Behind the Bastards - Part One: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

Episode Date: July 14, 2026

This week Robert tells Andrew Ti the story of Richard Marcinko, the founder of SEAL Team 6 and patient zero of tacticool "operator" culture. (4 Part Series)See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that you're listening to right now, unless you have multiple sets of ears or have had some sort of invasive surgery to, like, add additional, like, hearing organs to your body so that your life is one undifferentiated cacophony of noise. And if you have done that, why? Why would you do that to yourself? Anyway.

Because I could produce more podcasts. It would make me... Yeah. Sophie, you are the one person. person who needs that ability. Yeah, crime set. That's right. That's right.

Wire all of the audio directly into your brain. Speaking of things I want to wire into my brain, Andrew T. One of my very favorite guests. How are you doing, buddy? That's available. We could probably make that a product. Andrew's hair is so long and luscious now. I know.

I know. Andrew Beach Boys tea. We're a moderate. That's right. Yeah, it's summer. It's maybe never going to stop being summer in Southern California. That's right. It is always summer in Southern California.

Yeah. At this point. Yeah. Maybe perpetually. I had the most distressing thing that happened to me is I went to Santa Barbara. And distressing but not, I guess box crab is now very, very readily available in Santa Barbara when it didn't use to be necessarily in such punctual numbers. Box crab? Box crab.

Like the animal? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Okay, okay. I thought, is it like a restaurant? Okay, like literally the animal box. No, the animal is available. It's a little delicious, spiky guys.

And the way the, like, Fisher guy and the, like, restaurant people were talking, I mean, they know it's climate change. Yeah. But I think they're, like, not, they're trying not to talk about it. It's just like, it bums everybody out. All of a sudden, I guess, I don't know, crabs just decide they want to live here now. A lot of stuff suddenly.

changed. Well, Andrew, you are, normally, you've put it on pause. You're the host of a podcast called Yo Is This Racist. That's correct. That's right. And you are pausing it to do a Star Trek show with Tani Newsom and Jesse Gender, right? Yeah, we're, I think we can, I cleanly say, we're doing the Star Trek show as the main thing. Yo's This Racist might come back.

But yeah, we're doing Starter Trek. That's a show where Tani and Jesse are huge. Tony was on Star Trek. Jesse loves Star Trek and knows so much about it. They both no more than me because I only ever watched Star Trek extremely stoned

in syndication. So I recognize shit. Basically every episode is me doing the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of pointing at the screen like, I know that, but I don't understand it. Great. Great. Great. It's been in my eyes

before, but I don't know what the fuck it is or what the context is or what the history is. So, well, that is exciting. But I figured this week we could give, yo, is this racist fans, one last little hurrah, because I want to ask you an is this racist question. Oh, good. Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll bring back Yo's this racist just for here. Is this racist the Navy Seals? Listen, my only like experience with this train of thought is, that people generally say that like law enforcement and military, the higher up you get, like the closer to boots on the ground, like regular ass, like, you know, guys with no

impulse control and anger issues, boots on the ground, the more racist it is. So I think there's, my guess is, I feel like there's a chance that it's less racist than your average Navy man. That is, that's actually not true. At least as regards to the U.S. military, and I mean, how we determine the amount of racism and something, but the military as a whole is fairly diverse. Oh, that's true. A very diverse institution. Special forces, particularly the highest echelots of special forces, are a lot whiter than the rest of the military.

That makes sense. To a degree that's kind of uncomfortable when you also look at like where some former Delta guys who are now political figures and some former seals wind up. Right, right, right. This episode is not actually about the Navy SEALs as a whole, but we are talking about SEAL Team 6. This is going to be a two-part episode because I want to talk about how SEAL Team 6 went from, like, you know, another special forces unit where they were, the term you would hear a lot was like quiet professionals, you know?

These guys are incredibly good at what they do and they don't talk about it because that's kind of the point of like special ops, right? To now, like, every third Navy SEAL, or at least Team 6 guy, it seems like has a fucking book and a podcast. Yeah. All over the media. They're fucking Republican Congress people, you know. So how did we get there?

And how did we simultaneously get to the point where, like, the Navy SEALs are now way better known for their scandals for shit like Eddie Gallagher stabbing a 16-year-old kid in the neck for a re-enlistment ceremony and Mosul than they are for even, like, fucking killing bin Laden? And all of this comes back. Like, the reason why all of the shit with the Navy SEals is as, as, as messy and as fame-hungry and as crimey as it is today. It all starts with the guy who founded SEAL Team 6.

A fella, I can't wait to tell you about, named Richard Marsenko. Have you ever heard of Richard? Nope. Oh, yeah. Well, this is going to be a hoot. Yeah, can't wait. This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed human.

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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. What's up, fam? It's sports journalist Ari Chambers. Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam J. And we're the hosts. of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from Together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines, the viral moments,

and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, we'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports. Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse.

The world gets crazier, and Yominee. 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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. So before we talk about him, I want to kind of lead you in to the reason I wanted to talk about this at all,

that the Navy SEALs and like the kind of special forces look, the operator look, is one of the more dominant like styles in American pop culture these days. And this is, you can see this all over the fucking internet. If you happen to be particularly a male who has looked up anything related to firearms or survival gear or talked about that stuff on social media. Or how to sharpen a knife. Can I just say? Or how to sharpen a knife.

That's how my YouTube algorithm got poison. I literally was trying to learn how to sharpen knives during. Lockdown. Very valuable skill. Immediately. Like within like 20 minutes. It was like Nazi shit. It was incredible, actually. Yeah. And so if you have done stuff like that on the internet, you've probably run across ads on your social media feed that looks something like this. And Sophie's going to put it out. It's an ad for it says the pipe hitters union. They're advertising their spring break special,

15% off storewide. And there's like a picture behind the ad of you can just sort of see close in the center of a man's chest, he's wearing body armor, he's got like a tattooed hand, and he's holding, he's holding an AR-15 across his chest and like a low ready, right? Not the pipe hitters union, honey. Yeah, the pipe hitters union, yes. Honey. This is, he's got, you can also see his, like, chin. There's a slight shadow of a beard.

This is like a very clear sort of tactical apparel look, which is based on the look of U.S. Special Forces operators. Now, the fact that this business sells tactical and special forces themed apparel should be obvious from the context of the ad. But what are pipe hitters? Have you guys heard that term before? I just assumed it was, you know, weed smokers, bro. That and just in my girl, I've heard that in a girly pop conversation. No, definitely not. That's not what it means. So the short answer for what pipe hitters are is it's a modern synonym for like a special forces bad.

who kills people for the U.S. government. And the long answer is that pipe hitters are a big, like, pipe hitters are why the U.S. can't win wars anymore, right? The pipe hitter ethos and ideology has locked us into this sort of, I would argue, this kind of mental way of looking at how conflict should proceed that makes us incapable of actually winning most of the fights that we start. Anyway, it would be accurate to point out that the term pipe hitter has now crossed into the civilian world, as this ad shows and become a general way for guys who think they're bad

asses to brand themselves. Now, much like the word based, the terms origins start in drug lingo, which also, by the way, special forces, massive drug problems. Like, there's a fuckload of drug issues all across U.S. Special Forces. Right, right, right. And a pipe hitter originally, the lingo originally is someone who smoked particularly opium from a pipe, although some people will say crack. But I do think it's more from opium just based on when it started being said. Right. Because these were dudes in Afghanistan, presumably, right.

I mean, and before, yeah. Sure. Because I think Vietnam, too. But here's how the soldiers project describes the military origins of the phrase. It gained widespread popularity among the special forces and seals after it was featured in the iconic movie Pulp Fiction. The term was associated with someone who could be dependent upon in the midst of combat. And the military usage of the term pipe hitter was initially a description heavily

trained operators used for themselves. It was an internal term, right? If you were a Green Beret or a seal guy, a seal team guy, right, or a Delta guy, you might call yourself and your buddies a pipe hitter or pipe hitters, right? But today it's more commonly an aspirational term used by people who are desperate to embody it and usually seek to do so for buying things, right? And here's a fun example from the student of the gun company, which offers tactical training in books like the pipe hitters guy to the Citizens or Regular Defense Corps. For 1099, what a deal. And you can see the cover of this self-published book, there's like four schlubby-looking dudes with, it looks like A-K, various AK-style style guns and like quasi-civilian tactical gear in like a gray scale foggy photo of a city behind them. It looks kind of post-apocalyptic.

And the best way I can describe like the way these men are dressed is like it's race rioter chic, right? Like that's how they all look. They're all dressed like Kyle Rittenhouse a little. Yeah. Or how Kyle Writtenhouse thinks he's dressing. Yeah. Yeah. The product description of this book reads as follows. Building upon the widespread popularity of the

original pipe hitter's guide, this book will take the lessons from the original text and build upon them. The Citizens Irregular Defense Corps is a modern incarnation of many successful programs used throughout history for the defense of a community during times of crisis. And I intended to look out that first pipe hitters book and I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of related text, including a pipe hitter's guide to access

denial and a pipe hitters guide to small arms and weapons. Both of these are by Nicholas Orr. And I had to look into this guy. So I found Nicholas Orr's personal website. And it turns out that name is, quote, the nom de plume for a civilized barbarian, a savage gentleman, with 30 plus years of operational and combat experience in the United States and overseas. The author has carried a gun during innumerable assignments worldwide as a member of the United States military, as a military contractor, and an executive protection agent. I don't know if any of that's true. It's not under a real name. He could just be lying.

Yeah. I mean, the small, like, sliver of, I don't know, silver lining to all this stuff is, this is just, like, identical to the, like, dim mock people in the 80s and 90s kind of vibe, the, like, the, like, blood sport guy. Like, all the fake, like, white martial arts guys that could, like, kill you with three moves. Yes. And I guess what I mean is these guys have always existed with people. basically the same guns, same mindset.

And also, they have always worshipped the special forces aesthetic, and that has always been like the coolest thing. And the this guy hierarchy is a special forces dude, or a dude with special forces experience. Right. And again, I don't know if Nicholas Orr is ever served in the military. This is just some dude fucking rebranding, like old military training manuals to make a buck. It's got extreme strip mall karate vibe.

Right. in a great way. Exactly, exactly. But this guy's whole shtick is the perfect embodiment of what pipe hitter has become, right? It's a branding term to sell the illusion of special secret special forces knowledge and violent hypercompetence to insecure white dudes who feel like they're like one book and maybe one gun away from being like John Wick, right? If I buy a $6,000 pistol and enough books about tactical shit, then maybe I'll be that cool. And even before it reached the civilian word, pipe hitter as a term was an active brand. Special Forces guys at the dawn of the GWAT, the Global War on Terror,

took a term from a popular recent movie and used it to define themselves how they wanted to be seen, as gruff tattooed badasses who didn't follow the rules but got results. And that's why when disgraced Navy Sealetti Gallagher got off the hook for the series of war crimes that he had committed, thanks to President Donald Trump's intervention, he created the Pipe Hinner Foundation. And Sophie will show you the website for the Pipe Hitter Foundation. But yeah, I mean, again, for an idea, Eddie Gallagher, this guy was such a fucking maniac. His colleagues were doing shit like shooting above people's heads so that they would take cover so that Eddie wouldn't murder them. Because he was just shooting every civilian he could find in Mosul to try to rack up a kill count that would let him like market himself as the next Chris Kyle.

Like that's what this guy is alleged by a bunch of his colleagues as having done, right? Bad representation by Rayband here. But there's not any good representation of Rayban and the Gwazzov. I was going to say, the main step up in the pipe hitter ethos is these meta-glasses. Just the idea to look like this and be like an easy creep. Bad representation for people named Andrea. This website's amazing. It's incredible shit, right?

We'll talk about Eddie in the very end of these episodes. Because a lot of what we're talking about with both Richard Marcinco and with, you know, the history of kind of this conflict in Team 6 between these quiet operators and these, like, maniac murderer publicity hounds, right, is what births Eddie Gallagher in a lot of ways. Now, special forces guys have been seen as cool pretty much since we invented them, but their popularity really rocketed up after the Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, which is a little ironic because basically everyone is there was like it's the easiest mission we ever had.

It was not hard. We were not in. The main danger was that we fucked. up our own helicopters because we didn't like the pilot was like if you're going to land you can't land a helicopter in like a walled an environment like that it'll fuck up the rotors and they were like well you're fired and then the thing the guy said happened um not quite as professional as they often come across um but yeah since 2011 the term has made his way back from the military into movies like cicario that's kind of the first place i seem to remember hearing it in like a pop culture

sense and also and also theaters right right right Right, right. It's a good movie. Yeah. And also a wide array of products marketed to civilians who want to feel like more special, more like special forces dudes when they're at, say, the gym, you know? Here's another example from the pipe hitters union, right? And my favorite is probably this original pipe hitter t-shirt that shows this is part of like a series where it's like the founding fathers reimagined as like special forces gangster badasses. You've got like fucking George Washington with a tomahawk and Teddy Roosevelt's got a machine gun across his shoulder. shirtless, heavily tattooed.

He's got a jug of hard liquor, right? And you can see in this ad how much this product line really relies on the aesthetic of the operator and what the aesthetic of the operator is, because Teddy's not depicted as a regular soldier. He's got a gun over a shoulder. He's shirtless. He's muscular. He's covered in tattoos.

And he's drunk carrying what looks to be a jug of moonshine. And all of these elements, including constant illegal intoxication, are central aspects of real life special forces culture. Now, I would define the pipe hitter aesthetic today as a man usually bearded, wearing weapons, armor, and gear, but no uniform, so to speak, who operates as a soldier but is unaccountable to anyone, really. And today, every right-wing influencer who can pull off posing with a gun has tried to ape this aesthetic at least a little bit. And as an example, here's Andrew Tate posing for Instagram, he's got the plate carrier, he's got a gun. He doesn't have a beard, so he's got one of those skull masks around his face. And by the way, his plate carrier is riding too low.

You want to have that thing up higher. You see that there's like right underneath. He looks dumb as shit. If you're watching this in the video, right underneath where it's maskins, there's like three or four inches of open real estate before the armor starts. That's just like, well, that's just your heart, bro. Like, you want to have that thing covered? It looks really dumb. Yeah.

Now, the skull, the skull gator, too. That's the big. Yeah. The skull gator is a big part of this aesthetic, too, for sure. Yeah. Sure. Now, we're going to look this week into the first pipe hitter, the man who created the template for this kind of guy and also who literally invented SEAL Team 6, Richard Marsenko. Now, the Navy SEALs were already well known when an operator with SEAL Team 6 killed on Selham bin Laden in Abuabad, Pakistan.

But before that day, they were simply among the best special forces units that the U.S. kept in its arsenal. And in all honesty, prior to Abodabad, their public record wasn't all that impressive, really. Any sufficiently, we'll talk about that. Any sufficiently nerdy ROTC kid when I was growing up would have told you that like, well, Delta Force is the more elite unit, right? That was certainly like the attitude then. But after Bin Laden, there was not really any question anymore. The Seals and Team Six in particular were the premier military badasses of the American imagination. So yeah, anyway, I think I've hyped this up and up.

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305 with Lele Pons. as part of my Cultura Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. Richard was born on November 21st in 1940 in Lansford, Pennsylvania, IA,

in the home of his grandmother. Now, his hometown was a mining community, and Cole was the big business of the day. His ancestors were check on both sides, and in his autobiography, he described the ethos of the men and his family line and in Lansford as a whole as, They were born, they worked the mines, they died, right?

So understandable that he's going to want to get out of this, right? Now, we'll be discussing his autobiography, Rogue Warrior, not just as a historical document, because it's a terrible historical document, but it is in and of itself an important piece of history because the book Rogue Warrior is the first Navy SEAL tell all, right? It is the first true story book written by a former operator for the purpose of turning himself into a brand, right? There were books about the seals before. And by way, if you're looking for like a good book about the seals in, because I used to know a seal team one guy who was fought in Vietnam. And the book he recommended was like it was called hunters and trackers. That was like

he said was very true to his experience. Marcinco's book covers Vietnam heavily, but it's nearly all lies, right? That said, it's an important historical book, right? Because every one of these Navy SEAL fucking books that's come since in the modern era, there's two of them from two different guys who were part of the Osama operation who claimed to have shot him, neither of them killed Osama Bedlott. And everyone knows that, right? Oh, God. I'm just going to, this is also like L.A. comedy community stuff.

And I don't remember who it was, and I don't know the story. But basically, someone, I forget who it was. You know, podcast listeners might be able to find this. But someone, like, L.A. comedian-wise, basically went on a date with another person who, I don't even know if they're actually Davy Seal, but claimed to have killed Osama bin Laden also. The, the, if you actually, like, the serious and good reporting on that has shown and proven, basically, because they've talked to a bunch of guys who were either. The guy who actually killed him was a dude whose nickname is red. We don't know his real name. And he does not talk. Right? Like,

that's what people say about the guy who actually did it. We'll talk about that, too, because, again, because two different people who were there on the day they killed bin Laden were both there with the primary purpose for them being to write a book about it later. They both, like, fucked up and broke the rules and, like, broke ranks and left their colleagues exposed during the raid to try to get there faster to shoot him so that they could write a book about it. It's very funny. And that's all downstream of Rogue Warrior, right?

Like, Marsenko not only starts Team 6, but he establishes that this is a way to make a fuckload of money after you get out of the 80s, right? So, again, don't take anything, he says. in this literally and assume a degree of artistic license when Morsenko describes that his family was too poor to buy boots to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right? I don't doubt that they were poor, but he's probably exaggerating a little bit. From an early age, Richard seems to have identified with his maternal grandfather, Joe Pavlik, who he described as a cantankerous, short, barrel-chested, shot in a beer, hard-drinking son of a bitch with a square face

and Leonid Bresnev eyebrows, who worked the minds all his life and never complained about it once. Maybe this guy existed, right? If he didn't, you know, then Marcinco just invented this personality to graft onto a real guy because it was way more convenient, right? This is part of he has, this is a political work in part for him too. So a lot of his book is him outlining the guys he considers these are examples of good people and these are examples of bad people, right? Right, right, right. It's also like, that's what everyone sees their grandpa as like a take. Yeah, and so maybe it's that because this sounds like maybe how you'd idealize a person, but this is not how you describe like a real person.

you knew well. This is a description of a character in a screenplay, right? Here's Richard again. He was a real hellraiser, one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working class bars with big, wide, labor-tuffened hands that look as if they were designed to go around old-fashioned beer glasses. Get it, that's all aesthetic. He's not telling us anything about what his grandpa actually did or, like, said.

He's just talking about, like, his hands and how he's like an archetypal tough guy in a working class bar. That's just not, that doesn't sound real to me. That's not how, like, well, or it's not. a tough guy, but I wouldn't describe it that way. Scrape that surface. That's like fucking 3,000 guys in that town of 5,000 people. Exactly.

That's a picture. That's not a man, right? Anyway, Richard says that he was independent from a young age, right? His family is not very functional, right? His parents are fighting all of the time. And so he's just kind of doing his own shit. He starts working his own paper out at age five. By age seven, he says he's leaving on his own for a day or two at a time to explore the

woods and the wilderness around him. He claims his parents weren't big on education and says his dad probably dropped out of school around eighth grade while his mom may have gotten a ninth or tenth. And that I don't, I don't doubt. Right. I mean, that's true of my grandparents, right? I mean, my grandpa, I think had an eighth grade education. Yeah. I haven't found any accounts that contrast with this. So again, we, and I don't have trouble taking that stuff is right. Yeah. When he was in seventh grade, the mines closed down. And so his family had to move to New Brunswick, Because the school was so diverse, he writes, he got into a series of fights walking to and from class. His uncle moved in with them at one point after he had a brother, and the five of them had to cram into a small apartment.

Richard remembered his parents fighting constantly, and since his uncle would take his mom's side, his dad kind of stopped showing up at home. All the unrest furthered Dick's tradition of avoiding his family as he became an adolescent. He got a series of odd jobs, pinsetter for a bowling alley, altar boy, and as an adolescent, he worked as a waiter at a lunch place. near the Rutgers campus. He claims to have worked 120 hours a week during the summer. He says the Italian owner of the place treated him like a son and started giving him wine, which Richard developed a taste for, and by age 13, he was a daily drinker. I also don't doubt this.

Richard is a hardcore alcoholic his entire life. This is certainly true. When he was 15, Richard claims he pretended to be an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers and started dating a young teacher named Lucette, who he met at a fraternity party that he snuck into. The lie fell apart when she was hired to fill. in for a teacher in his high school French class. He's like dating this girl and she shows up to teach at his high school. I don't know if this is true.

This is wild to put it. This is, yeah. Autobiography. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He does want you to think this is cool that like he was, I mean, being statutorily raped by an adult, but also that she didn't know. Like, that's part of why I kind of doubt it is he thinks this is awesome.

And he's telling you this because he thinks it makes him look cool, that he's getting laid like hell when he's a kid. So by the time of his senior year, Richard was no longer showing up to class at all. He claims that he was dating an Italian woman, quote, married to a guy 27 years or senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping. Again, this is from his autobiography. I hated that. That was so angry.

It's really gross. This is certainly this kind of guy. Absolutely. Eventually, he dropped out of high school. And this is almost the first specific detail of his life that we can independently verify. He definitely drops out of high school. I can check that off. Behind the bastard's true fact about Richard.

He tried to join the Marine Corps at this point. Eisenhower had just sent the Marines to Lebanon. And Richard wrote after seeing them on TV, I liked their dress blues and their swords. So he shows up at a USMC recruiting office. And he asks the sergeant, what can I do? I want to get a gun and go shoot a few bad guns. guys. How can I do that? And the sergeant, and it tells you how, like, insane Richard must have appeared because recruiting sergeants will say anything to get you to sign that paper. And this guy's like,

well, you got to graduate high school. We don't just hand a gun to you, right? Like, he's clearly off put by this kid. Right. Like, dudes who joined the Marine Corps will tell you how hard it is to make a recruiting sergeant not want to get you to sign that paper immediately. You have to seem insane. Right. This will hurt me to pass him on more. than it was to like get the additional number. Jesus Christ, right? My conscience won't allow this. And I'm a recruiting sergeant.

Right. So Richard says that he got disheartened after this because he knew by the time he did all of the training shit that was required, the Lebanese problem would be solved and he wouldn't get to shoot anybody. So he decided not to join the Marines and fucks off and spends the summer partying and getting laid. Richard starts dating seriously for the first time at this point. And he writes that when I wasn't catting around with other women,

Quote, I discovered that we liked each other. That's how he describes falling in love is when I wasn't cheating on her. I had a good time with her. Yeah. That's love for Richard. Good for him. I'm mostly good for her, especially good for her. Yeah.

The less time you spend with this guy is probably on the whole helping you. Regardless, Richard abandons her that fall when she goes, well, I mean, I don't know, they break up, right? She goes to college and he volunteers for the Navy. I shouldn't call that him abandoning her. It's a pretty natural split at that age. He reports for duty in October 1958 and goes to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. In the great book, Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes, shortly after enlisting,

Marcyon, a radio man, saw The Frogman, the 1951 movie film depicting UD4's heroics in World War II and knew he needed to join the underwater demolitions teams. So we need to talk about the UDTs, right, the underwater demolitions teams. because while Richard was living his first five years of life, right? That's during World War II, 40 to 45. Military history was being revolutionized by the formalization of a kind of unit that had always existed, special operations forces, right? These have always been a part of warfare in every society and every place that's done formal war, right? You could look at the Greeks who hid in the Trojan horse as like an example, whether or not that was literally true.

That's an example of like a kind of operation that an early operator would carry out, right? the kind of elite, highly trained soldiers, spies, and assassins that would do the work that modern states have spec ops guys to do, right? This has always been a thing. And during World War II, the development of technology mandated the creation of highly trained soldiers capable of extremely niche operations, particularly doing complicated underwater shit. In the United States, because this happens, like the British have, you know, the SAS and shit.

Like this is independently happening in a number of places. The Germans have the Falchworm-Yagers, which a lot of, I mean, a lot of Americans. American special forces culture is descended from these different, from Nazi special forces units, right? Yeah. Unsurprising. Unsurprised. Just like a lot of, they were very influential in a lot of like small unit tactic development.

And for the U.S., a lot of this process started in the Pacific. The storming of Betty O' Island by the second Marine Division and the Tarawa Atoll was a hideously bloody affair. And the reason why it was such a fuckup is basically they calculated the tide because you need to know what the tide's going to be to like have the boats moving in the proper way to get all of the dudes on shore at the right time so that one set of them isn't exposed and just getting shot to shit, right? But there was a special kind of tide that day that if they'd had someone out ahead of the landing boats who could have gone back and said, hey, it's a different kind of tide you need to all, then it would have avoided a horrible bloody situation, right? And so the Navy

decides we need specialist divers who can scout out coastal areas ahead of a landing, measure the depth of exactly, figure out the tide, find and to say, mines before landing craft come in, right? Like, these are our first real special forces units. So the Navy had started training underwater demolitions teams before Tarawa. And these guys are more commonly known at the time as Frogmen. That's like the colloquial term. And they're cool, by the way.

Like, kids in World War II are, like, reading feverishly stories about Navy Frogmen. These are some of the, like, some of the first GI Joe's are Frogmen. These are like the coolest dudes. It's like GI Joe mentality. You need a water guy. You need an ice guy. You need a flying guy. Exactly.

You need a guy that looks like rocks. Yes. It looks like rocks for some reason. So the first men in the line of descent of the Navy SEALs were Navy's C-B volunteers who took special training in Fort Pierce, Florida, to learn how to fulfill this new role. Because the work of the underwater demolition teams was known to be so demanding and difficult, officers and enlisted members of these units went through the same training and were expected to handle the same task. and were expected to handle the same tasks and work together in units so small that you couldn't have the traditional divide between officers and enlisted men. One thing that's noted as being weird about Frogman is they all just called each other by their first names, right? And you're not supposed to do that in the normal.

Now, that said, I have known some people who were in units that would say that, like, after months of heavy combat, you kind of stop. Some of that stuff matters a lot less, right? Right, right, right. In the book Alpha, which is a great read about Navy SEAL alleged war criminal Eddie Gallagher, author David Phillips writes this about the first frogmen. They've been formed from civilian workmen in the New Deal 1940s America, and they embraced the era's informal attitudes of blue-collar solidarity and equality. So these men were soldiers, right?

But they also carried no weapon besides a fixed blade diving knife, which is a major thing that differentiates them. These guys are badasses, and they are widely renowned, but not because of their killing ability. That is not at all why they're like respected, right? They're respected because the thing that they have to do is both totally necessary for the success of naval operations and insanely dangerous. During D-Day, UD-T swimmers were the very first people ashore at Omaha Beach and had to clear the way for landing craft with zero cover. And again, for an idea, these guys are not in a boat.

They are swimming ashore in like shorts with a knife and flippers maybe, right? They're basically naked. And they're swimming directly into guns. 52% of the unit were made casualties in a single day. A rate of loss, no normal military unit could be expected to endure without complete collapse. The Frogman proved incredibly valuable in World War II, and obviously more in the Pacific Theater than the Atlantic. And because of this, they were allowed to live by different rules than other soldiers.

Phillips notes that they had little use for discipline that regular troops were expected to live under. They refused to shave their hair, wear proper uniforms, march or salute as a rule. officers outside the unit complained that they looked like criminals and hooligans, not soldiers, but from the book Alpha, they were not an attack force. They were a crew of workmen out to do an insane job. They could be as crazy as they wanted, right? And that is, then that's still a big part of the, and it's not a problem, really, in World War II, right?

Because for one thing, what they're doing is objectively heroic and good. I'm not just talking about the cause of the war. They're not doing anything to harm, like they're not killing people. they're protecting their fellow soldiers and risking their own lives to do it, right? Right. It's sort of like the engineering version of the medic. Yes, yes, exactly. They're doing logistics under fire.

And there is like demolition's work that does kill people that they do, but that's not the primary thing that they're up to. And it was not easy to train men to do this kind of work. From code over country, quote, the final week of training culminated with the men forced to do a trench on the Atlantic beach while explosives were set off nearby for an hour. The goal was to ensure that each man that they would send into enemy water had proved they could handle the stress. Many couldn't. Between 60 and 75% dropped out by the end of the week.

Right. And a part of what they're doing, the way they will frame it is we're looking for men who are immune to shell shock. Now, that's not a thing. Your brain is affected by it, or it isn't. But depending on the force of the blast and how close you are. But some people are better at handling it and not collapsing until much later. It destroys them. Right.

Right. So this is the start of Hell Week, which is still a very famous part. I'm sure it's the thing everybody knows about Navy Seals Day. Right, right. Now, we know that exposure to explosives like this causes CTE. But again, at the time was that this is like hardening them and showing like who's immune to shell shock. Yeah. I mean, some stuff gets hardened. Some stuff gets softened. You know, death training. Yeah, it was to say. Now, we'd never really trained a unit like this before. And this was also a top secret unit because we didn't want the enemy to know like what these guys were capable. of doing, and those two facts together bred an immediate kind of elitism within the ranks of the guys who made it through training. The first UDT training leader was Lieutenant Commander Draper Kaufman, and he was a very observant man. Because so many wannabe frogmen washed out, and because UDT swimmers weren't held to the same expectations of discipline, they had a tendency to view

themselves as better than their peers. As Cole writes, Kaufman and his officers were concerned that elitism would pervade their ranks, but the needs of the war won out, and this problem would only get worse in the years to come. Post-war, stories of these formerly secret elite units captured the imaginations of countless young Americans, and in the wake of World War II, the brass and our growing military industrial complex saw opportunity. The Pentagon had partnered with Hollywood during the war years to spread propaganda. Now that the Cold War was beginning, our national propaganda needs had changed.

Military planners felt the wars of the future could be won by air power, with anything on the ground handled by small elite teams of highly trained soldiers. In 1951, a Navy Hollywood partnership produced The Frogmen, which starred Richard Widmark and was designed to make UDT teams look fucking awesome. This is one of the very first, like, Hollywood U.S. military joint production propaganda movies. And the original theatrical trailer for this classic is still on YouTube. And I have to assume that Richard saw the trailer as a kid, too. So here's a clip to give you an idea of what must have been appealing about this to the young man. From top secret records

filmed with the cooperation of the Department of Defense comes the thrilling story of these pin-footed, gargolide beach-blasting heroes They fight like men from another world But they've got Brooklyn, Texas and Missouri written all over their hearts You're a brave man, all of you are You wouldn't be in this outfit, nobody questions that

But your kind of bravery comes 10 cents a dozen It isn't worth a hoot more when the chips are down It's great. So I love this 50 shit. It's so fascinating to put yourself back in the audience mindset of like in cooperation with the U.S. Navy being like a positive thing. Like, ooh, chucks. Well, and honestly, like that whole thing about like they've got, you know, Texas and, you know,

all their, the home state's written all. And just like, yeah, there is something that does a little. Like these are, like the original frogmen, we're just working class men forced by circumstances to endure insane. danger in an overall noble struggle. And that's pretty cool, right? And they could not be further from modern day Navy SEALs. Right. Modern SEALs are descended from these guys? Not at all alike, honestly, really. Now, young Richard Marsenko sees this movie and he loses his shit. He remembers it having lots of action, lots of heroism, and lots of songs. One of these songs was the official

UDT team fight song, which ended with these words. Out in front of the Navy, where you really get the heat, there's a bunch of crazy bastards pulling off some crazy feet. And that's that line, particularly those last two lines, that just completely writes over Richard's mind. Like that's software that just reprograms his fucking brain. Right. He never wants to be seen as anything else for the rest of his days. So Richard, who basically parented himself half his childhood, finds this really appealing. And he specifically recalls thinking, hey, I could do that after leaving the theater.

And his logic for thinking, this was, I mean, I was a reasonably aggressive sort of person. I'm really violent. That job looks great for me. Now, Richard had to spend a couple of years living the life of a normal enlisted sailor before he was able to try out for the UDT teams. They don't just let you join and do that. His first attempt was foiled by a broken hand, and his second was, according to him,

nearly thwarted by his commanding officer, who he describes as, oh boy, the ugliest female I'd ever set eyes on in my life. I called her the big female ugly commander or big fuck for short. Cool. You know, that sentence didn't go where I thought it was going to go. How could you have guessed where that was at it?

How could you have guessed? Maybe this lady existed. I can't disprove that. It does kind of seem a little unlikely, but it's not impossible. Women were first allowed to enlist in the Navy in 1908, but initially only as nurses. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels,

was weirdly woke for 1917, famously asked, is there any law that says a yeoman must be a man, right? Is there any law that says like a young sailor has to be like a man? Right. And he started letting ladies join the naval reserve while men were away during World War I. In World War II, a separate women's naval auxiliary was created, the waves. And they have like the wax is the air core version, right? The waves in the wax are like the kind of ladies' auxiliary during World War II. And post-war, the women's Armed Services Integration Act brings women into the armed forces properly.

but obviously, and they're still limited today in what roles they can serve, less than they were then. The first female Navy officers had just been commissioned in 1948. And so 58 is when this is all happening. Marcinko could have had a lady CEO, right? But it seems likelier that this is a lie he created because this caricature of a lady officer symbolizes everything wrong with what he called Big Navy, right? Right, right. This is also a term you'll hear in the Seals to this day, Big Navy.

And I think Richard, I'm not sure if he's the origin point, but he's, certainly one of them. So yeah, I don't know how seriously we should take this, but this is something that, like, he wants us to believe. Richard writes, quote, Big Fuck was also a rulebook creature. And he will later decide that basically all of the Navy's problems comes from people following the rules too strictly. In the book, Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly writes that some of the guys who served with

Marcinco would later claim that as a second class radio man, he bragged that he would one day be the chief of naval operations. So, you know, he's got a mouth on him and he thinks he's hot shit. But soon he's going to get, like, the chance to prove that he is because he gets transferred to the UDT training. I don't know why he claims that he beats off, first he beats up one of his peers for being a whiner, and then that gets him into a fist fight with his chief petty officer who he beats up so badly that he gets transferred to UDT training to keep everyone else safe.

And I think that's a lie. I don't think that's true. Yeah. That's famously how that works. Yeah, I think that's the kind of lie a guy like Richard Marcy Cottells. Oh, God. I have an uncle who punched his training officer in the Marine Corps, and he does not have a cool story like that. He got the shit beat out of him and in major trouble.

Major, major trouble story. Yeah. Oh, I was just too tough. They had to promote me. Too much of a badass. They had to put me in the UDT to protect the others. Now, you know who I? I want to protect, really?

The only thing I want to protect. You know, if the Navy SEALs are there to protect America from terrorism, then I'm the Navy SEALs of protecting these products and services from you not listening to them. Yeah, that works. That's an ad transition. You've heard the chaos. Now you can see it. Do we want to jump right in?

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Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. You know us, or rather you know them. Tony and Candice, Nina and Lance, Spike, and yes, the chicken. We've played a lot of iconic characters over the years, but today we're showing up as ourselves to tell you about Podlandia, AEO rewatch, our brand new podcast. Each week, we'll revisit an episode of Portlandia from the very beginning,

breaking down the sketches, exploring the backstories of our most iconic characters, revisiting the Portland locations you know and love, and opening up about our creative process. How did any of this get made? Why do we think that was a good idea? We're ready to talk about it. 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, a melody. I thought he was going to write. I thought you were all going to write a song for it. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Ayo, rewatch on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My first guest is Paris Tolkien, Shakita. and Yirin, Samira and Gracie! I'm so excited on the bouncy bed. You have surprises, many surprises. Welcome to Sweet 305 where the group chat comes to life. What a f***.

It's like a way of saying like, Oh, my name, oh, my friend, oh, my brother. What a . Look, I've never ever had to be a bled with nobody. Except with my children, my kids, my kids, and so know. Yes. I'm my amante.

Uff. Oof, that's, that's incredible, yeah, the telenovela. You're the only person I know that loves a yellow starburst. It's lemonade. I know anyone that you'd like to collaborate. Like, you'd say, I'd like to collaborate with this person. This is Sweet 305.

Listen to Sweet 305 with Lele Pons as part of my Coulthura podcast network on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So Richard claims he got transferred to UDT training, right? And he does. You know, I just don't know exactly what leads to that. He completes his UDT training in 1961. This is a decade after the Frogman was released. That same year, President John F. Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to examine ways to develop new counter-Garilla forces.

This included establishing new special operations teams as separate components of the existing underwater demolitions teams. And this is what, like, JFK is why we have the Navy Seals, right? He's effectively the father of the Navy SEals, right? Now, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in mid-1961 prompted Kennedy to address Congress. And everyone remembers the bits where he stated his plan for the U.S. to put a man on the moon. But Kennedy also asserted that the country needed to prepare to fight the new kinds of proxy wars that had come to define the Cold War. These next generation frogmen would need to be trained and armed to fight guerrilla conflicts, assassinating local leaders and military figures and carrying out acts of sabotage and then blending back into the jungle or the wilderness, whatever, right?

Captain William Hamilton Jr., a UDT man from World War II, who was one of the people who was tasked with creating the Navy SEALs, described the kind of men that he was looking for to populate this new unit, right? So at the birth of the Navy SEALs, this is like specifically the job description. They had to be more than killers, all muscle and neck and attack dog mentality. I wanted, demanded, creative men who operated with their brains as well as with their muscles, men of courage, dedication to duty, sacrifice, personal dexterity, and intelligence. intelligence. Team and mission must come first. At the same time, they must be individuals. Near rogues, in fact, rough men, tough men who could kick ass and operate outside protocol. And you can see why you might want that, right? If you're looking at a unit that's got to operate without support, you know, for long periods of time, they have to be intelligent and

creative and they have to have like knowledge outside of what you'd expect from a normal soldier in order to be able to kind of like pivot and think on their feet, right? But it's like the same as like finding an emperor. It's like you need those things, but you don't want anyone who would describe themselves as those things. Right. And the other part of it, you need those things, but the training is basically, is mostly like, are you okay with guys screaming at you and blowing stuff up next to you and yelling at you

or you're really cold? Right. And that doesn't necessarily like guarantee that they'll be able to do all these things. And part of the issue is that there will always be guys like this in the Seals who are legitimately like just incredibly talented and skilled and have a wide variety of knowledge. But there's also guys who are there because they really just want to kill people, right? And this, the fact that from the beginning, they're like, well, we understand that these guys have to be kind of like rogues.

There's to be like a criminal element to them if they're going to be able to do the job, right? That was baked into the seals from the beginning and it has always been a cause of problems for them. And it's because they, like, this, like Richard is going to be this guy to a fucking T, right? One of these rough men with of the criminal element. Yeah, like it's it's it's they couldn't have made the job more perfectly for how he saw himself. Richard attended UDT class 26. 20% of his teammates passed the intense training. So most people dropped out, including he noted in his autobiography with glee, most of the officers, they just couldn't take it. He would claim he found that

perversely enjoyable. Again, he really, he's going to be an officer later, but he really hates officers, like very performatively. After four weeks, he graduates. Training for the Seals at that point involved none of the diving instruction that it like previously had and that it would later have, right? They're not really learning to be swimmers at this point, nearly as much as they had in the past and would in the future. And Dick's largest difficulty during training came with courtesy of his bowels.

Here's the book Rogue Warrior. I had a problem with Hell Week. I developed a case of the runs. In today's Navy, that would probably be enough to get me excused. not in 1961. They stopped for nothing. The solution was speed. I discovered as they ran me up and down the beach that if I ran fast enough, the smell of what ran

down my leg and into my boot get left behind for the next boat crew to enjoy. Oh, man. So he, right. So he was just in a soft, permissive era. Yeah. And, and, oh, God. Well, he was in an era where all they cared about was, like, can you handle the physical difficulty of this?

The running. We don't care if you're, like, mentally fit, if you're crazy, if you're, like, an asshole? Like, are you comfortable shitting yourself while running, basically? It's the primary determining factor. And so he's laughing, like, a lot of these smarter guys who probably have a lot of the other skills that might be useful, aren't tough enough to make it through, whereas he is. And this is always going to be a factor of pride for him. So after he graduates Hellweek, he writes that he and his classmates were confident as $500 hookers. They were sent for 10 weeks of training at St. Thomas. And given, he claims, unlimited women, a never-ending supply of aged booze and

fresh lobsters and all the deadly toys you could ever want to play with. I don't really know how accurate that is to Navy SEAL training if they give you unlimited liquor and women. But I believe the deadly toys. That's like Blowfeld style. That's like how Goldfinger recruits. Also, I watch out with the lobster of Mr. Soft Stomach. Come on.

Yeah. Can't have that much. Come on. You really think you should be eating lobster right now, man? You got the runs? I think I might know why. He makes repeated mentions of his drinking in this book. About once a page in the opening of his autobiography,

Marcinko talks about how much he likes to drink. A little earlier, we're describing the kinds of men who made it through Hell Week, he mentioned that some guys, like him, spent all of their downtime at the bar. The reality is that he was a hardcore alcoholic, who at this point was already beginning to drink problematically and would be addicted his entire working life and special forces.

Despite his constant complaining about how bad officers are, Richard almost immediately got his high school equivalency exam and went through OCS so that he could become an officer. So much of his book is talking. And then he goes through like, and then I became an officer, but I had to like study the officers like they were aliens to learn how to become one. But I never really became one, you know. Right. I just got the rank, but that was never me, you know. Right.

He's just a tough guy trying to get ahead, bro. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he's trying to protest too much. Now, as a reminder, the seals don't exist. I just said seal training. They're still not quite, like, it's still like, it's 1962, so it's like the year after this train, the seals are officially formed. So he's, he's kind of in a similar situation to, like, former governor, Jesse Ventura.

Like, Ventura's a little earlier, but Ventura was UDT and then gets kind of grandfathered in as a seal, right? So the new seal unit would be similar to the old in some ways. The standard unit of organization was still the number of men who could fit on a small boat, five enlisted and an officer. The name seal came from their expected area of expertise, sea and land operations. Their insignia was the Tritent, with a flintlock and an eagle on it. People immediately are like, that kind of looks like the Budweiser logo.

So people call it the Budweiser too. Captain Hamilton, who handled training at first for these Navy SEALs, wanted creative, criminal-minded men. He sent his first team members to take classes from former thieves to learn safe-cracking and hot-wiring vehicles. This was all justifiable by the parameters of the jobs he expected they'd be assigned. What kind of jobs would the Navy need a bunch of heavily trained, heavily armed criminals to accomplish, you might ask? Well, let's talk about that. Who do you think was the first outside U.S. governmental organization to see the potential in a unit of killers with criminal training who were unaccountable to a standard hierarchy?

Who do you think found that really appealing? I mean, it's got FBI at the time, right? No, it's the CIA. It's the CIA. It's the CIA. Yeah. Now, the CIA had recently inaugurated something called the Phoenix program in Vietnam. This classified operation was based on the widespread belief that the Viet Cong were only able to function because there was this shadow network of supporters in South Vietnam that enabled them. And the best way to defeat the insurgency was to kill these people. So as early as 1967, the year that Morsenko first shipped to Vietnam as a seal, his job was carrying out. out Phoenix missions all over the war front. CIA informants would provide the agency with info, and they'd send it to the seals, who would murder, kidnap, and ambush whoever they thought they needed to.

Each of these raids would gather more intel, which would be used to plan further murders in raids. And we call it a different thing now, but this is how counterterrorism strategy in U.S. Special Forces worked in Afghanistan and Iraq, too, basically. It hasn't changed since project, like elements of it, they try to do less war crimes sometimes now than the old project fucking Phoenix guys did, but it's the same basic idea, right? You do rage, you gather info, you do more raids,

and you often just wind up murdering guys, right? Yeah. Both in Vietnam and in Iraq, and it's just often just murder squads, right? Right, right, right. Sort of some Stasi type shit. Yeah, you're kind of just trying to, at a certain level, it becomes just we're killing as many of the male population in this area as we can.

That's Vietnam, that's Iraq, and that's Afghanistan, right? This isn't really debatable. Right. And eventually we'll win. Eventually, they'll be on our side. It hasn't worked ever, but like, it's got it at some point. Couldn't hurt. We'll kill our way to the bottom of this barrel.

Now, we'll talk about how well all of this works in Vietnam and for Richard Marsenko and later, but I think this is a good place to end part one. How are you feeling, Andrew Tee? You think the Navy SEALs are going to pull it together and become? I mean, they're only getting worse, so... Yeah, yeah, it's really all downhill from World War II, but that's American military history in a nutshell. Yeah, it's true.

World War II was sort of our Batman begins. It, like, set a tone that actually every subsequent thing based off it really, really fucked us as a global concern, basically. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's... It's pretty bleak. Yeah. I don't know.

But hey, those frogmen were pretty cool, you know? You know who else is pretty cool, Andrew? You. Thanks, man. Plug your plug-a-pluggables. Yeah, you know what? Well, if we just kind of yada-yada our way that a 23rd century, you could just go to Star Trek times. Yeah, I don't know, Andrew T.

Starter Track. That's it. I don't know. Please listen if you like it. We're really having fun doing it. And yeah, it's really, and it's on YouTube also. That's the thing. I will, speaking of Special Forces and Star Trek, one of my favorite episodes of T&G is the episode where they, like, accidentally take on, like, a crazed Special Forces operative from some alien race that has been, like, arrested by his own people because they made them too good as killers.

Oh. And, you know, he's on like a, he's on like a ship full of Starfleet people who are, like, really good utopian people and are absolutely not prepared to deal with him. It's a fun episode. It's sort of like Rambo. It's like they just drop Rambo on board. It's like they dropped Rambo in like a kindergarten. Right. He's just,

Worf is not prepared. All right, I can't wait. We'll have you on for that. Great. We'll be back with part two. Bye. Peace. 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 IHeartRadio 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. Hey, Portlandia fans. Carrie Brownstein and Fred Armisen here. The Dream of the 90s is alive in podcast form. We're launching Podlandia A. A.O. rewatch, 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 Chryssel, 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. I remember you thinking that. Listen to Podlandia. Hey, A.O. Rewatch on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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 artist, 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. What's up, fam, it's sports journalist Ari Chambers.

Hey, what's up, y'all? It's your girl, Sam Jay. And we're the hosts of everyone watches women's sports, a new podcast from together. We're breaking down the biggest headlines, viral moments and the stories everyone's talking about across women's sports. From game-changing performances to culture-shifting conversations, we'll give you our takes, our debates, and a few laughs along the way. Because everyone watches women's sports.

Listen to everyone watches women's sports. On the I-Heart Radio app. Apple Podcast 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 it?

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 IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcast.

This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.