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Oh, my gosh. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where unbeknownst up to this moment to everyone who has been listening for years, Matt Lieb and I live in a house that is essentially an exact replica of Burton Ernie's home.
in Sesame Street. And we're just, we're in bed. We're getting relaxing from a long day of watching terrible things on the internet. Matt, are you tired? Are you bummed out? All the time. Every day is a new fresh crop of horrors, which is why, you know, I like to
go home to our special Burton Ernie house that we live in together in secret. You do it. We do. That was really tough on your wife. But, you know, I think it was the right decision we made. Yeah. I mean, she, she hates it, but also, you know, like it was pretty clear in the prenup that I would continue to be living with Robert Evans in our Burton Ernie compounds. Yeah.
unbelievably the rent on Sesame street is a nightmare. It's insane. It was just a lot of gentrification now, you know, we are the gentrification. Yeah. Well, sure. But I mean, when we first decided to move in there, you know, it was like, it was a nice, you know, neighborhood. It had a lot of culture, you know, that's right. And now there's just a lot of Oscar, the grouches. Yeah. Just say that, you know, they're in that trash can. And I'm like, wow, maybe, uh, try doing less fentanyl, you know?
Speaking of fentanyl, you know, the emotional equivalent of fentanyl, Matt, is when you accidentally, without trying to, have three straight weeks or like six straight weeks of stories about pedophiles on Behind the Bastards. Oh, God. I didn't mean to, right? When I started with the Margaret episodes that we were doing, talking about...
those German pedophiles. I didn't realize that the next like several weeks would just happen to, I mean, when I started researching the Thomas Jefferson episodes, I should have realized like, oh no, I'm just doing another pedophile. I got locked into a bad pedophile loop is what I'm saying, Matt. Sure, it happens to the best of us, you know. It happens to the best of us. You're trying to do your regular podcast schedule and it's just pedophile after pedophile. Oops, all pedophiles. Oops, all pedophiles. But you finally went outside. You got some fresh air. I finally,
Yeah, yeah. I went off-roading on a mountain and I came back and spent an entire week reading about the Olympics. And I am proud to say, Matt, no babies die in this episode, except for like off-screen. And no pedophilia in these episodes, you know? Oh my God. We're safe. We're safe. I'm so excited. Here's a round of applause. Yeah.
No, that was laughter. Fuck. The point is, is I have a soundboard, but I have not figured out exactly which sound does what. So it's going to be a test. We'll see. Okay. A lot of tests this week. Well, that's good. I just want to promise everyone before the cold open closes, we got a fun one this week. So when we come back.
We're going to start talking about Avery Brundage, who was the American who kind of ran the Olympics in the United States. And eventually he's going to be on the IOC and he's going to run the Olympics for everybody. And he is just just a Nazi, just a real good old fashioned American Nazi. I know now I understand why I got the call. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to have fun with this one. Anyway, that's the cold open.
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Ah, and we're warm. Matt, before we roll into this episode, you got any pluggables to plug? Yeah, that's right. I waited for after the cold open, guys. Yeah, I mean, I do have some pluggables. I actually started a new podcast, and this podcast is about Israeli propaganda. It's called Bad Hasbara, the World's Most Moral Podcast.
Hasbara, of course, being the word for explaining, which is kind of a euphemism in Hebrew and in Israel for, you know, PR propaganda. Yeah. And so, yeah, I started that podcast a few months ago. And just, yeah, if anyone out there is looking for sort of a
you know, information about what's going on in the news regarding all this Israel-Palestine stuff. Yeah, that's what I've been doing. I've been doing it from an anti-Zionist Jewish bent so that people can, you know, more fully understand what they are seeing and hearing with their eyes and why people are telling them not to believe what they see and hear with their eyes and ears.
It's fun. Well, that does kind of fit in with our subject of today's episode because as is going on right now in Gaza, we are talking about a time when a bunch of horrible stuff was being done by the government of a country and a lot of other countries, everyone just kind of tried to pretend it wasn't because it was really inconvenient to deal with the problem. Now, in this case, the country's Germany. Yeah.
Oh, yes. Yeah. So we're going to get to that. But first, we kind of need to start this episode. We really have to peel back a couple of thousand years here because it's worth talking about what the Olympics was. We have to start from thousands of years ago. Yeah, we do.
God damn. All right. When was the first? Oh, that's right. The Olympics is this thing. It's gone back a bit. In Roman times. Yeah. No, further than that. This is the ancient Greeks, right? Yeah. Those are different. Yeah. Yeah. They are much older. Just once. Could you do once upon a time? Just one time. Once upon a time, there were these guys called the ancient Greeks.
And, you know, they invented Western philosophy and they invented some chunk of mathematics. I don't know which part of mathematics, but I remember learning that some of math was invented by the ancient Greeks. Sure. And they made a lot of art. That said, while they did a lot of great stuff, they spent the bulk of their time murdering each other in really terrible ways. The ancient Greeks loved killing each other.
Yeah. But in the late 700s BC, the ancient Greeks decided, let's do something besides killing each other and philosophy. Let's do sports. I love that. It's kind of right in between. It's right in between. It's a mix, right? Yeah. It's like everyone fights, okay? But we're not going to kill at the end. We're just going to, you know, we're going to give a trophy. Yeah. Yeah.
So this is not a new – sports was not a new concept in the 700s BC. People had been sportsing for basically as long as we've had cities at least in some fashion or another. Nice. But the idea that became the Olympics was new, which is that all of these cities that are periodically at war or in conflict with each other –
we're all going to come together and everybody's going to compete without murdering each other. Right. That is kind of a, that's a novel idea at the time. Yeah. The first Olympics, you know, I think the dates, there's always a little bit of flex in dates this far back, but it was probably around 776 BC. Right.
And it was initially not a great show. It's just a single 200 meter race, which given that people are like, you know, if you're traveling, if you're walking five days to get to another city, you could die on that walk, right? You're going to watch a guy run 200 meters?
I lost three children on my way to watch people sprint for a little. My family died, but boy, that guy was slightly faster than anyone I'd ever seen before. Yeah. I mean, it's sad, but also I won $500 in a bet with DraftKings. That's right. DraftKings first started in 776 BC. Yes.
Yeah. So everyone seems to agree, have agreed that like doing a whole Olympics for one little race was kind of bullshit and not worth the trouble. So they started adding games pretty quickly. Now running is always going to be a staple as it is today. But the Greeks were like modern humans is that once they figured out the idea of big international sporting events, they
they all kind of solidified that the best thing to gather to watch other people do was beat the shit out of each other. Yeah. And fighting. Yeah, I mean, right? It's so sad because they were probably trying to get away from that. Can we do something like, you know, sportsmanship-like and peaceful? What's the furthest thing from war? Running! Yeah. Yeah.
Listen, there's got to be blood or else why are these people going to risk the lives of their kids to walk all the way over here? Yeah, I literally can't even get hard without watching a guy die anymore. Like, what are we doing? So wrestling was added in at the 18th Olympiad in 708 BC. Boxing entered for the 23rd Olympiad in 688 BC. And then pancration was added in the 33rd Olympiad. You're going to have to explain that one.
It's basically, yeah, it's ancient MMA. It's like the first kind of MMA, right? Like it's like a proto MMA style competition, right? Okay. So this is what eventually leads to the invention of Joe Rogan.
Oh, damn. Yeah. Who, as we all know, is an undying immortal figure. Yeah. He's the Alpha and the Omega. That's right. That's right. He's essentially the emperor from Warhammer 40,000. But he really, really just focused on fighting sports. The Alpha male and the Omega male. Yeah.
So the ancient Olympics had a pretty good run. They're doing this for like not far off from a thousand years, something like that, a little over. Cause they finally died. Yeah. It goes like seven 76 to 393 ad thereabouts. Again,
These are kind of soft dates on the last of the ancient Olympics is too. But the end of the old Olympics is generally blamed on Emperor Theodosius the first who is said to he's a you know, he's one of these big Christian Roman emperors and he's said to have considered it pagan idolatry.
I think that more rigorous scholarship has cast a lot of doubt on this because he doesn't seem to have actually banned them explicitly. But whatever the truth, whatever specifically kind of leads to the fall of the Olympics, they do stop doing them, right? That sucks. Yeah, it's a bummer. Well, I don't know. I don't actually like the Olympics, so...
Yeah. I mean, listen, I don't know whether or not the Olympics is good. I just, it sucks that there was like the first nerd emperor who's like, oh, no sports ball, please. Maybe. He may have just, it may have just been that he was banning other pagan shit, but like that stuff was less popular than the Olympics. And so people kind of lied about it. I don't know. I'm not an emperor Theodosius, the first expert. I just know people have cast doubt on the fact that the idea that he killed the Olympics. Sure. We'll never know. Probably. And it's,
At any rate, by the time the Roman Empire, the Western Roman Empire falls, we're not doing Olympics anymore. They are a fading memory. And they would stay that way until a French man with a ridiculous mustache was born in 1863. I'm going to ask Sophie to get us a picture of that man's mustache up on the old screen here. Yeah. But his name was Pierre de Coubertin, and he became French, by which I mean he was born in.
at a terrible time to be French because when he's seven or so, he's born in like 1863. So he is seven or eight when the emperor Napoleon III decides, you know who I want to start a fight with? Prussia. Yeah. Best Napoleon. Yeah. Best Napoleon. He's my favorite guy. He just went in there and was like, I'm going to be like my great uncle. What was he? It was like a nephew or something. Yeah, it was like a great uncle. We've done the episodes on I Might Forget the Axe. Well, it's kind of a tortured...
But he's like, I'm going to do it, but more shitty and lose faster. Yeah, I'm going to be really bad at it. Instead of beating the Prussians at a war, I'm going to lose so badly that they create Germany. But look at this guy's mustache. My God. One thing you can't critique the man on is his facial hair. He looks great. He looks like he's just railed a triple. It's incredible stuff.
I love it. Oh, my God. This guy. Every pick I click, it just gets better. This man couldn't. I know he actually did live past the 1800s, but he shouldn't have. That is an 1890s face. He's perfect for the 1890s.
Pierre's family were aristocrats and he was their fourth child. His dad, and again, they're aristocrats, so his dad doesn't have to do anything for a living. So he's like a painter and he's a royalist. He believes in bringing, I think it might have been the Bourbons back as kings.
And his childhood suffered from the fact that the whole royalist cause in France kind of takes a shit after 1871, which seems to have made his dad miserable. And his dad seems to have kind of taken it out on the family. Unlike a lot of European aristocrats, de Coubertin is going to grow up profoundly anti-war. He is actually never kind of not unique in this period, but it's kind of refreshingly rare. He's never one of these guys who's like, ah, the gallantry of combat.
Because his earliest memories are like, we got our asses kicked. We should never have a war again. We're not good at it anymore. We had one good Napoleon and the other guy sucks. Everything's gone to shit since him. We had bourbons. We had the Duke d'Or Leon guy became the thing. Like, we can't do any of this shit. Yeah. Let's stop.
So he's a great student. He goes to Jesuit school, which is like those that's the if you're like at all Catholic. That's where you want to go back in this period. But he refuses to follow his father's wishes because his dad wants him to join the military, which, again, had been kind of the expected thing for folks in his chunk of the aristocracy.
By the time he's a young adult, de Coubertin has decided he wants to study law and history. And he seems to have kind of thoroughly concluded that like my father's France failed. Right. Like the culture in which I was raised in is a failure and we need to make changes, which he's not wrong about.
At age 20, he encounters a book called Tom Brown's School Days. This is a really influential, maybe the most influential piece of fiction in educational history because it both – because of how popular it is, like the English boarding school system had existed before because this book is literally about it. In fact, it's like fictionalizing an actual English like –
basically principal Tom Arnold. Tom Arnold? Yes, yes, that Tom Arnold. He has deep roots, deep roots. He has also been around for a while. God damn. And was, yes, this was the thing he did before he was in, what was it, Coneheads? He was in Coneheads. Oh, he was in The Stupids. The Stupids, The Stupids.
Jesus Christ. So this is one of the most influential pieces of fiction in educational history because not only does it like create the cultural image of the English boarding school system as this incredibly like renowned and like it's part of why people from all over the rest of the world start enrolling like rich people in English boarding schools, right? Is the success of this book. And it also launches the genre of boarding school novel.
As like a thing. So this is literally like the this is like the start of the DNA line that ends in Harry Potter is Tom Brown. Right. These are directly related. Like we get Harry Potter because of Tom Brown school days. It's like the first YA novel. Yes. I love this. Yeah. I mean, it has a lot to do with that. Yeah. Tom Brown school days focused on the rugby school, which is, again, run by Tom Arnold.
In one later article on the subject, a guy named Volker Kluge writes, Arnold sought to educate his students by including sports and community games for Christian gentlemen. I was confronted with something completely new and unexpected. Athletic education, Coubertin wrote.
Now, Arnold actually didn't like sports. He's one of those guys where he's like, I don't actually, I think this is kind of like a little common for me. But if you don't give boys a way to tire themselves out, they'll masturbate. So this is the best option that we have. It always goes back to that. It's always someone trying to stop you from coming as a teen. What the fuck? The entire route of like Victorian civilization is stopping boys from coming. That's all that it's about. How do we stop this?
In an article for the Daily Beast, Candida Moss writes, Arnold believed that in order to create Christian gentlemen, he had to replace bad impulses with good. Arnold himself wasn't a particular fan of sport, but he preferred it to fighting or poaching. If you exhaust young men and promote the idea of sportsmanship, you will keep them out of trouble. So, Coubertin, he takes on this, and he's going to take it further, right? But this idea that, like, sporting...
kills bad impulses in young men, right? And he's not as obsessed with coming as he is with violence, right? But he's going to become increasingly convinced that like somewhere in sporting lies the solution to like all of these wars that keep happening. Yeah, I kind of feel that there's there's something to that there where you're just like, what if like instead of, you know, everyone just like killing a bunch of people every few years or
Like, what if we all just fucking had a Magic the Gathering tournament and figured it out? You know, I get it. Yeah, I've seen some like not quite sports riots, but I've seen some like really rowdy fights over sports in Germany between like German and French fans.
And I thought at the time was like, well, this is a real move up from World War One. This is so much better than the last time you guys got angry at each other. No one's getting gassed. You know, everyone is just kind of like using a couple teeth. What an innovation. Cooper teen spent the 1880s traveling around the world through the US and UK and Switzerland and meeting all sorts of advocates for youth sports and sporting organizations.
Particularly influential was a meeting with the Peace League. And this is an activist group who taught that boxing was a great way to prevent war, right? And I guess partly, yeah, I get that giving people a healthy outlet for physical aggression could be useful in that. But also, there's a lot of head injuries that come with boxing. And we know that head injuries...
Yeah. Contribute directly to war. Yeah. Listen, there's pros and cons to this idea, but I get it. I get it. You know, it could have, you know. You can see the logic. It doesn't stop war. No, it didn't. They were ultimately wrong. Yes, but I get trying it out for a little bit.
It's not like, yeah, it is. It's one of those things I both want to make some jokes because of how like wrong this guy is. But also I can see the logic. Like at the time you can't, he's not...
it's not dumb or like shitty for like wanting this to work. I also wish it had worked. It's better logic than, you know, oh, this will stop, you know, kids from coming. Yeah. That of course is not going to be, well, I don't know even know what their thought process is because I've never been too tired to jack off. No, no, no, no young man ever has been. No young man has ever been. We all always have a little extra room for jello. You know what I mean? Yeah.
And it's also like he's got better logic than the guys who are like, well, we've built the deadliest gun ever. Surely this will stop war. Yeah. No one's going to want to get in front of one of these guys. So war's over. Yeah. No one's going to feed an entire generation of their young men into these things. We built a giant human meat grinder. Anyways, war is over now, right? Yeah.
Oh no, the conveyor belt is pulling more men into it. Oh, cruel fate.
So, Cupertine wrote that boxing could be a peacemaker. And still, you know, again, this whole process is what culminates in him being inspired to revive the Olympics, right? He revives the Olympics because he has this messianic belief in the power of sports to end global conflict. And I think he's mostly when he talks about ending war, he's not talking about ending all these little colonial wars. He's primarily talking about, like, avoiding another European war, right? Yeah, right, right, right. Right.
Yeah. A war that will cost more lives for, you know, his own people. Whereas like a nice colonial war is just like, no, that's just a simple eradication. Yeah. We don't even hear about that on the news. Yeah, exactly. That's not even people. Don't worry about that. You kill all them. So as de Coubertin wrote, let us export rowers, runners and fencers. There is the free trade of the future. And on the day when it is introduced within the walls of old Europe, the cause of peace will have received a new and mighty stay.
Sure. It's a nice idea. Yeah. Eventually, he convenes a Congress in 18. And obviously, I am yada yada-ing a lot about this process. Sure. We don't need to get into the weeds of it. But they have a Congress in 1893 to decide like he and a bunch of other folks who are part of like major sporting organizations in the West. How are we going to revive the Olympic Games? Right. It is decided that these games should be for amateur athletes only, not paid professionals. Right.
This is the first of what are going to become mini breaks with the original Olympics. In the ancient Greek Olympics, there was no rule against them making money for winning, right? Like you could bet on shit. Like they didn't have any problem with that. There's also, as far as we know, there were no rules against doping. Now, doping was different in ancient Greece. We know that they would like eat a lot of beef because they thought it was like it worked the way steroids do. Yeah.
You know, if you eat a lot of beef, then you become strong as cow. Everyone knows. It's simple. Yeah. Beef makes you cow strong. Yeah. If you eat whole horse, you become run as fast as horse. It's simple logic. Everyone knows. You eat bald eagle, you can fly real hard. Everybody knows this. Now, this...
Now, the other thing I should note is that like at the start of the revived Olympics, there are no rules against doping. And in fact, people are going to do lots of drugs in the early Olympics and it's fine. Yeah, I'm OK with that. Early Olympics. Yeah, that's a they were figuring shit out.
It's considered, it actually may have been less common then just because it was considered ungentlemanly, but it wasn't like forbidden for a while. Right. And so a lot of times people wouldn't do dope just because it wouldn't dope just because like, well, I am a gentleman, you know? Yeah. Anyway, there's a lot of confusion in trying to understand what the Olympics were meant to be when they were revived in the use of the word amateur, because like,
If I were to say, oh, that golf player is a real amateur, you would interpret that to mean, well, he's not very good. Right. Yeah. You would not, an average person would never look at a world-class Olympic gymnast and go, wow, what an amateur. Right. That's just not how we use that word. Yes. But in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that word had a very different meaning. And I want to quote from an article for Vice by L.A. Jennings here.
Sports in the 19th century remained a luxury of the middle and upper classes, with lower class athletes routinely excluded from participation. The rules for the 1878 Henley Regatta declared, no person shall be considered an amateur oarsman or sculler who is or has been by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan, or laborer.
Sports historian Alan Gutman explains that in its earliest institution, rules of amateurism were invented by the Victorian middle and upper classes to exclude the lower orders from the play of the leisure class. That sounds about right, though. That's kind of what it is. I mean, listen, whenever people talk about, you know, NCAA basketball players, like trying to get a little bit of money for their games,
the fact that these schools use their images and sell merch based on them, but they can't make a single dime. It does feel very similar. It's like, no, we've put these rules in place so that you stay poor and we can make some money. Yeah. Yeah. And that is, we are talking about the origins of why the NCAA be that way, right? Like that all has its roots in this. And in fact, the bastard for the Avery Brundage is the guy who is
like has a major role in why the NCAA adopts those like student athlete regulations. Yeah. But it's important to know that like kind of where we are now with like these student athletes and it's like, well, you know, we can make millions of dollars off of you and you can mortgage your body and your future health, but you can't make any money off of it because then you wouldn't be an amateur. That has its origins and like the origins of that are these rich people being like,
Well, poor people like sports too, and they're often better at them than us. So let's just say if you make money doing anything, you can't compete with us. If you have to work for a living, you can't play our games. These are just for amateurs.
That is exactly why it was invented. They absolutely were just like, man, these guys are way too good at rowing. Yeah, exactly. And to be fair, Cupertine and the Olympics are actually a step forward from this very regressive. It's still regressive by modern standards, but from that 1878 rule, like, yeah, nobody can take part in this if you have to work for a living.
Right. Quote, when Pierre de Coubertin called for the revival of the Olympic Games in 1892, the primary discussion amongst the elite group of educators and public figures who formed the first version of the Olympic Committee was to determine who would be allowed to compete in the games. In other words,
Who counts as an amateur? Because it's very this word is still very important to them, but they are going to kind of redefine it. Right. Initially, it had meant like, well, only rich people can have the time to become world class athletes because they don't have to, like, work for a living. And it's going to evolve through this period. In 1894, the workers rights movement has made enough inroads that even the kind of out of touch elites that de Coubertin works with to start the Olympics, they're not going to say if you have to work for wages, you can't compete.
Right. But they are going to try and exclude working class people anyway, by basically saying you just can't make money from sports. Right. Right. Still excludes people because only rich people can afford to like practice enough to become world class without ever making money on it. Right. Yeah. It's still mostly excludes people. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I guess it's like someone if they run for a living because they have a job as
you know, a circus performer running away from crazy, crazed lion. But like for the most part, it's like, yeah, no one's playing basketball on any other level except for right. Professionally or for money. Yeah. And there is, there's also a degree of a legitimate concern, which is that these guys, as much as they hate to admit it, recognize that like pro boxers,
are always going to be better. Like, and most pro boxers are like poor people who came up fighting like the nastiest kind of fights you can fucking conceive of, right? Yeah, yeah. To be able to become, like, make a lot of money as a boxer. And that guy, some like...
Rich dude is like the 14th Earl of Chonsaberry or whatever. That guy is going to get his skull turned into powder by 1890s Mike Tyson, right? We must ban anyone who does it professionally lest we get our heads mashed in by an Irishman. A man whose ears are entirely cauliflower. Yeah.
They're like, he's not allowed. No, he can't compete. No, no, not him. So eventually they come up with a new definition for amateur, which is somebody who has profited specifically for their participation in a sport that they want to compete in for the Olympics. As Alan Goodman notes, throughout through most of the 20th century, amateurism was defended with the argument that fair play and good sportsmanship are possible only when sports are an athlete's avocation, never his or her vocation.
Okay. Part of what's going on here, we're going to see this when we finally do get to Avery Brundage. There's this attitude among the wealthy and the aristocracy who all have a lot of money that
There's something gross about capitalism still. They are the winners of this system, but they recognize that the way in which we compete under capitalism kind of ruins fun stuff. But their way of dealing with- Kind of right about that, actually. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Yeah. But their way of dealing with it is to just try to keep poor people away. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah.
So the first actual Olympics is going to hit in 1896. It is, you know, more gender woke than the original Olympics. Women had not been allowed to participate in the original Olympics. The ancient Greeks, not really big fans of women. Yeah. They didn't even fuck them half the time. Not really. Yeah. Not famous for that. Yeah.
So they, you know, the new Olympics is going to be a lot better at that, but it is biased heavily towards men and women of means. In the longer term, the fact that this veneration of amateurism is initially bundled up in the heart of the whole idea will provide an opportunity for Olympic officials to execute petty grievances and fuck with athletes they don't like for whatever reason.
We are talking bullshit power trip stuff. And the king of that kind of shit is going to be the future of International Olympic Committee President Avery Brundage. Now we finally got to our bastard. So let's take an ad break here and then we'll come back to talk about Avery. This podcast is sponsored by BetterHelp. This year has gone so quickly. We're almost halfway through it already.
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We're back. Do you like the Olympics, Matt? Like watching them and stuff? This is an Olympic year, I think. Yeah. So I don't like them nor watch them. But when it's on, it's something that like occasionally I'll just like turn on a TV and I'll be like, oh, shit, losing, you know, or like, oh, that guy's doing a shot put. And I'll sit and watch for a second. And then I'll think to myself, like, how the fuck did they fill up all those seats?
That's usually the question I have, but I don't mind people who love it. If you like watching people throw a javelin, more power to you. I wish I was that easily entertained.
Yeah. I'm torn because like you, I don't really like watching the Olympics. And I also recognize that they often destroy the cities that they're hosted in. 100%. Yeah. I kind of think we should have just picked one place to do them. Right. Yeah. And destroyed that. And destroyed that. Yeah. Really fuck up a single city in Greece. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. They're not using it. No. Or do it in like downtown Dallas. Just...
Just absolutely annihilate, like force all of these international dignitaries to get on the fucking high five for 17 and a half hours. They've got to go to Dallas. Every two years I'm in fucking Dallas. Just absolutely take one of the worst traffic cities. I mean, they're trying to do it in LA. That won't be any better. It's going to be a nightmare. Yeah.
What a fucking nightmare. My mom prides herself in letting me know that I was conceived during the 84 Olympics. Yeah, but which event? I don't know. I don't want to. She just says it and I run away. I don't want to know where she fucked and during when. Don't take this the wrong way, but you do seem like a shot put baby. I don't take that the wrong way. I mean that as a compliment. No, that's yeah, for sure. Honest sport. Yeah. Yeah. Top heavy guy.
I see what you're saying. I didn't mean that. Oh, balls of steel. That's what you meant. Yes, yes. There we go. Avery Brundage. Let's talk about Avery. Born on September 28th, 1887 in Detroit, Michigan. Hell yeah. Avery would be nine years old for the very first Olympics. He was one of the people, the aristocrats behind the early Olympic Games actually wanted to keep out because he is definitely working class. He's going to be very rich.
But he is born a working class kid. His dad is a stonecutter. Damn. Yeah, that's the OG working class job. Yeah, that's the original fucking working class job. Stonecutter and pit digger. And in classic working class fashion, his father abandons the family when Avery is five, which is a thing people could get away with a lot more easily back before the internet. Yeah, you could just walk. Just leave. Yeah, he goes out for a packet of smokes.
Where's dad? Gone forever. I don't fucking know. Who are you going to ask? You're the man of the house now, Avery. Okay.
Hope you know how to do taxes. Avery has one younger brother, Charles, and they spend their early childhood bouncing around with relatives. We don't get a lot of context as to how this impacted him, but it doesn't interfere with his schooling. He is an excellent student. He wins an essay contest in 1901 at age 13 that secures him a trip to see President McKinley's second inauguration.
Yeah, he really got in on the McKinley train right before the end of it there. So that's good. Is that the one who... Oh, yeah, yeah. He gets got. Yeah, Anton Shogosh fucking aces him with a... It's like an anarchist kills him, right? Sure was. That's the one one that we got. Yeah.
We did it. Yeah, there's a pretty good song from a musical about that sung by Doogie Howser. So check that one out. Oh, okay. Yeah. In general, aside from the dad abandoned them thing, his, you know, not a bad early 1900s childhood. He survives. So that's doing good. You know, he makes it past all the cholera and the Spanish flu. So, you know, he's not doing bad. Yeah.
He makes a living as a teenager, is like a boy delivering newspapers. It's kind of unclear to me how poor he really is. One source I've read claims he had to sell newspapers to help his mother buy bread and that when he got into sports in high school, he had to build his own equipment to be able to play. I kind of have come to think some of this is myth-making, right? He is definitely working class.
But he has a big family that seems to have been very supportive of he and his brother. And his Uncle Ed is the Republican leader of Chicago's North Side. During a time when that means you are taking every bribe conceivable. Like his Uncle Ed is the Attorney General of Illinois eventually. Like that man is getting so bribed. Yeah.
Yeah, there's no way. Okay, this is really poking holes in the whole working class hero thing here. Yeah. So one thing everyone agrees upon is that Brundage was an exceptional athlete. He becomes a track star near the end of his public school life. And when he graduates and moves to the U of Illinois to study civil engineering, he plays basketball and continues to do track.
He is sort of a stereotypical jock. He's a popular kid. He's the leader of his fraternity. He's one of those guys who would have posted quotes from Friday Night Lights on their Facebook wall every like hour and a half if he had lived to see the modern era. Hell yeah. So a cool guy is what you're saying. So a cool guy. A cool guy. My favorite guy from high school. Why is that the show that pops up in your brain?
Because I grew up in Texas, Sophie. No, it is a vibe. That's great. My high school sports stadium was more expensive than most state sports stadiums. And my high school did not have a good football team. We just had a $10 million stadium because you do. Yeah, because you got to be ready in case someone gets good. Yeah, so you might have a kid who's really good at some point. Or that you find Kyle Chandler to be a very handsome man.
I don't even know who that is. Both things can be true, Sophie. He's the star. Sophie, I didn't watch... My parents watched that show. I avoided it like the plague. I just know what it means to people. Ha ha!
Speaking of what sports means to Avery, since they don't have Facebook, he has to settle with writing articles for his school paper. If he had Facebook, he would have found his dad. He would have found his dad. But no. But no. So he's got to write shit like this, which I found in a 1972 Sports Illustrated article that's talking about his life.
One of his contributions was entitled The Football Field is a Sifter of Men. No better place than a football field could be chosen to test out a man. Here a fellow is stripped of most of the finer little things contributed by ages of civilization, and his virgin nature is exposed to the hot fire of battle. It is man against man, and there is no more thorough a mode of exposing one's true self.
Oh, you've definitely exposed your virgin nature. I'll tell you that much. Yeah, man. Football, the crucible of manhood. Touch one boob, bro. You want a fucking game that's a crucible of manhood? Uh,
There's a burst Kashi, the Afghan version of polo, which is played on horseback with the corpse of a goat as the ball. That's right. That's a crucible of manhood right there. Yeah. Yeah. Play some burst Kashi. Right. Don't give me this football shit. You guys didn't even know what a tackle back then. So Avery is look, they hadn't invented steroids. It couldn't have been very good football.
No. Yeah. They were wearing all leather. Exactly. Exactly. You know, they were the people were definitely getting hurt. But yes. Yes. Very little. But not in a way that was as impressive as the way our our our current professional monsters hurt each other. Yeah. Yeah. You don't know shit about CTE. Yeah. So Avery is a smart kid who's obsessed with sports. And like Cupertine, he comes to see them as a potential remedy for every problem of modernity.
Now, Coubertin is obsessed with peace because, you know, his childhood had been defined by a war and avoiding conflict through sportsmanship. Avery, on the other hand, seems to because he is a poor kid who makes a lot of money as an adult. He comes to see athletic competition as proof of the fact of the wisdom and goodness of capitalism. Right. Because he's good at capitalism. Right. And so sports has to mirror the thing that he has found meaning in. Right.
Sure. Avery gets a job as a construction superintendent for a major architectural firm, and he personally supervised the construction of 3% of the buildings built in Chicago during the years that he had this job. So he is very capable. He's now got real money. He has all the bribes this guy is taking. My God. Jesus Christ.
Throughout his early to mid-20s, he continued to compete as an amateur. In fact, working a day job completely outside of the field of athletic endeavor, Avery Brundage was the very model of what the Olympics now meant by the term amateur.
Now, the early 1900s are a different time in athletic competition. And Avery was into some stuff that I was going to say was very weird sports shit until I realized this sport is still a sport today. We just don't talk about it because it's kind of lame. But I'm going to read from a Sports Illustrated article about his chief sport.
OK, although heel and toe walking the discus and shot put where his specialties, he became a devotee to the tortures of the pentathlon, decathlon and most excruciatingly of all, what he fondly calls the old American all around. Now, I'm not shitting on the pentathlon and decathlon and stuff. Those are like really difficult, physically demanding things. It's just incredibly funny to me that heel to toe walking is a sport.
I'm trying to picture heel-to-toe walking. Is it just – is that gallivanting? What is – It looks like – did you ever live in a place where there would be groups of usually – I don't say this to insult them, but usually middle-aged women who would have a walking group.
together. Oh, yeah. My mom's bed. It looks like that to me. But when people describe it, they're always like, this is a shockingly intense race. Walking is actually one of the most intense and physically demanding sports you can do. And I'm sure they're right. But it also does. I don't believe them at the same time. Matt, did you picture Chevy at Hills Park?
Yes, I did. I was just like, there's the first thing I thought of. I was like, I've seen all these old ladies doing the speed walk. I'm willing to believe it's good exercise. But like, as an adult and president of the Olympic Committee, Avery Brundage told Sports Illustrated that an 880 yard heel and toe walk he did was quote, the closest a man can come to experiencing the pangs of childbirth. Laughter
I don't know, man. It's possible. I don't know, man. I bet it's taxing, but the problem is, is that you can't think about it without being like, well, is there Olympic crab walking? Is that also a thing? That doesn't seem that bad. Why make it silly? My mom did speed walking. And the only thing she ever compared to childbirth was kidney stones. Um,
which seems to be pretty widely done. So I assume kidney stones are a comparable experience in some ways, but I've never had either. I've never had either. So I would rather do heel to toe walking than push a kidney stone through my dick hole. I'll heel to toe walk on my dick.
All day long. All day long. I don't give a fuck. Anyway, race walking is still an Olympic event, even though I made fun of it. So if you're a race walker out there, I'm sure we're going to get the race walking hive get really angry at us on Reddit or something. Yeah, all five of them. I'm not trying to shit talk your sport, but it's very silly that he compares this to childbirth. Yeah.
But he is a really good athlete. In 1914, at age 26, Brundage won the U.S. Championship in the American All-Around, which is like it's a series of 10 events. The 100-yard dash, a high jump, high hurdle, shot put, broad jump, 56-pound weight throw, pole vault, and then that 880-foot walk plus like a hammer throw and a run.
All done in a single afternoon, which is like that's a whole thing to do, right? Yeah, that sounds taxing. That's a lot. He's very good at it. Sports writers in 1918 call him the greatest athlete of his day. So that's all very impressive. You could look at Avery Brundage's early life as an almost seamless path of success from poverty to like wealth to athletic greatness with one gap in his resume of perfection. And that gap is this.
In 1912, he partook in his only Olympics as a competitor. In Illinois, he had been a star, but in the Olympics, he finishes sixth in the pentathlon and 15 in the decathlon. And if we're looking at objective terms, neither of those is bad. You know, you made it to the Olympics. That's pretty good, right? You got to hang out in the Olympic Village. That sounds sick. Yeah, you got to. I mean, I assume they had less sex. I assume at least Avery wasn't having that much sex. Definitely. Yeah.
Yeah. Writing essays like that. This guy is talking about race walking. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He, he did. He doesn't have much game. Anytime he meets a lady, he starts talking about how he knows the pain of childbirth. Cause he had to walk. The virgin virtues of heel to toe walking. You'll never understand it. Um, but he actually drops out of the pentathlon before finishing because he realizes he can't get enough points to actually metal. Um,
which I don't know, might kind of, kind of seems like bad sportsmanship, but I've never been to the Olympics. I don't know. Jim Thorpe, the best athlete in the field at the time, uh, wins gold in both events. Jim Thorpe is a native American athlete, right? This is going to be very important because later in life, Avery is going to nurse something of a grudge against Thorpe.
Oh, when Avery becomes president of the International Olympic Committee, Thorpe loses his medals. And there was like a move to like, come on, give him back his, you know, he was a great athlete. And Brundage is always going to be like, no, fuck it. Yeah, he broke the rules. Right. Like some people will suggest maybe it's because he was kind of, you know.
jealous still. He never got over losing. Despite his frustration, or perhaps because of it, the whole experience of participating in the Olympics hit Avery as a sort of religious experience. He later wrote this.
What social, racial, religious, or political prejudices of any kind might have existed were soon forgotten and sportsmen from all over the world with different ideas, assorted viewpoints, and various manners of living mingled on the field and off with the utmost friendliness, transported by an overflowing Olympic spirit. My conversion, along with many others, to Coubertin's religion, the Olympic movement, was complete."
And I kind of think that what's happening here is that like people didn't travel as much internationally back then. It was harder. And he like goes overseas as a young man and makes a bunch of friends and has an intense physical experience. And he walks away in the same way people do when they go to raves and stuff now. Festivals. Right. He has that kind of this is like Burning Man. Right. Yeah. Yeah. They're like, damn, you know, it's just like it's the only place in the world where you can feel at one with
all of humanity. Right. And it's like, what are you talking about? It's like Bonnaroo. Yeah, exactly. And like any kind of person who has that sort of experience as a young person, he's going to spend some time convinced this is the way to save the world. And unlike most people, he never moves past that. Right. Yeah. It's normal to take ecstasy at a really good concert and be convinced that you found the secret to war. But like, yeah, right. But then you
find yourself a few years later taking ecstasy just to play some video games at home. And you're just like, I have a drug problem. Oh, this is no longer as fun as it was. So it was not uncommon for dedicated Olympians, particularly those who went on to work for the Olympics professionally, to kind of worship the games. This is a religion to the people who are most into it. It really is. In his book, Berlin Games, Guy Walters writes,
Coubertin was almost regarded as Christ and Ballet Le Tour, who is like his second in the Olympic Committee, as his disciple. These men were infallible because they embodied an idealism that far transcended the grubby quotidian strivings of humanity. It was a pagan idealism. Its pageantry godless, but its chauvinist adherents were nothing less than fanatics, men for whom no other point of view was acceptable. If anyone obstructed their ideals, then they would be subjected to the most vicious ad hominem attacks."
So they have a toxic fan base. Yeah. Breaking new ground there. They're Star Wars nerds. Yes, yes, yes. This is like how everything works now, but it is noted at the time as being pretty unique, right? There's nothing quite like the Olympics and its toxic fan base. Yeah. I told them that I don't really like the heel to toe running and they called me a slur. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. They mailed a bomb to my dad's house because I joked about walking not being hard. Starting in 1919, Brundage began to take on more, because again, by 1919, he's not old, but he's like old for competitive athletics. So he starts taking on more and more roles in sports administration. Mm-hmm. He
He initially takes on roles in the Amateur Athletic Association or AAU, which what is at one point the rival of the NCAA. This is one of those things where they both kind of come up at the same time and they're kind of trying to do at least very similar things. And so they hate each other. Right. There's like, no, I'm going to rip these kids off. Yeah, I want to rip off these children. I'm going to profit from their pain. They like exploit them.
Pretty nasty fight for a while. They're like, there's a period where athletes will get blacklisted for playing in like NCAA events or AAU events by the other group, right? And Avery's actually going in to negotiate a detente between the AAU and the NCAA. And part of how he does this is he offers the NCAA the power to certify college students as amateurs, right? Oh.
Oh, shit. Yeah, yeah. He is the start of all this. Now, at the point he does it, college sports is not an industry in the way that it is today. I don't even think it's realistic to say he would have conceived of sports, period, is it? Like, professional, like the best professional players of the day are making decent money, but not like...
they're not getting hundreds of millions of dollars. They're not getting even close to that, right? Right. In fact, he probably thinks it's antithetical to sportsmanship to make money off of it. Yes. Yes, he does. And it's important to note that while that is an excuse now for ripping these kids off, at his time, there's not the industry behind it to profit from. So I do think he comes by this belief honestly, even though I think this is a really dumb move. Yeah. Like, I don't think he's actually – I don't think he's full of shit in the way that like modern –
NCAA officials are. Yeah, I know. They all know what they're doing, but he might have been just a little bit more idealistic about it. Right, right, right. And this is a bigger story than we have the time to lay out. But the gist of the problem that comes from this is that colleges are going to immediately realize that taking a hard line on amateur status allows them to let kids work for free and keep all the money for themselves. This has led to some...
leads very soon after Avery does what he does. This leads to some horrific situations. And I'm going to quote from an article by Ellie Simpson and Lauren Chang Pratt about this.
Ray Dennison was an Army veteran, father of three, and a football player for the Fort Lewis A&M Aggies on a scholarship. In September 1955, he shattered the base of his skull on the knee of a ball carrier during a game. He died 30 hours after the incident. Dennison's wife, Billie, filed a lawsuit against Fort Lewis A&M for workers' compensation. The National Collegiate Athletic Association argued that Dennison was a student athlete because he was on scholarship, meaning he was not eligible to receive benefits.
In its defense, the NCAA avoided such terms as club since that was how professionals referred to their teams. The organization added an amateurism pledge to every scholarship signing. The NCAA won the case. Coined by then NCAA president Walter Byers for that case, the term student athlete is used as legal precedent to limit the benefits and compensation college athletes can receive while playing full time.
So that happens not all that long. You know, we're talking like 40 years, a little less than 40 years, but like that is the ultimate result of what Avery sets in motion. Yeah. So, uh,
In 1928, Avery is elected the head of the American Olympic Association, replacing Douglas MacArthur. Oh, shit. The guy who's not long after that's going to try to nuke Korea. Yeah, I love that. Doesn't that kind of put to rest the whole idea of sports being a way to stop war when Douglas MacArthur is there?
He's out. Avery's in 1928. And by this point, the new Olympics has gone through some growing pains of its own. After almost 20 years establishing itself, World War I threw a wrench in the planned 1936 Berlin Games. The
The games had been basically set before Hitler came to power. I mean, it's not in power in 28, but like Hitler comes to power in 33. The games had been set before then. And once the Nazis take over, this is going to become a serious issue. Right.
But the games, even before Hitler is in, the fact that there's going to be an Olympics in Berlin is a big deal for Germany. Because after World War I, Germany is this pariah nation, right? And the 36 Olympics are seen by the Germans, not wrongfully, as being like, this is kind of us reentering the community of nations. Yeah, exactly. Everything's cool now. Everyone will be normal.
This is the Weimar guys talking. Don't worry, by 36, everything will be so fucking chill. People will welcome us with open arms. Yeah, we've got some problems, but we'll have them figured out by 34. 35 at the latest. Yeah, it'll just be a few years from now, but people will still love Germany's end. Don't worry.
So Brundage gets elected president of the American Olympic Committee in 1929, a role he will hold until 1953. But later that year, disaster struck. The economy crashed and Brundage lost his first company and the bulk of his fortune on the brink of bankruptcy.
He responded to losing his money by bullshitting that he was still rich. He describes going about town with, quote, his my chest out and not a nickel in my pocket. But no one knew except my accountant and secretary. He's like, I'm going to still look rich, even though I'm poor. Yeah.
And I don't know if he's really- His monocle just gets bigger and bigger. He's like, oh, I just made more money. Again, he's described as having lost all his money, but the way he writes things, I kind of think he took a hit, but he was not on the streets or anything, right? He was not- It just hurt him, right? But he does start another company. He does recover and rebuild-
his fortune. I kind of think he just kind of exaggerates the degree to which he was down during the depression, because it's more impressive if you come back from being completely broke as opposed to like, well, I went from rich to kind of struggling middle class and then I got rich again, you know? Yeah. Yeah. There's no rapper. It was just like started from the middle. Yeah. Yeah. Started from honestly doing pretty okay. Yeah. Yeah. Started from the top, still at the top. Everything's fine. Has always been fine. Yeah.
Either way, whatever the truth is, he would later mock businessmen who lost their money and committed suicide in the Depression by saying they lacked, quote, the character building discipline of competitive sport. Wouldn't have shot himself if he'd done more heel and toe walking. Exactly.
There's all these people jumping out of buildings. Have you tried jumping over a hurdle? Yeah, over something slightly higher than you know you can jump over and seeing how well you do. Stop shooting yourself in the head. Start shooting a javelin a few yards. Shoot and put.
Oh, man. By the early 30s, Avery is back on top. And we were going to talk about what he does next. But you know who's never not been on top? Who? The sponsors of this motherfucking podcast. That's right. They started from the top. Still at the top. That's right. Now we're going to buy some socks. Or I don't know. I don't know what the product is. Could be socks. Could be the Washington State Highway Patrol. No way to know. Either one. Mm-hmm.
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We're back. So by the early 30s, he's rich again, I assume. That seems to be when he got rich again. It's a little unclear. I don't have access to the man's bank statements. Either way, he does get rich again. When he dies, he's worth like $20 million. He seems to have credited his love of the Olympics and sportsmanship with instilling in him the values that made his recovery possible. But he was worried, despite the fact that things are doing better for him. He's worried about the growth of sinister socialist movements in Russia and beyond.
At the same time, he finds himself intrigued by a new political strain in Germany. This Hitler chap has some interesting ideas. What?
Why does it always go back to Hitler, Robert? Part of why it goes back to Hitler is that Brundage is like an Olympics worshiper. And he comes to see the Olympics in somewhat eugenic terms. And in fact, he seems to have felt about athletes the way Hitler felt towards Germans. And I'm going to quote from Guy Walters here.
Brundage also saw in Olympism an enshrinement of his own racist ideals, ideals he shared with the Chicago Association of Commerce in November 1929. Perhaps we are about to witness the development of a new race, a race of men actuated by the principles of sportsmanship learned.
Thank you.
Yes. Such a short trip from race walking to race science. Yeah, that's less than 880 yards for sure. It's a problem with, you know, just the word itself being you're super into race. That's how you become racist. God damn it. Great stuff. Like, it's just, I don't want to say I get it, but it's like, it's one of those things where you just, whenever people...
This is a problem I have with the Olympics in general that makes me uncomfortable is there is something of a, you know, when they say like, yeah, all the nations, you know, are competing and whatnot. It does feel somewhat like.
race wars the sport yeah it has that element to it a little bit and it's always made me feel icky and there's this this other thing that like the Olympics de Coubertin seems to legitimately have come by his I think that this could help us you know get past war as a society and I respect those utopian ideals but it does
seem like we eventually walk back around to like, well, this isn't literally war, but like, what do you do in war? Well, you heard a lot of kids and I think about like Larry Nassar molesting all those gymnasts. He's not the only he's not the only gymnastics coach to have done that. No, certainly not. And I think about like, oh, you know, the the
the systematic mistreatment and abuse of young men as foot soldiers. I think about stuff like, you know, Soviet Union doping athletes. Sure, sure. Like athletes doping in all sorts of countries, right? Like this obsessive need to like, well, we have to win and anything that we have to do to these athletes in order to allow them to win is okay. So let's shoot them up with whatever the fuck we can shoot them up with.
up with right and including like creating a lot of this and the shaming of people you know uh of like athletes they're trying to like ban fucking at the olympic village that's the one great thing about the olympics that's why you get good at sports right yes you can eventually someday be in some sort of fuck village nobody ever became the best at a sport to not get laid i'll say exactly right come on
So the fact that Avery is kind of arriving at race science by way of here to toe walking leads him to occupy an awkward cultural position as Hitler takes power in Germany. Before Hitler's election, the 1936 Olympics had again been promised to Berlin.
After Hitler comes to power, many Americans, a lot of them are Jewish American athletes, but not exclusively. There's a lot of just people who don't like Nazis decided like, well, now that the Nazis are in charge, we shouldn't participate in these Olympic games, right? Because it will normalize the Third Reich and its oppression of its Jewish citizens, not just the Jews. There's a lot of people who are, because it's not just Jewish citizens being oppressed, but in general, the Third Reich is doing a lot of terrible shit. And if we show up there to play it,
The games will kind of be handing them a win and legitimizing the regime, and we shouldn't, right? Right. That's what a lot of people are arguing. Yeah. This enrages Avery. His most rigid principle is that the Olympics should never be political. Now, of course, that's not really true. That's what he says about-
But the way Avery treats the Olympics is deeply political. He just because it whenever he's thinking about something he believes deeply, he doesn't consider that politics. Right. It's not politics. That's just his that's just reality. Everyone else is just is just perverting his reality, which is the only true reality.
Yeah. And I want to quote again from that Berlin Olympics book. Quote, he also frequently insisted that more than the future of amateur sport was at stake in shielding sport from political manipulation. Upon sport for sport's sake depended the healthy psychological valuation of individual effort and excellence that was at the very heart of a democratic way of life.
Moreover, fit bodies and competitive spirits were, in Brundage's view, essential for the continued success of American capitalism at home and abroad. Though he never acknowledged the political coloring of his vision of the Olympics, he regarded them as a kind of international mission for spreading democratic values in the continuing ideological battle between communism and the American way of life.
Yeah. But that's not political. That's just the natural state of things. That's just fine. It's just normal stuff. That's not politics, right? Right. Yeah. God is a capitalist. Reality is a capitalist. Right. Communism is the devil. And most people who self-identify as apolitical are the most political people I've ever met in my entire life. Yes.
Right. Of course. It's that's like, you know, it's the height of privilege is the a political nature of your viewpoint when you're just like, oh, I don't know. I've always felt like politics is weird. Status quo always seems cool and great. Yeah. You know, I back when I lived out in the middle of nowhere, I ran into one guy who identified as a political and actually was. And the reason why I believe him is when I told him that Hillary Clinton was running for president, he was like, wasn't a Clinton just president?
And I was like, and it like did not seem to be aware of the Bush years. But this was a man who had been out in the mountains that entire time, not really aware of the Bush or the Obama year. Just kind of missed like 16 years. Yes. Yes. Yeah. No, if you're going to be apolitical, you have to be like almost literally living under a rock. No, no. I literally have not talked to anyone in 20 years. Yeah.
All my best friends are animals. I really don't know what's politics now. You, in fact, are apolitical, sir. Wow. All right. So, Matt, you got any plugables to plug? Well, if you are an apolitical person like me...
I have a new podcast out there called Bad Hasbara, the world's most moral podcast, in which me and some great guests, we talk about what's going on in Israel and we break down some of the hilarious new propaganda that seems to be dropping on a daily fucking basis online.
So yeah, if you want to check that out, you can get it wherever podcasts are given away for free or go to YouTube and type in Bad Hasbara. The channel is called Frotcast because I used my old YouTube channel that no one watched and I started posting on there. And now it's mostly Bad Hasbara content. But Frotcast is the name of the channel. Can I change it? Probably. Will I? I don't know. I don't know how YouTubes work. How do you spell that? It's weird.
F-R-O-T-C-A-S-T. That's the name of the channel. And the podcast, again, is called Bad Hasbara. H-A-S-B-A-R-A. Check it out. All right. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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