From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noela.
They call me Ben.
We're joined as always with our super producer Alexis code named Doc Holliday Jackson. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. Long time listeners, if you're listening to this the evening it comes out, then you have made it to Thursday. Congratulations all around. We are going to hear from our fellow conspiracy realist. We're going to have a follow up on the beginning of a conversation we add about fertility
rates and paying people to become parents. We're gonna learn about disruptions in the organ trade, not the way you might think, and not the organ trail. But before we do any of that, we thought we'd dip our toes in with a delightful piece of correspondence we got from an old friend.
Yes, indeed, I'm just gonna jump right into the email. This is a lot of fun. Hey, Ben the Octopi sympathizer, Matt the dad, and Noel the guy who refuses to play control for some reason, even though he can put hours into Skyrim. Okay, I see you. It's your not so British bank robber Ben. You pointed out that we have heard from this individual before, specifically relating to a period in their life as a professional bank robber.
Yes, it's great to hear from you again.
Yeah, this is from jas. By the way, although there's been some great heist and fake identity stories lately that are right up my alley, I'm actually writing in about your Haunted Places and Objects piece. My house is definitely haunted, but not in a stereotypical way. My wife got a puppy in the first year of our marriage, and that dog was consistently by her side. Unfortunately for us, that dog was a superflatulator, a killer of the SBD kind.
For the unitiated out there, that means silent but deadly. It didn't matter if I was cooking dinner or trying to relax on the couch and cuddle up to a movie. This dog was there and dropping it like it was hot. So we would constantly have to recoil in disgust at the foul smell and fan it away and say the dog's name aloud and scolding, no, no, no, I wish we had gotten the dog's name. But that's okay. Here's
where it gets crazy. This dog passed away recently, sorry to hear that, but it is not fully moved on. My house is haunted by its presence, and in the most loving way, it knew how in life it has continued in death. My wife and I will be in a room together when suddenly that same putrid gas smell will appear out of habit. We both start to berate the dog, but it's no longer alive, so how can that be possible? Creepy right. The even creepier thing, it
only happens when my wife is in the room. The dog continues to follow her around the house in death as it did in life. Ghost impression of its love or something sinister. Okay, we're gonna get to that. I'm no ghost hunter with a TV show, so I don't have the answers. A lot of those ghost hunters with the TV shows don't either, so don't feel too bad. But I'll leave you with that. It's taco Tuesday, so I better get started on making the beans. That's funny,
cheers Jasps. The dog also went through a phase of pooping in my house shoes, so if that happens again, I'll be sure to give you an update. Pps. I know you are all dads. I didn't mean to leave you guys out by singling Matt out as the dad, then as a cat dad. Noel has a daughter, But why can't he just play that super fun game al dight? So that's what comes to mind first for him in the intro.
I've got a quick thing. And I know this is maybe an unpopular opinion, but I do not consider myself a father to my pets.
Fair that is that is your prerogative.
Who do you consider yourself a father?
Too?
Sure?
Right? So, uh, this may be a conversation for another David, what what a cool letter? You know we talked about Uh, we talked about how memory is so often encoded in our olfactory sensations. Right, So smell makes sense that it could be for those who believe in an afterlife, it could be a means of communication, and of course a smell can instantly take you back to a point earlier in life. I kind of have a theory, a possig I'm I want to float it, but I don't want
to mess with anybody's relationship. You guys, is it possible that maybe Jase's partner was the one party in the.
Hole she was blaming on the dog as old as times impossible?
I want going to make these rampant accusations more like.
I like this one.
Let me give you mine, and then let's compare and contrast, because I think that's a really good possibility. Or it's Jason, he's just having a little fun with us. Uh, what if it's a natural gas leak somewhere in the home and it was never the dog or a human creating that sulfurous smell, because that's usually the smell I associate with the term SBD when it's silent, you can't hear anything,
and it's like that sulfury smell. Yeah, well that would be associated with a natural gas leak because it's put in there on purpose for you to smell it when it's leaking in your home. So like, if there's a small leak somewhere or a sewer backup problem, but maybe a natural gas leak, I'm just gonna say, Jase, you should get your house checked.
Bro.
I have to say I was googling, you know, ghost smells. That was my term. And first of all, the first thing that comes up is the idea of phantom smells, which is a thing that happens. It's sort of old factory hallucinations, right like people often who are experiencing stroke or some similar you know, cognitive kind of events. I smell bitter almonds, or I smell burnt toast or burning
hair or whatever it might be. You hear that a lot. Also, the smell of sulfur is often associated with infernal spirits, the smell of the pit, you know, the burning smell of the abyss, the ninth circle of hell. So there's a couple options there. Maybe maybe you guys are having a collective stroke on the regular, or you're you've got a demon, in which case that's that's no good. You need to get get you to a priest real quick to exercise that house.
Matt.
I think you might have nailed it on the head as it were. One of the things I found on Reddit with somebody asking a question typical smell during ghost encounters? Does anyone experience that. I'll just give the excerpt that is appropriate here. I've always seen in movies or heard of the rotting smell when there's a haunting. Has anyone experienced this? If yes, then what kind of smell was it? I recently moved to a place and since then I'm
unable to sleep because of unfounded fear. A few days in a row, when I woke up after midnight, there was this weird smell in the hallway which disappeared in the morning but came back in the night. Nobody cleaned the house or took out the trash, It just disappeared, and the source of the smell is definitely inside the house. Even if this doesn't sound paranormal to you, I just want to know if someone who has experienced some smell along with paranormal stuff, and what kind of smell to
which somebody responded. I believe in and have experienced plenty of paranormal phenomenon in my time, but this sounds disturbingly similar to a slow ghastly. This would also cause feelings of paranoia and the unfounded fear you describe. For your own safety and health, I would strongly encourage you to test for gases and or molds in your new house before assuming this is supernatural. I think that's sound advice. But I do like the idea of to your point
band of sense memory. We always talk about how, in a lot of ways, whatever your beliefs in the afterlife might be or in you know, spiritual things, that hauntings often can be attributed to sort of lingering energy of some kind, or a place perhaps that has experienced an inordinate amount of sad fartings and sparts sand or sad things, and there can be some kind of a vibe, you know.
We often talk of the show about, you know, the idea of vibes and whether or not you're someone who you know, signs up for more spiritctual kind of ways of thinking about things. I think we've all caught a vibe before. I think it's something that's pretty common to the human condition. So I think the idea of a smell being associated with a vibe and in some way kind of permeating a space where something took place, I could see that as being a thing. But I am
with you, Matt. I think maybe Jace, it's time to you know, call an inspector out there and make sure that you don't have some sort of slow gas leak, because that can be very very dangerous, not only because of igniting a flame perhaps, but also you know, it can just be can poison you.
There's also one thing to investigate. First off, I like that both of these theories were arguing that your dog is innocent, whether alive or beyond the grave beings didn't do it right justice for being hashtagg. So there's this other aspect though, with a gas leak, a low level natural gas leak is not going to be harmful immediate, but if you have long term exposure, and if Matt, if your theory is correct, then we'd be talking about long term exposure to some regard. Then there would also
be physical symptoms. Jason, I'm interested to hear whether you and your partner have experienced nausea, dizziness, severe headaches, right, or loss of focus. Actually what I'm naming these these sound like conditions of being alive in twenty twenty four. But that would be one of your first ways to really dig into the theories that we're proposing.
Yeah, and apparently you can check for this yourself. You can just get a CO two detector and check for a potential gas league without even having I think you can like rent one or something. So One side effect though, of CO two poisoning is an irrational fear or sensations or feelings of dread and paranoia that can be very similar or along the same lines of what one might experience if they felt as though they were being haunted.
Mmm, fart in the dark, and your too blame, darling, You give beans?
Yes see I was about to say, beans is not to blame, possibly though it could be a ghost dog fart. Who are we to say? We're just here to to suss out the possibilities. See, that's what we're here to do. But you know, often we do hear of people associating a scent with a loved one, perhaps your grandmother's perfume, you know, or the smell of, you know, your father's
cologne or something like that. And because I think those sense memories are so strong, I think we can possibly hallucinate those, you know, if you really associate a lost loved one with that smell and then you're in a place where they spend a lot of time or where you have a lot of memories of that person, I can't see why you might not be experiencing some sort of smell hallucination.
Know what do you guys think When my dog Buddy passed, I think it's exactly that. Like, rationally, it's just the smell of the places where he was a lot in the house. But man, I swear after he was gone, I smelled like that smell when he'd been outside for quite a while, kind of like that a dog got hot, got heated up, and it kind of smells bad. But it just it was a very specific smell, and I would smell it as soon as I walked into the
threshold of the house. And you know, it's my rational mind knows that's just me walking into the place where he was a lot. There's probably still dander and hair in there in some corners that haven't cleaned yet, But in my mind, in the moment, it's like, oh, it's Buddy in.
Here, you know.
Yeah, I'm with you, guys. I agree with you, guys. Smell is something that you can I hesitate to use the word hallucinate because of the somewhat unfair connotations, but we can do this right now. If you're playing along at home, if you're not driving or operating heavy machinery. Then close your eyes think of someone you love. They don't have to be they don't have to be alive, they don't have to be dead. But as you think
about them, don't just think of their face. Think of the sound of their voice, the texture of their hand, or the fabrics that they wore. And then I guarantee you your mind will present to you another sensory stimuli, which will be a smell.
No question about it. And I know I've told this story before. I'll just tell the quick abbreviated version for anyone that hasn't heard it, and for anyone that has, I'll try to get through it quick.
But oh and you can open your eyes now.
Okay, the experiment work.
I didn't want to see to everybody hanky no.
I played along. I played along, and it absolutely worked. But there was a time where I lost a friend and a girl that I dated for a very long time.
Just after she passed, we were sitting in her car, my girlfriend at the times car, and it was a very foggy kind of misty night, and on the inside of her windshield she blew on it, and our friend's signature was on the inside of the windshield, and in the moment of that moment, in both of our minds, we both were overcome with emotion and we were like, there's nothing that this could be other than our deceased friend reaching out from beyond the grave to communicate with us.
But the reality of it was that this was These were late teenage early twenties girls, they were high school friends, and she, you know, this was something that people do. You write your name in the condensation on the inside of a car windshield and there are oil is on your fingers that stick around, you know, And this may well have been done a week or more, you know, prior to us experiencing this, But in the moment, it
couldn't be anything but experience with the supernatural. But then a little bit later, thinking about it, we realized what it actually was. So anyway, Jace, thanks so much for the story. It's a nice twist on these types of of spooky tales, so we appreciate it. And I'll take a quick break and here are worth more sponsor and then come back to you with some more listener mail.
And we're back. Guys. I did a terrible job.
I gave that song a bad name when I tried to quote the lyrics from You Give Love a Bad Name by John bon Jovi, but there is a lyric in there because I'm looking at them right now, it says, WHOA, you're a loaded gun. WHOA, there's nowhere to run. That just reminds me of somebody who's got sbds locked and loaded. And as you trapped in a room with us, there's no one can say me. The damage has already done.
See. Oh whoops.
All right, let us jump into a message from Skippy the Prozac Elf.
Here we go.
Good evening, gentlemen, this is well. You can call me Skippy the Prozac ELF. I am a longtime listener, first time call, and I was listening to your recent Listener Mail episode where you were talking about the ethics of cloning, specifically for the purposes of generating one's own organs. And I would like to point out a article recently in the MIT Technology Review as I make this phone call.
It's about a week old now where a company name Liegenesis is doing injections into people's length nodes using a combination of novel therapies and skin skills stem cells. Excuse me to grow a new liver inside the patient. Eventually they hope to be able to do kidneys and pancreas as well, and as a Type two diabetic, the idea of growing a second functional pancreas is particularly of interest
to me. Anyway, I love the show very much, and I thank you for years and here of thought provoking episodes.
Take guys, wow, wow, thank you so much, Skippy the Prozac Elf, very kind words there at the end. Guys, we had that conversation about cloning. What what do you think about even the possibility before we get into it, of some kind of injection into a human that could cause you to grow new organs with stem cells.
I think the science is on the way, you know, it's just out of the current popular grasp. I would argue, if not necessarily this method of application, the idea of a of regrowing organs is nigh inevitable at this point, through one method or another.
We certainly know of certain species of animals that can regrow organs or regrow appendages, you know, like a tail, and certain kinds of lizards. David Cronenberg film called Crimes of the Future that is sort of like this dystopian world where performance art has become the highest form of kind of art and science in the whole world. And there are these like elite class of performance artists that, through various means of internal surgeries and injections, actually grow
new organs and then have them removed. They remove them from themselves as part of this performance art. Yeah, it's a really difficult movie to watch. I'm not certain kinds of body horror I can deal with that. I don't really like cutting, and there's a lot of cutting in this movie. But it's got Ego Mortenson and and it's kind of a dark comedy, and it really does deal with sort of this idea of like, how if we change to a certain degree, are we still human that kind of question.
Clearly, I think we're all in the same page here, folks, and you listening along at home. It's an ideal for state movie. You know, you really get a sense of the person that you're meeting. It's like up there with that time I accidentally went to Requiem for a Dream on a first date.
And then had pancakes or something at went to Applebee's. Yeah, okay, shout out.
Yeah that was But that's I think you're raising I think you're raising some fantastic points here, because the again, some form of this science or some application thereof is almost inevitable, and we know that there's a every year. There are so many organizations or startups that sell what we will call vaporware, right, they get a bunch of angel investors, and then it turns into a jam tomorrow,
never jam today's situation. But Matt, the sense that I am getting from our dear Prozac elf here is that there's some real sand to this correct.
And yeah, well, the ELF hipped us to an MIT Technology Review article from August twenty fifth, twenty twenty two. At least that's the one that I found, because we were just kind of searching around. But this is the one I found by Jessica Hamzulu, and the title is this company is about to grow new organs in a person for the first time. A volunteer with severe liver disease will soon undergo a procedure that could lead them
to grow a second liver. And it goes through and talks about some pr materials that were put out by this company, lie Genesis, which if you want to look it up, it is spelled l y g e n e Sis what is their stock symbol.
I don't know, not kidding, could be a good bye, just saying noels.
We were like, oh, I don't know if they're traded.
Maybe they are. I have no idea. I have no info on that.
All I know is that back in August of twenty twenty two, they were talking about the first trial as an individual human being in Massachusetts, Boston, Massachusetts that is going to try the treatment out this thing that Skippy was describing as injecting with stem cells and whatever other proprietary materials that they're injecting a person with into their lymph nodes and then somehow magically through science, actually the patient would grow a new liver. And I say a
new liver because that's how it's described initially there. But if you move through time just a little ways to twenty twenty three, there is a PR piece, a public relations piece that's put out through PR Newswire by Eligenesis that discusses how they just raised nineteen million in what they call Series A two funding along with this other lab to actually go into clinical trials and to actually move this thing forward, move the needle, if you will, And then you get to the final one I was
looking at, guys is from April second of this year, twenty twenty four, and this is when Ligenesis puts out another PR piece through PR Newswire saying that now they have the first person going into a phase to a clinical trial of this what they call regenerative cell therapy for patients with end stage liver disease. And it is crazy, y'all.
It is not just growing a second liver. According to Ligenesis, the patient would grow several livers, if not six livers in their body, just tiny little ones inside those lymph nodes because the cell therapy that they are injecting into these lymph nodes with the stem cells actually changes the lymph node into liver cells and it builds one at each lymph node inside the body. So six new livers in places where the liver is not, you know, right.
First question would be what are do we know? How this affects the shrimp the lymph nodes.
I guess they are no longer lymph nodes, they are now liver nodes.
Okay, yeah, I mean it's still better than dying from liver disease, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. So I'm looking to at the website and thank you Matt, and thank you prozec El for sending this. It looks like they've already done a lot of modeling and small and large animal experimentation. So moving to these clinical trial phases that does mean human right, Just to be.
Clear, yes, human clinical.
Trials rubbers hitting the road, all right.
Noading up.
But guys, look, I'm sure this is this is a great company filled with awesome human beings who are brilliant. You understand the science behind this, the math behind all this, and they're just working it all out. But if you go to their website and you go to the science section of their website, there's a little thing you could click on this as our science. I'm going to read this out loud and just tell me how you feel
when I read this out loud quote. Our allogenic cell therapies leverage the biology of the lymph node to ingraft, proliferate and form functional ectopic organs that recapitulate the native organs function.
So these a lot of fancy words to me, they know what they're talking about.
It sounds like it's for investors who have a bunch of money and go, oh my.
God, this is insane. What is that?
Even if I've given you this many millions of dollars, some of these words in the mission statement better have at least three syllables.
So do they really have to drop recapitulate come on ectopic organs? Maybe?
But yeah, I mean it's technically it is correct, Like ectopic just means for anybody who's familiar with the situation, like an ectopic pregnancy, that means the thing is happening outside of the area where it's supposed to happen. So these livers formed by lymph nodes, these mini livers, these
j livers are are ec topic at that point. And recapitulate is kind of one of those one of those words in English that's unnecessarily confusing, because it means a couple of different things, like you could make a summary, you can repeat something. But I think here they mean to accurately mimic or repeat the action of the original liver.
Yeah, I agree, But I think the use of that word begs credulity just a tiny little bit. And I was only half joking about the stock thing. It turns out they are not publicly traded, by the way, not yet. Yeah, no, I'm I mean they are merging with another company called AgeX. I found and even that as a name of a company. Their AgeX Therapeutics screams, I don't know, kind of high
in the sky, kind of technical like biotech. Agx Therapeutics is focused on the development and commercialization of novel therapeutics targeting human aging. We are building upon the foundation of our proprietary technology such as pure stem trademark and induced Tissue Regeneration I lowercase it tr trademark to develop innovative medicines designed to address some of the largest unsolved problems in aging.
I mean you need that profit though, I mean you need that profit motive often to propel this kind of research.
I haven't. That's very true that You're right, profit is not equal. We should doubt their motives.
Well, I mean we should be honest. Right to Guy's points, like the we do know, at least scoring their website. I haven't read this stuff, but they do seem to have pure reviewed research and they are bringing this to market. But there are so many other questions, like what is matt Do we know whether there is a kill switch or a handbreak to say we're only going to grow x amount of these new ectopic livers. Could somebody die from having too many many livers?
I don't think. I don't think you too many many livers. H Well, I mean I don't know.
Wait and I'm sorry, but you're basically like a farm for livers. It's not like they're hooked up to your nervous system. They're just growing on you right like right like in your nodes.
Yeah, so this is really important. Uh, let's go through this really quickly. This is from the pr they put out in early April. Here, I'm gonna read part of this. Their biologic therapy is created starting from donated otherwise unmatched livers. So a donated liver that doesn't have a person that
it's going to. They take basically the stem cells or the cells out of that liver, right, and then they they have a current good manufacturing practice process that carefully isolates and suspends hepatocytes in a solution ready for transplantation liver cells into the patient's upper abdominal lymph nodes, so like up on your upper body here, and they use an endoscopic ultrasound, a minimally invasive approach. But then the lymph nodes act as in vivo bioreactors that make those
the liver cells. They're using the words again and graft, proliferate and then eventually generate a functional ectopic liver tissue like the stuff that you would need to make a liver to become a liver, and then you'd be able to take those out and put one in you.
I think is the idea. I see.
Okay, maybe I'm wrong here.
I think that's how it would work, or maybe that's not how it would work. Maybe it would actually function as a liver in the lymph node places you just have several small ones rather than one.
Large one, right, right, It's a asymmetrical solution to the problem of organ donation.
Well yeah, imagine how many people it potentially safe, like for real?
Sure?
Yeah, no, I just want to add one last little thing about the other company that I was talking about, AgeX. They actually changed their name to Serena Therapeutics in twenty twenty four. But there's one sentence on here that just really has me kind of I don't know. It says here ITR was one of the technologies, the trademark technologies which has induced tissue regeneration. ITR is our revolutionary longevity platform aiming to unlock cellular immortality and regenerate capacity to
reverse age related changes in the body. So these companies are aligned in some form. I gotta do more digging. It does seem that they have merged in some way, but I don't want to steer anybody wrong. But there definitely have been press releases indicating there is connection between these companies.
So they're also.
You know, they're part of a larger trend, which surely you notice as well. Skip you we are past the where everything sounds like vaporware in anti aging technology and in this particular genre of biotech, it's on the way.
One thing to do that's really interesting if you ever have some free time, folks, and you don't want to go out and spend money, check out these companies we're mentioning, and then do a little digging into their board of directors and learn where their executives are coming from, and then learn what other things those executives are doing, because there's a heck of a lot of Venn diagrams when it comes to boards of directors. I think, okay, overall,
this sounds like a good thing. Of course, you know, once the trials are occurring, it may well happen that they run into something unintended right, and that may be an insurmountable obstacle, or hopefully, more likely, they run into something that might be a plot twist that might change part of their approach, but they're still able to get this across the finish line. I mean, this could be This could extend the quality of life and the quantity
of life for millions of people. I think that's really cool, and I just hope that when something like this happens, when it reaches market, as the investors like to say, I hope that it doesn't become a palliative only for the wealthy.
Yeah, I really hope so, because it could be incredible. I'm just looking at one of the chairman of the board of directors at like Genesis, mister Mellon. Fascinating character on several boards.
Yeah, yeah, yep, yeah, which doesn't make him bad Nope.
But he did publish a book in two thousand and five called Wake Up, Survive and Prosper in the Coming Economic Turmoil.
This guy loves New Zealand. How many passports do you think he has?
Oh Man, at least six and for Wow six deep.
In twenty twenty, you wrote a book called move whose Law, moos Law, and Investor's Guide to the New Agrarian Revolution.
Laurel Snake oily sounding a mean interesting, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.
We're gonna find out only time and those hepatocites will tell. So, gentlemen, I think that's all from this one. Thank you so much. Give you the prozac elf, be careful with the dosages there, and we will be right back with more messages from you.
I appreciate your liver. Folks, we have returned. We have one piece of correspondence here from Phoebe, which is representative of several other communications we got in the wake of something we talked about briefly on a previous Strange News, which is the story of private South Korean companies paying
families or paying their employees to have children. There's an underwear company that gives you like the equivalent of twenty two four hundred a piece for the first two, and then there is a construction company that gives you the equivalent of like seventy grand just pop out one. And there's a lot of context here. We mentioned yes, the climbing birth rates and what we would call the you know,
the quote unquote developed world. We also, I think briefly alluded to just how hyper competitive the culture of South Korea can be overall, you know, the tremendous amount of pressure put on people from their first days of school all the way into their adult life and retirement. One thing we didn't mention is this, And we're going to share this letter from Phoebe and then we'll discuss some of the factors at play here. Phoebe says, Hey, guys,
longtime listener here, you can call me Phoebe. When you were talking about the Korean company that was giving out a boat for having kids, I was hoping you would mention the four B movement happening there. The movement, says Phoebe, is basically women opting out of dating, marriage, and babies. The words for these all start with be in Korean.
As a result of sexual assault and harassment being so prevalent, especially with things like the in rooms in Japan, women feel like it's dangerous to bring a new life into this world where these Korean men and lawmakers are turning a blind eye to the violence. Happening to women anyhow, Thank you, And this is just one of the one of the pieces of correspondence we received regarding this. Now, have you guys heard of the four B movement before?
And this is new to me.
Same, Yeah, it's something I think it picked up in the West. A lot of people on TikTok and Twitter started paying attention to it around twenty nineteen. It was propagating through various social media accounts. But uh, it will be described often as a quote radical feminist movement. And the four bees or the four knows are the following one no sex with men, to no child rearing, three no dating men, and four no marriage with men.
So ouch. Yeah.
So it's it's like, hey, Stings, we're fine without you, know, all all your mess your baggage, your threats.
Is there a word for supporting the meaning behind or the reason to have a movement but also fundamentally don't want it to happen because you're one of those people who isn't like the people that they're fighting against. Hey, Sarah, we need to come up with a.
Word for that.
Okay, yeah, yeah, we do, because what you just said was incomprehensible to me. You know, it's like, I mean, it's like it's a lot that's like, you're right, It's.
Like I agree, like totally down and I agree with the reasoning behind all of this and why you would do that and self fulfillment and all that stuff, but also like, uh, some of.
Us are okay, right, maybe there's a better way, right.
Maybe cat quickly say something here, yes, please do Yeah. I just want to say that I think that one framework that can be worthwhile here from what I know about the Forbe movement is to think about it as sort of a form of protest to make the government and these other entities pay attention to these issues and do something to fix it. And the idea that protests
is supposed to inherently be disruptive. There's a quote that I can't remember who said it, but something about asking nicely to get your quote like oppressors to do something differently not working and having to do something a little
bit stronger. So I think that at least, like I said, from what I've read, viewing the Forbe movement as sort of a form of protests to like, we won't do this until these issues are fixed, not necessarily like we hate God, because I can't speak because I'm not there, can't, you know. But I just think that that's just sort of a slightly different way.
Of looking and reframes my whole thinking about it. Frankly, I mean, you nailed it.
Yeah, thank you so much for that, doc, because that is something that kind of came up in our off air conversation as well. Like the way we're seeing this. There's so much to get into here, but the way we're seeing this presented in the West. We have to be very careful with this, right. None of us are living in South Korea, you know, and it's perhaps easier, dangerously so, for Westerners to read stories about this protest movement,
things like that, the fight for equality. You see it happening, and you think about it in terms of another society, another country, You other the problem, and in doing so run the very real risk of ignoring the continuing problems that exist in your own neck of the woods, right, you know.
I just was doing a little cursery googling, and I found a really cool article that I'd love to dig into on the cut called a World without Men. The women of South Koreas for we move in, aren't fighting the patriarchy. They're leaving it behind entirely. And there's a great poll quote I think that sums up the cultural aspect of this that makes it so unique. In their view, Korean men are essentially beyond redemption, and Korean culture on
the whole is hopelessly patriarchal, off and downright misogynistic. And I do think, you know, there's parts of that you could certainly apply to American culture as well, patriarchal culture as well, but there it seems to be much more, even more extreme than what we have here.
I like that you're bringing this up because this is one of the primary things I pulled as well. So thanks to Anna Louis Sussman right in the cut March eighth, twenty twenty three. This is a tough thing for a lot of people to read because there are in depth stories of female female idental by residents of South Korea who have just had terrible, terrible, terrible things occur to them, and that, to be clear, are absolutely not their fault.
They were innocent people victimized by by a large scale blindness. Really, and we know that this is the four B is the descendant of another movement called Escape the Corset movement in twenty sixteen, which kind of inspired four b Escape the Corset, Escape the Corset. The word corset here is kind of like a metaphor for the social forces repressing women in that country.
Well sure, even I mean, the history of the corset is incredibly misogynistic. I mean, maybe at least I'm sure there are some women that enjoyed wearing a corset, I suppose, but it was certainly foisted upon women by the male gaze, right, Like it's like, we need you to look this certain way, have this certain figure. Therefore we will, you know, insist that you where are these very constricting garments that are not pleasant at all, and you know, tantamount to like abuse in a lot of ways.
Yeah, And we see also that the four Bee movement, by its own description is meant to be, like you were saying, Doc, it's a protest as well, Like think of it that way in that framework. Think of it also as an oppositional force to the traditionally incredibly patriarchal
state of South Korea. You know, and for people who are part of this movement, part of this protest, what they're saying is the state, including the giant corporations, the chibal including you know, like the everybody from the local legislators to Samsung on down. They are only viewing women's bodies and reproductive abilities as tools for the future of the state, which gets very authoritarian.
Cat with one more thing here, yes, please do yeah, one more thing that I think is sort of noteworthy about, for example, the incidents of intimate partner violence being significantly higher in South Korea something like forty one point five percent,
which is higher than the global average. And then also the president that was recently elected there said that he was going to dismantle the Ministry for Gender Equality or saying that he wanted to and sort of this in addition to the actual issues that are impacting them that they're protesting against, also the sort of gas lighting of them saying this is not actually an issue, and the president has said something about feminism being to blame for
the low birth rate instead of actually addressing or acknowledging the problems that they're speak out against.
That's like corporations like creating recycling to pivot the blame of pollution onto you know, consumers, basically to be even.
More crass, telling me what you all think about this. Is it not kind of like saying our nation has a house fire problem, so to combat that, I'm getting rid of all the fire stations. It's wild that'll be the problem.
It's a lot I'm not familiar with this issue until now. I want to do some more digging into it. I really appreciate, Alexis you bringing up the idea of this as a protest kind of movement more than it is, like, this is the way it has to be for everyone and all people. And if you're not on board with this hard line kind of attitude towards men, then you're not,
you know, doing it right. I think that's maybe what hit Matt and I, you know, weirdly initially, But no, I totally get it, and it makes a lot of sense.
We also knew, doc, you and I were talking about this. We also knew that. Again, the point I don't want to miss is that it is all too easy to look at this and say this is happening somewhere else. But Doc, you and I had like spent time thinking we're talking to each other. You rightly point it out. You're like, the gender wage gap is everywhere too right in the United States, is no exception, right.
Yeah, absolutely, because that's also one of the things that's listed as being part of the inspiration for the FORB movement is the gender like pay wage gap being the highest in the developed world there in South Korea at like thirty one cents on the dollar, but it's actually like when you get to the United States, it's not that much different. And then also when you add the intersectionality of the pay wage gap between like Hispanic women
or Black women or Indigenous women, you know. So, yeah, it's one of those things where we can sort of look at this as a microcosm of something that's happening with different levels of extremness in other places.
And maybe you can help us out as well, folks, because code named Doc Matt Nole and your faithful correspondent, I've been trying to think of a country where some version of this is not occurring.
Of course, you know, we have a patriarchy problem right here in the US of A, no question about it, and as I think got to the point where it's maybe better than it has been in the past, but it's certainly always room to improve that. But I was just looking up, like one aspect of South Korean culture that I'm a huge fan of, and I think we all are are. They're films, you know, there's some incredible
directors and wonderful films out of South Korea. I just looked up the stat I was wondering, how many, you know, women directors of a certain scale there are? And I saw an article here from the Korea Jungong Daily saying that only one of thirty five Korean films of a certain scale was directed by a woman last year.
Don't even get me started on those statistics in America, because I have a lot.
Of I know, I know a lot of it is lip service. I know it is, and you know, I'm not saying it's good, but I'm saying it's at least more than one.
I don't know, yeah, but it's there's something like, you know, twenty to one here in terms of films that are directed by a woman versus a man. So that's only sort of thing that we can look at and say, okay, yeah. In South Korea they're saying that the instance of domestic partner or like intimate violence is at forty one percent, but the global is at thirty percent. That's still pretty high.
You know, it's like a third. That means like a third of intimate partner relationships have some sort of intimate partner violence involved. So yeah, that's just sort of the thing in terms of thinking about like what they're doing and what they're speaking out against, and like, yeah, it's bad there and that's why they're doing this, but also it's not necessarily miles better.
Right, No, And I certainly wasn't implying that it was.
No, I don't think any I don't think we're Yeah, we're also we're also, if anything, we're we're showing a wider a wider lens here. I don't know enough about cinematography to know if that's oh sure works.
Well you know who does coding?
Dot?
Yeah, and dot. I just wanted to add in the same article that I was just referencing U zero women cinematographers in this crop of films that they're talking.
Yeah, we're like four percent here.
And as you can tell, folks, we have much more to explore and learn about this story, this phenomenon in particular. Sho go without saying that we are every single person on our team is ardently in support of quality for all people. We're also in support of learning more past the headlines. So you might read, oh, South Korea has
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