of Silwa's

Starting point is 03:36:06 votes would have gone to one candidate or another, but even if you do add all of his votes onto disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo's total, Zoron still comes out on top. Well, which was something that there was legitimately a lot of question about as to like whether or not will Silwa staying in matter, right? And it's a really good sign that it didn't. It did not. Sliwa, so whatever. No one really knows how to pronounce the name, including in the city.

Starting point is 03:36:36 You hear it different pronunciations or different people at different times. Sometimes it's Slilwa, sometimes it's Silwa. All I know is he got stabbed on the subway, right? Oh, and shot five times in the back of a cab. Five times in the back. That's right. How did they fail to fucking kill him? Jesus Christ.

Starting point is 03:36:54 It's harder to kill people by shooting them with a handgun than he might think. Yeah, apparently. A handgun ballistics are just different. Yes, and he does have 17 cats. He ran on the Republican. That's my favorite factor, Madam. The Protect Animals Party, you can have some criticism for past ills that he has contributed to, but he is certainly mixed up for that in some way for being a fascinating character.

Starting point is 03:37:18 He's a very New York kind of figure. And he was the only mayoral candidate to call and congratulate Zoran Mamdani last night. Both Cuomo and Mayor Adams did not call Mamdani, but Curtis did, which is kind of beautiful. It's kind of beautiful. He's a classy. Man, you don't get to wear a red beret like that unless you have some manners. The British Parishue Regiment would beg to disagree about having manners and wearing red hats. But, uh, no, he's, I, my head cannon now is that he is the British paratrooper regimen.

Starting point is 03:37:54 Yeah, they just drop him in with 17 cats and he, and he starts milling immediately. Yeah, he saves that fucking mall in Nairobi or wherever it was. Yeah, you tell you what, the Argentines wouldn't have fucked with the Falklands of Curtis had been there. Now with all those cats. That's where he's going now that he's being banished from New York. That's all islands and I was like, piss, guys. I probably shouldn't take this. It's just an island of cat litter.

Starting point is 03:38:19 Yeah, Staten Island Which You're a real New Yorker now, Gary You shed on Staten Island Which is the only borough That went for Cuomo Where he was up 33 points That was very funny

Starting point is 03:38:34 Mamdani won every other bureau Up 20 in Brooklyn, up 10 in Manhattan Of five in Queens And 11 in the Bronx From what this should tell everyone Everywhere in the country About what is possible In politics, even in times as dark

Starting point is 03:38:49 this is that he was, what, 8% a year ago? Six percent. Six percent in January. Six percent in January. And he won, he didn't just eke it out because there were a shitload of guys. This isn't like an Arnold thing where everybody's on the fucking ballot and it's like a crazy cartoon election.

Starting point is 03:39:05 He legitimately came from nowhere and won. The most votes for a mayoral candidate in almost 50 years. Yeah. Nearly reaching the vote totals in this election for like a presidential election. Yeah, it's very impressive for like a mid-cycle, an off-cycle election turnout-wise.

Starting point is 03:39:25 Yep. Specifically, he won a whole bunch of votes that he did not gain in the primary among some, like, black and Latino voters. You can see that in the turnout at like the Bronx. And these people aren't overwhelmingly, at least at this stage, folks who have been convinced of every aspect of ideology that Zoran has ever put out there, people who looked at who was available and they're like, this guy seems like he genuinely wants to do something. Yeah. And they listen to his, the specific policies.

Starting point is 03:39:55 They're not paying attention to the fact that he quoted Eugene v. Debs. They're listening to his policies on like creating municipal grocery stores and stuff, right? It's about affordability, not ideology. And Zoron's strict focus on affordability, not running a campaign that like falls back on fear, not running a campaign about foreign policy when you're in fucking New York City. A strict focus on affordability was the key. to winning this campaign. A strict focus on affordability

Starting point is 03:40:21 while not pretending not to have the ideology, which is also really noteworthy, right? Where he's still, he's still, he's not like talking around it, right? No, he's, he's not apologizing or hiding the fact that he's a Democratic socialist. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:40:36 And this produced some super interesting results. If you, if you refer back to the last election in 2024 and in everyone bemoaning, like how, how come young men, are so politically lost. Why are they all going so far to their right? 68% of men age 18 to 29 goes to Mom Dhani. 66% of men 30 to 40, 45% of men 45 to 65.

Starting point is 03:41:08 Among women 18 to 29 years old, 84% Mom Dhani. Fucking Saddam numbers. Hilarious. This is like bath party election. numbers along with it. Actually, Saddam Hussein Al-Tucreid did, in fact, vote, but he broke hard for Cuomo. Honestly, at the end, it was the sex crimes that did it for Saddam. Houda did vote for Sliwa, though.

Starting point is 03:41:32 That was kind of weird. I'm going to be honest with you. We're all trying to parse that one out. It's a cat thing. Yeah. Like I said, like not hiding his political inspirations in any way, quoted Eugene Debs 10 seconds into his victory speech. Immediately, you understand, like, oh, this guy's.

Starting point is 03:41:48 like, play it. He knows what's up. Eugene V. Debs, the socialist who ran for president from prison. Yeah. Yes. To know who Eugene v. Debs is, like, arguably the most radical national candidate who has ever existed in this country. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:42:04 And his speech was extremely poetic. It got a very strong positive reaction from the people who I watched this with in Bushwick, which was the district that was the most pro Montani out of the entire electoral Methodicity. But he started by talking about how power has been kept out of the hands of

Starting point is 03:42:23 working people, the hands that keep the city going, by lifting boxes, by gripping the handlebars of delivery bikes, and collecting burn scars from cooking food. Quote, over the last 12 months, you have dared to reach for something greater. Tonight, against all odds, we have grasped it. The future is in our hands, unquote. The whole speech was kind of a rife with little like metaphors and allegories like that. It was it was very cute. It went on to discuss how the campaign toppled a political dynasty and gave one of the most like, uh, fine-tuned disses I've ever seen. Quote, I wish Andrew Cuomo only the best in private life. Which is a phenomenal quote. But I hope I never have to say his name again or something like that. But let tonight be

Starting point is 03:43:12 the last time I utter his name. Man, only the best in private life is astounding. Yeah, I mean, basically, this is like, he's not the originator of this particular kind of diss. It goes back a while, but the gist of it is like, everyone's mom. Don't be a family man. Get out. Go away. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:43:35 And repeatedly, Mom Donnie has used the word mandate to describe this election and the results. Quote, New York has delivered a mandate for change, a mandate for a new kind of politics, for a city we can afford, a mandate for a government that delivers exactly that. I'm going to play a short clip here. Thank you to the next generation of New Yorkers who refused to accept that the promise of a better future was a relic of the past. You showed that when politics speaks to you without condescension, we can usher in a new era of leadership.

Starting point is 03:44:15 We will fight for you because we are you. Or as we say, on Steinway, anaminkum, wailakum. The Arabic there, wild, wild that we've moved this far in New York that wins you an election. Like, that didn't win him the election, but like, they really tried the 9-11 shit. Rudy Giuliani posted today a crude Photoshop. of his own face in the fires of the of the burning twin towers. We forgot written across it.

Starting point is 03:44:54 And that did none of that shit did anything. The last month of the campaign against Mumdani, whether that's from people like Bill Accum, Bloomberg or Cuomo's actual team, has used what people have been calling the 9-11 card incessantly. Playing clips of 9-11 with like Zoron like emblazoned like over, over top playing clips from Hassan talking about 9-11. But the Islamophobia that the Cuomo

Starting point is 03:45:20 campaign has resorted to as a last-ditch effort to stop Mamdani has been despicable. And the fact that this did not scare Mamdani into like hiding or like restricting that part of himself is incredibly admirable. Yeah, but they wasn't just 9-11, right? Like you said,

Starting point is 03:45:36 it was the broad Islam. Like they deployed as they always do. Like every urban area in Britain is now like the caliphate, like this bullshit. that exists only in the American conservative mind, and it failed, which is good. Specifically for a lot of the speech, it was about juxtaposing how we used to have good things in the past.

Starting point is 03:45:55 We have this idea that, like, good things now are always out of reach and juxtaposing this idea of, like, hope or, or, like, past exceptionalism that we just don't feel like we have access to anymore. And showing that if you actually involve young people, we can actually do good things in our city now. And I really liked the line about, like, politics that speaks to you without condescension and how much this campaign was, like, ran by and for, you know,

Starting point is 03:46:24 young candidates and young voters. So I went on to thank the people who have been forgotten by the politics of our city and how they've supported his campaign. Quote, Yemeni bodega owners and Mexican abuelas, Sangalese taxi drivers, and Uzbek nurses, Trinidadian line cooks, and Ethiopian on. unquote. And he went on to mention the kind of people that this campaign is about. And towards the end of that section, he talked about the hunger strike that he participated in four years ago

Starting point is 03:46:53 in order to win debt relief for cab drivers. And it's about people like Richard, the taxi driver I went on a 15-day hunger strike with outside of City Hall, who still has to drive his cab seven days a week. My brother, we are in City Hall now. That is the energy of like the campaign and the city right now. Like that sort of framing. And that's the energy that people are like carrying through. I saw among the right wing fever response responses to this, Mike Cernovich taking a clip from

Starting point is 03:47:36 the election night party where one of the people who was attending Zoron's party made a comment about how, like, white people need to get on board with the idea that, like, our culture is multiculturalism in this country, right? Like, it's not anything else. Like, that's, like, what has made America. And Mike did not react well to that. I can't imagine. The Declaration of War.

Starting point is 03:48:00 Sennovich Mad. Yeah. But, no, like, especially in New York. I don't know, like, anywhere in the country, like, especially in New York. Like, the culture is made through the mix of immigrants that have built. the city. And this is something that Zoran discussed throughout the speech. Zoran went on to thank the 100,000 campaign volunteers, and specifically how their efforts, quote, eroded the cynicism that has come to define our politics. I like that line.

Starting point is 03:48:27 And then he asked New Yorkers to breathe this moment in, quote, we have held our breath for longer than we know. We have held it in anticipation of defeat, held it because the air has been knocked out of our lungs too many times to count, held it because we cannot afford to exhale. Thanks to all of those who have sacrificed so much, we are breathing in the air of a city that has been reborn. There are many who thought this day would never come, who feared we would be condemned only to a future of less, with every election consigning us to simply more of the same. And there are others who see politics today as too cruel for the flame of hope to still burn. New York, we have answered those fears, unquote.

Starting point is 03:49:08 And while we cast our ballots alone, we take our ballots alone. We chose hope together. Hope over tyranny. Hope over big money and small ideas. Hope over despair. We won because New Yorkers allowed themselves to hope that the impossible could be made possible. And we won because we insisted

Starting point is 03:49:37 that no longer would politics be something that is done to us. done to us. Now it is something that we do. Standing before you, I think of the words of Jawal al-Neru. A moment comes but rarely in history when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of the nation long suppressed finds utter tonight we have stepped out from the old into the new. The line about politics not being something that's done to you. Yeah, yeah. That really outlines how politics has felt in this country for basically as long as I can remember.

Starting point is 03:50:30 He then outlined what his central agenda to tackle the cost of living crisis is, including freezing the rent for more than two million rights-temporized tenants, making buses fast and free and delivering universal child care across the city, saying, quote, this will be an age where New Yorkers expect from their leaders a bold vision of what we will achieve rather than a list of excuses for what we are too timid to attempt, unquote. Let's go on a quick break, and we will come back to talk a little bit more about the election. all right we're back during the second half of this speech zoron turned to address donald trump right this looming thing across politics nationwide but specifically new

Starting point is 03:51:26 york as trump has threatened to start to fuck with new york even more if zoron is elected and people in new york know this and and about halfway through zoron addressed trump directly which we will get to in a sec. But before he directly talked to Trump in this speech, Zoron laid out what types of people the city government will be focusing on protecting from Trump's division and hate. In this new age we make for ourselves, we will refuse to allow those who traffic in division and hate to pit us against one another. In this moment of political darkness, New York will be the light. Here, we believe in standing up for those we love.

Starting point is 03:52:19 Whether you are an immigrant, a member of the trans community, one of the many black women that Donald Trump has fired from a federal job, a single mom still waiting for the cost of groceries to go down, or anyone else with their back against the wall, your struggle is ours too. Specifically, I like this idea of in the dark and political moment this United States is in, New York and the Zoran administration

Starting point is 03:52:55 and how that reflects New York in general, though, will be a beacon for the rest of the country. And naming the trans community is like the second A group mentioned there was heavily appreciated in the Bushwick trans watch party that I was at. Zoran went on to say that, quote, No more will New York be a city where you can traffic in Islamophobia and win an election. This new age will be defined by a competence and a compassion that have too long been placed in odds with one another. We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.

Starting point is 03:53:33 tens of millions of dollars have been spent to redefine reality and to convince our neighbors that this new age is something that should frighten them. As has often occurred, the billionaire class has sought to convince those making $30 an hour that their enemies are those earning $20 an hour. They want the people to fight amongst ourselves so that we remain distracted from the work of remaking a long broken system. Together, we will usher in a generation of change, and if we embrace this brave new course, rather than fleeing from it, we can respond to oligar. and authoritarianism with the strength it fears, not the appeasement it craves. I think this whole section is something very important, and this has been something that's

Starting point is 03:54:13 been very consistent about Montoni's entire campaign, which is there's been on the left for a very, very long time a just interminable, intractable conflict between this idea of like purely focusing on class politics or talking about race. And, but I think what Mondami is doing here, has been very effective, right, is you can just do both and in fact, as the left over the last, you know, sort of sense is kind of the re-emergence of this kind of left

Starting point is 03:54:43 in like 2015, 2016, as it's gone on, it's gotten less white, it's gotten more diverse, it's gotten more multicultural, and it's been able to fuse these two things together, and it's been able to fuse that with just, you know, like being very, very openly pro-trans. And like, there was

Starting point is 03:54:58 also a pretty big response that I saw from people talking about the fact that he's specifically mentioned that it was black women who were being fired by the Trump administration, right? And you can just do all these things together, and it works. And it's worked the whole time. And refusing to pit these things against each other, like refusing to pit affordability against trans rights, refusing to pit, you know, like, fusing to pit the politics of, like, defending. And this is something that, like, fucking Bernie is terrible at, right? We're like, Bernie, like, has been, like, has a whole rant about how Trump has been right on, like,

Starting point is 03:55:29 we have to reduce immigration, right? And you don't have to do that. You can be pro-immigrant. You can be pro-trans. You can be pro-black women. You can be, you know, and you can also want everything to cost less. And you can be in favor of the fact that the U.S. is a multicultural society and can only function as one. And it's a winning form of politics. And I'm glad we're finally getting there. Yeah. And it will be great if this New York City as a beacon can actually shine and not get stifled out in these next four years. Because Zoran is, Unless things happen, Zoran will be the mayor for the remainder of the Trump term, right? Like, this is, he will be mayor after second Trump administration is over, barring any unfortunate incidents. Zoran, make sure your private security is really good and loyal and reliable.

Starting point is 03:56:22 Well, you have a NYPD detail. Get your own guys. Yeah, it's by it'll be fun. But also, it means like, like, from, I guess, a national perspective, it is likely that Mamadani will become, like, the enemy number one of the Trump administration, the way that probably Newsom or Prishkarah now, right? Like, it's, it is easier because of the obvious bigotry that underlies a lot of the Republican Party to go after a brown dude. Yes. And that is what they are going to do. And they're

Starting point is 03:56:57 going to use a brown Democratic socialist. Yeah, who stands up for trans people and migrants. You saw how acceptable Islamophobia is in Cuomo's campaign, right? Like, he'd just go on to every mainstream network and say shit that is fucking disgusting. Yeah. And so we should prepare ourselves for four more years of that, I guess. And I think he does a very good job of repudiating that. And obviously the electorate in New York did too. But that is going to beat what we are going to see as a result of this.

Starting point is 03:57:26 Well, no. And like, so much of the resistance to Zoran came from this idea that if he wins, that means that this is going to be what people point to as a future for politics, specifically democratic politics. And a lot of people wanted to stop him because they knew that's going to happen. If he is in control of the biggest city in the country as the Democratic mayor, that's going to be influential for what Democratic politics will be after they got completely clobbered last year. And he's showing that a different type of politics is possible, even within the Democratic Party. And that's true, like altering what the party is fundamentally.

Starting point is 03:58:02 Yeah. And I think it's, it is a cool little side note that Zoran voted for himself on the working families party line. And in fact, not the Democratic Party line. Because of how the New York mayoral ballots work. I'm going to play one more clip from the speech of Zoron specifically addressing Trump. It's going to be a teeny bit longer. And I think we'll cut, we'll shorten some of the applause bits because some of the applause sections go on for quite long. But this will be the last clip. After all, if anyone can show a nation betrayed by Donald Trump how to defeat him, it is the city that gave rise to him. And if there is any way to terrify a despot, it is by dismantling the very conditions that allowed him to accumulate power. This is not only how we stop Trump, it's how we stop the next one. So Donald Trump, since I know you're watching, I have four words for you. Turn the volume up.

Starting point is 03:59:15 We will hold bad landlords to account because the Donald Trumps of our city have grown far too comfortable taking advantage of their tenants. We will put an end to the culture of corruption that has allowed billionaires like Trump to evade taxation and exploit tax breaks. We will stand alongside unions and expand labor protections because we know, just as Donald Trump does, that when working people have ironclad rights, the bosses who seek to extort them become very small indeed. New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, power to by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant.

Starting point is 04:00:07 So hear me, President Trump, when I say this, to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us. The shit rocks. It's good. It's good. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool for a mayor-elects to say that. It didn't manage to get in the New York is the Ankara of America.

Starting point is 04:00:31 which I was hoping for, but otherwise great. That's Eric Adams' bit. Yeah, yeah. Sad day for Turkey today, I guess. On an actual important note, I think it is really important that, you know, all of this energy against Trump, right? And against all the shit that he's doing that's so hideously unpopular, it's starting to be channeled into politics that can actually defeat him. Yeah. And that are actually good.

Starting point is 04:00:55 You know, and that he's like talking about specifically the fact that you have to destroy the conditions that created him so they don't create the next one. Like, this fucking rocks. This is good. Yeah, like it, for so long, like for, I mean, most of the 2016 to 2020 period, and for a lot of this year, we've seen so many people turn the obvious disgust that people have of what Trump is doing into grifts, into supporting a politics, which fundamentally allowed for the conditions we are in now, right? And to see someone repudiate that and to see more than a million people turn out to support that. Yep. It is fantastic. Like, it's genuinely hopeful.

Starting point is 04:01:28 It's something like, Zorn has, like, acknowledge. it's like this is not like the end right this is a means yeah not the means either like this this this this is a means to an end and this this whole campaign started as he's referred to it as a quote unquote electoral project by the new york city dsa like this was largely an experiment and an experiment that grew wildly wildly uh kind of out of what i assume they kind of saw it as in the earlier in the earlier years and now they're in this like moment and they have to they have to keep rolling with it but it is it is an experiment for a a version of doing this and he knows this is not like the only method or tactic to be utilized um but as as an experiment i think it's uh so far uh pretty

Starting point is 04:02:14 well done now as zorne closed the speech by calling to chart a new path as bold as the campaign has already been saying that conventional wisdom would claim that he is far from the perfect candidate. Quote, I am young, despite my best efforts to grow older. I am Muslim. I am a Democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this. And yet, if tonight teaches us anything, it is that convention has held us back. We have bowed at the altar of caution. We have paid a mighty price. Too many working people cannot recognize themselves in our party, and too many among us have turned to the right for answers to why they've been left behind. We will leave mediocrity in our past.

Starting point is 04:02:58 No longer will we have to open a history book for proof that Democrats can dare to be great. Our greatness will be anything but abstract, unquote. And he concludes by saying that the greatness will be felt by rent-stabilized tenants who will wake up knowing their rent hasn't soared, by grandparents who can afford to stay in their home, and whose grandchildren live nearby because the cost of child care is not driving them out of the city, and by the single mothers who don't need to rush their kids to school

Starting point is 04:03:28 because they can commute to work on a fast bus. Quote, most of all, it will be felt by each New Yorker when the city they love finally loves them back, unquote. The stuff about, like, worshipping at the altar of caution for, like, the past, like, 20, more than 20, but especially

Starting point is 04:03:48 the past, like, 20 years of, like, Democrat politics and how he is also recognizing that, like, this is, this could mark a fundamental shift in what the Democratic Party actually is because the people, Democrats included, who have been trying to stop this, have failed miserably so far,

Starting point is 04:04:04 putting tens of millions of dollars into a campaign to try to crush, crush this version of what the future of New York Democrat politics is. And more people since 1969 showed up to deny that future. That's all I have for Zoran right now. It's literally, you know,

Starting point is 04:04:23 less than 24 hours. after the election. But this was not just a New York City mayoral election. There were other races, including other things in New York. There was a Prop 1 amendment to the state constitution

Starting point is 04:04:36 to retroactively authorize the winter sports facilities on Mount Venn Hovenberg, which is protected forest land, and would require the state at 2,500 acres of newly protected land elsewhere in the Adironic.

Starting point is 04:04:50 That's how I'm saying it. Adirondack mountains. There's another team. Yeah, I had a run deck. Which was passed, and this allows them to continue to build and maintain the winter sports facility. Propositions 2 through 6 were New York City Charter amendments. The 2 to 4 were housing reform proposals to fast track the approval process for affordable housing and simplify zoning reviews and establish an affordable housing appeals board.

Starting point is 04:05:15 All of these passed, these will limit the ability of the city council to control and slow down housing development and empowered the mayor specifically to build more affordable units faster in Prop 5, which also passed, creates a new digital map of the city. The only prop to fail, which was number 6, was to move local elections to be in line with presidential elections

Starting point is 04:05:34 on that four-year basis. Basically, the ballot that Zoran filled out himself was the one that passed for all of these proposals. Yeah, they call it a coattails effect in political science, right? Like the idea that the people who come up. his ballot that morning. He specifically did not. He didn't even announce it. Like a journalist asked him

Starting point is 04:05:57 what he was voting on. He specifically did not advocate for any of these or try to dissuade anyone from any of these before the election. Yeah, for sure. But you get a generally aligned politically electorate, right, a relatively progressive in American terms, the electorate coming out to vote for him who will look at these things and say, that seems to make sense with the way I see the world. Absolutely. Democrat, Abigail Spanberger won the governor of Virginia, flipping blue. Jay Jones, a Democrat candidate for Virginia A.G., also beat the Republican incumbent. This was after a month of attacks for a series of text messages from 2022,

Starting point is 04:06:35 where Jay Jones said that if certain Republican delegates died, he would, quote, go to their funerals to piss on their graves, unquote, and wish for the hypothetical deaths of Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert's children. Quote, only would people feel pain personally, do they move on policy? I mean, do I think Todd and Jennifer are evil and that they're breeding little fascists? Yes, unquote. That's also not wishing for hypothetical deaths. He did in a call with another Republican politician.

Starting point is 04:07:10 Then after the call, they continued texting about it. So the proof is in these texts, and he has admitted this. And basically, he was like, if these people's, like, children were to get killed. killed in a mass shooting. Maybe their opinions on guns would change. That's essentially what he's expressing there. And then he also, he also was,

Starting point is 04:07:29 uh, quoted in these leaked text text messages as saying, quote, three people, two bullets, Virginia host speaker, Todd Gilbert, Hitler and Pulpott.

Starting point is 04:07:42 Gilbert gets two bullets to the head. Spoiler. Put Gilbert in the crew with it. Sorry, I'm done you. Not just as an elected official As an attorney general Someone going to be a cop

Starting point is 04:07:55 That you put in the fucking text message Spoiler Put Gilbert in the crew With the two worst people you know And he receives both bullets every time It's insane Opsack hero But that is the new attorney general

Starting point is 04:08:12 That's a new Democrat attorney general Of Virginia Who the right has been attacking for quite, for relentlessly the past month, because you really fucked up if you can't, like, no, if you can't run attacks on that guy and you still lose, all, all of those jokes about the white moms in the suburbs, like wanting blood and like, they're looking at things like going, oh, hell yeah. Yeah. Give me four word bullets. We'll put in this guy. It's pretty crazy. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's

Starting point is 04:08:42 is downishing. Maine voted no, 63% on a voter restriction measure. Voters extended the Democrat Pennsylvania Supreme Court and the California redistricting measure or proposition passed with 63.8%. James, do you have stuff on this? Yeah, so Prop 50 in California. California, it was like a one-issue ballot, right? You said the Prop 50. This would temporarily redistricting. I think people maybe have not been like often it gets missed and this is temporarily redistricting California until re-establishing the non-partisan committee that does redistricting in 2031 for the 2032 those districts will come back or that they will return to a

Starting point is 04:09:27 non-partisan districting in 232 this is one of the most expensive propositions in state history 120 million was spent in favor, 44 million against There was also outside money. Newsom already called on New York, Illinois, and other Democrat majority seats to do the same, right? It's going to likely remove about five Republican seats, or those Republicans are going to struggle, right? One of them would be San Diego's Mountain Empire and East County seat, which is currently the 48th. That seat has been redistributed a few times, right?

Starting point is 04:10:06 It's moved around. It's currently Darryl Issa's seat. In response, California Republicans have already filed a lawsuit. The suit was filed by Harmeet Dillon's law firm. Yay. Yeah. Friend of the pod. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:10:22 Dylan is in the Trump administration now. But yeah. Yeah, Dylan is in the Trump administration and occasionally my inbox making threats. Fantastic. Great. It was Dylan's law firm that filed the case, right? The case has claimed that California drew the new lines to, quote, specifically favor Hispanic voters, which it's a similar claim to the Louisiana versus Calais.

Starting point is 04:10:49 I think it's Calais. There's where they say here. Case, which is currently before the Supreme Court, which the Supreme Court seems to be suggesting it might be amenable to this argument, right, that the consideration of race in redistricting is discriminatory. Yesterday, Trump truest, I'm quoting here. The unconstitutional redistricting vote in California is a giant scam that partisan block capitals, as is characteristic. The rest is sporadically capitalized. I'm going back to the quote now. In the entire process, in particular, the voting

Starting point is 04:11:23 itself is rigged, all, quote, mail-in ballots where the Republicans in that state are shut out. It's under very serious legal and criminal review. Stay tuned. Yeah, you know, fairly predictable. We talked about it last week. It's not entirely possible for me to pass out that second sentence. But I think we can see what direction is pushing in, right? This was predictable, but this was going to happen,

Starting point is 04:11:51 and we'll keep you updated on it. Also, predictable that we would have to pivot to ads again, which is what we're going to do now. And we are back. A little bit of immigration news this week, as always. According to reporting, this actually last week, but we didn't have time for it last week. According to reporting by CNN, Trump claimed he was, quote, very much opposed to his own administration's immigration raid on a Hyundai plan in Georgia, which obviously. This is what he's saying to try and get that foreign direct investment back in Georgia, right?

Starting point is 04:12:35 Because it looks very much like Georgia is going to pay pretty heavily for that rate. Unfortunately, another man lost his life when fleeing ICE officers. Last week, he seems to have left a car that he was in and attempted to cross a freeway where he was fatally struck by another car. Yeah, that's the second time. This has happened this year. Texas has signed an agreement with the federal government to allow local DPS officers to operate as ICE officers or technically to operate under the authority of

Starting point is 04:13:06 ICE officers under the 287G program. So this is not the first law enforcement agency in Texas to do this. Lots of local agencies had, but the DPS is statewide, right? So this would include offices of the Texas Highway Patrol. It has 5,000 employees. It will make Texas a markedly more hostile place for migrants. The authority allows warrantless detention under loosely limited, loosely phrased supervision by an ICE officer rights. It allows Texas cops to detain or question people who they suspect of being in the United States without documentation. Here in San Diego, San Diego's Border Patrol sector released a video with, I think it was like, I'll have to check what song it was, like some cringe kind of pop punk soundtrack of the dynamiting of land west of the Hacumba Wilderness.

Starting point is 04:13:59 this is likely the construction that saw many environmental and cultural protections waived by the HHS Secretary Nome earlier this year, right? And we're so seeing the beginning of what that looks like and what that looks like here is just a very unique landscape. I know some people who listen came out to Hocumbra a couple of years ago to help out. It's an extremely unique sort of high desert landscape and it's currently being dynamited. These are the areas where there were little gaps in the border. wall because construction there is very hard, and the way that they're going ahead with

Starting point is 04:14:33 construction is blowing stuff up. Finally, on the immigration beat, a case regarding conditions in the Broadview Facility, which is in Chicago, until earlier this year, it was only for very short stays, like not for 24-hour stays, has revealed some of the horrific conditions inside the facility. It confirmed something I've heard from multiple migrants who have been detained or over the US, which is ICE is using the threat of longer stays in poor conditions to get people to sign deportation paperwork. Often it's literally in the overcrowded rooms where they're sleeping and staying, right? Like at any point, you can just walk up to it and sign your name and you will presumably be removed from those conditions and placed into deportation flight as soon as possible. Reading directly from the lawsuit here, quote, people are forced to attempt to sleep for days or sometimes weeks on plastic chairs or on the filthy concrete.

Starting point is 04:15:26 floor. They are denied sufficient food and water. They cannot shower. They are denied soap, hygiene items and menstrual products, and they have no way to clean themselves. They are often denied a change of clothes. Continuing my quote here, the temperatures are extreme and uncomfortable. Most nights are freezing cold, yet only some receive thin foil blanket, sweater or sweatpants to try to retain warmth. The lights are typically on all night. People have also reported being denied water by agents, there being no running water in the places where they are. held and veritable food. We've reported on these conditions before.

Starting point is 04:16:01 Some of this is standard, right? Lights on all night, freezing cold. You only get a very thin blanket. That has been the case. It was the case throughout the Biden administration, right? They call these places the icebox, both in English and in Spanish. This has always been, the conditions of people have been held in, in these facilities have always been inhumane, but some of this is particularly bad.

Starting point is 04:16:25 People in Broadview reported being so crowded, they could not extend their legs. Jesus Christ. Yeah, so they had to sit like sort of fetal position. They couldn't sit down and extend their legs right, let alone sleep. Disgustingly unclean conditions, they have lots of people have reported paperwork not being able to language that they read and write. Bathrooms there are not private and the lawsuit alleges that people of other genders could see each other using the bathroom, which is pretty disgusting. I've linked to the lawsuit. You can read it if you want to.

Starting point is 04:17:01 Terraploc transition, go. Ah, music to my ears. Oh boy, okay, a rough shift in tone. so we got a little bit more details on the sort of partial agreement that Trump and the Chinese government have sort of come to that has staved off some of the most disastrous of the new trade war elements both sides seem to have gotten rid of the fees from ships both docking at their ports and also on like the sort of complicated shipbuilding stuff we talked about last year the U.S. has paused the thing we talked about last week. where they were using the foreign entity list to do anything that was like controlled, that was like 40% or more controlled by a thing on the foreign entity list

Starting point is 04:18:04 couldn't be traded with. The U.S. is backing off on that for a year. China's agreed to buy more soybeans. There's also some discussion of China buying more energy products, but this is one of these things that we just, we have no idea what that is. It's possible by the time you're listening to this.

Starting point is 04:18:20 There will be information. All we have is buy more energy. And the last, thing that Trump said that didn't seem to be part of the negotiations between him and the Chinese government per se, but were definitely part of negotiations that have been going on between Trump and his cabinet was that there's going to be restrictions on AI chip exports, although exactly what is not known. All Trump said was, quote, the most advanced. We will not let anybody have them other than the United States. What this seems to be, and again, everyone is

Starting point is 04:18:53 kind of murkily cobbling together whatever information they have, what it seems to be is Trump stopped Nvidia from selling its most advanced AI grade chips called Blackwell to China, which was, which Nvidia has been massively lobbying for because they need to expand their market to continue the giant bubble that they've accumulated. Trump has stopped them. It's unclear whether this is going to be made into formal policy or if Trump is just going to personally intervene every time a CEO asked him to do this. But yeah, we also have, so today recording November 5th is the start of the Supreme Court case against the tariffs. I think it's worth noting that this court case against the tariffs, it's framed as like a lot of small businesses brought this lawsuit and they

Starting point is 04:19:37 did. But also the reason it's gotten to the Supreme Court is because they're being backed by a huge player in the conservative legal machine. Almost the entire thing is being funded and paid for by the Liberty Justice Center, which is, it's a kind of libertarian right-wing legal thing backed by like the Walton family and the Coke Network. And this is, I think, one of the most direct and interesting actual oppositional moves we've seen from this wing of the Libertarian business wing of the party, which is very, very pissed off at the tariffs. We've seen a whole bunch of amicus Kura briefs from the American Enterprise Institute and

Starting point is 04:20:15 the Kato Institute and a whole bunch of other right-wing think tanks who, are extremely angry about this. We don't know exactly how it's going to go, but the initial arguments do not seem to be going well for the Trump administration. So that'll be unfolding and we'll report on it more as we know more.

Starting point is 04:20:31 This is literally we're recording issue the first day of trials. And finally, I'm going to close on a genuinely deeply baffling piece of news, which is that the day before the election in New York, Greg Abbott posted that there would be a 100%

Starting point is 04:20:47 tariff on anyone moving to New York after the election? Yeah, how does that work? No, isn't it moving to Texas from New York? Oh, I thought it was to New York. For me, it looked like moving to New York as well. I mean, it's certainly unclear, because this doesn't not seem like a policy proposal

Starting point is 04:21:03 and it seems more like a post. Yeah. It seems like something, it's just a post. It's someone who's posting through it because this is... Moving from New York to Texas. Yeah. Yeah. Is it? Anyone moving from New York to Texas. Interesting. I don't know.

Starting point is 04:21:20 Tariffs are just posts now. That's not like a thing that there's law around you being able to do. No, it's so unconstitutional. I think it's just a post. I don't think it is anything. I mean, evidently it is a post. I think the interesting thing about it is like is the way in which tariffs have come to be seen in the Republican mind as like this is something you do to people you're mad at, which is a very new development in this is a pure Trump too phenomenon. all and all effectively.

Starting point is 04:21:49 Well, absolutely. Yeah. A marker of how intensely they're paying attention to this election. Like, I mean, Abbott's said doing this because I'm sure it'll show up his local popularity. But it's a marker of like a change that has been going on that that has been really like supercharged in the Trump era of, no, no, you can't have local politics. Like, it's all national politics. and any kind of vote at a state or local level that goes against whatever the party wants is something to be punished, like even if it's 2,000 miles away. And that hasn't been as dominant in U.S. politics as it has been recently.

Starting point is 04:22:33 We should probably talk a little bit about Texas's election night because that was also pretty consequential. There were 17 ballot measures passed by the Texas legislature earlier this year by a two-thirds majority. and the way Texas law works is that once the legislature votes for a ballot measure to two-thirds majority, it becomes a constitutional amendment after a simple majority of voters on a ballot support it. And there were 17 measures on the ballot in Texas, which is wild. Very few states add constitutional amendments that the rate Texas does, and all of them passed, which is nuts. And some of them are like, fine. There was, like, one to create, like, a $3 billion fund for dementia research with, which is like, whatever.

Starting point is 04:23:19 Nobody's got a problem with that, really. Some questions about implementation, maybe. But there's some absolutely bug-fuck nuts stuff in here. Proposition 13 raised the homestead exemption from $100,000 to $140,000. It was passed by about 80% of voters. This lowers the taxable value of a home, which reduces overall tax bills on your primary residence, per an article in the Houston Chronicle. the amendments will be especially felt by elderly or disabled Texans who are poised to receive a separate tax, a separate break that brings their total property tax exemptions to 200,000. As a result, roughly half of seniors and people with disabilities living in Harris and Bear counties will no longer pay any school property taxes.

Starting point is 04:24:01 Jesus. I should have to say how, like, bad that is for Texas schools. And in general, a lot of these ballot measures were about making heavy cuts and making it impossible to raise new revenue. cuts that are just in these ballot measures are going to cost the state about $4 billion over the next two years, right? But that's not all that was done. Several of the bills that were passed banned the potential to create new taxes, right? So it is now illegal in Texas to create taxes on capital gains or taxes on the growth of assets like property and stocks or taxes on inheritance and estate taxes. Taxes on the operations of stock exchanges are now best.

Starting point is 04:24:44 because several have announced plans to open in Texas, right? So you are looking at, I think the estimate here that I'm seeing in the Chronicles article is that the state's going to spend about $51 billion over the coming biennium to pay for the new cuts and maintain existing ones. Texas is a state that has had for quite a while a budget surplus, and they are basically lighting a lot of that on fire to appeal to rich people and business owners and stock exchanges to take their assets to Texas. You won't have to help society

Starting point is 04:25:17 if you come to Texas. We don't have a society in Texas, right? And that agenda did very well in Texas. Jeez. Anyway, good stuff. I guess the last thing I want to talk about a little bit, since we've got a couple of minutes here,

Starting point is 04:25:31 is the question on everybody's mind, should I be flying anywhere for the holidays? Is that going to be a good idea? I'm saying this a day after a horrific crash of a huge. UPS flight over Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville, right, which, I mean, I think seven was the death till last I saw, nightmarish fireballs. I mean, it hit nine this morning.

Starting point is 04:25:56 Is it at nine? Because the plane just, the engine caught on fire, basically, on takeoff. And normally, from what I'm reading from pilots, normally that should have been a manageable problem, but because it happened during the ascent, which is the most dangerous part of piloting a plane and where you have the least control, they were not able to recover or gain any kind of control. And the plane basically plowed directly into a UPS warehouse. And it was loaded with something like 300,000 pounds worth of fuel because it was about to fly to Honolulu, so it was as full of fuel as a big plane can be. And just a horrific crash. Is this tied to the fact that

Starting point is 04:26:36 you have a lot of federal employees furloughed? Is it tied more just to the fact that the FAA is not functioning the way it should be or used to as a result of changes the Trump administration made as soon as they came to power. I think it's too early to say that. But this is part of a pattern of pretty disastrous near misses that absolutely can be attributed to things like the air traffic controller shortage and the fact that there's just a lot less safety precautions being taken. And this is something the administration is aware of and has become critical enough that they're no longer able to deny it. Secretary of Transportation's Sean Duffy on Monday said that all commercial flights might be

Starting point is 04:27:17 stopped nationwide to protect public safety, and they were certainly going to need to cut off flights in specific parts of the countries at times as a result of the ATC shortage, right? Basically, there's different, like, kind of grids that the country is divided into, and you might have to shut down one or more of those at a time in order to make the shortage of air traffic controller is able to handle the rest of the load, right? For an example of like how bad this can get locally on last Friday in New York's in New York State, 80% of air traffic controllers did not show up for work. So this is a potentially pretty calamitous problem. There have been

Starting point is 04:27:55 ground delays on Monday for three major Texas airports in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth, and Dallas Love Field. And this is just in general a problem that's only going to get worse as the shutdown Because I've seen some interviews with air traffic controllers where, like, one guy was like, look, we're not getting medicine for my kid and she'll die without it. It's just not coming in. How do you expect me to be a fucking air traffic controller? Right? Like the hardest job in the country that requires absolutely perfect concentration at all times without ever fucking up or hundreds of people die. So I don't know. To answer the question of like, should you fly, be planning flights for this holiday season? You should certainly get the flight and share. and be paying attention the days before as to what's happening if the shutdown doesn't end. Because right now we are seeing delays, the likes of which haven't really been seen since maybe like either the pandemic, like the pandemic probably before 9-11 was kind of the last time things were this completely fucked. Garrison can tell you how much of a fucking nightmare they had coming back. And it's not just in the United States, by the way, multiple major airports in Europe over the last week and change have had to shut down entirely or partly because, because of unauthorized or unknown drone flights in their airspace.

Starting point is 04:29:10 Yeah, that's been ongoing. Globally, air travel is not doing well. Yeah, Russia's been probing Europe with these Orleans for a little while. Yeah, I think, I don't know, Robert's flown, Garrison and I have flown this month, and it fucking sucks. Use a credit card if you can, one that has some protections. But maybe consider not flying right now. Yeah, just, you know, keep an eye on things.

Starting point is 04:29:34 I don't know what else to tell yet. Yeah, it's great. Everything's going great. That is the slogan. Everything's going great. You know, there's been worse times. There's been worse times, you know? The blitz, yeah, talking of worst times.

Starting point is 04:29:49 Loves people are hungry, right? Because we're fucking with people's snap benefits now as part of the culture war. Lots of people are very worried about where their food is going to come from, right? And where we're entering a time of year. You know, kids are going to be off school. There are lots of places you can still get your free school meals, but it's a difficult time for people. It's a difficult time for people to feed their families.

Starting point is 04:30:11 I wanted to plug, We All We Got, this is the San Diego group. What they're doing is helping people be able to rely on them by delivering groceries to them, right? And the way that they most need support is for people to sign up to regularly donate a certain amount. I'm not going to tell you how much you can donate, but if you're able to, that will give them the ability to plan to secure groceries for people they're supporting. The way you can find their website is to go to we all we gotsd.com slash donate. Also, if you want to reach out to us and you want to do it in an encrypted way, you could send an email from your proton mail address to our proton mail address,

Starting point is 04:30:54 which is cool zone tips at proton.me. If you're a marketing person and you want your client to be a guest on our podcast, don't email us, I'm just going to fucking block you. That's all I have to say about that. If you want to have to plug your product, I will also fucking block you. We reported the news. We reported the news. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

Starting point is 04:31:26 It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcast from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for it could happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. In the heat of battle, your squad relies on you. Don't let them down. Unlock elite gaming tech at Lenovo.com. Dominate every match with next level speed, seamless streaming, and performance that won't quit. Push your gameplay beyond performance with Intel Core Ultra processors.

Starting point is 04:32:02 era of gaming. Upgrade to smooth high-quality streaming with Intel Wi-Fi 6E and maximize game performance with enhanced overclocking. Win the tech search. Power up at Lenovo.com. Lenovo, Lenovo. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used

Starting point is 04:32:20 to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline is.

Starting point is 04:32:41 The most Texas story ever. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On an all new episode of IHeartRadio's Las Culturistas, Jennifer Lawrence is dishing. Jennifer Lawrence from her hilariously awkward run-ins with A-Lister's. I don't know what I was expecting, but he was just like, nice to meet you to her unfiltered take on beauty treatments i'm so upset i think the botox before that and a jaw-dropping reveal you won't see coming i don't know if i can announce this but i'm just gonna open your free iHeart radio app search loss cultureista and listen to the full podcast now

Starting point is 04:33:18 hey i'm cal penn and on my new podcast here we go again we'll take today's trends and headlines and ask why does history keep repeating itself each week i'm calling up my friends like bill Lily Singh and Pete Buttigieg to talk about everything from the space race to movie remakes to psychedelics. Put another way, are you high? Look, the world can seem pretty scary right now. But my goal here is for you to listen and feel a little better about the future. Listen and subscribe to here we go again with Cal Penn on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 207

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.