Stuff They Don't Want You To KnowStrange News: "Freedom Cities" are the New Company Towns, Sackler Family Doesn't Go To Jail
A phenomenally powerful international lobbying group -- Freedom Cities -- pushes the idea of US communities run by corporations. An opioid update reveals the Sackler family will pay money rather than prison time. A threat in Antarctica, while astronauts finally return home. All this and more in this week's strange news segment.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagot. Most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Fellow conspiracy realist friends and neighbors, if you are listening to our strange news segment the week or the day it publishes, let us be the first to welcome you to Monday, March twenty fourth. How's it going, guys, how are we feeling?
Welcome to the middle of the film. That's money, Piper, that's going good. I'm feeling like a giant nerd today as usual.
Nice. I am just for some reason craving Ntella. I just wanted to tell her right now. I don't know, because.
Yeah, probably that was to deal with palm oil. Palm oil bad, right. We don't like palm oil because it's I think, isn't it harvested historically by slave labor and South.
Well, I mean if you hate orangutanks, then palm oil is awesome.
Oh yeah, look it's got palm oil in it.
Yeah.
No, we we are not here to exclusively ruin wholesome good things. But maybe we pop the top on this would by giving everybody some news that some strange news that may make confirm some of our fellow listeners firsthand experiences. It may also be a nice uh whatever the opposite of a palate cleanser is to our earlier episod it on social media. What's the opposite of a palate cleanser? You guys.
Eat a lot of flavor bomb flavor explosions.
Okay, yeah, a palette blocker, a palette annihilator, yeah, a palette stem here all right, Uh, here's the news that broke. Financial Times covered it, Gizmoto covered it, Futurism covered it. Human intelligence does appear to be sharply declining depending upon how human intelligence is measured. What do we mean by this? Assessments from multiple institutions are showing that people across demographics and across age groups are having trouble concentrating a losing reasoning problem. Solving, critical thinking, and information processing skills. So the way that they are measuring intelligence in these studies does appear to confirm some of the things that we discussed in our episode on social media versus attention span. But I think Noel, you raised a really salient point that's been on everybody's mind earlier, which was perhaps cognitive processing ability. It's not necessarily part of it is attroby, but it's not necessarily disappearing.
It's being shifted.
It's being shifted or it's transforming to other priorities in the great mystery box called the human brain.
Do you remember that story we covered either here on Ridiculous History about like the decline of intelligence during the Roman Empire likely attributed to Lead led. I don't think we can blame Lead for this necessarily. They go plastic in our balls, ruminated everything.
Yeah, we can say that there are chemical substances that definitely, especially informative years for humans, They can affect cognition, they can affect later things like impulse control and critical thought. This goes to here, let's cite let's cite a few sources as we kick it off. We'll go to nor Al Sabai writing for Futurism, who points out the University of Michigan's Monitoring the Future study looked at what they call concentration difficulty of eighteen year old people in America and then.
Forty year old people in America. I can relate. Concentration is hard, yeah, and getting harder. It seems, uh huh.
And they said, you know, look at these other studies, like the Program for International Student Assessment or that's a standing institution. Their whole deal is to measure learning skills of adolescents around the world. And after years of research, really deep research, they found that people seem to universally be struggling with reduced attention spans and weakening critical thinking skills. Just in twenty twenty two, Oh, the pandemic was a game changer for US. In twenty twenty two, the National Endowment for the Arts found that just thirty seven point six percent of Americans US residents said they'd read a novel or a short story in twenty twenty one.
Remember I told you Ben that on our trip to the Middle East, I was really hoping to read a whole book, And so I bought the twenty twenty four collection of the best American short Stories. I am proud to reveal that I did read the forward, the introduction, and one story in thirty Hours of Flying.
The first story was good, very good.
It was called The Magic Bangle, and I highly recommend it. And I'm really looking forward to digging in because I figured, you know, I mean, maybe this is good advice for anybody that's struggling with this. I just kind of figured, like, we read a lot of bite sized stuff. I really want to finish a book, so why not read a book full of bite sized stuff.
Yeah, And some of the world's best novels are written in that way. For instance, you know, a great, a great debate covering The Things They Carried is whether that should be evaluated as a cohesive novel or whether it's a series of interrelated short stories. And what is life really except for a series of inter related short stories? With that. With that, folks, we do not abjure, but we do encourage you to spend some time in deep thought, you know, to take some time and for I don't, I'll be on a here as everybody's accountabil a buddy, h. I have to put my phone away now when I read, because we're just so it's so normalized. We're so acclimated to always having a thing that we check just in case something new has.
Happens, that dopamine casino we carry around in our pockets. Like I actually recently invested in one of those mag charger things that sits by my bed, So when I charge my phone now, I put it on that thing and close the door on the other side of the house. And I've been trying to listen to records and be more intentional with the stuff I do and try not to think about that thing. And it's it's, you know, working to a degree, but it's still not easy. I do feel that drive to go check it in the other room.
Can we pause for a moment. A vocabulary word of the day abjure. Please let us know abjure?
Yeah.
Does that mean kind of like to poo poo, something like to speak negatively or to reject.
It means to uh, it's it's like to renown. Here we go disavowed. So I I should have used admonish.
No, no, no, no, no.
We just some of us don't know words.
So we don't so we're not The point is we're not yelling at you we're not yelling at ourselves, but we're we're all working towards this, and we'd love to hear from fellow conspiracy realists who are in charge of younglings. How how do you handle uh the screen time? How do you handle the creation of uh capacity for critical thinking and deep thought? While you're doing that, we're going to give you a cavalcade of somewhat related stories. We're going to talk about eggs, of course, We're going to follow up on Purdue Pharma. We're going to finally catch up with Satan's disciples. Uh, We'll we'll talk about disclosure. We got some shout outs to the ends of the Earth literally, a story we've all been following in Antarctica, story we've been following in space. But before we do any of that, before we even pause for a word from our sponsors, I'd like to posit to you guys, the following, would you live in a city that had less rule of law but more potential to use science to improve your life?
I answer that question by citing an incredible take I just heard from Ezra Klein talking about all this idea of increasing government efficiency, and his critique was, I'm all about government efficiency, But the question is towards what end efficiency towards what? And he just feels like the current administration's vision of the future sucks because it does not involve the things that you're talking about, Ben, and it sort of absures science and technology and seems to have a bit of a retrograde attitude towards that. So I would I would hope, I would love to live in a place where all that stuff is more appreciate it.
All right, well, we'll go to and add break and we will introduce you to the not quite new idea of freedom cities. And we have returned. Do you guys remember the old song? Was it sixteen tons? The company store song?
Lord?
What do you get that is entirely about the US practice, or you know, the worldwide practice in the past, of a community that is run by not a state, not a government, a government entity, but instead by a private entity, by a corporation. This encounters all kinds of weird stuff like pain and script or having debts that are purposely structured such that you can never never really get back into the black ink. We've all heard stories about that. I think we did a few episodes on ridiculous history that touch on the idea of company towns, didn't we.
We had one on here, Absolutely we did on here. I mean just the idea of I don't know, just you know. It's funny too, with the discussion we recently had about scam factory, you know, that's almost an extension of that, but even more abusive. I would argue, just the idea of your captive you are beholden to these overlords of one type or another, and you are using currency that they determine the value of.
Well, great news for any fans of terrible historical precedent. There is a lobbying group right now active in the United States called the Freedom Citi's Coalition. The Freedoms Cities Coalition is currently meeting with officials from the present US administration to push for the creation of what are called freedom cities. Now, first off, that's that's a great name. Uh there. The idea is that you could create tech hubs exempt from all those pesky taxes and red tape regulation, uh, to to get get away from all these federal laws that stop us from doing uh you know what current society would call highly unethical things like anti aging, clinical trials, nuclear reactors, startups, different kind of construction that's not bound by all these you know, busy minded bureaucrats. Right.
Well, I feel like a dummy because when you tease this topic earlier and asked the question, I thought it was a good thing. I thought me maybe wanted to live in a place where more science and technology was you know, valued and pushed forward. But I guess you're talking about like unchecked, potentially problematic science and technology.
And back in twenty twenty three, current president US President Donald Trump kind of pitched the idea of creating ten freedom cities. The hardcore proponents of this will call them start up nations, and their concept is, or they're pitches that if you didn't have the FDA or the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency, you know, the bad guys from Ghostbusters won that you would be able to jumpstart, jumpstart all sorts of innovation and you could really put some gas in the tank there. They're hoping currently this lobbying group to have drafted and ready to sign by the end of twenty twenty five. If you'd like to read more about this, you can check out an excellent article over on Wired Big Thanks to Caroline Haskins and Victoria Elliott, who wrote this. On March seventh, twenty twenty five, Startup Nation Group say they're meeting Trump officials to push for deregulated freedom cities. I got to tell you, it smells a lot like company towns with a new skin put on them.
You know, boy, what very strange mean? Just to say again, like the sales pitch of this sounds great, and I was certainly taken by it because just full disclosure, I was not familiar with the story and I'm kind of learning about it in real time with everybody. But the way it sounds on paper, I'm cool with. But then you start digging into this company store aspect in the deregulation situation, it starts to feel a little more sketchy.
Yeah, that's the thing too. We see precedent not just in the idea of a company town, but we also see precedent in what are called special economic zones. These are things in other countries that have their own sort of bubbled rule of law and regulation right now. For instance, you can go to places like the island of Rotan in Honduras, they have they are home to a place called Prospera, which sounds like, you know, a pharmaceutical product. We'll get to the sacklers later tonight. Prospera the place has been attracting a bunch of tech workers and startups by promising very low taxes, no regulations, a very business friendly government. And it's the philosophical difference. This is another old episode we did on Ridiculous History. The philosophical difference is treating the public as civilians or citizens versus consumers or customers. And that's an episode that is worth a listen. Regardless of whether you're very pro freedom cities or you're very anti freedom cities. We've given you what the champions of this think. The people who are critics of this argue that existing in a place like this will remove the right of consent and will remove all sorts of the typical democratic rights of the public. So I'm wondering where we stand on this. By the way, the Honduran Congress and the Honduran government is kind of internally at odds and the idea of prosperity. The citizens don't love it. They say it makes it increases wealth, disparity and poverty. The former President of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez. He loved Prospera, you know, maybe arguably because he was already at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy. But he gave them a permanent charter. And it wasn't until twenty twenty two that Congress came back and said, look, we can't have this be going on. This is bad for the people of Honduras, you know, the people who can't afford to move from the area that is now Prospera. I don't know. There's an ongoing lawsuit as we record, and it's Prosperous suing the Honduran government. We have to wonder is this a one off? Is this a precedent? Would we see We talked about this in an episode or in Strange News a while back. Do you think do you guys think the United States would ever have new company towns? Well?
I think okay. So in the situation with Prospera, it came into form in twenty thirteen, right, and like four years before that there was a pretty big coup situation, and then a couple of years later, like a whole truth and reconciliation situation there in Honduras and that instability created the right political and economic climate for these folks to move in and create Prospera. Right, so it does feel well and now and what they are suing, right because the new government is basically saying this is a bad idea, guys, yeah, and Prospero says, oh yeah, we're going to sue you for ten billion dollars which would cripple your entire country.
Everybody raise your pinkies.
Wait a minute, bit, but like, aren't these things staffed by like highly educated and specialized individuals who like have a lot of other opportunities available to them, Like, they're not, you know, forcing people to work in these situations, right, I mean, I'm just trying.
To understand, not yet. But it's kind of like sesame credit. It always starts as an opt in thing until the choice that you have is later removed.
Yes, right, So what I'm seeing here, Ben, is the thing you've been warning about for I don't even know how many years, This concept that potentially there will be a new country of sorts formed in one of these places, right, a new economic zone that then, let's say, maybe successfully sues its parent country country and then that becomes the new thing that everybody. Everybody has to now vote between either the government or somebody who represents the government, or Hey, this new Prospera place or this new Freedom Corporation.
Yeah, the new region of southwestern North Oklahoma brought to you by me and dies and excellent and alphabet.
Well, it doesn't seem too far off from like the kind of technocracy that we're finding ourselves in with, like you know, the unelected billionaire Elon Musk kind of running so many key parts of the government seemingly to the interests of his own companies to a certain degree. And you got to wonder, as a company big enough at a certain point and installed enough in a government that they then you know, kind of flout the rules and basically take over. I don't know, does that Does that make sense?
Yeah, that's the that's the precedent that critics are prognosticating, predicting, and fearing. You know, if we if we go to folks like trade Joff go O f f uh, the chief of staff of Prospera, then we'll see we'll see that there. Everybody is agreed there is some sort of conspiracy afoot. It's just the champions of freedom cities feel like they're conspiring to make a better world, and the critics feel like these guys are conspiring to engineer a new form of neo feudalism, right a dark technocracy. If we go just a little bit further on this, please check out Freedomcitiescoalition dot com. That is the website of the lobbying group that we're mentioning, and our paltray from Prospera says, look, our group has already briefed officials at the White House on not just the concept of freedom cities, but three ways to create them. One is through what they would call interstate compacts. Two or more states set aside territories with the same kind of bubble tax and regulatory policy. And then under existing law, these interstate compacts are very tough to revoke. You can dissolve them, but it's like, you know, it's like how it's tough to rescind an amendment in Congress. Once you get an amendment in, you have to have a huge majority of people in legislation to take it out. It's a sneaky way to get it into federal law. The other options are creating federal enclaves with special economic zones, or and this might be the most plausible option, having the White House whomever controls it, issue executive orders to create a city one by one.
Uh huh okay, Yeah, it's making me think about that giant swath of land that was purchased out in California we talked about, yeah.
Or Elon Musk's compound outside of Austin, Texas.
Yeah. And then it gets tricky because if we're talking about private industries assuming something very close to the role of government, we have to ask ourselves are those private industries going to be US based or are they going to be industries from a foreign country that maybe doesn't have the same structure between like private and public caraffs cities.
Can I just say that if you go to Prospera dot co, the background image is like a video. It's the most sci fi looking kind of culty almost you know, idyllic future city kind of pitch that I've ever seen, and so much crypto content in it. And you got to imagine too, that a lot of these free cities or free freedom cities would be it would be proposed that they would use the new currency. You know what I mean, like, I just feel like that's sort.
Of the script kind of.
I mean, that's that's a big thing about like questions about how the government is going to start investing social security or whatever if they dismantle it. Is this idea that am I start making risky bets and like, you know, speculative cryptocurrencies.
We need a white lotus season in Prospera.
Let's do it.
M yeah, and we'll have Prospera produce it. I'm sure this is the issue on the table for many of us in the crowd. You might already be thinking ahead, like there are nobody likes to mention this, but there are objectively scientific innovations that could occur much faster were humanity not practicing a code of ethics, were there not hard regulations about human experimentation and so on, there would be horrifically high rate of attrition for a lot of things, but overall, arguably you would arrive at some breakthroughs faster than you would under the current regimen of rules.
I know, man, the more I'm watching this Prospero video loop, the more it seems pretty nice. You got healthcare, dental, A Commissary Green spaces a pickleball court, and what else.
Do you want?
I'm down here. You can do some human experiments on me if I get to play pickleball for free, herey you go.
And if you have a problem in a freedom city that it's kind of like having a problem as an employee of a corporation. That's another fear. You won't have a day in court. You might go to an arbitration board. And if you don't step right, as we used to say, then you could have consequences with no avenue for things like appeal, no avenue for things like habeas corpus and so on, because the federal government would then have to whatever that overall government is, would have to figure out how they interact with this increasingly autonomous nation state. There's a great graphic novel called Lazarus for anybody who likes graphic novel levels. It explores the dystopian end spectrum of corporate run global government and that in that there are three demographics. For there are a few companies that rule the world right regions thereof in those places, there are three demographics. There's the family, the ruling class. There's what are called the serfs, which are the skilled workers, and then everybody else is called waste. And the waste can disappear at a moment's notice. Their rights are severely curtailed, their avenue or access to information is highly limited. And that while that is science fiction and it's a great graphic novel series, it does, I would argue, speak to some real world concerns, especially now you know in the US where what forty eight New Mexico residents have just disappeared, and ICE doesn't know where, the ICE's lawyers don't know where they are. Everybody's ignoring the fact that people are ghosting in the US without their consent.
Dude, imagine a physical place on this planet where autonomous security drone slash robots will be in place for the first time. Can you imagine a country, or a state or a city where that will happen. I can't imagine one that has a government like literally, I cannot imagine a place on this earth that would do that except an entrepreneur based freedom city.
I have a scuba shop. There's a scuba shop on the premises.
Come on, I can imagine. I can imagine that easily happening with a overar constructure that calls itself the government, sort of like how your substitute teacher might show up in class. You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, we are going to move on or time. But with this we would also naturally see an erosion of privacy, which reminds us of one last golden apple to toss in the chat before we moved to the sponsor Folks. One day, one evening, one year, one decade. Soon we will hopefully be correct about something good. Yet again we come to you to say we correctly predicted something bad. Amazon has removed the privacy option for all of its all of its neat little recording devices, so all Alexa recordings will now immediately go to the cloud. You have been decisioned tread away yet again from a choice that you thought you were always going to be able.
To make Alexa stop spying on me.
No, I got in trouble for doing that joker earlier. Who was it? It was a few years back.
We go, oh, we did that. We did a bunch of them in a row. I just did one. Guys come on and alexas talking to me, and she says she can't do.
That, Dave. She could at least learn your name. But everyone be careful. We want to hear your thoughts on all of this, especially, we want to hear from people who are very anti or very pro Freedom City. Do you think this would actually happen? Do you think this is a company town, or do you think there is a net positive to removing all those regulations? Conspiracydiheartradio dot com. We're gonna pause for a word from our sponsors and will return with more strange news.
And we're back. I'm gonna jump right in by way of an update Produe Pharma, y'all. Remember those guys, the Sacklers. Remember that giant heroin spoon that that Momus sculptor built outside of their offices, out of their headquarters. Remember bad news, that whole situation with OxyContin being put forth as non addictive, of course, leading to the opioid epidemic.
Absolutely, demastology of the one to ten pain scale.
All of that, absolutely, all of that very very tricky stuff of coming from the Sacklers and Purdue Pharma. But they, you know, were forced the Sackler family to leave the board of Purdue Pharma. Perdue Pharma did declare bankruptcy. The Sacklers no longer are able to be enriched by any activity from the company moving forward. And now a deal has been made or perdue. Pharma has submitted a settlement plan including up to seven billion dollars of cash from the Sacklers themselves and their personal wealth. And you know, as let's under the deal, the family members just jumping off with the AP's reporting, estimated in documents from twenty twenty and twenty twenty one to be worth eleven billion, would give up ownership of the company in addition to contributing money over fifteen years, with the biggest payment upfront, okay, eleven billion in net worth collectively. It's just kind of making me think about what's going on right now with the stock market and with the loss of value of certain very very very wealthy individuals. It's like, if you're worth fifteen billion dollars, is you know, coughing up three billion of your net worth like that big a deal. I can't even imagine what a billion dollars even looks like or feels like. It just seems after a certain point people are just like hoarding their gold, you know, in their castles.
Well, I mean, gold is a tangible asset though, and this is when you get past a certain threshold of currency or the concept of currency. You're talking about ideas, you're talking about articles of faith. This is very non freedom City. Yeah, so it's not giving Freedom City. But but Noel, this does sound like at least some sort of accountability. When I was reading these statements, I was seeing a couple of astis up to seven billion dollars, which is not the same thing as seven billion dollars.
No, it's true, it's true.
And none of the sacklers are facing any criminal charges, Like, no one's going to jail yet.
Noah, No, not that we've heard. And you know, to me, that would be a more appropriate punishment or some kind of actual And if not, that's my point. I guess it's like, if you're worth that many billions of dollars, and yeah, going from eleven billion to just four billion, if you are coughing up that full seven billion, sure is a big hit. But also you're still you still have four billion dollars, which is more money than even makes sense to me. So it just kind of feels like, to your point, bend these articles of faith, is it really a huge sacrifice that's being made by these folks that are directly responsible for loss of lives and livelihoods and ruining families.
Well, where what money goes to preventing this from happening?
Again, that is a question makes it does not seem to be being addressed.
Like how could you? I don't know, just how do you prevent a corporation like that and damage is done family from generating something that causes so much harm?
Right?
Yeah, Okay, so I understand you now, because there are there are two related or ven diagrammed but distinct avenues there. The first question is how do we prevent that specific company from doing a thing right or other companies? Is there a preventative precedent set? And then the second thing is where does the money from a settlement go? That's that latter question is a little bit easier to answer because we I believe we discussed previously when this settlement was first starting to you know coalesce the idea of similar to like tobacco companies in those big settlements, they had to fund public awareness campaigns, they had to fund you know, resources for addiction, the resources for medical information, things like that. They're not quite defanged, but they're very dull canines when it comes to the bike.
Sure, I mean yeah, but it's also like one of these things that I think ties into what we were talking about with freedom cities and the idea of deregulation, which seems like more the order of the day rather than further regulation, because that would kind of be the thing that could prevent other companies from doing something like this. And you know, if there is this effort to scale back any kind of oversight and regulation that I don't think there's any way that this isn't going to happen again. And not to mention that, you know, the damage has been done. They began this epidemic, you know, in the nineties and it very much, you know, kind of started top the dominoes leading up to where we are now with defentanyl crisis because that you know drug and the proliferation of that drug, if you think about it, is just a continuation of the availability of hard opioids that then when they were harder to get because of regulation and issues with oxy content, a lot of people pivoted to heroin.
Well it was more affordable too, one hundred Percentially, if you don't find you know, a pill mill in your area or your doctor, this happens in the military too, when people get prescribed painkillers after an injury in the field, you know what I mean, And they come back and eventually, unfortunately, that's a tale that pre dates oxycotin. That's true emergence onto the market in nineteen ninety six. Right. The idea is that people would end up being through one circumstance or another, not always their fault, they would get hooked on some very serious substances and they would be physically dependent upon those. So you have to have something like that. What are you going to do when the official doors closed, You're going to find another window into the house.
I thought a piece of television that did a really good job of telling the story of the human cost of this whole thing was Dope Sick, which I think was based on a memoir of some kind by one of the doctors that was portrayed in the in the series by Michael Keaton. I think that's right, But it really does show not only the like how the sales people worked and the information they were being given, and how they were able these pharmacy reps were able to go out to these you know, hospitals and pitch their drug as being non addictive, but also how that trickled down to, like, you know, regular folks who were prescribed it legally and then ultimately just became completely strung out. I think it's a really well done show, and I do recommend that if you want to be reminded of the damage that this family did. So I don't know, Matt, does that kind of ensure what you were talking about, like, how do we what can be done? Is it even possible? Like I just feel like with the climate they we're in now, it's feeling less and less possible. And this feels, at the end of the day like a slap on the wrist to me.
Well, any of these corporations can develop a drug, right that they can then test themselves and then bring in the regulators and pay some of them off and then make their way through and create something that becomes just as bad as this. All of the money, I mean, there's a breakdown on the AP News article that you linked to know that it does show exactly where the money goes. And you know, two hundred and ten million to the lawyers of local governments who've been fighting this battle for how many years now? You know, money that is going to go to individuals, but it'll probably be between three thousand and forty eight thousand dollars.
And health insurers.
Yeah, oh yeah, a trust for Native American tribes that were affected. There's incredible stuff.
I didn't see this infographic, Matt, what a really excellent breakdown this is on the AP. I didn't realize that. So that's cool. Well, at least they are paying, you know, some sort of reparations to affected communities that I imagine would go into various treatment programs and at the very least, you know, counseling and stuff like that, because that stuff isn't available.
But ultimately, this is money, and it's stated within that article to fight the opioid crisis, that's right, So it's money to fight the giant problem that the corporation created in the first place.
Then that's so it's very positive.
It's positive, but ultimately it's it's trying to fix the thing that is the crap show that we're already in. So like, yeah, I just wish there was money that was going to somehow setting up a way to penalize an organization that looks to create something as addictive and damaging as that drug was right.
I'm with you. I don't know what that looks like those Yeah, no, no, I'm with you, And I will say too, there's amount of this that I don't know. The dollar amounts do seem meaningful, Like if you're talking about one hundred and forty million dollars for trust for Native American tribes that were affected infants affected by neonatal abstinence syndrome one hundred and fourteen million, that does seem like meaningful dollar amounts that could make a difference. But to your point, it does start to feel a little performative because it's like, way, way after the fact. And is any amount of money enough to fix what Purdue Pharma hathrought?
Yeah?
Well, I mean what three thousand, seven hundred dollars as the minimum right for an individual victim? That's enough for maybe a funeral maybe.
With the sheep casket.
Yeah well, but you know, up to forty eight thousand is that worth the life of somebody that was lost due to this stuff? And if you break down seven hundred and seventy eight point eight million dollars to individual victims, that's what it equals, three thousand, seven hundred to forty eight thousand depending on who you are and how you're fe.
Well, there's that update, and yeah, I think it was an opportunity to catch up on just how messed up the whole situation was. So I will just leave you with one more story. This one. It's pretty wild, y'all. It feels it reminds me immediately of that episode of the Twilight Zone terror at thirty thousand feet, I think, where it was like William Shatner is being terrorized on an airplane. He already has like horrible anxiety about flying, and then he sees this like gremlin on the wing and he just, you know, basically he's losing his mind. Throughout the course of this episode, something very very similar happened out of our state of Georgia and Savannah. A passenger absolutely went ballistic physically violent behavior, lashing out at crew members at fellow passengers due to what would appear, at least as described by this individual as some form of either demonic possession or belief that there were demonic forces present on this flight that had followed this individual. The individual in question is named Delanngea Augustine. He's thirty one years old and on a flight leaving American Airlines flight from Savannah, Georgia to Miami. He began to convulse and shake. Initially, a lot of the attendants on board thought that he was having some sort of medical emergency, like a seizure, but he, in fact, it was later determined, believe that a demonic spirit had entered the cabin of this aircraft. He you know, kicked and punched folks on the plane. One of them he kicked so hard in the chest that an attendant, a flight attendant, actually tumbled, you know, and flew across the aisle into a window on the other side of the plane. This is all according to an arrest report. Yeah, it's a quote from Savannah Solomon, who's a special agent with the FBI. In this New York Times piece about it. Augustine's choices appeared purposeful, though difficult to describe. After a certain point, he swallowed his rosary beats, you know, purposefully, claiming that later that it was a protective means to guard him against the demonic forces on board. I mean, everything about this just is like feels like something you'd see in a film, you know, and it's very scary. And it turns out his sister when they were detained, said that they had been fleeing Haiti due to spiritual oppression of some kind, oppressive forces that were following them, and that they were trying to escape from the words in particular, were to flee religious attacks of a spiritual nature. His sister was told by mister Augustin to close her eyes and pray because Satan's disciples had followed them onto the plane and the legion did not want the Augustines to make it back to Haiti. And that's when he swallowed the rosary beads and he referred to them as a weapon of strength and the spiritual warfare. Only about eight other passengers were on the plane. It must have been one of those short little hopper puddle jumper type planes, and no one was seriously injured, and you know, the crew apparently acted very efficiently and quickly. He is facing charges, most of which are misdemeanor's battery, obstruction of law enforcement, and one felon account of criminal property damage. There have not been any statements from a lawyer representing mister Augustin, So, yeah, what do you guys think about that? It's a real as real horror show.
There that's an intense situation where it feels like the personal belief so the family affected a lot of other people and also some kind of situation. It's interesting. There's a quote in the USA Today article that you posted here, Noel, where the family of this man who's experiencing all this stuff says, I didn't what was it. The quote was she was surprised that he had hurt anyone because quote, he hurts evil, so like he is a spiritual warrior of some sort in the belief of the family.
It just feels Jesus is also a mental health story, and we know there's a lot of intersection between hardcore spiritual beliefs and you know, mental illness that can kind of synergistically affect one another and create sort of like a whole new situation.
You know, mental health struggles are very much real, and we do know that there's something about the contained environment of a plane that can I don't know, you we don't hear the stories about the plane flights that go well where everybody on the plane behaves. We hear, you know, people who maybe are having a mental break, maybe hallucinating. It is going to be a story to keep an eye on, and we wish the or I wish the person in their family the best.
Oh same, no, no question, I mean it does. It breaks my heart in away. I mean, this is obviously someone who has a very strong spiritual belief and if you want to take what his sister's saying and face value, doesn't seem like someone who would typically lash out and try to injure people, you know. So yeah, my heart goes out to them as well, and definitely something to keep an eye on. But let's let's pause here, take a quick break here, a word from our sponsor, and then we'll come back with one more piece of strange news from mister Frederick.
And we've returned computer generate eighty foot tall version. I'm just showing you. Have you guys seen that clif so, no, okay, you should watch that. You should find that just search computer generate eighty foot tall version of Daisy with a full bladder, generate lawn chair and a pair of goggles.
Right, okay, I'm on it.
It's wonderful. Okay, let's talk about being stranded, you guys, having no way out, like if you're on that plane we just discussed, right, just having there's something occurring and you cannot escape physically.
Sure, or like being in a freedom city that you're born in.
Oh yeah, and you just don't know anything else outside of it, and perhaps the perimeter is patrolled by robot dogs with giant weaz f flamethrowers.
At least you could leave after paid a reasonable fee. It's like the Hotel California, you can check out any time you can't leave, or you know, being a bean in space or yeah, being in a place you can't walk away. It reminds me one thing, just a quick note here. Met One thing that I think shocks a lot of people and they're traveling internationally, is some countries charge you a fee when you arrive, but then some other countries charge you a fee to leave.
Oh yeah, I did not know.
That now, so hey, that's a really great point. There is definitely a fee to leave the International Space Station once you get up there, because we're and it's not just a little fee. Well you don't have to pay it necessarily, but somebody does, to the tune of millions of dollars. So back gosh, this was last year, just before the summer. Maybe it was late June, early July, when we talked about two astronauts that went up to the International Space Station on the very first, very exciting Boeing Starliner spacecraft. It was the first time that humans were going to be on there, actually traveling up to the ISS, and they did it. They made it there.
Well.
Once they got there, Boeing realized, oh, there's a lot of problems with our Starliner craft here, so we can't actually send you back the way we wanted to, you know, within a couple of days time there. So you're gonna need to hang tight and we'll figure out the problem and then you'll be good to go. That turned into a couple of months, and then a couple more months, and it turned into from early June twenty twenty four to this week. Oh, actually last week, as you're hearing this, when two NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, finally made it back to Earth, but not via a Boeing craft, via a SpaceX craft. This is just an update, guys. There's a ton of ton of writing about this, and it's big in the news, like, oh my gosh, the astronauts are back. We did it, Hurrah. And then it's being politicized just because of the fact that SpaceX is the one the company. They got him down right, it's being stuff out there. The previous president did it wrong, the new president did it right, and all this other stuff.
Ultimately the presidents who knows the president of Freedom Town, Red white and Blue Land and all that stuff.
But it does none of that matters. What matters is the two human beings who are awesome astronauts made it back to Earth.
Yes, it's cool.
Two other astronauts came down with them, Nick and Alexander, which is which is cool, and they made it out. Everybody's safe, and a bunch of dolphins apparently a whole pot of it, yes, which is it's just nice. That's just nice to hear.
Folks.
Tell us where you think about this, because all right, here's my theory, Matt Noel. Are those dolphins going to come back and say that they saw UFO thanks for all the fish. I hope that they are currently conspiracy squeaking right now? You know this is real.
We saw a sorry, yeah, it's good.
Well, it was the biggest crash we've ever heard, right, and then we went and checked it out, and there's a bunch of creatures on it.
And why won't Dolphin government tell the truth about what's going on there at the top of the water.
Yeah, what were those appendages they had that had little tiny appendages on them? Ale weird. So anyway, that's a cool story, guys. We're going to jump to another form of being stranded that we've talked about on the show before, traveling out to the frozen wastes of Antarctica and existing on a research station and what it's like to know that you have to wait for a very specific ship to make a very dangerous trek out to where you are, and then you have to take a very dangerous trek out to where that ship is in order for any supplies to come in, in order for any people to arrive or to leave. Very let's just say I was going to use the word precarious. It's a it's a fragile existence, right.
It's a battle episode because a bottle knows because there's such a small group.
Yes, So, so imagine that you are one of nine people existing on a far flung research station in Antarctica. Uh, and the only way in or out is by ship, and the only way to get to that ship is to take basically a small uh they call them, they don't call them snowmobiles, they call them something else, but a small snowmobile out to a larger vehicle, and then take that slow, large vehicle down far, far away to where a ship could arrive. Imagine somebody one of the other nine people with you is getting real violent and making threats, like threatening lives, and you're stuck in You know, it's a fairly large station, the one we're going to talk about, but it's also very claustrophobic. There's not a lot of large open spaces there, and on the other side of the wall, every wall is just snow and negative thirty degrees celsius weather.
And HP Lovecraft monsters, Mountains of Madness. Yeah, yes, we're talking about Sinai, right.
Yes, the the Sinai for base that's in Antarctica. It is run by South Africa. It is officially their base. And there was an email sent to a journalist from one of the people who is currently staying on that base saying that another team member had physically assaulted a colleague and threatened to kill another colleague. This email also alleged some sexual assault that is a little weird because South African officials came through and said after investigation that specific instance of sexual assault was not correct. But we don't have all the details that is being kept by whatever investigation was made there. We do know that there was an individual on that base that did seem to become violent, both in words and in actions, and it just reminded me of some of the films that we've seen over the years, or reminded me of the psychological place you are in when you are in a far flung place like that, feeling like there's no way out, there's nothing you could even do. What am I going to do? Send an email, which is what this person did, right, Please help via email. It just doesn't seem like you're going to get any help anytime.
Soon, especially the closest other physical basis like one hundred and ninety miles away, right.
Yes, yes, so you could, I guess escape if you wanted to an attempt to make it to the other place, but the chances that you make it there safely are not.
Great, especially this time of year.
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, it's not a great time of year because everybody on that base is going to have to stay there until I think December. Like that's like they're locked there basically until December.
Because the hemispheres have opposing seasonal shifts. So yes, right now in the very lowest part of the hemisphere, not to be too normalizing the northern normalizing of the Northern hemisphere, but in Antarctica right now, the weather is turning increasingly hostile for travel.
You're snowedd Yes, unless a corporation or country or group decided to spend a ton of money and send a ship out there to do some kind of a urgency evacuation or emergency intervention. Which again, just like on it's not quite as expensive as you know, the whole SpaceX saving them and all that stuff out in space, but it's pretty close when it comes to just the expenses that someone would have to incur to save.
You, and the dangers also there are very MiG Even if you have a state level entity doing an exfiltration on this, they're still going to be rolling the dice a little bit.
Ah exactly.
So, guys, all of this is making me think about being somewhat stranded here on planet Earth because in both cases, the individuals on the Sinai Research Station, the people who are out on iss they made it or the concept right is you make it to safety, you make it to a place that is that feels maybe more like home, that feels like I'm no longer in danger. We're currently all of us. If you can hear this existing on planet Earth, right.
Yeah, it's the first spaceship when you think about it.
At least that we're aware of, right, And it's making me think about more of that stuff out there, right, connecting it back up to space. And there was this documentary that really caught my eye. I've not seen the film yet, I've only watched the trailer, but when I watched the trailer and then did a little digging, it reminded me of the first time we talked about the Disclosure Project, Stephen Greer's thing that he put together out in Washington in two thousand. This concept of bringing together as many individual human beings that have true access to government programs, especially those special programs that we've talked about on in this show before, where only a couple of members of Congress, sometimes only a couple senators sometimes even know that they exist. This documentary, it's called Age of Disclosure, brings together around thirty human beings that have real access to these programs like a TIP and programs like the ones that are that followed a TIP that are happening right now that are looking at unidentified anomaloust phenomena, which is what they call it now, and they are coming forward in this documentary and saying, yes, non human intelligence exists. It has been here for a long time. The technology has been here for a long time. We are currently in a cold war with every other country on the planet, especially the United States and China and Russia, and that cold war is all about taking this crashed technology or technology that has been encountered that is not of this world and somehow reverse engineering it. And they are saying that the first country or superpower that successfully reverse engineers it will be the next dominant hegemonic power on this planet.
Ooh, and they're not saying, by the way, I love that you're playing this out, Matt, because it's something we point out. Obviously, no one has said definitely extra terrestrial. The confirmed phrase that is being used by a lot of people who are experts in their fields is non human in origin, and that's a hell of a umbrella phrase.
Well, some of the folks in there. I think they use the aliens wordy.
In the trailer at least. Yeah.
Well, from what I'm reading about the documentary, so people who were at south By Southwest this year were able to see it. That's where it premiered. And and the interesting thing to me, guys, is that there are there appears to be bipartisan support when it comes to the two party system in this country, for more money being thrown at this concept, for more transparency about this idea. You've got people like Marco Rubio, people little Micah, Yeah, the Secretary of State, Mark Rubio. You've got Kristen I don't know how to say her name, Gillibrand Gillibrand she's from New York, she's a senator. You've got uh, there's there's several other lawmakers from both sides of the aisle who are saying, hey, we need to do more with this thing. This is really important. And then you got people from the intelligence side, from the Pentagon, from people who are career Pentagon officials coming forward and saying, yeah, this is this is absolutely real. It's time for us to take this seriously and tell people because we've been keeping it secret for so long. It's always in a lot of these documentaries. It's talked about as in, it's the alien thing, right, it's the concept of aliens. Oh, there's all these possibilities with aliens. What this is focused on, at least to my understanding, is this arms race essentially that we're all locked into.
Because it's a it's a defense threat at this point.
To everybody, and and everybody wants the new thing because whoever gets it first, whoever drops that technology first, wins, at least according to the folks in this documentary. But I just want to put that out there for anybody who's listening. What do you think about all of that stuff? What do you think about everything we've talked about on this episode today? You should contact us.
Yes, there are many ways to do so. You can take your local UAP over down our way, just drop by, you know what I mean, Send us a blurry photograph of yourself Bigfoot style. By the way, there's also a move I don't know, I told you guys, there's a move to make Bigfoot the state cryptid of California. So gobout that. Yeah, yeah, we're on board with that.
I think it'd be Oregon, though, honestly.
You know, hopefully it's setting a precedent, fair enough, right, matting a precedent there, It is so you could contact us with your take on all of these stories. We discuss us recommendations of other stories you fill your fellow conspiracy realist will enjoy in an upcoming episode. How do I do that? You're asking yourself? So glad you asked. You can call us on a telephonic device, You can send us an email. You can find us on a variety of platforms on the old Internet.
It is the question. In fact, you can find us at the handle conspiracy Stuff where we exist on Facebook with our Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. Get in on the conversation, tell us your thoughts, share memes and witticisms with your fellow conspiracy realists. Can also find this a Conspiracy Stuff on ex fka, Twitter and on YouTube, or we have video content gloor for you to enjoy on Instagram and TikTok. However, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show, and there's more.
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