Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Excited Delirium: How Cops Invented A Disease

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

Robert is joined again by Ben Bowlin to continue to discuss Excited Delirium. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's justifying murder my corrupt doctors paid by a mega corporation in order to increase profits for dangerous electric murder guns used by violent people in order to enforce white supremacy? Shit, I lost the thread of that introduction a little bit. I mean, I think so. Well, you're doing great.

Welcome to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that, you know what podcast this is. Nobody's dropping into episode two for the first time, not having listened to any of our other episodes. You know who I am. You know what we do, motherfuckers. This is Robert fucking Evans, motherfuckers. This is behind the fucking bastards, motherfuckers. Are we not doing that? That's a little bit much, Sophie. Turn it down. Come on. This is behind the bastard. There we go. He's Robert Evans.

I am Robert Evans. This is behind the bastards. And my guest for part two of our episode on excited delirium is Ben Boland. Ben, how are you doing today? Ben, Ben, Ben. Hey, thanks so much. Thanks so much for having me back again, guys. I know things got sort of dicey at the end for anybody who wasn't listening in to part one. I think a lot of people might be tuning in just for part two. Just for part two.

But yeah, yeah, just just for part two. They said, I don't want don't they read the description. No, I want to go in media res, baby. Yeah, Tabula Rasa coming in, coming in hot. But yeah, thanks for having me back. I know things got difficult off air. We had some creative differences read Doritos, which is fine. But I'm glad I'm glad to be here.

Yeah, I'm glad to have you back. I'm also glad to continue discussing whether or not to reintroduce Doritos plugs. To be honest, when it comes to the old running jokes that I'd like to reintroduce, I'm really looking forward to getting in a studio again and just damaging company property with a machete thrown objects. That's that's the thing I'm most excited for. I've been practicing and I'm going to throw a bagel in your face. Really. Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. I've come to the conclusion that, you know, the pandemic.

It gave us some necessary pause time, you know, because we've been doing that a little bit too much. People were like a little bit too much throwing stuff. But now the pandemic, I think people are ready for it again. And that's that that kind of makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it? Yeah, I'm going to beam you in the face with the fucking everything bagel. It's going to be great. Good stuff. Before we get started, though, I do want to give give you a shout out for the show.

And Robert, you personally, because I was I was listening to some of the old school behind the bastards. And it hit me, I was I was listening to this and was one of one of the machete moments as I call them. And I was thinking, damn, my machete is really old. All right. Well, what's what's your brand? Oh, is it one where you don't know the brand is just an old knife, old machete? Yeah. Yeah, it's just an old big acid. Is it one of those big stamped steel deals? Like kind of one of those, like I think a lot of them are made in El Salvador.

It's kind of a thin stamped piece of metal with an edge on it. Yeah, actually nailed it. Yeah, those are great. I mean, honestly, for most, I mean, well, it's just because if you actually go to the places in the world where like every single person like right down to the old ladies is walking around with a machete like Guatemala, like fucking, there's big parts of Guatemala where everyone you see is just going to have one on them because it's like a life tool. I used to live there. Yeah, you're right. Oh, I didn't know that.

Yeah, I spent months there. Where were you? I was in Jaila. Oh, oh, Shaila Shaila. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, was it cool enough for us? Yeah, I'm glad I brought it, Lon.

But yeah, it's like whenever you see people who who use machetes all the damn time, it tends to be one of those stamped steel ones because like they work, they do the job, they're fucking unkillable. You can just run them on like one of those, you know, one of those foot powered sharpening wheels and sharpen it up. And it's they're not fancy. So like, yeah, that uses up steel, but you don't care. It's not like an artisanal knife. They're great. I love those. For all that I enjoyed my artisanal machetes, if I'm just going to go out and fuck a knife up, I'm going to use one of those.

Right. But speaking of fucking things up, Robert, this is part two of a very fucked up situation. Yes. Yes, it is. And we're talking about so when we when we last left this very fun story, we were talking. I had introduced a guy named Dr. Jeffrey Ho because we just talked about Charles Wettley and Deborah Mash, two doctors who receive a decent amount of money. We don't know exactly how much from the axon corporation to explain why tasers didn't cause taser related deaths. And now we are going to talk about Dr. Jeffrey Ho, who is like, like the the ultimate form of that kind of doctor.

That guy is such a shady motherfucker. If there's a single biggest bastard of the episode, it's Dr. Jeffrey Ho. So Ho worked for 10 years as an ER doctor in Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis. The fact that we're talking about Minneapolis should key went on some of where this is going. Now, from an early stage in his medical career, Dr. Ho got involved in, shall we say, extracurricular work. He was hired by a nearby fire department to direct medical services there, which is great. He consulted for a private medical product company, which is probably okay. He enlisted in the National Guard and he taught at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

And then he took a side gig working with the Minneapolis police SWAT team. This dalliance with law enforcement was apparently so appealing to Dr. Ho that in 2003 he returned to school to get a two year degree in law enforcement, which was a requirement to pass the police licensing board in Minnesota. He became a part-time police officer near Minneapolis. And so far, my feelings on policing aside, based on the standards of our society at its present moment, that's not the worst thing in the world, right? Doctors can moonlight, like cops get to moonlight as security guards. I guess why wouldn't a doctor be able to moonlight as a cop? Like, theoretically, if you're a doctor and a cop, when you horribly injure someone, maybe you can provide life-saving medical aid to them more accurately, I don't know.

Oh, wow. I'm picturing like the worst 80s movie right now. Yeah, Dr. Cop Doc. Dr. Cop Doc. It would be funny to just redo Dirty Harry, but every time he shoots someone, he then like puts on a tourniquet. Once I kill him, I go right into doctor mode. So yeah, that's a little sketchy, but again, based on sort of the standards of our society so far, I guess I don't think he's violating anything. I don't think there's any rule that says a doctor can't be a cop, so whatever. Seems a little odd to me.

Now, while Dr. Ho was starting his journey into law enforcement, Axon had a Nebraska doctor named Robert Stratbucker as their chief medical advisor. In 2005, Dr. Stratbucker signed on as a consultant to help conduct a massive study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice to look at the safety of stun guns. The study was being managed by a University of Wisconsin professor named John Webster, and it was supposed to be completely independent of Axon or any other stun gun manufacturer, right? This is the DOJ who wants to do a big study on whether or not stun guns are safe, which is a reasonable thing for the DOJ to do, right? Like, you're buying all these stun guns, you probably know how often they kill people. So Dr. Stratbucker gets named as one of the consultants on that study, even though he's in the employ of Axon, which is kind of shady, and I'm going to quote from an NBC write up now. In March, both Webster and a Taser spokesman told the AP the company had no ties to their research. In his grant proposal, Webster proposed Stratbucker received $18,000 in salary and travel expenses for his advice.

Stratbucker's resume was included, but did not mention his work for Taser, and Webster checked the box to deny any conflict of interest. Now, Ben, I'm not a doctor, nor am I, well, I'm a kind of scientist. You can see my book. You're a Reverend Doctor. I actually am a Reverend Doctor, so I am the perfect person, and I've experimented with different kinds of dangerous drugs on my friends and family. So, you know, I am a good person to say this. I would argue that if you are conducting a DOJ study on whether or not Taser's are safe and you're paid by Taser, that is a conflict of interest. Yeah.

Well, well, it's a perfect alignment of interest for the people who are selling out human beings. First of extra cash. That's jolly good for them. It's not well written. That's the part. Like, if you were writing this to be as insidious and evil as it is, you would come up with maybe better motivations. And it's one of those things. I don't know how much Stratbucker is getting paid by Axon.

It has to be more than 18 grand, because, like, for a doctor, for someone in that kind of income bracket, and I'm going to guess a similar income bracket to Stratbucker, 18 grand isn't chump change, right? You'd miss it if it came out of your bank account, but it's not enough to sell your soul for, right? He's got to be getting a lot of money from Axon on this, because 18 grand is not enough to sell your soul out if you're in that kind of income bracket, right? Because he's not fucking starving on the street. He's a very prominent doctor and professor. He's got money. Like, there's got to be, and that's one of the, like, a lot of times when they talk about how much these different doctors are getting paid,

it's like 10 or 20 grand, and you know, like, no, there's more fucking cash coming to you than that. Like, I can't prove that. I don't know, because these are private payments, right? It's not a government employee, but you have to be getting more money than that. 18 grand's not enough, you know? Not for that. It comes through different ways. Yeah.

That's how it works. It'll come through a different direction. There are a lot of things that are easily lost, unfortunately, when it comes to those kind of payments. And then also we have to consider, as messy and depressing and shitty as it is to point out, there are people at that income level who are driven to a great degree by a self-delusion and ideology, you know what I mean? Yeah. So they're just down to clown. They're down to fucking clown, yeah.

So in May of 2005, documents were uncovered that showed Stratbucker had received both cash and stock options from Axon. And again, I don't have an exact number there, but you have to assume it's a lot, especially the stock options, which gives him a further vested interest in the company's success, right? Because how much those options are worth are valued on how much Axon is worth, which has directly related to whether or not the Justice Department decides tasers are safe enough for cops to use, you know? Now, the Justice Department very shadily claimed that they'd known about Stratbucker's affiliation with Axon the whole time, and they didn't consider it a big deal because obviously you need a taser expert on a study to determine whether or not tasers are deadlier than advertised. Dr. Webster's response to the reveal of his relationship with Axon seems to have put the lie to this.

He told the AP, quote, In view of this potential conflict of interest, I can make the statement that I have not received advice or paid Stratbucker and I will not use him in the future. So Webster pulled back, didn't pay Stratbucker the 18 grand, cut him from the study. And this kind of like spoils Dr. Stratbucker, right? Because now he can't be a part of these studies that there are going to continue to be done on the taser, because journalists revealed the fact that he has a conflict of interest. Now, for Axon, this meant that they needed to shop around for a new scientist to tweak research in order to make their products seem safe. Tasers had gone viral among law enforcement agencies, and a ton of folks wound up dying or being horribly injured by cops who were using electrocution guns.

Axon's lawyers were now fielding dozens of lawsuits, and they needed a way to assure investors that they were going to get past this and salvage their image. Now, thanks to Reuters, we have access to a packet for investors that Axon handed out where they proposed a solution to their bad PR and lawsuit problem. This solution was to employ a group of, quote, world-class medical professionals to defend the brand. Now, the doctors we've talked about were all brought on for that reason. And I want to read you a chunk from this investor document, because it really is one of the most sociopathic things I've ever come across. So this is the Axon corporation talking to investors. As a result of various litigation, inquiries, and proposed legislation mentioned above, we had to incur significant general and administrative expenditures in 2005, an investment in protecting our brand equity and educating the various public interests in our technology.

In particular, we incurred substantial incremental legal, lobbying, public relations, and related traveling costs, which ultimately had an adverse impact on our overall profitability in 2005. However, we believe these investments were well worth the cost. In many cases, what began as adverse circumstances for us yielded opportunities to educate high-level public leaders in the value of our products. Those adverse circumstances were tasers killing people, and them being like, well, but then we got to fight it in court, prove that it wasn't the taser. So these adverts, it really was a boon to us that we killed these people. It's off the hook, yeah, not cool or good, but totally expected, I guess.

I'm baffled at how much of that is an act and how much of that is, in your opinion, as you said, like a sociopathic lack of awareness or lack of caring about that very apparent lack of caring. Do they know? They have to, because they're the ones. We'll talk about this later, but they are actively fighting to force medical professionals not to diagnose taser-related deaths as taser-related deaths. That's a thing they go to do. They hire these people to tweak research and stuff. Now, I'm sure there's a lot of employees that lie to themselves about what they're doing, but we have some real problems.

I mean, the overall problem is just the fact that there's a certain amount of these people in any society, and that's why you should dissolve systems that put power in people's hands wherever possible, because you can't get rid of these people. They're always going to exist, but you can get rid of power. And this is a perfect example, Axon has a great deal of power, and they use it to hide the fact that they sell electrocution machines. Well said, on all points. I agree. I wish it wasn't true, but that might be the most viable, if ambitious, solution to remove the power if you cannot, in a feasible way, remove the tendency.

Yeah, and I don't think you can remove the tendency. There will always be, I don't know, this is getting a little off topic, but one of my favorite books tried by Sebastian Younger does talk a bit, and there's other books that talk about, like, some of these people who don't have, we would say, a conscience, right? There's uses for these people historically. You know, if you're part of a hunter-gatherer tribe and you have a real fucking bad winter and some hard decisions need to be made about, who's going to be left behind, who's going to get a limited supply of food. A lot of people can't make those calls, and sociopaths can.

But then you wind up in... That is in a situation where you have a small number of people, and while, like, they are as affected by those decisions as everyone else, because it's all part of a small group that's trying to survive in adverse conditions, where it becomes maladaptive on a societal level, is when you have individuals like that who will never face the consequences of their decisions and who are not impacted by them, and they're just hurting other people, because our society allows them to be completely divorced from the consequences of their actions, because they have money in a position of influence. That's when it really becomes a problem.

These people who have tendencies that continue to persist in humanity for a reason, because they provide some benefits to society, become fundamentally toxic to society, because they're completely divorced from the consequences of their actions. When a hunter-gatherer tribe is someone like that, if they go too far or get too much power, the rest of the tribe will just murder them. That happens a lot in these societies. People are like, that doesn't happen here because they're the CEO of Axon, and they have bodyguards and a whole system set up to protect them.

It's the same story with these pharma CEOs who have jacked up the price of insulin. It's the same story with every American president, pretty much. That's good shit. Then also, I don't think this is a diversion at all because you're bringing it back around. The only point I would add is when we talk about the evolutionary necessity of some of those cognitive hardware or design, what we have to realize is that I think this is what you're getting at, Robert. The need for that kind of person in society is somewhat archaic and vestigial. There is potential to do something else.

Humans are just very bad at changing in general. Yeah, we sure are. But you know what we're not bad at, Ben? What's that? Producing products and services. Doesn't that make it all worth while in the end? The products, the services. Sure, we're killing the planet and a lot of the people on it and a lot of the life on it,

boiling the oceans, all that stuff. But by God, we have products and we have services. Where would we be without those products and services? Watching a lot more sunsets sleeping under the stars. Anyway, here's some ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

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He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost.

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How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back and we're talking about Dr. Ho and his relationship to the Axon Corporation and how it started. So we just talked about Robert Stratbucker, who gets exposed in 2005. And right around that time, the Axon Corporation reached out to a doctor at the Hennepin County Medical Center to ask if he wanted to be a consultant for them. Now, this doctor, whoever he was, had too much on his plate already, but he said, hey, I know another doctor who's a workaholic bootlicker. Here's his number. And that is how Dr. Jeffrey Ho wound up on the payroll of Big Taser from a write up in the Star Tribune, which is a Minneapolis paper that has done, I don't know, generally anything about this paper. They've done some incredible work on this specific issue.

In 2005, with funding from Axon Enterprise Incorporated and the Arizona-based Taser manufacturer, Ho wrote an article for Police Magazine disputing claims from human rights groups that its stun guns were killing people. It has never been scientifically proven that a Taser has directly caused an incustity death, Ho wrote. He offered another explanation for these sudden deaths. Excited delirium! Now, and keep keep keep keep a pin in that it has never been scientifically proven that a Taser has directly caused an incustity death, which we've heard before, right? You remember the other we were talking about? Wetley, I think it was said like they don't we've never no evidence that these cause deaths. Keep that in mind because we'll be talking about that a little bit later.

We're still talking about Ho for right now. And over the next decade, Dr. Ho joined doctors Mash and Wetley in researching and popularizing the term excited delirium. When interviewed by the Star Tribune, Dr. Ho claimed that excited delirium is real widespread and deadly. He claimed that his interest in researching it came from a pure hearted desire to save lives and reduce the threat of this totally real deadly disease. He did not initially acknowledge his financial relationship with Axon. When Axon was reached for comment, they cited Dr. Ho and their other pet doctors in order to claim, quote, There is no longer a true debate among knowledgeable medical professionals on whether excited delirium syndrome is a valid diagnosis. So, no, there's not a debate anymore.

Thank you, Axon. Now, as we've already cited a number of knowledgeable medical professionals who will argue that it is very much not a settled debate. We've cited a lot of those people, but considering the number of shill docs who keep making claims like this, I feel the need to keep, quote, encounter arguments. Dr. Homer Vinters is a former is the former chief physician of Rikers Island Jail in New York City. He now works for a nonprofit that studies health care in the criminal justice system. He does not believe that excited delirium is a valid diagnosis, quote, This is not a medical diagnosis.

I think there's still an open question as to the scientific legitimacy of excited delirium. Now, there are emergency medical specialists who do not work for Axon and believe there is some validity to the excited delirium diagnosis. They tend to argue that if you don't acknowledge this constellation of symptoms is real, how can you expect police officers to recognize when someone might be at risk of dying in custody because of it? To which I might respond, the cop with the cop with Derek Chauvin that day in Minneapolis recognized excited delirium and George Floyd still died. It sure seems like it doesn't help anyone stop deadly behavior. It just justifies it.

Now, one of the people who went to bat for Dr. Ho in that article was Dr. James Minor, chief of medical chief of emergency medicine at Hennepin County. Dr. Minor authored a Taser research article with Dr. Ho. He does not seem to work for Axon. I cannot find any evidence that he is directly paid by Axon, but he still benefits financially from Dr. Ho's relationship to the company. Here's why. Axon Enterprise retains Ho as its contract medical director,

a job to which he dedicates 32 hours per month at HCMC. In exchange, Axon pays the hospital about $140,000 per year. Ho's annual salary at Hennepin Health Care is currently $460,000. Ho's position with Axon is not disclosed on HCMC's website. So you see what's happening here. As long as Dr. Ho is employed by Axon, Dr. Minor's hospital has $140,000 less dollars than he'd defined in their budget every year, because Axon pays that chunk of his salary.

In 2016, HCMC, the hospital they both work at, lost $49 million. In 2017, they lost $29 million. So they are in an every penny count sort of situation, and Dr. Minor could be argued to benefit directly from Dr. Ho's financial relationship with Axon, because that's less money he has to find in his fucking budget, and clearly his budget is tight, right? There absolutely is an ongoing financial interest that this guy has too, even if he's not receiving money from Axon.

Dr. Ho took Axon money for well over a decade, which means the hospital would have gotten something like $1.4 million from the company. And he used his position during this time, his position of prominence within the hospital, to defend both the Axon corporation and cops who killed people. In 2007, Ho went to Las Vegas to defend an Avada cop accused of killing a man by tasing him repeatedly, even after that man had been strapped to a gurney. A coroner's jury determined that the taser had played a role in that man's death. So a cop tases a restrained man to death.

And a coroner's jury says, yeah, the taser is part of why he died. And taser says, oh, we're not going to take that shit sitting down. This gets back to what I was saying earlier, right? Dr. Ho is able to claim I can't think of a single case where a taser was found to have killed somebody. It's because whenever a taser is found to kill somebody, Axon goes to fucking war, right? That's why that is the case. And they've got the money to throw at it, too, right? Yeah, of course they do.

Cops are buying a lot of tasers. Yep. Now, Dr. Ho was not about to let that stand. In 2005, he'd taken a course with the Las Vegas Police Department on excited delirium. And in 2007, in court, he cited symptoms of excited delirium to explain how the man had died, totally independent of being repeatedly tased. The judge ruled in favor of the police and Axon. In 2008, Axon hired Ho as part of their lawsuit against a medical examiner in Ohio who cited tasers as a factor in three deaths.

Ho argued that the taser could not have killed any of those people, claiming that excited delirium had caused death in all three cases. The judge ruled again in favor of Axon, and the medical examiner was forced to remove any reference to taser from the death records. In one of these cases, this exonerated a police officer who was being charged with murder. So, that's good. That's good shit. Yeah, it's so fun. We're having a good time. So, I imagine that someone is, I don't know, like, it's weird.

It's time, I guess, for an irrelevant, fun fact. You know, for any fans of Scrooge McDuck, right? You can automatically imagine the people in Axon swimming in a vault of money, but it's actually really difficult, especially if you want to get a dive with some air. You're much more likely to hurt yourself. And so, at this point, Robert, it feels like, and I know we've got more to explore here, but it feels almost like that kind of ridiculous injury is the only consequence that these folks will face for these actions. Right? Because it appears like business is booming with tasers. They're not getting in trouble with that.

Tasers doing great, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, taser is fucking nailing it these days. Yeah, it's not great. And we've been talking about how taser goes after and, like, goes to war, basically. Anytime a medical examiner is like, yeah, obviously a taser killed this guy. Or at least a taser was a factor in his death, right?

Like, it's also the fault of the cop tasing him, as opposed to purely the taser. Because in a lot of cases, as a general rule, these cops are not using tasers the way they're supposed to be used. They're repeatedly tasing people at closer range and for longer periods of time than they're supposed to. But taser doesn't want to deal with any of that bad press, which means defending the cop entirely and removing the tasers, even being involved in the death, rather than just being like, they're using our product improperly, you know? Which is often the case. And here's another completely sociopathic passage from that axon investor document I quoted in the last episode. Quote, So, it's good for the bottom line.

We got to slander dead people and sue medical examiners who dare to say that being tased repeatedly is bad for you. Where did those medical professionals get off with the audacity to do their jobs? Yeah, yeah, to dare to blame a device that electrocutes people for their heart stopping. Yes, fucking shameful. About $159 per share. It's up 5.3% today. Oh, wow. Yeah. So let's look at their five year trend line in 2016. They were at like $30 a share and they're down from their peak, which was a little earlier this year, February.

But they're at like, so that's five years they've quadrupled in stock value. So that's pretty good. Holy smokes. Yeah, let's take a look. Oh, yeah. So they were at like a low point in 2000. So yeah, at around like 2004, 2005, they're like 960 a share. And really, they start to soar after 2016.

That's like almost all of their stock growth has happened after that point. Wow. And they're only 28 years old as a company. Yeah. I don't know why I sometimes get that. I'm probably not the only one, but I sometimes like if you read a lot about defense corporations and like the bigger players in the industry, it's always easy or tempting to assume like, oh, these dudes are old as shit. And they go back to, you know, the world wars and so on. But that's not the case.

28 years old founded 1993. And obviously we're talking about a new kind of thing with a taser like the technology hasn't existed all that long. But yeah, these guys are like they're new to law enforcement. If even if you're someone who believes cops should exist and there's a benefit to having cops, there's a lot of evidence that we're capable of maintaining it. Cops are capable. Whatever you think they're doing that's positive can be done without a taser. Or at least with a. Maybe with a taser that's that accepts the deadliness of their product potentially and works to mitigate it rather than just suing anyone who claims it's deadly.

Like an ethical if you're going to if there's any ethical way to do this. And I do think there's ethical reasons for less than lethal weapons, even though I don't believe in the police. I think that there's reasons to have stuff that's not a fucking gun that you could use against somebody that might stop them from carrying out a violent act. An ethical company where that to be a sort of thing that could exist would be like, oh God, they died in this case because the person applied the taser for too long. Let's build in like a guidance thing so that it can't do so shock. So like, oh, maybe we have it too hot. Like you there are ways in which this could be more ethical than it currently is. But it seems like mostly what they do is just sue anybody who claims their products dangerous, which is cool.

So cool. And good. Yeah, so good. During his time with axon, Dr. Ho has provided expert consulting in more than 24 lawsuits in 14 states and one Canadian province. In addition to the $140,000 per year axon paid of his salary, Ho bills $400 an hour for his services to axon and the different law enforcement agencies he defends. He's been hired to give more than 100 presentations around the world on taser's wonderful technology. In 2006, he lectured to French police. In 2011, he gave presentations on arrest related deaths and the use of force in Serbia and Turkey. In 2017, he traveled to London and Ireland to spread the Gospel of Taze.

By 2019, Dr. Ho was an extremely valuable and prolific contributor to the spread of tasers worldwide. That year was the first time his financial relationship with the company was revealed publicly when the Star Tribune published a bombshell investigation titled Where Law and Medicine Collide. Here's how that article opens up. Depending on the day, Jeffrey Ho's work attire may include a doctor's white coat or a badge and a 40 caliber Glock with high capacity magazines. Ho transitions between head of paramedics at HCMC where he oversees the response to tens of thousands of 911 calls every year and a part time sheriff's deputy in rural Minnesota. He also draws on his expertise in healthcare and law enforcement for a third job. He is a paid advocate for the taser stun gun, one of the most popular police weapons in North America.

Ho's allegiances to medicine, police and collided last year when investigators from the Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights discovered that police officers were urging paramedics to sedate emotionally disturbed people in the field with a powerful sedative ketamine. Some patients were then enrolled without their consent in an HCMC study on ketamine on which Ho was a lead researcher. Now this is getting us a little bit outside of tasers and excited delirium, but it's a fucked up story and we're going to talk about it. So starting in 2014, researchers at HCMC, led by Ho, started having paramedics responding to medical emergencies, inject quote agitated people with either ketamine or a control group sedative to see which worked better. As noted in the quote above, patients were not asked for consent and were only informed afterwards of what had been done to them and that they'd been enrolled in a study. Now, medical ethics does allow for patients to be drugged without consent under certain circumstances, right? Sometimes people are a danger to themselves and others and that is considered to be the best way to deal with it, right? If the situation is an emergency and the risks of the medication are considered minimal, this can be done, but that is not the case with ketamine being administered in Hennepin County.

From a write-up in Nature, quote, 39% of subjects who received ketamine developed respiratory problems that required the insertion of a breathing tube, compared to only 4% of those who received the sedative haloperidol. The study also reported that ketamine sedated patients much more quickly than haloperidol did, but that respiratory side effects were most likely to develop in severely agitated patients who received ketamine. So there's significant dangers to this. After three years of drugging agitated people at random, the HCMC launched a second study of ketamine use in non-compliant patients. 420 people were enrolled in this study, although enroll is an odd term to use for people who are drugged against their will. The way the study was supposed to work was that all agitated patients admitted to the hospital during the first six months of the year would be dosed with ketamine, while everyone who was agitated and admitted during the last six months of the year would receive haloperidol. Or a different sedative. The hospital had to shut the study down after just six months, though, because a Star Tribune investigation publicized a report from the Minneapolis Department of Civil Rights.

This report alleged that, rather than the study being conducted just on patients admitted to the hospital, local cops had started advising paramedics to drug troublesome patients, including people the police had already physically restrained. The hospital denies that police... Yeah, yeah, that's not good, is it? That's fucking disturbing. Yeah, cops are the people who should determine when someone gets fucking ketamine. Right, because then, then inherently, the police, who are not doctors, with this one notable exception of Dr. Ho, that puts them in a supervisory or administrative role in this study, does it not? You could argue that. But these guys aren't part of the study necessarily, this is just happening in the field. Like, the hospital gets approved to do this on patients in the hospital, and so this stuff becomes part of the toolkit paramedics are carrying around, and cops find out about it, and they just start having people drugged when they're having an issue with somebody.

Wow, that is... It's pretty rad. Yeah, well, for everybody in the audience today who's a big fan of recreational drugs and is somehow not familiar with... Ketamine is fun, yeah. Yeah, well, is not familiar with this stuff. In the right circumstances. There we go, very important asterisk there. If you are a fan of recreational drug use, you probably don't want law enforcement calling your dosage, or you don't want to be hanging out with them.

And also, I would argue, you know, when you're saying in the right context there, Robert, you probably mean consensual ketamine, right? Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah, like the last time I did ketamine was in a hotel in Los Angeles with a bunch of friends, well, like a friend and their coworkers, and we were all railing lines of ketamine off of the side of a machete and having lovely conversations. And that was a wonderful night. We called it machetamine. But we all consented and none of us were being restrained by police at the time, which I think both of those facts were key to our enjoyment of the machetamine that night. That's really funny. It was. It's a good way to do ketamine.

I highly recommend it, theoretically, you know, theoretically. Hypothetically. Hypothetically, that would be an enjoyable thing to do. And I should note for legal purposes, HCMC denies that police ever directed paramedics in this way. But you can decide whether or not you believe them. I think the Star Tribunes reporting makes me question that. But you know what I don't question? Doritos.

Nothing says cool ranch like a mustard gas cloud billowing across the fields of Flanders. Anyway, here's some products. This summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation.

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

I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up.

Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. And I was just telling my friends how, while 18 grand isn't enough to buy my integrity, just giving me a pile of weapons is. Like if the company that makes Bearcats wants to give me a Bearcat, I will stop complaining about the police Bearcats. I'm telling you all that right now. My integrity is the price of a free Bearcat that I could drive around town. I'll do it. I'm not even, I don't even feel bad about it. Yeah, you would use it for good, though. No, no, no, no, no. I absolutely would not. But it would be it would be fun. It would be fun.

There's a lot of things you can do with a Bearcat that people would have trouble stopping you from doing. So we should probably get back to the episode. Yeah, now the Star Tribune report on this Hennepin County Medical Center ketamine study also revealed that in several cases, these involuntary ketamine doses stopped patients' hearts. Multiple people had to be resuscitated at the hospital, and some of these stories are fucking horrifying. Here's the Star Tribune. And remember, Dr. Ho is one of the lead researchers on this study. Good guy. Quote, body camera footage from one case showed a woman after being maced by police asking for an asthma pump, the draft report said. Instead, a paramedic gave her an injection of ketamine. If she was having an asthma attack, giving ketamine actually helps patients and we're doing a study for agitation anyway, so I had to give her ketamine.

The unnamed paramedic told a police officer, according to the report. After receiving ketamine, the woman's breathing stopped and medical staff resuscitated her, according to the report. It is troubling that the dictate of the study mentioned by the paramedics appears to have played a significant role in the decision to administer ketamine. The report's authors wrote, I can tell you, as someone who has had asthma and who has had to deal with other people's asthma, the thing you do is not just give them a bunch of fucking special K. Right. You give them their inhaler, you know? Yeah. I'm not a paramedic.

That would be my go-to treatment for asthma. Is asthma medication as opposed to a fuckload of ketamine that stops their heart? I'm not a doctor. Again, none of us, none of us, I think, are doctors. Well, actually, I am a reverend doctor, but yeah. You are a reverend doctor. Sorry. Recognized by the state of New Jersey.

Yes. I am not a paramedic. No. Yeah. But I feel like that's a reasonable assumption there, Robert, that you give someone asthma medication for asthma? And not ketamine? Yeah. Not to be a backseat first responder.

Yeah. I know where I sit. Hard job. Yeah, ambulance. But yeah, right? But that seems like ketamine wouldn't be the go-to. It's just a weird direction to take it. Like, if someone is going into a diabetic shock, right, then wouldn't your go-to be something like insulin?

But again, not a paramedic. Not a paramedic, but yeah, it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be ketamine. It wouldn't be ketamine. So Thomas Hosley, 18 years old, wound up enrolled in this study because he had a seizure. His mom called 911 and cops and paramedics showed up. His mother insists that he was not combative at all. Quote, he was not arguing. All he was doing was crying for me because they wouldn't let me be by him.

So Thomas, the police restrained him and had paramedics shoot him up with special K. When his mother saw him next, he was unconscious and intubated. In all these cases, the victims were informed they'd been enrolled in Dr. Ho's study afterwards by letter. 64 doctors, bioethicists, and academic researchers co-signed a complaint against the HCMC study. Michael Carome, director of a health research group and co-signer of that complaint, explained, quote, This isn't even a close call. This is clearly a prospective high risk experiment. This is really just a colossal failure of their program to protect human subjects. Dr. Jeffrey Ho did not see it that way.

All available evidence suggests he thinks that the costs of this study, which are the dignity, bodily autonomy, and health of its participants were minor compared to the prospective public health benefits. He told the Star Tribune, I very much view my careers in emergency medicine, law enforcement, and research as parallel pathways to public safety. It is my life's work to develop these areas of intersection for the benefit of public protection. Question. You got a question about that? Do you think he believes that?

I think he has to. I think he knows at some level because he's not a dumb man, right? You don't have a resume like this guy. And you're not that successful at arguing in court if you're a dumb man. He's not a dumb man. But I also think people are very good at knowing on some level what they're doing is wrong and still doing it because fucking money talks, baby. Yeah. And intelligence also helps with rationalization. Yeah.

Well, props to his mental parkour. Yeah, props to his mental parkour. Now, I'm watching For All Mankind right now, which is an alternate reality TV show about what if the Russians had made it to the moon first. And it kind of follows the American space race if we lose the race to the moon and what happens as a result of that. One of the characters in it is Werner von Braun, who was a real guy. He was probably the reason we actually did make it to the moon first. He was a brilliant rocket scientist who also was a Nazi. He was a member of the SS.

He would argue that it was forced upon him. I don't think that's a valid and I think a lot of historical research suggests it's not. But he did what he did because and he utilized slave labor. There were death camps that provided labor. Thousands of laborers died building his rockets, which he wanted to use to explore space, but he was willing to turn into weapons because it furthered his rocket research. And I think he would have justified it if he'd ever really been called to account for it by saying, like, look, the importance of my research had value for all of mankind. So even though people were suffering in the immediate term, it was worth it for the long term benefits of what I was doing. I don't think that justifies being a Nazi and utilizing slave labor.

It just doesn't. But you cannot if you're a smart person, you can always find a justification like I will find a way to justify my partnership with the company that makes bear cats so that I can get a free bear cat to drive around town. And can you imagine just getting up in the mountains doing donuts and Whippets and a bear cat? That would be so fucking rad shooting out the window. Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. And look at the interior.

Really? Oh, yeah. Covered cab option. Oh, absolutely. You could live there. So overlanding in a fucking bear cat sounds like a great time. Oh, God. Look, bear cat people, I have already admitted on air.

I will sell my integrity for one free bear cat. So let's let's make it happen. It doesn't have to be a bear cat any any route clearance vehicle really. I'll take like defense manufacturers, one of those big up armored trucks. They drive around Afghanistan and Iraq just send it here and I'll all change my tune. You know, that's it's that easy people. I support you in this, you know, but like at this point, you know, I think you really went hard on the bear cat angle.

Like I think maybe we can maybe you can say that you can be like, hey, I'm a man of integrity. I'll sell my soul for for a route clearing vehicle, but it's got to be bear cat. Right. Maybe I'll sell my soul. No, I'm, you know, I'm not I'm not particular. I will sell my soul for any modern armored vehicle. As long as it's not like a BMP fucking Russian trash or a Humvee, fuck Humvees. No, thank you.

I've been in a lot of them and they suck. But like a big one, it's got to be real fucking. It's got to be like a like a like a real monster of an armored vehicle. And then I'll sell I'll sell out. Absolutely. Absolutely. Lockheed Martin, we could make a lot of money together. Well, you could make a lot of money and I could go joyriding in an armored vehicle.

Win-win. Well, not for all. Win-win. But for me, a win-win. So the story about HCMC sees ketamine program broke it right around the same time as the story about Dr. Ho's cozy relationship with axon. There was an immediate outcry by the community and by some elected officials in Minneapolis. HCMC's chief executive resigned over the ketamine study.

Dr. Ho's relationship with axon was a thornier problem. Publicly, the hospital stood by him. But the Star Tribune revealed a recording of a private meeting Dr. Ho had with a group of paramedics in which he admitted the hospital had asked him to resign. He told them, why would I resign? I didn't do anything wrong. He blamed politics and an overzealous police oversight board for the fact that people were angry at him.

I'm sure I don't have to tell any of you that I think that Dr. Ho is a grifting scumbag and any ethical society would be stripped of his medical license and flung into the sun. I could rant about him for a while, but it is time to move on because there is much more fuckery afoot. So far, we've discussed how excited delirium came about, how it's used to explain away police murder, how Taser hired experts like Dr. Ho to blame deaths caused by their product on excited delirium, and how they sue medical examiners who rightfully blame their products for deaths in custody.

But it gets shadier than that. I want to quote now from a Reuters article, which opens with yet another story of a man being killed by a cop with a Taser. Quote, With a police officer close behind, Israel Hernandez Locke ducked into an apartment building and dashed down the hall. Busting through a rear exit, he scrambled over an iron fence, landing hard on a parked car and sprinted across the parking lot.

Within seconds, Officer Jorge Mercado caught up with him, drew his Taser and fired a single shot to the chest. A recent high school grad and aspiring art teacher collapsed on the sidewalk in cardiac arrest. The chase lasted six minutes. It was 5.20 a.m. on August 6, 2013. At 6.18 a.m., he was pronounced dead. And by the way, Israel Hernandez Locke was being chased by a cop because he was spray

painting shit. He got murdered for graffiti. Four hours later, the Miami Beach Police Department received an email from Stun Gun manufacturer, Taser International, so Israel dies 6.18 a.m. from a Taser shot to the chest. Four hours later, Taser emails the police department. The message, marked confidential and not previously reported, provided guidance on how investigators should proceed, from collecting hair and nail samples to recording the teen's body temperature and documenting his behavior before he was stunned.

It included a sample press release and an evidence collection checklist. The bold letters marked timely and urgent. The dispatch advised Miami's medical examiner to send the teen's brain tissue for testing to Deborah Mache, a University of Miami medical researcher. It did not mention Mache had been paid by Taser to testify on its behalf and lawsuits. Yeah, that's right. That's fucking right. If a cop kills you with a Taser, they will send your fucking brain tissue to the Axon Corporation,

or at least one of its pet medical examiners. Holy shit. Yeah. Okay, so when we say guidance, first off, that timeline is four hours, profoundly disturbing. Yeah. And then secondly, when we say guidance, that feels like guidance with air quotes around you, because it feels like it's written kind of like a mandate. Like they write a press release for you and you just slot in the name of the officer and

the dead kid, you know? Oh, man. It's fucking rad. It's awesome as shit. It's so good. Everything I just read in that excerpt is part of the total package that Axon offers to law enforcement agencies. If you taste some teen to death, you're not on your own.

Axon will send you a ready-made fill-in-the-brank blank press release, and they'll help you come up with a way to blame the victim. Lawyer Todd Falzone, who represented the Hernandez-Lock family in a liability suit, explains, from the minute they find out someone dies, they're doing everything they can behind the scenes to set up a legal defense. So the case goes away. Now, when questioned about the Hernandez-Lock case, the Miami-Dade County associate medical examiner, Mark Schumann, told Reuters he was unaware that Dr. Mash was employed by Axon

when he sent that teenager's brain tissue to her lab for tests. When Reuters reached out to Axon, VP of communication, Steve Tuttle, told them it was not the company's responsibility to inform Schumann that they were advising him to send brain tissue to one of their employees. They didn't think Dr. Mash's relationship with the company was something police needed to know either. Quote, why would I tell them something that's a legal matter? I'm not a lawyer, he said.

Oh, fuck you, Steve. You fucking piece of shit. You absolute goblin. Oh, my God. You soulless monster. Oh, it fucking moves. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

Tuttle went on to describe Dr. Mash as a, quote, respected, independent expert. Reuters was able to show that she had received at least $24,000 from the corporation from 2005 to 2009. That's just a four-year period. We don't know the full amount that she has been paid by Axon over the years for her services. We don't even know that that's the full amount from 2005 to 2009. That's what they were able to verify.

We do know, thanks to Reuters, who did a great job, it really has been like a fucking pit bowl latched on to this specific story about the tasers and Axon. They've really done some incredible work on this. And we know thanks to them that there have been at least 1,005 incidents in the United States where people have died after being stunned with tasers. When questioned about tasers' weird policy of inserting themselves into active investigations over deaths and custody, Tuttle told Reuters that his company just wants to ensure investigators get, quote, the best available evidence in cases where people are killed or hurt by their

weapons. As he explained it, the scientific information Axon passes on to examiners is just, quote, things that an outside investigating agency needs to see. Coincidentally, one of Axon's chief findings after all these years of sticking their nose into investigations is that the overwhelming majority of people who die after being tased are killed by underlying health conditions, drug use, or some other police force besides a taser, from Reuters, quote. Though the company has warned since 2009 that a shock to the chest can affect heart function,

it says no one has died from taser-induced cardiac arrest. It asserts its weapons have been a factor in just 24 deaths, always as a result of secondary injuries, such as hedging injuries from falls after someone was stunned. In 2009, the American College of Emergency Physicians published a white paper on excited delirium, which is quoted regularly by the FBI and by guys like Dr. Jeffrey Ho and ladies like Dr. Deborah Mash when they need to blame deaths caused by tasers or other excessive force on the victim. Incidentally, Drs. Ho and Mash were two of the authors of that white paper.

At least one of the other 19 members of the task force who wrote that white paper was also a paid taser consultant. The paper described excited delirium as, quote, a real syndrome of uncertain etiology or cause. The white paper did not note that three of its authors were paid employees of axon. This was justified by the fact that it came out in 2009 when disclosures were not required for task forces assembled by the American College of Emergency Physicians. They started requiring that in 2011. We just didn't require that at the time.

It's not a lapse of ethics or anything. No reason to reexamine this. Now, so far, everything I've gone over today is pretty fucked up and infuriating. But guess what? It gets worse because axon also decided in the early aughts to try to preempt as many lawsuits against medical examiners as possible by just buying up medical examiners like Dr. Deborah Mash. Here's Reuters, quote, Michael Graham, president of the National Association of Medical

Examiners in 2005, was approached by Taser in 2007. The chief medical examiner for St. Louis and professor of pathology at St. Louis University agreed to be a paid Taser consultant and still receives an annual stipend, he said. Taser wanted to educate medical examiners about the physiological effects of its weapons and rebut criticism running contrary to the science, Graham said. In 2014, the Medical Examiners Association hosted a big meeting on tasers and stun guns. Graham presented at that meeting. So did Mark Crowell, a University of Minnesota professor and a member of tasers corporate

board since 2003. Crowell did disclose his tie to the company when he told medical examiners that tasers satisfy, quote, all relevant safety standards and advise them to this exclude the weapons as potential causes of death. In 2008, Mark Crowell testified in a wrongful death suit and suggested that tasers were like therapy for people suffering from excited delirium. Wow. If you start exhibiting.

Yeah. Yeah. Taser therapy because you're excited. That's like that's honestly like saying that that is that is like saying dying is therapy for depression. Yeah. Except that depression is real. Yes.

Yes. Yes. I'm going to read this quote from Mark Crowell because in an in an episode full of sociopathic shit, this might take the cake. This is what he said in court here for this. If you start exhibiting excited delirium behavior and you are in the terminal throws of death and you are so bizarre, you can't be controlled anyplace else, you will receive taser therapy. They need to be brought under control so their lives can be saved.

Just a life saving. And I mean, obviously in my medical kit, I keep a taser right next to the tourniquet. Sometimes you need the tourniquet. Sometimes you got to taste people. Wow. That's just medicine. Ketamine. Yeah.

Ketamine at the end. Look, if you've got ketamine in a taser, you're basically a hospital. Yeah. You're a walking hospital. You're the scientist of Dr. Kopp at that point. So Crowell is a bioelectricity scientist. In 2016, he earned $267,000 from taser and owned $1 million in company stock. In an email to Reuters, he insisted that his affiliation with the company did not bias

his research, explaining, due to this well-known relationship, I was motivated to be very careful to be extremely accurate and objective. Oh, good. Oh, good. Good. Good. So in other news, it's like Fox calls new henhouse design a step forward and better overall for the hens.

Yeah. If we're using the tired, kind of go-to. Yeah, this open-air henhouse, really, Foxes are big fans. The wider doors, really, when you think about it, are more friendly for everyone. For everybody, everybody benefits. And then the chickens get more Fox therapy. Right. Right.

Fox therapy, which is, you know, according to Fox Therapeutics International, that's like a lead form of treatment now. Yeah. Yes. This is unconscionable, man. Yes, it's pretty bad, right? So let's end by talking about one more murder. I think this one is valuable to discuss because it really brings together just every shady

tactic and shady professional we've discussed in our episode so far. In 2004, David Glosinski's mother called the police because her son, a schizophrenic suffering from substance abuse, was in the midst of a psychotic episode. She told 911 he needed to be hospitalized. When the cop showed up, he was standing in the street, screaming incoherently while holding a Bible and a book about the Grateful Dead. Officers tried to restrain him. Glosinski kicked and screamed.

The cops took him to the ground and one stunned him nine times by applying a taser directly to his flesh. He was handcuffed, his legs were zip-tied, and a 270-pound officer pressed him to the ground while another maced him. David went into cardiac arrest and died on the spot. His mom sued the cops and axed on, and you know what comes next. From Reuters. Quote,

Taser persuaded a judge to exclude a medical examiner and pathologist with 25 years' experience whose testimony was central to the family's case, arguing that it was unqualified, unsupported, and unreliable. Backed by a half-dozen experts, Taser asserted that there was no medical certainty its gun shocks caused acidosis. The death was natural and attributable to excited delirium, Taser argued. The company had help from Suffolk County medical examiner. The post was held then by Charles Whetley, the man who had revived the excited delirium

theory to explain Miami cocaine deaths decades earlier. At Whetley's direction, the coroner on the case, his deputy, sent Glosinski's brain samples to Deborah Mash at the University of Miami. Mash found evidence of exhaustive mania, a form of excited delirium said to occur when drugs are not present. In his autopsy report, the coroner echoed Mash's findings. The Glosinski family's lawyers called the concept of excited delirium a sham. The defense prevailed.

In 2013, Judge William Waldis missed Taser from the case, finding no admissible evidence the stun gun killed Glosinski. Fuckin' hell. It's pretty good. Good shit. Wow. Just rad. How much is Big Taser?

I feel like we can save Big Taser now, unironically. How much is Big Taser paying the judge? I don't know if they are, you know, I assume they're paying a lot for the lawyers. I assume, you know, there's a lot of shitty judges who are sympathetic to Taser and I don't know if they're paying the judge or if they just know how to make the argument to get shit dismissed. I don't know. I'm not gonna do what is legally slander to a judge without more evidence on that.

It's possible that the actual corruption here is just in all of these paid experts, right? And the judge is looking at all of these experts who are paid by Taser and being like, well, of all these people are saying the Taser couldn't have done it. The Taser must not. I don't know. I'm not defending the judge either. I just don't know enough about his specifics.

Yeah. I mean, you're right. You're right. That's fair because otherwise it gets a little too far into speculation. But my friend, I think you've proven a solid case that this, I know it's very stereotypical and on the nose for me to be the one who says this, but it's kind of a conspiracy. Is it not? It is.

We could call it a conspiracy. Yeah. Yeah. Ben, Ben, thinking something's a conspiracy. What? What is this? What is this strange thing? Some folks call it a conspiracy.

Some would call. That's all I'm saying. The pieces are there. I'm not saying it's a cake yet, but there's some flour, there's some sugar. There's a shit ton of people who could have been alive. Yeah. Most importantly, I think. Yep.

Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, that's, that's, that's the episode, Ben. That's the episode. Then you got some plugs that you like to plug at this exact moment in time. Drop down in the P zone, baby. So yes, if you haven't listened, I'm going to do a weird reverse plug.

If you haven't listened to it could happen here somehow, please check it out. If you'd like to hear more about critical theory, apply to allegations of corruption and conspiracy, check out stuff they don't want you to know. And if you'd like to hear about ridiculous history, because there's a lot of it, then check us out at Ridiculous History, that's, that's it for me. This is going to stay with me. You know, I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

Yeah. It's a two-parter. I think. Me too. Bad and not cool. Yeah. Yep. Anyway, that's going to do it for all of us here at Behind the Bastards for the week.

Yeah. Until next week, I don't know, Dr. Jeffrey Ho's home address it. No, I'm, Sophie's giving me the, I'm, I might be. Committing a felony sign. Okay. Well, that's just a job for legal purposes. Also, I don't actually, I don't actually know his address, nor would, nor would I suggest anything untoward.

What? What is this? What is that? We should really end the episode. Episode's over. Yeah. We have, we have to end this now. All right.

Have a good week or be very angry or both. Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen.

Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.