Stuff You Should Know - Is it possible to brainwash someone?

Episode Date: July 7, 2009

Brainwashing is an extreme form of "thought reform," but does it actually work? Tune in to this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com to find out. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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new Mississippi Aquarium, the recently expanded Hattiesburg Zoo, the Tupelo Buffalo Park & Zoo, and sports and literary attractions too. Expand your sense of wander today at visitmississippe.org slash family fun. Mississippi, Wanderers, Welcome. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. I'm about to brainwash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. You can't brainwash me. Yes, I can. You capitalist pig dog. That's not working. Oh, it will. Believe me. I haven't even gotten started, buddy.

I'm so confident in my abilities to brainwash you that I can even tell you how I'm doing it while I'm doing it. You're going to come out on the other end, exactly what I want you to do, which is a chicken. You do seem kind of, you know, confident. Stare into my belly, Chuck. That's not brainwash. That's hypnotized. Hey, have you ever known anybody who's brainwashed? Do you ever know a cult member? No, but why do I have a feeling that you have? I've met cult members before. Of course you have. I have. In your drum circles. They were part of the Kashi yoga cult. Really? Wow. Yeah. Totally nice, harmless people, but they were part of a cult. And they didn't do a Heaven's Gate deal? No. No. Actually, they do quite the opposite. They make

like sandwiches for homeless people and stuff like that. And they don't wear Nikes? No. No, but they wear loosely fitting clothing. Didn't all the Heaven's Gate people wear that one of the Hallmarks? Sure, yeah. Nike tennis shoes. And they were all, all the males were castrated. They were basically asexual. Slick as a kindle down there. Yeah. Wow. Have fun with that. Yeah, but Chuck, you know, there's kind of a hysteria associated with cults. Like, you know, if you're a member of a cult or even tossing that word around, it's kind of blah, but in the 70s, big time. Remember all that? Yeah. The Mooneys, the Unification Church. Yeah, brainwashing was a big deal. Jim Jones' church. I don't remember what he called it. Yeah. And that's Jonestown. Right. Did you

know, though, that what everybody considered brainwashing was just, this is rubbish. Well, what, like torture? No. No. Okay. There's actually a distinction I found out. Well, there's two camps. Right. Well, here's the thing. You've got actual brainwashing, which has been empirically demonstrated to work on a person if it's carried out in conjunction with torture. Right. There's another thing called coercive persuasion. Yes. And that's basically brainwashing without, without torture, which is why everybody, you know, is, that's what they think that, you know, the Mooneys did, or Jim Jones did, or David Koresh did. Yeah, there's usually not violence involved in cults, to be honest. No. No, there's not.

Threat of violence, perhaps. Nor is there brainwashing, or at the very least, it's never been empirically demonstrated that that actually works. Right. I think the willingness of the participants is often overlooked, especially by family members. Right. So basically, what I'm saying is that the whole concept of cult is like these, these brainwashing machines, it's not correct. Brainwashing machines or brainwashing machines? Same thing. Yeah. It's good stuff. Thought reform, Josh. Yeah. But all of this can be traced back, this whole hysteria over brainwashing can be traced back to a British journalist by the name of Edward Hunter. I don't, this is extra research. Look at you. Well, he was mentioned briefly in

the article. Okay. Well, but he was in a fervent anti-communist. He wrote a book called, I think, Brainwashing Techniques of Red China. And it was published in 1953, and he later testified in front of the McCarthy Committee, the Senate Un-American Activities Committee. Yeah, yeah. I don't think it's quite right, but yeah, it's close. I think I got all the words in there. It's not in the right order. And he basically scared the bejesus out of everybody saying that the communists have brainwashing down to a science. They'll do anything they're going to brainwash us all. Not true. Well, no, I mean, it's not like the communists didn't try. And specifically, they tried most actively in Korea during the Korean War, right? Korean and Chinese

captors did this to American soldiers that were POWs. To some varying degrees of success, I think they said that 21 soldiers refused to come back to the United States when they were set free. Right. And there's a little bit of discrepancy because that's 21 out of 20,000 prisoners. Right. So some people say these guys weren't brainwashed. They just, you know, kind of come back. Yeah. Maybe they, you know, dug Korean chicks or something. Yeah, maybe so. Yeah. Or Korean dudes. Or yeah, we're wide open here at Stuff You Should Know. You know, whatever you want to do as long as you're not hurting anybody else, we're cool with that. But yeah, the Korean and Chinese captors of these POWs did in fact have a systematic process of

brainwashing in place and they did it in conjunction with torture. So it could have actually worked. It could have. And I think this article is great. Just let me go ahead and say, Julia Layton has got the goods, bro. She does. She's a great writer. She is. And I love it when we do podcasts on her articles. Yeah. Because they're just chock full of good stuff. Way to go, Layton. And so when I read this article, I thought it all made sense to me when we're going to break it down here in a minute of how you brainwash someone and it all added up. I was like, wow, I could see how that would work. Yeah. Pretty cool. Yeah. So let's talk about it. There was a psychologist named Lifton, right? Robert J. Lifton. Right. And he was the one who started

studying returning POWs from the Korean conflict. And he basically by cobbling together their information and their reports. Yeah. Yeah. He figured out the process of brainwashing as you know, the communists did it. And actually, it wasn't anything new. It's a 20th century phenomenon. It appears. Oh, it is. Yeah. Chairman Mao actually wrote about it as far back as 1929 in his little red book, which wasn't published until 1964. Yeah. What did he call it? Are you ready for this? Yeah, go ahead. He called it C-Juang-Do-Zeng with apologies to Sasu over in QA who tried to teach me that pronunciation. She did. She took a lot of time out of her day for that one. And hopefully I didn't butcher it. Her candy bowl. I sat there and ate candy the whole

time she was helping me. Yeah. So that means fought struggle. Yeah. Which makes sense because what you're doing is you're creating a conflict in the person. That's one way to look at it. But you're also there's a struggle between the person who's being brainwashed, which is called the target, right? Uh-huh. And the person who's doing the brainwashing, which will heretofore be referred to as the agent. Is the agent. Right. Kind of creepy. Agent and target. Yeah. So should we talk about, should we just go ahead and go over the steps of how you do it? Well, let's talk about what brainwashing is based on. It's actually based on real psychology, right? Oh, okay. Called social influence. Yeah. Which is everywhere. It's all around. And there's three different little

zones here. Compliance, which is just do it. Yeah. That's a good way to say it, Josh. And then there's persuasion, which is do it because you feel better, more successful, more, more happy. Do it because it feels good. Do it because it feels good. And then the education method, which is do it because it's the right thing to do. Right. Which is also called the propaganda method, because if you don't, if you don't believe what you're being taught, and we've talked about propaganda. Yeah. Good stuff. Yeah, it was. So basically brainwashing is all of these things combine persuasion, compliance, and education and taken to the nth degree. Right. But it's, it's generally carried out, like I said, in conjunction with torture and using techniques like

sleep deprivation. Yeah. Isolation. Isolation. Sure. You have to be, you can't brainwash someone if they're reading the paper every day. Right. Or if you send them out and say, all right, that's enough for now. You can just go back home and watch Jeopardy. Go to the library for a while, cool your heels. Yeah, it's not going to happen. So you need to isolate somebody. That's the first thing. Yeah. That's the first thing that needs to happen. Okay. So let's talk about it. Basically, there's three main phases in that, that lifting figured out the communists carried out. Can I say them? Do it. It's breaking down the self. Uh-huh. Step one, introducing the possibility of salvation. Part two. Yeah. And rebuilding the self. Part three.

Yeah. And I'm not going to make any comments about my Baptist upbringing in relation to brainwashing. I swear, because I would not want to get listener mail. Yeah, no. You might just from that one, buddy. We won't go there. A day of travel brings a basket full of learning in Mississippi with family friendly places like the Mississippi Aquarium, the Hattiesburg Zoo, and Tupelo Buffalo Park. Explore today at visitmississippi.org slash family fun. Mississippi. Wanderers welcome. Has your household been hit with COVID-19? Learn about a research study from the comfort of home. We are looking at ways to help people with COVID-19 feel better, faster. Learn more at active6study.org slash radio. That's activ6study.org slash radio.

So, Chuck, let's talk about breaking down the self. What's the first step? Well, it's basically just a constant attack. And we're going to talk about this in terms of just for the sake of ease of a military type situation. Like you've got a soldier that you've captured. Yeah. This is the one that's been proven to actually work in. Yes. We're not in a military situation, prisoner of war, torture. So basically that's when it's, you know, you're not defending your freedom. You're not doing anything good. You're not a man. You're not a soldier. It's just a constant verbal assault on the senses, breaking you down. Right. And you're actually saying you're not what you think you are. Like, Chuck, if I wanted to brainwash you, I would start with Chuck.

You are not a hipster. You are not a hipster, Chuck. I am not a hipster, Josh. Exactly. Now we're getting started. Now, what I would also do right now would be to isolate you, as we mentioned. Right. I would probably perform phalanga on you. Which is? What do you think it is? I don't know. I would perform phalanga on you. It sounds like something involving beads and sticks. And oils and stuff. No, actually, it does involve sticks, bamboo canes. It's actually beating the um, soles of the feet with bamboo canes. Yeah. Hurts like you would not believe. I bet. Believe me. I bet you've been caned. Um, and actually also this, this isolation thing, one of my friends told me about, uh, I guess he's found it in like the Kubark manual, which I've yet to see it. Um,

but it's called birthday party. And if you're trying to disorient somebody or break their, their grip on reality, one of the things you could do is, you know, you're, you're assaulting them verbally, you're attacking them. And then all of a sudden in the middle, everybody comes in wearing birthday hats with a cake and you celebrate this guy's birthday and everybody's hanging out, talking, eating cake, you know, kind of fraternizing with the, with the target. And um, then all of a sudden everybody leaves the parties over and then you get back to business of torturing them. And it completely throws them off. Really? Yeah. Because you're, you're assaulting them. And then the next thing they know, you're like, they're celebrating your

birthday and it's not even your birthday. So like you have no idea what's going on any longer. What you're trying to do is disorient the person. Okay. So once you start to become disoriented, you are, you begin to lose your grip on reality. Right. And once that happens, you move in with the guilt, telling him that what they're doing is actually very bad and their mission is bad and they're evil and they've sinned, that kind of thing. Like I would tell you, Chuck, Chuck, Chuck, you are not a hipster and you should feel poorly about the state of your goatee. How long have you worked on this? This is off the cuff, buddy. Yes. No. Okay. So now I'm beginning to slip further into your, uh, the palm of your hand, Josh. Yep. And now

you were going to move in at me with, uh, self betrayal. And that's basically when I need to agree that I'm bad. So I'm starting to lose it to the point where I'm starting to say, yes, I am bad. So you, you, you do feel your, uh, goatee is shoddy. Right. And you would force me to say that and you, uh, may force me to denounce my, my friends and their goatees and my family and their goatees. Right. Yeah. Once you start denouncing things that, that you hold dear, all of a sudden your identities on the brink of crisis, right, which brings us to the breaking point. Right. And that's when you're totally at their whim. Who am I? Where am I? What should I do? Right. And, and you're, you're just completely lost any faith that you've ever had in your goatee.

Yeah. You may be sobbing uncontrollably. You've reached what we would call a nervous breakdown. Exactly. You become unhinged and you have lost your grip on reality, which as Layton put it, your identity is up for grabs. You're, you're literally a man without an identity. You have nothing that you attach yourself to any longer. Right. So now that I'm broken down, dude, that's the breakdown of the self. You have broken me down to the point where I don't even know which way is up that then you come in with a little good cop, bad cop, and you offer a little bit of leniency. Yeah. I might give you some water. Here's some water. I can help you out or you're feeling bad. Even a break in the torture and me saying, I don't want to hurt you or something

like that. Small, small gestures just become amplified in this situation. So now you've offered me sip of your energy drink and Josh, I'm, that's the most kind gesture anyone's ever paid to me. Right. To give me that energy drink. I'm indebted to you for showing mercy on me. Sure. Yeah. Well, you know, that's leniency, Chuck. And it's the first step of the possibility of salvation phase, right? And that leads us into compulsion to confession. Yeah, that's a good one. So what I'm going to do now, Chuck, is tell you that by confessing that you were wrong in wanting to be a hipster or thinking that you were a hipster, right? You were wrong in liking your goatee. Right. You can stop feeling the psychological and physical pain. Sure.

Right. You can stop feeling this guilt and the shame that I've cultivated in you. I have a razor right over here. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to do a shave. Right. So, which leads us to the channeling of guilt. Right. So you've got this guilt and the shame that I've created. And you, by this point, you, and because you've entered the nervous breakdown phase, you have no idea what you're really feeling guilty or shameful about. There's no meaning behind it, but you feel it constantly and overwhelmingly, right? So I'm now going to give you that, that way to get rid of your guilt. Right. You attach it to something, which is your old belief system, my old belief system, which is my goatee and my hipster presence. Right. Now,

I'm actually thinking, you know what, that is where, why I'm at where I'm at today was because that goatee and me thinking I'm a hipster. Right. And in your family's goatees and all that stuff. That's the problem, Josh. Sure. Now here is a razor and Chuck, it's time for the releasing of guilt. You shave your goatee. Well, cause you tell me, it's not, it's not my fault, essentially. It's like, it's not you, Chuck. It's, it's your belief set. Right. Hey, who's doing the brainwashing here? Maybe I'm doing a reverse brainwash twist. No, you're not. Okay. Okay. So Chuck, you're going to denounce your goatee. You're going to denounce your hipster past in your family. You have to actually say it. This is how you can gain control of your life

again. I hate my goatee. It's a stupid thing on my face and I don't know why I grew it to begin with because it's not, it's, it's not even a quarter of a beard. I feel like an idiot for having this goatee. Chuck is stupid music I listened to and those dumb tattoos. I know. I know. It's okay. Okay. It's all right. We've reached the end of the possibility of salvation and now Chuck, we've actually entered salvation. We've entered the rebuilding of the self phase. Okay. You are broken down. You're nothing now. And now it's time for me to build you back up into what I want you to be, which is a preppy. Okay. Okay. So Chuck, I want you to say now that you've consciously abandoned your old belief system. Yes. That you realize that this new

belief system being a preppy is the greatest thing on the planet. It's what you're meant to do. Well, Josh, it is what I was meant to do because being a preppy is clearly the style and fashion sense that I've always craved. Yeah, right. I just had no idea. And Chuck, because that this is what you're supposed to be, you really didn't betray anybody else. Right. In your old belief system and by denouncing your family because that was wrong all along. Okay. Do you promise? I do promise Chuck. Okay. Now here, Chuck, I want you to take this Argyle sweater. You know, don't put it on. Okay. Don't put it on. I want you to drape the arms over your shoulders. Can I rub my face on it? In a minute, Chuck. Okay. I want you to take the cuffs of the sweater

and roll them together so that now you have this sweater over your shoulders and it won't fall off because the sleeves are attached now. Are you trying to make me a preppy or are you trying to send me back in time to 1984? Chuck, I'm in control here. Okay. Sorry. You've been isolated for months. You're just grateful I have an Argyle sweater for you. I am. Thank you for the sweater. It warms my chest. All right. So Chuck, are you consciously choosing this new belief system, preppydom? I do choose preppydom. Are you prepared to eat an alligator? I am prepared to eat an alligator. Do you want penny loafers more than you've ever wanted anything in your life? With pennies in them. We'll get you pennies later. But first, do you want these penny loafers? I want

the penny loafers, Josh. Chuck, you are reborn. You are now a preppy. I have broken you down from a hipster and rebuilt you into a preppy and you're better off because of it. Wow. Where did my gut go? Yeah. You look good, Chuck. My face is all fat. No, it looks good. I mean, we'll work on that a little bit short, but we got to get you tanned first. Nice little bit of role playing there, Josh. Yeah. So it all makes sense to me. When you look at those steps, you break someone down and then you offer them a grain of bread, you know, a morsel, and then you gain their trust, and then you rebuild them. And when you look at these cults and not the prison of war in this case, but when you go to the cults and some of these people that may be involved, they may be

to that breakdown stage, you know, already. Yeah. I want to actually hate this. This is like, if I could cut parts of my brain out, I would cut this memory out. What'd you do? I went to a weekend long new age convention and dude, it was rough. I was walking around just like, you people will buy into anything. And it wasn't that it wasn't like I just scoffed at their beliefs or, you know, the people who are peddling these beliefs. I just thought it was sad that these people were walking around looking for anything to attach themselves to anything that they could define themselves with and were completely abandoning any thought of creating their own identity. Right. They had to attach it to something else. And it's clearly it's not just new age people.

You can make the case that it's anybody who uses something as a crutch, whether it's, you know, church or whatever, right? Sure. But yeah, this one particularly stuck out in my head, this new age convention. So apparently, and check, this is why I could never actually brainwash you. It works better on some people than on others. Right. People have a weak sense of identity, which you definitely do not. If you have a tendency to be guilty or feel guilty, which you definitely do not. And absolutism, black and white thinking, which and self doubt and self doubt. Yeah, you've got none of those. Dude, no one could brainwash me. I know you, you, you get a thick skull.

Not, not you, not anyone here. Watch this razor. I definitely tend toward guilt and slash your face. Ow. Ow. I just committed violence. Yeah, you did, Chuck. So Josh, you can't, uh, they can't study brainwashing clearly. They can't actually perform this in a laboratory on someone because that would be wrong. Right. But thanks to lifting, we have this, we know how it works. And actually soldiers are still to this day trained to, yeah, how to recognize the steps in brainwashing, which immediately takes away most of the power of the brainwasher. Right. And also how to detach themselves from the situation. Yeah, I would think in meditative techniques and things like that. Just me personally, if I was in the Korean

war, let's say back then, and I had a Korean captor yelling at me and probably broken English, breaking me down, I would, I don't, I mean, I guess when there's torture involved, this is a different story, but I would be like, dude, you're not brainwashing me with that accent. Are you kidding? Right. No. And I wouldn't concentrate on the poorly conjugated verbs and things like that. Yeah. Well, that's what one of the techniques to avoid it is they teach you to focus on, on certain details and things like that or details of home and to not buy into all this stuff. Yeah. And they said people who, who believe in a higher power, apparently, are much harder to brainwash, which strikes me as that rod. It's been said that a day of traveling

will bring a basket full of learning. Fill your basket to the brim in Mississippi with family friendly experiences like the new Mississippi Aquarium, the recently expanded Hattiesburg Zoo, the Tupelo Buffalo Park and Zoo, and sports and literary attractions too. Expand your sense of wander today at visitmississipi.org slash family fun. Mississippi Wanderers, welcome. COVID-19 research has come a long way, but there's still more to understand about how to treat COVID-19 effectively. The active six study is researching existing medications to find out if they may help people with COVID feel better and give back to the things they love faster. The best part, it can all be done from the comfort of home. We'll send medications

to your door and you'll take surveys completely online. Learn more at activesixstudy.org slash radio. That's A-C-T-I-V-6 study.org slash radio. Yeah. So I've got another thing for you. You ready? I'm ready. Menticide. No idea. Another word for brainwashing. Oh, is it? Yeah. Interesting. Isn't that? What's the root there? Mint. It's minty, fresh, aside. It's good. I guess mental mentality. It's the breakdown of the person's identity or belief system, which, you know, is lodged tamperly in this little campground in your brain. Right. And so the aside part, you know, is murder. Brainwashing, you took a lot out of me, Chuck. Did it? I'm sorry, you look like you're whipped like, you look like you're whipped like a lead-boyed Malvo.

Let's hear it. Well, there's just a couple of famous incidences of brainwashing. One was Patty Hearst in the 70s when she was, the famous Hearst family was kidnapped by the Symbianese Liberation Army. Yeah. And she claimed to be brainwashed when she was robbing banks and they used that in her defense and she actually was convicted. She was in 76. Yes. Her sentence was commuted by Carter. She was pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 79. And then cast by John Waters in many films. Yeah, that's right. Wasn't she? Yeah, she's in a few movies. I forgot about that. You know who one of her greatest proponents was? Who's that? John Wayne. Really? Oh yeah. And actually, that's one of the reasons why her

sentence was commuted by Carter was because John Wayne was such a vocal advocate on her behalf and because of the Jonestown tragedy. Wow. After that happened, people were like, oh, wow, brainwashing really does exist. Although the courts have always been skeptical of it. Yeah. My name's John Wayne. John Wayne. Named after John Wayne. Did you know that? Your name's Charles W. Bryant. Wayne. I always figured you were named after Wayne Coyne. Yeah, the flaming lips. Yeah. No, that wouldn't have worked out time wise. Weird. Well, let's talk about lead-boyed Malvo. Yes. He famously, as you remember, was a part of the sniper shootings that happened. Yeah, in 2002. 2002. In DC.

And he was just a young kid in Antigua when he was plucked away by John Allen Muhammad. And he was brainwashed, or at least that's what his attorneys speculate. Right. And that didn't get him off either. He got like in prison without the possibility of parole. Yes. As far as the courts are concerned, it's a little dubious. It is, actually. And it was that whole coercive persuasion I was talking about earlier. Yeah. The idea that brainwashing can work without violence or the threat of violence. Right. That all kind of went away in 1990 in a case called USV Fishman. Let's hear it. There was a guy who was being convicted of male fraud and he entered an insanity plea saying that he had been brainwashed by the Church of Scientology.

And it didn't work. And that was pretty much the end of the idea of coercive persuasion. Interesting. We're going to get people asking us now to do one on Scientology, I guarantee it. No, I'm not doing it. Heck no. Nope. We've got to wait for anonymous to break them down a little more before we step in. Right. Travolta and the crews will show up at our door with baseball bats. There's no telling what would happen to us. Yeah, I don't want to do that. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it. That's actually probably the last time we'll ever mention Scientology, too. Yes. Let's do Listener Mail and pretend we never did this. Okay. Josh, I'm going to call these Listener Mails. Okay. This first one is from Ben Bollin's buddy,

our friend here, Ben, that works here. Yeah. Who is the one that turned us onto the Esperanto deal. Apparently, Tim, his friend, turned him onto Esperanto. Yeah. And Tim says, thanks for your mentioning of Esperanto. I was happy you mentioned Lernu as well. He says he's a long time friend of Ben and he introduced him to it, although I'm sure he would have run across it eventually in his own explorations. I love that. Ben does like exploring. He does. And he plugged our podcast. We're going to plug right back. He has a website. He's actually the vice-pres of Esperanto USA. Yeah. Which I thought was pretty cool. Yeah. So the name of his website is Esperanto-usa.org. And go check it out. I think it's kind of cool. Yeah. I think it's cool too. Ben said,

I talked to Ben this morning. He said that he can read Esperanto, but can't really speak it. Really? So I was like, that's a disappointment. He's such a cool guy. He is. All right. And this next one is from Rick in Woodstock. And I don't know if this is Woodstock in New York or Georgia. Let's go with New York. I got the impression Georgia. Oh, really? Yeah. What do I know? So he's got an innovation to tag onto our three innovations. That was pretty cool. A DNA specific killer virus. So basically, he says, get our boys into Pentagon to hook up with the fellows from the CDC. You engineer a virus which is highly contagious, airborne, and bioengineered to only target one person on earth. So he... The unluckiest person on earth. Yeah. Well,

he said Osama bin Laden. Like if we get some of his DNA, make a virus that would only kill him, release it to the masses in the Middle East. It'll be contagious. It'll get around to him eventually and kill only him. I don't generally advocate killing, but that is a fascinating concept. Pretty interesting. He's like, you know, what if he could have taken out Hitler with no bloodshed, essentially, or bin Laden? So I thought it was kind of interesting. He said that it still has one or two kinks, but so does teleportation. So touche to you, Rick. One or two may be a bit glib. Yeah. I also want to give a shout out about the innovations podcast to Dylan, who emailed us, and I engaged in a very spirited debate over whether or not teleportation was a

good thing right now. It was good. It was very intelligent. He raised some really good points. Debate, and I was in trouble. Yeah. That's right. Now, you guys, it was good. That was a very well thought out answer. Yeah, I smacked him down pretty hard. No, it was in good spirit. That was nice. Agreed. So if you want to engage in a spirited debate with Chuck or me, not me, just Josh. It's probably not going to happen, actually. You can send us a come on to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you for food lovers?

There's no place on earth like Mississippi where sweet, spicy and smoky flavors satisfy your spirits wherever you wander planned today. Visit Mississippi.org slash dining Mississippi. Wanderers welcome in 1980. Cocaine was captivating and corrupting Miami. The car tells they just killed everybody that was home setting an aspiring private investigator on a collision course with corruption and multiple murders. The detective agency would turn out to be a front for a drug pilot would claim he did it all for this CIA. I'm Lauren Brad Pacheco. Join me for murder in Miami. Talk about walking into the devil's den. Listen to murder in Miami on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.