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.
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben.
We are joined with our guest super producer, Dylan the Tennessee pal Fagan. Most importantly, you are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know. It is quite a week for strange news. We're going to visit some folks across the Pacific. We're going to go on air with some conversations we had had in the past about different ambitious attempts at grass roots regime change.
We'll call it. We'll see some bribery. Well, we'll also just for anybody listening right now, if you have a pager, no judgment. If you have a pager, move it across the room.
A pager? What is it? Nineteen ninety five, Oliver Bay I had one. I had a bright green, translucent Motorola pager.
Yes, hopefully you don't need to be worried about your pager. If you know, if you're.
A doctor or a drug dealer, a work production mine never mine never injured me, you know, physically anyway.
The ones I had injured me emotionally exactly.
That's that's clear. All those mean spirited pager codes that were flying around.
Is it really nine one one? Is it really nine one one? Or do you just want me to tell you what Jennifer said about you in middle school?
You know?
No, I mean, it's not nine one one, it's eight zero zero eight five?
Is it really? Boobs? Guys? Is it really?
We're fans and we've returned. Listen, folks, fellow conspiracy realist. We are recording this on the evening of September eighteenth, twenty twenty four, and our breaking news story should be considered just that we don't have all the facts. Very few people do. But I was talking with the guys earlier when I got the news and it quickly spread around the world. There was a massive pager attack on affiliates of his Belah.
But not like an interruption of service attack, like where all of a sudden people's pages didn't work. It was something quite different. Ben right, Yes, sir, that's correct.
This is.
In contrast to a denial of service. This was a quote unquote service that the people affected certainly did not welcome, nor did they expect it. And to intro into this, I think it's important for us to note the events were going to describe here occurred just a few days ago. As a matter of fact, as we were gearing up for things. In the past twenty four hours, another attack occurred, another mass attack with exploding walkie talkies. This is going
to be an episode in the future. Right now, we want to set the stage and answer some questions that are on everybody's mind. To really understand what happened, you need to go back to October of nineteen ninety five and a guy a lot of people don't remember his name, Kamil Hamad, met with operatives of shin Bet. Without getting
too into the weeds, that's Israel's counter terrorism outfit. And when this guy met with shin Bet, he came to him and he said, look, I need funding and I need Israeli identity cards for myself and for my family. And shin Bett, like a lot of good intel organizations will do, said well, now we've got you by the short and curls right now, you work for us. We will inform on you and your bosses will murder you
as a result. So he agreed to cooperate. He went in thinking that he was the deal maker, and he came out at the wrong end.
Of a deal.
So what they did is they gave him a cell phone, and they were upfront. They told him this was bugged so that they could listen in on his conversations. What's more important is what they did not tell Hamad. They did not tell him that this bugged phone also contained fifteen grams of explosives.
WHOA I mean, that was my initial question, because there's part of me that almost wondered, is this some way of hijacking a device and causing it to overheat to the point.
Where it would injure somebody. But it's deeper than that. It's it's potentially like someone got in on the supply chain of the product or planted a tampered with product that these individuals ended up using. That just seems so complicated.
Which we'll get to. That's the twenty twenty four event. We're still like October nineteen ninety five.
But yeah, you're describing that it is possible, right to do that, but with one person.
Right, Yeah, that's what I'm hoping to do. Yeah, like the president here, which doesn't get as reported as widely as it should. Takes us to not Kamil Hamad. Kamil Hamad was not the target of this operation. Instead, the Intel was targeting a guy named yahe Ayash that is spelled yahya Ayyash. During his lifetime, this guy was known as the prime or chief bomb maker of Hamas. And so when the Chinbet gives Kamal Hamad this cell phone
that he knows is bugged, he knows is tapped. Essentially, what they're doing is waiting for him to give it to someone who will give it to Ayash. And so Hamad gives the phone to one of his nephews, his nephew, and he knows that this guy, the chief bombmaker of Hamas, regularly uses this nephew's phones. And then fast forward It's January fifth, nineteen ninety six. Ayash's father calls him on
this bugged phone. Aosh answers, and then and Israeli playing flying overhead, picks up the conversation, relays it to command. They confirm this is the guy they're looking for on the phone, and they remotely detonate the device. They kill him instantly.
Wow.
Effective, brutal effective.
And this is what leads us to the news that everybody saw. On Tuesday, an attack in Lebanon across the country of Lebanon caused pagers to explode. Thousands of people were injured. At current count, twelve are dead as a result of the pager attack because the day after this evening, as we record, walkie talkies associated with Hesbola affiliates also exploded.
This is something that I would say is not unprecedented therefore in terms of the principle or the concept, but it is unprecedented, I would argue in terms.
Of the scale of the operation. To your earlier point, it's it's wild. I mean, and you know, we don't know much yet. I mean, we will hopefully by the time we do this full episode, but like you know, we certainly know there are things like defects and phones that you have to get recalled because the lithium batteries can heat up to the point of injuring people. I mean, there have been like lawsuits filed but against cell phone manufacturers for like people getting horribly burned, but this sounds
even worse than that, and like more immediate. We hear we're hearing a lot about injuries to people's eyes and faces because they're holding the thing up to look at it when the call comes in.
Yeah, but they got a buzz notification, right, And you can see you can see a lot of video of the aftermath, which is horrified. You can also see a couple of videos that just happen to be caught on things like CCTV and what you'll what you'll see there is somebody gets a buzz like soap, they into their pocket, they hold up the thing and it explodes with much more force than you know, an overheated lithium ion battery.
Yeah, and Asia probably doesn't even take one of those. I mean, they're so underpower they don't need much.
Yeah, No, that's a really good point. It was said, it was known that the pager definitely got a signal. There were some kind of strange code that was displayed, you know, on the on the display there on the pager right before it went off, and it was like a like a couple of second delay.
I think I maybe heard on public radio today that these were meant to be like proprietary communications from HESBELA.
Yes, yeah, this was meant to be what we would call sequestered or discrete comms for Hesbelos. So if you had your own pager already, your CIV pager or your civy phone, that would not be connected. This is to message people in this organization because there is, as you can objectively understand, there is a great deal of concern about security of communication because HESBLA, being a proxy of Iran, has been at war with Israel for quite some time. Look,
we know that this is ideologically deep for people. We're not here to talk about the ideology necessarily. We're here to explore what appears to be an insidiously successful covert operation, a genuine conspiracy.
Yeah, can we quickly just talk about what Heswela is. I think sometimes people get confused about some of these organizations and groups and just to get people to run down on like because Hesbela is a vast and multifaceted thing. Sure.
Yeah.
HESBLA is a political party, Lebanese Shia Islamist political party and also a paramilitary group. So if you talk to some people in Lebanon, they're going to say this is not a terrorist group, right, These are more akin to freedom fighters However, it is an open secret that Hebela receives a lot of funding from the nation of Iran, which is currently a theocracy, and Iran has different statements about this, you know what I mean, kind of like
Russia writes laws about any Russian president. One notable thing that happened in the pager attack was that the Iranian ambassador was also injured. So one of the first questions that the international community is asking is why did you have a direct plug in to hisbolo?
Holy crap, the plot dickens. I mean, now, that's wow, that's very I didn't even think about that aspect of it.
It's a big deal. It's a good question.
It's a big deal and a good question.
This is where we get to something that was brought up a little bit earlier, but let's get to it. Initial conversation and speculation concerned the idea of how an attack could happen. Is it theoretically possible that malicious code could have been used to simply overheat a battery right, resulting in all of these things going off at once. That does not appear to be the case. Pagers again, are you know, not super advanced technology. They're not all cloud connected to.
The point, probably why they use these instead of cell phones or instead of smart devices, because it's so siloed and low tech.
And I keep thinking about I rewatched it too many times. I keep thinking about the scene and Breaking Bad spoilers three to one. I keep thinking about the scene and Breaking bad. Wherein Walter White ordered hits on a ton of people all in the same two minutes in the US prison system. Do you guys remember that?
Uh?
Huh, I didn't. I don't remember what clever mcguy vermethod he used to do that, but I do remember that plot point he got a biker gang ye had inside people in different prisons from this back. What was so this you're saying, just the level of precision and comms kind of reminded you of that.
Yeah, but in this case also innocent people were injured, and perhaps more importantly, this is real life. Now, another thing we have to think about here. When these explosions occur again simultaneously or near simultaneously, it tells us some very important things. The first thing it tells us is that this came from the same signal, right. The second thing it tells us is it's important mission critical to figure out the provenance of this pager supply and speculation
is going for Hungry to Taiwan right now. And then the third thing I think it tells us to be quite clear, is that there was somebody waited. They put explosives in these things. They put grams of explosives in pagers, and they didn't immediately pull the trigger.
Yeah, they waited.
And the question then is why did they wait without sounding to James Bondi about it. It was probably because the plan was getting close to being exposed, so it was time to maximize the leverage.
It's hella, James bond all of it. It's crazy. It's like an exploding pen.
The big question I have, guys, is if they were a if whoever did this right was able to gain access to all those devices. These are just like a pretty simple send receive signaled device right usually with radio signals. If they took the time and were able to gain access to all those things and put explosives in them, what makes us think that they weren't also enabled with some kind of listening device or tracking device.
Like original story Ben told was exactly.
Exactly like and you're doing it across an entire organization, and it makes guys, it makes me think about the stories we've heard in the past from listeners in read online about let's say, a federal agent from any country that intercepts an Amazon package or something that's ordered that has a device in it, like a new computer or a phone or something like that that gets it gets intercepted, and then something gets meddled with just enough to where
it can be useful in the future. And it can be that kind of thing you're talking about, Ben, where it's a tool that now you have and you can use it when you need.
It right and you don't want The main thing you want to protect will be what we call methods, right, and I know we're going a little over again. We will have an episode on this pretty soon. Another question I had was immediately, what's next. There's a lot of scuttle but in the policy wonk field, in the war maker field right now, over whether or not this is the harbinger of a large scale ground invasion, which is very dangerous for innocent people. Here's what I learned when
I thought what's next? The goal was not to instantly kill everybody with these pages. I imagine again whomever did it was hoping to fatally injure as many people as possible.
We know that message, we know at.
Least a dozen or dead. Worse than sending a message more dangerous listening because now that you have that network identified, you can look at things like hospital roots, which ambulances are picking someone up?
Where are they going? Right?
How many of these people in these places? How many folks have similar injuries?
Well?
Yeah, because we're talking about the network of individuals that this opposition force is interested in. Right, So you're you're absolutely right.
So are you saying that they don't already know who these people are? Yes? How would they? So they cast a wide net. Does that mean that maybe potentially civilians got a hold of these devices too? Quite possibly. That's why I use the phrase affiliates. Yes, And that's why it's important to say that, you know, in Lebanon, Hasbola is considered a political party, right, so there are people who are not you know, out at the front lines of the border trying to murder folks they ideologically identify
with certain tenets of that party. And then if you just so this part up, if you assassinate a few people, but then you have already hijacked the enemy's communication network. They are identifying their forces to you, and then right after that they followed up with the walkie talkies.
I wish we had time to talk about the providence, but it's going to have to be an episode.
Yeah, it's definitely a full episode, just to think about it. Guys, the CFR, the Council and Foreign Relations that you know them. They describe Hesbella as a terrorist organization because the United States has designated hesbel as a terrorist organization. Does this attack not feel like a terrorist attack or an act of terrorism? Both of these where car you know, and completely unexpected, and then just the fear that it generates. I don't know.
I will say as we end this, before we go to a break, there is what we could see as public possible public like motivation, which is the attent at assassination. Hezbola earlier failed to assassinate a guy named moshe Yah alone, and this may have been a reaction to it, or methods may have been exposed.
We do know, we do know that.
The question on everybody's mind, and a lot of you guys, friends were asking you about this, friends of family. We do know the question on a lot of people's minds right now. Is my stuff safe? You know, like my kid just got a phone? Is my kid safe? What could happen next?
Gears? It could be other classes of devices that are affected too, as we've already seen two. I mean, you could easily argue that those are both kind of more low tech radio wave based devices. And to my understanding, it's usually radio waves that are used to trigger bombs a lot of the time. But I guess surely there's advancements in bomb making and triggering.
Well, your device would have to have explosives in it to be triggered, right, of course.
I guess. I just mean like it creates this sense of fear as to what's next, Like Ben was saying, like could it be in an iPhone? Could it be in you know, my razor or whatever?
You know?
And here's why, as we go to ad break, here's why people are kind of other points I want to get to. Yeah, yeah, we'll do an episode here. Here's why people have been concerned candidly about the idea of a large scale ground war. It's because you're removing command, right, and a lot of hisbela command by the way, didn't use these pagers. They were communicated to by people who had these pages, so that the heads of the organization
are not entirely gone. You remove command, you create fear, right, you break comms, and then by doing so, you remove the ability for the enemy to respond, and that is an arguable part of the calculus. This enigmatic what's next question is still haunting the world right now. We don't know what's going to happen. We know that as targeted as these things may appear on paper, there are inevitably civilians bystanders injured, and the question always becomes what happens next.
So we'll be back with a full episode. We know this is heavy stuff. We're here with you. We got your back, folks. Let's go to the app break.
And we've returned and we are going to travel over to Venezuela for the first story here. Maybe we'll get to the second one and we might just focus on Venezuela. We'll see. But guys, Venezuela in July had an election and somebody that we've talked about a lot on this show, mister Maduro himself, won a third term as the leader of Venezuela, much to the chagrin of pretty much the world and the opposition that he faced there in Venezuela.
People are saying, uh, yeah, it really does seem like they're just covering up that he lost the election and just saying he won, and they being, you know, the powers that he, mister Maduro as a leader currently has, the levers that we just talked about with regards to other countries on the show, where once you have that power, you can do things like turn courts and legislatures and other powers in your favor to do things like cover up the results of an election.
You know, the US has done it for less I mean, right in terms of being instrumental.
In coups, Oh yeah, carrying out a coup in another country. There was a story from July. Ben I don't know if we actually talked about it, but you had it in the dock there to talk about at the end of July that there was a failed coup in twenty twenty in Venezuela something like that. I can't remember the specifics.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's been a fertile soil for attempted non consensual regime change.
Oh yes, to just go back to that election, for one more minute. The National Electoral Council of Venezuela also known as the CNE, declared Maduro the winner on July twenty eighth, and it was ratified by the Supreme Court
a couple of weeks later. But you know, the official documentation of that election, the things like the what they call the disaggregated data or data from the vote tally sheets, has not been published in a bunch of other countries, including the US, to saying this election is not right. Something is sour here, at least with those with the
official reporting on that election. And you guys, I didn't realize the opposition leader who was going up against Maduro in that election had to get the heck out of there. He had to leave because he was facing some pretty serious charge, really freaky stuff. He flew to Spain because there was an arrest warrant out for him, accusing him of terrorism and conspiracy.
That's what I accuse.
Anybody disagrees with me about anything down, I'm like a freaking terrorist and you're inspiring case a Dias are clearly a superior sandwich. Someone arrests this.
Man and this all transpired like after the election was called, then all of a sudden, these charges were filed.
Yes, and then he had to leave. The opposition leader there who had to go to Spain and was charged with that stuff was Edmundo Gonzalez, and he was you know, he went out publicly and said, hey, this vote was stolen, this isn't right, and he became an enemy really quickly. So why are we talking about all this? Oh, because it's context to this story that was written in CNN. It is titled US says claims of CIA plot to kill Maduro are categorically false. That's in quotations. Yes, after
Venezuela rest six foreigners. Okay, so let's just get in this state department says no, no, no, there's nothing. There's no base to these accusations that somebody was trying to kill. His name is Nicholas Maduro. By the way, I think we just lovingly calling him Maduro again mentioned before in that episode. It is one of my favorite foods that exists on this planet. A good Maduro or Maduro's usually.
What is that I don't think I know about this food, Matt.
That is a ripened plantain that has been somewhat fried in that's sweet and.
Delicious I don't know that I've had a Maduro. N Oh, it's so good. All right, we'll hang out later and get sack, but not this Madru. I don't think we care for this.
We're not hey, hey, we're not involved. We're giving you the strange news. As a matter of fact, none of us have officially visited Venezuela in Quba officially.
Yeah, this guy Maduro seems like a real pill. Matt Oh.
Yeah. Maduro, who was famously the number two for a long time to Hugo Chavez, which we've done a whole video series and talked about numerous times. He had some weirdness going on, right.
Yeah, you can see. I hope YouTube hasn't pulled it down. They're tricky with that kind of media. This guy, in the midst of running Venezuela, also was known for having his talk show that went on in excess of four hours where you could just call him live yeah and ask him stuff and then you know, off the cuff, he would he would have this big at least in
the public facing persona. He would have big Uncle energy where someone would say, hey, sir, we are hungry, retired, crime is out of control, and he would just say something like mothers are the most important part of this country. Give that woman thousands of dollars, you know at buyer a house, all right, next caller, Which is not the way you're supposed to run a government.
Yeah, but he did have a team of people that just went out and bought houses. No, I'm just joking. I can't confirm that. So so there was allegedly some kind of attempt on Nicholas Maduro's life, at least according to Venezuela's official apparatus there and the State Department here in the US says no, that's categorically false. That did not occur. But they did. Venezuela did arrest six people, that has been confirmed. Those six people include a US
Navy seal, which you know Navy seals. Guys, what separates someone who I don't know is in the Navy versus someone who is a Navy seal?
Badassory, I mean, Navy is like your a sailor or you're on a ship. But I mean, I understanding, so you can be a pilot too. But isn't a Navy seals like a special ops kind of individual?
That is my understanding. I just didn't know, if you guys had anything further on that. I know, Navy seal training is historically some of the most intensive stuff you can go through.
Brutal.
Yeah, if you ever, if you want to ever feel palpable tension in a room, hang out with some Army rangers and Navy seals and just you know, ask them if they want to arm wrestle and stand back.
Don't ask them if they want to arm wrestle.
But yeah, you're right.
Special ops we call it small unit specialization as well, often ordered or tasked with identifying, capturing, and or terminating high level targets or sometimes reconnaissance, just getting behind very difficult enemy lines, getting the lay of the land. And I think we talked about this in maybe July twenty twenty four on Strange News that maybe that's a different one. Oh yeah, because that's the twenty twenty.
Yeah, this was a whole separate thing in twenty twenty where there were two green berets that were arrested.
Exactly, and again the government, the US government, we should say, did make statements disavowing any kind of green lighting of this activity. Right, So, yeah, it is possible just to be objective, it is possible that these folks simply had their own experience and their own expertise and leveraged that of their own agency and volition to push for something they wanted to happen without checking in with chain and command.
Completely possible.
And guys, this Navy seal has been named a bunch of times. We're not going to say his name on here just because it doesn't well, maybe it does matter. We don't have to say his name. There are two other Americans that were also arrested, and then three other people, and Venezuela is alleging that this was a full on, like an action, a destabilizing action that was supposed to
take place. They say that they seized four hundred US rifles that were linked directly to this plot, which implies, if true, that these were guys who were going to recruit a bunch of other people in country in Venezuela to take some kind of action that is much larger than just six human individuals. Right, four hundred guns, That's that's a lot of people. But that could also mean that it's some kind of weapons trade or you know,
black market weapons deal thing going on, which I don't know. Weirdly, feels more likely to me, but maybe maybe I'm out of my depth here when it comes to, you know, some kind of attempted coup versus making some money on some rifles, and I don't know.
Ay you raise a you raise really interesting point there too, because I think it was not just the CIA that was accused of involvement, but the Interior Minister was saying Spain's intel agency was there, Yeah, like named a rogues gallery of possible actors.
Well, yeah, there was a citizen and two Spanish citizens who were arrested. So I don't know, three Americans, two Spanish citizens, and one Czech citizen.
Do you think do you think it's possible that there was some kind of internal dissent in like, let's say, so the CIA, as you as you point out, has publicly responded, which they don't always do, but has publicly responded and said, hey, nope, hashtag not it, not us. Is it possible that there would be factions in that organization who decided to you know, yeah, pony up their own bones.
Aren't there? Like? I mean, we know that there's wheels within wheels and a lot of these massive branches of governments and military branches, you know, so maybe if this was some kind of siloed operation, like a black op of some kind, is that what you mean then?
Yeah? I think right. I mean that's what you're saying. It's an unknown, it's an unknownn wait no.
No no, it's a no no, it's a.
No no, it's a new unknown.
No.
Also yeah, again, to be clear for anybody in general who's listening, we are not saying anything. We are asking questions, and I think that's totally fine.
Yea, wildly.
I do love the point you made, Ben, I don't know exactly how you put it, something about the CIA just saying hey, not us. I'd love the idea of the CIA being known for having a reputation for just coming out and saying, oh are bad guys? That was us? Yeah, sorry, anytime they get accused of something, Ah, shucks, you.
Gotta the CIA's new motto transparency.
Or aucks you got shuts od jeepers.
We're the real Apple Dumpling Gang, the twenty first cent. But yeah, I mean you're you're bringing up, though, something that's that's incredibly important because we know that there were multiple things that have been framed as coup attempts or even described as coup attempts by the people involved. What makes the CIA come out and say not it right?
Like you know, typically you think they would just not dignify it with a response.
I I don't know, what do you think? Seriously, do you guys have any ideas of why this idea would be auspicious?
It's weird. Maybe the denial is part of the op in a way.
Possible, Yeah, it's I mean, if we had to guess, and again just guessing, then one of the reasons you would do this is to kind of maintain the boundaries and parameters of your current geopolitical rivalry. Honestly, and this is a terrible comparison kind of like how when somebody stole the secret recipe for Coca Cola and tried to sell it to Pepsi and then PEPSI said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no, not us. We're going to turn this to the authorities.
Guys, Sorry, quick off, quick aside. Did you see that the Kentucky Fried Chicken original recipe secret spice blend was leaked by a relative of Colonel Sanders.
It's the ones closest to you.
And then I always hurt the ones we.
Love, my God, we need to impose sanctions on.
That person, and the internet collectively shrugged because no one likes KFC anymore.
Wait, wait, Ben, has the CIA issued a statement?
Where is job rule? It's a good question, then it's a good question.
Hey, guys, just quickly we can end this out here. There's a lot going on between the US and Venezuela right now. Sanctions were just imposed on them by the United States. Sanctions on officials who are you know, they're in that close relationship with Nicholas Maduro, who may have actually helped change and cup up the election, right, make it so that Moduro won. So, yeah, the US and post sanctions on several of those people. That was on Thursday, y'all,
September twelfth, as we record this. Then just before that, the US, I think, yeah, the US seized I think it was like the private plane or basically the air force one of Venezuela when it was in the Dominican Republic. They just said hours now, but.
Also not it. Yeah, they called dibbs and then not it.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. It's very very weird, y'all. So there's more to come here. Look up this. We're not gonna talk about this story. Just look it up. And I want to make sure you're aware of this. Look up New York fire chief bribery scheme. Just look it up, read about it. I'm sure we're going to talk about it at some point in the future. Yeah.
If you ever thought, man, the firearm department doesn't get to my house as quickly as it seems to to a lot of these other houses, well, if you're in New York City, there's probably a reason for that.
Gotta pay to play baby, a lot of money, apparently, pay to blaze.
All right, be right back after a word from our.
Sponsor, and we're back with one more piece of strange news. Matt. I just wanted to do a quick micro story. Mentioned that your second story tease made me think of there was a story that I read about a woman in Greece I believe, who was setting fires in order to flirt with firemen. That's a true story. It's a true story. To the scene, a real firebug. Oh my god, it's
crazy we keep meeting like this. I know, it's bizarre. Yeah, I just wanted to had to get a gander at those beefcake firemen rushing to the scene and their sexy uniforms. But anyway, that's not all my story's about today. My story is about the work day, the workplace. It's a workplace story specifically centered around the work culture in Japan, which I know we've talked about numerous times as being
particularly hard and harsh. A regular, you know, work day in Japan is nine to nine, it's my understanding, with people typically staying as late as eleven and sometimes twelve. A lot of folks have probably seen viral images of Tokyo salarymen passed out on park benches and in train stations because they have to go out drinking with their bosses and they get hammered and the train stop running, so they just kind of fall where they lay, and
that's part of the culture as well. Well. Another part of the culture is apparently it's quite difficult in Japan to quit your job. It's something we take for granted.
I think maybe here in America, in addition to all that other stuff, we have a lot more protections in this country, minimal though they may seem to the average blue collar or hell even white collar worker here in America, But in Japan, ad just don't have this to the point where many folks report the when they try to quit their jobs, they are relentlessly shamed, hounded, harassed, borderlines
stalked by their superiors. There's a really great article in the Wall Street Journal that outlines a situation where somebody who attempted to quit their job, an employer literally came to their house knocking on their door, came to their apartment knocking on their door. There are stories of folks trying to quit their job only to be held up in weeks of meetings, told that this is going to ruin their life, is going to ruin their future. All
of this stuff just absolutely browbeating type behavior. And you know, in Japan there's also kind of a culture of non confrontation that is possibly, i think likely what these employers
and companies are taking advantage of. That despite being an untenable situation workplace situation where you know that people feel like their mental health suffering toxic environments, they find it really difficult to quit, to the point where in recent years a handful of companies offering a service have sprung up wherein you can hire someone to quit your job for you, and they basically cover all of the bases in terms of giving notice, setting parameters for kind of
no contact, even making sure that equipment or uniforms or any company property are returned. But it's just this buffer that for the price of like you know, a night out maybe with friends, like a date night, two hundred bucks roughly American, you can hire these agencies to phone your employer and quit on your behalf and you don't ever have to see or talk to these people again. There are sort of more bespoke versions of this that
are a little more expensive, about four hundred dollars. In the case of hiring a firm to quit a military job, because of the nature of that and the government ties of that kind of employment, they offer a lawyer to do the quitting for you, a company cited in this Wall Street Journal article too timid to tell the boss you're quitting, there's a service for that by Miho Inada. The name of this company is Momori, which I think literally translates in English to I can't take it anymore.
And so this is one of the companies that does all of this legwork for you when you want to quit a job. It's pretty wild that it requires that because I mean, it's certainly not illegal in Japan to quit your job, but there is such a kind of deference to authority figures and a sort of power dynamic in inequality that employers are bullying people into staying in
jobs they hate. And the kicker is this, Japan actually has a worker shortage, so you don't have to be beholden to your current employer because there's probably something else out there that you can snap up pretty quickly. And this is partially why there's been such a spread of these companies who are now also consulting with employers who are looking for people who have recently quit jobs. So they'll call Memory and say, hey, do you have any candidates that I might be able to ring up for
these open positions. So with that, i'd really love to hear what you guys think, especially you've been with your experience abroad, if you've witnessed any of this toxic workplace culture, and what you guys think of this kind of service and how popular it's becoming.
Well, I'm trying to imagine a situation where I felt like my boss was too legit for me to quite well, sorry, I'm so sorry. No, but where I be afraid to resign and I did not understand it. I didn't have the personal perspective on it because I've I don't know about you, guys, I've known a lot of people who have resigned from positions over the years, or have left a position to go to another job, or that specific instance where you're like, I'm not going to work here anymore.
I just need to put in my two weeks notice. Until I started reading this article that you shared with us, and there's another CNN article. There are a couple of the places that have articles on this, and they're describing I couldn't fathom the number of overtime hours that people were putting in. There's a story, there's a story in there of somebody who put in one hundred and fifty nine overtime hours in a single month before dying, literally experiencing
heart failure. Now it's nuts for me, because you have to imagine that the stress levels in somebody who's going through that must be incredibly high. Is that stress directly related to the heart failure that that person experienced. It seems to be so, at least it's written about it
that way. I don't know the science behind all of that, but if you've got a huge number of people that are going through that kind of stress, then yeah, this kind of service makes a ton of sense and being able to be that cold third party that says, here's what my client is going to do, and it takes the potential emotional encounter out of it, which is kind of good.
Probably worth your money at that point, because it sounds like some of these folks just can't muster up the courage or the kind of grit. I guess to face that because it is so off the charts, toxic and meat spirited and manipulative. Understandable. Ben you have any experience with this kind of thing that is from your travels or just any perspective on why this would be so necessary from a cultural.
Standpoint, Yeah, it's definitely tough. The overtime is crazy. Overtime here in the United States is pretty crazy as well. But Japan's work culture has some serious objective obstacles that will have to be tackled at some point. A lot of it is the idea of face of preserving decorum in conversation. Another thing that happens on the flip side of this, which may help explain the emergence of these
sorts of agencies is that sometimes Japanese companies won't fire people. Instead, they'll kind of quiet fire them, they'll sideline them from projects, they'll just not give them work. You show up, you have eight hours, nine hours in the day, and you don't have anything to do. Right, you're literally rearranging paper clips. You're just checking on the printer, making sure the coffee is working. This is something that, unfortun only a lot
of people have experienced. And another thing that maybe missing, I think from what we would call the salary man philosophy, is that in places like the United States, which doesn't have the same worker protections as maybe your EU countries. But in places like the United States, it is not abnormal to fire or to be fired, to resign, or to somehow quit a job and then go to another place in the same industry without your character or your
reputation being smirched. It's not necessarily a demerits people know you get in situations. However, depending on the industry we're talking about. In Japan, in corporate life, it can be seen as a vast demerit, as a loss of face. If you are God forbid fired, right, because that means that you did something, or if you quit, that also means that you did something. And so now the onus is on you and you have this sort of scarlet
letter employment wise upon your characters. So there are reasonable, valid and actionable needs that explain why this industry would take off, because a big part of it too is being able to not burn bridges to retain good relations even after you were maybe no longer a colleague of someone for sure.
The article on CNN that Matt mentioned interview is somebody named Shiori Kalamazo is the operations manager at the Monmuri agency that does this and said that in the past year alone this articles came out, like last month, they've gotten more than eleven thousand inquiries. And the agency's located in Manato, which is a very busy business district in Tokyo.
It's been around since twenty twenty two. And there's a really telling quote from Kalamada that I think and on saying, we sometimes get calls from people crying asking if they can quit their job based on X y Z. We tell them that it's okay and that quitting their job is a labor right, and the thing it was something I was trying to remember earlier. It just one last
point that I wanted to mention. Another thing that Kalamata says is that most of the time the employers go along with them and they're you know, quitting on behalf of these other individuals, but about ten percent of them insist on further negotiations involving lawyers. So there is just this really entrenched culture of just not taking no for an answer when it comes to, you know, the bosses
there in Japan. It's very very interesting. It does kind of reading stuff like this does make me feel lucky that we have the minimal labor protections that we do have here in the good old United States. So that's that one, guys.
We have We have learned a lot, and thank you for bringing that story, Noel. You know, we've got a lot of listeners in Japan. We've got a lot of people listening who are of Venezuelan extraction or providence or may live in Venezuela now. And you know, we have family members in Lebanon or of Lebanese origin, and there is so much more to all of these stories. We can't do this show without your help. So thank you very much, fellow conspiracy realist, for tuning in. We would
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