It Could Happen Here - The Lunar New Years Special: Is China Maoist?

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

To celebrate Lunar New Years, Mia investigates how the Chinese state actually mobilizes its resources to do campaigns and how the process differs from the Mao period state's approach.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and

expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Welcome to the very special Lunar New Year's episode of It Could Happen Here.

I'm your host, Mia Wong, and today we're talking about China. And more specifically, we are talking about the Chinese state and the persistent question that haunts American national security experts and leftists on social media like, Is China Maoist? Now, if you, gentle listener, are not embroiled in a kind of running turf war with American China watchers like I am, you may rightly be asking, wait, what? People actually believe this? And the answer, unfortunately, is yes. Yes, they do. And those people get to write in major media outlets. Here's the New York Times. How Xi returned China to one-man rule. For decades, China has built guardrails to prevent another Mao. Here's how Xi York Times. How Xi returned China to one-man rule. For decades, China has built

guardrails to prevent another Mao. Here's how Xi Jinping has dismantled them and created his own machinery of power. Here's also the New York Times. This one, I guess, technically is from the opinion section, but Xi Jinping is the second coming of Mao Zedong. Here's the Wall Street Journal. China wants to move ahead, xi jinping is looking to the past as china's leader embraces more elements of mao zedong's rule its people are confronting a more uncertain future lest you think this is purely an american phenomena uh here's al jazeera which was funded by the government of cotter is xi jinping china's new ma Zedong, with Xi casting himself as a 21st century Mao, China risks arbitrary rule. Here's foreign policy, the Maoist roots of Xi's economic dilemma.

In contrast with Deng, Xi has embraced a distinctly Maoist socialism that emphasizes personal sacrifice for the collective good, harking back to the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 70s the british of course are also not immune to this mao derangement syndrome i guess i would call it xi jinping's pilgrimage to red mecca brings back the mao factor so you know this is this is a very very common sentiment it's been a very common sentiment for most of the last decade um i have i haven't even done some of the most common ones like if you if you expand a little bit out from just xi jinping is the new mao ones you get a lot of like xi is the most powerful leader since mao which is kind of true and i think this is part of why this sort of strategy works because people do not want to actually differentiate between different kinds of authoritarian systems there are many many

different kinds of dictatorships and people people are just loathe to actually look at the differences. And you see this, this is not just a sort of American media class thing. You see this in political science literature all the time. Political science literature, especially in the US, has this tendency to divide the entire world into this sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies. this sort of neat classification of dictatorships and democracies. And as a product of this, I have had to read some truly, truly appalling articles that were published in peer-reviewed journals. My absolute, I don't know if favorite is the right term, or the most cursed one that I ever saw was, it was an about like the quote-unquote resource curse and this argument about whether like having a bunch of oil means that you were inherently going to have an

authoritarian government or whatever so they have this chart that's supposed to be tracking like the quote-unquote time to a democratic transition of a bunch of non-democratic societies by like just how much how much natural resources they have now this this chart has in the same category saudi arabia a theocratic monarchy and also hoaxist albania a country whose political line was that mao didn't mao hard enough and these are just being treated neutrally as the same type of government because it's not a representative democracy. North Korea is another good example of this. You see people in the U.S. calling North Korea a hereditary monarchy like all the time, and it just isn't. Leadership of the party state passes between members of a family,

but that's not actually enough to make something a monarchy unless you're prepared to argue that like the u.s is a monarchy because we had two bushes as president now on the grounds that that's extremely funny i'm not wholly unsympathetic to that argument but it's not calling the u.s a monarchy because of the two bushes is not a very serious academic argument. It is just a joke. And that's, I think how we should be treating people like people calling North Korea, a monarchy,

because it's not a monarchy is not just, there's a guy who's in charge and it passes to another person who's related to them. It's not just that there's someone who you could call a King. There is a whole political system beneath it, right? There's a whole network of like princes and courts and land titles and inheritances and who and who doesn't have royal blood. And there's, you know, there's a whole, you know,

and the economic system of a monarchy has changed over time, right? Monarchies are very old. You know, we now have like capitalist monarchies like the Saudis, you know, we've had feudal monarchies. We've had sort of pre-feudal monarchies, but you can't simply reduce monarchy to one guy in charge. That is absolutely absurd. But people just do this all the time. into a party state where this is you know a sort of shortening of one party state technically speaking there are actually other parties in north korea and this is true of china as well but they don't really do anything um and this is not the episode where i'm going to have to try to explain the difference between the united front the united front works department that that's another time but they are functionally one party. There is one party that actually does the

ruling, and then there's a couple of other parties that keep around for appearances who might do consultative stuff. But even knowing that something is a party state doesn't actually tell you a huge amount about how that system actually functions. And this is where we come to the core elements of today's episode. How does the modern Chinese state operate and how is it different from previous iterations of the Chinese state? So to answer this question, we need to start with the origins of the party state itself. And the party state really, in the sense that we're dealing with, is born with the Soviet Union. Well, I mean, I guess it technically predates the soviet union a little bit but it's it's it's it's born it's born of

the october revolution and the bolshevik taking consolidation of power on the other hand you know party states are not built in the image of lenin they're built in the image of stalin and the thing that makes um you know a sort of like the party states that come after it, what makes them function is the way that Stalin consolidates power. And Stalin consolidates power by using the rules of the Bolshevik party to maintain control over members of the state apparatus, even though technically speaking, he doesn't have – he doesn't technically have the formal authority to do as a member of the doesn't technically have the formal authority to do as a member of the government but he has the authority to do as a member of the party and this this is how stalin consolidates his power and sort of walls out trotsky etc etc etc however comma this is where people make mistakes when that when they're trying to sort of understand what stalinism was which is that they make this mistake of looking, you know, of kind of projecting back the later Soviet Union onto, you know, onto sort of like

1930s Stalinism. And the mistake that they make is the assumption that Stalinism is purely a bureaucratic doctrine, right? It's purely about seizing control of the bureaucracy and using a bureaucracy to consolidate power. And that is just not true. Part of Stalin's success, and as bleak as that success is, part of what Stalin does is mobilize masses of people against parts of the party and in parts of the state bureaucracy that oppose him to do things like denunciations and to weaken their bureaucratic power. And this means that Stalinism is not a pure politics of state bureaucracy the way that sort of later Soviet governments are. It's a combination of bureaucratic power and also the direction of mass mobilization of the mobilization of large numbers of people to go

do a thing towards the end of consolidating power. This interplay, the control of bureaucratic power checked by mass popular mobilizations, is the characteristic element of Stalinism. Both of these tools, both the bureaucratic apparatus and mass mobilization, are used to maintain Stalin's personal power. Now, Maoism, for all of its claims to be the direct ideological heir of Stalinism, Maoism and Stalinism are not the same thing. In sort of like

Mao era China, you know, you can trace this from sort of like Mao's insurgency era through the time he was in power to the end of the 70s. During that period, China is, if anything, even more prone to mass popular mobilization as a strategy. Some of this is ideological. Maoism is to a large extent, a kind of internal critique

of Stalinism that, you know, I mean, like, so people in like you could argue about, you know, how good were the intentions of the people who are in charge of the Chinese Communist Party in like the 20s and 30s. Right. But they're not. They're not stupid, right? These people are smart. These people understand that there are a lot of problems with the Soviet system. These are people who watched a bunch of their comrades get murdered because the Soviets fucked up. So these are people who understand the threat of bureaucratization to a revolutionary movement and the potential of a formation of a new ruling class composed of sort of like management and bureaucratic cadres. But on the other hand,

because it's an internal critique of Stalinism and not like an external critique of Stalinism, because it's an internal critique of stalinism and not like an external critique of stalinism maoism is utterly unwilling to try to solve these problems by actually giving like workers or peasants like any kind of autonomy or democratic control over anything except for like the most trivial minutiae of like shop floor bullshit and the result of this is that, you know, you can't defeat the bureaucracy with democracy. So what do you, how do you actually deal with it?

And the result is what's called campaign style mobilization. These are mass mobilizations of extraordinary large numbers of people to do it, you know, to do a task, right? There's a lot of different sort of things they try to do with this. Sometimes they're tried, they're used for economic ends.

This is like the Great Leap Forward, which is this mass mobilization of people to increase productive capacity. It is a fiasco. Now, part of this also is political, right? Partly, this is Mao trying to use mass mobilization against the bureaucracy in a way reminiscent of Stalin, but at a much, much larger scale. And the other, you know, part of what's going on here is that the bureaucracy of the Soviet Union is much stronger than the bureaucracy of China, right? Because, you know, the Bolsheviks kind of have a state like bureaucracy sort of intact that they're able

to sort of graft themselves onto china like doesn't have like a functioning government at all like there's no functioning central state in china when the maoists eventually like knock off the nationalists so you know this this this always means that the level of bureaucratization is lower in china but you know it's still it's still that's still like the state building process is still one of the things the Maoists are trying to do. And this is, you know, this is sort of what Mao is trying to check. But this doesn't work. The Cultural Revolution ultimately fails.

And part of its failure is that, you know, okay, so in order to like stop the dread specter of like democratic election of factory councils and shit mao like cobbles together this coalition of soldiers like loyalist red guard factions and some of the pre-existing bureaucracy and these people are these are the people who end up running the country through the 70s and that is just another bureaucracy and through this whole period china continues to get more and more bureaucratic now this is the most cliche thing that you can possibly say, but unfortunately, I do have to say it. The Cultural Revolution had a massive impact on subsequent Chinese policy. Every Chinese leader from Deng Xiaoping on, including Xi Jinping, and this is something that is not very well covered in the American press, but every single one of these people agrees that the cultural revolution was a mistake. And you can see the results of this analysis in how the modern Chinese state

mobilizes resources. Now, do you know how you can mobilize resources? It's by buying the products and services contained in these ads. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. relationships and culture in the new iHeart Podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's

iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. We are back. I don't know why I'm saying we, it is kind of just me and you, the listener, but I guess that's technically plural. So let's get into how the modern Chinese state is very, very different from the previous kind of Chinese state, right? Because the Mao era, for everything that goes wrong with it, right? For all of the reality that it's an absolute disaster is based on, in a lot of ways, what we would call grassroots style organizing, right right it's based on getting a bunch of people to go out and do a thing now the modern chinese state doesn't do this in the same way of the closest thing that they have to sort of like maoist mobilizations are you know there is still a thing that's called a campaign style mobilization but it it's not the same thing at all as the Maoist system. So let's ask the question, what the fuck is campaign style mobilization?

administration review in a very colorfully named article called campaign style enforcement and regulatory compliance describe it thus following the literature we define campaign style enforcement as a type of policy implementation involving extraordinary mobilization of administrative resources under political sponsorship now this definition is very interesting because if you look at what is being mobilized here, it is not masses of people. You're not trying to do mass popular mobilizations. You're mobilizing administrative resources. And this is something that becomes very clear the more you look into the sort of literature here. I'm going to quote from a piece called Revised sky fabrication in china by yang dong shen and anna l aylers during the mao era the they this is a campaign style mobilizations

aimed at nothing less than mobilizing society as a whole while when they occur today political campaigns are usually foremostly addressed at the state apparatus, i.e. especially party and government organizations at all levels of the political hierarchy, and ultimately at cadres, in other words, the implementers of the policy goals at stake. Accordingly, Elizabeth Perry has called this transformation, quote, from mass campaigns to managed campaigns. Moreover, contemporary campaigns, or better, campaign-style politics, mainly take the form of, A, disciplinary supervisory and sanctioning campaigns, such as anti-crime campaigns, or the recently reinforced corruption campaign, or B, regulatory enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns.

Or B, regulatory enforcement or policy goal attainment acceleration campaigns. So, okay, that's kind of a lot, but I think it's worth actually taking this in a little bit of detail. That same article defines the characteristics of what a campaign-style mobilization is. So they have a defined goal. They have political sponsorship. There's a high degree of urgency. There's a defined period of time, tightly coordinated operation, the pooling of extraordinary resources and public involvement. the 2016 G20 meeting in Hangzhou, where the government sets out to make sure that there is actually like a blue sky for the event. Now, this is a massive undertaking because Chinese air pollution is fucking atrocious. This is something that I might do another fall episode about this

at some point. Chinese air pollution is unbelievably bad. It kills unfathomable numbers of people every year. It's gotten a little bit better since I was last there. But like when I was last in Beijing, air pollution is unbelievably bad it kills unfathomable numbers of people every year it's gotten a little bit better since i was last there but like when i was last in beijing like i didn't fucking i only saw the sky one time in the time i was there because and that was only because it rained and so after it rained the sky was blue for like a few hours and the smog just like consumed it again so in order to make sure that there was like a blue sky for pr purposes for this g20 meeting because china wanted to sort of show off there was a massive massive deployment of resources and this this becomes one of the sort of campaign style

mobilizations and these mobilizations you know they may not be sort of maoist style mass mobilizations of like getting people to go do the thing but they are massively intrusive they include things like shuttering factories moving millions of people restricting like who can drive on what days like restricting whether or not you can like use like cooking stuff in your house but comma we need to look at how these things actually happen so the the way that these campaigns start basically is for for the large-scale ones you have mobilization that flows basically down the lines of the state right they start from the federal governments and then they go to local governments and regional governments implementation flows basically down the lines of the state, right? They start from the federal governments and then they go to local governments

and regional governments for implementation. You know, for sort of scientific stuff, right? So if you look, if we're, you know, going back to the sort of example of the G20, for, you know, in order to do the scientific coordination for it, you get a very, very broad sort of, broad reaching coalition of coordination

between scientists at universities as well as at research institutes and government agencies and you're pooling them all together in order to produce like i don't know you're like air quality measures right and these efforts also can very rapidly fold in the governments of other provinces so what does it actually mean in terms of how these mobilizations work? What it means is that mobilization is a way of moving around different state and sometimes just kind of pseudo non-state actors like universities or research institutes. It's a way of moving those resources around in such a way that you can accomplish a thing. Now, one of the kind of

defining characteristics of a lot of these, one of the kind of defining characteristics of a lot of these campaigns, and not all of them, like the anti-corruption campaigns, obviously are sort of different, but a lot of these campaigns rely on scientific and technical mobilization, both in the sense of what resources they're moving,

right, you're moving scientists around, but also in terms of public justification. And this is also something that's very different. Like there is ideological justification going on, but in a Maoist high culture revolution period, or even greatly forward period, you're mostly using direct ideological motivation to get people to go do a thing. Here, it's very technical. It's very scientific. It's very technocratic. And one of the products of this, one of the products of sort of how technocratic everything is, is that, and this is something Shen doing and you are not telling them back like anything like you are not negotiating with them you are not in a dialogue you are not submitting comment

uh they are just telling you what to do and this goes from like regular people all the way up to like corporations right like even large corporations a lot of times with these like campaign style things don't get a like negotiated deal or whatever the fuck it just it just sort of happens now you may have noticed in the original one of the original descriptions i was talking about one of the things they have as part of the definition is public mobile is mobilization of like the public but we need to be clear about what that means so that it doesn't get confused with like maoism so when when we say there's mobilization of the public it's stuff like so during the g20 campaign they were like they would the the ccp would like have old people volunteer to like walk around their neighborhoods and like snatch on anyone

who was like using their cooking stove so like that's the kind of mobilization we're talking like these these are not like these are not like red guard tribunals like dragging people out of their houses this is like a 70 year old person incredibly nosy 70 year old going like ha this person's using their cooking stove do you know how you can get a cooking stove that you can actually use uh maybe these products and services i don't know if we're sponsored by cooking stoves but you know we could be there could there could be. There could be a cooking stove, product and service, out there waiting for you.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast

Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.

And we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though.

I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com and we're back now we should also look more at some of the methods of how this stuff happens right so one of the things that's happening as part of this campaign is

part of the part of the plan to reduce pollution is they need is the chinese government wants to move a bunch of people out of, out of the city. Right now, a Maoist style thing would just tell the people to fucking leave. The way that the, the way that the modern Chinese government does this is to send people like basically free travel vouchers. Shannon Ehlers report the value of these vouchers is more than $1.5

billion. So like that's dollars right that's that's like so you know this is this is these are very expensive campaigns but but you know this is the way that the chinese state moves in in in a lot of these cases right when they're trying to move when they need to move a bunch of people they deploy vouchers so some of these campaigns are using even more like technocratic means to get things done so looking back at the article uh campaign style enforcement and regulatory compliance we find examples of what is technically campaign style mobilization

okay quote for instance the central government either waived the loan interest for corporate spending on basically these like desulfurization things to make uh industrial like exhaust not have sulfur in it or cover these expenses using central environmental and central environmental funds in addition an innovative green electricity policy offered a 0.0023 cent price premium per kilowatt hour to power like plants that installed one of these systems so this is like exactly the opposite of how a malice campaign would do this right like they are these factory people are getting like price subsidies and like they're waiving the interest on loans. Now, we've been focusing on campaign style mobilization because those are the most sort

of extraordinary kinds of mobilization, but most policy isn't even implemented by campaign. It's implemented by normal bureaucratic processes. And this is even less Maoist than the sort of campaign style mobilizations. Now, most people, a lot of people who describe China as Maoist are describing their oppressive apparatus, but here they have things exactly backwards, right? Contrary to the government of the socialist period, which was sort of governed by mass mobilizationization the modern chinese government is almost pathologically adverse to anything that even smells like mass popular mobilization and this isn't to say that china doesn't have protests like it does there

are protests in china um but comma like a lot of these you know there there are protests like there are like ecological like nimby protests there are like real estate there's a lot of real estate protests and some of those some of these are allowed there are there are protests that one of the very common forms of protests is against not getting paid by your boss but even at even attempting like and most of these protests aren't like this what just aren't really anti-government right like they're not of like, they're not calling for the downfall of the regime or whatever. They're like pissed off about a corrupt local government. But even attempting to document all of the protests that happened in China in a given year can and has landed people in prison.

So, you know, the state is not super happy about this. And if we look at what happened to mass protests in 2022 they were brutally suppressed and you know the the sort of anti the like the even even things that weren't even really that big but were kind of antecedents of this that attempted to use sort of maoist politics were also unbelievably quickly like stamped out right there was the repression of the student workers movement in late 2010s um the student sort of worker like maoist movements the chinese state does some sort of like limited mobilization online you know in terms of sort of like they have this like pr strategy thing overseas of like wolf warrior diplomacy or whatever it's unbelievably cringe but even then these are not even close to

the kinds of mobilization the state and the party could like nationalist mobilizations they could unleash if they wanted to and this is because instead of working through mass popular mobilization the state isn't maoist and because it's not maoist it works through the bureaucracy policy implementation works by going from the top and then they go down to local governments local governments respond it goes back up to the top again it comes back down the policy gets implemented right like you know when when there are mass like you know mass campaign style things they're not they're not mass mobilizing people they're mobilizing research institutes they're mobilizing like government bureaus they're they're they're shifting bureaucrats and technocrats around. Now, I think there's a lot of reasons for why the Chinese government is sort of like pathologically adverse to anything that even sort of smells like Maoist style politics, right?

One of them is that, you know, these are, we talked about this before, but like these are people who, a lot of people who lived through parts of the Cultural Revolution. They saw really fiascos emerge out of this stuff. people were around for the cultural revolution like these people saw the chinese working class take the city of shanghai 1967 right this is on this is part of the reason why tiananmen rattles them so much because they you know they nearly watched the working class take another chinese city and these people these are people who have a you know and i i think understand this on a more visceral level than most other political leaders understand that if they if they don't correctly manage situations and like stamp up popular mobilization like they could you know the there there are worlds where they fucking wake up they're dragged out of their houses and the chinese working class hangs in from lampposts right that that's a real threat and this is part of why you know they're using something that's something that's called

neoliberalism right the disenchantment of politics they this is this is why the state even when it's doing repression operates through sort of technocratic and bureaucratic means now journalists resort to calling this maoism because they're lazy hacks who are also racist. But, you know, we can see pretty clearly by actually looking at how the state functions that this is not Maoism. Maoism is built on mass popular mobilization. The modern CCP is built on stamping out mass popular mobilization. This has been Nick Could Happen Here.

Yeah, happy linear New Year's, everyone. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers.

Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.