Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “Circumcision Is Medically Unnecessary, Barbaric, & Traumatic.” -With Filmmaker Brendon Marotta

Episode Date: September 22, 2023

This is a razor sharp conversation surrounding one of the most controversial medical practices in modern America. Alex Clark interviews filmmaker and activist Brendon Marotta, who is responsible for the award-winning documentary “American Circumcision,” on what evidence there is to support removing the foreskin from male infants. Turns out, there’s none!Check out Brendon’s movie at: https://circumcisionmovie.com/Follow Brendon on IG: https://www.instagram.com/bdmarotta/For delicious, Real Ame...

Why do we circumcise boys in America? No, seriously. Why? Did you know we are the only industrialized country that still practices circumcision? Only 33% of men in the world are circumcised, and that's essentially just Americans, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. But what if I told you that the stereotype of it being more hygienic or that it prevents cancer is completely unfounded?

After all, if the majority of men in the world are uncut, wouldn't the infection rate be slug? sky high? Wouldn't this be a massive epidemic? The truth is, Americans have never had a national conversation about this. In fact, when people have attempted to, they've been shut down. Well, my plan is to have this conversation right now with young moms and women who want to be moms one day in the United States of America and also men. What does the American Association of Pediatrics have to lose by parents deciding to not circumcise their sons? Americans have really never thought critically about this.

The pandemic revealed that just because the experts recommend a procedure doesn't mean you should get it, or even that it's completely safe. My guest today is leading the anti-circumcision movement in America and has done an incredible job talking to and convincing American men of this. Well, my job today is to introduce him to a new generation of mothers. He's the filmmaker behind the documentary American Circumcision. He's an author and a father. He has spoken at Yale University, the international conference on men's issues, the international

symposium on genital autonomy and children's rights, and the Association for Pre and Paranatal Psychology. He also hosts a regular podcast called The Brendan Marada Show. It's an honor to welcome Brendan Marada to the spillover. It was a very deliberate decision to have you on the show, Brendan, because my audience is overwhelmingly female. And almost exclusively young moms, they're about. to be a young mom or they want to be someday. And the more that I have learned about circumcision

in the United States, the more I'm convinced that we are ignorantly participating in one of the greatest human rights atrocities in our nation's history. When did you decide that you were anti-circumcision and that you needed to change America's mind on the subject? I think that when I became aware of my own feelings about it and started researching it for myself personally is when I started to realize that I needed to do something to spread awareness on this issue. So I had a period in my life where I was, you know, going through a lot of early childhood things that I was letting go of, letting go of beliefs and attitudes and things that no longer serve me. And as I was doing that, one of the things I came across was the issue of circumcision. And one of the first things I learned about

it was how often it is done without any anesthesia or pain relief of any kind. And I had been learning about the impact of early life trauma and how just not being held enough can impact a child. And so to hear that people were cutting off parts of children's genitals without anesthesia, I thought that has to have a massive impact of some kind. And then, of course, it's been done to the majority of the American population. Do you think that most people know that there's no anesthesia during a circumcision? No. And in fact, most doctors will tell them, oh, the baby doesn't feel anything, or, you know, it's just a little sniff. There's always sort of cultural myths around it to protect people from the reality of circumcision. I've heard some activists say that if it was done in the halls

instead of, you know, soundproof rooms that it would be done overnight. Is it actually a soundproof room? A lot of the times, yeah. It's done away from the parents, for one thing. And that's, again, a deliberate choice. A lot of the people who I've spoken with who are activists on this issue say that they came to the issue by watching a circumcision that just seeing it done was enough for them to go, okay, there's something wrong going on here. Well, you include actual footage of a circumcision in American circumcision in your documentary. I had to like close my eyes. That's a really common response to that scene. And in fact, part of the reason that at the beginning of that scene, there's a little piece of text that says, you know, the full procedure takes this long. But

I'm only going to show you two minutes is so that people who can't handle it know, okay, I'm going to close my eyes for two minutes or step outside the theater for two minutes, as many people did at screenings so that they know, okay, this is how long it's going to be. But for the child, of course, they don't have that conception of time. Yeah. They don't, you know, the only way that they can leave that experience is to disassociate psychologically. So this is an early life event where essentially a child has to disassociate from their own body to feel safe. Are there any medical reasons for circumcision?

There's medical excuses for circumcision. I'll put it that way. There's a lot of justifications that have been given over the years, and they've changed over time. So if you look at early statements in favor of circumcision, one of the arguments they made was that it reduced sexuality in some way, that it actually decreased the sensation that people have during that experience. And that was a justification for it. And then, of course, after the sexual revolution, that reason disappeared.

And it became, oh, no, no, it doesn't have any effect on sexuality at all. Well, we're told that circumcision prevents certain types of cancers, that it prevents STDs, UTIs, that it's more hygienic. Do these claims have evidence? Again, I would say they have justifications. But the challenge is that going through the academic research on that and debunking it requires almost more time than it does to make the claims. And I don't think that most parents are,

making decisions for their children based on, you know, the rates of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa or urinary tract infections or things like that. They're making those decisions based on their values as a parent or their culture or the things that other people have told them. And, you know, you wouldn't decide on any other body part. Well, what are the risks and benefits of keeping the child's earloat or keeping their nose or can I reduce ear infections if you take the ear off? That would be considered monstrous. And it's also not the way. that people make decisions about female genital cutting. On that issue, it's very clear that people have the right to their own bodies,

to cut off a part of someone else's body without their consent is a violation of their rights. And so this issue, there's a certain sort of cultural trance around where people have heard those sort of headline statements, but not actually thought through, like, am I making decisions as a parent based on HIV rates in sub-Saharan Africa, on trials that were conducted where more people dropped out of? of the study then stayed in. And one group was encouraged to use condoms at a higher rate than the other. So actually, there's studies on condoms. And surprisingly, condoms reduce the risk of STDs.

You know, when you start breaking down the data like that, or even the urinary tract infection one, children who are intact, who have their foreskin, it's fused to the head of the glands. And it doesn't actually become mobile until later in life. But for a very long time, doctors told parents, well, you need to clean under there. Well, it's fused the same way that your fingernails fuse to the head of your finger. If you were to rip off someone's fingernail, I know it's painful to think about, and then try to clean under there, you'd get infections, which is what's happened with intact children in America. So a lot of the data that exists, exists in a culture that has ignorance about the part of the body they're removing and is given bad advice historically as to how

to manage and care for that part of the body. I think there's different reasons why people get radicalized on this issue. And sometimes it is just inflicting, you know, pain for no good reason, or different reasons why this resonates with people. And for me, it was realizing that the majority of men in the entire world are uncircumcised. It is exclusively almost Americans who are doing this. No other industrialized countries besides America are doing this anymore. It occurs in Islam and Judaism in a religious tradition or a religious setting. But outside of that, no, it's an American custom to do it medically or in infancy with medical justifications.

And so the medical justification that we are given as Americans, it seems to shift over and over and over again throughout the years. Like we're told this is about health and all of this kind of stuff. And let's just say, let's just say they're right. there are some benefits. Let's give them that. Wouldn't circumcision be a radical means to an end? Yeah, you don't treat any other disease with surgery or preemptively at that. So if there's no issue, the previous medical thinking is that you don't, you know, as little as possible. And again, also, I hate to talk about it in medical terms because I actually don't think it's a medical issue.

I think it's a human issue. How so? Human beings have the right to their own body. And when you do something like that to a child, they're not processing it through academic jargon. There's been this sort of, again, cultural trance. The left-wing term for this is epistemic injustice, that only certain voices or certain ways of thinking about the issue are considered okay. And it's specifically academic literature written by people who have a profit incentive

to perform the procedure. Is there a profit incentive to circumsumcision? Of course. It's over a billion dollar industry per year. Interesting. Yeah. I mean One of the things that conservatives get very upset about is transgender surgeries, and there's 500 of those over the course of a year, and there are 3,000 circumcisions per day. So if we're concerned about child genital mutilation, this is the log in the eye of conservatives while they're pointing out this back on others. Okay. When I made this exact point on Twitter, and the tweet got some traction.

And people on the right could not wrap their head around this. Now, I am an, I'm openly conservative. But people were like, Alex, this is an absurd connection to make. Like, you know, this is a terrible analogy that you're making. And I thought it was very, I mean, pun unintended, but it was cut and dry. Right. What's funny is that the language of calling things child's, genital mutilation, that was used by the movement against circumcision long before

conservatives ever picked it up. So actually, it's been so funny watching their people have protests against child genital cutting when that is the focus of my documentary. It was going to protest like that that existed long before any issues around, you know, transgender issues or gender issues became mainstream. But this is that connection that people don't want to make because if you are to admit what circumcision is, then you have to admit what you have potentially inflicted on your own child. And that is something no parent obviously wants to do. And so they don't want to admit

that it is child genital mutilation, because then what does that say about you? And I understand that. I think that parents get scapegoated on this issue and that it's often framed as a parental choice, but the only choice that parents made was to sign one consent form. So they didn't train doctors in it. They didn't produce tools that are used just for this procedure. They didn't create a sales funnel pipeline that was integrated into the hospital birth system. They just signed one thing and then all of the blame is put on them. When actually there's a system that manufactured their consent to this.

So I don't think that parents on this issue, you know, let alone children obviously can't give consent. I am actually not sure that parents can give consent, given the power differences between them and the lack of knowledge they're given on this. Well, in women, when it comes to just giving birth in the United States, you know, hospital births were coming to terms with all of these different interventions that are being made without our consent anyways in the hospital birth process. Like a lot of, I would say with my audience, conservative women are waking up to that. And this is just one of those things, it seems to me. Like, it's another intervention that we don't really know about. And so when a doctor says, okay, now it's time for this. It's just like, well, okay, doctor knows best.

Yeah, the hospital system has a systemic problem. It's not like there's one thing that, you know, doctors are not telling the truth about or have a profit incentive on. And everything else is totally okay. I think that if you've been willing to question one thing about the medical industrial complex, then all of it becomes a little suspect. Yeah. And this issue is really egregious. That's how it felt to me, because American circumcision popped up on like recommended Amazon Prime, you know, movies for me to watch one day post-pandemic.

And I've already been so awakened to everything with big, big pharma or whatever since the pandemic. and I think this is how it was for a lot of Americans. And so when I watched your documentary having absolutely no idea that there was any opposition to circumcision before, I'm watching this and I'm like, holy crap, so many things are coming to light for me. Like, yeah, why are we doing this? I am anticipating that me having this conversation being who I am, that there will be people who attack this conversation and try to shut it down or not listen to it because I am.

because I am conservative. And they're going to say, well, there's some kind of right-wing agenda behind having this conversation. But that's not necessarily who, like, the activists are that are against this procedure, right? Yeah. I think that there's an attempt to shut down this issue in general. And, you know, the people that are involved on this issue come from every background. So this is a really strange issue where there are both men's,

rights activists and feminists involved. They're both people who are very politically left and very politically right. Wait, feminists care about this? Yeah. Why? Because it is an issue of consent around sexuality. I mean, there are many people make the argument that if you believe there's such a thing as a rape culture, this is the birth of it. Because you're teaching boys during their first shared sexual experience, the first time someone else is touching their genitals or their body, that if you're bigger and stronger than someone else, you get to do what you want to them. That's the lesson from this. You're never going to look at your skin care the same after this episode.

It shook me to learn that tons of skincare products have four skin-related compounds in them. Actually, Oprah's favorite moisturizer has four skin in it. It makes me absolutely sick. Boy part should not be in your skincare. You never have to worry about that with Nimi. Nimi's skincare is a modern, conservative, and Christian-owned skincare company with timeless values that don't include foreskin, okay? Their hydrating retinal moisturizer works magic and it doesn't need baby boy parts to do it. Lots of people have been asking what other products of Nemeys I recommend.

Easily, that would be the vitamin C cleanser. It has gentle beads to exfoliate some of the dead dry flakes without leaving you feeling tight and dehydrated like other exfoliating cleansers. It is so gentle and I like to use that wash every other day or so to get some of the blackhead build up on my nose. I remove my makeup with mycel or water, and then I use either a hydrating creamy cleanser or the vitamin C, Nimi one, depending on the day. Try Nimi-Skincare today by going to Nemeaskincare.com and use code Alex Clark for 10% off. That's N-M-Y-Skincare. N as a Nancy, I-M-I-Skincare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off or click the link in the show notes. It wasn't until I watched your doc that I learned the way a circumcision is performed. it takes a doctor arousing the infant.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a very small thing. You know, it's a baby. So one of the first thing that happens is that they rub like an iodine disinfectant solution on. And then that makes the child erect. And then the procedure begins. And it begins with inserting a blunt probant

to break away the foreskin from the glands. So it's the forcible penetration of a minor, which in many places is the legal definition of separate. assault. But it's, again, done to children. Now, Jewish people circumcise, but that is not what American circumcision is. Yeah. So in order for a circumcision to be a part of the Jewish tradition, there's a whole series of other things that have to happen, and a medical circumcision in a hospital is not a part of that. It is true that the procedures are similar, and that the version that is done in Judaism is the kind that Americans adopted as a medicalized practice.

Do you ever get accused of anti-Semitism just for having this anti-circumcision conversation? Yes. What is that? What is up with that argument? So this is another case where there's a concept that I could use both conservative and liberal language for. The liberal language would be fragility that someone is triggered when they are seen as being a part of a system of oppression and they're not willing to examine that.

The right-wing version would be that facts don't care about your feelings and you can take the snowflake feelings you have around your own identity somewhere else. But it's essentially that you're telling someone that a part of their identity is causing harm. And a lot of the times with identity issues, people don't separate the behavior from I am statements. Even this issue of circumcision, people, you know, you wouldn't say for any other surgery or body modification, like I am shoulder surgery. But people say, I am circumcised and make it a part of their identity. And so when you start speaking about someone's identity, they take offense to it the same way they would any other part of their identity, like, you know, their race or their gender or anything like that.

And I think that for Jewish people, they've combined the behavior of circumcision very strongly with their identity. And so if you say, well, you know, not even talking about someone else's beliefs or their perspective, you just say, well, I feel this way about it. For someone who's made it a part of their identity that feels like a personal attack and an attack on the identity itself. Ah, yeah. And so then those kind of accusations come out. What about the Christians who say that circumcision is biblical? The apostle Paul calls it a mutilation. And he says that if you do it, you're denying your faith in Christ, that you're essentially saying that you need to do a blood sacrifice other than what Christ did on the cross. And the early church fathers were very clear

that circumcision was not a part of Christianity and that, in fact, not performing circumcision was what made Christianity different from Judaism. So I think on that issue, a lot of people say, well, it's in the Bible, but they haven't really thought through or done a study of what the Bible actually says about it. It'd be a bit like saying, well, you know, the homosexuality is in the Bible, so we should be doing that. Like, you kind of need to look at the context that the Bible is talking about it. Sure. You know, it's not actually what is being said there. So for Christians, there's a very clear statement against it in the New Testament. So if there's this argument that we have to do this because it's more hygienic.

You know, I hear nurses saying things, like, you don't understand all of my elderly male clients. This is the number one problem. It's UTIs, whatever, the ones that are uncircumcised. It's such an issue when you get older. That's why we have to continue this in America. Wouldn't there be like an epidemic of this happening all over the world of people, you know, getting older and then having all of these complicated? and things, but we're not seeing that.

Yeah. It's a cultural myth. I mean, this is the challenge on the issue is that people will make statements that sound medical. And then if you ask, okay, what study did you get that from? They're saying it's my experience. I'm a nurse. Right.

And then if you hear someone's lived experience around, well, I feel upset that this part of my body was taken from me or that, you know, one urologist interview had said that about one in ten of the boys who come through his practice have a complication of some kind or a botch, mean that there's more done to that part of the body than the surgery intended, so things like scarring or skin bridges or things like that. That is dismissed often, but then even anecdotal evidence that's in support of it. You know, people have a different attitudes towards. So I think there's a cultural bias there.

And you see the same thing, by the way, in cultures that practice female circumcision. They'll tell you anecdotally, oh, there's all these problems with that part of the body. It's dirty. it's unclean. A woman who are circumcised will say, I'm much happier because of it. And it's the same sort of cultural trance. It's just,

it's hard for some people sometimes to see their own trance and their own culture and criticize that, but it's much easier to look at other cultures and say, well, there must be something wrong with them. How is it permanently altering the brain of an infant? So anything that you do to a child early on in life is going to have an impact later on. And children are constantly,

making new neurological connections. I mean, this is how children learn. In the first year of life, the child is establishing trust. They're starting to understand who is safe to be around. And so if you do something to a child during the period where they're trying to establish trust, that's going to have an impact later on. And I liken semantic memory to the kind of memory that an animal has in the sense that, you know, if you have a pet or a dog, your dog can't give you a narrative story about what it did the other day and it can't use language to explain it, but it has a felt sense. So if someone abuses an animal, then the animal's going to have a flinch reaction to that later on.

And there is research to show that children who experience circumcision have the same thing. So there's a study done called the Tadio pain studies in which they were examining the pain responses of children being vaccinated. So children at six to four months, they go, they get a needle in. And some children are reacting much more dramatically to the pain of vaccination. They're trying to be like, what's the common denominator with these kids? Why is it some of them are reacting to this, this like overblown, intense, you know, screaming and crying. Yeah.

And it was that some of the children had been circumcised. You're kidding me. And what the researchers concluded was this was a form of PTSD. So they had a traumatic experience during circumcision of pain. Then they had a later pain and it triggered the memory, the re-experience of this earlier pain. So it can be studied. There is research to show that there is a memory created that changes behavior through. circumcision. Okay, but what about this argument? Well, they're only a couple days old. They're never

going to remember this. They're not going to remember maybe consciously, but they will remember somatically. The body keeps score, right? So if there's a traumatic experience, it's going to change behavior. And one of the things that I learned about this, I interviewed a woman who was circumcised in the American medical system, which was legal, by the way, up until 1996. You are kidding. Yeah. It's the 1996 FGM law was passed at the federal level. And before then, were some women who were circumcised in the American medical system that was covered by Blue Cross and Blue Shield. Wait, wait, wait. Why were they doing that? What reasons? A lot of the same reasons that male circumcision was carried out. And it was rarer, but it was done. And there's a woman who wrote

a book about it, who I interviewed and spoke with. Her name is Patricia Robinette. And one of the things that she talked about was that a lot of the behaviors that we think of as male behaviors, she experienced. And she described them as, these aren't male behaviors. These are traumatized behaviors. And if you look at men from cultures that are intact where this isn't practiced, they have a different relationship to these things.

And so one of the things that she described, for example, was going from partner to partner, looking for some sexual experience that she didn't feel like she was getting. And maybe if I try this new position, this new person, maybe then I'll be fulfilled. And of course she didn't later figure out, wait a minute,

there's a part of my body that should be producing that fulfillment that she was missing. Oh, my God. And so then, you know, people think, oh, that men have this behavior of, like, all sorts of behaviors around sexuality and ways that they relate to their body. And maybe some of that is innate. And maybe some of it is just the result of a shared cultural trauma, which is so pervasive that you wouldn't know. Because if, you know, 80 to 90 percent of American men are circumcised, well,

80 to 90% of American men might share a certain behavior. If the Academy of Pediatrics were to admit publicly, circumcision is torture, it's pointless, we don't need to do it. 70 million men are, pun intended, left standing with their dick in their hands. What do you mean by that? Like, we can't do anything. Like, it's just like, well, why would they admit? Why would the American...

They wouldn't admit that could open them to lawsuit liability. That's what I'm saying. So all the men just like suffer, just like, well, we're just going to, everybody just, you just live with it. Like, we're not going to admit it that it was a mistake. Right. Well, they wouldn't admit it because actually, I don't think men would be in that position. If there were cultural recognition, there'd be all sorts of things that men could do. There'd be ways they could get help.

Even just having it culturally acknowledge would mean that men who want to talk about their feelings around this would get acknowledgement over those feelings instead of shut down. it would mean that if there was a lawsuit that you could show damages. And that's actually the big reason. Yeah, I was going to say, is this what the whole thing is of why this is so hush-hush and nobody's willing to have a national conversation about it is people don't want lawsuits? The medical system obviously does not want to admit fault. So if you say that you've done this horrible thing to the majority of American men, the majority of American men who would have a lawsuit against you, right?

It would be massive damage. Even now there's a lawsuit happening against the American Academy pediatrics just on fraud, saying like, hey, you made these claims about your product that it does all of these things and, you know, prevents various diseases and actually doesn't do that if you look at the research. And that lawsuit alone, I know, is something that they're taking seriously. Well, how did this become normalized in America in the first place? If nobody else in the world is doing it, why did we all of a sudden start doing it? So circumcision began as a medical practice in Victorian England. The Victorians thought that masturbation was the cause of all sorts of social and moral ills. It was the cause of many diseases. And so they had this massive campaign against masturbation, which included circumcision as a remedy. The thinking being, if we just cut off the most pleasurable part of the male body,

then people will be less likely to engage in this awful harm. Of course, they were very successful. No one does that anymore. But the result was that, this is a joke, by the way, I don't know, apparently it didn't go over. The result was, of course, that this became a normalized practice. And then, of course, when hospital birth began, then it was something the hospitals could charge for. And so it became sort of part of the standard hospital package. Now, I'd always heard that the reason the Victorians did this was that they were basically just crazy and hated sexuality.

And it wasn't until I read the writings of Michelle Foucault around this issue that I had a different perspective, which is interesting because he's sort of considered in a lot of conservative circles as the architect of many of the ideas that became wokeness. And he actually didn't write a lot about those ideas, but he did write a lot about the medical system. Okay, wait, what are the alleged woke ideas? Oh, if you read like James Lindsay's writing, Michelle Foucault, is the architect of all sorts of, I mean, if you hear people talk about things being a social construct, or the idea that language creates power, that comes from him. Okay.

And he was a French philosopher who wrote a lot about how a lot of what people think of in society as just being the way things are is actually a social construct and created through language and something that can be deconstructed as forms of power. Now, what's interesting is he actually wrote a lot about the medical system and how the medical system was engaged in this. And one of the things he talks about is this early campaign against math.

masturbation. What he says is that these doctors weren't idiots. They knew that this was never a problem you could actually solve or something you could actually end. What they were doing was gaining power over children's sexuality. So previously parents had power over children and parents made all the decisions about children. And what doctors came and did was they said, you have this massive problem. The children are engaged in this horrible form of self-harm, but we doctors are the only ones who can solve it for you. And so what parents were told to do is they had to watch their children. for signs of masturbation. And of course, at the first sign of them,

then the doctor would come and solve all the problems for them. And so this was a tactic to gain power over children's bodies and children's sexuality, according to him. And that theory makes a lot more sense to me than, oh, they were just crazy, right? Yeah. And it also is a tactic that you see repeated throughout the medical system of, oh, you have this problem,

and you need to give us massive amounts of power to solve it. And that problem could go be everything from, well, you're going to have a birth, birth. And so you need the experts to come make your birth safe. And oh, you've got this, this COVID-19 virus. Like, we actually need power over all of society to make sure that you don't get this virus. And so that pattern is one that the medical system repeats and is a way that it extends power. And of course, whether or not the problem is solved, they still keep the power. But even back then, wouldn't the mothers have heard their infants screaming during this procedure in

pain? And then what? Did the doctors just write it off and say, oh, like they, like, they, like, they don't actually feel pain or something. So at the time, what they wrote is that the pain was to create a salutary effect of the mind. If you were causing the child pain in this way, they would associate sexuality with that and be less likely to engage in immoral behaviors. This was the thinking in Victorian times. So you're projecting from a modern 20th century consciousness of like, well, we want to be nice to our children as opposed to a Victorian, you know, just spare the rod, spoil the child.

Yeah. It's a different mindset. But of course, once it's a part of the system, then getting it out is really challenging, right? Because then it's something the hospitals can charge for. And then it's, you know, you have this massive population that's all experienced it as a trauma. And if you start to question it, then all of those feelings come up. And so now there's an institution in a system and a cultural set of beliefs and values and language and to say, well, wait a minute, why are we doing this?

that brings up all of the stuff underneath that and would mean changing all of these other systems. And I think the reason it continues now is, like I mentioned, one, it's that, you know, there's a medical interest in keeping it alive. But now there's this sort of psychological barrier to talking about it where if you talk about it, well, what does that mean as a parent if someone let this happen to their child? And what does it mean for me as a man if my body had this done to it? all of those psychological feelings come up. And the interesting thing is that when it comes to trauma, the first time you talk about it and you start being with the feeling,

yes, it might be painful. But once you are with it and once you express it, it's actually done. And so I can talk about it very easily because I've talked about it. Like I've dealt with whatever feelings I had around this and I've processed them and I've talked about it many times before. and what's actually taxing is to maintain psychological defenses. So if someone is putting energy towards repressing some aspect of themselves or not feeling something, they have to keep doing that for the rest of their life.

Yeah. And once you experience, this is true of every childhood trauma. Once you experience it, once you acknowledge it, it's done. And it's actually, you know, I think people have this idea that if they talk about it, that the feelings or whatever comes up was just going to be unending. And it's actually, no, it's the opposite. It's the psychological defenses that are unending. Yes. Oh, the psychological defenses are what are keeping you in a prison.

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Good Ranchers.com slash Clark with Code Clark or click the link in the description. Good Ranchers. American Meat delivered. And when I have talked about this and I've just brought up the question, why are we doing this? Is it necessary to be doing this to our baby? baby boys. It seems like the biggest defenders of this practice are men. It's not women who are in my replies saying like, oh, Alex, you're wrong. It's the men. Yeah, it's that identity thing. I am circumcised. Like, I am a man or I am a particular race or gender, all these things. For a lot of men,

talking about this feels like a referendum on their sexuality and their body. And especially hearing a woman talk about that part of their body is that maybe you might be missing something? Is that really triggering for guys? Hugely. Yeah. So there are automatically all the women that are listening down there like, honey, we have to listen to this podcast together. All the guys that are in their car listening to this right now, they were already on edge

that I am the one bringing it up on a female centered podcast. It's hard for me almost to relate to that because I'm past it. Yeah. It's almost hard for me to put myself back in that mindset. A wife is going to ask her husband like, honey, have you ever like regretted the fact that you were circumcised? And they're going to go, no. I've never even thought about it ever in my life.

You know, how do you respond to that? Guys that are like, I've never thought about this. I've never regretted this. I've never wondered why this happened to me. Like, I would be weirded out if I wasn't circumcised. Let's pretend it was to happen to you as an adult. Like, you just woke up one day and half the chef skin if your penis was missing. Would you go, it seems fine to me?

I think if that was to happen to someone as an adult, that they would go on a quest to figure out what it happened. Yeah. And if you were to talk to your friends and be like, You guys, you're not going to believe this. The thing happened to me. And they were to say, oh, yeah, I happen to me too. I'm fine with it. You'd be like, what is wrong with you?

Like, what is going on? But because it occurred when someone was a child and they were defenseless and they were in their most vulnerable state, oh, well, now I'm going to, you know, like now you're going to ignore it. I feel like to, a big reason that men have in the past been reluctant to talk about this is that a lot of the male role is about protecting. and sacrificing your own well-being for society or the good of others in some way. Wow, that's true. I mean, the classic sort of, you know, men's rights examination of this issue is that men,

we make women's sex objects and say that their value comes from their body, but we make men's success objects and say that their value comes from their ability to do things for others. And so men sacrifice their well-being in war. They sacrifice their hours and their labor and work. And so to say as a man that you are not okay with a sacrifice society has asked you to do feels at times for some people like rejecting an aspect of masculinity. But in this case, what was done had no value.

And it was not an adult making a conscious decision to sacrifice their well-being for the good of the tribe or for the good of others. It was someone attacking a defenseless baby. And actually, the male role is being willing to, do something difficult for the protection of your family. And so if you are talking about this issue, you are doing something difficult to ensure the next generation, your children are safe.

So I actually think that the most masculine thing you could do is be willing to explore these issues and ensure even at the expense of your immediate emotional comfort. Again, it's almost simple. Like we're not asking people to go to war. We're asking them to, for a moment, maybe experience some feelings that are a little bit uncomfortable. And then once you're past that, the next generation is safe from this level of trauma.

It is such a small price for such a significant reward. Now what I've seen is that, well, now in, you know, 20, 23 and beyond, babies are asleep during this procedure. So they don't feel it. Are they asleep or are they disassociating? Because you cannot put a baby under full anesthesia and put them to sleep. That's actually not something that's possible. So if you put a baby in a full anesthesia, they can die. And about 100 babies per year die from the procedure, not even because of anesthesia,

but because of bleeding and things like that. So if a child is not making any sound or appears to be asleep, that is often a sign that they've disassociated so much that they're not even screaming anymore, but they've just, like, left emotionally. This is going to be very interesting to my audience. Now, when I look up a map of the world and where the most circumcisions happen, you see America, you see a couple, you know, countries in the Middle East, and then you see a huge portion of Africa. How does Bill Gates feel about circumcision?

Oh, yeah. So he has contributed millions of dollars to circumcision campaigns in Africa. And it's funny because I included in the film a couple clips of, you know, famous people talking about those campaigns. And the one that people got really upset about was that Hillary Clinton gave $40 million through PEPFAR to these African circumcision campaigns. And that was seen as like a really political choice to include in the film, even though it's $40 million. I mean, how are we not going to talk about that? And Bill Gates was just like a famous person in that montage. And now he's the one that people are really upset about.

And they're like, it just, he is a different reputation now. Well, he's buying up farmland. He's contributing to, you know, vaccines. And now he's contributing. He's funded over 650,000 circumcisions in Africa through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. They say it's for HIV prevention. Why does Bill Gates care about circumcision? I don't know.

It's one of those things where the justifications given are not convincing. But in order to try to reach into his mind and figure out why he personally is involved, I don't know. And it's also the reason I often talk about the issue as a systemic, problem because he might have a particular personal interest, but there is a system that supports him and carries it out. So the people who are working for him who have done these studies have been longtime proponents of circumcision and they've like dedicated their careers to promoting this particular thing. And I feel like it's a little easier to guess why they're interested. And there's other people who are involved who've written statements for, you know, the World Health Organization

saying, oh, we should do these campaigns. And then you, research them and lo and behold, they have a company that makes circumcision devices, and they recommend in their report that the World Health Organization pay their company $8 million for these various devices. Well, if they're saying that, you know, this helps with HIV prevention, they must have some sort of evidence to support that. So the studies that were done in Africa, there were three randomized controlled trials. We'd go through the science of them in the film.

And there's a lot of issues with those. I mean, you couldn't conduct them in the United States because the amount of money. you're giving people in them would be unethical, then that alone would be considered corrupting the studies. But more people left them than stayed in. The group that was circumcised was given sex education and told to use condoms, which they use condoms at a high rate, which that alone means that they're really just studies of condom use.

And then there's, you know, there's all sort, like going through all of the various things in those studies, it's almost a wonder that anyone buys. Oh, and they were ended early because, you know, results were so important that we need to start immediately pushing funding towards this. Because maybe if they'd gone on longer, they would have had a negligible result. I'm telling you, when you watch this film, when you look into this for two minutes, there are so many holes in this argument of why we should do this in America.

It's unbelievable that there has not been a massive national debate on this. And if there were any other issue that affected every man in America, every parent, every child, in the most personal way possible, that involved sex, religion, politics, medicine, money, all of these various elements. It would be a national debate. Well, and here's the thing, Brendan. We have the highest circumcision rate in America,

but we also have the highest HIV rate. Yeah, I mean, when you go into the data on that, it doesn't make any sense. Nothing makes sense. This is going to change the cultural conversation. Like, there's no doubt in my mind. And they say that circumcision is like a highly effective vaccine. It's one of those things where, you know, previously I would have said that the counter to that is that a vaccine is supposed to stop a virus.

And if you still have a chance of getting it, that's not actually how a vaccine works. But I think the definition of that changed. So I'm not actually sure if that argument still works there. Yeah. A lot of these arguments are meant to sound like good one-line headlines. And they're essentially thought-terminating cliches. So if you actually start thinking about the justifications given or the statements made, they don't really make a lot of sense. But that's not the purpose of them.

The purpose of them is to get someone to not think about this issue further. The intention is like, okay, I heard that one headline. That must be why we do it. Now I don't need to think about it further. Even though that one headline came out last year and this has been going on for far longer than that, even though the original reasons why this started don't actually make any sense in our contrary to all of our cultural values, even though that one headline doesn't actually reflect the values of the person hearing it. So I think most people listening to the show, if they're a parent or considering becoming a parent,

they're not making decisions for their children based on, you know, HIV rates in Africa. They're making their decisions based on their values and what do I want to teach my children. What relationship do I want them to have with me? What relationship do I want them to have with their own body or with their sexuality? And I think that circumcision goes against all of those values. Now, you bring up the sexuality thing, and if you're a guy listening to this and you have not been convinced with anything else, I know that this is going to be the thing that convinces you because I'm watching the documentary. I'm like, oh, Brendan's smart. Because you include all this stuff about how intact foreskins help guys have way more pleasurable sex, better orgasms, all of this stuff. And I'm like, here it is. This is what's going to convince the men. So the foreskin is actually the most sensitive part. of the penis for men with it intact. And on circumcised men, the most sensitive area of the penis was at the scar where the circumcision took place? Yeah. Scar tissue has that impact that it becomes

more sensitive, but it's often more sensitive to pain. But if you're circumcised, you can essentially do a test, a sensitivity test on yourself and feel if you run your finger lightly above the scar line and below the scar line, which has more sensation. And the part above is the remaining foreskin, the inner lining of the foreskin. Oh, my gosh. You know, people say, oh, he'll never know the difference. You can find out the difference.

Immediately. Yeah. But it is true if you look at what's known as Misenor's corpuscles, a sensitive nerve tissue. It's the same nerves that you have in your hand. So if you run your hand, you know, very gently over the, your fingertips gently over the palm of your hand, you can feel those sort of nerve sensations.

That is the same types of nerve endings that are in the foreskin. and it is most densely concentrated in the ridged band of the foreskin, which if you think about it, makes sense that the body wants a lot of nerve endings at the opening of the body to be able to sense things entering or leaving, and that part of the body rolls over the head of the penis during sex. So it's essentially like gliding over itself during sex, and circumcision changes the mechanics of sex.

This is what also shook me during the doc. they talk about how the way that we have sex is completely altered due to circumcision. I'm trying to think how to have this conversation not like a super vulgar way, but like the strokes during sex are different because you are missing foreskin. Yeah. Someone is intact. Then they have the foreskin gliding over the head of the penis. and they can do much shorter strokes and stay closer to the woman's body.

Which feels better for the woman. Yes. And if they're missing that, then they have to rely on friction. And so what feels good to the man is the maximum amount of friction, essentially, you know, not to be crude, but jackhammering. Right. And that's going to take the man's body away from hers more. Instead of, like, grinding against the clitoris and the outside of the woman's body, his body's being pulled away from her. I mean, how many people have had a comparative experience there and then talk openly about it?

Yeah, I mean, like, even the ability to have that kind of an open conversation around sexuality is not something that's existed until, you know, recent history. I mean, there are people listening to this. They are physically uncomfortable, but they know we're right. They've just never thought about this. Right. That's that weird feeling of like, I'm hearing something. I know it's right, but this is blowing my mind. It's shattering my worldview.

I mean, that's how most of my audience is pro-life. I think if you were somebody that was pro-choice before becoming pro-life, I mean, that's, you're a lot. I mean, that's that like earth-shattering type of, whoa, like, I've never thought about this before. This changes everything for me. I think that's how a lot of people are going to feel about this. Yeah. And I would say that if you feel any kind of lack of comfort, that's okay. Like, that's actually normal.

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description. G-A-R-N-U.com slash spillover with code spillover. Find the link in the show notes. These are the cleanest tampons on the market. And by the way, something new you're going to want is coming next week. So look forward to that. Garnu.com slash spillover with code spillover. Do you think that we as a society view men's bodies as more expendable than women's? Yeah. Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, there's all sorts of cultural ideas around the body. In fact, I interviewed one woman who's an anthropologist who did all of her research around the issue of symbolism around male and female genital cutting. And one of the things that she talked about was that in African traditions, in the earliest African myths around circumcision, the idea of genital cutting of circumcision was to create gender. So the woman's clitoris is erectile tissue.

it sticks out from the body. It's the masculine in the woman, and so to make her a woman that had to be removed. And the foreskin in men is wet. It's enveloping. It's the feminine in the man. And so to make him a man, that had to be removed. And she said that she thought that the cultural symbolism around this

had continued in a certain way where now in Western culture, women are allowed to play both masculine and feminine roles. And one of the worst things you can tell a woman is like, oh, get back in the kitchen or that she's only allowed to play the feminine role. And she said that part of the reason she thought that Westerners were so upset about female genital cutting, but not about male genital cutting,

was that they had had a revolution around women being able to play both gender roles, but they hadn't had that with men. So if you tell a man, get back to work, it doesn't have the same impact. In fact, it seems as kind of an okay, normal thing to do. Yeah. So the idea that something that is culturally coded as feminine, is removed from men or that, you know, going back to this like earliest symbolism, that scene is something different.

Tell me about the men who grow up and they resent being circumcised. It's different for every person, but it's more common than I think people realize. You know, one of the things I'll hear people say is, oh, I've never met a man who told me they were upset about this. And it's like, because you didn't make it safe for them. It's a bit like saying, oh, I've never met a woman who is sexually assaulted. It's like, well, the kind of woman who has had that experience isn't going to talk about it with you because you didn't make it safe for them, right? It's really common for people to have both of those experiences, but it's such a personal, intense wound that they're only going to talk about it with people they feel safe.

And so a lot of the time that's online, especially for men. Yeah. So there's entire online communities. There's a whole section of Reddit. There's hundreds. Yes. Hundreds of thousands of men. And I would add.

too, that recently I've been going through some data around men's feelings around circumcision, and it's roughly a third of circumcised men that would want that part of the body back. So one third, and when people hear that, they're like, well, that's not a majority, but that's of millions of American men. So if you extrapolate that data, that's like 30 million people. I might be wrong on the math on that, but it's millions. And at the same time, you know, how comfortable is it for those men to talk about it in public? And what's the social consequence of talking about it in public?

So men do what they do with all their feelings. They just push it down and carry on. Okay, but here's the thing. If the majority of American men are circumcised, which we've talked about, and we're talking about social stigmas, I think a lot of parents are like, look, I don't want my kid to be the guinea pig of trying to reverse like a cultural norm. I don't want my kid to be the one uncircumcised kid in the locker room that's getting roasted by everyone else on the football team. I would add the rate for

circumcision in the American population is about 80%, but the current rate is about 50. Oh, it's changing? Yes. So if your child's growing up now, they're more likely to be in the majority if they're intact. What is the cause of that? Is it because people are finding out this information? Well, it's a couple of things. It's finding out the information. It's also it used to be that if you went into the hospital for birth, you signed a blanket consent form that said the hospital can do whatever they want, and that included circumcision. So they didn't even ask you, which is why, well, it's also funny that now people consider it a parental choice when parents were not asked when this began. It was just done, essentially. So the rates gone

down because people actually have to make a decision on it. That's one thing. There's more access to information. You know, when I was born, my parents would have had to like go to the library and find some academic studies, who knows if they were accurate or good, whereas now you can pull up your phone or a podcast like this, and you can just find everything you'd ever want to know about anything. So I think that the power around information has changed. It's also just there's more normalization around things like homebirth, around, you know, raising your kids with peaceful parenting, around all these different topics. So it's a whole series of different things. I don't know that there's any particular one that's changing the rate. Oh, it's also,

by the way, that in a lot of states, Medicare is not covering anymore. And so the moment you tell someone, you're going to have to pay a thousand bucks for this, they're like, hmm, I'll think about it. Yeah. Yeah. Not with inflation. The weight is like, we're good. Thank you. Now, here's something that I think is important to bring up. What do you say to the parents who did choose? to circumcise their sons. And they haven't realized until maybe this very conversation, that it was unnecessary, that it's barbaric. They're feeling immense guilt and shame

over making that decision as a parent. I feel like that my relationship with my family is really good because they can admit their mistakes and change and grow as people. How did that feel for your mom, for you to become this like anti-circumcision activist? I'm constantly embarrassing my family. they've become accustomed to it now.

You got outspoken about this and like obviously your parents made that decision for you. So how did that dynamic go? It's like all of the trauma stuff I've talked about. It's difficult at first and then it's better. Do you feel like it was easy for you to understand and be forgiving of like, you don't know what you don't know? My mom didn't know. My dad didn't know.

Yes and no. I have that perspective. Part of me has that perspective and then part of me was still mad. Like this is true of any. child's feelings towards their parents. Like on the one hand, yes, I can intellectually see that they were doing the best with the information and resources they had. And at the same time, there's still a little kid part of me that's mad.

And it's like, but I wanted it different. Yeah. And so you have to be with both of those feelings. And I would say for parents, too, if there's a part that feels guilt or shame or if there's a part that feels defensive or whatever it is, that's okay. And you can just be with that. That's a legitimate feeling to have. And what will make your relationships great, not just with your kids, but with everyone in life,

is if you're willing to grow and change as a person. So I think on not just this, but any parenting issue, if you can acknowledge something and change, that's going to make you so much better as a parent. What if you're somebody who's changing your mind, but you've already had some kids, and you're planning on having more? And so you have maybe a husband who's uncircumcised. Or sorry, you have a husband who is circumcised. your first son is circumcised.

Now you're pregnant with another boy. Is it better for a family to all have made the same decision? Or is it okay to have some kids that are uncircumcised and some that are? Is it better for everyone to have a mistake or make a mistake or is it better for you to change course midway? But as a man, would that have bothered you to have brothers who weren't while you were or your dad is while you aren't or vice versa? Of course it'd bother me. I would feel like, why did you do this to me? But they're going to feel that if you do it to all of them or if you do it to some of them.

It just depends. My girlfriends who are still in the process of having more kids who have already had some sons, this is how they feel. They say, Alex, I am with you. I'm totally against this. But now that I've already had some kids, I don't want now my new sons to be left out and feel like I'm the only one of the family that is like this. This is the sunk cost fallacy. This is someone feeling.

like that they have to, well, I'm already invested in this mistake, so I should invest further. Why? Why lose more? Like, if you can acknowledge it for what it is, there is a loss, yeah. But cut your losses instead of your child. We talk about abortion all the time. Like, this is something that is brought up in presidential debates. Obviously, it's like an emotional topic always.

But it seems to just be something that like, at least now more than ever, we're hearing it more come up at dinner parties and things like that. How do we create that same sort of debate and conversation around a topic like circumcision? I don't know if I'd want to copy the abortion debate to this because it's intense. Let me put it this way. I would want the level of interest. I don't know if I'd want the level of rhetoric. Okay. Although I will say when I was working on the documentary, I called a bunch of Moyles, a Jewish ritual circumcise. to try to get an interview with one, to get one in the film.

And I got like eight noes. And one of the ones I called, I started my school, like, hi, my name's Brendan, I'm doing a documentary. And like before I could finish, he said, no, absolutely not. I said, okay, well, that's what I said.

Like, do you mind telling me, you know, why? And he said, because circumcision is going to be the abortion debate of the 21st century. And then he hung up on me. And I was like, I really wish you'd come said that on the film. You know? No kidding.

Like, that would have been good. Well, you still now here. So I think in a way it already has that quality of that intense feelings that it brings up for people. But I will say sometimes those two issues are compared. And I actually feel like whatever a person's perspective on abortion is that they should be in favor of keeping children intact. Because if you believe that we need to protect children, well, I mean, this is an obvious issue for you. And if you believe in bodily rights. And if you believe, yeah, if you really even believe in, you know, personal choice around your body, well, then of course, this is all.

also an obvious issue. American circumcision is free. It's available to watch now on Amazon Prime. You can find it in the show notes. If people want to see more research on this, if they want more studies, what sources do you recommend or books? I mean, obviously watch the film, circumcisionmovie.com. That's probably the reason I made that was because when I did my research, I had to go between like three or four different books and I had to go to obscure websites and YouTube videos and all these different stuff. And I wanted something that I could give someone where they could become an expert in one sitting, that instead of having to go through all the research that I did to figure this stuff out, that they could just watch a movie and then they would understand all of that.

So I kind of made it so that you wouldn't have to do it. But if you do want to do all that. Circumcision in the Hidden Trauma by Ronald Goldman is a great book. Marked in Your Flesh by Leonard Glick is a great book, you know, recounting the history. I would also go find activists who are working on the issue and talk to them because there's always new stuff that maybe hasn't made it to books and of, you know, those kind of articles that they're aware of. And there's also always new things around the activism. Like I mentioned, there was a lawsuit recently against the American Academy Pediatrics. By the time this is out, that could be in a different place. I don't know. Do you think we're going to eventually see it become illegal, like what we did

with female genital mutilation in the 90s? I think you've got a really big barrier. there. I mentioned there are sort of three reasons this hasn't gone mainstream. One being the medical, one being the psychological defenses. And then I think the third is Jewish identity. That if you were to criminalize this, that there are a lot of Jewish organizations that would feel like you are infringing on their religious freedom. But why not have a religious exemption of like, I need to be able to do this. This is a religious choice or whatever. People have talked about that, but there's not a religious exemption for female genital cutting. In fact, the 1996 female genital mutilation law was overturned recently by a court case where they were going to actually prosecute it for the first time.

And what the defendants were going to argue was that essentially this is their religious right. It's the type of female general cutting they were doing. They said was less invasive than male genital cutting and that they should be allowed to do it. And what ended up happening is the judge sort of ruled it on a technicality. He said, well, the federal government doesn't have the right to regulate this. This is something the states need to figure out. And he kind of punted the issue because I think that they, didn't want to, you know, be on the court case that was going to have to have that conflict.

But that's, I mean, there isn't a religious exemption for female general cunning. So why would it be one for men? And the other thing I've heard is there's some Jewish people I spoke with who say, like, I have rights too. Like just because my family had different beliefs and was from a different culture, had different cultural beliefs. Why shouldn't I be protected? Like, what about my religious right to make my own decisions about my body and my beliefs?

This is an ignorant question. because I just don't know. And it might be a stupid question. But if we were to say, you know, it's a law in America, you have to wait till someone is older, till they have consent and they can choose. Once you're a certain age, then you can be fully under to where you don't feel it, right? Like if we said that we have to wait until people are older to do this? I mean, that's essentially what criminalizing it would mean.

It would mean that you can't do it to a minor. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's what I think. Yeah. I mean, after listen to this, that's what I think we should do. Okay, is there anything that we did not discuss that you think is important, like parting words of this is what America needs to know about circumcision? In a sense, this issue is really simple, that we should love our children just the way they are. Children need love, not surgery. It's that simple. It's all of the distortions and untruths that exist around this issue that become complex. Truth is often very simple, but sorting out all of the lies is often, you know, something. something that takes a little time. And so I would say that if someone is listening and understands,

I don't know that there is much more that they need to do other than to protect their own family. If you're a man listening to this and for the first time in your life, you're like, wow, maybe I am upset that I was circumcised. What can they do going forward? Depends how high agency you are. Obviously, all of the things that people do to heal around any kind of emotional issue or childhood sexual violence can apply to this, all the same therapies, all the same things. I would also add that there are people who do what's known as foreskin restoration, they take the remaining skin that they have and stretch it over time to create a covering of the body. So it doesn't bring back all the sensation. It doesn't bring back the unique

nerve endings and structures. But a lot of men report that they have a benefit from this, that their sexuality is improved, that they also get a psychological benefit of taking back power over their body. And recently, I actually had someone do a survey to find out, you know, how much would people pay for fully getting their foreskin back? What did they say? There was about, I think it was nine percent of circumcised men who wanted their foreskin back, who said they would pay over $20,000 for that. Wow. Which means that in America, it's nearly a, 200 million. It's over a $200 million market. So there has been people, there have been people who've talked about using regenerative medicine or things like stem cell therapies to

regrow that part of the body. And I think it's possible. It would just take enough money and political and economic will to do it. If somebody wants to get in contact with you directly, where can they find you? At BD. Murata on all social media and brettamara.com. Brennan, thank you so much for coming on the spillover. Thank you. If you listen to this episode and you know in your heart that circumcision is not medically necessary, that it's purely cosmetic, that it violates your son's bodily autonomy for the rest of his life, that it permanently alters your child's brain and that uncut penises

are perfectly functional and hygienic like they are in the entire rest of the modern world, do not let anyone cause you to fold on it. Protect your son. Protect our sons. This episode has the power to change culture. Share this everywhere. Post it to your Facebook that you never post on, your Instagram story. Send it in your family group chat, parenting forums and groups that you're in. Share it to Twitter. Post it on Reddit. This is a human rights issue. We know mutilating our children with trans surgeries and hormones is wrong. We know abortion inflicts harm on another person and therefore it's wrong. You cannot claim ignorance after listening to this any longer. Circumcision is wrong. It's been wrong and we need to

stop. Every important link pertaining to things discussed in this episode are in the show notes. Please leave a five-star review for this episode and tell everyone how important this one is to listen to. Next week won't be as intense as this, but it will shake you to your core. I'm talking to an international water scientist. He invented the technology for reverse osmosis water and he's going to tell us about how dangerous tap water is or isn't. If plastic water bottles are really that bad, the truth I have heard no one discuss when it comes to Stanle's, why we need to consume sea minerals in our water

and which home systems are best and more. The spillover is back next Thursday at 9 p.m. Pacific, midnight eastern, anywhere you listen to your podcast, and on YouTube at Real Alex Clark, subscribe there to watch each beautifully shot episode. I'm Alex Clark, and this is. the spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.