Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 7

Episode Date: October 30, 2021

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

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I'm John Gonzalez, the host of SI's new podcast, Sports Illustrated Weekly. Sports Illustrated has delivered some of the best storytelling in sports for 70 years. And now, that continues on our show. Each week, we'll dive deep into the best stories from around the sports world. Sports Illustrated Weekly is available every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a 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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Spooky Week! A week where we are not really any spookier honestly than the average things happening because everything happening is terrifying and like ghosts and ghouls are a lot more fun. Anyway, hang up.

In this podcast, don't listen. Go watch Herbert West Reanimator. Have some fun. But if you decide to keep listening to podcasts, for some reason, we have a bunch of spooky content for you this week. How was that? How was that introduction, Sophie? Spooky, scary, terrified. Get going. Do your thing. Yeah, my thing. So yeah, we're doing Spooky Week, which we're very excited about. But yeah, everyone I've told them at Spooky Week, they're like,

oh, so it's just a regular week for the show? Yeah, pretty much. No, no, it's more fun. But in a few ways, it is actually going to be more fun because the spooky, spooky, mind-bending tales. Commit to the goddamn bit. Yeah, spooky, mind-bending tales actually do have some more fun than just the solely depressing ones. This was the first theme week that we all agreed upon months ago.

I was like, can we do something around spookiness near Halloween? And everybody unanimously said yes. Yes. So this is the first theme week. We have been promising Nut Week coming up eventually. We'll have to tease. We once talked about things that made us nut or where we talk about the legumes. Mostly legumes. Okay, that's fair.

But anyway, we should start off our first spooky tale. So I'm going to tell a very, very spooky tale of an entire French town going, going mad over the course of a single week. Oh, yeah. Probably with the help of psychoactive drugs and a certain three-letter agency. You know what I think we're going to get to do, Garrison? Uh-huh, ma raciste French, accent! I did get a few messages for that.

You can't be racist against the French. They're like the British or Americans. I did get a few messages saying that your French accent was very racist to the French. There is a certain number. It's like the Germans. There's a certain number of genocides after which people get to make fun of your country and it's not racist. And that number is, let's say three.

Honestly, the worst part of this story is that we're probably doing critical support for France. I mean, in a way, well, we'll see. Honestly, I'm going to be kind of more critical support to the CIA by the end of this one. Yeah, that is the most critical support can be. So anyway, our very spooky tale begins in 1951 in a small, charming French village called Pont Saint Esprit, which is how I'm going to say it. Pont Saint Esprit! Yeah, there you go.

So not much happened in this little picturesque little town on the south side of France. You know, on the day that we start, it's just like a regular summer day. People are going about their routine, going to their jobs. Kids are playing in the street enjoying some delicious freshly baked bread. But suddenly strange things begin happening. And I'm going to start off with some of the more mild, mild, mild effects here. So on August 15th, first dozens, then hundreds of people began first just complaining of nausea. You know, and some people with some stomach and abdominal pain.

Oh yeah, they're coming up. Less often noted, there was a few instances of vomiting and diarrhea. I'm only about 30% of people had diarrhea. That is a weirder, weirder thing. That's a lot of diarrhea. Yeah, that is on like a town-wide basis. 30, sorry. That's a significant strain on the sewage system.

30% of the people affected. It's just going to be like a few hundred. If I was taking drugs with a group of friends and a third of them had diarrhea, I would say we might need to go to a hospital. This is a sign that we have taken someone that perhaps what we got was tainted. There is, yeah. We'll be talking about the actual drugs being used here are going to be. Unless we were taking like aminitas or something where that's not an uncommon side effect.

But yeah. First, nausea, a little bit of vomiting, stomach pains, cramping. Hospitals began reporting people experiencing alternating warm and cold waves over their entire body. The British Medical Journal recalls abundant sweating and a disagreeable odor. Which I'm guessing the odor is just because there's all those sweating people in the same cramped hospital room. In the summer heat. Yeah. So anyway.

And they're French, so. A lot of escargot sweats. That's all I'm saying. I don't want to get more messages saying that I have to stop. By saying that he's going to do it more. By the way, do we know that the diarrhea was the result of whatever substance or maybe it's just the wine shits again? There's no way to tell. There's no way to know.

So yeah, patients began complaining about weird pains and pressure around their neck. Which yeah. And one of the most reported symptoms was insomnia. In some cases lasting several days. Quoting the British Medical Journal. The first symptoms appeared after a latent period of six to 48 hours. The digestive disorders quickly became worse with burning sensations throughout the entire digestive tract. Some experienced sensations of burning at the anus.

A state of giddiness persisted. I mean, who's not giddy when your anus is burning? Am I right? I do. This is like the clear side of it. There's some psychoactive drug going on. Because your anus is burning and yet you're very giddy. And you're psyched.

You are on board. Yeah. It's like that sign from that. What is that? From a rejected. What's that? My anus is bleeding, but like you're down. You're down for it.

Yeah. You're 110%. Was that a John Mulaney impression? No, no, no. Who did rejected? That was bad. It wasn't a John Mulaney impression, Sophie. That's just your poison to millennial brain.

Don Hertzfeld. Yeah. Great artist. Yeah. Great artist. So these pale and limp patients. Still quoting the British Medical Journal. These pale and limp patients showed inconspicuous trembling of the extremities and they complained

of disorders of the visual accommodation and especially being unable to read. So this, this is, this is the more mild. French. So this is the. Oh, this could be a long one here. So this is for, for, for many people affected. This is where the symptoms stopped after suffering for insomnia for a while with, you know, mild disorders of the visual accommodation and, you know,

and stomach pains and like weird like neck things after they were able to sleep. That was the sign of their recovery is like the ability to sleep again after the insomnia wore off. But in, in around 50 of the cases reported, the effects were much more intense. I'm going to continue from, from the medical journal first and then get into some of the more colorful reporting around the incident, quoting the medical journal again. Vivid visual hallucinations appeared in particular themes of visions of animals and of flames. All of these visions were fleeting and variable in many of the patients.

They were followed by dreamy delirium. Yeah. That's, that's about right. That's actually pretty good description of like LSA, LSD, those kind of like the movies always get it wrong because you're not usually not like, you're not seeing some sort of like visual like cartoon world. It's, it's these kind of like fleeting impressions of visions and things in the corner of your eyes.

Yeah. It's a pretty good description. Especially on lower, like it is unclear what exactly they were on because there definitely can be the more cartoon elements. Oh, I mean, you can get full open-eyed hallucinations, especially the shogun chemicals will do that, but I don't get it so much with like LSD, LSA and LSA. If you want to shit yourself. That is, that is right.

Eat some Hawaiian baby Woodrow seeds, get them from Home Depot and have yourself a horrible night. So the delirium seemed to be systematized with animal hallucinations and self accusation. It was weird, weird terms from the medical journal. Self accusations. Yeah. It's, I think, I think they're trying to get at ego death, but they don't have terms for it yet.

Either that or that. Like sometimes you're hallucinating, you get like overcome like guilt, like, oh, I did this terrible thing. Yeah. Yeah. Everybody's angry at me or whatever. Continuing from the medical journal. Self accusation.

And it was sometimes mystical or macabre. In some cases, terrifying visions were followed by fugus, which is an old term for like fugues. It says, it says fugues. Yeah, fugues. It's pronounced fugue. It's like extreme disassociation. Yeah. Yeah.

You're kind of zombified a little bit. Yeah. And two patients threw themselves out the window. Oh boy. Yeah. And it was because of a confusal kind, which could be interpreted for some moments by a strong stimulation. Every attempt at restraint increased the agitation.

Well, yeah, that's, that is how you're straining. I've had to restrain a number of people and it does not calm anyone down. Especially when you're tripping hard. Yeah. Yeah, this sounds like a real, real bad time. Not the thing to do. In severe cases, muscular spasms appeared. The duration of these periods of delirium was varied.

They lasted several hours and some patients. And in others, they persisted overnight. So that, and then here, it's, we're going to get a little bit darker and then we're going to have more fun. We observed four fatal cases, three men and one woman. Three of these people were old and in bad health. One of the men was only 25 years old and had been in good health previously. They died in a muscular spasm in a state of cardiovascular collapse.

I think this was probably mostly due to how the doctors were handling these patients. Yeah, that sounds right. I mean, obviously your blood pressure and whatnot can elevate when you're Yeah. hallucinating. But I think it also has a lot to do with the way they were being handled. Yeah, you're right. The disorder is developed more quickly in children, but also left them more quickly.

An interesting feature of some of the cases was that the delirium was the first sign to be noted. So it depends, people come up, came up on different ways, right? Some of them first had weird body feelings. Some first started just seeing stuff. One other interesting tidbit that we're not going to spend much time talking about, but like around two weeks after this initial incident, some symptoms started to reappear either through like a secondary poisoning or it was like some kind of like acid flashback.

Yeah, it must. It must because I've done a fuckload of acid. I've never had a flashback. I did at one point. I mean, I have like done some damage and so I have permanent tracers, but it's not like my guess is they got, I think the idea that there are like acid flashbacks that are vivid hallucinations has been pretty heavily debunked. My guess is they got redosed.

Yeah, I don't know. I might fight you. It could be PTSD. It could be that it was traumatic enough that like they're dealing with PTSD and kind of that's what's happening. But I don't know. And I think I definitely have seen enough reports that would see acid flashbacks definitely actually being a thing in some cases, especially in like the early days of studying these types

of drugs and like the 60s, like the CIA reported a lot of stuff around acid flashbacks around the people that they tortured. But I guess if it's tied to torture, that could just be PTSD stuff. It could be PTSD. It's also, I mean, one thing you have to know, and I don't know what kind of dose these people are getting with the CIA would dose people. They were sometimes giving people doses. People do not take, like you do not take that much, like hundreds or thousands or millions

of hits. Yeah. Ridiculous, irresponsible doses. So now we're going to get to some of the more fun descriptions here, which we can actually kind of like based on our experiences can actually kind of see like what was actually going on in these people's heads. So basically we had at least dozens and dozens of people tripping very, very hard. The local postman was doing his rounds on his bicycle when he was suddenly overwhelmed

by nausea and wild hallucinations, quoting him, it was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms. Yeah. That guy had some other stuff going on because the very first acid trip was on a bicycle when Heinrich Hoffmann like made it and dosed himself. He started coming up. I believe it was in Amsterdam, like riding his bicycle, which is like, well, this is

lovely. I've made something cool. Why was the postman riding a bicycle to deliver packages and because they're in France because he's in France, we don't have the vehicles in the 1950s, it's not there is only came to France in 1924. I mean, that's I'm sorry. So yeah, the mailman fell off his bike and was taken to the take into a hospital in a nearby town.

He was put in a straight jacket and he shared a room with three teenagers who were also tripping. And the teenagers were changed to their beds to keep them under control. Yeah, that's that's how you it sounds horrible. Right. You can see having flashbacks to this to being chained to a bed while tripping. Yeah, that's a bad thing to do. Some of my friends is trying to get out the window.

They were thrashing wildly screaming in the sound of the metal beds and jumping up and down. The noise was terrible. I would prefer to die than go through that again. Yeah. Totally terrible. This sounds like the worst acid trip you could go on. That sounds like about the worst way you could have a trip go.

It sounds awful. So back in the French town, a little girl screamed as she was being chased by man eating tigers. Oh my goodness. A woman sobbed about how her children had been ground into sausages. Oh, great. Oh no. So graphic and specific.

Yeah. A large man fended off a terrific beast by smashing his furniture and using the wood as weapons. Good for you, buddy. Good for you. A husband and wife right around chasing each other with knives. Again, probably something else going on there. My guess is we're not just talking the acid in that, because I have, again, been on acid

a lot around knives and other weapons. I've never chased anybody with knives. I've never chased someone around with knives on acid. No. That's a couple who was on the verge of a knife chase before the acid. I think the important part here is that in 1951 in this French town, acid wasn't a thing yet. Like hallucinogenic drugs weren't a thing, right?

Even like mushrooms weren't popular around this time. No one knew what the hell was going on. They just think that they're just basically losing their minds. There's no other explanation for what's happening to them. Can we just say that the most shocking thing that has come out so far is that when Robert was on acid, he wasn't chasing people with knives. That seems like it's... It's honest.

Depending on your acid trip, you wouldn't want to chase someone with a knife. I think it's not the kind of headspace you're in. We would like during the winter solstice, we would take a bunch of drugs and grab my AK-47 and hike out into the woods and we would shoot down a fir tree and we would drag it back to a clearing and we would bury it standing up and we would drape it in pig intestines and put a pig's heart on it and then we cover it in gasoline and light it with firecrackers and dance around it like the pagans of old. But there was nothing aggressive about that.

No. You very rarely would want to hurt somebody on acid in my experience. You generally are way more compassionate in a lot of ways. But if you have no idea what acid is and you're in the 1950s and you're losing your mind and you're seeing weird things, then yeah, I can see how this would maybe cause some other type of behavior to happen. Yeah. You just think that God is angry at you.

Yeah. Because they're not dosing themselves either. They're being dosed. It's very different where you're deciding to go on a trip versus this is happening to you and you have no decision. I think for basically anyone in this position, the logical assumption would be, oh, the devil has taken over our town and our minds have, we have been infested with demons. Yeah.

What else are you going to assume? You're not going to be like, oh, this drug that's just barely been invented and nobody really knows about yet except for weird nerds. It must be some version of that that I've taken accidentally. No, you're going to assume like demons are in your blood. So one interesting tidbit before we go on break. Even some of the local animals had been affected by whatever poisoned the town. There was one dog in particular that kept chewing on rocks until its teeth chipped away.

I don't like this. And ducks were behaving very odd. It's described that they were walking around erect and upright like penguins in a line. They're just like very weird behavior from ducks. Kind of makes no sense. That's the scariest thing I've heard so far. That kind of makes me want to dose our ducks, Garrison. We're not wasting acid on the ducks.

You can waste. No. A lot. I mean, there's a lot of things you could give ducks. We're not giving ducks acid. That's not happening. The nice thing about giving ducks drugs is they're all monsters. That is true.

They are monsters and rapists. Yeah. Every one of them. Yeah. All of the male ducks. So anyway, a reoccurring theme was that people were running around wildly and being very fearful of like, monster-y animals and encroaching flames. Sounds like the ducks were having a good time though.

The ducks were having a great time. They're doing their ministry of silly walk shit like, I don't know what all these people are bummed about. This is rad. Okay. So when you first said that, I heard dogs and I was like, that is the most terrifying thing I've ever heard. Ducks.

Ducks is much funnier. It's like duck standing like very upright like penguins walking around in a line. I think ducks might enjoy it. I think dogs are a little too aware of what's going on. Harrison did say the stone thing was about the dog, but the penguin scary thing is ducks. Yeah. I just don't know that the dogs enjoy it because like, I've seen dogs accidentally eat large amounts of pot and whatnot and they are not having it.

They get weird. Yeah. They're pretty scared. They're having a good time. They're pretty scared. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what?

Is also very spooky. Capitalism. Yeah, capitalism and all of these spooky advertisements to sell you things. Advertisements are also a form of mind control, speaking of the CIA in the fifties. Anyway. They're profoundly damaging. We are back from the spooky advertisement. Yeah.

Yeah. Anyway. So I think another reoccurring factor for why a lot of these people have very similar types of experiences around like snakes, which we'll talk about later and like flames is like, with this many people tripping and no one knows what tripping is, I think it's really easy for an idea or a fear to spread from one person to another while they're tripping. With like this many people, I think if someone says something, it's going to start happening to someone else.

And it's kind of this cascading effect where they're all developing this very similar fear is because it's almost like being spread like an infection. So there was a one man convinced that red snakes were devouring his brain and he jumped out a window. Oh, no. Wait, did he live through this? He did live. Yeah, I'm guessing a lot of these, it's like France in the fifties.

So I'm guessing most of these buildings are not super high up. They're not super high up. No, no. They're like falling off foot or two. Although here, we have another one. Another man reportedly left from a window yelling, look everyone, I'm a dragonfly. The men broke both legs. But he stood up and continued running.

Fucking rad. Wow. King, sigma, sigma behavior. Yeah, absolute absolute sigma behavior. We're adding it. This is a new kind of man. New kind of dude just dropped. The rarest kind of man.

Look everyone, I'm a dragonfly. Breaks both legs, keeps running. Look, based on the information you've provided us, I can't say he's not a dragonfly. No, he is an absolute, absolute king. Oh, good for it. I hope he had a great life. Another one saw his heart escape through his feet and besieged a doctor to try to put it back into place.

Yeah, you don't want to have that happen. That doesn't sound fun. You want to keep that somewhere around the middle of your body. Everyone sprinted down the lane, claiming that he was being chased by bandits with donkey ears. Okay, fair enough. At a nearby river, a man was convinced that he was a circus tightrope walker and attempted to balance his way across the cables of a suspension bridge.

How do you know it doesn't say the report does not tell you. Sounds like he did great. Yeah, like he was right. Yeah, he's not in the death report. Yeah. So he's not in the death report and therefore another person did try to die in the river. He tried to jump into the river only to be saved by his friends and he was screaming, I am dead.

I am dead and my head is made of copper and I have snakes in my stomach and they are burning me. It's just a weird description of like tripping and saying like, my head is made of copper. I'm just trying to think of like, what was going on? What series of events did he spiral down in his brain to have that sentence? I'm not quite sure. I can definitely see it happening. I'm trying to think like, what exactly would happen to get to that point?

It's real interesting. I think some of these are hard because again, it's like these people just think literally think they're going insane or that like this stuff is just actually happening to them. When you're tripping on acid, you already kind of have the feeling that there is moments where you feel like this is like never going to end, even though you know you're on acid. These people don't know that, right? These people don't have the reassurance to like, no, I took acid. I'm on a drug.

This is going to be over. Eight hours or so it's going to be. They think this is going to last forever, right? Like they think this is just the world now. Like this is just one of those, Robert Anton Wilson, who is a thinker, I enjoy a lot, writes a lot about how to calm people down when they've taken too much. And most of his advice is around talking about like, okay, well, how long ago did you take it?

Hey, well, that the good news is that this is going to end here. You know, it's only going to last this long. Like you're through this. But oh, this is the second hour freaky. By the third hour, you'll be fine again and enjoying it. Like it's all about making, keeping in people's minds like this is going to pass. So yeah, you're right. Like this is the fucking worst way to take drugs.

All right. So local newspapers and also like in national newspapers described this as among the stricken delirium rose patients thrash wildly on their beds screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies. People throwing themselves from rooftops, men and women throwing their clothes off and running in the streets naked and children complaining their stomachs were infested with coils and snakes, which mean half of that sounds like, yeah, that's like a normal good time just running around the streets naked on acid.

Other than I was like, yeah, that doesn't seem pleasant with the coils and snakes in your stomach, but also like flowers blossoming from your body. I can, I can, I can understand that kind of sensation. Um, but like it definitely, it definitely wasn't all horrible and not like nightmarish. We already mentioned the giddy people with burning anuses. But for like the full on tripping folks, uh, according to the New York times, there was reports of people like hearing heavenly choruses and seeing, you know, bright colors. The world looked beautiful to them.

Um, apparently the head of the farming co-op wrote hundreds of pages of like enlightened tripping poetry. That, that guy must be sick of shit because knowing nothing, he starts tripping, not knowing he's tripping. It's just like time to make some fucking art. Like, you, you know what this head state is good for? Write in some shit. He just like went to his cabinet and wrote poetry.

Yeah. That's fucking awesome. That's a guy, I, I'll bet he handled just everything that life threw at him. Well, like, that's, that says a lot about you when you're like, oh, demons have infiltrated my brain. Guess I'm going to hang out in my cabinet and write some poems. Hundreds of pages. Wow.

Oh, like I, I could hardly, I could hardly write shit on acid. I cannot imagine trying to write poetry. I mean, I've done a lot of creative stuff on acid. Creative stuff. Yeah. I just feel like, like specifically like reading and typing can, can be hard at certain points. You know, if, if you're like coming down, it can be easier, but like, it's not really good for like writing.

It's good for ideas that you later can flesh out into writing. But yeah. Yeah. And unfortunately, you know, because this was, you know, no one was going on, many people are taken to local asylums in straight jackets and tied onto beds, making things undoubtedly worse for people tripping. It's one of those things I can't even be angry at them because like, they don't know what's going on.

I know. Like you have no idea what's going on. Like nobody does. The whole, like every attempt at restraint, increase the agitation line is like horrifying from the concept of like, you're tripping, you, you, you, you don't know what's going on. And people are tying you down to beds, making you feel like you're even more stuck in this permanent state of delirium.

It's just, it just, it's the worst nightmare. Yeah. All of this is horrible. Yeah. The mayor of the town said like, I've seen healthy men and women suddenly become terrorized, ripping their bedsheets, hiding themselves beneath their blankets to escape the hallucinations. So yeah, it's, it's, if you, if you, if you don't know what's going on, pretty, pretty, pretty scary, except for the poetry guy.

Good for him. Yeah. Good for him. Yeah. Making the best of it. But by the time the effects had subsided for everyone affected, which was around like a few days after the initial reported like nausea, like, you know, not, it didn't affect everyone at the same time.

You know, some people got dosed later on. It's unclear what exactly, because this is the fifties, we didn't have a great idea of the exact timeline of events of like when the first effects were felt and like how all the stuff was spaced out. But the sole incident aroused lasted around like a few days for like everyone, everyone totaled. It was reported that anywhere between like 300 to 500 people had felt the effects, you know, around 50 feeling in very, very extreme, like open eye, like hallucinations of objects

that aren't even there, like, like very extreme hallucinations. And four people did die in connection to the poisoning, at least where people died. It's again, it's unclear for exact numbers for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. An investigation into the sudden outbreak of the madness was promptly underway. Town officials wanted to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, you would want to figure out what was happening here.

And the blame fell onto a single batch of bread. What? So among the common denominator among those affected, that they all allegedly consumed bread from one specific baker. Yeah, that's how it works. He was accused of using ergot-contaminated rye flour and he was arrested and temporarily imprisoned. Also, a nearby miller that he got the flour from was also arrested and given the sum

of the blame. The funny part is that around this time, the French government had a very top-down grain distribution system that rigidly controlled everything about where the grains were milled, where they were sent and what bakers could use which flour. So bakers had no choice on what type of flour to use or what type of grain they could use in baking. It was all decided by other people. Yeah, because France, bread is like a real big deal.

It's pretty important, yeah. For the record, just like ergot poisoning, there are a lot of cases of different dancing manias and whatnot in medieval Europe where whole towns will be, everyone will start dancing or hallucinating. They always came down as these people assumed apocryphal stories about demon possessions or whatnot. And now a lot of the suspicion is like, oh yeah, some ergot got into that. No, yeah.

Everybody was just tripping. Ergot poisoning, it seems like one of the rougher trips to go on. Yeah. It's not super clean. No. I mean, I've done LSA, which I think is similar in that it's- It's similar to ergot in few ways, yeah. Yeah, they're tryptomines that are like really rough and it's, I would not, don't do LSA.

No Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds for the pod. If you're going to take LSA, then actually like synthesize it out of Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds, which is a felony. You can synthesize it. Yeah. Which is a felony. It is a felony. You can just buy a Hawaiian baby woodrow seeds and eat them and you will have maybe the worst

trip of your life. Great advice from the pod. Yeah. So yeah, on the rye and ergot topic, the past growing season was especially wet and ergot fungi did grow across the country's rye fields. But the amount of ergot on the rye and the amount of rye used in baking was thought to not be enough to induce any type of poisoning. In fact, the last time ergot poisoning had struck France was back in 1816.

So almost like a century and a half before this incident. Not about a century, if it's the 50s, right? A little less than a century. No. So the last incident was 1816. This was 1950. I thought you said 1860. No, no.

1860. Got you, got you, got you. So a century and a half ago and no other towns and no other part of France was affected by anything similar to this. So the ergot thing is kind of iffy. But the ergot explanation was the only thing that doctors and investigators could come to do, like, you know, their limited knowledge around brain altering substances and just pressure from town officials to get to the bottom of this so that they had something

to blame and people could like move on. But you know, as a result, not much evidence really backs up the ergot claim and a lot of experts today kind of deem it bunk. Yeah, there's, and there's a bunch of like, there's this thing kaikion that the Greeks would take that was like this Greek hallucinatory thing that they think it was because they were putting grain and wine and it might have been ergot poisoned, but also like people enjoyed it. And so there's a lot of debate over whether or not it could have been ergot, but I don't

know. I don't know what else. Is there other other theories about what it might have been if it was an ergot? Oh, oh, Rob. Oh, yes, there is. Oh boy, is it the CIA? Is it the CIA, Garrison? Where could I get to it?

So yeah, it doesn't really make much sense that the high amounts of ergot rye would only be in one batch of grain used in a single batch of bread from just one bakery in one small town doesn't doesn't really make sense. Other explanations that people have come to includes like mercury poisoning and overuse of other fungicides. These have been mostly disproven. Yeah, that doesn't seem like mercury poisoning. No, but there is a guy who likes to drink some mercury, you know, boy, mark on.

So yeah, so there's a lot of other theories around like fungicides being used, but those have been kind of disproven by some people, but others still point to them as possible explanations. But but there is one other theory that we will focus on that features two of my favorite things, LSD and the 1950s CIA, because if you're going to pick a CIA, the 1950s one, they had the most fun. They had the most fun, right? You know, who else has a lot of fun, Garrison?

Who? Who would that be? The 1950s CIA. Whomst? Our sponsors. Oh, really? Good for them. What could happen here is sponsored only by the 50s CIA.

Only the one from the 50s. Yeah. When you order any of our products, they will come to your house and inject you with 7000 hits of LSD. Hey, free. Hey, that is that sounds like a great deal. Honestly, you're saving a lot of money. You are saying that is a lot of free, a lot of acid for the amount of money you're spending.

That's a license, you won't do more acid. That's for sure. Nope. That's acid for life. You won't do it again. Yeah. You probably won't have to do it. You won't have to do any expenses ever again.

Yeah. Yeah. You'll survive. You'll just be a very different person by the end of the experience. Yeah. You won't survive. Your body will. Yeah.

Someone else will be inhabiting it at the end of that trip. Someone else will wake up. So speaking of waking up, here's all the products. So 1950s CIA wild time in 2009, Hank P. Albarelli is an American writer and journalist released a book called A Terrible Mistake, which focuses on the suspicious death of a CIA scientist named Frank Olson, who worked on the CIA mind control experiments during the late 40s and early 50s. While researching the book, Albarelli claims to have come across a number of old CIA and

White House documents referencing the Ponce de Sprite incident, and he claims that the village was the target of a CIA experiment on the mass effects of LSD, and that around the time that Frank Olson wanted to sever his ties with the Army and CIA, Frank started talking about his participation in the experiment, which may have led to the government offing Olson. So I know that is a lot, and it is slightly more than just a speculation. We're going to get into the evidence here shortly. But by now, it's pretty well known that throughout the 40s, 50s and 60s, both the U.S. Army and

the CIA tried to use hallucinogenic hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD as both an offensive weapon and as a way to make like psychic super soldiers. The program is like MK Ultra, MK Naomi, Project Bluebird, Project Artichoke, what lots of these lots of these things were trying to find different ways of using LSD for like offensive and defensive means. Some of the interest was promoted, was prompted by reports of the Soviet Union doing experiments with drugs around the same time, also stuff around like psychic powers and hypnosis. This was very popular around this time for lots of different intelligence agencies.

But so, alborelli uncovered a report from 1949 by the director of the Edward Arsenal, which was where many U.S. government LSD experiments were carried out, and this report stated that the Army should do everything possible to launch so-called field experiments using this drug. And later in his 2009 book, alborelli claims that he found references to a government document with the label REE, Pont Saint-Esprit, and F. Olsen Files, SO, SPAN, SLASH, FRANCE, OPERATION FILE, INCLUSIVE, OLSEN, ENTEL FILES, HAND CAREY TO BELLEN, TELL HIM TO SEE TO IT THAT THESE ARE BARRIED.

This document does exist. We do have this label on this document. But the actual contents of the document are gone, but this is just a label that is being referenced as a piece of this thing. We just know there was a thing with this title, great. So the document label references Frank Olsen and David Bellen. So Bellen was the executive director of the Rockefeller Commission, created by the White House in the mid-70s, to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the Central Intelligence

Agency. So alborelli believes that the French town LSD incident, which is like the Pont Saint-Esprit, which is the name of the town, and the F. Olsen Files mentioned in the document would definitely show that if the document hadn't been buried, as it was said in the label, it would show that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople by dosing them with what he thinks was LSD. Now there is also a bit more to it than that. Using Foyas, he got a hold of another CIA document, a two-page report from 1954 detailing

a conversation between a CIA agent and a representative of the Sandas Chemical Company. So the Sandas base was the place where Albert Hoffman invented LSD in 1938, and it was only a few hundred kilometers away from Pont Saint-Esprit, the town where this happened. So the chemical company was actually pretty close, relatively to Europe. And it was also the only place where LSD was being made at the time, and they were providing both the army and the CIA with a lot of acid. But they were also giving it to universities. They gave lots to Timothy Leary initially, but they didn't give quite a lot to Tim Leary.

They were giving it out to a lot of different universities and research people, including the US government. So the CIA agent wrote in this report that he was detailing a dinner he had with this representative of the chemical company, and he reported that after having several drinks, the scientists started talking about the Pont Saint-Esprit incident. The Sandas official blurted out, the Pont Saint-Esprit secret was that it was not the bread at all, continued the Sandas official. For weeks, the French tied up our laboratories with analysis of the bread.

It was not the grain ergot, it was a diethyl laminate, sorry, it's the last part of the LSD name. Yeah, diethyl acid. Yeah, the diethyl laminate compound. Yeah, the surgical diethyl acid is what LSD stands for. So yeah, the scientist said that it was basically an LSD-like compound. So that was a report detailing a dinner that a CIA agent had with this scientist. And that document was uncovered, it was from like the 50s.

Now this next part has a little bit less proof to it, because there's no documents backing this up. But Albrelly also claims that Dirk is digging two former CIA researchers reached out to him and revealed some possible details of the method of the poisoning. They told him that the village was subjected to an air blitz of pulverized LSD. Holy shit, did the acid bomb them? I'm sorry, that's fucking based. So to force the townspeople to take the substance through the air, according to the researchers,

this manner of distribution proved mostly unsuccessful, forcing the CIA to move on to phase two, which was contaminating local food. So apparently if the air blitz was a thing, it didn't work super well. That's a bummer. No, although actually, I was about to have Sophie buy us a plane. We will talk about this later. But the CIA did do more air blitzing of acid in New York City, actually. They would ride around in cars in poorer and poorer, more like multicultural areas, shooting

LSD out of the back of the car to see what would happen to people. I mean, take out the racism, and that really is a dream job. Just driving around cities, air dosing people with acid at random, smoking cigarettes, probably. Oh, my God. So with the conclusion drawn that it was one of the towns bakeries being the source of the poisoning, Albrey says it was possible that LSD was put in or onto the bread. So yeah. And also, lots of the scientists dispatched to investigate the poisoning after it took

place were actually from the Sandos chemical company. They studied the situation for like two or three weeks and gave the explanation that would later be kind of disproven that it was ergot poisoning, which they told the town officials and the British Medical Journal. What no one knew at the time was that, one, the existence of LSD in the first place, and two, that Sandos was the company making it and giving these drugs to the US Army and to the CIA. And apparently Albert Hoffman himself went to the town to investigate this incident.

So yeah, one last thing on like the physical evidence side of things. Albrey also found an undated White House document that appeared to be part of a larger file that had been sent to members of the Rockefeller Commission containing the names of two French nationals who had been secretly employed by the CIA and made direct references to the quote, Pond Saint Esprit incident. Also it was linked, the document linked former CIA biological warfare expert and the chief of the Fort Derrick's Special Operations Division. So those are all places that they were experimenting with a similar kind of thing.

We have mentioned the Rockefeller Commission a few times now, if you remember the names of Frank Olson, the guy, one of the CIA researchers on LSD and David Bellin, they were on the label of that missing document. So but Bellin was the executive director of the White House Commission to investigate the CIA's abuses and crimes, which was called the Rockefeller Commission. It was formed by President Ford in 1975 to investigate abuses and other activities by the CIA and a few other intelligence agencies that were operating within the states. So the Rockefeller Commission revealed not only, the reason why we know about MKUltra

was because of the Rockefeller Commission. This is how we know this was a thing. So it not only revealed stuff about like programs around MKUltra, but it also revealed the details of the CIA dosing their own scientist, Frank Olson, with LSD and possibly killing him. There's also like, there's like a Netflix series about this called Woodward, which I haven't, I haven't actually watched it. So I don't know how good or accurate it is, but they did, they did make a series a few

years ago about the death of Frank Olson and all of the weird sketchy stuff surrounding both his job and, and, and, and his death. Yeah. We do love the CIA folks. Uh huh. So the, the, the commission also, uh, concluded that the head of the CIA's LSD program, Dr. Sidney, uh, Gauchlieb, uh, destroyed all of the drug programs records in 1973 to hide the details of possibly illegal actions.

And he was personally involved in the torture of Frank Olson, um, 20 years after Mr. Olson's death and 10 years after the LSD experiments were halted, uh, Dr. Gauchlieb ordered the destruction of all the records of the program, including a total of 152 separate files. This came shortly after other reports that, uh, that, that records were being destroyed by Richard Helms, the, the, the then director of central intelligence. So it's undoubtedly true that the CIA was up to, up to some shit involving LSD around the, around the exact time period of this French town incident. Yeah.

It's certainly not like you're not coming out of nowhere suggesting the CIA may have dosed all these people because they did it to a bunch of folks. If they didn't do it here, they'd done similar shit. So it's also, it's also worse mentioning at this point that like, this is like the point where the CIA is also running this like enormous heroin network out of France as like, basically, basically have this whole, they have this deal with the French where they're like, okay, so the French mob can like basically move all the heroin they want in exchange.

They'll like stop the communists from taking control of the point of Marseillais. And so this is, this is all also going on, like at the same time that they're doing the LSD stuff. It's great. So there's, there's some historians that think the LSD theory does not hold enough water. Stephen Kaplan is a U.S. historian specializing in the French food history and the author of the 2008 book, Cursed Bread, which follows this incident.

He says that he is, I have numerous objections to this poultry evidence that this, that this, against the CIA. First of all, it's clinically incoherent, LSD takes effects in just a few hours, whereas the inhibitors, where the inhibitors showed symptoms only after 36 hours or more. And furthermore, LSD does not cause the digestive elements or the vegetative effects described by the townspeople. So to both those claims, I say they're not necessarily true. It's unclear how soon the deleterious effects took place.

For some people they were, they first effect felt. So the whole thing about like the effects only taking effect after 36 hours, that's not, that's not necessarily true. And also LSD can definitely have nauseating or digestive effects. Oh yeah, absolutely. So that's, that's, that's not, that's, yeah. And, but, but like there were other types of symptoms that are not common for what we think of as like modern LSD, but again, this is the 1950s and we don't know what they were

actually on. It did, it's maybe not, it may not be what we think of as like LSD now. It could be suddenly, you know, this is a whole class of psychoactive drugs that's unclear what they were all actually being dosed with. Yeah. Who the fuck knows what they were being given and who the fuck knows what the actual like dose amount was. Yeah.

We've no idea. And it's also, you know, I think it's leery was the origin of the phrase that like the things that determine what happens on a trip are set, setting and dose. So your mindset, where you take it and who you take it around and the dose and the fact that these are somewhat unique symptoms could be to the fact that like other people taking acid have never taken it this way in this whole town is all dosed at once without knowing what acid is like. So Kaplan's other objections revolve around like the delivery system.

He says it's absurd, this idea of transmitting a very toxic drug by putting in, by putting it in the bread. As for pulverized to get for ingestion through the air, that technology wasn't even possible at the time. Most compellingly, why would they choose the town of Pont Saint-Esprit to conduct these tests? It was half destroyed by the U.S. Army during fighting with the Germans in the Second World War.

It makes no sense. And to that I say, that makes it the perfect time for the CAA to fuck with. Yeah. They generally would choose to dose someone with acid because it sounded funny. Yeah. They didn't give a shit. I think the fact that this town was already kind of like only half inhabited and half destroyed by the Second World War, it makes it the perfect town to fuck with.

And also the CAA and the government very much did have the means to try to distribute stuff via the air because we can see other documents are in the time of them doing this two specific areas of New York City. They also tried to poison the entire New York subway with LSD in the 50s, but that was shut down by higher-ups in the Central Intelligence. Unfortunately. God, what a time that would have been. But Kaplan isn't sure or gots to responsible either.

He says that ergot contamination would not have worked because it doesn't make sense that only one sack of grain would have been affected. And he says if it was ergot, the effects would have been way more widespread. Yeah, that does sounds. He rules out LSD in the grounds that the symptoms that people suffered, although similar, don't quite fit what we modernly think of of the drug. Also, I don't think Kaplan's ever taken LSD, so I don't think he knows much about it. I think he's right about it, probably not being ergot, but I don't think he knows much

about LSD. Yeah, he also points out that LSD probably wouldn't have survived the fierce temperatures of the baker's oven, although Albarelli counters that LSD could have been added after the fact to the surface of the bread. Sure, yeah. You could just drop it on. You could just drop it on with liquid blotters, which would also explain how the effects were so different from person to person, because one person may be having a whole drop of LSD,

where somebody may only have a tiny little speck of moist liquid on that one. So I can explain some things. But this is still pretty much a mystery. It's very clear. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you've got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure, he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

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This very well could have been some kind of hidden LSD CIA experiment, or the CIA could have just been interested in studying what happened in the town since they were also doing studies into psychoactive substances at the time. It could be either or. And that's where it's spooky because you'll never know. So yes, that is the spooky incident of a French town basically thinking that they lost their minds. And then, you know, they...

You'll love to see it. Do we? I think it's funny. It is a little funny. It is definitely a little funny. It is a great example of, like, the worst way to trip. Yeah, that's pretty high up there. Anyway, critical support to the CIA for dosing random people with acid.

Always one of my favorite sets of stories. You love to see it. So yeah, tune in. Tune in tomorrow for more spooky tales. For another spooky story. And you can follow the spooky social media that poisons your brain at... Twitter.com. Happen Here Pod and Cool Zone Media, which he asked Twitter about poisoning your brain.

That is just as spooky. Goodbye. Way more spooky. Way worse for your brain than, surprise, CIA acid, to be honest. The acid wears off. The Gangster Chronicles podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around the underworld. With criminals and entertainers, to victims of crime and law enforcement, we cover all facets of the game.

Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify our promote illicit activities. We just discuss the ramifications and repercussions of these activities. Because after all, if you play Gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with Gangster prizes. Our heart radio is number one for podcasts, but don't take our word for it. Gangster Chronicles podcast and the I Heart Radio app are wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoey Deschanel, and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates, Hannah Simone and Lamorne Morris to recap our hit television series, New Girl.

Join us every Monday on the Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American, and discuss how the show got made with the writers, guest stars, and directors who made the show so special. Fans have been begging us to do a New Girl recap for years, and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus, each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this.

At the end when he says, you got some Schmidt on your face, I feel like I pitched that joke. I believe that. I feel like I did. A thousand percent. I want to say that was, I tossed that one out. Listen to the Welcome to Our Show podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. From Cavalry Audio comes the new true crime podcast, The Shadow Girls.

I always wanted to know when it felt like to kill somebody, and he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer, savant, kicking up these girls, getting them in a position of vulnerability, when he got hold of their neck, that was it. I'm Carolyn Osorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River, and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to the river? One time.

Just one time. He started fantasizing about having sex with his mother, and he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer, it's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. It's to all of us kind of strange. Do you know how he feels about prostitutes?

Listen to The Shadow Girls on the iHeart radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm so close to clicking leave meeting every time that that bullshit comes up. It's like, yes, I consent. That's why I'm fucking here. All right. Let's see if we're starting with that line from Danil. Welcome to Spooky Week on It Could Happen Here.

Today we are discussing a truly spooky topic, one that everyone is just really gonna hate. And it's, we're talking about esoteric kekism and meme magic. So Chateaulay, my brothers and sisters, come along on a ride. We read a whole book for this. Oh. At least I did. You read a book just for this. I would say that like all of the books I read from age 19 to 22 prepared me for this.

Have been preparing here for this. The books I read while I was doing psychedelics twice a week all really were good background on this subject. That is true. Do you want to kick us off? I don't. I think first thing we're talking about, we're gonna emphasize awareness over amplification. My goal for this is that we can all be more aware of the power that images on the internet

can have over influencing the actual world and talking about people who believe this to a ridiculous degree and how they actually have been able to institute change not only because of this belief just because of their dedication to this practice because it's a thing that exists and it has had real world ramifications and it's good to understand that that's a thing and that also maybe we can influence the way we like us use the internet to also maybe make good things happen as opposed to just being doomers all the time. So that's kind of what I wanted to start with. Many dubs to that, Garrison.

Eat kek with you. God. No. Although to be fair, the past few days I have just been spamming the, it could happen here group chat with horrible nonsense around kek. It has been the most insufferable week of my life. Horrible nonsense. Like paragraphs.

Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Paragraphs. Walls of text so big. Any actually safe working environment that cared about its employees would have fired you long ago. So I think the other thing that we should definitely mention is that any type of like occultism,

mysticism or like woo, woo, has actually does have a decent history within right wing political ideas and specifically like more extreme right wing stuff from the past few hundred years. Like most people know that like the early Nazis had some mystical stuff going on. There was a lot more stuff going on behind the scenes. A lot of their favorite authors also were like practicing occultists. This is a thing that goes back a while. You can even see this to some degree with like how close Christianity is to a lot of

the right wing, to a lot of like the modern right wing states as well. A lot of what we would consider evangelical Christianity has a lot of stuff that's actually very similar to occultism. They just use different terms because occultism and like magic is taboo, but it's actually the same things. It's all like just, it's interacting with the same systems just with different words. So like this is the thing that is not, it's not just on the internet. This is the thing that's been going on for thousands of years.

In particular the past 100 years we've seen a big rise in the amount of like occultism and mysticism specifically tied to politics. Yeah. And if there's this, I mean, there have been a couple of articles written just recently about the fact that a lot of like the woo, woo left the kind of not really esoteric but kind of mainstream occult-y left like the pop occult-y left has increasingly turned towards stuff like QAnon and a big chunk of it is like this openness to like feel power in coincidences, synchronicity would be the term.

Synchronicity is the term. Yeah. And just a general open-mindedness to maybe too many things. Sure. Yeah. I mean, you can see this on a lot of sides. Yeah. It is definitely not just the right wing.

I mean, it's like the biggest example of this would probably be facets of QAnon the past few years have done very similar types of things. There's a lot of other stuff going on behind the scenes, like how Pepe operated was very similar to that, which is what we're mainly talking about today. But, you know, there is also stuff like this on the left wing, whether it be like new agey type stuff that seems to kind of mostly be bullshit. And there's a, you know, other type of like folk magic or like indigenous traditions that have, I would say, a slightly more...

Significantly more. Like there's actually... There's reasonable actually stuff going on, as opposed to just like new age selling books and that kind of stuff. Yeah. One of the things that also separates actual religion from religion that kind of has formed in this mematic way recently is that all of this stuff, particularly what we're talking about today, formed simultaneously with political sentiment and was crafted.

And in a lot of cases, like they state facts wrong specifically because they are trying to craft a political narrative alongside this like weird quasi-spiritual thing. And speaking of spiritualism coming to the same, kind of coming to the same... This is, you know, we're all kind of anarchist-y adjacent here. And one of the things that really came up around the same time as anarchism in the 20th century was a concept called chaos magic, which was really, really tied to a lot of all... Really tied to a lot of like anarchist thought and anarchist kind of thinkers.

Some of the most famous chaos magicians are like explicitly anarchists. Someone like Grant Morrison. Others are like Discordians, which have a lot of like anarchist crossover, stuff like Robert Anton Wilson, which kind of operates in that same ocean. Yeah. He played a big role in kind of pulling me away from proto-alt-right style beliefs. And I think also a lot of his work was very intelligently crafted because he wrote about conspiracies, he wrote about esoteric magic, but always with a really intent eye on increasing

people's defenses to this kind of stuff, what we're talking about today. He was very like cognizant of that. Like he wrote about conspiracy as an enthusiast, but also as someone who was trying to stop kind of unchecked conspiratorial belief. Yeah. I don't know about that in peculiar ways, but he was an odd man. Yeah. And the reason why I've been getting more into this type of stuff the past year, increase,

and the reason why I really like chaos magic, as I like it as like a postmodern system of magic of looking at how basically if magic is just ideas and trying to figure out how our brains can interact with the physical world, then chaos magic introduces a lot of interesting stuff around like late stage capitalism, because it's explicitly tied to like postmodern art and postmodern thought and the way brands and marketing and specifically the internet all affects our minds. All this stuff gets talked about in chaos magic a lot, and I really like using that framework for things.

And speaking of that kind of stuff specifically around the internet, we're going to be talking about the first thing I want to mention is like the concept of searching for something and then you're going to find it, whether that, you know, Robert Anton Wilson and like the Illuminati trilogy has like and like and Discordianism has like 23 and the Law of Fives, right? I read that book when I was 20 and I have been like seeing 23s repeatedly at like significant moments in my life for the last 14 years or so. Yeah.

It's like once you get that kind of meme implanted in your brain, it can stick with you for forever. And this happens to everything, you know, this happens to everyone like once you learn about a new topic, the next day you'll see it somewhere, right? You'll be like, oh, you'll be like, you'll be like reading a song and it's in all these places that you didn't see it before. This happens all of the time with everything. This is how this is like how synchronicity works.

And this is where religions come from and it's like throughout history. And it's because like this all has its roots in why we're very good hunters. We are pattern and we're pattern recognition, yeah, pattern recognition, like our brains are pattern recognizing machines. That's what we're best at. And it means that we're good at spotting berries and tracking deer. And it also means that we can't stop making religions. We can't stop making religions and cults.

And if we have one too many synchronicities, we can change the entire way we view about the like the whole world, which can have varying degrees of effects that sometimes I can if it's just a little bit that can maybe actually be very helpful. If you join a weird cult that does messed up stuff, then it's like, yeah, that's a problem. Yeah, sometimes it ends in Burning Man and sometimes it ends in Burning Men. Oh, drop the bomb on that one. So first thing I want to kind of discuss before we get into the actual timeline of how Pepe and Kekkazem became a thing, I want to just do a brief overview of sigils and memes and

this idea of what like let's let's take the original concept of the meme, which is like, you know, the genes are genetic, memes are cultural, these are cultural ideas that can spread like a virus. And usually memes in the since since since the Internet has become way more popular, memes have become more tied to images, like in like memes are much more visual thing now, whereas in the 90s, they were more of just like an idea concept. But now they have like in this extra visual backing. So a sigil is a is a magical concept tend mostly to chaos magic, which is basically an abstract

concept or like a specific concept put into an abstract image that then gets charged and then it's going to manifest itself in your life. The reason why this works is because part of this desire gets implanted deep in your brain when you charge it through like a trance or there's there's there's there's like there's different methods of charging sigils, but you have this I you have this concept and this idea and this desire, and it gets put into you. So you're going to kind of subconsciously do things that that influence it into becoming something that you can see.

Just like you know, if you're if you're looking if you hear about 23, you're going to see it. Same thing for this. It's the same kind of base concept. And then Grant Morrison of comic book writers, my favorite comic book writer, he he was he's really the only person that's developed sigils more since their inception with the concept of a hyper sigil, which is taking the same idea of like wanting to influence change in the world via this visual medium of a sigil.

And instead of just having it be like an abstract glyph that you charge, a hyper sigil is an entire work of art with this express interest. So everything that you do in this is trying to get some type of real world change and it's very, very intentional, right, a lot of art already operates like this. This is why a lot of postmodern magic is very similar just to like making art, because it's the same kind of basic idea, whether that be something like, you know, like the matrix or, you know, any, any type of art kind of does this already if it is good. And it can find ways to influence reality.

So memes operate on this the same way. And eventually people actually found that eventually people on 4chan realized that they were doing sigils and started using this word because it's really the same thing when you're when you're altering all of these images of this frog and posting it into all these different kind of more abstract, more like ugly, obscure, kind of like weird, like surreal types of types of memes and you're spamming them on politicians, Twitter account. You're basically doing a group, a group sigil and a group hyper sigil because you're all making these individual things and you're spamming them into the world.

And because there's so many of them, yeah, they're going to have they're going to have a real world effect. Yeah. And they're going to have a real world effect in part because of the way human brains work and in part because of the way algorithms work, which is one of the things where like it's easy, especially if you're an impressionable kid to mistake the algorithm doing what it's designed to do, which is find patterns, groups of people sharing something and expand that to a larger group of people because, oh, if this cluster of people likes this, this will

probably be something that's very successful. Algorithms are great at making synchronicities because that's what they're designed to do. That's what they're supposed to do. That's the whole point of why they exist. And that's why this is, that's why our, because as you stated a little earlier in one of these days on bastards, we're going to talk about Helena Blavatsky and like the theosophy movement and more detail and like all of the occult stuff that fed into the third, the early stage of the third rike.

But the occult back then is very different from the kind of occult feeding into fascism now, which is heavily based around synchronicity because it's also heavily based around social media and the way memes spread. Yeah, that's what I think chaos magic has really gotten kind of a resurgence the past few years with social media and how algorithms develop because they do mirror a lot of the concepts within chaos magic because the internet's kind of a chaotic place, but it's also, it's not just pure chaos. It is chaos within a framework of order, which is why I like the like the like the chaos

star, what like the actual like chaos like sigil. Yes, the arrows are pointing in every direction, but you can make a perfect circle around all of the arrows. It's because it's not just pure chaos, it actually is contained within this other framework. And by the way, Garrison, when you started talking about synchronicities and sigils, I checked my phone for a second and saw that it was 517 on October 23rd. Five, of course, contains both two and three and is thus a sacred number. October 23rd, I shouldn't have to explain why that's significant.

Robert? Robert? And then 17 is a sacred number. Robert? It's the 22nd. It's the 22nd. Yeah, but it's the 23rd on my phone. Why is it the 22nd?

My phone's fucked up because because that's the universe, baby. That's the synchronicity. I'm living in the future, motherfuckers. And what time and what time is it that it's not right now? It was 517 on my phone. And the other time it is, but I don't I don't I don't need to know what time it is. Sophie, this is. Your default reality.

No, no, no. Yeah, you are on a different in a different dimensional plane now. We have a wrong one into two into two different ones. Why is mine wrong? I think I think this channel a I think this gives us a gives us a perfect opportunity for the audience to find their own synchronicities in these ads because who knows what's going to happen? Very good.

Who knows what's going to play? Spooky. No, no. So look for patterns and you'll find them here's some ads. I hope it's an ad for the Egyptian goddess Mott and we are back. We're going to we're going to now actually kind of get into some of the some of the actual pepe nonsense I think another important part to mention is that like for a lot of people doing this online, this this is like an online pattern that happens all the time.

It happens with it happens with stuff like this. It happens with with with cat boys. It happens with a whole bunch of stuff is that like stuff starts as a joke and then you do it a lot and the repetition basically makes you do it genuinely. Yeah, like me talking about getting all of my followers to a compound in Idaho where we die fighting the FDA. Exactly. Eventually that turns into an actual death cult.

So it's it's it starts as a joke and then under repetition it becomes genuine. This happens to basically almost everything on the Internet. Yeah. Yeah, this this this this leads to Garrison and I doing the inevitable Robert Evans behind the bastard's episode. Yeah. Yeah. That's the last one.

That's a three-parter if I ever heard one. You you hope so. You wish. What? Hold on. What are what are cat boys? That is that is that is that is a different that's a different podcast that is a different podcast or thing.

Yeah. Hi. Sorry. I know I only interject briefly. Is that is that are they are they like pre furries? Is that some different? No. Kind of post furry.

It's kind of like post it's it's it's rehumanizing the it's rehumanizing the furry. So like the same way that the same way the same way Sonic the Hedgehog is a remaking massification of Vegeta cat boys are a rehumanification of furries. This is a whole process on the I can explain this in great detail in the later episode. You're good. But I think we have enough. We have enough to talk about already. I understand.

Thank you so much. I'm going to get my dog. Okay. Sure. Would someone be willing to sacrifice their own mentality to describe the the rise of Pepe just originally in the early 20s. Yeah. So it started as this guy's comic that there was nothing particularly great about.

Yeah. It was just it was a dude's comic. He was like feels good man was kind of a good man. He was a chill dude. He was a chill dude. Yeah. Not a fascist comic. Pepe's actually pretty fun.

Yeah. Comic Pepe's greatest artist is he's like he's like a millennial slacker who doesn't really know what to do with his life after like after 9 11 after the financial crash. He's just trying to kind of get by. The comics fine. Yeah. The comics fine. But the art just that kind of the specifics of how he drew Pepe made him very well suited

for a meme because he's expressive and he so he shows up and starts getting spread in 4chan and you know it that kind of idea goes viral and it particularly gets attached to a lot of like the political shit on pole and the people who are like churning into Gamergate and the alt right. And Pepe gets very popular smug Pepe gets very popular. Yeah. Yeah. And then as a so Keck is well I mean that does tie into the frog shit Keck's a bit like

later on I think we'll go over more for like how Pepe is like the cartoon character got you know as soon as it becomes a meme it spreads out into all corners and the people who memed this hardest were were on 4chan so this is how Pepe became kind of tied to this and I think the last bullet in Pepe really solidifying him as as an alt right meme specifically was the Richard Spencer punch. Yeah. I think that's the thing that actually was like done it's like no Pepe is just this now he can't be anything else because when Richard Spencer was being punched he was describing

what Pepe was that was what's happening in that specific viral moment if you want to talk about like magical terms this is Pepe getting like charged like this is the idea of like this idea getting getting charged because it is now going to be profiled into the masses in this in this moment of like pure emotion so that's when Pepe really gets tied to that and I think Hillary Clinton made it very very worse the way she talked about this kind of stuff on her speeches basically gave gave the alt right a baseball bat to hit her with the problem that Clinton and everyone else because like a big part of I would argue that like the largest part of why Pepe became a thing that was destined

to last was that pundits and politicians including Hillary and media people kept talking about it as a fascist symbol and kept discussing like what it was and that anyone who grew up on the internet who grew up around these communities knows that you ignore them as much as possible to the extent that that's possible you don't feed the trolls you don't give them power yeah you don't and and talking about it again this is like chaos magic shit like referencing it bringing it up bringing it into the real world gives it power that's the thing that happens yeah so that that's how it got so much more power the more Clinton talked about it the more news media wrote about it everyone got so excited on a four

chain that's like that's that's that's like that is them winning them them seeing this thing and and then and then this goes this goes back pre even it being far I can remember because I was in these spaces when they first started doing shit like raids on the church of Scientology every time there would be actual like news coverage of what people on the internet did it got people so fucking excited because like the internet had been this thing that didn't matter for the longest I think in the book I read about this kind of stuff they did use the example of like anonymous and the raids on Scientology being like a precursor to this type of like me magic of this thing like of like internet forums influencing the

real world through repetition and getting getting to grow power but getting people who don't use internet to talk about these same things yep it was like a precursor to then what we always saw the alt-right which is a which is a pretty a pretty common opinion and then and then enter enter the Egyptian gods Robert do you want to do you want to do you want to do you want to discuss that we're good that's what we're going to say next is how's this intersects with Egyptian gods so the ancient pharaohs played a card game of ancient and terrible power man nobody wants you give us a kid this is no man I'm surrounded by heathens my buddy now man Robert do you want to do you want to do you want

to do want to discuss Keck yeah I mean so way back in the day and I think this even predates World of Warcraft I remember it first happening on like Starcraft games online there would be yeah gamers from Korea and like when you were doing like a zur gresher something which is when you have a bunch of guys they all attack the enemy base or whatever they would type out their term for LOL which was like keck KEK yeah KEK so it usually just looked like a stream of KEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKEKE school and over and over and over again this really took off in in World of Warcraft where like they were Korean gold farmers were a big thing and like Kek was something that like everyone kind of knew what it meant because

Because it was often the only thing you could understand as an American that these people would be typing. And as a result of all of that, it took off in internet culture as just an LOL. And specifically, one of the things that's going on here, as the mid-oughts dawn, and the internet becomes serious business, and social media, and everybody's, even before social media is dominant, but just when everybody's taking the internet seriously, it's clear there's a lot of money in it, it's mainstream. You have this kind of second generation of internet people who got on in the late 90s,

early 2000s when they were kids, who get frustrated at the fact that all of these different terms and phrases and bits of internet culture that they had identified with are going mainstream and Keck is kind of a way of playing. Normies are using them, yeah. And Keck is, everyone knows what LOL is, people don't know what Keck is. So in places like 4chan, that becomes a really popular thing. And Keck kind of is, so Keck, as a term for laughter, is floating around at the same time as Pepe memes.

And so whenever you meme something into the mainstream, whenever some 4chan op or whatever you want to call it, succeeds in getting mainstream coverage, you would get a bunch of views. As soon as Taylor Clinton mentions Pepe on stage, everyone in 4chan goes Keck because they're laughing. And they say stuff like Top Keck and whatnot, and eventually somebody realizes that there's an Egyptian goddess, one of the translations of that god and goddess's name is K.E.K. Now there's a couple other translations out there. There's a whole bunch of issues with this, if you wanted to look at it, that's with a

rational kind of brain, it's because there was this old family of gods, very old Egyptian gods. They all had male and female versions. The male versions all had frog heads. But around... Because frogs can change their gender. Yeah, because frogs can change. Jurassic Park taught us all.

So this whole era of Egyptian gods all had frog heads. So there was one of them that was named Keck who was a god of chaos. And this also played into how 4chan was using Trump because they liked Trump mostly as a chaotic re-force that got people angry because that's what 4chan wanted to do as well. They wanted to be a chaotic force that gets people angry, so that's why they really latched on to Trump. And then when they found out that, oh, there's this god named Keck who is the lord of like pro...

What's the word? Yeah, primordial darkness. Primordial darkness, yeah. And this idea of primordial darkness. So not even chaos as much as like pre-being. Kind of like Uranus and Greco-Roman faith, like a god kind of before the gods that are more well-known. But this was a synchronicity, so they took it as the same way religions take synchronicity

and create divinity, they took this as like divinity. Now, again, this starts as a joke, but you do it enough and you start to take it seriously. And you get a mix of real Egyptology, which is that yeah, there was a god named Keck among a bunch of other gods. One of the ways he was depicted was with the frog head, but also like bad Egyptology. Like I found an article on the board plus press blog, Pepe the frog faith, which is Oh, I'm sure this, I'm sure this is like a bastion of archaeology. Yeah.

And the title is amateur Egyptologist ways in on the frog statue, hieroglyphs. And one of the things he points out, Oh, are you talking about the frog statue that isn't a Keck, but they thought it was Keck? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And a number of things. So like one of the things this guy claims is that the hieroglyphics for Keck are a frog

man and then a couple of what he calls baskets. First up, they're cups, not baskets. And the actual hieroglyphics for for K.E.K. don't include the little frog man. They're like two of the little cups in this weird T shaped thing. Like yeah, it's all it's like it's bad because again, amateur Egyptologist, like he's just a kid who was Googling stuff and like got some either lied or got some hieroglyphics wrong. But this kind of stuff compounds, but Keck as like an idea is like now we have a backing

of an ancient God again, first as a joke, but then some people started to take it more seriously, really, really caught on among people because because it's funny, like it's just funny and ridiculous. It is funny. It's extremely funny. Of course, it's going to catch on on four checks. It's hilarious. Yeah.

Right. So they're going to start using this and repeating this and creating whole new memes, creating like there's like there's like an eight eight part book series that's like fake books written by like someone who's like just memeing, but pretending to take it seriously. But like the authenticity doesn't actually matter because because it exists, it doesn't actually matter. I think it is. Yeah.

Like and there's there's weird coincidences that continue to occur. Like one of the biggest being there's this like phrase Chateau Lé, which creeps up and all of this and becomes like this exhortation that they use like a way of like exclaiming and such. And then somebody figures out that Chateau Lé is also a song like an Italo disco song I think from the 70s and the album that Chateau Lé is on has like a frog man face on the cover. Yeah.

And so they're like, oh, it's a sign. And then like all of the big, yeah, because you're going to find frogs wherever you look now because that has become the new 23 thing. You're right. Think of it. Think of it. The frogs are not uncommon. Frogs are everywhere.

You're going to find them everywhere now. And there are every ancient religion everywhere in the world. I'm going to guarantee you there's some fucking frogs in it because like they're everywhere and they're old creatures. People pay attention to frogs. They've been around for a long time. Yeah. There's frogs been around a while.

So the other the other thing that happened. Those people not only basically created their whole mythology around this, creating different types of religion. There was like Kekism as a religion, the Cult of Kek, Esoteric Kekism, all of their own distinct differences because these people spend all their time on the Internet. So they developed these things and they also found this old frog statue that they said was Kek. It actually, it isn't.

It's actually, it's actually a gold called Hecket. But on the basis. That doesn't matter. But on the base of the statue, it had it had glyphs, which appear to us modern humans as they, they look like someone sitting on a computer, like they look like someone sitting in front of a monitor on a keyboard. And on the other side of the keyboard is a DNA is is like what looks like a DNA spiral. So this is like, Jesus, like genes, right, genes, genes are DNA, memes are cultural DNA.

This is a glyph of the God Kek on a statue with someone on a computer with a DNA spiral. Of course, you're going to take this is like some like message from the, from the gods. You're like, yes, I'm supposed to be, I am supposed to be by my memeing. I'm doing Kek's work to put Trump into office. Yeah. It's, God, that's frustrating. It sure is. It sure is.

But all of those in the in group, this is like the statue was just a depiction of what the Kek people and the Pepe spammers were doing, posting on the internet to manifest real world change. And that's, that's all it is. If you want to see other examples of this, like if you look at the ancient alien stuff, there's this like famous Myan hieroglyph of the astronomer that's like, if you, if you know what a telescope is because you're looking at it a thousand years after it was carved, it kind of looks like it might be a telescope.

And it's part of what like people say, like, oh, this is proof that like that this is an alien, like he's looking at a fucking telescope. And I was like, no, it was, there's other explanations for it. It was something like that somebody carved. Yeah. I think there's another thing that you start running into here, like, I see this like not even like, I see this just, this is just on the internet all the time. Like I see leftists do this or like, so like, okay, so you learn something and then, oh,

it's not true. But then people will keep spreading the thing because they'll say, and I've had this, people say this, like, well, it might have more power. Yeah. It has more power with it, so you're still going to believe it. Yeah. And they talk about the fact that Wil Wheaton murdered three people in 1998. If you repeat, this is the message, like, yeah, yeah, with a knife.

What? It's horrible. Yeah. Now, I mean, he was in Thailand at the time, so he was able to get out and we don't extradite. So he's, he's, he's got out scot-free, but yeah, okay, word. But I mean, like this is like the same, this is the same thing that Trump does, which we'll talk about a bit. We'll talk about a bit is like, if you repeat the thing enough, it becomes true for large

swaths of the population. That's all truth actually needs to be for people. I think, I think we're going to go and break and come back and close us, close us up and finally finish this horrible discussion. Anyway. You know who won't meme fascism? Well, actually KFC, have you seen, have you seen the KFC fascist posting on Twitter? Yeah.

Yeah, there's like a Spanish KFC account that has been doing that, that is up to some shit. Yeah. That's funny. I hate, I hate that that's a sentence that, that, that you got to say. I just hate it. Paradox. And we are back. I have finished an entire dark meat bucket and I am so full.

Yep. And now, now I'm sad, I'm sad because I'm still thinking of the fascist KFC Twitter account. So we, the other thing I want to do in a mention is kind of Trump's own power of belief kind of idea and how Trump was basically using esoteric terms was able to basically create an alternate reality for millions of people to live in. And there's really no getting through to them now because they are literally just in it, just in a different dimension. Yeah.

There's no way to pierce that other dimension. They're basically living in just a totally alternate reality. There's no use saying that it is the one that we live in. So Trump was obsessed with a few of these ideas. He's less interested in like the woo and more interested in like the power of positive thinking, power of your own belief. Yeah. Yeah.

He grew up in a movement and a specific. Norman Vincent Peel stuff. Yeah. He grew up following a specific movement and church call that falls under the umbrella called new thought, which is where Trump's, you know, Trump's like, like how strong Trump's ego is comes from this idea of that you need to reinforce yourself and reinforce your own victories because if you do that, you're going to, you're going to find them. Right.

If you're looking for 23, you're going to find it. If you're looking for your own victories, you're going to force them to happen. Even if they don't happen into other people, right? But like, so that's, we see this happening successfully with the 2016 election. We see both like all of the memeing, everything that happened in the 2016 election worked for Trump. And it, you know, we, you know, of course, of course he didn't win the popular vote, but that doesn't actually matter, but it worked in getting him to office.

Now it, you know, it worked less well for the 2020 election. But still his reassertions that he won still gave us a lot of real world results, like the January 6th capital insurrection. So like, it's this, right? So this type of idea that if you re, if you, if you reinforce this thing, if you reinforce this belief, if you can, if you have, if you have this idea and you keep putting it out into the world, it's going to manifest some type of real, real world result. And that, that was January 6th.

That's what that was. Yeah, baby. And that's the kind of the world we live in now. It's like the weaponized unreality world where people, because of how media works, because of the internet works, they're able to create this like chaotic, like, like sphere of, of energy and ideas that can like spread so much faster than anything used to be that could everyone can segment their own reality into two degrees that we've never really seen before because of how fast information can travel now.

It is, it is, it is a new, it's, it is a relatively new thing, the way that, the way that this, this, this can operate. So like memes, memes themselves, like Pepe and all this kind of stuff undoubtedly had, had an impact on not only just the 2016 election, but just the entire political climate surrounding the whole Trump presidency. Now, to the degree to which we can credit me magic or the God Keck, that part is meaningless because, because the effect is the same, that like the, the, the synchronicities were, were still experienced and, and truth is just, is just experiential.

So it, the beliefs that we kind of hold will shape how we experience things anyway, that will experience what the actual truth is. There is, there is a great Robert Anton Wilson quote that is like, reality is what you can get away with. Yup. And that's, that's like, that, that like summarizes how Trump was able to be so successful because he was able to shape reality, right? I think me and me and Chris were talking about this the other day about how, Chris, do you

want to say the thing about like the Democratic Party and Republican Party and how reality differs? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, okay. So there's, there's, there's a thing, and Garrison I think was too young for this, but there's a very famous thing that, that one of the Bush administration people said about how Democrats lived in the reality based community. And this, this was like a whole thing in the, in like the 2000, this is in the Bush administration

and everyone loses their minds and this is like a whole meme when the Democrats that's like, oh, we're the reality based community and they're not, but, but then this is the interesting part. If you look at the second part of that quote, right, what he's actually saying is that, so the Democrats are the reality based community, right? They analyze reality. The Republican Party is the party that creates reality because other people don't control the empire.

And this is, this is what neo-conservativeism was, right? And you know, the argument here basically is that the Democrats are, you know, they're always going to be a step behind because they're merely analyzing reality, whereas Republicans are using the power or sort of the state to, you know, change and define it. And this, this worked for them, you know, I would argue this is how they came into power. This is how they're, this is what they're still doing. Yeah, yeah. This is why every president since Ronald Reagan has just been Ronald Reagan with a mask.

Yeah, but, but I think, I think there's something very important here specifically about how Bush took office, right? Because Bush, Bush steals the election, right? Bush does, like the thing that Trump was trying to do is what George Bush did in 2000s. But with a riot, just with a very specific kind of riot. Yeah, but this is the thing, this is the thing that Bush and the neo-cons understood that the Trumpists kind of understand, but never quite solidified because they're not like, they're not sort of insider political actors, which is that, okay, so all of the stuff about

saying something and it becoming real, right? There's sort of a limit to this, if, if you don't have a gun, now, if you have a gun, then the limits of that are, you know, you can do basically whatever you want because you can just, you can force everyone else to also accept this as reality that, you know, this is what the state is, right? Yeah. And there's a whole, there's a whole thing, this is a couple of like performance theory where it's like, yeah, so like you saying the thing makes it so, right?

Well, this, this is what a state is and this is how Bush won the election because he, unlike Trump, whose people tried to like take power directly by like storming the Capitol, Bush was smart and Bush was like, oh, okay, I, I'm gonna, I'm gonna declare that I won the election and, but, but, but instead of like openly doing it, right, I'm going to get the Supreme Court to declare that I'm president and, you know, and this, this, this requires the Brooks Brothers riot to stop the counts and all this stuff. We were like, you know, it doesn't, yeah, yeah, it's great, but it's like, it doesn't, it doesn't matter that, you know, he, he didn't win Florida.

Like if, if, if, if, if, if, if the, if the votes had actually been counted, he would not have won Florida, but because he was able to get. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. Because the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters

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And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

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It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Courts to say that he was president. He was president. And that's that's like that is the concept of magic words. Yep. Yep.

And this is this is this is this is all the state is right? It's the state is magic with a gun behind it. Yeah, it is. Yeah, the state is magic because it's like, yeah, you're right. It's like magic can't have a hard cap. There's going to be a certain amount of people that, you know, with with with Trump's reality altering kind of power, there's a certain that there is a hard cap on how much that could influence the general population.

But if you have a gun behind that, that gives it so much more enforceable power. Yeah. And to go back to Egyptian mythology, one of the attitudes they had about the Pharaoh is that reality was whatever the Pharaoh declared other a lot of societies have this idea towards their monarchs. And the duty of his people is to make reality conform to the Pharaoh's will. And like that's that's what the GOP does. Like that's what fascists always do.

I think the quote surrounding like, yeah, the Democrats are the reality based party because they because they, you know, observe the reality and like, and like, and like, and like, Libs and Democrats are like, yes, they like, they take some pride like, yes, we are rational. We observe reality. Meanwhile, the Republicans are like, no, you just observe it, but we can just we can create it. I think that is a great example of how those two parties operate politically and how it's

like, yes, they're both they're both the right leading parties. But here's the difference for how they actually operate is that one of them is way more passive in their observing of reality. And one is is okay with getting their hands dirty and actually forcing this type of reality altering changes. I will say, I think like one thing to close this out is that, you know, we can we can tie this all the way back to the second part of the Dual Power episode, which is that the neocon neocon project doesn't work.

And the reason it doesn't work is that, you know, they they like, basically they lose reality. And that just that implodes the entire project. And so, you know, and if you look back at like all of this stuff about how we can shape reality, we can shape reality, we can shape reality, that stopped being true the moment that, you know, like they lose control of Basra or like, you know, all like they run into other people. Yeah.

Maktar al-Sadr used to be unkillable by all the weapons of empire. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, you know, and Sotir and Sotir does this by like, you know, Sotir sets up a bunch of baby clinics. Right, he's like, here's a bunch of clinics, we will give help to pregnant mothers, like you guys are really going to shoot us. You know, he builds a militia around this and he's able to, like, he's one of the smartest

people on the planet. He's extremely good at what he does. It's not a good guy, but like, it's just like completely shatter the neocons. Like they they're dead, like they don't like that that project, which was like the culmination of this, this incredible, like, incredible intellectual project, incredible military project. Like they got their absolute ass kicked by a bunch of people doing dual power. Yep.

I think, and I really, I do want to talk more about kind of chaos magic and there's a lot to talk about here. There's a lot to talk about here. On the pot of the future. I think this is a good grounding. And I think, but yeah, I think this is a great intro to how of the, how these concepts overlap with politics and how reality overlaps. And I'd like to disagree on the end of this with one aspect, Garrison, because you said

their reality can't be pierced, but the ancient texts speak of a spear that once pierced the side of Christ itself. And while Hitler held it, his armies were ascended, but it was stolen. And if we can find the spear of Longinus, Garrison, we can pierce their reality. Hey, I have a fedora. I have a whip. We can, we all have fedoras, Garrison. Let's do it.

Let's go. All right. We are, we are off to find the spear that sides us off the spear of destiny. You can follow our adventures on happen here, pod and cool so media on Twitter. And yeah, I'm sure we will give you updates for our spirit ventures at the pod in the future. Yeah. Sophie, we need half a million dollars to find the spear of destiny.

Okay. Okay. Great. See you on the other side. Hey, let the listeners take here last season on lethal lit. You might remember I came to hollow falls on a mission, clearing my Aunt Beth's name and making sure justice was finally served, but I hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart the town.

My mission put myself and my friends in danger, though it wasn't all bad. I'm going to be real if you take I like you, but now all signs point to a new serial killer in hollow falls. If this game is just starting, you better believe I'm going to win. I'm Tig Torres and this is lethal lit. Catch up on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast, lethal lit, a Tig Torres mystery out now and then tune in for all new thrills in season two, dropping weekly starting February nine.

Subscribe now to never miss an episode, listen to lethal lit on the I heart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The art world, it is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls, you know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the I heart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever

you get your podcasts. I call the union hall, I said it's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Dr. King on April 4th, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis, a petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed, right? James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story. The authorities would parade over, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham

that killed Dr. King, except it wasn't the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems that came out when I got the ray case was that some of the evidence as far as I was concerned did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes. The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I heart radio app, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Kill them all. This has been it could happen here, the show where I just kill them all.

Harrison, Chris, you want to take over? Oh boy. I just woke up. I haven't had coffee yet. That is incredibly spooky. Surging murder. Well, it is spooky. You're right.

This is true. I didn't realize that until just now, but retroactively that makes it fine. See, extremely spooky. Yeah. What are we doing? Who are we? We're doing where it could happen here. We're doing this is this is this is a podcast where we talk about spooky stuff that happens

around Halloween and today we are doing the spookiest thing of all, which will be revealed shortly. Oh boy. I hope it's Wil Wheaton is not Wil Wheaton. Well, that's the spookiest. I really I really should have looked for that tie in because there might be one is a CIA asset. We might get there.

I don't know. Okay. Okay. See, this is this is I'm hacking the fraud and I didn't actually look into this. The Wil Wheaton connection. Nope. Well, we missed it. You and most journalists.

Yeah. All right. What are we? What are we doing? What are we doing? On June 14th, 1947, a rancher named W.W. Mac Brazel and his son Vernon were driving across their property when they encountered quote, a large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tin foil and rather tough

paper and sticks. Yeah, me too. Just a regular night in Oregon. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Brazel's back in a time where people are baffled when weird things happened instead of going, oh, it's Tuesday. Yeah.

Oh man, what a time. Yeah. So they didn't just go straight to Twitter. No, no. He, he, you know, he, he doesn't think that was actually, you know, I kind of like reasonably a reasonably responsible thing to do in 1947, which is that he spends about a week like picking up all of the scraps that he can and like putting them in a box and then he drives it to the sheriff.

Okay. Sure. And the sheriff's name is George Wilcox. I love, that says a lot about the difference in urgency back then where it's like, oh, this is important. I'll spend a week getting everything together before I take it off to the sheriff. Like before the internet, you could really afford to sit on some shit. Take your time.

It was an era in which like, if you had a busy life, three things happened. Okay. Yeah. So, so George Wilcox, the sheriff looks at this and is like, I have no idea what any of this crap is, like what is happening. So he takes it to Roswell Air Force Base for further investigation. Ah. Now, Colonel Butch Blanchard, the commander of Roswell Airfield's 509th composite group,

you know, sends a team out to analyze the wreckage, which includes an Air Force intelligence officer named Major Jesse Marshall. Now Marshall gives a now infamous series of quotes to the media that results in the Roswell Daily Record running the sentence, quote, the intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment Group at Roswell Airfield announced at noon that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer. Now this is the birth. Yeah.

I mean, this isn't the birth of modern ufology, but this is, you know, this, this is one of their most important events. Yeah. Of course. The pictures do rule all of all of the Roswell pictures are super rad because it's just random shit in a field and they're like, it's aliens, there's random shit in the field. Now this this is all happening and be just like like scattered sort of reports of UFOs that have been cropping up throughout the sort of like the post-war era.

Yeah. And the next day, the Air Force releases a statement saying there's no flying saucer in the wreckage, it's just an air balloon. It's just, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's just why the balloon is flying. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. So the Air Force is lying.

Sure. Sure. Air Force. Yes. Weather balloon. Yeah. Yeah. They're lying.

Everyone knows they're lying, but this is where things get bad. Because what Mark Brazel really discovered was something even spookier and more sinister than aliens. What Mark Brazel had discovered was the American military-industrial complex. That is incredible. The wreck. It turned out. That's what's really spooky.

Oh, it's, it's, it's real spooky. It's, yeah. By the end of this episode, they will have, I had to cut two times, they almost killed everyone on Earth. Because. Okay. Well, all right. So we're going to be judging folks for almost killing everyone on Earth, like you haven't

almost killed everyone on Earth. Come on. That's true. That's true. Podcasting saves me from a life of mass extinction of the entire human race. And will eventually end all life on this planet. That's true. I believe in podcasting's potential to kill absolutely everyone.

Yeah. It's, it's great. It's, it's a time. It's, yeah, actually, you know, this part, part of this is actually going to be about how we get to the point where everyone is podcasting on the internet about things. That, that, that, that runs through this. This does absolutely play in to the Roswell incident. Yeah.

Because there's a, there's a strong line between shit like coast to coast FM and the old like conspiracy, you know, the precursors to that alien UFO, whatever radio shows and shit on the, on the wide band back in the day and, and podcasts where we are right now. Yep. It's, it's great. It's a good time. We're descended from great media. We're going to continue to produce great media.

We're totally not just like an extremely large, a much larger version of the, the radio broadcast you get right before a genocide. That's like, that's not what's happening here. It's all in fact good and cool. I mean, this is why I tell people to get machetes. It's true. That was a bad. Yeah.

That's a, made that, made that comment. Look, we just, we just, we just, we just got to make sure only ways to blaze on. Yeah. Let's go right ahead. Now the Air Force is lying out of its ass, but the Air Force isn't lying out of its ass because they have a flying saucer. The Air Force knows precisely what they've got in their hands on here because the, the, the unidentified flying object that has crashed at Roswell is actually something called Project

Mogul. Now, to understand Project Mogul, we need to go back a little bit. Yeah. Now in, in 1945, the US drops two nuclear bombs in Japan and this does a lot of things, literally all of which are bad. Yeah. And one, one of which is that it sets off a sort of, it sets off, you know, the thing that we all live in now, which is the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR, who,

you know, but pretty quickly after World War II are just bitter enemies. And, you know, by, by 1947, there's just wars raging across the world between communist anti-communist forces. This is war in China. I mean, in Greece, which I think people know, people know more about the Chinese of war. People know less about Greece where just like the British, the British are like, oh, the communists are going to take power. So they just like give all the guns back to the fascists and they start doing the Holocaust

again and that, you know, sets off this own, another civil war there. And you know, as, as, as Europe becomes, you know, divided between the two great powers, the US becomes increasingly worried about the USSR are crying, they're acquiring their own nuclear weapons. So to detect a potential Soviet nuclear test, the US embarked on Project Mogul. Project Mogul sent 657 foot balloons. These are like massive. They're twice the size of the Statue of Liberty.

Yeah. Those balloons are bigger than a balloon needs to be. Yeah. They're too large, too big for balloons. And they, so they load these balloons with like sensor and listening equipment to like detecting nuclear detonation. They like, they like float them into the upper jet stream and the jet stream will like push them to Russia is sort of the plan behind it.

And this sort of works except the Russians don't have nukes yet. So yeah, this, by the way, is also why the song 99 red balloons was not just a banger, but also very realistic because we absolutely could have had a nuclear exchange over some fucking balloons. Oh yeah. Yeah. Actually, I'm not sure there's any direct balloon related near nuclear exchanges in this episode.

But don't worry. Yeah. Well, you know, and what, what, what it did actually do was, you know, set off the modern UFO thing because, you know, one, you know, one of these balloons like fails and it spews the records around, and, you know, there's, yeah, this, this, you know, this is this, then you see a bunch of the problems that are going to happen with sort of the rest of how the course of UFOs go because, you know, you have initially the government's like, we have a flying saucer and then they turn around and do this like incredibly half

ass cover up that like everyone knows is fake. And you know, it's, you know, because Americans are Americans, they don't assume that like the U.S. is, you know, creating a devastating new surveillance intelligence program that will be used to further total nuclear war. Instead they go, it's aliens. Yeah. Because we're great at Occam's razor. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, it's a time. But I think what's really important here is that what Brazil had actually made first contact with was America's new thermal nuclear monarchy. And this is something that I think more people should talk about, which is that having nukes just as a thing massively centralizes power into sort of individual people and into the executive branch because, you know, so if you have nuclear weapons, right, the theory is that you have to have one person who presses the button to shoot them and you can't have

like, you know, there's not enough time for like a parliamentary delibit or body to like set the nukes off. And so this becomes this rationale for enormously centralizing the power of the executive branch. And this produces an absolutely terrifying new age of state secrecy filled with increasingly powerful and clandestine government agencies and bureaucracies ranging from the CIA, our good friends, to the much lesser known atomic energy commission. And these agencies, the power of their secrecy is so strong that, I mean, by the 1990s, atomic energy commissions like successor agency decides that they can keep secrets from the president

on the basis that the president does not need to know, which is absolutely horrifying. Well, yeah, I mean, look, it's just, you got a democracy and that's going to be a problem because in a democracy, people presumably get to make choices. And if you don't want them to decide not to continue making weird shit to throw into the sky, then, you know, you probably should just not tell anybody anything. Yeah. And that particular story is also grim, I sort of think I was debating covering, they're covering up the fact that they deliberately poisoned enormous, like hundreds and hundreds

of people with radiation to do human testing on them. Yeah. Yeah. The president doesn't need to know this. Like, doesn't need to know about our, you know, I mean, it's like, we don't tell Sophie guys a lot of the things that we do with our budget. Like when we irradiated all those people for a podcast, we're still not telling Sophie that.

Yeah. It could happen here. Black budget will remain secret. Yeah. It is a lot of money. Please continue. Now, all of the secrecy around this and the fact that these coverups are like the most half ass shit anyone has ever seen, you know, it continues, it fuels this rampant speculation

around UFOs. And the conspiracy theorists are also aided by the fact that people keep seeing weird flying objects. We sure do. We love, we love to see weird shit in the sky. We are very good at it. Yeah. And we're incredible at seeing weird shit.

And the sky is full of weird shit. It's true. I saw a crow the other day. Anyway. Yeah. In 1995, hundreds of people start, who are on airplanes, start seeing these just enormous flaming crosses flying impossibly high and impossibly fast in the sky. And publicly KKK's gained space flight.

It's worse than that. It's the people, the people doing this are worse than the KKK, which is what is what a sentence? What sentence, Chris? It's great. It's yeah. So, you know, in public, the U.S. governments, like whatever, these aren't a thing. They're fake, whatever the meteorological assumptions in private, the passengers who

are on these jets that see these flaming crosses are all detained by the FBI and sworn to secrecy after providing accounts of what they'd seen. Awesome. And yeah. And this, this is also a part of the sort of UFO mythology. And this does actually happen. Like the FBI does actually show up to these people. Well, that's who you send in when you want people to stop wondering if something shady

is going on. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. When I hear the FBI is telling people to shut up about something, I think, well, that's not worth looking into at all. When you have five men in suits and sunglasses show up at your door and telling them to talk about something, you know, that means everything is fine and normal.

Yeah. It's great. You know what I don't think of when I think of the FBI, UFO coverups. It's great. Yeah, and this is this is America's first contact with yet another new part of his clandestine military military bureaucracy, Area 51. Area 51 is a secret military aeronautics research and development facility built on a salt flat called Lake Groom inside the massive Nevada test and training range.

This place, by the way, this place is massive. This place is like the size of Connecticut. Like it's like larger than Connecticut. It's larger than than most of the Eastern states. Yeah. It's enormous. So it's something I think is very interesting about this, is that for all its mystique, Area 51 is not the most dangerous facility on the Nevada test and training range.

No, that's Area 52, the sub level below where they store the real weird shit. Yeah. Okay. So the funny part is I watched a few YouTube videos. I think I know what I'm talking about. Well, definitely. So we are actually going to get to Area 52. Okay.

All right. Yeah. Well, the thing that's actually really dangerous is areas 12, 19 and 20 because that's the Nevada. How many areas do these motherfuckers need? There's like a hundred. God damn it. They're like sectioned off all these things.

Yeah. All the others. Because I mean, this is like a state-sized like testing facility, right? You got to divide it. Okay. They get all these fucking areas, but the Branch Davidians have one compound where they don't even do very many illegal things. And suddenly it's a problem.

Well, because I think the Branch Davidians never had nukes and that, that, that, that's all. Could you imagine though? Pretty amazed. You know what? They had nukes about like 80 people would still be alive. Maybe. They might have actually nuked themselves.

Or everyone would be dead. One of the two. Yeah. Those are the two. Yeah. 80 people would be alive or everyone on earth would be dead. So Area 51 is the partner of the Nevada test site, which is, which is areas 12, 19 and 20.

And that's where the real dangerous shit happens, which is the U.S. test nuclear weapons there. Okay. But we, I need to make it clear at the outset, we should not be underestimating Area 51. That place has done irreparable harm to the cause of world peace and very nearly like caused us all to go extinct several times. So do not underestimate the power of, of, of military spy airplanes. Yeah. No, those are lead us all to destruction.

Those are honestly way more, way more spooky than any little gray creatures. Yeah. Oh yeah. Diff, various planes just with cameras on them have gotten us closer to the extermination of all life on earth than basically anything else. Yep. Yep. Except for that one computer book that the Russians had that would have killed us all,

if not for Petrov, I think his name was, I forget his last name. That one guy who was like, no, we're not going to have a nuclear war right now. Well, there's, there's a lot. This is, this is weirdly the Soviets come out looking like, not bad in this episode. Yeah, it's like, every, every time there's almost a nuclear war, it's like, it doesn't happen because the Soviets are like, no, and the Americans are like, we want this war. And the Soviets are like, no, actually, once it comes to atomic apocalypse stories, if you, if you, if you tally up all the columns, because the Soviets definitely have a few in

their side, but it winds up way more fucked up nuke incidents on the US side of things than the Soviet side of things. Although there was that time they built a bomb so big that it might have changed to the tilt of the earth if they, and at the last moment they were like, let's take half of the material out of this. This seems like a bad idea. It's great. Yeah.

So, so speaking of bad ideas involving, involving nuclear weapons. So area 51. Oh, no, I thought you were doing an ad break. It is time for an ad. So yeah, speaking, speaking of bad ideas. You know what else will change the tilt of the earth? The products and services, their quality is so intent that it's like the Tsar Bomba. It is just like that explosive potential.

Okay. Here's the meds. Yeah. Area 51 was founded in 1951 by the Atomic Energy Commission, a federal agency established as a successor to the mother of all black projects, the Manhattan Project. Now black projects are secret off the books, military defense projects, the existence of which are kept secret even from Congress, which is a totally cool and normal thing to have in a democracy when your representative body does not know what anyone else, what

the military is doing. Now area 51 is interesting because it's basically like a black project for black project. It's so secret that like the vice president, LBJ, who is like not a fuck off vice president, right? This is LBJ. No, LBJ wields some power. He's like a chainie type. Yeah.

Yeah. And a chainie is also going to show up in the story briefly. Yeah. Even he didn't actually really know what was going on there until like after JFK was assassinated. So this place is really secret. And as best we can tell in its first four years, it was essentially the Atomic Energy Commission basically wanted a place to do off the books like pilot and aircraft testing. And they were able to do this successfully that like we basically don't know what they

did for four years. But that's good. Yeah. But but in 1955, the facility is taken over by an even spookier organization, the Central Intelligence Agency, our old friends. Yeah. Now, now the CIA, you know, this is 1955 and the CIA has spent the early years of the Cold War getting just its absolute ass handed to it in Europe because, you know, this is what

happens with a bunch of different Harvard grads and like, hey, yeah, because they keep poisoning people with acid and that's all they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. But promise they're running into a real intelligence agency, which is the KGB who like, like those guys do not fuck around. They don't just poison people with acid. They do.

Yeah. They're much, much more intense than the early fifties, the CIA. Yeah. Yeah. And so they had this real problem, which is that the CIA basically can't get intelligence out of Eastern Europe, which is bad when your whole like your entire like state is based off of like fighting Eastern Europe. So yeah.

That's kind of your main target. Yeah. Yeah. So the solution is to fly a plane really high over Russia and use it to take pictures. Uh huh. No. Seems good. Yeah.

Like, I think like this sounds like, I think kind of banal to us in the 21st century where like we are. Yeah. Because this is like, this is like, this is like pre-satellite. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're all just sort of used to the fact that like the government is spying on us at

all times. We sure are. But you know, in, in, in 1955, this is incredibly radical. Like the US, the US has only had intelligence agencies for like 10 years and there, there is no precedent at all. There was none, no precedent for flying surveillance over a country you aren't actively at war with. Like the only reason you fly an airplane over a country is if you're about to bomb them.

You should note also that like the first 10 years or so that we had an intelligence industry, every single or that we had an intent like intelligence agencies, every single vote for funding them, every single like vote for giving them new powers was like universally supported by both parties. There was, there was zero dissent about whether or not we should have a CIA and they should have a giant black budget to do all sorts of scary shit that might provoke a nuclear war. Yeah.

Like people just like, well, of course. I bet. And I think this, this is, you know, this is what Area 51 actually is. The Area 51 is the place where the development is that the permanent intelligence industrial complex is permanently solidified. And this all starts with the U2. Now the CIA brings in Lockheed Martin and a little known but very powerful and influential defense contractor called EG and G who, I mean, they do a lot of stuff, but that's such

a defense contractor. Yeah. And it's, it's like, it's the ultimate defense contractor name and nobody knows who they are because they make like cameras and like film equipment and stuff. But like, you know, these are the people who like made the cameras that could take pictures of nuclear explosions. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, and so, and so the CIA brings them all to this like remote testing rage in Nevada to work on a secret project called Dragon Lady. Now, and it's early stages, Area 51 is so secret that like even the Air Force doesn't know about it. And this like really pisses off the Air Force's senior generals, in particular a guy who is going to become very important to the story, Air Force General Curtis LeMay, who like that man, like that, I don't say this very often about historical figures, but like, if someone

had assassinated General Curtis LeMay, the world's like, we would, like the, the amount safer that the world would have been described of the architects of saturation bombing, making World War II and continuing for up to now, we didn't stop. And that is, that is not the worst thing he's involved in. Yeah. Yeah. Now, but LeMay is extremely pissed off that the CIA doesn't tell him about this and he's going to remember that, that's going to become important later in the story.

But eventually the CIA is forced to bring the Air Force into Area 51 for a number of reasons, partially because they're flying airplanes and partially because the YouTube is like kind of a piece of shit, you know, and part of it is, okay, so they're learning how to fly planes really high for the first time. But you know, the YouTube, if you fly it too slowly, it stalls, which is like, okay, that's kind of a normal airplane. Yeah. The YouTube is an amazing aircraft because it just is one of the most absurd pieces of

aviation equipment ever designed. And like watching those things take off and land is the most funny thing I'm asking. It's wild. Like the other problem is like, okay, so it has a stalling problem, but it also has a problem, if you fly it too fast, the wings will fall off. Okay. It's so fragile. You build a plane, Chris.

It's so, it's so massive and so fragile. The wings are so heavy and so large, it's one of the most ridiculous pieces of equipment ever designed. It's, it's, it's incredible. So yeah, so the CIA needs help to get this thing working. So the result is that Area 51 at this point is staffed by about, it's one-third CIA, one-third Air Force and one-third Lockheed Martin. What a combination.

Yeah. Wow. God, can you imagine that cafeteria, the conversations? Yeah. It's wild too. Cause it's like, okay. So you have a bunch of just like spooks, right? Yeah.

A bunch of just like CIA people. And then there's just like a bunch of test pilots who are like just nuts and have been like, yeah. Absolutely. Like people who are like genuine war heroes who like fought in World War II, but then went, turned around and like did horrible war crimes and like Korea and yeah, that's how it works. Yeah.

And then 20% like Tom Cruise from Top Gun, but with horrible PTSD and 80% Michael Douglas from Falling Down. Oh, it's also picked up a gun yet. We can mention this now. So top, the reason that Top Gun exists is actually also Area 51. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cause at one point the US like, so the Israelis managed to convince a, I think it was a big 23 pilot to defect and then they gave the airplane to the US and so the US spent a bunch of time like flying this big 23 around and figuring out how it worked. And that's how they like trains. They basically trained all their pilots because they suddenly do how the Migs worked. And that's, that's the origin of the Top Gun program. But then also hilariously that the Migs got their revenge when an Air Force general whose name is, whose name is, I am not making this up.

His name is General Bond and he was like, he's like shows up to air 51 is like, I want to fly. I want to fly a MIG 18. And they're like, and then he just flew it into a mountain died, which is okay. Well, all right. Never mind. It was extremely fun. Yeah.

We have turned my opinion. Was he killing himself? Or was he just like it? Yeah. Yeah. But he was like, that's incredibly big. Wow. Which is like a really, really fast, difficult to control plane.

Just that rules, that rules so hard. I see. I was, I was, you just completely changed my opinion of this man. Wow. It was amazing. That is, that is the, that is incredibly based. I'm so happy. Yeah.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of other way more depressing plane crashes that happens here. All right. The reason why it's bad is because so that, you know, this, this whole thing is a black planet, right? I have trouble imagine being depressed about anyone. They're dying. Oh, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of, so there's a, I don't really care so much about the people,

but like, so there's a bunch of like 14 of the, the people who are flying you to like die and they, like they, they, they, they crash into a mountain in one of the planes. It's like whatever. Yeah. But that sucks about it. Is it like, like the US government lies to their families for like half a century about how they died. Absolutely.

Yeah. This sucks. But then it gets even worse because again, this is, you know, this, this is the black project of like all black projects. And that means that they have a bunch of people from Operation Paperclip because again, this is a facility run by the CIA in the 1950s. God. And so they let these literal, a bunch of literal Nazi, Nazi doctors wrote endurance

tests on potential YouTube pilots. Now, these doctors are Nazi concentration camp doctors who had performed horrific human experiments on people in the camps. So naturally, when they do endurance tests, they torture people. So they would do things like, they would force pilots to like hold their arms under ice water for like extremely long times. They would strap in the chairs, just like randomly electrocute different parts of their body.

And it was like, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's a nightmare. Like it's, yeah. You know, this is what happens when you give the Nazis free reign over a completely secret testing facility where no one can even talk about what people did to them. It's great. It's great. It's, it's, this is, this is why you don't have black projects because the Nazis wind up in charge of them and they torture people.

Yeah, I think we're pretty, we're pretty all on the same page and not having really any projects. It's bad. Now, the CIA has another problem, which is, which is a much weirder and funnier problem, which is that people keep seeing their spy planes. They should. Yeah. And, you know, it's a part of this is the original YouTube's were silver, which means

that they reflected the sun and I didn't know that flaming cross. Yeah. The very first you choose are now they're right. Cause like they, they, they. They're not at all Matt black. Yeah. Yeah. Imagine like a chromed, a chromed, out.

Yeah, it's you two what does it feel like. It's kind, it, it's it looks like the flying cross. Incredible. Yeah. And it's, but you know, like this, this, this is, you know, this causes like a huge number of the UFO settings, just people seeing this thing. And, and eventually they're like, wait, we have to make this black because like having a spy plane, that glows in the sun.

Yes. Bad idea. idea. No, and worse yet, so you know, the U2 can fly at like 65,000 feet, which is way outside the range of anti-aircraft guns. It is ridiculously high how high that plane can go. But the CIA in their eternal hubris assumes that it's also too high for the Soviets radar to work. And so what happens instead is that they fly a U2 directly over the Kremlin to like take pictures of where Khrushchev is sleeping and the Soviets just immediately see it. And they get really pissed off because

again, like there's no precedent for flying a spy plane over a country you're not at war with. And they're like, what the fuck? Why are you flying planes? The problem is they can't actually shoot them down because the plane's too high up. So they're sort of too high to shoot down. They can just see it. Yeah. Yeah. But the U.S. is like, okay, this is not provocative enough, right? We've now flown planes over the house of a guy who can fire nuclear weapons. That's not enough. Fuck yeah. No, that's incredibly fucking actually. It is very funny. But they're like that. So Curtis LeMay, who's also reminds me of some things that anyway, we don't need to talk about alleged actions in front of

Russian embassies continue. Yes. So LeMay is this guy. This guy is a threat to all humanity. And he has this idea. Okay, he wants to figure out how the he want to figures out like how the the U.S. stars radar system works. And so his plan is he's going to get the U.S. stars to trigger their radar system. And he's going to do this by flying 1000 B 47 bombers over Alaska and fly them like right at Soviet airspace and then turn around the moment before they get in. Guys, come on. There's no that's based. There's other ways to do trolling. Like you don't know. There's not. You don't need to risk the entire population with your trolls. Yeah, you do. Garrison. See, this is why you're not an A level troll. Level trolls

know that if you're not risking the entire future of possibly all life in the known universe, then you're just you're not even really there's other ways to troll shit, Garrison. Make some friends. Make some friends and troll your friends. It's not that hard. Come on, guys. Troll the world by by playing chicken with its continued ability to live any life above the microbial level. Like the thing that's incredible about this is the only reason any of this works is that the Soviets like the Soviets are not good, but the Soviets aren't who the Americans say they are. No, they're sure not. Like if the US had done this against the US, everyone on Earth would have died. It would be so dead. Like we would have nuked

the shit out of our life. Yeah, we're at the end of it. And LeMay, like you can say like who LeMay is LeMay. Someone asked about this afterwards and his and he says and I quote with a little bit more luck, we could have started World War Three. Oh, man. Oh, this guy's this guy's a fucking like. Yeah, they're all monster. Yeah, they are. They are all just like this. This is so bad that like the CIA sends a panel of like advisors to the president telling him that like you can't do this again because the Soviets will think it's an actual attack. When the CIA is calling you out, then yeah, I think it's time to it's time to wrap up shop. Yeah, I think we're done. But the thing is like this is not like

the only just absolutely psychotic thing going on in this period, like around error 51. So in 1956, 1957, the US tests the first dirty bomb. And they really don't know what this thing is going to do. And it's like this is extremely dangerous or detonating a bomb. It's place plutonium everywhere. But just wait, lest you think that detonating a dirty bomb was not dangerous enough. In 1957, they dropped something called the hood bomb. And this bomb like the blast. Okay, they dropped this bomb in Nevada, right? The blast of this bomb blows out windows in LA. People people see this is in Nevada. People see the explosion in Canada. Great. They see the Mexico like you can see it from 800 miles out to sea.

And the funniest part is that it temporarily renders Area 51 uninhabitable and they forgot to tell the people to evacuate. Oh, that is incredibly fun. Just give it to everybody cancer. That is that actually is incredibly fun. That actually is incredibly funny. Yeah. And then, you know, so the people still want to work there. And so they, but this is like before they have hasmat suits. So they said a bunch of people in lab coats with like magnets to go collect radioactive bomb fragments. So people can go back to testing spy planes in Area 51. Great. That's extremely fun. Just killing all of their spooking. I have no problems with this. Yeah, this is fine. This is completely fine. We've probably saved a lot of lives,

honestly. Yeah. Well, the problem is though that they like Area 51 was allowed to resume and that like very nearly killed us all. Yes, but like the more people that died Area 51 get cancer that probably odds are that that contributes to it is it is it is slow death. I guess that's what everyone says about radiation poisoning. It happens too slowly. Yeah. Yeah. Now. OK, so Area 51's U2s are like continuing to do flights and pissing off the Soviets. But unbeknownst to the Americans, the Soviet anti air capacity was rapidly improving. And on May day 1960, the U.S. pushes it too far. And they send a pilot and Gary Powers to fly over the Soviet Union. And the Soviets just like shoot the shit out of him. And this is

actually this really cute moment where like he crashes and he's survived and he's found by some random Soviet farmer. And the Soviet farmer just like is like, oh, hey, cool. Just like gives them a cigarette with Lucky or the space dog on it. And they have this very nice moment where they smoke a cigarette together and then Powers gets arrested by the Soviet government and put on trial for espionage. Now, the interesting part about this is that so the U.S. assumes that Powers is dead because when they designed the U2, the CIA was like oh, yeah, if this, they didn't tell the pilots, but they were the CIA, everyone will die. You weren't done. Yeah, yeah. But you know, Powers lives through it. And so they, the

U.S. is like claiming on live television that Powers was like, oh, this wasn't a spy plane. He was collecting high altitude weather data for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Sure he was. Sure. This lets Khrushchev has like his finest hour here is like incredible theatrical moment. He gives this incredible speech that's like, he's like, he's like asking like comrades like what would happen if Soviet planes flew over Detroit in immediate war and he goes on this thing about how he's accusing like, he's like, okay, so who said the spy plane? And he's like, well, it couldn't be the American people and must have been the American military's running the spy plane program without the knowledge of the commander

in chief. And so the U.S. like keeps denying it. And then Khrushchev a couple of days later gets this another incredible line. I'm going to quote from the speech because it rules comrades, he said, I must let you in on a secret. When I made a report two days ago, I deliberately refrained from mentioning that we have the remains of the plane. And we also have the pilot who was quite alive and kicking. And the U.S. just like it gets owned because they've been oh my God. Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure the state is I'm sure the state isn't thrilled. Oh, yeah, it's like it's an enormous embarrassment for this. And there's this is a couple of other great lines. So Gary Powers gets tried for espionage. And there's this incredible line

this trial where Sergey Rodenko, who's this is an Air Force general, and he's also part of the trial. And he calls Area 51, quote, a criminal conspiracy between, quote, a major American capitalist company and espionage reconnaissance center and the military of the U.S. And this is true. You're right. You're right. That is true. This is this is literally what 51 is. Um, you know, but but this is where everything goes to shit, because there was supposed to be a massive like U.S. U.S. is our peace summit to like, look at the nuclearization. Uh huh. Yeah. Yeah. And so and and Khrushchev is like, OK, Eisenhower, you need to apologize for flying spy planes over our country. And Eisenhower is like no.

And this this yeah, the conference is canceled and the world is plunged into mortal peril that will only barely survive. And barely. I mean, we did it. It's fine. Oh yeah. We got extremely lucky. All of this basically causes Khrushchev to like start a military buildup in Cuba. And, you know, you can see where this is going. But but don't worry, lest lest you think that Area 51 is only indirectly responsible for this, they are in fact directly responsible for the Cuban missile crisis. Oh, good. Yeah. They they they air 51 does they do a bunch of other stuff to like fuck with the Cubans like they have this thing where they send in pilots like right up to right up to Cuban airspace and like have them

basically trade missile locks with Soviet pilots so that they can test the Soviets like electronic weapons capacity. And it's again, cool. Once again, we only didn't die because the Soviets didn't shoot after the US did some like just absolutely. We would have absolutely shot them for doing it. They've done it to us. Yeah. Yeah. If a if a MiG had buzzed like Washington DC, we would have ended all humanity. Yeah, we sure would have. They fucking knew that God that has to be so frustrating. Yeah, like not a lot of sympathy for the USSR in my book, but just being like, well, this is unacceptable. But if we do literally just what they're doing to us, yeah, so I guess we have to be chill. Yeah, it's like, yeah.

Well, speaking of doing things, there's also there's also an incredible Bay of Pigs connection, which is that Richard Bissell, who's the guy who did Bay of Pigs was the guy who ran Area 51. And what's one of the reasons why it fails is that so remember when I talked about how the CIA pissed off Curtis LeMay by not telling him about Area 51. So the LeMay is supposed to send a bunch of B-52 bombers to support the Bay of Pigs and he doesn't do it. And his defense is that he fucked like he's defense is that he fucked up the time zones, which I've just, hey, we've all missed meetings because of that. I'm late all the time because of time zones. It's that that, you know what, Curtis LeMay did nothing wrong. Yeah. In that

instance, it's amazing. And this causes Bissell, but yeah, it doesn't work because it's a cluster fuck. And yeah, this, you know, this, this causes Bissell to get kicked out of the security establishment, but it, it doesn't stop the US fucking with Cuba. Of course not. We still haven't stopped fucking with Cuba. Oh yeah, no, we're like never going to. It's, it's incredible. And, but, but okay, so this is the time that came closest to killing us all, which is that. Well, Chris, you know what will also eventually kill us all? Products and services. Yeah. That's not even a joke. That's just true. Yeah. All of these things that is being sold for fake money. So yeah, bye products. And this is when Garrison goes

on a rant about fiat currency. Oh, we're back. And we're talking about the Honda fiat, which is certainly a car. I lost it all. I lost, I lost it all to fiat, please. Everyone, everyone send me, send me what you can. I'll reinvest and give you back your money in a few days. You're going to buy one of those fucking, one of those eight bit illustration NFTs that costs two million dollars. Aren't you Garrison? Oh, you bet. See, no, wait, Robert, you, you can't, I heard, I heard now that they're making physical copies. This is a brand new phenomenon making physical versions of an NFT. So you can actually like have something. Yeah. It's amazing. I'm sure it costs an extra fee. There is, there's nothing else like this. It's like

art, but you actually can have it. It's the first time it's really, really, really amazing. Robert, you guys, you can't, you can't tell the public how are, how, how, how, how, how we funnel all of our money around for our black projects. You're not allowed to explain our money laundering schemes on air. You know, one, one surprising thing about all of this, like air 51 stuff is honestly the, the degree to which the, the government does not deflect stuff by using alien shit more often. Cause like if they were smart, they could just use alien shit more often to deflect any suspicion about what's actually happening. So they, I don't know, they go back and so, so part of what's going, so they go back and

forth on this and part of what's going on is that the CIA, when, when, when people start first reporting UFOs, like they have two like concerns, one of which is that it's just going to cause panic in the US public and they don't want, they're doing the sort of like elite panic thing and they're afraid that it's going to go insane or whatever. But the second thing that they're worried about is that they're really concerned that the, the, the Soviet Union is going to block out the US's early warning system by sending a bunch of fake UFO reports. Which would be very funny.

Yeah, which would be very funny, but you know, but so, so they, they, their initial line on UFOs is like, they try to spend a lot of time trying to get everyone to like not believe in them because they're like, this is, this is treading hysteria and it's like damaging our early warning capacity cause people keep reporting and also cause people just keep seeing their spy planes. And so they're just like, guys, there's no UFOs is yeah, we'll get to in a little bit of some more about that because there's a lot of very weird stuff going on there. But first we have to almost end the world.

All right. Let's, let's just do that at first and then we'll get to that. In 1962, the CIA flies, it flies a U2 over, over Cuba and they get a bunch of pictures of nuclear weapons and this, this is basically the thing that starts the Cuban missile crisis. Although I also, I also, we need to talk about Lemay one more time because before they get these pictures, Lemay is convinced there's, there's no nukes there and Lemay wants to do a preemptive strike on Cuba to stop the Soviets from bringing missiles in, which again, literally would have killed us all.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. But, but Lemay gets voted down. So the CIA, you know, sends the U2s in and this, this is the thing that starts the, the, the, starts the Cuban missile crisis and you have the Soviets and Americans like staring each other down at sea. And but again, because these people are just like, like, because there are 51 people in

the CIA, people are just nuts. They keep sending UFOs and they keep sending U2s over Cuba and they, they're sending U2s over Cuba and the Americans like lying on the U2s they send over is if they shoot down a U2, we're going to invade. And so the Soviets actually do shoot, shoot down a U2. But for like the only time ever in history, the U.S. is like, wait, maybe we shouldn't end all, like literally end all humanity. And like, we get this, we get this moment where just like, you know, you, you, you get

to actually, so you have all of the, like just horrific leadership stuff that has got you here, but you get a moment where like the soul of humanity is tested in like a very small number of people. And it's like, if, if any one of these people on either side flinches or like decides that they want to end all life on earth, everyone is going to die. And for one of like, this is like, this is like one of the only times ever that it has actually mattered that we're not all just like terrible pieces of shit and we didn't do it and we didn't end all humanity and eventually, you know, the whole thing is wound down and

alternatively, the people in charge realized that if they were doing this, they could no longer do whatever fun stuff they did in their spare time and it's only for selfish reasons. Oh yeah. I mean, of course, the leaders get no credit here at all. The people who do get credit are just like the random assholes on a ship who like got sent over to the other side of the world and had to just like sit there knowing that they could be destroyed in any moments and then didn't panic and like held and kept kept everyone on earth from dying by just not just like holding it together in a situation that would

have just like destroyed most people. So good on good on like the crews of the ships for not killing us all. Yeah. It's always nice. Yeah. So depending on how I feel. Yeah. Now, part of what's happening here is you choose getting shot down, makes area 51 people

go, we need to build a faster plane. Sure. And so there's the solution to this is the A12 ox cart. And the A12 ox cart is interesting because this is another thing that everyone thinks is UFO but actually isn't. And I mean, there's a very famous UFO picture of like one of NASA's like X-15 rocket jets and in the very like in the very corner of this rocket picture of the rocket jet, there's there's an A12 and everyone is like, oh, this is UFO is the UFO is like, no, it's not.

It's this. But, you know, the CIA keeps doing these like half-assed cover ups, but like again, like you can just see these out of passenger planes, like if you're in a plane, you'll just see it. It's like, oh, this thing looks like a cigar just flew past. And they try to do these cover up looking, they do look incredibly weird. Yeah. It just doesn't work.

And actually in the mid sixties, Walter Cronkite like goes on TV and tells the American public at the CIA, I've been doing a UFO cover up. Cool. Which is true. Yeah. But everyone assumes this is about aliens, but it's not about aliens, nothing with aliens. It has everything to do with the fact that people keep seeing this by planes. And so the Air Force gets put in charge of an investigation of UFOs.

But the problem is that only a few top Air Force generals know about the A12. Yeah. They only a few people know about the existence of this aircraft. Yeah. And so all of the investigators are like, oh, the Air Force is doing a UFO cover up, which they are, but they assume that it's about aliens. And so a bunch of these people like turn into alien, like UFO conspiracy theorists. And yeah, because this is, you know, and we're getting to see this, the U.S. basically through

it sort of like the secrecy around these programs, it just, it keeps creating UFO conspiracies. And there's some, okay, there's some question as to how deliberately they're doing this. So the head of the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which is like the U.S. is UFO study group in 1969 is taken over by Joseph Brian, the third, who, Joseph Brian, the third was the CIA's first chief of political and psychological warfare. He seems like a solid dude to hang out with. Yeah. Yeah.

So I have no idea what that means. No one does. Yeah. There's no way to know. And there's some reports. There's been a couple of like books and documentaries in the last, in the last like 10 years that have reported that. There has been a lot.

Yeah. That, yes. But it basically reported that people in the CIA deliberately fed like fake UFO information to people to cause people to like go even deeper into their conspiracy theory stuff. Which I absolutely believe. Yeah. I was, I will say this. Okay.

So like this is the kind of thing the CIA would do. But the people who are giving the evidence are sketchy. And of course. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they probably feed it to a lot of people and the people who talk about it. Well, I mean, so the people who are testifying about it are people who allegedly did it.

Yeah. Which is interesting. But the thing that, well, the problem is weird about those people also just sort of, they're like, oh, I spread this conspiracy, but like they kind of, they also want to get into the UFO scene. And so the question, it's weird. And it is a lot of weird conflicting interests going on. Yeah.

And this is one of the problems with the CIA, which is that like, okay, so there's a couple of, there's like some important things you need to understand about the CIA. They're bad. You don't need conspiracy theories for that. They're just, they're bad. They do a lot of bad things. The CIA having done something is not in and of itself proof that they did another thing. So for example, like you can say the, like, you know, you say something like the CIA is

a moon base, right? And someone asks you for evidence and you can go, oh, well, they did operation paperclip and they're involved in the development of rocket technology. But just because the CIA did operation paperclip and had rockets does not mean they have a moon base. Right? Yeah. And that's something that happens all the time with, when people talk about the CIA.

That is like a basic fallacy. And it's hard to avoid falling into. Yeah. That is like a basic fallacy. Yeah. You cannot, you cannot use something that the CIA has done as direct evidence they did something else unless there's a direct tie between, unless, unless you have evidence that the other thing happened.

There's other people who suck. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing is they're not omnipotent. And this is one of the examples I always bring up because it's really funny. So the CIA just completely missed two, two different Indian nuclear weapons tests, like across two decades. Like not only did they not realize that, that there were tests going to be happening soon.

Like they didn't even know that India was doing tests at all. And then they, they, they, yeah. So these news would go off and they would learn that the India was doing tests when Indian government announced it on TV. So like they're, they're not actually omnipotent. I think, I think what is it also interesting people, I'm not sure if you're in a tight, not sure if you're going to bring this up shortly, but like this sort of thing is definitely is still happening in terms of like, like Air Force pilots seeing weird stuff in the

sky and then going to talk about it. Like, you know, just like, this is some other aircraft usually, usually, usually we're able to actually like prove what these things are, but like, you know, military or people see stuff, they talk, talk about it in the news. And then the timing is always weird. It's always been like some other like, like civil unrest is happening when like we get some weird piece of information about UFOs are like, Oh really? What a coincidence.

And it's, it's an interesting thing too, because though, because like there's this kind of like weird interplay, because like a lot of like, like, like senators and presidents, like actually believe that there's UFOs. And this is like, this is a weird thing, because UFOs, yes, but like, the different, do you mean like UFOs or do you mean like aliens? Well, like aliens, like this, like there are, there are a lot of people in the government who do believe in aliens. And, and, and it's, it's this weird tension because in a lot of, like everything is like,

like, I don't know, like Harry Reid, for example, was a big alien dude, right? But Harry Reid, like, I mean, I know he's very powerful in Nevada, like maybe he knew, but like, Harry Reid is not someone who knows what's happening in these black projects. No. Because they don't tell, they don't tell Congress, right? I mean, he might know because of how powerful he is, but like, again, it's up in the, even, even the people who are supposed to be in charge don't know what's actually happening. And that means they fall for conspiracy theories, because-

Yeah, they fall for conspiracy theories. And at this point, it's more of a, it's more of a fandom than anything else. Yeah. It's really easy to get sucked into a fandom like that. So I can't, I mean, I don't trust any congressman on any level, specifically around this issue, because this is solely a fandom issue. It's like, it's like, it's like taking their opinion on like, religion. It's like, I care zero amount, because it's only a fandom at that point.

Yeah. But I think, I think that the thing that is very dangerous about this, though, is that again, Area 51 is like, the existence of Area 51 is like an atrocity to anyone who thinks you live in a democracy. They have almost killed us like multiple, multiple times, and everyone is like, oh, it's the aliens. It's like, no, they, they literally almost ended life on Earth like four times. And yeah, you know, what we're going to get into, they, they, yeah, we'll get into the

other horrible stuff they do in a second. But I do want to talk about the one cool thing they did, because, okay, they did one thing that was incredibly awesome. That was the greatest thing the American empire has ever produced, which is they made the SR 71. And the SR 71 is fucking sick. This is, this is the coolest airplane anyone is like, just like, go Google a picture of me.

It looks so cool. It can hit, it can hit Mach 3.4. Like it's just fast. It's faster than bullets. It doesn't have any weapons on it. And it's, it's defense strategy. So I want to shoot some missile at it is to outrun the missile. Yeah.

This strategy. It's what's the X-Man's plane is. The X-Man's plane is based off. It's dope. It's a fucking rad. It does look just like the X-Wing and not the, it does, like, just like the X-Men's jet. Well, yeah.

It's specifically there. Yeah. A modified SR 71. Yeah. Yeah. It's the dopest shit. It's the sickest thing ever. And it's like, from, that was like, that was the pinnacle of the American empire is when

they made this, this one just absolutely incredible machine. And then they used to do war crimes in Vietnam. And then they were like, oh, it's too expensive. Dick Cheney, who is a demon in human form, who will one day return to the hell that spawned him and spend the rest of his days being torn apart by Satan. Because the program killed because he wants to make B2 bombers and he's like, oh, we've got to be able to drop nukes from weird triangle planes. We can't run the coolest plane of all time ever anymore.

So he kills it and it's depressing and it's, it's everything is bad now. And he will rot in hell eternally for, of his many crimes killing the SR 71, the only good thing the Americans ever did. He should have, this is the only thing we should have ever spent money on as a country. Yeah. No roads, just a network of SR 71s taking people, it was almost $300 million in today's money. For one.

Yeah, sure. But like the, the F 35 is like a trillion, it's like a trillion dollars. Look at how much worse that plane looks than the SR 71. Like every successive flying around in an F 35, they're so wet, they're so bad. Because Professor Xavier has, has fucking style. Unfortunately, so there's the, the other things they're building there are horrifying. One of the most important ones that I think people have sort of like forgotten the real impact of is, is that the F 117 Nighthawk.

And so, so every 51 is basically where America's South technology is developed, which really does sound like conspiracy, but like, no, this is actually like, yeah, this, this is what they're doing. Yeah. Where else are you going to do it? Yeah, they're doing South technology. And the Nighthawk, the Nighthawk is really bad and the Nighthawk is really bad because it fundamentally changes the balance of power between anti air weapons and bombers.

And this means that the US can just like, I don't know, for example, just obliterate an army of fleeing Iraqi conscripts without having to like, worry about someone shooting down their planes. To be fair, I do think, I do think the Nighthawk looks way better. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aaronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. Standing inside his hearse with like a lot of guns. He's a shark and not in the good and bad ass way and nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman, join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI.

How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Then the previous plane we mentioned. That's a 71. No, that's a 71.

It's way cool. I mean, that's not a bad looking plane. But that's a 71. It's a beautiful plane. It is a horrible killing machine. It's all designed for and it looks like it. It looks like death. Like the plane looks like it's true.

It does. It looks like, well, that's why I like the 71. Because the 71 just looks like it looks like a race car that looks like sexy death. Yeah. Whereas whereas. Like this one looks like a government put into a plane that is death. That is what it looks like. And so, yeah, this is part of a transition.

The Nighthawks actually, there's an interesting transition that's happening here, which is that. So the Nighthawk is tested at Area 51. But this is the first plane that can actually drop bombs that Area 51 ever made. Because up until this point, they've been doing reconnaissance aircraft. They've been doing the U-2, the 71, the A-12, which is like a worse aircraft than the 71. Yeah. They're just capable of accidentally ending the world by forcemanship.

So they're like deliberately ending it by dropping bombs. Yeah. And this is one that the CIA gives control of Area 51 to the Air Force. It's 1971. Got it. Okay. Yeah. And this is also where Area 52 comes in because Area 52, which it's literally just a facility

next to Area 51. And so, Area 51 is like, sorry, Area 52 is built up basically to like house the Nighthawks now. It is. It is interesting that like the older Nighthawks look a lot more like UFOs than the newer Nighthawks. Yeah. The newer Nighthawks look more like the stupid like Tumblr Batmobile, but in a plane.

The older Nighthawks look a lot more sci-fi, and it is interesting looking at the difference to be like, if I saw the older Nighthawk, I'd be like, oh, that's a UFO. If I saw the newer Nighthawk, I'm like, oh, that is like a military plane. Yeah. Well, I will say this. And they start doing a lot of things to like reduce the number of UFO sightings they produce. So like they start flying at night because it turns out it's actually really hard to see a black airplane at night, which, yeah, but you know, the other thing that they're

doing in Area 51, and they've been doing this really since the 60s, is Area 51 is where the U.S. basically develops its drones. Yeah. And that is the modern thing that pilots see and then talk of it on CBS or whatever. And you know, and interestingly, so I mean, I've been sort of aware of this. I didn't fully understand it. The U.S. like had drones in the 60s. We've had them for a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. Like one of the things they do with the A-12 is they put like, they had this like ramjet drone on top of it, which is like pretty sick. Like a ramjet drone is sick. Like that's like, that's just like a cool thing. I mean, yeah, if it wasn't used for killing people, then all these things are cool. Yeah.

But they're only designed to kill people. Well, yeah, but the fun part about the ramjet thing is they had to stop using it because it kept, it kept just like, like cutting the airplane, like cutting the A-12 in half. Okay. Well, critical support. Critical support. Critical support to the ramjet drone. But yeah.

And I think the last thing we should talk about is that, yeah. So Area 51's, the latest thing that we know that they did that is horrifying and awful is so up, up until 9-11, there had been a line in the U.S. military and that line was you do not put weapons on unarmed drones. And after, yeah, yeah, so after 9-11, yeah, yeah, and after 9-11, the Air Force and the CIA basically get together and they're trying to draw up a plan to kill bin Laden. And so their plan to do this is to put hellfire missiles on a drone. And this is, this is, this is the origin of the...

What a horrible series of events. Yeah, it's awful. Because they're like the few decisions that have impacted the course of humanity for the next century that are, you mean, responsible for so many, so many bodies. And this thing, you can see where this is going in the initial thing because so when they're testing the missiles on this, right, in Area 51, they set up like a mock version of like bin Laden's house and they're setting it up so that they can figure out how many children they're going to kill when they blow this thing up.

And yeah, that's been Area 51's modern consequence. No, the worst, the worst thing to come from places like this is putting guns on robots and drones. This is like the worst thing that humanity can do. Almost ending the world with nuclear weapons and then now drones. Deciding to put bombs and weapons on little tiny things that fly and little robots that crawl around, this is the worst thing imaginable that we could have, we could have just not done.

Yeah. But we're like, nope, let's do it. Yeah, the thing is, the thing is I heard about it is even, even though like 70 CIA was like, this is a bad idea, I know it's one of one of the first laws of like one of the first laws of yeah, first law of robotics, the first law of robotics. Yep. Yeah, but we stopped talking about that years ago. Nope.

Yeah. And now we have those, now we have those fucking robot dogs with the fucking like five, five, six rifles. No, no, no, no, it's just that 6.5 creep or even worse, even worse. Yep. And that's the episode and go buy a 6.5 creed more rifle, it'll go right through a robot. Yeah. I'm really excited for the robot wars.

And then you'll be able to take the robot Sammo. It's going to suck so bad. We're already in the robot wars. Yeah, I know. Yeah. Well, it's happened. Well, you know what will never happen. It would have been so much, it's sort of been so much better if it was just aliens.

God, what? Nope. Yeah. I will say this though, I will say this though, if we ever do Storm Area 51, we should just destroy it. Like that place, that place should be raised to the ground and like left as a monument to the people that killed because yeah, they, that should be most of the states. Yes.

Yes. The specifically 51. We fill every inch of it with concrete and we top it with a statue of Fox Mulder. You know, you know what we do is we do the thing like for the theoretical, the theoretical nuclear waste disposal sites. Yeah. That is what we do. It is also still sort of irradiated.

It is still so irradiated. So yeah. Nothing. The Tony and bombs there. Nothing, nothing, nothing of value is kept here turned, turned away. Yep. Yeah. Well, I wish it was aliens.

Nope. We all wish it was aliens. It's all right. Well, the CIA. That's the episode. You can follow our CIA exploits at the happen here on Twitter and Instagram. God, I hate social media. All right.

Yep. That was really great act. Okay. Here's to the great American settlers, the millions of you who settled for unsatisfying jobs because they paid the bills and you just kind of fell into it. And you know, it's like totally fine just another few decades or so, and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say.

You could, I don't know, start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom and spend all day researching and talking about stuff you love. And maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your irritating boss as you quit and walk off into the sunset. Hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com. That's a S-B-R-E-A-K-E-R. Hustle on over the day. I'm Jake Halbert, host of Deep Cover.

Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. He bribed judges and even helped a hitman walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true.

There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool-bidget. He looked like what he was or at. I can say with all certainty, I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire on the first time, my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat.

Listen to Deep Cover on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When PT Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the ground in 1865, what rose from its ashes would change the world. Welcome to Grim and Mild Presents, an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating. For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact that is the American Sideshow. So come along as we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn about the people who

are at the center of it all. In a place where spectacle was king, we will soon discover there's always more to the story than meets the eye. So step right up and get in line. Listen to Grim and Mild Presents now on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Learn more over at grimandmild.com slash presents. Spooky!

All right, we're done. Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show that this is on the week that this is, which is the spooky week of the year where things are spooky. Today, my guest, Katie Golden. Katie, say hello to the audience. Hello, audience. Now say goodbye.

Okay, bye, audience. Now tell the audience that acts of industrial sabotage are always morally justified in defense of the climate. Uh, acts of, wait, okay, so are you, do you guys have a team of lawyers that I can ask for access or? Absolutely. They say it's fine. They say it's fine if you tell people that.

Then, you know, industrial saboteurs or whatever he said is cool. I love it. All right, everybody. I wouldn't have made that kind of claim, but you heard Katie, so, you know, there you go. We've now made a full-throated defense of the Niger Delta Avengers. That is true. That is an upcoming episode, Chris.

Katie, what are we, what are we, what are we, what are we, what are we? What are we? Uh, we're all Stardust, Robert. Oh, okay. Well, that sounds soothing, actually. Well, first, Katie of the Golden's is the host of Creature Feature and writer for some more news. You write for some more news.

You're the host of Creature Feature. That's right. Jesus, Sophie, you got to remember these things. Yeah. Everything's always my fault. What are we doing today? What do you got? What are, what's happening?

Well, I mean, this is your podcast, but uh, you know, I, I thought, uh, all right, fine. It's my podcast now. Welcome to, uh, It Could Happen Here, hosted by Katie Golden. Excellent. Beautiful. I thought we could talk about animals, because I like animals. All right. You got a spooky thing about an animal for us?

Yeah. I thought, uh, because the theme of your podcast seems to be, you know, sort of the future and how things could get pretty fucky in the future. And I thought there are some examples of things getting fucky with, uh, animals in the current present that seems to, it could maybe be a bit of a crystal ball for things that could happen in the future with climate change that is kind of spooky. All right. Let's do it.

Have you guys heard of the Saiga antelope? Uh, I mean, I've heard of antelopes and I've heard of the Saiga and I guess I'm not surprised that there's antelopes in the Saiga. Do me a quick favor and just Google Saiga antelope and just take a gander. Take a moment. Okay. Okay. As I, I'll describe them to the audience while you're there.

Oh, wow. Yeah. They are kind of some of the cutest, doofiest little ungulates in the world. They have the best little face. I know. It's weird. It looks like. It's like just too, it's just a big nose.

Yeah. It's just a big, ridiculous nose. My God. That nose looks silly. It's all nose. They must be endangered because they look, they look like they're terrible at staying alive. Their, their face is all nose.

It's like someone's whole face was just a nose. Like someone stepped an anteater to like an animal. They look delicious. I'm just going to say it. I would hunt them and eat them because they kind of have like what they did with Voldemort's nostrils and the Harry Potter movie, but like long. Yeah. They look ridiculous.

Yes. They kind of look like a Star Wars animal. Yeah. Some of them, their patterning makes it look like they have tear drop tattoos under their eyes, which I think means they've all killed someone in prison. That's hard. If I'm remembering. They go hard.

Correct. Yeah. Anyways, I want one. Are you going to tell us something horrible is happening to them, Katie? Yes. Are they racist? Oh good. Are these racist antelope, Katie?

We're going to milkshake duck these antelopes. Yeah. They're all, they're all, as far as I know, they're not too racist. They have some problematic views on like, you know, gender. Abortion. Yeah. That's, I mean, all antelope have really regressive attitudes towards women's reproductive health.

I mean. It is frustrating. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these guys look like Star Wars animals to me. They kind of look like a Star Wars animal named like a grass honker or something. Yeah. They look extremely fake.

It's amazing. It looks like a guy you'd meet at the bar where the aliens play jizz. Yes. Yes. That type of music that Katie's doing is canonically called jizz. And if you are, if you are, if you are a musician who plays jizz, you are a jizz whaler. And the best, the best thing about that is that I know all of the thought that, you know, that George Lucas put to that was, oh, someone asked what the type of music they

play in the canteen is, jazz is a real kind of music. Let me just put an eye in there. Let me do it. It's jizz. The vowel. It's jizz now. Well, that's going to be the day for me. He didn't even put an apostrophe in it, which I feel like it's really lame.

I know. It could have, it could have, it could have been jizz. Right. Yeah. I know. It's so funny. The effort wasn't there. Because.

But yeah, these are. Sorry. I've been doing this for hours. I just, the differences between J.K. Rowling and George Lucas as creators who, who both made very popular fiction franchises and want people to think they thought about them more than they did is absolutely hysterical because J.K. Rowling does that by creating all these convoluted backstories. And George Lucas replaced the A in jazz with an I and didn't realize that jizz was a thing.

Right. What an incredible person. It is pretty good. Yeah. Sorry, Katie. No, it's fine. It's fine. So these Saiga antelope, a.k.a. jizz whalers are found in the grasslands and semi-deserts

in Central Asia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. They actually used to have a much wider range, but because of all the Roberts out there wanting to taste their delicious and horrible meat, as brisket, oh my God. Just that nose on a plate, their population declined and it's now limited to a small territory. So yeah. So they're still enough for me to eat a couple is what you're saying. No, Robert, if you try to kill one, I'll kill you first. No, I'm going, I'm going Saiga antelope hunting.

We have to protect the jizz whalers. They look stupid as shit. They can't possibly be good at stuff. Actually with that nose, I bet their senses are incredible. They could do a lot of interesting things. Yeah. Can we let Katie tell the story you interrupting Fox? Go.

Sorry, we all got jizz killed in now. Not so cool. It's OK. I understand the excitement about these guys. I do want to paint a mental picture for the audience just so they get like why people are freaking out. So they have this elephant, like imagine a little antelope and they're small. They're about two to three feet tall, about 60 to 150 pounds.

Yeah, they're little babies. And it looks like you took like a cute little deer and just glued like a big elephant nose to it. It's not as long as an elephant trunk, but it's sort of like a it curls under like an elephant seal nose stuck to a little deer. And that snout is called a proboscis. And yeah, it's they're kind of they have sort of a light tan white coat. They can get really fluffy in the winter.

They have these really huge tubular nostrils on that nose and that gigantic honker helps them filter dirt as the huge herds sort of trample on the ground and kick up dirt clouds. And it can also act as an AC unit that cools the Psyga antelopes blood. So as blood flows through it, you have this spacious chamber and it cools the blood and it recirculates. And then in the winter, it can act as a space heater that warms the air before they breathe it in. So a AC heater, yeah, filter system.

It's really a cool nose, which is why it was absolutely horrifying when entire herds of the Psyga antelope started dropping dead en masse within like days of each other, just like a biblical plague. So there are photos. What's sorry, Robert, unbelievable, unbelievable. You're so embarrassing sometimes, Katie, I'm so sorry. No, it's it's it's fine. I mean, I don't know how else to sort of add levity to just the most adorable little

antelope in the world just all suddenly dying there. So there are photos in Kazakhstan of in Kazakhstan of these fields just littered with these white lumps. And when you zoom in, you realize they're all Psyga antelope corpses just covering the ground. It's pretty bone chilling. It kind of looks OK. This is a little bit.

It kind of looks like a cult death, a mass cult death like Jonestown, yeah, antelope. Oh, boy. I was going to say when you go grenade fishing, but yeah, same kind of idea. Grenade fishing. Yeah. What is that? When you drop a grenade in a lake and then it kills all the fish and they float to the top so you can scoop them up.

Oh, OK. I thought it was like you were fishing for fishing for like running around a field going like, is that a grenade? If you go fishing in a lake where people go grenade fishing, you may in fact catch a grenade. But but no, right. Two grenades with one stone. Well, kind of.

I'm having this image of like bobbing for apples, but like the apple is the grenade. Yeah. Yeah. That's where you get to be able to pin. Yeah. Careful with the lakes in Iraq. Is it because they've got grenades in them? Yeah.

Wow, really? That's how you fish. Yeah. Oh, OK. Yeah. If you're lazy. Well, I'm still obsessed in looking at these pictures. OK.

They're adorable, right? What caused all this nightmare plague that killed all of the all of the weird knows the Gonzo antelope? Right. The Gonzo antelope. It was kind of a mystery. So in 2015, 200,000 Saiga died off in that year alone. And literally just.

How many of them were there? Not that many. So I hate that. That was the. Yeah. It was like them. They wiped out the majority of the global population because they were already endangered. Yeah, they just like keeled over died without explanation.

And so researchers were obviously horrified and confused and slightly curious and. Yeah. That's more than they are left. Yeah. Yeah. So they're like 100,000 left. And so they started investigating the mass deaths and they found that the cause was a bacterial infection of pasturella multocita type B bacteria, which is really catchy name.

And it caused hemorrhagic septicemia, which is a horrible. I looked up the symptoms. It's like internal bleeding and just it's like the worst cold ever, but also with your organs bleeding inside, which doesn't sound great. It sounds and honestly looks like Captain Trips like the, the, the plague from Stephen King's, the stand that killed all of the people, like just this horrible plague that makes everybody bleed out and drop where they're standing. Yeah.

That's essentially what happened. What happens also with a lot of snot, like a lot of. Yeah. That's also very Captain Trips. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, maybe that. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, what is thought to have happened is that basically this bacteria, pasturella has often been found in Saiga antelope large noses. They're also found in other like ungulate noses that have big, these big sort of proboscis noses and it lives in there, but it's normally not a problem because the immune system is able to fight it off fine and maintains this balance.

But the climate, I don't know if you guys have heard, but climate's kind of getting weird. It's like. That is something I've, I've heard of. Yeah. Yeah. I'm learning about it. It may be, it may be changing from what it used to be a little bit.

Yeah. It's called change of climate. Change of climate, kind of on a global scale, everything getting slightly warmer. Yeah. Usually. Yeah. It's climate hotening. Climate hotening.

Yeah. That's what they call it. Climate hotening, this bacteria, it had much more ideal kind of, of an environment to grow. So inside. Yeah. This beautiful proboscis of the antelope, you can imagine it's moist, it's warm, it's great for bacteria. It was moist and warm and fester.

Yeah. It would fester inside the nose. Right. Exactly. And so when it gets more humid on the outside, more hot and humid, that nose increases in temperature as well, and it became the perfect incubator for hosting this bacteria, such that it overwhelmed the antelope's immune system, and literally they just started dropping like flies from this infection, like an entire herd dying within a couple of days.

When you first mentioned this, you're talking about how like they can use their nose as like an air conditioner. I was thinking like, oh, maybe these animals will be like well adapted to climate change and so they can like self-regulate, but no, of course not, of course it's not a good story. Yeah. No. Sad.

I think that's what's so creepy about climate change to me is there's like the obvious effects are things like more fire. We get real hot and we die because it's too hot, but things like, oh, this means bacteria loves live and life and like starts eating us from the inside out. Like that's not a really, I guess, intuitive consequence of global warming, but it is one of the things that seems to be likely to happen, so it's really creepy. Well, what's fun is when you started this and talked about like a whole herd of these antelopes dropping at once, I thought it was going to be like, oh, another one of those

like horrible sulfur bubbles that killed like a city's worth of animals in a matter of seconds because a bunch of ice melted, and I'm not sure which is creepier actually. This is worse because like they died in like horrible pain. Yeah. I don't think the sulfur wasn't painful, but yeah, I mean they're both horrifying. The sulfur's at least faster. They're both very frightening and it's also both things that like, oh yeah, that could drop some people.

Yeah. They could just jump right across. There's a couple of ways this could go bad for us. This is the thing me and Robert was looking a little bit into to put together the first five scripted episodes of the daily is we, in the few books you read, there were sections, like large sections about how this is going to basically just make plagues be a thing forever now. Yeah, this is going to be hard for people to really get their heads around, but imagine

a plague hit in the 21st century. How scary that would be. Just really try to get your head around that. Global plague. Yeah. People dropping. It's frightening, you know? And this is just the world now.

Coronavirus is technically, it's not a plague, right, because it's not a bacteria. It's not bacteria. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think you could call any disease that kills a lot of people a plague. It's both. Both viral pathogens and bacteria pathogens with globalization can spread out much faster

right to now with global warming. There's going to be more breeding ground for literally new bacterias and with stuff melting in the ice caps and all that kind of stuff, there's just a lot of reasons to just assume that, yeah, we're just going to kind of live with plagues constantly being a problem now. Like it's just, oh, they're never is going to be a post-COVID-19 world. It's just this forever. COVID was just the first plague that really got through the defenses that we're never going to hold up to the damage we're doing to the climate.

Like there were a couple of plagues beforehand that like we were able to kind of tamp down on, get a lid on and COVID was just the system actually finally shattering and it's never going to get fixed and the plagues are just going to get play gear and it'll be fun. But on the upside. Well, that's on the upside. Here's some ads. Oh, okay. Yeah.

On the upside capitalism. We are back. I've unfortunately, I've got to the point where I'm scrolling through these pictures where I've now found the mountain of dead animals. Yeah. It's horrible. Yeah. They're fucking the stand shit.

Yeah. It's a lot of them. A lot of them dead just in a giant pile. Yeah. Like imagine the cutest Sesame Street character cuter than Snuffle-Ophagus, just lying in heaps. Oh, and that big nose has to make him extra vulnerable to fucking horrible nose bacteria. That's what we were just talking about. Yeah.

You know what it's sad. It's just so sad. Literally. That is big nose. That's just what we said. I know. Katie just explained that. I know.

But it's so sad. It is very sad. It is sad. It's very sad. And there's, this is not an isolated case that'll never happen again. Researchers warn that it's very likely stuff like this will keep happening with climate change and they're warning that reindeer populations are at risk because reindeer actually also have a really, even though it doesn't seem like they have a huge perg boss because they

have a very impressive nose. It's very spacious. It also actually works like a little space heater and warms up the air as they breathe it in. It's pretty amazing. But those same characteristics that are so beneficial to the reindeer now could actually become very dangerous for them with climate change if this bacterial growth happens. So we're looking at potential, you know, risk to reindeer population.

And there's also a lot of risk to farm animals as well. Like for something similar to happen where this bacteria can infect farm animals like cows and other types of ungulate farm animals. And so, you know, even if people don't care about the adorable Saiga antelope, which I guess would be just psychopaths, murderers, you know, but like, you know, we also have very important species like, you know, reindeer that are keystone species and also, you know, are farm animals that, you know, eat. Yeah.

They're very important for a lot of people to basically how they live their lives are based around cultivating these animals and hunting and raising it. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, in my opinion, every species, even if no matter how obscure it is, it is typically something very important for humans. It just, it's sort of the like seven degrees of Kevin Bacon. It's like you don't have to get too far away to realize that Kevin Bacon, like his survival

is really important to the planet, except instead of Kevin Bacon, it's like any animal in the world. That is basically all, yeah, all animals and all ecosystems, no matter even if you feel like they're not super important, the way our world works and how ecosystems work, they're all incredibly intrinsic and reliant on each other. So even, you know, that we're seeing stuff about like, why don't we just like turn entire deserts into solar fields and be like, well, no, because the desert ecosystem actually serves a very, like it serves a very important purpose.

Like you can't just be like, oh, deserts aren't important. Like no, like we have an actual ecosystem that's actually very important to the surrounding area. So we can't just bulldoze it and turn it into a solar field. Just sand garrison, which is coarse and irritating. And it gets everywhere. It gets everywhere. Is that an actual quote from Star Wars?

Yeah. Episode two, Attack of the Clones by Ian Christensen playing Anakin Skywalker, the Padawan with the rat tail. Yeah. Yeah. Classy. I love that. Yeah.

His rat tail. Amazing. The courage they used to have in Hollywood. The courage of 2003. Yeah. Really stunning. Yeah. Anyway.

How could Pat may not? How could she not want that? How could you resist? It's like that Ween song, Every Girl Wants a Guide with a Rat Tail. Yeah. I'm just assuming if that were a song, it would be by Ween. You know, I'm right. It's called a, like a love lover, I think, rat tail.

That's right. That's right. So what's up with these animals? Yeah. You want some more animals? Because I talked about how those animals mostly all died. Oh, I remember just thinking, like, what's like, what's like, do you know, like, what's happened with them since they all dropped?

There's a whole 124,000 of them left alive. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that is bleak. Yeah. They're not currently all dying of this bacterial infection. I think like some of them are, they apparently outside of the danger zone, I guess, outside of the area where researchers, I guess, would expect to live.

Yeah. That's about the best you can say for any species in 2021. Some of them aren't in the danger area currently. Yeah. Obviously, that's going to change as global warming progresses. So yeah, it's pretty grim. It's also, I think, you know, obviously, when you think about these things, humans obviously don't have like these big snuffalophagus noses, which is really sad because I'm imagining

us with it. And we're way cuter. But we'd all be dead. We'd all be dead. But really adorable. Which would be better for the planet. So I don't know. But we would also be way, we would be way better at wailing jizz.

And honestly, I feel like it's their trade off. I would be wailing the hell out of some jizz. Ah, man, one can dream. We would be nose deep in a big old pile of jizz. Oh, wow. Yeah. How would you, how does the Bible quantify jizz? Cubits.

Okay. Cubits of jizz. That's what Noah said, but he wanted to get the jizz on the ark. Yeah. God's like, Noah, you must bring one cubit of jizz. Back that shit in the cubits. Two jizz of every kind. Well, Noah was big into, now we're just like dropping the pretense that it was ever about

music. All right. Sorry, Katie. No, it's all right. I asked. So yeah. I mean, I thought another thing we could talk about is how animal folklore is really important to pay attention to and to kind of listen to as both information and warnings for the

future, because we often dismiss folklore as like, oh, you know, these are just spooky stories that we tell around the campfire. They're just legends. They don't mean anything. We're especially dismissive, I think, when it comes to indigenous peoples, it's like, oh, you're folklore. Oh, that's so cute and quaint, but we'll listen to it. We look at it as we really infantilize it as like, oh, look at you primitive people

still doing folklore, which is extremely disrespectful and also very naive about how things work. When you look at how heavily engineered all of the forests were in the entirety of the Americas, like from the Amazon up to the Pacific Northwest, it's a little like the architect of a building comes in and says, hey, you can't knock out that retaining wall. The building's going to collapse, and we're going to be like, ooh, Mr. Architect with his magic walls, and then the building collapses on us. You know, there's a bunch of paintings, there's like these drawings from like, this is like like the early 1600s of people like in North America, and it'll be these drawings, it's

all these European guys standing on a tree, and what they're watching is like, it's one of the, I forget exactly what tribe this is, it's one of the people like, they figured out how to have like, a fire that's like, it burns it like exactly, like perfectly in this ring around the tree, does not catch anything else inside of it, and it's funny because it's like, you look at this, and it's like, okay, like the people who are drawing this painting cannot do this, and it's like, it's very clear that they're just like, incredibly befuddled by this, but it's like, you know, it's just sitting there, and then all the people who paint, who paint that you're like, all the European artists who like do this,

and they're like, no, no, no, it's fine, we don't know how they're doing this fire control stuff, but we're Europeans, everything we, ignoring everything other people say is going to go fine and great, and we're not going to like, turn half the country into a dust bowl, like, what have they got to teach us, we figured out how to make boats that only kill half the people on them. Only half. Yeah. Barely.

I mean, that is a really good point. Controlled burns have been practiced by a number of civilizations for millennia, but when European settlers came and colonized North America, we're like, control. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations, and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. But the center of this story is a raspy, voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the good and bad ass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to heaven.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. The wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't

a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that the stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. It burns, but we want to sell the timber and that sounds dangerous, so let us handle it. This is all immortalized in the biographical song Timber by Pitbull, which tells this story in lyrical version.

Please continue. And in Timberland Boots. And in Timberland Boots, that's right. Every Timberland Boot has a piece of the story. And Timberwolves, the hockey team? Yes, the hockey team is, yeah, okay. Sophie is shaking her head. I'm sorry, Sophie.

Minnesota Timberwolves are an NBA team. I'm sorry. I apologize to anybody. I'm disappointing everyone. You should be. But yeah, I mean, so in North America, especially in California, indigenous American tribes practiced controlled burns for thousands and thousands of years. The Yurok, Karak, and Hoopa tribes of California did controlled burns, which in addition to

preventing larger, more dangerous wildfires by getting rid of dead brush, it also promoted new growth of vegetation, like really important plant species like oak and hazel. It even had unexpected effects like supporting the salmon population because as you did these controlled burns, created a block from the sun, so that the ash clouds and then that would cool down the temperatures of the streams. And I know what you're thinking, that, hey, to counter global warming, we should burn everything so that. I agree.

Cool down. So the problem with burning everything, like these uncontrolled burns is they also kill living vegetation and it's just like it burns everything in sight and leaves basically nothing and it burns off a huge amount of carbon stores. So the great thing about controlled burns is it very slowly burns off these carbon stores in this dead wood. And then it gives it time to regrow so that you recapture the carbon rather than just like burning all this carbon at once, releasing it all at once, and then it's like trying

to play catch up. It's like if you spill like a little bit of milk on the table and you use a paper towel and wipe it up, it works. But if you just like pour out the entire milk jug on the table, you know, on like a sloppy Saturday just pouring out that milk, it's like a paper towel is not going to do anything. That's like trees and carbon. You know what I'm saying? Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. I do. I do. I do pick what you are putting down, as they say. Although I still think. It's the classic milk analogy. We should try a controlled burn on, let's say, Boston.

See how it goes. Right. Just give it a shot. Why Boston? Very anti-City-pilled. I've been there. Didn't care for it. Didn't care for Boston.

Don't see how we need it. Even North End? Yep. Yep. Didn't care for it. They've got good cannolis there though. I'm sure they do. You know where else has good cannolis?

I don't because I don't care for cannolis either. Okay. Well. I'm actually living in Italy, and so if they find out I've been on this podcast, I'm going to get kicked out of the country. Oh, you need to be very careful. It's filled with Italians. They're everywhere.

If you can get up to the Alps, there might be some Swiss nearby who can protect you, but you're in dangerous territory. I didn't realize they're Italians here. That's scary. Yeah. It's one of the main problems that Italy has. Yeah. So yeah, but when basically, indigenous tribes had a pretty good system of controlled burns

in California, and then when colonizers came to North America, we were like, hey, stop that. In fact, we're going to make it illegal to do controlled burns because that seems dangerous. They focused on fire suppression and protection of timber stores rather than paying attention to the way people had been doing this for thousands and thousands of years and how it kind of worked. So they just thought like, hey, if we just stop fires from ever happening, they'll never happen, but spoilers, they just started happening.

They still happen, and it's worse, and they're out of control, and they're big problems every year, and they learned nothing. Yep. But another thing is that we could have learned about controlled burns much, much earlier if we had decided to listen to the Aboriginal peoples in Northern Australia about firehawks. So firehawks are raptors, that is like birds of prey, who seem to either accidentally or intentionally spread wildfire by picking up smoldering twigs and sticks from a burning area and dropping them elsewhere, and then once they start that fire, they watch for

all the little scared mice and rodents and lizards and just feast upon the fleeing animals. It's extremely metal. That does sound very fun. Yeah. And so research published in 2018 detailed about how three species of birds of prey in Australia seem to do this, but of course this is not news because Aboriginal peoples have known about this for thousands and thousands of years and have documented this in their own folklore.

There's even a ceremony called Yebedua in which people act out birds carrying smoldering branches, which sounds amazing, but essentially they are teaching this sort of naturalist history of how they have seen these firehawks carrying these burning sticks and distributing it. And if we had listened to this earlier, we may have had more research on how maybe these birds of prey have been terraforming the Australian outback for thousands and thousands of years. And that's really cool, and it may be really informative, but unfortunately we kind of really only decided to start researching it in 2018.

And those researchers started doing it because they listened to these stories from the Aboriginal people. Yeah. Yeah, I feel like everyone should be more okay with understanding why folklore exists and what purpose it serves. This is something I got into years ago because of the lore podcast, learning about just how folklore influences culture and politics in a whole bunch of really interesting and weird ways, and that is something I wanted to talk about more because it's a thing, and folklore

is different for us now in terms of how we have cultural stories, but it's still the same purpose, and we just kind of deny it in a way that is kind of silly. Yep. Yeah, I think there's often this idea of there is a clear distinction between fact and folklore, and while it's true, we can't necessarily just take folklore at its exact word because it's sort of like a telephone game throughout years and years, folklore is going to take on new shapes every generation, but we really should take it seriously as a part of very important data set of like this is human observational history.

Maybe some of it has been sort of turned into myth, but a lot of it could be genuine observation that people are relaying over many, many generations, which I think is really important. Well, thank you, Katie Golden for talking about those very silly Gonzo things that are unfortunately dropping dead. Yeah, the little Gonzo climate change genocide. And then the other climate change issues are in folklore. Where can people find you on the old interwebs? Wormst.

Wormst. And people. Yeah. I got a podcast. I don't know if you've heard about those. It's called Creature Feature, and I talk about stuff like this all the time about animals. It's not always about animals dying in horrible ways, but sometimes it is. It's a good mix.

It's like sometimes animals being alive, sometimes animals being dead, sometimes some animals making other animals dead in interesting ways. Those wacky animals. Yeah, you can never predict. Never predict them. No, you can find me on Twitter at Katie Golden. That's K-E-T-I-E-G-O-L-D-I-N, yeah, where I just, you know, just post it on the Twitter. Doing that whole thing.

So listen to Creature Feature, find Katie on Twitter, and shoplift. Sure. What's up, guys? I'm Rashad Bilal, and I am Troy Millings, and we are the hosts of the Earn Your Leisure podcast, where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment. From DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross, and Shaquille O'Neal, I mean, our alumni list

is expansive. Listen to them as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth, and the questions are always delivered from your standpoint. We want to know what you want to know. We talk to the legends of business, sports, and entertainment about how they got their start, and most importantly, how they make their money. Earn Your Leisure is a college business class mixed with pop culture.

Want to learn about the real estate game, unclear as how the stock market works? We got you. Interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The Earn Your Leisure podcast is available now. Come to Earn Your Leisure on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What grows in the forest? Trees? Sure. Know what else grows in the forest? Our imagination, our sense of wonder, and our family bonds grow too. Because when we disconnect from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think.

Find a forest near you and start exploring at DiscoverTheForest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. It's spooky. All right, I did it. Sophie, I'm done for the day. Taking the rest off. Bye. Okay, we have a cooler replacement.

We sure do. So normally this is a show about collapse, all that good stuff, yadda yadda yadda, but fuck it, it's Halloween week. So we're making sure all of our stuff has a little bit of an extra spooky twist. It's like when you make a martini and you decide to actually put vermouth inside it as opposed to just kind of waving it nearby, that's what we're doing this week with spookiness being the vermouth. And mixing up our martini today is Margaret Kiljoy.

Margaret, hello. Hello, I'm a famous mixologist, so clearly this will be very good. Now Margaret, today for this very special episode of It Could Happen Here on Spooky Week, you have written us, well, you've written a short story and you're going to read it, and we're all going to enjoy it. Is that accurate? I hope at least I can testify to the first parts, and I hope for the last part. Excellent.

All right, well, without further ado, or with minimal further ado, let's, you know, with the stuff. With the stuff, Margaret, with the stuff. Well, and this is great because this is actually a short story that you start reading of. Oh shit, yeah, where's that link? You texted it to me, but I don't have my phone on me. Okay, let me put it in the chat here. Based.

Impressive, to say the least. Based and fiction-pilled. Okay, I start reading the italics. Yeah, it's the first couple paragraphs of introduction, and then you're interviewing me. All right, motherfuckers, let's get it started. The Northern Host. For all its lingering horror and misery, the wake of a war is rich terrain for a folklorist

like myself. More people report more supernatural experiences during times of war than times of peace. Some of my peers have argued the stress and shock of battle leaves our brains more susceptible to mass delusion. Others claim that the veil between worlds remains thin when so many are passing from life to death. The Second American Civil War has been no exception. Most famously, of course, soldiers from each of the three armies present at the fifteen-day

siege of St. Louis reported a wailing man who walked among the wounded, healing some and ending the lives of others. On the Cascadian Front, rebel forces spoke of black bears who in effect stood sentry for their guerrilla positions. During the White Army's occupation of Washington, D.C., civilians and soldiers alike reported apparitions pouring out from the Pentagon crater every new moon. Of all the various myths and legends to spring up in the wake of the recent conflict, however, I find myself most strongly drawn to the stories of the northern host.

Never have I heard a myth recounted in such detail by such a wide variety of people. My favorite telling comes from Private Sarah Dollar in the Battle of Asheville. This interview was recorded in the spring of 2035 and lightly edited for clarity with permission of the subject. Note that the subject refers to the White Army by pejoratives throughout. These have been left intact for the historical record. Could you introduce yourself and tell me what you saw? Yeah, my name is Sarah Dayher.

I'm 31 years old. I live in Asheville in the Appalachian region of the United States of America on stolen Cherokee land. My U.S. military rank was private. They made us all privates when they incorporated the Irregulars into the Army, but I only served in the Union to fight the White Army. A year later, I'm one of those crazy radicals who doesn't think the reconfiguration goes far enough.

I'd never fired a gun in my life before the Irregulars and I hope I never fire another one again. By temperament, I'm neither a lover nor a fighter. I'm just your average trans girl who likes cats and hates Nazis. I fought in three engagements in Weaverville, Leicester, and Asheville. I think I killed two people. One of them, I know I killed him. I saw him bleed out and I saw him taken away in a black bag.

The other person was a man I shot in the thigh during the Battle of Asheville. I didn't know you could die from a bullet in the thigh, but I've spent a lot of time looking at casualty records and someone who fit that man's general description died in that battle from a bullet to the thigh. Does that bother you? Yes, no, I don't know. I don't lose sleep over it, but I think about it a lot. I look at the docks on both of them.

The first guy was a true believer, a real blood and soil type. It doesn't bother me that I mingled those two things for him. The second man, though, I'm not so sure. He signed up because his son signed up. I don't have any kids myself, but I could see myself doing that. His son survived the war. Have you been in contact with his son? No, fuck that guy.

That kid's a fucking Nazi and I don't know how he talked his way out of the tribunals. Can you tell me what you saw at the Battle of Asheville? This was during the fascist spring offensive last year, you know, Hitler's birthday, April 20th. By that point, the White Army was pretty much done, but they weren't about to go down without doing some major symbolic damage. So there were about 40 of us, all are regulars, with our own commanders, no army oversight. Morale was down, we felt pretty abandoned, common sentiment in the south.

I was on the street out in front of the library walking rounds. Downtown was half-rubble at that point. Only the library was standing because symbols matter and all that bullshit. So that's where we were making a stand. Other side had artillery really by that point. The brass had just commandeered even our RPGs for the quote, real fight. Air support wasn't coming, not for them and not for us. Really the Battle of Asheville was like nothing to the rest of the world and we knew it.

So I was doing the rounds, thinking about my shit luck, thinking maybe I was gonna die and how so many people had died and what's another dead girl to add to the pile. I was thinking about how at least this dead girl is going to die surrounded by or in defense of books. Then I heard dogs from around the side of the building. One barked loud and near, the other sort of distant and echoey. I went to check it out, turned to the corner and there was this naked guy. He was pale as hell, tall, tattooed and scarred and like I said, he was naked as the sun.

I stared at him. He stared at me. I got so distracted trying to figure him out that it took me a moment to realize there were nine others behind him or maybe they weren't there at first, I don't know. Most of them were men, mostly of the tall, Norse-looking variety, but there was a Middle Eastern man and three women, including one who by my read was Latinx. No dogs anywhere that I could see. The man closest to me, he asked me something in a language I didn't know, I just kind

of stared. He asked me another question in another language. What? I asked, who are you? Who are we fighting? He asked. His accent was thick and I couldn't place it for the life of me. I mean, I know now, but I sure as shit didn't know it then.

We? I asked. What? I was due back out front because I was a century doing the rounds and this sure needed reporting, but what the hell was I going to tell people? Who are we fighting? Where are we? You're in Asheville.

Who are you? Ah, the American conflict, the man said. Behind him, others nodded. Their movements were sloppy, dreamlike. They were drunk, I later realized. One of them had dried blood running down from her lip onto her not insubstantial belly. You're fighting the nationalists, the first one said. We're here to help you.

Who are you? I asked. This third time he actually answered. My name is Belgear. We are the dead. We are the Einhejar from Valhalla. Every day we are sent to a battle to fight and we die. The others behind him nodded, definitely drunk.

Now I know there were good folks on our side who were into European paganism, but you have to understand that a lot more of the Fash were into that shit than anybody else. If they hadn't been naked and drunk, I might have mistaken them for the enemy and shot them. Valhalla, I said, reciting the tiny bit I knew. That's where Vikings go if they die in battle feast every day and fight every night in Odin's Hall until the end of the world where you like also fight and die, but Wolf eats the sun or something.

That's enough. Belgear said. I mean, Odin only gets half the battle dead and Viking isn't a good name for us. But sure. And you're here because we are to take arms alongside you, fight your enemies, and die today. Am I going to die today? Only the seers and the gods know that.

I'd been calling myself a witch half my life, but honestly that was mostly because I like tarot and astrology and panograms and shit. I've never been someone who took the supernatural all that seriously, but nothing in the world made sense like it used to. Fascists had just been driven out of D.C. Cascadia had not only seceded, but was in a civil war of its own now. Mexico was gone and replaced by self-governing states of almost every stripe in the political rainbow.

China had backed white supremacists and other nationalist types in an American civil war, and anti-government leftists were fighting alongside weirdos like me in the damn U.S. Army. I can't say those things were as weird as naked dead don't call us Vikings talking to me in the street, but somehow all of that was just comparably bizarre. Come, let us arm ourselves and fight together, you and I, and Belger said. So that's how I met the northern host. Most people don't believe me, assume it was just some kind of drunk wing nuts, maybe some

of the regulars I'd never met before. But I saw what I saw, and I believe it. The rest of us who survived, they saw it too. And how did it go? Yeah, pardon? The battle. How did it go? We got the INHIR YAR into irregular's garb and armed them.

There were plenty of guns at that point, in the forgotten hellhole of front. Bullets not so much, but plenty of guns. They were all comfortable with firearms, though one fellow groused about what he wouldn't do for an axe and shield, and another said what we had was fine, but monofilament web guns were better than any combat shotgun. To hear them tell it, oh fuck it, why am I pretending like I don't believe them? I believe them with every bit of my soul and damn what people think of me for it. The northern hosts fight every night, and every night they are in a different time and place.

Most battles in human history were in the past, they said, which sounds optimistic, doesn't it? But they said they fought in every century up to the 24th. Nothing happens after the 24th century. Ragnarok most likely, the end of the world, wolves eating the sun and the moon, all that. They stood guard out with me out front. Around midday, we got hit with an EMP. We knew that was coming, it didn't screw us up much.

We had a hardened phone in the basement, and all our weapons operated just as well in dumb mode as smart mode. Including our own EMPs. The white army showed up, maybe a hundred men. All men. That's their whole shtick. They came in on motorcycles and ATVs and horses. More shtick.

Like how fucking folksy they are. We hit them with the EMPs anyway, leveled the field, took out the ATVs. The bikes were retrofitted, no electric, and a horse? You can't EMP a horse. I don't know if there was a skirmish in that war that didn't start with both sides ritually knocking the other one back to basically the 20th century. I think the tactical EMP is the reason there's anything left of this country. We took a few potshots while they were still at range, but we didn't have the ammo to waste

on anything else. Don't think we did any damage. They took up position further up the hill in the ruins of the old basilica. Then we waited. We should have mined the church. That old thing was blown half to shit anyway. It wouldn't have made the world any worse if we either leveled it or hidden explosives throughout.

But you know, ethical war or whatever, don't mind churches. The other side leveled every mosques and agog and quote heretic church they got their hands on, not to mention libraries and universities and even the goddamn Statue of Liberty because they hate immigrants, but we were supposed to be fighting a quote ethical war. Those two words don't got nothing to do with one another and everyone knows it. So they hold up in the basilica and we pulled back into the library and we had one of those good old fashioned standoffs where people die slowly from sniper fire and everything is awful.

That's when Laura got shot right in the head because we missed a spot when we bulletproofed the facade. She's dead. She had natural red hair, but she always dyed it redder and her favorite show was Buffy the Vampire Slayer and she liked to drink water out of long stem glasses. She was, I think she was 37, way past drafting age. She volunteered. It was her first engagement.

She was only there because she loved books. Had plenty of time to avoid looking at her corpse while she was in there with us dead. Dwight was another one of my friends in the unit, one of my favorite people hands down. Total weirdo and he was all obsessed with that Viking shit in Dark Ages in general. Both his parents had come over from Sweden though his dad was originally from Nigeria. Dwight had one degree in medieval studies and another in African history and I can't tell you how many times during basic he'd run down the details of this or that ancient battle whether in Europe or Africa.

If there were guns involved he didn't care about it, but if there were swords and armor or spears and shields he was all in. He started talking to the Vikings first thing. He was the first person to believe them, to really believe them and his faith was contagious. While we were pinned down he asked them everything. Honestly they were quiet, even taciturn, but there was one thing they were very insistent on and that I overheard them talking about. Nazis don't go to Valhalla.

But why not Dwight asked? It takes two things to go to Valhalla, the spokesperson said. You have to die in battle and you have to venerate Odin. A bunch of those fuckers are Odinists he said. No they aren't. They're nationalist, fascist, racial separatists, they're all kinds of things, but they don't venerate Odin, whatever they think. What do you mean?

They only know one half of Odin. They know the masculine side, the heterosexual side, the Christian side. They worship a bastardization of our God, a bastardization first created by a nationalist Christian 800 years ago that's only gotten further afield since. Our Odin practices women's magic, the magic of the sexually penetrated. We also worship female gods of war and male gods of the hearth and gods who change their gender when they're bored. Nazis don't understand that, any of it, in life we raided sometimes, traded other times.

We also did all sorts of things that won't fit your modern sensibilities. Things that were I alive, you might kill me for, but we're not Nazis and people who worship a Christian version of our God most certainly do not go to Valhalla. It was as if the man had used up every word allotted to him for the day because I don't believe a one of them spoke again before the battle began in earnest. And how long was that? Another hour maybe? The sun was still right overhead when the white army rushed us.

It was a bullshit move rushing us, one part over confidence and one part desperation if you can imagine that. They knew they were losing the war at that point, but they had us more than two to one and we all know the KKK commanders don't give two shits about the lives of their men. That's when I put a bullet in a man's leg. While he was in the street running, it was a good shot. He was running and I led the target and everything. I'd been aiming for center body mass, but still, at least a hundred yards against a

moving target. I was proud of that shot at the time on a technical level, even if I'm not sure I'm proud of it anymore now that I know the man's name. We expected the charge. What we didn't expect was the ordinance that knocked the reinforced front off its hinges, but that happened and almost all the fighting happened right there on the first floor among the empty shelves. The whole thing felt like it lasted half an hour.

I've looked it up since. From the time of the first blast to the time the last shot was fired, we're talking about three minutes and 12 seconds. We thought they were going to pour in through the door after they blew it the fuck off, so James got in there with our one functioning automatic and he took at least ten of the flashdown with him before someone got him in the neck. It was a faint and they blew a hole in the side of the building while that was going on and that's where they got in.

Close quarters combat is a whole different beast, a worse one maybe. Maybe a better one. I go back and forth on that sometimes instead of sleeping. I think about the pros and cons of various types of absolute horror. Is it better to see your death coming or to get picked off without knowing it? I would have thought the Vikings would expend themselves right off, I mean, Vikings. They were starting to sober up by that point, but still they'd been drinking and they were already dead and they were doomed to die, but they were smarter than that and never risked

themselves unnecessarily. Your next assumption of a comrade you know is doomed is that they'll sacrifice themselves to save others. None of that either. They knew they were the best trained soldiers on the field and that in order for us to win, they had to be in the fight as long as they could. They were smart like that, assholes like that. I stationed myself in the back.

I fancy myself more of a sniper than the assault sort, so I watched the whole thing go down. I also only hit three targets out of 117 bullets I fired, but that's another story. I watched us win. We took casualties of 50%, half of those were KIA, but we defeated a force twice our strength. I watched the Einhejar bayonet men and shoot them, and I saw one of the Viking women break a man's face apart with her fists. Soon after, a bullet found her heart and she collapsed with a smile on her lips. She disappeared, like literally she phased out of existence, being me up Scotty.

We pushed them back onto the pavement. When I say we, I'm honestly not being fair, because I didn't do much of it myself. We had them scattered and running, most of them. Dwight was out there, waving a pistol in one hand and swinging a wooden stock rifle like a club in the other. A Viking with a shotgun stood beside him. I think the same fashy little shit killed them both, maybe in the same three round burst. I tagged the fashy in his belly, and his friends helped him get away, and the remaining Nazis

ran. He survived his wound. Why do we have so much information about the war? Does it do me any good to know who I killed and who I didn't? And Dwight? Dwight lay alone in the concrete. Facedown. There wasn't much blood, but he was dead.

Two ravens sat atop him, one on each shoulder. I've never seen a raven in Asheville in my life, not before, not since. There were two of them. As big as people say those things are. They barked and they sounded like dogs. One was loud, like it was right where I was. The other was distant, echoing. Then they flew away, directly up and toward the sun, and I tried to watch to see where

they went, but you can't look directly at the sun like that. I looked back down and Dwight was gone. Okay, so his body was still there, but there was something about him that was gone, and I don't know how to tell you what it was. That was that. We won, sort of. They didn't storm the library, which I guess means we won. But sometimes I'd think I'd burn every single book in that place that would bring back

Laura or Dwight or any of the rest of my friends. The war was over at that point, even if we didn't know it yet. So what did they die for? I guess for symbols. Maybe symbols matter that much, I don't know. I deserted after that. Half the survivors of the Battle of Asheville died less than a week later up in Pittsburgh, and I suppose I'd be dead if I'd gone, and it probably makes me a coward that I didn't.

It's not that I was afraid of dying. It's that I was afraid of dying in battle, because I believe in Odin now. It's hard not to believe in a god without venerating him. I don't want to go to Valhalla. I don't want to fight ever again, let alone every night. I don't want to serve with the iron yard at the twilight of the gods sometime in the 25th century. If I don't want to do that, then I don't want to die in battle.

Dwight, though, I expect he's happy. I expect he dies every day with a smile on his lips and mead in his belly. He won't have to fight alongside the monsters of the human race either, because as I learned in Asheville, Nazis don't go to Valhalla. All right. That was awesome, Marker. Thank you. Yeah, thanks.

I know. Dan, I'll put a bunch of applause noise here, because this is not translating over. And an air horn. Definitely an air horn. I don't think the air horn is going to be that. Nope. Garrison. Air horn.

Your show. Thank you. Thank you, Garrison. Uh-huh. Margaret, how long ago did you write that? I wrote that, I believe, in 2017, maybe 2018. Oh, yeah. Well, it's not gotten less relevant.

Yeah. Man. There's definitely some times where I've wished for a platoon of Vikings to deal with some shit. Well, this has been, It Could Happen Here, and this has been Spooky Week. I hope you enjoyed this scary story that's also relevant to our theme of collapse. Margaret, you want to tell the people where they can find you? Yeah.

I'm on Twitter at magpiekilljoy. I'm on Instagram at Margaret Killjoy. I'm on Patreon at patreon.com slash Margaret Killjoy, where this story and many other stories are available for anyone who sponsors me at a dollar a month, and if you make less money than I do, then just message me and I'll give you all my shit for free. And I have an upcoming, because you asked me to plug things, and I'm definitely just going to go ahead and plug things. Hell yeah.

I have a book coming out from AK Press. It's a reissue of my anarchist utopian book, A Country of Ghosts. If you like my very, I like writing war stories, but I specifically like writing war stories that are actually sad and how about how war is horrible. And so A Country of Ghosts is such a book, and this story will eventually, I'm excited to say, I just signed the contract for, AK Press is going to put out a short story anthology of mine, which will include this story. Hell yeah.

That sounds incredibly rad. Yes. Great publisher. Not biased at all in that. No, no. Nor towards stories of the second American Civil War with super, super strong characters. I've been introduced to just today. Yes.

All right. We'll check out Margaret's book, parentheses S, and check out this show when it comes back someday, one day. You'll never know when, but you'll hear a whisper on the wind, and there will be, or it'll be the next weekday, after this one, one of those. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. I'm John Gonzalez, the host of SI's new podcast, Sports Illustrated Weekly. Sports Illustrated has delivered some of the best storytelling in sports for 70 years, and now that continues on our show.

Each week, we'll dive deep into the best stories from around the sports world. Sports Illustrated Weekly is available every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now. Listen to Eating While Broke on the iHeart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's to the great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills.

Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. Start a podcast with Spreaker from iHeart and unleash your creative freedom. Maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your old boss, hey, I'm no settler. I'm an explorer. Spreaker.com, S-P-R-E-A-K-E-R. That's a long over today. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests.

It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based

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