Behind the Bastards - Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

Robert takes us into the modern day history of SEAL malfeasance, from kinda robbing Captain Phillips to the comedy of errors that was the raid on Bin Laden.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Also Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we are now in our fourth episode of our series on Richard Marsenko, the founding of Seal Team 6 and the continuing derangement of the Navy Seals. This episode featuring focusing much more on the continuing derangement of the Navy Seals. Yeah. It's not getting better. It's not getting better. It's not getting, it was pretty bad at the start. So maybe I'm wrong.

There's a lot. I mean, we're not talking about Abu Ghraib. and how that connects as much as we should, maybe. There's a lot to cover. We're not talking about, like, those seals who got in trouble for murdering a green beret over maybe drugs and prostitution. A bunch of, like, there's a lot of stuff that we're, I mean, I'm trying to give you the hits here. But there's a, the Navy SEALs get up to a lot. A lot of different seals doing a lot of different things.

Yeah. It is like, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely immediately. It is shocking every time. Really fast, really fast right away. Yeah. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. On Raiders of the Lost Podcast, we explore cinema like no one else,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In Afghanistan, the seals were exposed to the kind of tempo of activity that they had never known, and killing became an everyday affair in some cases. This had a brutalizing effect. Within months of Roberts Ridge, Red Team Operators had started filming what they called bleed out videos and showing them to other seals at Bogram. One viewer later described these as war porn. And the operator responsible...

Yeah, they're war porn. It's like videos of like guys getting executed and dying. and like bleeding to death, you know, after being like... Dark, bro. Yeah, it's really dark. It's really dark. Yeah. Trophy taking in the digital age is like, oh.

And there's... Yeah. I can tell you when you do like Warzone reporting, you will accumulate either directly or through like the people that you know bits of footage of horrible things that like you can't avoid taking but you don't want to air. Right. Or sometimes you're asked not to air because it's just like a guy bleeding to death.

Yeah, yeah. But like, so the idea of just like taking. that and like watching it with beers is pretty gross I think. Yeah. The operator responsible for these war porn videos, bleed out videos, was ultimately forced out of Team 6 after pistol whipping a fellow Navy SEAL while drunk on base the next year. That's what got about. Not the videos.

He fucking pistol whipped one of his mates. Yeah. Yeah. On base. After Roberts Ridge, the number of allegations of brutality and war crimes among SEALs, particularly Team 6 members, but not exclusively. in the field continued to percolate out. As in Vietnam, the seals often persecuted their own little war in Afghanistan.

One kidnapping mission would lead to information about a caravan smuggling guns or an isolated al-Qaeda cell, and that would lead to more emissions and so on. While the war itself had stalled into something of a quagmire as the U.S. struggled to rebuild a functioning government, the seals delivered what looked like a constant string of winds, enemies destroyed, arms seized, high-value targets, captured and killed. That all changed on June 27, 2005. A four-man seal team had been dropped in to go after a local leader named Ahmed Shah. Now, there's a movie starring Mark Wahlberg called Lone Survivor that's about this mission.

And if you watch the movie or you read the book, Lone Survivor, which is by the lone survival of this mission, Marcus Littrell, he will describe Ahmed Shah as a major al-Qaeda guy. He's close to bin Laden. He's one of bin Laden's top guys. There's no evidence. These guys knew each other in an aerial way. There's no evidence. Shah's not with the Taliban. He's a local warlord.

There's a lot of them in Afghanistan. And he's not even particularly hostile to the U.S. at this point, right? This is a guy who could have maybe gone a couple of ways. But then we send dudes to kill him. And you know what happens? You know, like, if someone sends dudes to kill you, you probably, like, take that bad. That really, like, clarifies how things are going to go. Yeah.

Okay, I guess I know it's Saitam on now. Yeah. But they always refer to him as a Taliban. He was not. He simply wasn't. That's a lie. Shaw and his men heard the distinct twin rotor sound of a Chinook descending with seals, and they mobilized to ambush them.

Marcus Latrell, a Navy hospital corpsman second class with the SEAL team, would later blame a group of local herdsmen for giving them up to Shaw. In, like, the movie about LaTrell's book, they come up to these guys and they, like, capture them and hold them for a while, and they have this debate about, should we kill them? If we don't kill them, they're going to run, and they'll tell the Taliban, and we'll get ambushed, and the SEALs are like, no, you know, they're civilians. They're not, we're not going to murder them. And eventually they let these guys go.

And La Trell's group does meet some herders and they leave. And LaTrell does blame them for like, but there's no evidence of that. And in fact, we actually have evidence from Ahmed Shah and his people that kind of contradicts that, that they were already moving in when those guys were, like, that didn't really lead to the ambush happening, honestly. Right. But if you frame it that way, then that means seals are always justified in killing any civilian. they come across in the field. You got to.

Nothing else to do. They're all informing to the towel, and we got to murder them whenever we come across them, you know? It's also just like it was your dumb-ass car. Exactly, exactly. The idea that it's the fault of these herders and this evil, no, you guys got yourselves killed by flying in unsupported a four-man team to go after a dude you didn't need to kill.

Yeah. So in Lone Survivor in the movie, there's dozens of these fighters attacking the seals, and there's this long battle and they're firing until they got nothing left. And Marcus LaTrell played by Mark Warbur is doing everything he can, all the badass John Wick gun stuff. You know, they kill 50 or more men in every popular account before everyone but Latrell is killed in this lengthy gun battle, right? So this epic last stand, this four-man unit holds off dozens of times their number, right? But they just get overwhelmed in the end by this vast number of savages, right?

You're supposed to read that they're savages. It's cowboy time. Yeah, of course. right? I'm not, like, here's what actually happened. And this is a description by Matthew Cole from the book Code Over Country. And this is based on the actual evidence of what happened in that fight. Shah grabbed his small force, as few as seven, but no more than 10, and quietly stalked up the ridge line in the early morning hours as the seals settled into a covered observation post. Shaw and his men had the advantage of both the high ground and familiarity with the terrain.

They hit the Americans with an overwhelming attack from AK-47 rifles, a PK-machine machine gun, and rocket-propelled grenades, which forced four seals down the nearby sheer mountainside. Now, the seals do manage to fight on for more than an hour, but they're running and barely can see who they're shooting at a lot of the time. There's video from Ahmed Shah and his men. He has a videographer with them as they are ambushing and taking out this unit of Navy SEALs. And in the video, you can hear, Shah has a guy who's repeatedly saying, guys, surrender. If you surrender, like, we will take you captive.

And he's saying it in English. Now, if you were to tell that, I think, to a lot of Americans, they say, well, obviously, these guys would kill any Americans they got. Number one, they've captured Americans and not killed them a bunch in the past. Yeah. There's lots of evidence of this. Number two, you don't know that at all. That war was not nearly settled at this point in time.

They just assumed these guys are, oh, maybe they didn't hear, obviously, that's entirely possible. But if they did, they may have just assumed that these guys were monsters and would never have actually, like, taken them in it. It was a fate worse than death or whatever. So they fight to the death and Shaw's men are willing to oblige them. And at the end, again, in the movie, LaTrell keeps his rifle basically the whole time, I think. He drops it and flees and runs away because his guys are getting killed. He like, the way it's been described and the way LaTrell tells it at least, or is told it at least once, I think, in more recent days is that like his officer

got himself into a dangerous position to try and call in for help and was able to reach to tell them that they'd been ambushed and then got killed because like the position he had to get in to get a signal, and Latrell fucking panics and runs. At least in one interview I've heard, he says that he felt like it was an active cowardice to run because he drops his gun. Now, realistically, again,

even well-trained, experienced people break under the worst possible circumstances. You can't overwhelm human nature. People are going to flee at a certain point. That said, the idea that LaTrell fought until he could do nothing more is simply not true. He is rescued later by a local Afghan dude who just sees a wandering lone Navy seal

who decides to help this man, who's clearly terrified and out of it and unarmed. And that guy reported that when LaTroo came up to him, all of his mag pouches had full magazines in them, but he had no gun, which suggests he didn't really do much of any shooting. Yeah. Which also happened.

In ambushes, you're just running. You know, you've got so much to do, you know? That's what you should do. You should get out of there. You may be completely unable in that situation to actually provide effective counterfire, you know? And probably at some point, when everybody starts getting hit

and you realize it's hopeless, you fucking panic. And you bolt, right, to try to survive and save yourself. That's the real story. And in objective terms, that's not shameful. You were in a terrible situation. You had no fucking way to deal with it. And you ran like, fuck, but that's not a good story. That's not a good movie.

So, a quick reaction force with eight more seals and eight Army Special Forces guys, is dispatched in a Chinook to rescue these dudes when they're under fire. But it gets hit and destroyed by another one of Shaw's men, killing everyone on board, which makes this the deadliest day and Navy SEAL history. again, they get another 16 people killed, including eight more seals, because they fly in another fucking Chinook, the first, the last thing they had done that had alerted them, the enemy, and they get blasted again, because they're not going in with proper cover, they're going in too quickly, and they're assuming the enemy's not as smart as they are, right? They're underestimating these guys. That's why they get beaten, and this is a defeat by the Navy SEALs. There's no other way to look at it.

LaTrell is eventually rescued, and after he's saved, the Navy gives him time off to write a book about his heroic. survival because they see this as a great way we're going to need way more of these guys we just got a bunch more brailed letrell puts out a book maybe we can get some more marks in here you know turn them into seals send me to die in afghanistan um so marcus does a huge media tour loan survivor becomes a bestseller and he makes a bunch of money i think this is the first seal that i'm aware of that makes a fortune off of doing a navy seal book after marcinco right right um i can't say it to 100%, but this is like the first one, the War on Terror era, certainly. Right.

All across the teams, cash register signs started ringing. The Trell's book is so successful. And the fact that, and his movie does pretty well, Marky Mark plays them. That's a big hit. A lot of guys want to be played by Marky Mark. Marcinco had started the pattern, but LaTrell makes it obvious to every new seal in the global war on terror that this job could be a path to riches after you quit, right? Right.

Right. So the same year, the DOD, the same year that this all happens, 2005, the DOD issues an order to the Navy to bring in 500 new enlisted seals in five years. One of the things they start doing to try to do this is they start producing a movie that we'll talk about a little later called Act of Valor, starring real Navy SEALs. It's awful. It's dog shit. I can't remember that, yeah. That doesn't come out until 2012. And obviously LaTrell in his book is part of that. I'm going to quote from a 2016 article in the New York Times, discussing like the effort to increase the number of seals. The average increase in the force of the previous decade was just five annually. The United States was fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and seals were getting killed, wounded, or just burned out, and leaving the service.

The command decided that a movie aimed at high school athletes would be the best way to draw in more recruits. The film project, though, took years. Act of Valor was released in 2012, grossing 81 million at theaters around the world. And this was an attempt to do a new frogman, which is what brought Marsenko in. Sure. It is funny enough to be worth watching. But like the plot is there's these two Russian villains, right? And one of them is like a Russian mobster who's like working for the Russian criminal cartel, moving drugs.

And one of them becomes a Chechen Muslim terrorist. And they're both like working together because obviously Chechen Muslim terrorists and like Russian crime love working together. Yeah. And by the way, also. the Russian criminal helping the terrorist group is based out of Costa Rica. And the whole plot is that they have a factory, I think somewhere in Southeast Asia, where they're manufacturing a new kind of deadlier suicide vests that can't be detected with x-rays. And they have a bus full of migrants that they're putting the suicide vests on and driving the bus through the tunnels under the border to attack America and create 9-11 times 50.

And the Navy SEALs have to stop it by invading Mexico at the end. It's great. That's so insane. So fucking crazy. Holy shit. I do like this idea that all new sales. I just think all new seals should also have to submit a writing sample on top of everything else to get in. Give us a spec script.

Gotta make sure that novel is going to be good. A short story, short story's fine. You want to make a harder hell week? Have these fuckers bash out a full screenplay in under seven days, you know? It would, it would measurably make them better at. It would. It would probably get you a better quality of seal. Yeah.

You can make them do boat stuff too at the same time. It's fine. So to do this, in order to increase the number of people getting into the seals, the seals had to reduce their standards and start accepting candidates who were less competent and maybe less mentally stable, right? Navy brass had repeatedly tried to coal the pirates from the ranks of the seals in the pre-global War on Terror era. But now, letting more of them in is the only way to fulfill their order. Right? If you're trying to get hyped up, people who get hyped up on the dumbest movie ever, they're not going to be guys by and large who overwhelmingly are motivated to follow the rules of war. One of the first members of this new generation was a troubled young man named Eddie Gallagher. We'll talk a little bit more about him later in these episodes.

In 2006, Seal Team 6 sent a sniper, James Foreman, to Ramadi in Iraq to observe a pair of Seal Team 3 platoons who were supporting training the Iraqi army and also aiding Marines in a major. battle. Ramadi is like the big battle after Fallujah that becomes a center of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Early reports had shown that like, wow, you know, even though they're just there to train guys and help the Marines out a bit, their snipers are racking up an insane body count. They're killing like way more guys than SEAL snipers have ever reported killing before. And this one sniper, Chris Kyle, is really getting a lot of them. So they send Foreman out, Team 6 does, to be like, is there anything Team 6 is the most elite team and the other SEAL teams can learn about what these guys are doing in Ramadi, right? Is it maybe that they found out and invented some new and incredibly

effective counterinsurgency tactics, right? So Chris Kyle, you've probably heard of him. He's the American sniper guy. Yep. His commanding officer was current podcaster, Lieutenant Commander Jaco Willick. Oh, God. He also makes like protein bars now and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Podcaster and chef. And chef. Considering how famous Jaco and Chris are today, you might I'd expect Foreman to have been really impressed by what these guys were doing and been like, yeah, they've got a lot to teach the rest of the teams. Instead, he walked away deeply concerned that they were ignoring the rules of engagement. I'm going to quote from the book Code Over Country again. According to two Team 6 leaders, what troubled Foreman most, however, was what he witnessed once the seals got into contact.

After being fired upon, the seals could make individual determinations as to who presented a threat, and that could be unarmed Iraqis, including women and children. And the chaos of Ramadi, an unarmed individual fleeing gunfire could be seen as a civil. or an insurgent who had just hidden his weapon. A child, walking to the store as seal snipers engaged nearby insurgent, through the sniper's scope, appear as a potential enemy, maneuvering in some manner and therefore engaged in the battle. An Iraqi mother standing on a nearby street, holding a cell phone in a bag of groceries,

could be shot because an IED had been set off down the street, and the SEALs concluded her cell phone was the detonator. The judgment was left to the SEALs, to determine who was the threat, and by extension, who lived and who died. Foreman reported to a superior that willing, young SEAL shot unarmed men, women, and children. The SEALs declared threats, according to two Team 6 leaders. A retired senior SEAL officer told me that Forman's account of Vermonti was seen inside Team 6 as an ominous sign, that seals had lost their moral compass and that the United

States may have lost the war. There was no discretion over who they were killing, the officer told me. Their assumption was that because they were dropped into a war zone, everyone in the city was the enemy. After they shot a woman, who was going to say she wasn't going to set off a bomb? Once they shot a kid who's going to say he wasn't serving as a spotter for the enemy. Yeah. And. But that's also like, of course, that's how you get record number, like, kills. Yeah.

Right. You just start blasting, whoever. The fact that the army had, like, any or the Navy had any, like, oh, we should, we should research this. Like, obviously it was that. And that's, if you look into Kyle's story in his own book, he writes about a bunch of medals he didn't get and shit, like, didn't. And again, like Marsenko, he's in real combat.

He kills real armed people. He just also does a lot of not that in lying, you know? Foreman's conclusion, apparently, was that Willink's unit only wanted to draw fire because it would give them a justification to kill whoever they wanted, right? They were kind of exposing themselves to get shot at so they could begin to start blasting, right? Yeah. And this is a tactic some people will argue was valid encounter insurgencies called reconnaissance by fire sometimes, right? where you're basically shooting so that you'll get shot at and you can see where the enemy is.

And obviously, like sometimes, yeah, that is, like, I've been in that situation, not as a guy with a gun, but the dude, like, it's, it's a thing that happens in war, right? But, you know, Foreman is a combat veteran. He knows what that's supposed to look like. And he is saying, I think they're just kind of mostly shooting random people, right? At least no one to, I mean, that's what these other guys in the unit say, Foreman's report concluded. I'm not in the Navy SEALs. One retired SEAL told Cole, quote, they had no supervision and they were looking for body count because they thought it was cool.

So people inside the unit think that too. Foreman was particularly upset with Chris Kyle, whose colleagues had started jokingly calling him the legend because he seemed to be a legend in his own mind. And now it's just printed on T-shirts like that was a real nickname. Kyle was accused of constantly exaggerating or lying about how many people he'd killed, even to his own teammates. One senior seal eater later told Cole that Foreman had reported, they're shooting kids as spotters. Whoever was used as a spotter, Kyle's shot.

Quote, a young unarmed male had been forced by insurgents to spot the seals. Kyle's teammates manning the sniper roof and scope refused to shoot the young male because he wasn't armed. They would not take the shot, the retired seal leader recounted. So he, referring to Kyle, just jumps on the gun and plugs the dude in the street. When the guy's family runs out to help him, he shoots them too. Only he misses. And then he calls four enemy killed in action for his confirmed kills. He was lying about the number of his confirmed kills.

It's not only allegedly is Chris shooting people he doesn't need to but he's also just like missing sometimes and be like, I got him! I totally got him.

Killing kids and civilians and lying about cleaning up the family. Jesus Christ. The guys who accused Eddie Gallagher of breaking a bunch

said he did this too. He would shoot and kill civilians. He would also miss it's not a good shot. They said he would miss constantly and like just say he had killed them. And before he stabbed that kid his guys were like, some of them were like,

well he seems like off. Like, what do we do? Like, because he's just lying. and shooting at nothing and saying he's killing people. So there's this point at which they don't know how seriously to take, how deranged and dangerous he is.

Right. That's according to their story, is related in the book, Alpha. It's a very weird one. But I think he's, my interpretation is that Gallagher, after Chris Kyle got super famous and got a movie, Gallagher just wanted to do what it lie, pretend whatever he could,

in order to get more kills than Chris and become more famous. Yeah. That's, I think, what his goal was, right? Because Chris Kyle got rich and made a bunch of money. Yeah. And, you know. In fair. After his time in Iraq, Kyle wrote a best-selling seal book, which was published in 2012,

which was later turned into the 2015 blockbuster movie, American Sniper. He was played by Bradley Cooper. And, you know, even though Kyle dies not long after this and a really messed up turn of events, his whole story is going to be very inspiring to Eddie Gallagher, a troubled young man whose early life had left him with two options, crime or the military. In other words, he was exactly the kind of guy Richard Marcinco selected for. Sounds like one option to me. Yeah, these are the greatest seals.

Here's how David Phillips describes Gallagher's early life in Alva. One morning in 1999, without telling his family, he had walked into a Navy recruiting station in a strip mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, determined to enlist. On the wall, there was a poster of a seal commando coming out of the water with night vision goggles and a glistening assault rifle. Eddie told the recruiter that was what he wanted to do.

The recruiter laughed and said that the seals are not just something you sign up for. So Eddie becomes a corpsman. That's a Navy medic, but corpsmen are deployed with U.S. Marines. And that's what Eddie does when he finishes. training. He goes to Iraq right after the invasion, and he's eventually attached to a Marine sniper unit. He applies to the SEALs every chance he gets, but he gets rejected repeatedly because he's not, again, as some of these guys, he's not that good at the technical stuff, right? But then 2004, they say yes, because there's not enough SEALs. They got it, yeah.

This is right before the Pentagon's like, we need 500 more, right? So he gets in, and, you know, he's one of those guys with kind of looser standards. He graduates, Hell Week, the same year that Latrell becomes a lone survivor. And Eddie's first years as a seal saw him acclimating to the organization while Marcus Latrell became a best-selling author and eventually kind of a movie star. In the years that followed, the seals only grew more famous. And unfortunately, they also grew increasingly comfortable flouting the rules of war. If you remember Roberts Ridge, that disastrous seal-op in Afghanistan, where that guy fell off the chopper and got abandoned by his friends on accident, well, he had been killed after he was killed and the Taliban had mutilated his course.

Gives, guys like Slabinsky, his former boss and other high-ranked seals, had started passing around a book to each other. This was published in 1971 and it's titled The Devil's Guard. You've heard of this book, Andrew? Mm-mm. I don't like the name. Remember when these dipshits pass around books? Now it's just like Nazi podcasts. Nobody wants to read anymore.

It's all podcast. It's all Twitter and podcasts. That is unfortunate. Tweet threads. Tweet threads. Unfortunately, this book did do some damage. So the book claims to be the very true story of a former SS officer who took a bunch of his old comrades joined the Foreign Legion and Fight in Vietnam.

And these guys, there were a bunch of SS guys who fought from the Foreign Legion in Vietnam. But this book is nonsense. As Matthew Cole wrote in an article for The Intercept, the novel, which glorifies Nazi military practices, describes counterinsurgency tactics such as mass slaughter and desecration and other forms of wanton violence as a means of waging psychological warfare. against the savage Vietnamese. These fucking morons read the book The Devil's Guard and believed it,

said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders who investigated Slabinsky and Blue Squadron. It's a work of fiction billed as the Bible, as the truth. In reality, it's bullshit, but we all see what we want to see. Slabinsky and the Blue Squadron seals deployed to Afghanistan were frustrated,

and that book gave him the answers they wanted to see. Terrorized the Taliban and they'd surrender. The truth is that such stuff only galvanizes the enemy. And that's a former SEAL officer saying that, right? Is that like,

this is deliberately harmful and these guys are idiots. It's so weird to occasionally hear like a rational person among these quotes in the military. I mean, it's really hard to do. And you do have to, so like some of the people who do that are exceptional, at least in like a physical way. And some of them are also just like smart guys and think enough that they don't fall for all of the bullshit completely. Even in, you can talk about like morally, what do you think overall, is it moral to be a Navy SEAL? I certainly wouldn't argue in the 21st century it is.

But that doesn't mean like everyone in that feels the same about all this. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But I don't know, this is a pretty good time for an ad break, Andrew. I didn't have a really good plug into it, but we're doing it now. You can't stop it. Why would you? I won't.

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Like, what are we, what are we eating? The highlights, the rivalries, the breakout stars, the moments to take over your entire timeline. In the conversations that start during the game and somehow keep going all week. Every week, we're breaking down the biggest stories across women's sports. Naomi Osaka showing out, she beat Sabalinka.

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So, starting in 2005, freshly read up on the devil's guard, Navy Steals, And this starts with Team 6 guys, but it does spread, I think, to other teams over time. But it's really, it's known particularly for being a Team 6 thing. They start canoeing dead and wounded enemy fighters. That's the term they use. And canoeing is a term for if somebody's like dead or like just wounded and otherwise harmless, you shoot them in the upper forehead in such a way that you crack open their skull and spill their brains. That's called canoeing, right?

And this is something, obviously, if you're in gunfight, some guys are going to get hit there. It happens accidentally from time to time. And that's probably what happens. Like one former Team 6 leader tells Cole that it starts as like accidents, but people decide it looks like cool. So it becomes a meme to shoot dead guys and wounded guys to do this to their heads. And 2007 is really when this like picks up in a big way. And that's not the only form of corpse mutilation that the Navy SEALs are doing during the global war on terror.

On some missions, they start being required to bring back a scrap of skin for DNA testing. And of course, once they're told you've got to bring back part. of these guys, dudes start carrying big knives and skinning dead enemies much more than the enemy requires because it's fun. Right. Right. Now, this is a war cry. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, I mean, also the DNAs, isn't that what like hair and saliva is for? That's the idea. I think you should just get like a little bit, right? We'll talk about it on more later, but they're going way outside of what's necessary for DNA. And for the most part, Team Six leadership seems to the, want to pretend it's not happening. And again, in part because, like, well, yeah, if you're sending guys out literally every night

to murder people in their beds at point blank and then you say, bring back a piece of them, it's kind of your fault if they start desecrating the corpses, honestly, you should have known. Yeah. You should have known. Like, you definitely basically asked for it. You really pretty much did. Jesus. But yeah, also just lunacy.

Lunacy. In 2006, a seal officer in it, this is my favorite part. A seal officer named Hugh Wyman Howard the third takes over Red Squadron, the Red Men. And he's exactly the kind of old Navy royalty Mar Sinko would have hated. And I think this guy is, again, very insecure. The reporting makes it seem like this. This is a guy, again, who wants to go to extreme lengths for his enlisted men to think he's cool and bond with him. And because of the unit mascot, he commissions a famous knife maker named Daniel Winkler

to make a bunch of tomahawk hatchets for the guys in his youth. units. And these are supposed to be like symbolic gifts as first. And it's symbolic because it's very funny. You often come across like tactical tomahawks being sold. And people will say like, well, the Navy SEALs use them. They're actually a really effective, even still in the modern day combat weapon because the SEALs still use. Yeah, yeah. That's complete fucking horse shit that only an idiot believes, right? Can you kill a man with the Tomahawk? Sure. Tomahawks are really fucking heavy and cumbersome for the job, especially the Tomahawks Winkler is making. These are not like very lightweight, like, absolute minimalist Tomahawks.

They're, like, big and heavy. They're a bad thing to carry into a modern battlefield where you have silenced fucking guns, right? You have, and you also, you're the seals. You have access to modern, lightweight, purpose-built tools for anything you need, but Tomahawks are cool. And, like, the old Indians used them, right? You know, the guys that we wear in our patches used them, didn't they? And there's also this thing, because the old frogmen had always carried knives, and some

of them had killed guys with knives in World War II, the crowning seal achievement was to kill an enemy with a knife, right? Or some sort of edged weapon, because that's extremely rare in modern war. Very rarely are there. Sometimes it does happen. There are times when people have to and have had to defend themselves with edged weapons in modern combat. It does occasionally occur.

There was a fucking bayonet charge by British troops in Iraq that worked. But it doesn't happen. That's so wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does not happen often, right? Yeah. And because it doesn't happen often, guys who really want to be able to say that, like, the term is that they've been blooded, right? Yeah.

This goes back to Vietnam, right? You cut a man, you feel his hot blood, cut over your fingers, and then you're blooded. Even though, like, maybe he wasn't an enemy, maybe he was just like a fishery. Yeah. And you just, like, killed a dude for no reason. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to quote from Cole's article in The Intercept again.

By 2007, when Howard and Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports, according to a former SEAL Team Six leader with direct knowledge, of operators using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants were provided to both commanding officers of SEAL Team 6 at the time, Captain Scott Moore and his deputy, Captain Timsismansky. Howard, who declined to answer questions from the intercept, rallied his seals and others before missions and deployments by telling them to bloody the hatchet. One seal I spoke with said that Howard's words were meant to be inspirational, like those of a coach, and were not in order to use the hatchets to commit war crimes. Others were much more critical.

Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they had gotten blood on your hatchet when they returned from a deployment. Right. And also it's like, because of course you don't use, you're only ever going to use your hatchet on someone who is helpless. Right, because it's not a great weapon in a modern war. Yeah. Exactly.

The odds that you will be in a situation where the only way to defend yourself is a fucking tomahawk in the 2000s. And you're festooned with guns and also better fighting knives. Like, it's just nonsense. So I quote, it earlier that Team 6 officer who talked about how some of the Red Team guys like experienced a metamorphosis of identity and persona and start believing their Native American warriors.

Well, this guy told Cole about the Tomahawks. Guys are going out every night and killing everything. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a Tomahawk to have been a good idea. The former seal, who himself had served in red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men. Use it. that's when you take away a hatchet, the retired seal said, not provide them. Yeah, yeah.

And this guy, he really is talking, that retired seal is talking about like seals like kids. And again, you kind of have to treat soldiers that way because a lot of them basically are. Yeah. I mean, some of them literally are. We send kids to war. They're like young men, young, young men. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So maybe you don't give them hatchets if you don't want people to use the fucking hatchets. Yeah. Yeah. You're going to hurt someone. You're going to, some shit's going to, it's not going to turn out. And it's going to make all the Iraqis talk about, you know, these maniac Americans are just chopping up civilians to death and then some of them will go blow up Americans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And they'll kind of be right to do so. Yeah. In the years since Morsenko left the Boy Scouts, Team Six leadership had really emphasized the ability of highly trained seals to discriminate as key to their value. Seals don't hit people who aren't a threat, right? That mostly held in the very earliest days of the war, but it kind of starts to crumble pretty quick. Right. Seals initially who fail at this, who hit civilians, as we talk about, it's happening very quickly. and initially they're forced out of the teams if they do that, right? But within a few years, that stopped happening as much.

As Cole writes in Code Over Country, in 2007, for example, a gold squadron sniper was pushed out, according to a former SEAL Team 6 leader, after he killed three unarmed people, including a child, in at least two different operations. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams. No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever resulted in formal disciplinary action against a member of SEAL Team 6. Sure.

Probably not great. Unsurprising, but yeah. Yeah. The SEALs also continued their long working relationship with the CIA during the GWAT. In 2008, Gold Squadron operators deployed near Jalalabad with CIA officers for a raid on an insurgent stelle. Seals were ordered to capture and detain six men sleeping inside. Instead, all six sleeping men were canoeed. The CIA guy who was with him, and who himself was a retired seal.

The CIA sends like a former seal with this unit to monitor their own. them and he's pissed and he complains to his bosses that like these guys just murdered everybody. Like we had them dead to rights. They were asleep and they just shoot everybody in the head to take pictures of them, basically. Yeah. And so the CIA gets pissed and starts complaining to the SEALs. And this erupts in a massive conflict between SEAL Team 6 and CIA officers stationed in Kabul. The SEALs like SEAL leadership kind of gets involved eventually and there's a deal made with the CIA station chief, gold squadrons redeployed back to the United States.

And there's like a period in which the SEALSELT. SEALs are kind of like pulled in a bit, right? They're stopped from like operating in the way that they had been temporarily as things are, there's like attempts that are made to kind of like reform some of the disciplinary problems that have become too obvious to ignore. But complaints like these, not just from the CIA, but from regular army and Navy units and from Afghan officials continue to build. And the Navy never really does much more.

And the SEAL command never does just much more than like rotate a guy or rotate a unit. there's no desire for accountability. They're not punishing people, right? Of course. And they're not fixing the problem, you know? So Admiral William McRaven becomes head of J-Soc and he pulls Team 6 temporary. This is right around the time Obama gets elected and he pulls Team 6 temporarily back from action. And then he pauses seal and J-Soc operations for two weeks in February of 2009 as reforms are

sketched out and hastily attempted. So after Obama gets in, people are sick of the ugliest days of the, ugliest days of the, the war on terror, what they assume will be the ugly states of the war on terror. And, you know, Obama puts McRaven and a guy who'd been fired from the SEAL Team 6 by Marcinko for being too much of a wet blanket. So he at least seems like a good guy, actually, to give that job, right? And initially, it seems like he's going to cause some, like, major reforms, but he never gets enough of a handle on this unit.

He's, because it's kind of impossible for him, too, the way the unit culture is. I shouldn't say impossible. He never tries hard enough. that's the issue really he never makes it that much of a priority because it's kind of scary right right right like we just have like a group of entitled psychos yeah and they're fucking shit up for the rest of the military yeah but it's like you know you you you fuck with them enough it's just like they're coming after you who knows like they're a lot of them are like not above that clearly yeah the american people seem to be really into them you know it's kind of hard to just just like they're going to just like go after these guys and you know that doesn't that's not an excuse but i think that's why mcraven that's why none of this is going to go as far as it all yeah no one's incentivized to really fix them so some of the intended reforms involved stuff like requiring seals to do callouts before raiding a compound to where they're like hey we're about to go in there so like women and

children can get to safety and maybe some people who like surrender but the seals complain will we lose the element of surprise when we do this and i guess what i say to that is like hey dipshits if you want to be treated like heroes you got to act like it that would mean like taking extra risk on yourself to avoid hurting civilians, which is like what would make you special as special forces. It kind of seems like you're just forces. Yeah. Yeah. You know? Like, I could put together a group of guys capable of shooting sleeping people to death. I think anyone could. It's not hard. Like mentally, maybe, but technically doesn't take a lot of training. Especially, again, when you have fucking the Air Force and an army behind you, which just seems to be what

you also require. Right. So McRaven's reforms attempted with mixed success to reduce the amount of corpse mutilation as well. All of these attempts at reform ran into two issues. Marcinco's insistence on seals covering for each other had only grown more entrenched in Team 6 and had spread to other teams. The other issue is that the Pentagon and the president needed the seals more than ever once Obama took the White House because a big thing for Obama is going to be keeping the operational footprint low as few guys as possible in there, but still killing people. That's part of why we have drones, and that's why special forces are really convenient. The war crimes don't stop.

Come on. No, no, they just changed their clothes. So, speaking of people who change their clothes, I don't know. Here's an ad. Yeah. Badoom. I'm Ruby Carr, the host of the podcast, Encore. Check out our brand new episodes featuring music from the show that everyone is reheating as we speak.

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on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. 2009 is the year the Navy Seals rescued Captain Phillips from those Somali pirates. If you've seen the movie about this with Tom Hanks playing Captain Phillips, you know the basics, right? very famous moment. Phillips is trapped in this tiny lifeboat with three pirates and there's like a $30,000 in cash because when he'd been kidnapped off the boat, they had like petty cash that he took

to try to like, here, maybe take the cash and don't kidnap the boat. It didn't work out. So it Phillips, three pirates and that bag of cash, which is important, are in this tiny covered boat. And the Team Six drops, like they drop into the water and like I guess get to the boats or whatever.

A handful of Team Six snipers who are like stationed on a naval vessel and there's this whole process where they get to tow the vessel in and negotiate. And the snipers are waiting until they can hit. In the movie, the snipers are waiting the whole time until they can see all three simultaneously, to drop them all simultaneously because that's the only way to save the hostage from getting killed in counterfire, right? And in the movie, this all goes very quickly and cleanly and one assumes legally and according to plan. That's not true.

Sure. That movie is not fully accurate. President Obama had only authorized Admiral McRaven in charge of the operation to use deadly force if it was immediately necessary to save the captain. But McRaven is managing the op remotely. He's in Afghanistan, I think it might have been Iraq, but I think he's not anywhere near the operation. He's in a different country in an operation center. And there's an officer and the seals on the ground are commanding the actual effort. So Raven, he thinks he's got, he should have clout, he's in charge, but seals don't like.

to listen, right? And because the way McRaven gave the orders to the seals, they technically felt that, well, the way he phrased the orders, we could technically shoot whenever we feel the timing as best, even though he doesn't really want them to shoot. So McRaven does not want this to end in bloodshed. His hope is that negotiations could still work, but these SEAL Team 6 guys are some of the pirate type, and they respect McRaven no more than Marcinco had when he'd fired the dude. So, as soon as they get a chance to shoot all three pirates, they shoot them all. Without asking for approval. Now in the movie,

have you seen that movie, Andrew? I have a long time ago, but yeah. I've seen it, yeah. They all die in the movie right away. Yeah. Seals are incredible. They never, they would never, like, there's no muted man left alive.

Perfectly surgical. Brilliant. That's not accurate. So after they drop these guys, two officers make their way to the lifeboat. They're like crawling over rope to get there. One of them's got a knife in his teeth, you know, because it looks really fucking badass.

And when he arrives, he finds Phillips in the boat with one surviving wounded pirate. Phillips is unharmed and the pirate does not appear to have been armed or capable of harming anybody. And I want to emphasize this because the Navy SEAL with a knife kills the pirate as soon as he enters. Now, I know what you're thinking and how Hollywood would depict this if they'd chosen to show that a Navy SEAL stab that man to death is like one really cool surgical motion, like a badass. Because like that's what it would be if this guy was a danger and you only had a knife to defend yourself, you'd have to quickly use it. fucking horseshit. You want to know how many times

this Navy SEAL stabs this unarmed pirate kid who's wounded? I mean, I'm sure I don't, but... 91 times. Right, right. He's like a prison assassin.

Special training. He's a trained knife fighter. Yeah. No, he's just fucking around with a knife and a wounded kid. You might also remember from that movie that $30,000 that's supposed to be there. Whatever happened to that?

Here's code over country. Quote, FBI agents inspected the lifeboat after it had been towed up to the Bainbridge, documenting the crime scene and the evidence. Captain Phillips told investigators he'd seen the $30,000 in cash he'd given his captors during the ordeal on the lifeboat, and at one point felt it when his captors gave him a bag to lean against. Yet the FBI agents couldn't locate it aboard the lifeboat. The vessel had been monitored second by second throughout the standoff, and no one had

seen anything go overboard. No one could account for the disappearance of the cash. Investigators zeroed in on two seals, the operators who first boarded the lifeboat. The FBI and NCIS conducted an investigation during which the two operators submitted to a polygraph. The results were inconclusive. The seals were never charged and the money was never recovered. Cool.

Now, I might say the Navy SEALs have a documented history from Vietnam of stealing money, at least in Vietnam, to spend on drugs. Maybe that's what happened here. I don't know. I wasn't there. But that didn't make it into the movie. It's also rough that the best tool we have against this

is a polygraph, a k.a. Nothing. A polygraph, the thing that doesn't work. Yeah, it's all pretty silly. And it's like, again, this is like the operation that is the most like why you would think someone would justify the existence of the seals. This incredibly nuanced, difficult rescue that only people

trained to do like three simultaneous shots like that could have pulled it off. But maybe those shots didn't need to be taken. Yeah. And also, what certainly didn't need to happen is like a kid gets stabbed 91 times after he was already taken out of account and $30,000 get stolen. Yeah. Well, again, the shots need to get taken because otherwise, how are they going to get that 30K, gee?

How are they going to get that money? McRaven and Obama are both really pissed off initially, but that gets kept quiet because this whole event is riotously popular to Americans who largely ignore what happened afterwards. You know, they're just big fans of these seals. This increasingly becomes a pattern with the Navy SEALs, who due to their fame and the need the Pentagon has for pipe hitters with a low operational footprint, becoming a increasingly immune to consequences and oversight the more famous they get. The same year that happens, Richard Marsenko's highly fictionalized life is turned into a video game.

The same year as Captain Phillips. This video game is called Rogue Warrior and, boy, I wish I'd gotten to play it. Did you play it? I don't know. They all kind of blend together to me, the sort of Call of Duties and Rainbow Sixes and all the shit. From that era, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, this is Rainbow Six-esque.

I found a review in the Bad Game Hall of Fame. That's pretty fun. The original design concept for Rogue Warrior was an ambitious thing. Set in present-day North Korea, the game would have seen players control a squad led by Richard Demo Dick Marsenko as you relieved the country of their nuclear launch capabilities. This campaign would have provided optional four-player cooperative play, presumably allowing each player to take the role of one of the squad's individual members. The role of Richard Marsanko would be played by actor Mickey Rourke, fresh off from his Academy Award nominated performance as, Randy the Ram Robinson in 2008's The Wrestler. In a press release put out by Bethesda in cooperation with Blindlight LLC, an organization

established to facilitate the involvement of Hollywood actors in video games, the game's executive producer Todd Vaughn is quoted as saying, Mickey Rourke, absolutely 100% captures Marcinko's raw and gritty personality. That actually, that part does seem about right. Yep. I got to play you audio from this, guys. We need to hear this together. This is a selection on YouTube of all of Mickey Rourke's quotes.

from Rogue Warrior. Fuck you, asshole. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Bring the noise, bitch. Send me the bill,

cock suckers. I got bullets for every one of those motherfuckers. Carl Marx. Fuck Carl Marx. He's a big fucking faggotty pussy.

Suck my balls. My hairy fucking big balls. Wrap him around your fucking mouth. God damn. Cock breath. Tell me motherfuckers. Stop dead.

Motherfucker. You fucking amateurs. Hey man, fighting. It only makes it worse. Just die like the little motherfucker you are. Okay.

Okay. I think that's enough. Is this an episode of Sons of Anarchy? What's happening? At a certain point, it did start to feel improvised. It does, it does. Should they just let Mickey Rort go after a while?

Just saying slurs and shit? Yeah, like it feels like at the end of that tape, he goes like, okay, I'm ready. Okay, I'm ready. It feels like his contract was just a case of tequila in the first. Holy shit. But I don't know that would have made it much different from the wrestler. Great movie, though, honestly. Yeah.

Really funny. Really funny stuff from Mickey Rourke here. Yeah, I don't know. We could talk more about what happens in that game, but the plot is fucking nonsense and very silly. And just I think it's, I just wanted you guys to hear Mickey Rourke pretend to be Richard Marsenko before we talk about Osama bin Laden and the Abodabad raid in Pakistan that kills bin Laden and makes Steel Team 6 a household name, right? Yeah. Now, the raid isn't worth going into in a ton of detail here. That's not really what we do.

movies that you can find all, and a lot of, we all, most people like lived through this and remember the media coverage, right? What I'll tell you is that, like, wasn't in a lot of media coverage, which is that the seals who were present seemed to pretty universally agree. It was like a comparatively simple and easy mission, even though one of the books about it, I think is called No Easy Day. Right. But like, this is actually like kind of a cake.

Maybe today. Yeah. You know, yeah. Only one of Bin Laden's people even got off a shot and he was dropped pretty much immediately. I could do a whole episode, honestly, on bastardry in this mission. but for now what you need to know is that, again, of the two of the Team Six guys who were there that day, wrote books about having been the guy who shot and killed bin Laden. We know neither of them did it, right?

I mean, also, those guys, at the very least, if the Navy SEALs are going to, like, just create a core of fantasists, a seal rule should have to be these two guys have to fight to the death. Right, right, before one of them can write a book. Yeah. What's very funny is that reports indicate Bissinette and O'Neill, the two guys who write these conflicting books, were friends at one point. And initially planned to co-author a book on the raid, but they like broke up before it happened. And they were both, it seems like they were kind of competing the day of the raid to try to get there first. And both of them accused of having, like, exposed their teammates in some ways, well, trying to do that.

One of these dudes actually shoots bin Laden after he's dead in the head. And he's like, I had to do it. He was still alive, but it makes it harder to identify the body. And so they have to, like, take it back and stuff. And it increases risk for the whole unit, basically, the time that this adds to the mission. The main thing you should take away from the real, what actually happened in Abadabad, is that by the time the mission to kill bin Laden happened, two of the 23 seals present that day entered action with an active plan to profit from their experiences.

Right. And this was important enough to these men, the best of the best, that they were willing to endanger themselves and their teammates and the mission to get it done. The second of these books came out in 2014. Two years after the movie Zero Dark 30 was released based on the raid. Over those same years, Navy SEALs were elected to Congress, published multiple bestselling books and in general grew to become a massive brand, which they are to this day.

For his part, Richard Marsenko spent the Global War on Terror years trying with minimal success to become a media pundit. He really wanted to be like a right-wing influencer. And he just didn't have the mental agility. He wasn't in with the new technology enough. I don't think to really make it work. It's honestly surprising he isn't. Yeah.

Yeah. He was never good at the Internet. Yeah. In 2006, he wrote an op-ed complaining that the media was being too mean about U.S. torture at Abu Ghraib. He operated a private consulting firm called Red Cell International, giving security consulting. And he hosted a right-wing talk show. Not good at that.

It could be right-wing dirty work. Like, Joe Rogan could star in it. Like, genuinely, if Daily Wire had any juice, they'd be doing shit like that. I just love the idea of his, like, red cell named consulting firm being like, yeah. So your first real security issue is you got to have a lady willing to shoot any one of my guys. The instant they try to, like, break into your house. Arm your wife and tell her to shoot at anyone who looks like me. Just like, or just anyone fight back, honestly.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. His main claim to fame in the 21st century is that in the year 2000, Richard Marsenko worked with Ron Howard on the Grinch movie with Jim Carrey. Perfect. What? People have heard about this. The way it's usually described is that the makeup and costume Jim Carrey was wearing was so fucking awful and horrible that they had to bring in a Navy seal to talk to him about like techniques that you're taught in like Seri to resist torture. Oh, sure.

Right? In order for him to endure it. And I'd heard that for men. I was like, I guess that makes sense. Like, those guys do get taught those techniques. That's like a real thing. I didn't realize it was Marsenko. That's so crazy.

What are the odds? So, yeah, he probably got an IMD credit for fucking The Grinch movie. Oh, my God. As like a costume consultant. So it's like, I don't know what they would. I don't know if he's actually credited, but he gets brought in for that. Oh, my God. That's so amazing.

So for essentially, by the way, just doing the calm app. Yeah, yeah, the call map. So Jim Carrey doesn't hate being the Grinch so much. Marcinco died of a heart attack fucking finally on December 25th, 2001. He was 81 years old. Oh my God. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus, 2021.

He was 81 years old. That's wild. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Long life. Listen, usually those guys never die, so. Yeah, yeah, for mostly alcohol, probably. Yeah.

He really, it was a rough story most of that, but right at that, the end there. I was on the same page as Richard. He finally did something I can support. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Andrew? Plugables?

All right. Well, hardly any war crimes over at Starter Trek from a new podcast, which is still on the same. It's like the same feed as Joe's this racist, which we're putting on hold for a little while. It's me, Tony Newsom, Jesse Jender. Again, I've watched almost no Star Trek intentionally, and they've watched a ton. So I'm just going through it. They're telling me what the hell's going on.

It's fun. We're all writers in some way, TV writers, and just making, you know, I know how TV is made, but I don't know how Star Trek is made. Turns out those are pretty different, actually. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I know how Behind the Bastards is made, and it's not made anymore today,

because you've listened to it. So go away. We'll be back next week. Shoo, shoo, shoo. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. On Raiders of the Lost podcast, we explore cinema like no one else,

including huge interviews with stars like Ryan Gosling on Project Hail Mary. It was like the Jaws Shark. Didn't always work, came with its own problems. That's what made it great. The cast of obsession. On set, there was so much magic happening with each scene we were putting together. deep dives into classics like 2001 a Space Odyssey or Fight Club, plus weekly episodes on all industry news. Listen to Raiders of the Lost podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And for more, follow at Raiders of the Lost podcast and at TikTok podcast network on TikTok. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia, A-O-Rondia. We Watch, our brand new podcast where we revisit every episode of Portlandia together, breaking down sketches, going deep on our iconic characters, and pulling back the curtain on how it all got made. And we'll also be joined by the people who helped bring it all to life.

Guest stars, collaborators and friends, including director Jonathan Chrysall, the mayor himself, Kyle McLaughlin, legendary musician Amy Mann, and many more. Kyle is going for it here. You fully improvised, not just words, but a song about it. Well, I thought you were all going to write a song for you. Thinking that. Listen to Podlandia, AEO rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, fam?

I'm sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the host of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together and Iheart women's sports. We're breaking down the biggest headlines. Naomi Osaka, showing out. Shoutouts to you, Naomi. The viral moments.

I've been obsessed with Kashan Rock's boxing journey. She looks good. Her combos are swift. and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women, then I should have a bunch of men.

Do better or do less, so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to You're the problem with Yamanika on the IHart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHart podcast. Guaranteed human.