HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you guys on, what's it called, Twatch?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh Threads?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Threads, yeah. And Twatch.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. I haven't decided if I'm gonna do it but I don't think I will.
MARCUS PARKS
In an interesting synchronicity, Threads which debuted today-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Threads debuted today, of course it's the whole Instagram thing. Threads is also the name of a movie in which nuclear bombs destroy England.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's about the consequences of nuclear warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that is actually just as destructive as social media.
BEN KISSEL
Synchronicity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And let's hope that's the farthest it goes.
BEN KISSEL
Well I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Threads. That's a good synchronicity. You know what's also strange? Three days ago, July 3, 1947 is the anniversary of the Roswell incident.
BEN KISSEL
How is that a synchronicity with the Manhattan Project?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying you'll see.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna get into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'll see.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. All right.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I want to talk about the real problem of the Manhattan Project.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We've been talking a lot about sloughing, people have been really upset about us besmirching the good name and the good works the United States of America did during WWII and then we kind of ruined it with dropping a bunch of atomic bombs, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well I got a bunch of DMs being like good sloughing talk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to Sloughing Talk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Talk amongst yourselves. Why don't you melt amongst yourselves?
BEN KISSEL
Oh no!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I realized one of the real true demons of the Manhattan Project is that there was, this is true, one of the offshoots of the research within the Manhattan Project was the creation of Glitter.
BEN KISSEL
Gary Glitter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His namesake. Glitter was created as a way to hold the plutonium or it was an idea that we could help like stabilize plutonium inside of the bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But instead they just liked how it looked and they sprinkled it on a bunch of shit.
BEN KISSEL
Well I mean how much nicer would Nagasaki and Hiroshima looked with a little bit of glitter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see, Glamatomic bomb. We got glam it up.
BEN KISSEL
Glam it up!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Glamatomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Also now it's Skinny Boy and it is Non-Binary Individual.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is really what the LGBTQ community is looking for is more representation within giant destructive bombs.
BEN KISSEL
Yep. Sorry guys, Halliburton's not gay anymore. It's no longer Pride Month. Okay everyone, welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left. Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. Holy hell, what a slog it's been.
MARCUS PARKS
Slog? It's not been a slog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He doesn't understand it's history, it's flights of fancy.
BEN KISSEL
You guys are the ones who are always like I'm so tired. I'm so tired. And I'm like well don't do all the work then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unbelievable.
BEN KISSEL
Come on! Okay everyone-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. So we just said two months of work-
MARCUS PARKS
Two months.
BEN KISSEL
Two months of work. Two months.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's just on this show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just with yelling and talking on the show.
BEN KISSEL
Two months. Two months. Two months. Okay, Manhattan Project part 6. And is this the final one or is this gonna be a Nightmare on Elm Street or are we going-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is called The Project Takes Manhattan.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, great. This is Friday The 13th perhaps.
MARCUS PARKS
So when we last left our story, Japan had surrounded to the United States, much of the relief of at least those in Japan who were slowly starving to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
However there were some ultranationalist fanatics in the military who didn't actually believe that the emperor would ever surrender, much like the soldiers who spent years and in some cases decades fighting private wars against nobody in particular.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait a second, are you talking about me?
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is interesting because you can kind of see where Supernova in the East talks a lot about kind of the build up of this like really intense war fever inside of Japan and the adherence to the emperor and the belief of his sort of like deity-like status. You could see though how events like this that took place shows some proof that the Japanese were on some levels not quote unquote "ready" to surrender ever. They never would be.
MARCUS PARKS
Some.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's kind of like why they got their really intense reputation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There's people still fighting the war today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which ones?
BEN KISSEL
Well you would have to go there and ask them what's going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think mostly they're into Coca-Cola products.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've seen that, giant robots. They love their mecha.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Ramune is a very tasty soda.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's got a little ball in it.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something? Do you like it better than Irn-Bru?
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely not.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
There's nothing I love more than Irn-Bru except for the possibility of Lemon Lime Solo which I think may have been a fever dream because nobody seems to know what the fuck I'm talking about. I had a can of it in a fucking airport in Australia and I have never heard of it again. It's incredible and yet gone forever.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just went to the same universe where David Grush went to pull out those objects from the other. That's the other Marcus.
BEN KISSEL
Oh wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Had that Lemon Lime Solo.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, he's loving life.
MARCUS PARKS
Well indeed the ultra nationalists on the mainland were so deeply fanatic that the only explanation for a general surrender that they could possibly accept was that the man who'd given the address over the radio had been an Allied impostor.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Conspiracy theories can happen anywhere and everywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Well there's no way someone would do a voice interpretation over the radio.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you can't do it.
BEN KISSEL
An impressionist?
MARCUS PARKS
Now this wasn't quite as ridiculous as you might think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me, is Ray Romano here?
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, please don't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is Ray Romano on the show?
BEN KISSEL
No, nope, that was not an intro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's me, Johnny Carson.
BEN KISSEL
That's not even close.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Johnny Carson. Like a glove!
BEN KISSEL
Don't even know what that is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll put that in a basket.
BEN KISSEL
It's an amalgamation of all of your past trauma.
MARCUS PARKS
Well imitation wasn't really an issue because the radio address given by Emperor Hirohito was the first time that the Japanese population had ever heard his voice.
BEN KISSEL
No kidding?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, it's me, not Ray Romano, Emperor Hirohito to say time for everybody to go to sleep! Sleepy time!
BEN KISSEL
Wait, is that the emperor? That's the guy who we think is a god?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean this was kind of like hearing the voice of god. It was highly jarring for most of Japan. But it also gave plenty of room for allegations of disinformation. Furthermore, most of Japan had no idea of the full extent of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one did.
MARCUS PARKS
No one did. So the idea that there was a super weapon laying in wait to raze the rest of their country, this was not on the forefront of most people's minds.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it also makes sense because at the end of the emperor's address, he was like and don't forget your tactical bath, you're gonna want to buy a tactical bath. And for the patriots out there, we've got patriot popcorn. And yeah, don't worry, we've separated the caramel from the cheddar. And oh my god, the plain popcorn, we call that the Jewish popcorn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Totally separated as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Once he got into merch-
BEN KISSEL
It was impressive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did not know that Hirohito was gonna move so much t-shirts, water bottles.
MARCUS PARKS
Cuckcorn.
BEN KISSEL
Cuckcorn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cuckcorn.
BEN KISSEL
Cuckcorn!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, that's good. That's why you gotta write for InfoWars.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Somebody does.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a result, because there were many people in the military who did not believe the Emperor Hirohito would ever surrender, 32 young Japanese officers stormed the emperor's palace in Tokyo claiming that the man on the radio couldn't have been the real Hirohito because Hirohito would never surrender. In their zeal, these officers killed a commanding general and set fire to the home of the Prime Minister before filling it with bullets from a machine gun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody kill this house!
BEN KISSEL
Yep. And one of the strangest things is one of the guys that stormed the building there, he actually played Jimmy Pesto on Bob's Burgers. Bob's Burgers.
MARCUS PARKS
Bob's Burgers. What was the point of that Bob's Burgers reference.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's making a January 6th reference.
BEN KISSEL
The guy who played Jimmy Pesto stormed the Capitol.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I know him best as the Herky Jerky Man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Herky Jerky Man.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, that's even weirder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The audience can't see.
BEN KISSEL
He should have done that when he stormed the Capitol.
MARCUS PARKS
Entertainment for everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right. Well by the end of this highly misguided misadventure, six Japanese guards were dead and all 32 insurgents had been killed. The overreaction to the surrender however wasn't yet at an end. Around the same time as the attack on the emperor's palace, a group of ultranationalists were part of a secret society called the Black Dragon Society.
BEN KISSEL
That's cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They also made two unsuccessful attempts at assassinating the Prime Minister.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they were kind of like, weren't they sort of a Japan supremacy group? Like isn't that in that world?
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. Because they had a massive, that's why we got to here is that they identified with the nationalist streak of the Nazi party.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well it's ultra nationalist, there's a reason why they put the ultra at the beginning of nationalist because this is far beyond anything that you might see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I just thought it left your engine cleaner.
BEN KISSEL
Well absolutely. And it could. I've also been drinking a lot of Michelob Ultra.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? That's keeping his engine cleaner. I haven't heard a rumble from his engine in quite a period to be like, honestly his farts are completely silent. And I want to thank Michelob Ultra for that.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you very much.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the next day after that double assassination attempt, 10 young men calling themselves the Sanjo Gigun seized a hill within sight of the American embassy and they then killed themselves by setting five grenades off simultaneously.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Excuse me, Emperor Hirohito. I just gotta let you know, I know you're in the middle of like very long breakfast but a couple of guys that we don't really care about just ruined a hill.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I mean what's the point of this?
MARCUS PARKS
Well now they're starting to change a little bit now.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now they're starting to accept that Hirohito has indeed surrendered. So now the shame is setting in on the Japanese military.
BEN KISSEL
So they're blowing themselves up on hills now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
When General Douglas MacArthur arrived in Japan with a corncob pipe hanging from his lips-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
32 members of various ultra nationalist secret societies disemboweled themselves in the act of hara-kiri.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(metal guitar riff)
BEN KISSEL
Oh Jesus. A hello would have done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fucking sweet, dude. Just being like they love me! He just shows up, guts just shooting out of them like it's a fucking New Year's Eve party favor. It's like yeah, wow! Gut bust, dude!
BEN KISSEL
Like seriously Pamela, can you tell me, is it me? People keep on committing suicide as soon as they see me. Is it me?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think it's you and the entire US military industrial complex behind you.
BEN KISSEL
It's still a little baby though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Well there was great meaning to General Douglas MacArthur setting foot on Japanese soil. This was the first time in Japan's 1200 year history that an invading force had ever made it through.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
MARCUS PARKS
The first time. And these guys, I mean they were stabbing themselves in the stomach in public out of shame that they had allowed the defeat to occur.
BEN KISSEL
Did they do that to you when you showed up with Carolina?
MARCUS PARKS
What?
BEN KISSEL
Did they start stabbing themselves as soon as they saw you at all? When you went to Japan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they welcomed him with open arms. They love tourism.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely not. We were actually revered when we got there because-
BEN KISSEL
Revered.
MARCUS PARKS
Revered, yes.
BEN KISSEL
You were revered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. A guy came and he was just like oh my god, oh my god. Cause they thought he was K. D. Lang.
MARCUS PARKS
The Japanese love K. D. Lang. They love K. D. Lang.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, absolutely. No, it was weird. We were pointed at as like funny Americans. Like look at the tall Americans.
BEN KISSEL
So they were making fun of you and then in your mind in order not to commit suicide, you were revered.
MARCUS PARKS
Revered.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's called the comedian's mind. I take the laughter at me, I flip it to with me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. Revered.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But while the mood around Japan was grim to say the least-
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Cities and towns across America erupted in celebration on the day that victory was declared over Japan, known thence forth as V-J Day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, that's when all everyone was Charlestoning.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everybody had a balloon and then obviously they had a pop it because again, air is for the soldiers.
BEN KISSEL
That's true, that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were out there. Hoo, man, that party. So much white casserole.
MARCUS PARKS
In New York City, 2 million people huddled into Times Square.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
One veteran described the celebration as ten New Year's Eves all rolled into one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you even believe it? It was just, I couldn't even...
BEN KISSEL
Well honestly the way that the war aged the people, it kinda was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And by the next morning, the sidewalks in the garment district were five inches deep with scraps of fabric-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
That had been thrown as an impromptu ticker tape celebration.
BEN KISSEL
Yay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't say we don't know how to party.
BEN KISSEL
Here's some fabric!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Woo!
MARCUS PARKS
This however was one of the celebrations that went well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
MARCUS PARKS
The one that's been fondly remembered for nearly a century.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Usually this scene is what's shown at the end of most World War II documentaries-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
As an example of innocent American jubilance and romanticism.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah! Oh yeah, we let Rosie the Riveter put her dress back on.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We went right back to it. And it was awesome. It was a great day, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But over on the west coast, the celebrations turned dark.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
In San Francisco, V-J Day celebrations quickly devolved into a 72 hour riot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
The deadliest in the city's history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Has it never stopped?
BEN KISSEL
I guess it's still going today.
MARCUS PARKS
For three days straight, a riot crew made up of 90% soldiers and sailors held the city hostage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
And by the end of it, 1000 people were injured, at least 6 but probably dozens of women had been raped, and an even 100 were dead.
BEN KISSEL
They should not have booked Limp Bizkit for that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, exactly.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They needed water, they needed Port-a-Potties.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this was like the one like good day we had. Before everything was like-
MARCUS PARKS
What are you talking about the one good day we had?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean in terms of like after WWII-
BEN KISSEL
As far as a nation and they ruined it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. San Francisco ruined it with the three days of mayhem.
BEN KISSEL
But why did they riot?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I don't actually get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's how we party.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean why do people riot after a fucking Super Bowl victory? Why do they riot-
BEN KISSEL
Well because it's very rare when the fucking Packers make it to the Super Bowl, that if they do win... No, actually in Wisconsin they just eat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well think of it this way. This is a Super Bowl riot, a fucking Stanley Cup riot times 1000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
It's that same energy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why though?
BEN KISSEL
So it probably started off with jubilee and then... Okay, we'll get into it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well let's get into it.
BEN KISSEL
Let's get into it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the San Francisco V-J Day riots began on Market Street-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Where thousands of drunken soldiers and sailors jammed and gridlocked the streets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I know that whole area. You can see, you can imagine it jammed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's beautiful now.
MARCUS PARKS
The police meanwhile have been told to quote "let the people do anything within reason".
BEN KISSEL
It's the exact same as now as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That leeway of course was San Francisco's fatal mistake. Soon soldiers and sailors were climbing onto the roofs of jammed streetcars-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Where drunken marines clumsily tried to reenact the famous flag raising photo from Iwo Jima.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So far, that's fun.
BEN KISSEL
That's kinda fun, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's good old fashioned fun.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's fun, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But once the revelers got a little taste of chaos, it was off to the races for the greatest generation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just need to be able to dye their hair.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They need more outlets.
BEN KISSEL
Was there hair dye then?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just got done killing a bunch of people. You figure they don't get it out of their system.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely. They did not just finish killing a bunch of people and that's part of the point, we'll get to that here in a second.
BEN KISSEL
These may have been the scallywags that didn't do anything at all.
MARCUS PARKS
The soldiers and sailors began setting fires, smashing windows, overturning cars, and according to witnesses, gang raping women. As one reporter put it, you couldn't stop the crowd with anything short of tear gas and fire hoses. And yet the city of San Francisco did little to stop the mayhem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they could have tried the tear gas and the fire hoses. Once the gang rape starts, I feel like then we can move on to other methods of stopping the crowd.
BEN KISSEL
I just don't think that we're even celebrating the victory anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no.
BEN KISSEL
I mean and that's true when it comes to the Super Bowl. After two hours post Super Bowl, they forgot why they're partying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Now the idea is that it's some expression of a group rage that has been embedded within a community-
BEN KISSEL
It's scary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they are unleashing it for some reason.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean this is... No, this is not-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm talking about Super Bowl.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh right, right, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like Philly does every year no matter what happens.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they're upset.
MARCUS PARKS
No, this isn't a rage thing. This is a little more complicated than that. Now as opposed to the guys and dolls in New York who had been fighting in the European theater for years, those are the guys who had spent years killing people-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's why that was a nice celebration because those guys had basically just seen a bunch of horrible shit and now they're just like... That one woman says she wasn't really kissed with her consent, it's in the famous picture.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know that guy was fine at it at the time.
MARCUS PARKS
The majority of the soldiers and sailors rioting in San Francisco had never seen combat. These boys were draftees waiting to be sent to the Pacific where they'd been told that they would most likely be entering into a years long hellscape battling the quote unquote "savage Japanese" on their home turf. Furthermore, it was being said over and over and over again in the press that at least a million combat troops would be killed taking the Japanese homeland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Feel like that should be kind of a sense of relief then.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that's the thing.
BEN KISSEL
I'd be happy I didn't go, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean, okay, let's put it this way. Thankfully for my family's honor, my Papaw, he was in camp on V-J Day over in California.
BEN KISSEL
No one's indicting your family here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, we're not covering for your family.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's just to say-
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
He did not participate in the riots. But from what he told me, he was to put it lightly a bit worried about going up against the Japanese.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As anybody would be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't wanna go to war. Nevermind a world war, I don't wanna go to a localized war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't wanna go to a city-based war. You know what, because what is war good for?
MARCUS PARKS
Nothing!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Except for helping the economy.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this is of course no excuse for the behavior of the servicemen in San Francisco but it does give you a glimpse into just how relieved America was following the use of the atomic bomb and how grateful they were to have such a weapon. An incredible tension had been broken. But it had not been broken with a prolonged Navy blockade or a diplomatic solution as it should have been, it was broken by a big fucking bang, two big bangs in fact, the likes of which the world had never seen. And I think that may have had a little bit of influence on the behavior of the soldiers and sailors in San Francisco.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There is definitely a sense that we showed our gigantic cock and balls to the world when we set off two atomic bombs in a wartime scenario. And I think that they could see that as sort of they got swept into it.
MARCUS PARKS
And there is also something to be said, I mean a lot of these guys were Marines, they were sailors. There is something to be said for training these guys to kill, kill, kill, kill for months and months and months at a time. And then all of a sudden you're not gonna be killing anymore, instead you don't have to do anything but you still have that instinct within you to kill, kill, kill, violence, violence, violence.
BEN KISSEL
Right. You know what you gotta do?
MARCUS PARKS
And that's just how it was expressed.
BEN KISSEL
1940s America, I don't know if you guys are aware of this, a lot of wild hogs. You gotta take these folks down to Texas and get them on that wild hog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I agree!
BEN KISSEL
You gotta have them killing all them hogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have them fight the hogs.
MARCUS PARKS
Ben, I'm sorry, I gotta drop a little bit of Texas knowledge on you.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
MARCUS PARKS
The wild hogs did not come until much later.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
MARCUS PARKS
The wild hog problem didn't really come until the 90s when actual hogs, when actual pigs started getting turned out into the population, they started breeding with boars and then shit got out of hand. So wild hogs were nowhere near as pervasive back in the 40s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? You fucking idiot.
BEN KISSEL
Well, well who knows? Either way what I'm saying is they should have directed their anger towards something that deserved it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I do feel like when you keep saying wild hogs coming to Texas, it does sound like a big fat man version of the Hawaiian Tropic girls-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just going around, just having men rub them with lard and shit. Just like being like yeah, that's tan, I like them shiny.
BEN KISSEL
I love the Hawaiian hogs.
MARCUS PARKS
Come to Abilene, Texas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You better watch out! You better cover them soup canteens cause the wild hogs run in, you can't keep a bowl empty.
MARCUS PARKS
We got the wild hogs at midnight rodeo from Friday to Sunday!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You can't even see their dicks!
BEN KISSEL
That's great. What time does it start?
MARCUS PARKS
Now once the rioters in San Francisco got all tuckered out on the first day, the violence died down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's when Norah Jones was doing her set.
BEN KISSEL
Oh very fantastic. I saw her at Willie Nelson's 90th birthday party and she had a fantastic song with Chris Kristofferson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Really great.
MARCUS PARKS
Do you remember which song?
BEN KISSEL
They sang the same one twice, Chris doesn't really know how to sing anymore. But he is indeed the greatest generation.
MARCUS PARKS
He was after the greatest generation.
BEN KISSEL
Wasn't he the greatest gen?
MARCUS PARKS
He was Vietnam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was Vietnam.
BEN KISSEL
Vietnam! Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Top Navy brass however, even after the first day of rioting, they did not cancel leave. They did not admonish their men. Instead they politely requested that the sailors and soldiers return to their ships. Guys, come back, guys. They basically gave them a 'guys'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guys.
BEN KISSEL
Come on, guys, let's go 69 back in the vessel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, guys.
MARCUS PARKS
The guys didn't of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, they didn't. I toured one of those fucking submarines on the wharf there in San Francisco. I don't know how any of them aren't gay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's where my father-
BEN KISSEL
Because there was no room. I would be so fucking scared on that thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like the one thing that keeps you truly from being gay in a submarine is the smell.
MARCUS PARKS
The sex smell?
BEN KISSEL
I think who cares at this point.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like everybody, the food is bad enough. The idea of a submariner's dick going in and out of your mouth I feel like on some level is unpleasant.
BEN KISSEL
Who knows?
MARCUS PARKS
And the dried come.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The dried come flaking everywhere.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it's definitely still everywhere. People are jerking off, they're young boys!
MARCUS PARKS
That's true, that's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The psoriasis just in general. But according to my father, he said they were they didn't get gay until they surfaced.
MARCUS PARKS
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
Well they wanna do it for show.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the riots continued for another two days, more women were raped, far more people of both genders were seriously injured, and 100 people died either as a consequence of the chaos or in trying to stop it. They're killing cops.
BEN KISSEL
What the hell?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You guys, just remember this is about the war being over.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, this is a horrible way to celebrate San Fran, come on!
MARCUS PARKS
And this is the so-called greatest generation as well.
BEN KISSEL
I know, you continue to dig.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And Tom Brokaw.
MARCUS PARKS
Because those assholes spent so many fucking years looking down on every generation after them. Oh we did so great, oh we were so honorable, oh we did this, oh we did that.
BEN KISSEL
You have so much weird anger.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He does.
BEN KISSEL
I feel nothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know what's funny is that again, we did this last week when he got real hardcore on it, I like seeing hot take Marcus.
BEN KISSEL
No, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like feeling this heat because I just view us all as the same fucking... I don't think time is real. You know? And that's my main issue is that we're even talking about this, I don't think any of this even technically happened. I think this was in another earth and we're actually diverted into another timeline somewhere around 1947 and it doesn't even matter looking back on these people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's a good way to handle the past by just pretending it never happened.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just kind of just coast on that.
MARCUS PARKS
And you're misunderstanding my anger. It's actually less about the condescension.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's bitterness, it's bitterness.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not bitterness, not at all. It's about historical accuracy. It's about actually looking at the history of America with open eyes and actually seeing what actually happened in this country throughout its fucking entirety without sucking the dicks of anybody-
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
That don't deserve their dicks to be sucked!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will say in terms of a satanist point of view, it was good that the greatest generation did these horrible things to make us on top. That is kind of the idea, right? We can thank them for our lovely Apple computer, we can thank them-
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if we can thank the people for the-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look at shoe culture.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. Those shoes are really green.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know why you're taking your clothes off. They are green shoes. Not the people in San Francisco, we'll exclude them, we'll do a carve out. We'll do a greatest generation carve out. If you're in San Francisco at this time, you're not part of it, and you're dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're on the bad list.
BEN KISSEL
You're dead. Because I do believe there's one left. There's one greater generation person left.
MARCUS PARKS
I think there's more than one WWII-
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. No, there's one that they can talk to.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, one guy who doesn't just go blah, blah, blah. Yeah, there's one guy but you don't want to really hear what he has to say.
BEN KISSEL
No. For the most part we know that they're still alive but from the other side, because they're still getting arrested for war crimes.
MARCUS PARKS
But in the end, no one was charged with murder in the San Francisco riots. No one was really charged with anything of consequence, at worst they were thrown in the drunk tank. And as a result, the deadly riot quietly slipped into the dustbin of history in favor of a feel good picture of a handsome sailor kissing a pretty gal amidst a moment of jubilation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I really thought we were gonna have one pleasant moment in this show.
BEN KISSEL
I mean the one in New York was nice because then you go down to McSorley's, you have your, what is it, white or red?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
McSorley's is extremely overrated.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my hot take.
BEN KISSEL
No, it wasn't-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wanna talk about my true hot take?
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's my hot take.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And I'm gonna say that moment in New York, I did give you that. That was a nice moment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you. Sweet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Hot dogs, get your hot dogs here!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like I was there.
BEN KISSEL
Everyone's happy, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while America was celebrating the end of a four year war, rightfully so for those who didn't behave like those in San Francisco, there were plenty of good ones-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's good.
MARCUS PARKS
Out there in America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
MARCUS PARKS
The horrors of Hiroshima and now Nagasaki-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh god. Right back to it. Right fucking back to it.
BEN KISSEL
But you know the strangest thing is as soon as they dropped the bomb, they played this clip from a guy named Urkel. And it just said did I do that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he said did I do that?
MARCUS PARKS
Did I do that? Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Those horrors were getting exponentially worse. Hundreds of crows filled the sky-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus fucking hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It became Halloweentown.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't know Jack Skellington was there.
BEN KISSEL
Hundreds of crows. Man, I do love a good crow. They're so smart. They give you treats if you feed them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Guess what, man? They weren't getting any treats in fucking Hiroshima.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Hundreds of crows filled the skies above both cities, occasionally landing to pick the flesh-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(snorting) Sorry.
BEN KISSEL
We have to get through it. We have to get through this.
MARCUS PARKS
It's real, this is real. This is absolutely real.
BEN KISSEL
This is real. So from the streets of San Francisco-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I got my Rice-A-Roni on one side-
BEN KISSEL
Bring a flower in your hair and maybe a shank.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Let's try one more time.
BEN KISSEL
And now here we go. Crows eating human flesh.
MARCUS PARKS
Hundreds of crows-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Filled the skies above both cities, occasionally landing to pick the flesh from the radioactive dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord. Get the lead out or whatever.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. These crows are gonna end up being radioactive.
MARCUS PARKS
They were.
BEN KISSEL
Oh.
MARCUS PARKS
And so to prevent animals from treating their countrymen as carrion and possibly just to do something, the survivors began to gather the corpses for mass cremations across both cities. Oil was poured on corpse piles that were described as mountainous, then set on fire. But because of the nature of the injuries sustained was so poorly understood, people inside the funeral pyre who had merely been unconscious came crawling out of the pile-
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
When they found themselves set on fire.
BEN KISSEL
Hey guys, I'm actually fine! I'm fine!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what? Actually I'll just stay.
BEN KISSEL
I seriously might.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At this point, oh crows are eating the radiated dead?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just throw some kerosene. Yeah, add some kerosene, please.
BEN KISSEL
Please just get it done with faster.
MARCUS PARKS
Some actually had enough in them to run out. So there's these gigantic mountains of corpses and there's people-
BEN KISSEL
Just on fire.
MARCUS PARKS
And there's people on fire running around them. It's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like this new Burning Man. You get it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cancelable.
BEN KISSEL
I don't-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I'll say.
BEN KISSEL
Cancelable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cancelable.
BEN KISSEL
Oh no.
MARCUS PARKS
In other parts of the city, the bodies were stacked in a manner so haphazard that identifying them became impossible. In one case, two men argued over an unrecognizably scorched body laying between their houses because both of them claimed that the corpse was that of their wife.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. Are we still talking about San Francisco?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god. This is like the worst version of the 'take my wife please' thing I've ever heard.
BEN KISSEL
That is bad. That is bad. That is... Man.
MARCUS PARKS
Others found only traces of family members, something as small as a ring, which became the only way to identify a blackened corpse, or in some cases a pile of ashes. In another case, a woman identified the eyeless corpse of her mother by the gold tooth in her mouth which had been left wide open by the scream she'd let loose as she died. But as far as the dead went-
BEN KISSEL
I'm surprised the gold didn't melt truly.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well she actually probably had been killed in the firestorm afterwards.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See?
BEN KISSEL
Gotchu.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See? Almost.
MARCUS PARKS
You almost-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You almost let one thing kinda just lie there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he just said actually what you were gonna say, it was actually much worse.
BEN KISSEL
The firestorm afterwards.
MARCUS PARKS
It's actually a lot worse, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But as far as the dead went within the radius of the most extreme radioactive exposure, they were the lucky ones. Burn wounds on the most badly exposed stubbornly refused to heal and began to decay while the victim was still alive, attracting insects that usually waited until the victim had died. As one childhood memory went, a boy was attempting to take care of the burns on his mother's hands, legs and back, in addition to a cracked skull. Like so many others, her burns wouldn't heal. But when the skin dried and peeled off, the boy saw why. His mother's flesh underneath her skin was infested with maggots that swarmed from underneath. Once the skin peeled off though, flies soon joined the maggots. They covered the exposed wounds in such number that the child found himself in the endless task of gently picking them off one by one so as to cause the least amount of pain to his mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you know that Tim Allen turned down the pilot of Turner & Hooch-
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Dead Poets Society. They were gonna make that like literally television shows.
BEN KISSEL
Thank god.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he turned that down to make fucking Home Improvement.
BEN KISSEL
Oh well he actually chose right with Home Improvement. Turner & Hooch, underrated Tom Hanks classic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well it's a dog, it's a cop.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's fantastic and of course that's Hooch.
MARCUS PARKS
But from what the boy later said, his mother never really complained about the pain or the obvious itch.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The ultimate martyr move.
BEN KISSEL
Itch? Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly it does feel like what my mom would do, be like oh don't worry about me, there's nothing wrong. Oh yes, the bugs of the dead have been attracted to a living being, yeah. But don't even think about taking care of me.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You go live your life.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Instead all she would say was 'I'd like to eat a peach' over and over and over again.
BEN KISSEL
Do we have any peaches?
MARCUS PARKS
Actually one of the relatives did travel and she found a peach eventually.
BEN KISSEL
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
But this went on for a month before this woman finally died.
BEN KISSEL
Oh mama.
MARCUS PARKS
However it's probable that this woman didn't just die from her wounds or from infection. Most likely she joined the ranks of short-lived survivors who died horrible deaths in the weeks and months after the initial blast by way of radiation sickness. Now in 1950, a Japanese survey estimated that a combined 368,259 people had survived the atomic blast. 18 had survived both. These survivors came to be known by the derogatory term of hibakusha, meaning survivor or exposed one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Derogatory term?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, why is that bad?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like that means you made it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it was derogatory in its context. If one was a hibakusha, they would live as pariahs in Japanese society for the rest of their lives because many people in the rest of the country erroneously believed that radiation exposure and therefore radiation sickness could be contagious.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
And lifelong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did not know that. That's very, very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
These people were believed by some to be permanently radioactive and as a result they couldn't get jobs and they were forbidden from marrying into certain families. In the Hiroshima: In Their Own Words documentary a guy talks about it, how you know he would hide it from everybody, he would hide his scars. He met a nice girl and then the family found out, they started asking questions.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
where are you from? And eventually he had to say Hiroshima. And the second he said Hiroshima, they said exposed one, get out of here, you can't marry our daughter. And that happened again and again and again to these people for their entire lives.
BEN KISSEL
That sucks. That sucks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It also sounds like an internalized... It does. And it does sound like it's an internalized thing of the shame involved in quote unquote "losing the war".
MARCUS PARKS
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And kind of we brought this amongst ourselves. There is that vibe, right, because the people would take the failures of the government unto them themselves.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they identified so hard with their own culture.
MARCUS PARKS
Nationalists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As they would. So it's like it is interesting to see that where just even the the compartmentalized shame-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Within their communities to deny the memory, to get away from the memory.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We could use a little bit more shame in this culture but not that much. Not that much.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need like a dollop of shame.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But we need it in different places.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
We have too much shame on sex, we need to take that off. Just spread that around to other places.
BEN KISSEL
Spread that around.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Back onto violence.
BEN KISSEL
The lying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And politicians again, they should be shamed every month to remember. They should be paraded out in diapers, chained ankle to ankle, just so we can tell them, remember, this is your place, you're a bunch of little servants that are supposed to do what we tell you to do.
BEN KISSEL
Rotten food. You throw the rotten food at them. Classic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They should be scared of us.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, we should rename Congressman shit kids.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That would be incredible.
BEN KISSEL
Shit kids. There we go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Also a great band.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, absolutely. Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Shit Kids. Well in addition to fearing the exposed ones for false reasons, there was the very real fact that any of these people could suddenly drop dead from all manner of cancers. And as we'll cover later, any of them could be taken off their jobs at a moment's notice to be studied by Americans who found the aftereffects of the nuclear bomb to be absolutely fascinating.
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fascinating. Well because we'll get into all the granular details there. It's thick. It's very complex.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they didn't get any superpowers. It seems like it was really bad.
MARCUS PARKS
Nope, no Incredible Hulks here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
No. Or Ant-Man or a whole bunch of other stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now as far as the dead went, recent estimates put the final death toll at a far higher number than what was touted by General Leslie Groves in the immediate aftermath of the bombings. It was estimated that 140,000 people were dead by the end of 1945 and within five years, 200,000 were dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that bomb gives you extra for your buck.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, more bang for your buck indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
When it came to Hiroshima, 54% of their population had died as a result of the Little Boy bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also remember the estimates are based off the concept that they thought that these bombs were just gonna kill everybody clean.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they were just gonna show up, it was gonna explode everybody, they were all gonna burst into dust and we wouldn't even have to clean anything up. We would just go and see this cleared land and be so happy that we did it. And we'd just have the number, we'd just say like that's it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well eventually we did develop that though. It's called the neutron bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow!
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, there ain't nothing we can't do.
BEN KISSEL
That's right, Johnny Neutron.
MARCUS PARKS
In the days and weeks after the bombing, 71% of Hiroshima's population and 69% of Nagasaki-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nice.
BEN KISSEL
No, Henry.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
This is not that kind of 69, this is bad 69.
MARCUS PARKS
69% of Nagasaki and 71% of Hiroshima experienced to some degree what was first called atom bomb illness but soon came to be known as radiation sickness. To put into perspective just how much radiation was created by Little Boy and Fat Man, the nuclear incident at Chernobyl created a radiation exposure that peaked at 500 rads.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that actually converts to 1500 groovys.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, that is crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
And 3000 radicals.
BEN KISSEL
Indeed. That is a big bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually that's what rads is short for is radicals.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
BEN KISSEL
That's fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Groovys is just when you try to talk to hip guys.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, groove indeed. I've heard it's in the heart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is, it's actually a serious condition for a lot of people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I know.
MARCUS PARKS
By comparison, the in air doses of gamma rays from the uranium bomb at ground zero in Hiroshima, that was over 10,000 rads.
BEN KISSEL
I mean you're just saying numbers here, buddy. I don't know how to quantify that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a lot of gunk.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
A lot of gunk?
MARCUS PARKS
Okay. Think about how deadly Chernobyl was. Like they talk about the elephant foot, they talk about how dangerous Chernobyl was. That's 500.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Hiroshima, that's 10,000.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a much larger number.
BEN KISSEL
It's a larger number.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's bigger, it's more groovys than the last one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Worst thing about having an elephant foot is it never forgets.
MARCUS PARKS
Forgets.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never forgets.
MARCUS PARKS
Never forgets.
BEN KISSEL
It always remembers the horrors of Chernobyl.
MARCUS PARKS
But what would a foot need to forget?
BEN KISSEL
Oh, just where to go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. If I was a foot I wouldn't wanna remember every single time I stepped on dog poop.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, forget it. That's gone.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Nagasaki was even worse, that was 25,100 rads.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking-
BEN KISSEL
It's a higher number than the ones before.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost not groovy at all.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. All the science people are just mad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Mad at us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no, it just means it's a lot.
BEN KISSEL
It's a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
Each rad increases the chances of radiation sickness and increases how bad it's gonna get. And I'm about to get into the worst of how bad it gets. As a result, cases of serious radiation sickness reached three miles from ground zero. Now those who didn't die in the blast or soon after the blast seemed to improve in the days afterwards, giving the doctors a little bit of hope that maybe the worst was over. But within a week, radiation sickness began to take hold as those who were severely exposed began to fall apart from the inside out.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh, I don't like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they really thought that it would take a long time to die from radiation exposure.
MARCUS PARKS
The Manhattan Project scientists, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. They thought that-
BEN KISSEL
Why would they think that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because every other example we've had of radiation exposure showed someone that you got basically little bits at a time and they thought that eventually you would kind of grow, you get sick. You got Madame Curie, right.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Was an example of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Died at 64.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Died at 64.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But younger than she should have. But the idea is she still like had a life. And they kind of thought that it would hold true no matter what, that you kind of would get these things. They were wrong.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. We'll see what happens in Florida. They're paving the highways now with radioactive materials, so we'll see what happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God. Another reason to not go.
BEN KISSEL
Well I mean everyone's gonna be dead soon.
MARCUS PARKS
Well radiation sickness usually began with hair falling out in large clumps, bleeding from the mouth, gums, throat, rectum, and urinary tracts soon followed. You're literally bleeding out of your dick.
BEN KISSEL
Oh gosh.
MARCUS PARKS
And that was in addition to nausea and loss of appetite. Then came-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I could see the loss of appetite.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean just because the mirror.
BEN KISSEL
Just the whole thing is pretty not appetizing, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Then came the bloody vomit and diarrhea as the victim's body began to seriously hemorrhage. So terrified were people of radiation sickness that many survivors woke up every morning and they tugged on their hair to see if they were the next to die of a condition that was at the time barely understood but greatly feared. As we now know, radiation sickness affects the body by causing rapid cell division. But the radiation itself temporarily suppresses the action. It's delayed. And once that wears off, internal tissues and organs rapidly begin to collapse into an unrecognizable bloody mess.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's like what the machine from The Fly does but it does it like inside of your body over and over again.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you gotta make sure no fly sneaks in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
The radiation causes massive tissue death, massive hemorrhage, and massive infection. This caused one doctor to compare the radiation death sicknesses to the Black Death of the 1300s in terms of the sheer number of deaths and the carnage that came with them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got a really good email this morning as I was researching that I thought was real. This guy, he was great, but he was basically saying imagine just the spookiness of radioactive material in general. It is rocks that come from the earth that glow, they literally glow in dark. And they dissemble any sort of matter that is in a circle around it. And so imagine that vaporized, just like spread across all this stuff. And all it does is turn everything into fucking soup.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like it.
MARCUS PARKS
When autopsies were performed on victims in Nagasaki, doctors found upon opening the bodies that the internal veins had been torn to shreds. And as far as the organs went, they were so badly destroyed that they had begun to decay even before the victim had themselves died. The organs died first.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
God.
BEN KISSEL
You don't want that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Quiet quitting.
BEN KISSEL
You want to time it. Yeah, that's what happened. It was millennials! The organs were made of millennials!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you heard millennials have ruined having an internal organs business? Another casualty of millennial culture.
BEN KISSEL
We're the greatest generation.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a result, when the bodies were cremated they gave off a strange smell. Most assumed that it was because of the radiation. But as those experienced in cremation pointed out at the time, it was in fact because the bodies being burned were simultaneously in two different stages of decay.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See a lot of times what I found is that if you don't know what that flavor is, it's fish sauce.
BEN KISSEL
Could be. That's common, that is common. But I don't know if that really the case here. I'm surprised they actually went the burning route. I don't know what the safest way is to dispose of a-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is technically still the safest way, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it is?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's the safest way. And it's also the only way, I mean they're not gonna dig.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
There's no other way to get rid of these bodies. And they also know that the more bodies you have, the more disease you have.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
If you have a bunch of bodies, you gotta get rid of them fast.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, buddy. Every Sunday. I know. I got a bunch of bodies, oh goddamnit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of nice because that's kind of me and Kissel's bonding time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When I can go, I help him with his pyramid of bodies.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Obviously because I can't ask questions about that-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can ask questions about him.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can get to know him more.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I find out stuff like he loves the color orange.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
I don't hate it. Green is my favorite color but orange is fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then I was just like is this a fucking look alike of your mother?
BEN KISSEL
Oh I would never do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's just a stack of them.
BEN KISSEL
I just want her near me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Full of holes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
By the 8 week mark though, deaths by acute radiation poisoning began to cease, although the long-term effects carried on for decades. Leukemia cases began two years after and peaked at eight years after. But every survivor had a far higher chance than the average person of all manner of cancers for the rest of their lives.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually, my conspiracy theory little thought in my own head is I thought that maybe that they thought that these diseases would... Because they thought they were long term things that would slowly come about. So I figured in my mind that maybe they thought well once they start-
MARCUS PARKS
The Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The Manhattan Project people guys, that like at some point we'll start to see this information come out but it'll be decades after the fact when they'll have written all these exposes, we won't have to deal with it til later on. We'll all be dead by the time they're talking about the actual like repercussions of these bombings. But it turned out it was day three.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now as far as what the people behind the Manhattan Project knew about the possible side effects of the bomb, the dangers of radiation in at least a lab setting had been well documented since the 1920s. As we said, Marie Curie, like they knew that her journals were still radioactive, her cookbooks-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they can make you sick. They'll make you sick, being around them makes you sick.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If you're around them for a long time or if you're exposed, like Marie Curie died many years later because of how many X-rays she was exposed to during WWI.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also got some good thing on the radium. You know it's still not good to just be touching radium.
MARCUS PARKS
No but you gotta ingest it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you shouldn't do any of it. I would say let radium-
BEN KISSEL
None of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Use a glove.
MARCUS PARKS
Use a glove. In the Manhattan Project itself, all laboratories monitored radiation exposure constantly and they had precise handling procedures for nuclear material to prevent long term exposure, like Marie Curie. Nobody however had seen what acute radiation poisoning might do to a large population.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like what if we turn it into a purified gas that just goes into you? Because also radiation just goes through all of your cells, like it doesn't have to go, like especially in that form, it's just everywhere and it just zips right through your body back and forth as the wind blows it back and forth.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And that's the thing, the wind carries radiation everywhere. That's why after Chernobyl there were so many cases of cancer in a vast large radius.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Huge circle.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's what the biggest danger of a nuclear meltdown actually is, is that it's not the immediate surrounding area-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's everywhere else.
MARCUS PARKS
It's where the wind takes the radioactivity.
BEN KISSEL
You want to get some big fans, put them around you, have them facing out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. To the White House!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy, it's kind of crazy because Robert Oppenheimer, even he said after all of this, he made a little like... When the bomb drops and there was all that obviously celebrating for a couple of days and then everyone's like what did we just do? Robert Oppenheimer said that he thought that theoretically his statement that the radiation would have basically not have made it to the ground.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He thought that it would have dissipated before it got to everybody. And he was also wrong.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, he was.
BEN KISSEL
It's called fallout for a reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or he was purposefully lying.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well I think they called it fallout after the fact.
BEN KISSEL
It falls.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the scientists of the Manhattan Project, I think they were certainly smart enough to speculate. The problem was that their scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think that they should.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
You can't handle the truth!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Life finds a way.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god, Jeff Goldblum!
MARCUS PARKS
Rawr.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Rawr. I could be anybody.
BEN KISSEL
You really are super talented. Jurassic Park, you're gonna wanna check out that movie. That's a good one. That came out in '92.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
94.
BEN KISSEL
94. So that's a good one. That's only almost 20 years ago.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's only 8 years old. It's only 8-10 years old.
MARCUS PARKS
Actually that's far more than 20 years ago, that's 30 years ago.
BEN KISSEL
30 years ago. Fucking shit. God dang.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by late August 1945, about three weeks after the bomb dropped, international media outlets began picking up stories from the Japanese press about a mysterious and deadly illness that had no doubt been caused by the bombs. General Leslie Groves however went into damage control mode immediately and dismissed the stories as Japanese propaganda meant to garner sympathy.
BEN KISSEL
See? That's all you gotta do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all you gotta do.
BEN KISSEL
No. How about not?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not. But General Leslie Groves, I think in many ways it's also personal because Robert Oppenheimer also went in hard right afterwards to say like we're trying to kind of validate, figure these things out. I think General Leslie Groves in many ways, yes, he was trying to save his ass and he was trying to save like the view of the Manhattan Project to history. But I also think that there was a great sense of guilt from what I was reading about him.
MARCUS PARKS
And denial.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he did not, they did not know that when you literally use the building blocks of the universe itself that it might not be good. It might be a Pandora's box.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe they allowed themselves to be willfully ignorant on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Because they had to know something was gonna go wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They just thought maybe just big explosion.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well Groves said the only reason why the death toll kept rising was because they were finding more bodies.
BEN KISSEL
Well that makes sense. And technically Leslie, that doesn't make it better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
It doesn't.
MARCUS PARKS
But that was happening during the rescue efforts.
BEN KISSEL
I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that those bodies shouldn't count and there should only be one day of counting bodies.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. What if we named one of the bombs Mulligan?
MARCUS PARKS
Now Groves willfully ignored what he was being told about what was happening in both cities because soldiers showed up in Nagasaki pretty soon after the bomb dropped. And that's the thing-
BEN KISSEL
US soldiers?
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Probably not safe for them either to be honest.
MARCUS PARKS
Well but that also tells you how little they understood it.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Because they're sending US soldiers in there to check it out. If they thought it was that dangerous, they wouldn't have done that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's why I do think that there is a level of ignorance about what the fuck they just did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think that they just did not fully appreciate that we're gonna melt people here.
MARCUS PARKS
No, they didn't think about it hard enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They only thought about the bomb-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They tried to end the war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They only thought about making the bomb or they're trying to fucking beat the Germans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they're only thinking about making the bomb, all the problems about dropping the bomb, they're not putting any thought into what the bomb's actually gonna do afterwards.
BEN KISSEL
That's the thing with scientists, man. Very focused. But if you get them off track, it's just like what are you even talking about?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very scary and it turns out a lot of their stuff, because that's the problem is once you get them off track, you find out everything they're doing-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's gonna like irrevocably change history, it's gonna make a bunch of people turn into like sock puppets and shit.
BEN KISSEL
It's not good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you're like why don't we stop talking? Why don't we just stop? I don't wanna know anymore.
BEN KISSEL
Try to pivot but there's nothing to pivot to.
MARCUS PARKS
Well furthermore General Leslie Groves became even more aware of the consequences of acute radiation poisoning after an incident that occurred on American soil with a little something called the demon core.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there was nothing cute about it.
BEN KISSEL
No. Well it's called the demon core, I don't think it sounds very cute.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See I like the demon core because I think the demon core-
BEN KISSEL
They would hang you upside down and just play your butthole like it was a goddamn cornhole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, no. The demon cop is misunderstood.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know I they... Demon core. I've been playing Diablo IV, dude. I know what these fucking demons can do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nah, man.
BEN KISSEL
If you don't upgrade, they will kill you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The demon core was just honestly being blamed for being itself.
MARCUS PARKS
Now if you'll remember from episode five, Little Boy and Fat Man were the only two atomic bombs in existence when they dropped. So Los Alamos was hard at work on a third just in case America wanted to drop another on Japan. And that's a hard want, that's not a need.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, because they just said, I forget what the the bill was that Truman said basically right after they bombed, they were trying to figure out well how do we stop this? Blah, blah, blah. And Truman's like no, Manhattan Project continues as it was before. So we're just keeping pumping shit out.
MARCUS PARKS
The plutonium core for bomb number three however soon developed a reputation for injuring or killing the people who worked on it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see? It was supposed to be a bomb and it was supposed to live this life and have this fun thing and it never got to.
BEN KISSEL
Right. It's really sad. The story of the bomb that never was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's Rudy of the atomic bombs.
BEN KISSEL
Aw yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this is his one shot, he finally got in the game a little bit but just... Yeah, he killed two scientists but that's his version of playing the one play for the Notre Dame.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in the first of two serious accidents, a scientist was performing experiments on the core when he mishandled a component.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, it sounds so fucking frightening.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because again, it's also real loose too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because the core, that's one of those things I had to like figure out how to wrap my brain around because I couldn't really understand when they talk about piles and cores and like what does this even mean?
MARCUS PARKS
Bricks.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And bricks.
MARCUS PARKS
Because he dropped a brick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And then I realized oh it's just that.
MARCUS PARKS
Piles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just a pile. Like they put it like in a metal circle, like the plutonium in a metal circle, and then they build these bricks of stuff around it that are supposed to make all the neutrons within it bounce around, where you basically make it like an oven with the plutonium in the center of it. But I just didn't understand. I thought it would be way more technical than that. But it's literally just like a brick made out of extremely technical metals that he's put together.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But all you have to do is fucking whoopsie and things go fucking critical.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You don't want your last words to be ga-ga-ga-goi!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ga-ga-ga-goi! That is gonna be my last words.
BEN KISSEL
Oh isn't that something?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll be coming in my pants.
MARCUS PARKS
I think my last words are going to be po!
BEN KISSEL
That's not a word.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kissel, no!
BEN KISSEL
No, he'll be begging me. Kill me, please kill me now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Like I can't, man. I'll go to jail, dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the component fell into the core, caused a chain reaction, and bathed the scientist in radiation.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good.
MARCUS PARKS
The scientist lived in the immediate but died decades later of leukemia. Now that's not too bad but a second scientist exposed a year later, he would not be so lucky.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
They gotta tighten up the strings here. You gotta make sure, stop dropping all this stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
His nickname was like Flathead.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, he'll do it.
MARCUS PARKS
His nickname was Flathead and that was deserved. He had that nickname for a reason. Now presumably since a third nuclear bomb hadn't been necessary, this plutonium core remained an experimental object because there were bigger and better bombs on the horizon. So the demon core kept changing hands as the experiments continued. And almost a year after Hiroshima, a scientist named Louis Slotin, who'd been working on the core, was in the process of handing over responsibility to another scientist.
BEN KISSEL
Demons can do a lot but you know what? When I think of catching a football or holding onto atomic energy materials, they drop stuff. Cause their hands are actually not good for grip, I mean they're good for gripping. But I think demons also get distracted very easily.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, you're hung up on the demons.
MARCUS PARKS
I think of the demon Etrigan and he wielded a sword many a time to great effect.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I was a demon. I literally played a demon for fucking years on a television show. I had hands.
BEN KISSEL
Well I know that. Then I know that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah but didn't you drop stuff all the time?
BEN KISSEL
You would drop stuff all the time and you were pissed on in a urinal.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because I was a goofy character, it was like a funny character. Like a Homer Simpson-like idiot.
BEN KISSEL
You were also distracted by a big pair of tits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always. Yeah because I was looking down-
BEN KISSEL
So if you were holding a brick of toxic materials... Very good. But then you'd be like oh I'm supposed to be doing this and then you'd see tits, you're gonna drop it cause you're a demon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but there's no tits here, it's scientists at this time. There were not a lot of tits in science.
BEN KISSEL
We don't know that.
MARCUS PARKS
And if I remember from Pretty Face, most of the demons were not too bright.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No and all of them were just ugly men.
BEN KISSEL
So point proven actually.
MARCUS PARKS
Now for the whole time Slotin had been performing experiments on the demon core, he'd arrogantly used a flathead screwdriver during a step that required absolute precision.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy's a fucking asshole.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he's an asshole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because what he did was, you remember in Tommy Boy when he gets mad at the woman? Because they find out at the end of the movie where-
BEN KISSEL
Don't spoil it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well she says that she doesn't keep a filing cabinet and she just does her own specific way. That's this guy in hell. Where he just was like no, I do it this way, where it was two halves of noncritical material or precritical material-
MARCUS PARKS
Precritical, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That he would layer between each other and before they could completely seal, right, because they'd have to be together and the two halves would have to seal to create a critical reaction. He just stuck a fucking screwdriver inbetween.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then that's what he'd use. And they'd all be like hey Louis, you have this nickname for some fucking reason but please don't do this anymore. And he's like I know what I'm doing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well and to be fair to her, she was sabotaged by that man having sex with his mother.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know, I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Slotin, he wore cowboy boots and blue jeans in the laboratory.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he did things a little different around here.
MARCUS PARKS
He saw himself as a bit of a maverick.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And I think he used the screwdriver as some sort of affectation to separate himself from all these fucking nerds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But as it went, nerds like Enrico Fermi were warning him that if he continued using a flathead screwdriver during a complicated nuclear experiment, he'd be dead within a year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Also or you're gonna blow up whatever fucking city this thing's in the center of.
BEN KISSEL
That wouldn't be good. This is where you need to respect the nerd. You are in the nerdland.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
You're not on the ranch where you think you might have an upper hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yeah, I'm not looking for the best chicken wing.
BEN KISSEL
No, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm asking for nuclear experiment advice.
BEN KISSEL
This is where the nerd shines.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Richard Feynman said the technique was quote "tickling the dragon's tail" because one slip up could set off a nuclear chain reaction that would literally blow up in Slotin's face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it would ruin a chunk of America.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You know that the dragons breathe fire. Do they fart fire?
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think so.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't think so, no.
MARCUS PARKS
I think there's some sort of gland in their throat.
BEN KISSEL
Is it glandular?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a gland. According to Dungeons & Dragons, it's a gland.
BEN KISSEL
It is a gland.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a gland, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay great, good to know.
MARCUS PARKS
Well predictably that's exactly what happened right at the end of Slotin's time with the demon core. As he was showing his replacement how the experiment was done, Slotin's screwdriver slipped a fraction of an inch which set off the nuclear chain reaction that he'd been warned against for ever so long.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can you imagine that you do that? Because then the half slap, it just starts glowing.
BEN KISSEL
Oh man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like this thing just starts blowing up with blue light.
BEN KISSEL
Lunch time! It turns out we gotta go.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't slow, it was a poof. Like it was a big flash.
BEN KISSEL
Shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then he had to like knock it off the top. He literally had to use his bare hand to flip the fucking thing off the top of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's kinda what they were creating in Happy Death Day 2.
MARCUS PARKS
A little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A little bit, yes.
BEN KISSEL
If you had a chance to watch that. Which I love that movie, I love both of those.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It bathed Slotin with a lethal dose of 1000 rads of gamma radiation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow! Far out!
BEN KISSEL
Wow! And that was the invention of hypercolor, fantastic shirts from the 90s.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If you had tits and you were a man, they let you know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh wow. The sad literally upside down number 3 I created with one of those thermocolor shirts.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With my little boy tits. Like ruined that shirt for me.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I never thought of that.
BEN KISSEL
That was one of the flaws in the plan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh it was.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was for delicious women's breasts.
BEN KISSEL
I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Not for a little fat boy's breasts.
BEN KISSEL
It was marketed to boys though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it was. And the shitty thing was that the replacement also got just a little bit of the radiation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Not a whole lot but he got a little bit. But Slotin died nine days later with his guts turned into a slurry of blood and decayed tissue like so many in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they don't know. They said that at this time this was the only real evidence they had of acute radiation poisoning.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it wasn't until after the bombs had already been dropped. And then they're like oh wow. Oh we didn't know it does this fucking shit.
BEN KISSEL
I mean technically he kind of donated his life to science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He did.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's what he said, that comment, his last word, well the words in the laboratory he did it, he's like well that's done. That's literally like what he said at the end of it.
BEN KISSEL
Those are actually good last words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's also scary too, right. Because you don't feel anything at first, you know now you're dead.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like you're dead, dead, dead.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you don't know until days later and it ain't pretty.
BEN KISSEL
I would try to jump on walls to see if I could stick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You do. It's because of the sloughing.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's not a good reason to stick.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Leslie Groves, he knew the details of the demon core incident because he was still in charge of the Manhattan Project.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We still haven't said on the demon core that even though it was told it couldn't be a bomb, it could still kill people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And Leslie Groves was maintaining a year after the bombings that from what doctors told him, radiation sickness was a quote "pleasant" way to die.
BEN KISSEL
Well compared to what, being Gaddafi? Having a gun shoved up your ass? So I guess it's nicer than that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The only thing I will say it's like mostly more pleasant than is like have you ever been in a scenario when your head has been kind of like lodged in a sort of like a desert scenario, like a kind of crevasse, like between two rocks. And then your butthole, because maybe you have been gaped or you're on vacation.
BEN KISSEL
Sure. That's what you do on vacation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Your wife says we're here at our favorite river spot, I peg you here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And we all know this is what happens and then let's just she left a bunch of honey in there.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And a bunch of ants all crawled up inside and then they were living in inside of you and then they were slowly but surely eating their way out from esophagus, like out through your mouth.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's definitely more pleasant than that.
MARCUS PARKS
Now naturally the horrific deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't something that the United States government wanted to be public knowledge because it destroyed the moral high ground that we've been flaunting since the end of the war. And especially since the end of the European theater. But what we understood at the time too is that I guess we're abandoning the moral high ground and we are just showing the world that we can blow you the fuck up.
BEN KISSEL
Well I mean this is a different time for America. I think they were teaching newborns how to smoke because they thought it was gonna be really good for lung growth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was. For a while.
BEN KISSEL
We didn't know a lot of stuff back then.
MARCUS PARKS
Well at this time we had respect. But eventually we wanted respect and fear. And that's the thing is that once Hiroshima came out, once all this came out, respect went away and all we were left with was fear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
And isn't that what Jason Voorhees has been looking for this entire time?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This whole time.
MARCUS PARKS
See it was one thing to have a weapon that made a big boom to scare the Soviets, the international community, they could wrap their heads around that. But it was something else altogether to create a full blown hell on earth in two highly populated cities, enemies or not. So Leslie Groves deflected any conversation about the aftereffects of the bombings by emphasizing the bad shit Japan had done during the war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is real and totally viable.
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely real. Like yeah, Unit 731, the Rape of Nanking.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Pearl Harbor, everything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did a lot of fucked up shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And that's the thing, Leslie Groves for America focused on Pearl Harbor, he focused on the innocent civilians that have been killed in the process. Speaking to the New York Times, Groves said that if Japan didn't like the way we ended the war, they should remember who started it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, there you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And there is that little bit, there's a tiny bit. But again, if it had just stopped at Hiroshima.
MARCUS PARKS
But no, they never would have dropped it at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying-
BEN KISSEL
I would go with no droppy. But then someone's gonna droppy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not saying that it was good, I'm just saying what I said last episode, I can wrap my head around the one. It's the follow up that changed really the entire vibe of the room.
BEN KISSEL
I think that's just because they named it Fat Man and you're offended.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, because I'm both. I'm Fat Man and Little Boy.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that I can't wrap my head around Hiroshima because they knew for a fact that they didn't need to drop it and they knew that they were killing tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of civilians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They wanted to, Marcus. No, they wanted to. Crazy.
BEN KISSEL
Well let's just say they should have done some things different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, Kissel.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Hot take from Kissel.
BEN KISSEL
Very brave stance.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Brave. Do things different.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Complicated.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the American government had put General Douglas MacArthur in charge of overseeing the American occupation of Japan. And MacArthur was given the directive that he could exercise his authority as he deemed proper to carry out his mission.
BEN KISSEL
That's good, you want to give generals just unbelievable amounts of power for them to do anything they want.
MARCUS PARKS
Thankfully, MacArthur mostly ruled fairly and without cruelty.
BEN KISSEL
Oh good.
MARCUS PARKS
He actually instituted a lot of good things. He gave women the right to vote, he changed up their whole government. He kind of tried to make Japan like a mini America. But I mean the ultimate motive was to turn Japan into an American ally against the Soviets in the upcoming Cold War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it worked!
MARCUS PARKS
And it worked.
BEN KISSEL
It definitely worked.
MARCUS PARKS
But there were some solid consequences. But no matter the motivation, MacArthur's men for the most part treated the Japanese with respect. They briefed them on Japanese courtesy, they briefed them on language, geography, culture. This became an actually successful hearts and minds mission, to the point where Japanese children became enamored by American troops who gave them candy, they taught them simple English words like hello and thank you and all that type of shit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's like when you get kidnapped and sometimes they're nice to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, that's the idea.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. It's like wow, today I'm not getting completely destroyed. So thanks for the Salisbury steak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's called marriage.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that is.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though many of these interactions with American troops were pleasant, the speed at which America was rebuilding Japan resulted in serious infractions that any culture would find distasteful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, because now you're getting a taste of our true American ingenuity.
MARCUS PARKS
Ingenuity, our stick to-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stick-to-itiveness.
BEN KISSEL
Stick-to-itiveness?
MARCUS PARKS
Not even stick-to-itiveness, I guess a little bit of our gumption.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we're good!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh gumption.
MARCUS PARKS
Needing to build an airfield in Nagasaki in an area nicknamed Atomic Field, soldiers used bulldozers to clear the ruins. Those ruins however were still filled with thousands of dead bodies and skeletons. In their rush to build the field, the bulldozer operators treated the bones of the dead the same as the sand, soil, and rubble. That mixture was used in broken roads in Nagasaki which are presumably still in use today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And I think that's a good metaphor for marriage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Why?
MARCUS PARKS
Because in order to build something new, you gotta just bulldoze through all the bad shit of the past and just build something on top of it.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Turn it into a slurry you can build on top.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But then you also just see what seems to be seashells in the walls that is the memories of the fights for the past.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Much as you see in Edinburgh because half of their walls are just fucking human bones.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that's only if you obsess on things. That's what it is, that you don't want to obsess on the small things in the past, you just want to look at the good things that you built.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a nice wall.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what you say instead of oh that wall is littered with the broken bones of my ancestors and all these other things.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could say oh, nice wall.
BEN KISSEL
That's great.
MARCUS PARKS
I built something good from all the bad.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I think that's really smart.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well I can see people getting married as we speak.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're running to the chapel.
BEN KISSEL
What a ringing endorsement.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And we built it together. So all you out there, be a bulldozer of love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Be it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but if you build it together... Whatever. Then no one gets any credit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Single.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they had far larger problems than what they were going to do with the dead. See since so many kids had been taken out of the cities to avoid the fire bombings, mercifully missing the atomic bomb, thousands returned to the cities as so-called atomic bomb orphans or genbaku-koji. These children or genbaku-koji, I have no idea-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know.
MARCUS PARKS
These children were left to fend for themselves and many became desperate. In one case, a boy drank water from flower vases and cemeteries in order to survive.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He would go on to form the Japanese version of The Cure.
BEN KISSEL
Oh well isn't that something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the most goth thing you can do.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that nice?
MARCUS PARKS
Others had to leave their pitiful shelters and cross former playgrounds that had since been used as mass cremation sites just to retrieve clean drinking water. And as a result, they walked on the ashes of human remains and bone fragments day after day in the playgrounds that they used to play in.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds symbolic but it's not.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Sad. Very sad.
MARCUS PARKS
But as it almost always goes in times of chaos and desperation, some took great advantage of these orphan children and none were more cruel with their exploitation than the Japanese mafia, aka the Yakuza.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ooh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I played them in video games before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There's also a new sort of GTA-style game where you get to play the Yakuza.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fun.
BEN KISSEL
So I wonder if they'll have this in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know if they will use them taking advantage of the orphans of the atomic bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. What a weird side quest.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What a strange side mission. I don't like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The pedophilic sex slavery side quest?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Far, far too realistic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I don't like this.
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm good, I'm good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is too easy.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the Yakuza had been largely inactive during the war because so many of them had been conscripted into the Imperial Army. But once the war was over, the Yakuza quickly reformed and created a thriving black market. In addition, members of the Yakuza also found themselves in positions of power. See in rebuilding the Japanese government following the war, General MacArthur attempted to weed out most of the ultranationalist Japanese citizens from civil service. This was the same thing that we did in Germany with a policy called denazification.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we did it on our side vaguely but we also had the other side in Russia that were using active Nazis to prop up the governments in all of these places. And we did it too, we did do it. We brought in Nazis, we let them run the show half the time because-
MARCUS PARKS
Well with denazification, we tried to take all the Nazis out. We did try it at first. But then we found like oh shit, everyone's a Nazi and nobody is here to run the government, no one knows how anything works. So they had no choice but to put the Nazis back in power if they wanted Germany to survive in any way whatsoever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See that's the type of shit I actually find more reprehensible than a lot of some other shit. It's like that's one of those things where we did just kind of let them operate fucking for a while.
BEN KISSEL
There's only so many Germans there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I know. I know.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there's only so many Germans.
BEN KISSEL
You can take the Nazi... You can take the German... Wait, you can take the German out of-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me see how he works it out.
BEN KISSEL
You can take a Nazi out of a German but you can't take the German out of a Nazi? No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Again, you're just damning yourself, you're damning your entire family.
MARCUS PARKS
Because a lot of Germans left, a lot of Nazis left Germany and went to all sorts of places and were still Nazis.
BEN KISSEL
They did.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you could go anywhere and be a Nazi. Even now.
BEN KISSEL
It's just an idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even modern America.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I know. Please.
MARCUS PARKS
But you can't have like a 10 year old boy running the police department in Dusseldorf.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's cool though!
BEN KISSEL
I mean that's kind of adorable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on! Kid Captain?
BEN KISSEL
Kid Captain! All the guns are nothing but snickerdoodle bars.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And candy is free and homework's illegal!
BEN KISSEL
I love this new Kid Captain.
MARCUS PARKS
But just as it was in Germany, MacArthur soon found that after he removed these ultranationalists, there was nobody left to keep the peace because a lot of these ultranationalists had been unsurprisingly cops.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As a consequence, there was little to... Yeah, look at the ultranationalists we have in America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
A lot of cops.
BEN KISSEL
There are some cops in there, aren't there?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've seen some guys at the grocery store.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As a consequence, there was little to no police presence in all of Japan, so the Yakuza filled the gap. Because really this is a case of damned if you do, damned if you don't.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
In one case in the city of Kobe, the Yakuza put down an uprising of formerly enslaved Koreans at the request of the mayor. This of course put the mayor in debt to the Yakuza. But nobody in the occupational government had any real interest in getting mixed up with Japan's increasingly powerful criminal underbelly.
BEN KISSEL
Seems like the mayor got into some political issues there. I think he got in a little over his head.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so too. I feel like a mayor in post atomic Japan was like pretty overwhelmed.
MARCUS PARKS
Well a lot of Japan, it's kind of like Escape From New York.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Iit's all chaos. And then MacArthur comes in, it's just like yeah, anyone who's like super into Japan as a superior nation-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't want you anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
We don't want you, you can't be in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And now we have the Yakuza who's jumping in and they are just straight up saying like oh this is our time to make some money.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the Yakuza are straight up evil. And we're about to get into just how evil the Yakuza could be.
BEN KISSEL
It's an impossible request.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
To be like you're a Japanese citizen, hate your country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
No, no, no. Not hate your country, just don't treat your country as if it is a god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I need you to just be an American but look like a Japanese person.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Like the person that did that just dropped two huge bombs on you is requesting that you no longer...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No. It seems to be complex.
MARCUS PARKS
Complex.
BEN KISSEL
It might be complex.
MARCUS PARKS
Far complex, it's very complex.
BEN KISSEL
You know what? I think it's complex.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's complex.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because Japan did after all start the war. Well on the negative side of the occupation, there was collaboration in both the sale of black market goods and heavy participation by the Americans in a massive sex slave trade that was created in the chaos of a ruined country that was still starving. By October of 1945, just a month after Japan's surrender, a group called the Recreation and Amusement Association had opened one of the largest brothels in the world using trafficked women posing as quasi geishas. And American troops were regular customers. But when it came to exploitation, the Yakuza were most cruel with the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who could disappear without anyone noticing or caring. Now the orphan boys had relatively innocuous jobs. They would use shoe polish stalls as fronts to sell bootleg alcohol and heroin.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. And if that was just the only thing that was happening, there would be part of me that'd be like that's fun as hell.
BEN KISSEL
that is fun as hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? Orphans selling alcohol and heroin and hanging out, flipping coins.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Being like you looking for hooch, mister? Like that's fun.
BEN KISSEL
Just legalize it at that point. I think booze was probably a good thing. It may have been needed.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not that booze was illegal, it's that booze wasn't really being manufactured in any specific way.
BEN KISSEL
Gotchu.
MARCUS PARKS
Because all the factories were destroyed.
BEN KISSEL
That was probably like not the first thing they wanted to do with the factories.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no. They had to get everything else back online.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The girls however, most between 8-11 years old, they were sold into sex slavery, either privately or in red light districts all over Japan. More often than not, after the girls were used up, to put it crudely, they would disappear, either killed or turned back out to the streets to starve.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, this is just fucking... This is a very scary time period.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Those orphans who weren't picked up by the Yakuza however, starved to death by the thousands once winter came. Many died with stones in their mouths because presumably having something to suck upon was somewhat soothing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Yakuza had total control over the food deliveries and they would decide who got what and then they would like basically take all the rations and then they would sequester them and they would make people line up and then you have to buy them from them.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
At a highly increased price.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now the United States certainly had a vested interest in rebuilding Japan's economy and infrastructure because they desperately needed as many allies in Asia as they could get, especially since China was obviously on its way to full blown communism by this point. But when it came to treating the radiation-related illnesses caused by the bomb dropped by the occupying forces, they opted instead for scientific research.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is why people get upset with scientists and doctors.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, nasty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they this is one of those things. Because they arrived here to try to at first they thought that they were coming to help. But then it turns out they were just trying to watch them melt in a controlled situation.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, dude. I mean it's disgusting. We've been doing all these experiments on special needs people for a long time and on the orphans of American streets. Experimentation being done on human beings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I know, I was made in a lab.
BEN KISSEL
I know, you were made in a lab.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't ask to be this perfect.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, I know. Made in a lab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And actually it's kind of been a burden for me.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And I didn't ask to be geoengineered.
BEN KISSEL
You were kind of experimented on when it comes to heaps of pasta. And how much can one family consume?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And guess what? It's a-nice.
BEN KISSEL
It's a-nice.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a-nice. How much pasta does it take to replace love and affection?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what? To up to a pound.
BEN KISSEL
For me, one pound. Yeah, I agree with that. With a lot of parm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
With a lot of parm.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well these scientists, they weren't experimenting, they were just studying. They wanted to know the long term effects of radiation on a large population. And in order to get clean data, they refrained from treating any and all illnesses suffered by the populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a result of radiation. So in order to study these effects, an organization called the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was founded in 1946 to study the effects of the atomic bomb in the long term, meaning their original test subjects were mostly children and young adults.
BEN KISSEL
So we're talking about the bomb as a job creator now.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh very much so.
BEN KISSEL
So there you go, look at that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But right before this they had released a report that was actually fairly thorough explaining the Manhattan Project to the United States of America. And they sent out this like long thing kind of explaining what atomic power was and what it does and what it's gonna do. And it is interesting on what it left out. Because basically it ends at Trinity. Like you see this big report come out and you're like and then we did it!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it does not mention the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki afterwards. Because this is up until then. Because now they're trying to figure out like okay, what the fuck did we just do?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean there's so many, again complicated, but from a science perspective it's a huge achievement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because then they'll say we're using the research to figure out how to build a more humane bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Of course.
BEN KISSEL
Of course they are!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what a tactical nuke is. A tactical nuke is the idea-
BEN KISSEL
Humane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It spreads, it's just a small spread. That's why when we were in Europe and they were all just like... And this is why I remember seeing a headline, it was like why tactical nukes are actually okay for you. And you're like just I can't right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Well at least once a year for the rest of their lives, these subjects participated in examinations that usually occurred under harsh fluorescent lights and they were always forced to strip down naked so the scientists could study every aspect of possible ill effects. In the most humiliating of exams, some were forced to stand on stage in auditoriums full of doctors and scientists. In the case of the daughter of Reverend Tanimoto, the man we mentioned last episode who was forced to meet the copilot of the Enola Gay on live television-
BEN KISSEL
Oh god.
MARCUS PARKS
She went through this mortifying indignation at the age of 13.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually got a really interesting email about Reverend Tanimoto after the fact and that it actually helped him. He said apparently this was actually really good for him, meeting the pilot from the Enola Gay. It helped him put a human face on it. And there was like a whole story where they kind of like came together and it actually was like a healing moment in his life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You know what it reminds me of? When Leif Garrett met the person that he hit when he was driving drunk and then the guy was in a wheelchair forever. But they met on VH1.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
And then Leif got to apologize finally.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
God, what was the line? Me and Carolina used to say it to each other all the time because like it's something about like fucked up, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fucked up, bro. Yeah, I remember that.
MARCUS PARKS
Something like that. Oh man.
BEN KISSEL
Leif coming clean.
MARCUS PARKS
I forgive you. I forgive you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I forgive you.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I would be like lift up my legs so I can kick you in the butt once.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Drinks on you! You're frozen, you're both frozen in a smile like at the end of sitcom.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after being shoved on stage in an auditorium full of doctors, and I know indignation isn't the right word there, it's bothering me, mortifying indignation. It's not indignation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would say it's mortifying... Technically I know what you're saying.
MARCUS PARKS
Humiliation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Desecration, humiliation.
BEN KISSEL
Degradation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Degradation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Degradation, that's the word I was looking for.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you so very much.
BEN KISSEL
I do know words.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mr. ACT.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
I got a 19, baby.
MARCUS PARKS
19!
BEN KISSEL
26 in writing, 26 in reading, 13 in math, and i believe a 12 in science.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very good.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow, very nice. I got a 27.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, it's still low.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Kurt Cobain committed suicide at 27.
MARCUS PARKS
No, 27 out of 32 is pretty good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I didn't take the ACTs, didn't have to.
BEN KISSEL
I believe it was 36.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was in the IB program, so I didn't have to.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah, it was 32.
BEN KISSEL
Was it 32?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah because I got one question away from perfect on reading comprehension.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, yes, I did well as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just another completely valid bragging point.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Especially once you're over 40.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And the kids don't even have to take them anymore.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no.
BEN KISSEL
You just gotta be able to pay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They have to go in, they have to say like vibes. You know what I mean? They have to pass a vibe check and then they go to Zoom University and then mostly they just go and they create destabilizing videos on the internet.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's right.
BEN KISSEL
With a lot of debt as well unfortunately.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the ABCC still exists to this day as the Radiation Effects Research Foundation, although such cruel examinations as those suffered in the 50s are long in the past.
BEN KISSEL
I would hope so.
MARCUS PARKS
These days they mostly study the children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors in order to see the hereditary effects of radiation poisoning and it's now voluntary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come here, John. I just want to say, I just want to make sure how many eyes you have. Good, you still have two.
BEN KISSEL
Two eyes, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Flippers? Looking for flippers. No flippers, huh? Throw him away.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I want a flipper one.
BEN KISSEL
I would assume it does go through the generations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does.
BEN KISSEL
If you take into account lead poisoning being generational.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh no, it mutates all of your shit inside of you.
BEN KISSEL
Yikes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It involves your entire body.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as the press went concerning Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General MacArthur was able to keep a lid on the worst effects for a fair amount of time, longer than you'd think. See while the Japanese press were freer than they'd been under the imperial government when it came to censorship, they still weren't allowed to report any details about the aftereffects of the bombings. Likewise, foreign reporters had to submit all reports to occupation censors for approval. But with such a massive story involving so many people, the truth was bound to get out eventually. In the year after the bombing, two journalists almost got the stories of Hiroshima and Nagasaki out to the rest of the world but both were stopped just short of publishing by the government.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
The man who finally got the word out though was a Pulitzer Prize winner in fiction named John Hersey, who not only brought the story of the bombings to the world but revolutionized non- fiction writing with his report on Hiroshima. He was the man who was said to have created the new journalism. And the story he wrote on Hiroshima is considered by the New York Times in a list they did in 1999 as the best piece of journalism of the 20th century.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's incredible because it was an extremely closely held secret. It was one of our, how do we put this? Later on we discover many layers of kind of shame that America would experience but this was a big one obviously.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was a very, very big one.
MARCUS PARKS
Now in a poll conducted a week after the bombings, 85% of Americans approved of the use of the atomic bomb. Strangely enough, 5% didn't care, they had no opinion one way or another.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What happened?
BEN KISSEL
There's always those people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes, 5% literally was like there was a world war?
BEN KISSEL
That's weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was two? This is the sequel?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. There were stories of people who lived in the Ozarks who had no fucking clue what was going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure, sure.
BEN KISSEL
That's the dream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he's still with the census like his voice still counts.
BEN KISSEL
It's does. Moonshine!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's America.
MARCUS PARKS
Well journalists thereafter repeated the government line that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were symbols for the birth of a new Japan dedicated to peace, progress, and reconciliation with the rest of the world.
BEN KISSEL
It did end old Japan. So I suppose the only other step is a new one.
MARCUS PARKS
Well that perspective changed with John Hersey. Hersey had been a war correspondent embedded with Allied forces during the invasion of Sicily. In addition, he'd survived four plane crashes and had assisted in evacuating wounded soldiers in Guadalcanal.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, tell me when he's embedded with the enemy, okay?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. But the thing is that he did believe, he saw that the WWII story that we were all getting was not quite as clean cut-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As what was really happening.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that he went there and he realized which is kind of part of what this story I think is kind of symbolic of is that this war was fucked up too.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And while this was supposedly the last like quote unquote like "good one" or whatever-
MARCUS PARKS
This was the most fucked up war that ever existed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was fucked up what everybody had to go through. Everybody went through a lot of bullshit fighting this war.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the American soldiers, yeah, they had now the veneer of being heroes at the time. But the shit they saw was wild.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then they weren't allowed to talk about it when they came back because then that would throw shame upon this quote unquote "great thing" that you did.
MARCUS PARKS
And the Americans didn't even see the worst shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
BEN KISSEL
We got in late.
MARCUS PARKS
They say that the worst place to be in the entire war was Poland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Like Poland was absolutely like...
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
if you were in Poland during WWII, you were in one of the worst place in the entirety of human history, in the entire history of the world.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I feel like yeah. Just Auschwitz being there. Like Auschwitz is a place you can take a voluntary train to.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, Poland.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like not a place I wanna be.
BEN KISSEL
There was a lot of Polish people that loved those Nazis.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, there were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did. It's true.
BEN KISSEL
It was kinda crazy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And that's part of what made it so much worse.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well having seen his-
BEN KISSEL
Fucking Polish.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey! Hey. We were so surprised. But again, they walked in backwards, they told us they were leaving.
MARCUS PARKS
Auschwitz, Warsaw. So much horrible shit happened in Poland.
BEN KISSEL
Was Dachau over there?
MARCUS PARKS
No, Dachau was in Germany. That was the first of them.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that was Germany. There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
Well having seen his fair share of war, Hersey suspected that there was far more to the official story concerning what had actually happened after the bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Hersey knew the human face of war and his journalistic instincts twitched when he noticed that the only pictures coming out of either city were only of destroyed buildings and bare ruins. In other words, there were no pictures of people.
BEN KISSEL
Honestly if I could teleport one journalist to this as well, Hunter S. Thompson. Peak Hunter S. Thompson.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is kinda where he came out of.
BEN KISSEL
Right, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the generation he came out of.
BEN KISSEL
Is it fair to say it's narrative journalism?
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
This is the beginning of narrative journalism.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the New Journalism as they put it. And so in the summer of 1946, nearly a year after the bombings, Hersey was granted a two-week pass to visit Hiroshima so he could see and hear what had actually happened.
BEN KISSEL
He had a backstage pass. Did he get a lanyard?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly he better have.
MARCUS PARKS
He interviewed-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He better be made out of fucking lead.
BEN KISSEL
Seriously.
MARCUS PARKS
He interviewed 40 survivors as to what they'd experienced during and since the bombings. But eventually inspired by a book called 'The Bridge of San Luis Rey' that he'd read on the ship to Hiroshima, he focused on the stories of six people, including that of Reverend Tanimoto.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But after writing what amounted to a horror story, Hersey did not submit the finished article to the government for censorship clearance. Instead he said fuck them.
BEN KISSEL
Good.
MARCUS PARKS
And he gave the story directly to The New Yorker who dedicated an entire issue to Hersey's unflinching portrait of Hiroshima.
BEN KISSEL
So he's a whistleblower.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was.
MARCUS PARKS
The article was soon published as a book and it was so definitive, so harrowing, and so well written that it's probably the reason why the focus is still mostly placed on Hiroshima to this day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well we got that incredible testimony.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But either way, Americans were for the first time exposed to the realities of atomic warfare. Human stories were finally attached to the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki which caused a reckoning across America over what their government had done. But if the average American felt guilt and shame over Hiroshima, it was nothing compared to what some of the scientists at the Manhattan Project, the ones who'd known exactly what they were building, they were feeling quite a few feelings.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As they should.
BEN KISSEL
I thought you were gonna say the Germans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
As one scientist put it, he wept as he read the story and he was filled with shame to quote "recall the whoopee spirit" that the team had after the bombing had been successfully detonated over a highly populated city.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well again, they sort of understood what the fuck they were making.
MARCUS PARKS
Sorta.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They sort of understood it. I do think in that way they knew that they needed to make it blow up. But they just thought again, it's blowing up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's just gonna blow up.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's bomb. We're no different than hundreds of thousands of other people making bombs right now.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. No different from the guys firebombing Tokyo or Dresden or whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're just making a bomb, it's gonna blow up, and then that's it. But while Hersey brought the story of Hiroshima to the world, the effect it had on a lot of Americans was less sympathy than fear. In other words, a lot of Americans started worrying about what would happen to us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Me, me, me, me, me, me, me.
BEN KISSEL
Well it does make sense for self-preservation reasons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
BEN KISSEL
It does seem like it's getting a little cold in here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. The wonders of the atomic age-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Brrr.
MARCUS PARKS
The wonders of the atomic age quickly turned into Cold War paranoia and fear. And the justification of a nuclear arms race was shifted from beating the Germans to the bomb, to having a larger nuclear arsenal than the Soviets.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, why didn't the kids of Hiroshima and Nagasaki just get under their desks? I was told just get under your desk.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh get under your desk. Your hands behind your head, yeah. That's how you protect yourself.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, like that. In no way is that completely fucking useless.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's also interesting because this is technically in his way, Robert Oppenheimer, in his way of kind of figuring out how to get himself out of his own moral quandary after all of this was like that's why everyone should have atomic bombs.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then we'll never have war ever again.
BEN KISSEL
Proliferation.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. If everybody has an atomic bomb, then everybody knows that if I use my atomic bomb, they're gonna use their atomic bomb. And then we're all gonna be a crater.
BEN KISSEL
And you know what you're gonna have? A couple of carve outs for Iran. And then that's basically it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel that that wasn't the answer.
BEN KISSEL
Iraq had yellow cake.
MARCUS PARKS
It did not.
BEN KISSEL
No, it didn't.
MARCUS PARKS
It had nothing. You know what's funny?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They don't even eat cake over there.
BEN KISSEL
Oh they do.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what I just learned? Remember when they supposedly found the mobile chemical weapons labs?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And they were like there's ammonia in here, they could have used it to clean up. You know what the ammonia was?
BEN KISSEL
What's this?
MARCUS PARKS
Someone had pissed in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'm Hans Blix! They call me Hans Piss.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone found my piss bucket.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. Someone had just emptied out the truck, someone just used it as a toilet and that was used in Colin Powell's speech to the UN to justify the Iraq war.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, our intelligence community is almost never correct.
BEN KISSEL
No. Also speaking of whistleblowers, 70% of meat in America used to not be allowed but now they spray it with ammonia so they allow it for human consumption. It used to only be allowed for dog food. So that's why we're dying as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
So be very careful.
MARCUS PARKS
That is interesting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am.
BEN KISSEL
Be very careful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm very careful.
MARCUS PARKS
Well between 1946-1958, the US government detonated 23 nuclear devices in a series of tests that ranged from the Pacific Ocean to the deserts of Nevada and Utah. And all of these tests caused cancer rates to skyrocket in the surrounding areas.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah guys, don't we know already?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It definitely brought us to the attention of the Reticulans and the Greys.
BEN KISSEL
How?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll get to it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean that's the thing thing is that they're-
BEN KISSEL
Are we gonna get to that in this episode?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The thing is they're detonating these things in places where they don't care about the people, they're detonating this shit next to reservations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
They don't give a shit what happens if it fucking blows onto a reservation.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or where people quote unquote "are not supposed to be living". That's kinda what they do.
BEN KISSEL
It is horrible what we've done to the Native American.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
And we continue to do it. They just lost water rights again because Cavanaugh said that in 1854 there was a treaty.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
He was like 1893, he's like we better uphold that treaty. It's like oh my fucking god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like there should be a cut off of what counts. I think 1990.
BEN KISSEL
1990, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that's the cut off.
BEN KISSEL
I think you know what we could do with the Native American? A redo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Let's redo it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Renegotiate.
BEN KISSEL
Renegotiate.
MARCUS PARKS
That's fucking insane. We're still using treaties to fuck over the tribes?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, for water.
MARCUS PARKS
That's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the fallout from these tests were so pervasive that a film crew working on the set of the John Wayne movie The Conqueror-
BEN KISSEL
John Wayne.
MARCUS PARKS
In which John Wayne laughably plays Genghis Khan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The name is Ghengis Khan, you commoner.
BEN KISSEL
I feel like he sucks.
MARCUS PARKS
He does.
BEN KISSEL
I tried to watch John Wayne movies growing up and I don't like them.
MARCUS PARKS
John Wayne sucks. John Wayne's a fucking Nazi. It's just like they said in the song, John Wayne is a Nazi.
BEN KISSEL
I don't like him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what it is too? He's passé in a world where we don't really care about that form of machismo actor anymore.
BEN KISSEL
No, I'm fine with The Rock. He's more masculine than him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't feel he is as compelling in future analysis than he was at that time. Because at the time he was like a number one movie star.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They loved the western thing, they loved this idea. But now you watch it and you're like actually he doesn't do anything.
BEN KISSEL
He doesn't do anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He gets off a horse, he walks over there, he kind of squints. And honestly Clint Eastwood for me does the same bit but he does it better.
BEN KISSEL
He does do I better.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he did a whole movie with an orangutan.
BEN KISSEL
He does do it better.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And that's why my grandfather Herbert never liked John Wayne. But he just didn't like him because he was an actor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He didn't like actors.
BEN KISSEL
I'm sure all of our grandparents were like he's just a fucking actor.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, honestly my grandfather knew him very well.
BEN KISSEL
Did he really?
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, my mom met him like three or four times.
BEN KISSEL
John Wayne?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, John Wayne.
MARCUS PARKS
John Wayne was an incredible racist, a fascist, and a coward.
BEN KISSEL
Go on, Henry. How does your family know him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very tall. Extremely tall with big hands.
BEN KISSEL
6'3".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My grandfather used to work as a PR person for Pepsi.
BEN KISSEL
I know that.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was the head of the relations for Pepsi. So he knew John Wayne, he knew Henry Kissinger, he knew fucking Ronald Reagan.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He knew Joan Crawford, him and Joan Crawford, I have a whole bunch of pictures.
BEN KISSEL
I love Joan.
MARCUS PARKS
Joan's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's pictures of my grandfather with Marilyn Monroe, he knew her. He knew a couple of the Kennedys.
BEN KISSEL
Apparently Mommy Dearest is a lie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. It is framed.
MARCUS PARKS
Mommy Dearest.
BEN KISSEL
Apparently it's a lie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was framed as one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well a lot of the people who worked on The Conqueror, which is widely considered one of the worst movies ever made-
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
They developed cancer at a far younger age than was normal because they filmed in the Utah desert near a nuclear bomb testing site. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
For some reason, I don't know if movies should be filmed in deserts anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Well some people say that this is a myth because the film crew died at the same rate as the general population of cancer.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or got cancer at the same rate.
MARCUS PARKS
They got cancer at the same rate, I think it's like 22%. But they died far younger than many people die of cancer.
BEN KISSEL
Well yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That would change the math there a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
It does, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it depends what they're doing on set.
MARCUS PARKS
Regardless though, the first of these tests was Operation Crossroads, in which the government blew up a bunch of captured Japanese and German battleships just to see what the bomb could do to purely military targets. And what it could do underwater.
BEN KISSEL
Sort of a fun day. That's kind of a fun day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That test is fun. And it made SpongeBob.
MARCUS PARKS
This test however would be better known by its location, Bikini Atoll. And my Papaw was there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And he did nothing to stop it!
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. What would you do if you could stop the atomic bomb testing? Absolutely nothing, Mr. Parks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he was present as a sailor in the Navy. And that's also where the name bikini comes from, the bikini was released like a couple of weeks after Bikini Atoll. And the inventor was like that's a great name.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's sweet.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Gotta see them titties.
BEN KISSEL
When I think of the greatest generation, I always say I want to see them in bikinis.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eleanor Roosevelt.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, indeed. Roose-felt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wait a second, you sitting on a skunk? Oh Eleanor, you gotta maintain them tanlines.
MARCUS PARKS
However it would be the second test held at Bikini Atoll in 1954 that would have a huge cultural impact the world over. Having moved on from the atomic bomb, the United States had started testing a far more powerful nuclear weapon called the hydrogen bomb or for short the H bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because there was one dude within the Manhattan Project was like (German accent) I feel that my bomb is more superior in ideas. And they're like listen, we're already working on a thing. And then this guy just went and built a bigger bomb than the atomic bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
You know it's funny, the guy who actually started the earliest research on the H bomb was Klaus Fuchs, who was the man who was a spy for the Soviet Union.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ah yes.
BEN KISSEL
Klaus.
MARCUS PARKS
Well during an underwater H bomb test called Operation Castle, a Japanese fishing boat was destroyed and the survivors were showered with radioactive fallout in a blast that was 1000 times more powerful than those above Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course they died. This incident inspired a huge anti nuclear testing movement in Japan, not least due to the fact that two years earlier the censorship ban on the full scope of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki had finally been lifted, the people of Japan finally knew what the fuck had happened there.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And as a result, a movie director named Ishirō Honda translated the power and ruination of the atomic bomb into an unstoppable creature named Godzilla.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah! I like Godzilla.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I love Godzilla, dude!
MARCUS PARKS
(Godzilla noise)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's a good noise.
BEN KISSEL
Holy shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's good.
BEN KISSEL
That's what it sounds like?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Godzilla noise)
BEN KISSEL
Oh my god.
MARCUS PARKS
I do it at home all the time, it's one of my favorite noises in the world. (Godzilla noise)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If only to be a fly on the wall.
BEN KISSEL
Indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is that your come noise?
BEN KISSEL
(Godzilla noise)
MARCUS PARKS
(Godzilla noise)
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'mma Godzilla! I'mma Godzilla!
BEN KISSEL
Godzilla, perhaps from center earth, middle earth. We just simply don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they just retconned all that fucking shit.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
No, Godzilla is from deep in the Pacific Ocean and he was down there for millions of years.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
2 million years as they put it in the movie. And then when the Americans started testing the H bomb, that's when his habitat cracked open.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
They destroyed his habitat and that's when he came up and started destroying Japan.
BEN KISSEL
Well why would he destroy Japan? He technically should have come to the US.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because he was grouchy, he was woken up from his nap.
BEN KISSEL
That is true.
MARCUS PARKS
And Japan was the closest island available.
BEN KISSEL
I can't even imagine how grouchy I would be after a 2 million year nap.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
No, he wasn't napping, he was out there, he was fucking around, he was having a good time. He was propagating his species.
BEN KISSEL
He was being a godzilla.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was coming.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's what they said. There were a bunch of godzillas down there.
BEN KISSEL
That's a great name.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in creating Godzilla and setting him loose in Tokyo, Honda recreated the helplessness felt by the Japanese in the face of the unfathomable strength of a nuclear weapon. And he in fact used the real life incident of the destroyed fishing boat as direct inspiration for the opening scene in the first Godzilla movie, which if you haven't seen is fucking incredible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Of all those old school movies, the horror movies and sci-fi movies, Godzilla the original holds up like a motherfucker.
MARCUS PARKS
Goddamn it does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's got really great scenes. It's genuinely creepy and scary but also like it's got great scale.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That was back when movies were big.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed, it holds up like Chris Chan then. If it holds up like a motherfucker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I will eventually do my deep dive into Chris Chan.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
And you'll do it alone.
BEN KISSEL
Disgusting.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the only right way to do it.
BEN KISSEL
It is indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have to be alone.
BEN KISSEL
I agree.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as a side note, perhaps the most telling line in Godzilla came from a moment on a train between two commuters who were speculating on the destruction Godzilla might cause in Tokyo right before he unleashes his fiery atomic breath on the nation's capital.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the cool thing about it, there's all these like atomic bomb nods where he has this atomic breath that sets everything on fire, it destroys everything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But basically this woman on the train says 'I barely escaped the atomic bomb at Nagasaki and now I gotta deal with this?'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Was there anyone that said it's too soon?
MARCUS PARKS
No. No, absolutely not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no.
BEN KISSEL
This is cathartic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they're extremely ready.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
It's extraordinarily cathartic. This happens again and again with people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean think about how many fucking 9/11 movies there were like two or three years after 9/11.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I think Nicholas Cage had that one about a year after and then...
MARCUS PARKS
I mean they were all awful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were.
MARCUS PARKS
And they were completely unnecessary.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they were.
MARCUS PARKS
But also this is just what happens to cultures.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In the years after 9/11, American Cinema was nothing but disaster porn for two decades.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it still is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it still is.
BEN KISSEL
That's all it is.
MARCUS PARKS
Like all we see is just the destruction of cities, the destruction of the world over and over and over again. That just what happens in culture.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Isn't it kind of relaxing in a way though? In my way, I kind of like it.
BEN KISSEL
In a way it's relaxing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The total destruction of everything because then you just keep moving. Because in the end you don't gotta pay taxes anymore.
BEN KISSEL
It's just a movie, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But in this line, I think that this woman gave voice to what a lot of people in Japan felt at the time. American testing of the H bomb in the Pacific was directly affecting them. It was poisoning their food supply, the fish, they couldn't eat it out of the fucking ocean because it was radioactive.
BEN KISSEL
Now they just do that to Americans.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well they also got quite a bit of it as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we got fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
We got the least of it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, fucked up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the Americans were killing even more Japanese civilians. And this was all while the Japanese were still dealing with the long term effects of the first two bombs the Americans had dropped. And while Japan was dealing with its own trauma, America was having somewhat of a reckoning concerning the men who'd actually built the bomb.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. They propped them up and they were happy to have them and then they decided to destroy them from the inside out.
MARCUS PARKS
Now perhaps it was America's unconscious guilt over the horror their country had unleashed upon hundreds of thousands of people, but by the 50s, America had begun to turn on the man who'd been the most responsible for constructing the bomb. That man was J. Robert Oppenheimer. And his reckoning came in the form of the Red Scare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see J. Robert Oppenheimer at the time was extremely popular and he was kind of like angling, they were talking about like oh, Oppy could be President.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, like Einstein.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they were ready. Because he wanted to get involved in all of these various... Basically he wanted to figure out how do I control how we legislate things around atomic power from here on out? He's like I want people to hear my opinion and move forward.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it is interesting because then he made a bunch of weird moves that kind of, his communist group kind of kicked him out because for a while he was like we need to do nuclear proliferation, we need to give out the secrets to everybody. But eventually he came around to this idea of like all right, we'll keep it an American secret. But if I get in there, maybe if I get inside of the US government, I can kind of direct policy from the inside out. And what everybody who discovers what happens when you go on the inside is that you're irrevocably corrupted by the machinations of the government.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So as soon as you get on the inside trying to fix it all-
BEN KISSEL
There's only so much you can do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Eventually you're just playing the same games as fucking everybody else because them games are as old as time. There's a big club and you're not in it.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
BEN KISSEL
Well I don't want to be in it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You ran for office.
BEN KISSEL
I don't want to be. Well that was for Brooklyn Borough president and that was a fantastic experience. And Eric Adams is a total failure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes, he is.
BEN KISSEL
So there you go, everybody. You too can get 1.4%.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that easy.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as we've established time and again, Robert Oppenheimer wasn't a communist but he was friends with a lot of communists back in the 30s when being a communist wasn't dangerous or even all that strange.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was shtupping a communist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, he went to parties.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He wanted to go bang a bunch of hot commie chicks.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. A lot of people back in the 30s, they were flirting with communist ideology because of the Great Depression. For example, when my family cleared out the house of some of my Oklahoma Dust Bowl ancestors back when I was a kid, we found multiple books on communism openly displayed on their bookshelves.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it probably made you look worldly too. It made you look like oh look, we're interested in shit.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're interested in shit.
MARCUS PARKS
No, it's not that at all.
BEN KISSEL
His family, they're the Dust Bowl side.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
No. I mean these people, these were fucking survivors and also they were smart people at the same time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. And communism, honestly in times of need you were kind of like this would be a great time, this would be great if the government could come and help us all come together and we can share resources.
BEN KISSEL
I think we could use a 5% dollop. I mean we're not even giving lunches anymore.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's unbelievable.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
We could take a little, we could take a scoop out of the little ice cream there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think so.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean for these people, capitalism had obviously failed so horribly-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Miserably.
MARCUS PARKS
So miserably that the consequences of capitalism was dust pneumonia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
People were drowning in dust.
BEN KISSEL
That's horrible. Man, that's a whole other thing unlocked now. I don't want to die in dust.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's been a lot of bad shit in this series.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. I don't want to fucking die by drowning in dust.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah. Dust pneumonia is a horrible way to die. But by the mid 50s, America was gripped by the Red Scare and of course led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.
BEN KISSEL
Yay!
MARCUS PARKS
And Oppenheimer-
BEN KISSEL
And is totally straight lawyer, Roy Cohn.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Completely straight!
BEN KISSEL
Totally!
MARCUS PARKS
Oppenheimer came into the Red Scare crosshairs in particular because he'd previously pissed off a McCarthy ally named Lewis Strauss.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one liked his weepy fucking attitude. Nobody liked him. They were all over him because especially when he went to Truman and there's that classic story where he walked into Truman's office and he was just like the blood on my hands, I can't believe! And then Truman throws him out of the office and he tells all his aides don't let that motherfucker back in this office ever again. The blood was on my hands, I dropped the bomb.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He just made it.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So Oppenheimer wasn't making himself a popular person.
BEN KISSEL
Chris Chan met with Truman? Now that's a comic book.
MARCUS PARKS
But the other thing on the other side though, everyone fucking hated Lewis Strauss as well.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nobody liked anybody.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. But I will say-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one liked McCarthy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
McCarthy is like a Ted Cruz.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He was like actually maybe worse, I'm not sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like powerful but still everybody hates him.
MARCUS PARKS
Far worse than Ted Cruz.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Not far worse. But it does show you the power-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It just shows how bad Ted Cruz is.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I mean? It shows how he doesn't have the ability to be a true villain.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It shows you the power of just having a suitcase you don't open.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's it.
BEN KISSEL
It literally is just the Howie Mandel.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just tapping it. Tapping it.
BEN KISSEL
You don't wanna know what I have in there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You don't know what's in this. Just full of snakes.
BEN KISSEL
It really was porno mags and booze!
MARCUS PARKS
Well Lewis Strauss had a grudge against Oppenheimer because Oppenheimer had openly ridiculed one of Strauss' recommendations on atomic research during a public congressional hearing in 1951.
BEN KISSEL
So we're gonna get a little sensitive here?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Strauss was butthurt, to put it very-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I hate that term, I fucking can't stand it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it works for him.
BEN KISSEL
In this case he was butthurt.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. In this case, yeah. Well Strauss took this slight personally and using previous intelligence that Oppenheimer had consorted with communists in the 30s, Strauss soon became convinced that Oppenheimer was a secret commie and he got to work convincing others that Oppenheimer was a secret commie.
BEN KISSEL
Guys, I'm gonna tell you this right now. There's no such thing as a secret communist. They let you know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They tell you immediately, it's like a vegan.
MARCUS PARKS
Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it's like no, Oppenheimer has been fighting being called a communist this entire fucking time.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes he has.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was like I went to meetings back in the day. My girlfriend was one.
BEN KISSEL
Look at a picture of Rebecca. You telling me you wouldn't be a communist for her?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seriously. I was not with nerds anymore.
BEN KISSEL
Dude, if I married Gwyneth Paltrow somehow-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna end up with a jade egg inside of you somewhere.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that's what the family does.
BEN KISSEL
And you guys just don't get it.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know, Henry. The fucking communists I knew in New York were the biggest fucking nerds I knew.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Different.
BEN KISSEL
Oh they are. They are.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is when it was cool. You know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
But they were funny and they all worked at bookstores.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah they did.
BEN KISSEL
So that's actually very nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah they were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They did great fucking stuff for unionizing The Strand and all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They did.
MARCUS PARKS
They were amazing but they were fucking nerds.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the idea. Because with the capitalist, you don't have to read a book to be a capitalist. You just have to have big tits, a great idea, and you can make it all the way to the top.
BEN KISSEL
It's better if you don't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But a communist, you do have to read a lot of stuff.
MARCUS PARKS
You do.
BEN KISSEL
It's too much reading, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you gotta read a lot and you gotta be able to comprehend it.
BEN KISSEL
Theoretical, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as I said a few episodes back, scientists in the Manhattan Project with Soviet ties, this was not without precedent. Theoretical physicist Klaus Fuchs, as I said earlier, he'd been a key member of the Manhattan Project's inner circle and it was discovered in 1949, years after we dropped the atomic bomb, that he'd been feeding information to the Soviets from day one.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they were already like only two years out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This information had allowed the Soviets to cheat their way to nuclear weaponry an estimated 7-10 years sooner than if they'd been left to figure it out on their own.
BEN KISSEL
Oh Fuchs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if they had just figured out an actual peaceful way of negotiating working on this. Because that was the problem with the Potsdam Conference is they were trying to figure out like what do we do with nuclear weapons? And let's just say the Soviet Union wasn't being super chill. Not that we were because we just killed fucking half a million people using it.
MARCUS PARKS
But the Potsdam Conference was before all this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there was a part of the conversation of like after the fact they're trying to figure out all these negotiations, it ain't working out.
BEN KISSEL
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Well not only that but like Truman had hinted to Stalin... Truman thought that he had...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Had his number, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He had a bomb to drop on Stalin.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
He was like you know we've got this super weapon that we're about to use on Japan and he thought that Stalin was gonna shit his pants. But Stalin already knew all about it because of Fuchs.
BEN KISSEL
Fuchs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's already public information.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And then Stalin just showed him a picture of a little dog named Laika. Isn't it Laika?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, the one in space?
MARCUS PARKS
It's Laika, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is years later. This is much later.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Laika wasn't alive at that point.
BEN KISSEL
Laika was dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Laika was dead.
MARCUS PARKS
She wasn't born yet.
BEN KISSEL
Really? I wonder how old Laika was before they shot her up into space.
MARCUS PARKS
I think she was only like 3 or 4.
BEN KISSEL
Oh she was a puppy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I had a whole point.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I had like a whole point. I don't remember what it was.
BEN KISSEL
What was it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't remember.
BEN KISSEL
About Stalin. About Stalin and the Soviet Union and the US, we're fighting but the Soviet Union was all mad.
MARCUS PARKS
They go it 7-10 years earlier than they should have.
BEN KISSEL
Cause Stalin already knew cause of this Fuchs guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I like Stalin's mustache.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a good mustache.
BEN KISSEL
Man, I will say about WWII, powerful moments for the mustache.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All different kinds.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some mustaches so powerful they can't be repeated.
BEN KISSEL
Unless you're Michael Jordan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you remember?
BEN KISSEL
He literally had the Nazi stache in a Hanes commercial. Cause what are you gonna do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Again, he's allowed. He is the one American who's allowed.
MARCUS PARKS
Now that's the thing though about Klaus Fuchs and feeding the information of the Soviet Union, it could be argued that objectively it was a good thing in the long run because it was the only thing that kept America from using nuclear weapons during the Korean War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes. But J. Robert Oppenheimer was basically saying his message was the math is already there, they're gonna get it no matter what, it's obvious.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's like it's already there. From the theoretical papers you can automatically extrapolate what you need from it to make a bomb. So he was like there's no even reason to keep a secret because anybody can figure it out.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that why the Korean War is the forgotten war though?
MARCUS PARKS
Why?
BEN KISSEL
Because we didn't bomb anybody. There was no big boom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I know I'm a moron but it's because any other war for the most part i can give you a very basic rundown of what it was about and what happened during it, for the most part for America. Korean War? No idea.
BEN KISSEL
It's just a little proxy war gone fucking out of hand.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very complicated. Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Complicated.
MARCUS PARKS
It's extremely complicated and it never ended.
BEN KISSEL
Also in North Korea right now it's officially illegal to commit suicide.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
They'll kill your whole family if you do. That's true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's kinda fun.
MARCUS PARKS
I was about to ask how they were going to enforce that. But wow, that is one hell of a punishment.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, they kill the whole family.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a really good idea. If you hate your aunt, just kill yourself.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Also if you survive, they kill you. That's true. That is weird. Life is weird.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
They kill you. But do they kill you and kill your family?
BEN KISSEL
I think they kill, yeah, they're killing everybody.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Wow!
MARCUS PARKS
Wow. That's incredible.
BEN KISSEL
Kind of in a twilight... Whatever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, if I went to North Korea though I'd be able to play professional basketball.
BEN KISSEL
I don't think that you would be able to do anything.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You see me dunking on people and stuff. That'd be awesome. Because they make the hoops-
BEN KISSEL
No. The hoops are still the same.
MARCUS PARKS
They're still the same.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, they're like 6.5 feet.
BEN KISSEL
It's not the moon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I jump higher there. I'm less gravity there.
MARCUS PARKS
But even though there was an ever growing cabal determined to ruin Oppenheimer's reputation, General Leslie Groves, a loyal friend even if he was a little bit evil at times, he stressed his emphatic belief that Oppenheimer's blood ran red, white, and blue.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well he had many opportunities to fuck everything up and he didn't.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even so, a four week security hearing was held in 1954 to determine whether Oppenheimer should be allowed to keep his security clearance. And by a vote of 2 to 1, Oppenheimer was pushed out of the government atomic research game.
BEN KISSEL
Wow, it was just a three person panel? Dang.
MARCUS PARKS
Eventually though the government came back around on Oppenheimer. In 1963, JFK presented Oppenheimer with the Enrico Fermi Award for Scientific Excellence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nice. Here's your fucking trophy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
hey, you know trophies are a big deal.
MARCUS PARKS
The funny thing though is that historians think that had it not been for the Red Scare, it would have been the Robert Oppenheimer Award for Scientific Excellence.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. He would have been president. He probably would have been President of the United States of America.
MARCUS PARKS
He was too weird to be president.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you know, Woodrow Wilson.
MARCUS PARKS
Woodrow Wilson.
BEN KISSEL
What about him?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you're talking about weirdos who have been president.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that was long before anybody actually knew what the president was like.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That was like 1900 or something.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm just saying, he was a weirdo.
MARCUS PARKS
It was more like 1911.
BEN KISSEL
Well he was the one that really brought in the fucking corporatocracy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He had a weird long nose, tiny glasses.
BEN KISSEL
He's kind of a piece of shit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. KKK member.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow! Wow!
BEN KISSEL
Wow!
MARCUS PARKS
Or at the very least KKK sympathizer which is the same thing.
BEN KISSEL
Adjacent, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what they say, you know what you call a person who puts up with Nazis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A Nazi.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. If one man sits with nine Nazis at a table, you have 10 Nazis at a table.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
BEN KISSEL
Bold statements.
MARCUS PARKS
Two years later though, Oppenheimer was diagnosed with lung cancer due to his chain smoking. And by 1967 he was dead. Although he had been vindicated-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ.
BEN KISSEL
Really nice, Marcus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He didn't even make it to fucking Woodstock?
BEN KISSEL
Really nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
He was dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was dead.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
He was dead.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And clouds of crows descended-
BEN KISSEL
Did he melt? Did he slough?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, what else fucking worse happened? Did they take him to a place where they fucking euthanized a bunch of blind children?
MARCUS PARKS
But he was vindicated by the scientific community by the end of it. His place in history however in full retrospect is complicated to say the least and will likely remain so forever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know it will be very quickly wrapped up in that three hour movie.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I know, I'm very excited.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that movie is gonna tell us all what happened in a way. And we're all gonna be like aw, Robert Oppenheimer, you're the best guy I've seen.
BEN KISSEL
I have some faith in this feature film. It also comes out on my birthday.
MARCUS PARKS
That's nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I already got tickets for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the person who wrote 'American Prometheus' came out of it and said that it was highly historically accurate.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure, sure.
MARCUS PARKS
They said that it's a chilling movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh of course, yeah. Christopher Nolan's not gonna fuck it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I am excited to see it.
BEN KISSEL
I mean he could.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, sure. Again, send us money. Send us money for it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I just gave an advertisement.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah we did.
MARCUS PARKS
For the fucking movie.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We get nothing.
BEN KISSEL
No, we never get anything.
MARCUS PARKS
I haven't even seen it yet.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're on strike. You shouldn't even be working, Christopher Nolan.
BEN KISSEL
Well not the strike-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever, it doesn't matter.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
All right, so now my turn?
MARCUS PARKS
Your turn for a bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's really quick.
BEN KISSEL
Are we getting into the Grays now?
MARCUS PARKS
A little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen, okay. So number one, what happened there?
BEN KISSEL
What? We just did six episodes. With what?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What are we even talking about, right?
BEN KISSEL
We're talking about the atomic bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Number two, you know what we've been talking about this whole time? Opening up the universal cloaca to alien attention.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. I believe it's possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So we now know, 1945, sure, bomb, big deal.
BEN KISSEL
It's a huge deal.
MARCUS PARKS
And let's go ahead and say, let's put on top of this, let's put a veneer of respectability due to the fact that alien or at the very least unidentified aerial phenomena have been proven to be in existence. There's a veneer of respectability to Henry's-
BEN KISSEL
I agree.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm just saying.
BEN KISSEL
I'm already in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Basically if what David Grush's current whistleblower is talking about is remotely true, there is a whole chapter of American history that is also then true, which is really fucking wacky. And one of those chapters, one of the couple of serious pages in that chapter we will definitely be talking about with seriousness, if David Grush's stuff comes out to be actually vaguely real.
BEN KISSEL
And he's the new whistleblower?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He is.
BEN KISSEL
Who was just on television.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is what happened July 3, 1947 in Roswell, New Mexico.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now we know that on the Brazel farm that sunny desert day, an object that they did not comprehend crash landed in that field and created a 3/4 long mile series of debris.
BEN KISSEL
And you know the first thing the aliens were told? Oh it gets cold at night, it's a desert.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna want to wear a jacket, it gets really hot in the afternoon. If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. Which is what everybody says about every city you've ever been to and every city you've ever lived in.
BEN KISSEL
It's true sometimes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But so obviously this object crashed. The Brazel farm, these very scared men who are so used to seeing these things because they're around all these various areas where Project Mogul is currently being tested. They've seen these objects in the sky. We know that Los Alamos is only 3.5 hours south of this location. And what's right next to it is Roswell Air Base. So they see all of this debris, they don't know what the fuck it is. It's been left out there for days which is also very interesting which would go on to disprove their idea to do some experimental balloon, Project Mogul, blah, blah, blah. Right? So they called the Roswell Air Base. Guess who is the occupying the Roswell Air Base? The 509th Group, the guys that were the flight team that flew the Enola Gay to go drop the bombs on Hiroshima. That crew including their bombardier, a guy named Jesse Marcel, was the first man to see the wreckage that happened. He's like this is the weirdest shit I've ever seen. This is a guy that is used to... Think about it, this guy who went through the training in the Manhattan Project.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was like what in the living fuck is all this stuff? He packed it into a bunch of boxes, took it back to his home, showed his kids all of this weird shit, this like weird aluminum foil that you pull apart and then it would collapse back in on itself, these eye beams with weird like symbols drawn, don't know what the fuck it is. He brings it to his commander. His commander gives the okay to go to the newspapers and say we have found the wreckage of a flying saucer which is where we get that very famous picture, where we get the very famous headline where you know like UFOs found in Roswell, blah, blah, blah. But then the next day he takes Jesse Marcel into another room and he's like this is the stuff you found. And hands him a box and it's just weather balloon wreckage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he takes out and that's where we get the picture of Jesse Marcel holding up that piece of weird aluminum foil in the newspaper disproving it. Then you see actually the flying saucer was a weather balloon. We don't know now what the fuck it is, it's just like wild to think that all in this area, this shit's all happening at once.
MARCUS PARKS
Within a few years.
BEN KISSEL
So that's the thread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the thread, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right, there it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude, that's real.
BEN KISSEL
No, I love it. I mean I think that's fascinating.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what if there's something to nuclear abilities, right? Because we know the fact the Grays got interested in us because of this ability. Why? I don't know. Are Grays just future humans?
BEN KISSEL
But why do we know that for a fact?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I have this idea.
BEN KISSEL
Wouldn't they already have the ability?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is like a highfalutin idea, this is like dumb, super sci-fi based, right. What if nuclear signatures are bookmarks throughout time and allows time traveling objects, which is kind of what David Grush is kind of hinting at, that they're saying that the stuff that we're finding in the bottom of the ocean is actually, they keep saying it's not from this earth, that maybe it's something either in a dimension that's in the future and they're literally coming back. Maybe that's how they find other points in time is from nuclear signatures.
BEN KISSEL
So you want to have more nuclear explosions?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I'm just saying.
BEN KISSEL
You want more bombs. You want more bombs, more interactions with the alien life forms. It's possible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy Jesse Marcel... It's just crazy. This guy Jesse Marcel's life is just fucking nuts. The fact that you're tied into all of this shit at once-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was a strange man.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like he had a hell of a life. Is there any place on earth we can just bomb a whole bunch and just be like come on, hang out Grays.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The moon!
BEN KISSEL
No, we can't blow up the moon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But just set up bombs on the moon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You think that's close enough and then we can meet on the moon, neutral territory?
MARCUS PARKS
But the moon could certainly be very important to us in the future if as Henry said, we could build nuclear bases up there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that would be our way station.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And then we could bring nuclear power cells down to earth via a gigantic space elevator.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, space truckers.
BEN KISSEL
The Hubble just had some new pictures released as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by the 1980s, it was generally agreed upon amongst historians that President Truman
was well aware of all the alternatives to end the war without using the bomb. He knew that we didn't need to invade Japan to secure a victory. And he knew that the claim that the bomb had to be dropped to save American lives was a lie used to sell the bomb to the American public. The actual reasons why he chose to drop the bomb however are many. They range from we spent a lot of money on this fucking thing so we gotta use it, we gotta show the Soviets that we mean business. It could have even have just been fucking simple revenge against the Japanese for dragging us into a war that was by all accounts a blood soaked horror show from beginning to end. It killed over 40,000 Americans wounded almost 150,000 more. There was this fucking grudge.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
In the end though, it was probably a combination of all three.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The fact remains however that just the existence of nuclear weaponry can be hard to fully comprehend. The Manhattan Project was such a massive turning point in human history that it's hard to put into words what it really meant for mankind to split the atom.
BEN KISSEL
We just did six episodes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, we did though. We did try to.
BEN KISSEL
18 pages of script per episode, you do the fucking math.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Technically this is a book.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's close to it. It's like 1/3 of a book.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Now I'm not gonna say that we should all come together to push for nuclear disarmament because frankly it isn't up to us and it never was. The doomsday clock has been close to midnight for a long time and shows no sign of turning back anytime soon.
BEN KISSEL
No, they just put it fucking five seconds closer to midnight, just turn it back.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And no amount of protest is gonna change that. See with atomic weaponry, humanity ripped something from the grip of nature itself and introduced it into the world without thinking of the consequences beyond the near sighted view of one tribe trying to scare another tribe with a bigger stick.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is it weird to say that makes me more proud of us?
BEN KISSEL
I mean it's so simple and so complex all at the same time.
MARCUS PARKS
Like other powerful technological innovations, like say social media, it's quite possible that humans simply can't be trusted with nuclear weapons. We're too violent, too volatile, too temperamental. In fact it is a miracle that only two nuclear weapons have been used in aggression since their inception almost 80 years ago. But on the other hand, perhaps it isn't a miracle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's a gift from time travelers who came in order to... We had to invent nuclear technology in order to create the hole and the gap that allows them to shoot through time sections to our time.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you for that.
BEN KISSEL
That's a very important piece of information. He's talking about time flaps.
MARCUS PARKS
Perhaps we can handle that power because we've been handling it. Aside of course from a couple of close calls and oopsie-dos that almost ended the world during the Cold War.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean that seems like a real big yada yada but...
BEN KISSEL
We did just kinda briefly talk about that one plane that just accidentally dropped something over North Carolina, what was that, 10 years ago or some shit?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. That bomb that just like rolled around a street.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the flock of geese that almost ended the world, so on and so forth.
BEN KISSEL
It is amazing how the human brain just wraps it all up together, just being like I guess that happens.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But even so, in every case there was someone in the room with enough intelligence and compassion to prevent the world from blowing up. There was always someone there to keep it from happening. And if history is any indication, we have a good chance of that trend continuing. In fact, considering how many military personnel we have who listen to this show, it may one day be up to one of you to be that person. So go forth with mercy and if it is ever your choice to decide whether or not to press that button, remember the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
BEN KISSEL
And of course when he means press that button, get that Uber Eats, you're gonna want to have lunch and you'll be different when you're done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
As far as I'm concerned, the only bombs I'm dropping are the jokes I'm telling.
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, buddy. Wow.
BEN KISSEL
All right. I mean it is very scary. Humans brought us into this, science brought us here as well. But it is just, it does... Like The Man Who Saved The World, fantastic documentary about the Russian.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's just one person.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just one guy.
BEN KISSEL
Man, you just gotta hope they make the right decision at the right time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the X factors of history we bring up all the time. It's that human element that's keeping us alive and we just kind of gotta keep that playing, the whole let's keep us alive game.
BEN KISSEL
You know how like people fail up all the time?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So then it's just like...
MARCUS PARKS
That is true.
BEN KISSEL
We have faith, we have faith.
MARCUS PARKS
We have faith. We have to have faith.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because if we don't then this fucking weird chaos magic ritual that we accidentally did many years ago that seems to manifest things out in the world after we talk about them on this show, it's happened I think about three dozen times now-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We just have to keep knocking on wood.
MARCUS PARKS
We just have to keep knocking on wood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just keep knocking on wood.
MARCUS PARKS
And putting positivity out there so that we don't manifest some sort of nuclear explosion.
BEN KISSEL
I'm more scared of all the sonar weapons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well sonar weapons are-
BEN KISSEL
There's so many different weapons I hate to be scared of.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then there's the gray goo, we can do a gray goo incident where nanomachine technology kind of goes haywire.
BEN KISSEL
We've already seen it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it makes a giant encompassing gray goo to destroy the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, the goo.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's also solar flares that we're still waiting for the big one.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
George Noory, afraid to this day.
BEN KISSEL
Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
About the solar flares. So there's so many ways for everything to end. So I'm actually still holding out for that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I'm holding out for the solar flare as well. Because we can come back from that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Slowly. The first couple of months are gonna be rough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I'm holding out for Godzilla. Godzilla!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, this was crazy, dude. So much work. Good work, Marcus.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you to our whole research team that helped us with fucking everything.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you to Madeline Shaw who I will say is a co-producer on this series. She killed it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, great job. Joel did great work. I want to thank Rob and Fernando, they've been working on this show. We want to thank everybody. We did it, we landed her in the harbor.
MARCUS PARKS
We did.
BEN KISSEL
All right, everyone. Thank you so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey, come and check it out. We've got a couple of special announcements.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We are going to be in San Diego at the San Diego Comic-Con. I know Friday is our day.
MARCUS PARKS
Friday and I think we're gonna be signing on Friday and doing a panel on Saturday and probably signing on Saturday as well. So we'll see y'all there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We'll see you there.
BEN KISSEL
Well there you go. And I'm gonna be in Las Vegas that weekend, yucking it up on Sunday at some place in Las Vegas. I think it's called Wise Guys.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You go see that motherfucker. And then if you were in the Los Angeles area, come and see us do the final performance of our tour Mamma Mia, Here We Go Again.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
At the Palace Theater November 4th. But for those of you that cannot be in town to see it live, we're gonna do one last final big stream show.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, big stream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To get this tour out of our buttholes.
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Thank you all so much for supporting the shows on the Last Podcast Network, everyone is doing such a great job. And our little Sirius ventures as well. And do we have anything else other than the normal stuff? Thanks for all your support, everyone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Thanks for listening to this series. I hope you learned something, I hope you laughed. And I hope we don't have to ever-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I hope you didn't. I hope you fucking cried.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's a bit of both.
MARCUS PARKS
They might have.
BEN KISSEL
That's the power of this show.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh wow.
BEN KISSEL
You laugh, you cry, you learn, you think, and then also you're dumber.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. You're also dumber.
MARCUS PARKS
All at the same time.
BEN KISSEL
Which is so bizarre.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
It all evens out.
BEN KISSEL
It really does.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't worry, our next series is gonna make you much stupider.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait for that. I need to just bathe in cryptid blood.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We got some
BEN KISSEL
I just want cryptid talk for the next like month.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll do it.
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone, hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein!
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail me!
BEN KISSEL
Bye.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Never drop a bomb again.
BEN KISSEL
Don't drop a bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Send soda. Kill them with sugar.
BEN KISSEL
I mean honestly the Irn-Bru is maybe more dangerous than the atomic bomb.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it used to be, it's Irn-Bru and it used to be dangerous until they took all the fucking sugar out of it and now it's not as good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good lord.
BEN KISSEL
All right.