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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Friday, October 30, 2026 at 10 am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">California voters this election will usher in new representatives, vote on 14 statewide ballot measures and weigh in on many other local races and propositions. With just days to go until the midterms, we want to hear your last-minute voting questions. Are you wondering what you should do if you haven’t received your ballot? How can you find your polling place? How soon can you expect election results? Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, and KQED’s Scott Shafer and Guy Marzorati join us to take all of your voting questions ahead of the Nov. 3 election.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Kim Alexander,\u003c/strong> president and founder, California Voter Foundation\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Scott Shafer, \u003c/strong>senior politics correspondent and co-host, political breakdown, KQED\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Guy Marzorati\u003c/strong>, correspondent, KQED’s California politics and government desk\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003c/p>\n",
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"slug": "cursed-all-tabs-portals-creepy-caves-jumpscares-and-haunted-objects",
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"content": "\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this special Halloween edition of Close All Tabs, we’re diving into creepypastas: horror stories that spread online until they become urban legends on their own. What happened to the girl who fell into a mirror in 2001? Did Ted the Caver ever come back to the surface? Was the Momo challenge real? And finally, we venture into eBay’s haunted doll marketplace … where we may have ended up with a spirit wreaking havoc on the production of this episode. It’s a ghoulish good time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Guests\u003c/strong>:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@hallietut\">Hallie Tut\u003c/a>, visual effects artist, and digital content creator\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@chillingtalesfordarknights\">Craig Groshek\u003c/a>, horror author and founder of \u003cem>Chilling Tales for Dark Nights\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://tedthecaverfan.com\">Ted Hegemann\u003c/a>, author of “Ted the Caver”\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Rena Lee, social media manager\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophia-bruno-846358286/\">Sophia Bruno\u003c/a>, educational nonprofit coordinator\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@paranormalteej\">Paranormal Teej\u003c/a>, haunted doll collector & paranormal investigator\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlaXgi-Jpdo\">How She Creates VFX Shots That Break Your Brain\u003c/a> — Hallie Tut, \u003cem>Youtube\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://tedthecaverfan.com\">Ted the Caver\u003c/a> — Ted Hegemann\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Momo_(Creepypasta)#:~:text=%E2%80%9C-,Momo,-%2C%20Momo%2C%20Momo%20is\">Momo (Creepypasta)\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Villains Wiki\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@LanceUlanoff/momo-challenge-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-internet-4d1a5679c1ed\">Momo Challenge Is Everything That’s Wrong with the Internet\u003c/a> — Lance Ulanoff, \u003cem>Medium\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://yokai.com/ubume/?srsltid=AU7gw4UWwYuhjk8jv7LUe8ip4Sjmbw0bTmlbqoJ6kyNNEwWAjC7IZCV5\">Ubume\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Yokai.com\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-momo-global-social-media-hoax-about-paranormal-threat-kids-n977961\">How ‘Momo’, a global social media hoax about a paranormal threat to kids, morphed into a U.S. viral phenomenon\u003c/a> — Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.inverse.com/input/features/dybbuk-box-dibbuk-kevin-mannis-zak-bagans-haunted-hoax-revealed\">Finally, the truth behind the ‘haunted’ Dybbuk Box can be revealed\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Inverse\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/work/careers/a34322508/the-witches-of-ebay-industry-selling-haunted-item/\">The witches of eBay: Inside the industry selling haunted items online\u003c/a> — Daniella Scott, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/62125/1/a24-youngest-ever-director-kane-parsons-the-backrooms-creepypasta-into-cinema\">The Backrooms: How Kane Parsons turned creepypasta into cinema\u003c/a> — Jack Mills, \u003cem>Dazed\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/what-is-backrooms-movie-original-explained-4chan-creepypasta-horror-internet.html\">The Eerie Backstory Behind Backrooms\u003c/a> — Nadira Goffe, \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/revisiting-creepypasta-the-social-horror-craze-that-launched-slenderman/\">Revisiting Creepypasta, the Social Horror Craze That Launched Slenderman\u003c/a> — Zac Thompson, \u003cem>VICE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Happy spooky season tabbies. Is there a creepypasta you can’t stop thinking about? Or any internet trend, tech subculture, or online oddity keeping you up at night? Well, now you can ask Close All Tabs to investigate! Go to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">KQED.org/podcasts/closealltabs\u003c/a> to submit your question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just a note, this episode contains mentions of suicide and horror themes so listen with care — or skip this one and come back next week. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let me tell you a story about one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I was in middle school, hanging out in a family friend’s basement with a bunch of other kids, when my friend’s older brother asked us if we wanted to see something. We crowded around his laptop where he pulled up a YouTube video, titled “Entry #1.” It was just a few seconds of shaky footage, shot through a window from inside a house, of a lanky, suited figure lurking near the door. No sound…which made it feel more unsettling. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My friend’s brother told us that some guy online found all of these videos in his friend’s camera and started posting them to YouTube. He hit play on the next one. This had sound — some guy talking while he drove down a dark street. Not much is visible in this video…except the blurry silhouette of that same lanky figure, looming in the distance. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Marble Hornets:\u003c/strong> I saw this really tall guy stand in the middle of the street, just completely still. For whatever reason, this really set off Rocky, and he got really scared. He wouldn’t move and he kept on pulling on his leash to go back home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Back then, everything on the internet seemed real. My friends and I took all of it at face value. So we believed the YouTube comments that said they’d seen this figure too. My friend’s brother left, but the rest of us were totally hooked. So we hit play on another video. This was more shaky footage, again shot through a window from inside a house. The same figure was lurking, closer this time. The camera finally focused on an unnaturally pale, bald head. It had no face at all, just smooth white skin and hollow contours where eyes and a mouth and a nose should be. And then it turned to face the viewer, as if it was honing in on us. Then, my friend’s brother, from the top of the stairs, called out, “Who wants to meet Slenderman?” And shut off the basement lights. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The legend of Slenderman started in 2009, when someone posted black and white photos of children on a playground, seemingly oblivious to the spindly creature looming over them. The captions alluded to a string of child abductions from the 1980s. It was a submission for a Photoshop contest of paranormal happenings, which later inspired the YouTube series, Marble Hornets. That was the supposedly found footage that we watched in my friend’s basement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I totally fell for it. For a good year after, I was terrified to look through windows at night in case Slenderman was peering back in. That was my first experience with a creepypasta. The word “creepypasta” is a play on “copypasta” — which is a portmanteau of “copy-paste.” They’re blocks of text that become memes because they’re copied and reposted so often. Creepypastas are online urban legends, Horror stories that start on forums and comment sections that spread across the internet and take on lives of their own. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to Cursed All Tabs. This is our very special Halloween episode, where, instead of one deep dive, we have a bunch of spooky stories for you. These are tales of the paranormal kept alive on the internet. A girl stuck in a portal, caving gone wrong, an entity that might get you through the screen, and the eBay listings for haunted dolls. So, gather around our digital campfire and if you’re easily scared, don’t listen in the dark. Ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is Cursed All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung — tech journalist and your chronically online nightmare — here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. Let’s open our first tab and get into our first spooky story: “The girl in the mirror.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Picture this: It’s the middle of the night. You can’t sleep. You’re doom-scrolling. It’s way past your bedtime and you’ve been awake for a little too long. So, in the darkness of your room, shadows start to take on the shape of strange figures. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, barely visible in the moonlight, and for a second, it seems like the room and the reflection is deeper. Like it goes on forever. And then…mid-scroll, you come across this video. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> There’s something really strange going on here, and if something ends up happening to me, I just hope that this video can maybe explain it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s a video of a teenager recording herself on an old-school, hand-held camcorder. The caption says it’s found footage dating back to January 2001. The camera sweeps across her bedroom — a matching set of yellow furniture, frilly curtains, pink walls, very 90s — and settles on an antique mirror propped up on a chair. It faces another full-length mirror mounted to the wall. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Okay, so I have these two mirrors in my room. As you can see, they’re pretty normal looking mirrors, but I was cleaning and I had them kind of set up like this, and I noticed something really weird. Just watch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The girl places the camcorder on the bed and films herself putting her hand on one of the mirrors, but she passes straight through the glass into another world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> See, when you look through the mirror into the other one, it becomes like a window. And there’s this huge warehouse, grocery store, or something down there. But wait, it gets even crazier. Watch this. Three, two, one. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She fully jumps through the mirror and is transported into what looks like a fully stocked supermarket. But the aisles go on forever and there’s nobody else in sight. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Woah. What the hell? What is this place? Hello? How far does it go? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She begins running, and then… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Oh shit. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The camcorder zaps back to her room mid-air before bouncing onto her frilly white bed. It faces another mirror and in the reflection, the room looks empty. The girl is nowhere to be seen. You’re thoroughly creeped out so you start scouring the comments. Legend has it…she’s still missing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from ItsNickHoliday:\u003c/strong> A video a girl recorded in her bedroom in 2001, right before she went missing, has resurfaced and now is going viral. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Generalist Authority:\u003c/strong> The camera was later found on her bed. She has not been located. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from brookesobasic:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if people know this or not, but facing two mirrors together is something you just shouldn’t do. And it’s said to open portals or bring in really bad energies or spirits — sometimes good — but usually bad. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what happened to this girl who fell through a mirror over 20 years ago and was never heard from again? What is it about that abandoned, endless supermarket that feels both so familiar and so unsettling? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it — it just really is something where you don’t normally stay very long in a place like that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Hallie Tutte, a VFX artist. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Liminal spaces are kind of these transitional places where usually it would be somewhere that’s filled of people going from point A to point B when a place that usually is filled with people is now completely empty — that gives it that eerie feeling because you never usually are used to seeing it completely abandoned like that. So if you got trapped there, it just brings out this strange feeling in you, I think. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Halle is the real girl in the video. And don’t worry, she did not get stuck in the portal despite what some internet conspiracy theorists might think. She’s always been fascinated by liminal horror — stories that take place in vacant, in-between spaces, like the internet lore that inspired the movie Backrooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I grew up in a town that didn’t have a lot of people in it, and there’d be like these old shopping malls where no one would be around and all the stores are gone. And I always just loved the feeling of being in those spaces, like empty food courts. Me and my friends would just like to kind of hang out there. And I guess when I got into 3D modeling, it was a really fun way to get to build that feeling again by creating those spaces. And it’s something that’s really easy to accomplish in 3D and make it feel very real, very quickly because it’s just a lot of walls and lights and rooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that video wasn’t filmed in 2001, but actually made in 2023. Hallie was inspired by found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project. She wanted to create something that felt like it was from the early 2000s, but using modern equipment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I shot it completely by myself in my room and it was actually shot on a Sony camera on a tripod and then any of the handheld stuff is all fake. The mirror that she’s shooting into is fake and to create that infinite Walmart effect, I went to my local Walmart late at night when it feels like a liminal space and I was able to kind of scan all of the shelves and create these 3D models that I then brought into, like a software like Blender, and created this infinite world with it. And yeah, it’s shot in my real bedroom. I live with my grandparents, so this used to be my aunt’s room. And everything in it feels very of the time period that I was trying to make that video set in, so it worked out really well that way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The video got a lot of views when she first posted it, but didn’t really go viral until a year later, when other influencers reposted it, speculating about what really happened to the girl in the mirror. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Even one of my art school teachers had sent me a link on Facebook to like a conspiracy channel where he’d seen it and asking if it was me. And that video had maybe 3 million views and thousands of comments, people’s discourse about whether it was real. Having remembered seeing this video from when they were younger, like in the early 2000s, people had made up like memories of it. Like kind of that Mandela effect was happening where people had — had this memory of knowing this story of this girl who went missing years prior to when I posted the video. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it was — it was just going all over the place online and I kind of started to go down a rabbit hole of Reddit posts about it and different names they were making up for the girl in the video. Like in one spot her name was Violet and the video was titled “Violet’s Playtime” or something strange like that. And then people were kind of using that name to discuss it in different forums. So just gets it away from you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year, Hallie posted a video explaining that she was the creator of the video and that none of it was real. Even then, the conspiracies continued to spread. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> When I made the video talking about how it was fake and I explained how I had made it and how viral it had went around the internet, but trying to claim that, in fact, it was me in my room by myself and I’m here and I am alive — a lot of people in those comments were saying, “The government made her do this,” or “She’s AI and this is a cover up — like this is the CIA cover up for this girl who’s still missing. She’s just — this is just a plant. This girl trying to pretend she’s the girl so they can keep hiding this conspiracy from us.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s wild how drastically the internet has changed since 2023. AI videos back then were nowhere near as convincing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it would be a lot harder now with AI and even just the VFX work that was put into that. I don’t know if it would feel worth it anymore because of the way that people would just write it off. That video was definitely a labor of love for the technical challenges that I had to go through to make it look realistic and I think people now just won’t appreciate the craft that goes into something like that because they’ll just write it all off as AI. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, I don’t know if I’d ever do one quite in the same way. I think if I had a really good story that I wanted to tell, and it was more based on just a really horror story, I might try again. But in a way that was more of a fun technical challenge for me to make it convincing. And in today’s day and age. That’s no longer really a worthy challenge. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s so depressing. Have we killed creepypastas with AI? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think creepypastes will live on, especially the more fictional stories that can’t be real things but that people really wish were real. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hallie herself is still making creepy horror content, pushing herself with new technical challenges and VFX tools. But the story she put out into the world three years ago continues to spread and morph beyond what she ever created. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> It is essentially a creepypasta now, and the creepypasta might be well known by people, but it’s never going to really come back to me, which I kind of appreciate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If, during the witching hour, you place two mirrors facing each other, you might open a ghostly passage. Legend has it that, if you look long enough, the infinite reflections will dissolve into all sorts of in-between places — sprawling underground train stations, sterile hospital waiting rooms, school hallways lined with pristine lockers. They will almost always be eerily empty, as if time comes to a standstill there. And sometimes, you might catch a glimpse of a cavernous, eternal supermarket — and the pink-haired teenager doomed to wander its empty aisles. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That story was brought to us by producer Maya Cueva. Unsettled yet? Well, we’re just getting started. The next internet scary story we have for you is actually the one that started it all. It’s known as the very first creepypasta, dating back to 2001. This tale comes from our very own senior editor, Chris Egusa. You might wanna turn on the lights for this one. Okay, let’s open a new tab. Who is Ted the Caver? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> In early 2001, a series of posts started appearing on an obscure Angelfire website, a site-building platform from the early internet. The page was bare bones. Basic HTML, a black background, and at the top, a salmon-colored title: “Welcome to the Page of Ted.” The posts were journal entries. The author? Anonymous, except for that first name: Ted. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the course of a few months, Ted posted a detailed account of a series of caving trips he took with a friend he identified only as “B,” to explore a previously unentered passage in a spot they called “Mystery Cave.” According to the first entry, the pair had found a hole in the rock wall deep inside the cave. It was only four to five inches across, but they knew it had to lead somewhere because of a steady stream of air that blew through it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first journal entry included a link to a grainy photo of the hole. It was uneven in shape, and the rock it went through looked several inches thick. There was a glove tucked inside the hole for scale. The entry went on. Peeking through the hole with a mini maglite, they could see a tight tunnel that opened up after a few feet. They could feel the air blowing past, and they could hear something else: a low rumbling that came and went. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ted and B brushed aside the strange details. They were too excited at the prospect of finding their way into a completely unexplored passage. So they made a plan: come back with hand tools and a cordless drill, break up the solid rock, and widen the hole until it was big enough to squeeze through. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ted named the passage Floyd’s Tomb, as a nod to Floyd Collins — an early 20th century cave explorer who got trapped and died as he attempted to enlarge a small tunnel in a cave system in Kentucky. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every few weeks through early 2001, a new post would appear on the website. They detailed the slow, grueling work of drilling and chiseling through rock until the batteries on their lights and tools ran out. Since the cave was a good distance from where they lived, Ted and B would stay at a nearby motel, recharge their batteries and bodies, and continue working the next day before heading home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Occasionally, Ted would mention some odd detail. Something unsettling. In one post, he described the wind as getting louder, a howl at that point. The rumbling had become more frequent, and he noted that it seemed to be emanating from deeper in the cave. Then he’d move on, refocusing on the task at hand. Each post linked more photos, documenting the progression of the hole. And as the entries went on, the details got stranger. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On a trip in February, they brought B’s Jack Russell Terrier into the cave. Typically excitable and enthusiastic, she became edgy and began to whimper as she approached the hole. Her hair stood on end and she refused to get any closer. Later that same trip, B heard a scratching, grinding sound coming from inside the hole. When he got Ted’s attention to listen, it stopped. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On another trip in early March, Ted was kneeling at the wall, drilling — ear plugs in and safety glasses on. Over the noise of the drill, he heard a high-pitched sound. He pulled his earplug out just in time to hear an ear-piercing scream coming from inside the hole, echoing through the darkness. In his journal, he described it as a cross between a man screaming in fear and a cougar screaming in pain. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next day, the two couldn’t stop thinking about the sound. But they rationalized it as some kind of animal and decided to continue on, focused on getting to the other side. They’d come too far to give up. In the next entry, Ted explained that they’d widened the hole enough to squeeze through. It was so tight that Ted had to turn his head to the side and wedge himself in with his arms pinned at his sides. As he went further, he could feel the rock pressing into his back. The only way forward was to exhale all of his breath and push with his feet. So that’s what he did. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Exhale. Scoot an inch or two. Breathe in shallowly. Exhale again. Scoot further. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The photo linked in that entry showed Ted wedged into the crevice wearing a black bandana, head cocked to the right. The flash lit up jagged rocks littering the floor beneath him. Then the passage began to open up. Ted was able to crawl forward, emerging for the first time into the untouched cavern. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The entries kept coming. And, without spoiling the rest of the story, things escalated from there. Ted found strange hieroglyphic markings on the cave wall, an unnaturally round rock that seemed to be moving on its own. A smell he described as damp, rotting, rancid, putrid, death, drifting up from deeper in the cave. Then, in the deepest section of the tunnel, he encountered something. Something that seemed to follow him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The last entry on the site was from Ted, writing the morning of his final trip into the cave. By then, he was badly shaken and suffering from lucid nightmares. He was determined to figure out what was going on, once and for all. And then, the entries stopped. Even years later, nothing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the Angelfire site stayed up, preserving Ted’s story. The collection of entries — nine in total, clocking in at over 25,000 words — is now known as Ted the Caver, and many consider it to be the very first creepypasta. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> At the time when I first read it, there was nothing like it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig Groshek is a horror author who runs Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, a company and YouTube channel devoted to creepypasta, along with several podcasts. He first came across Ted the Caver in high school. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> You’re just surfing the internet and all of a sudden you come across this poor guy, you know, getting trapped with unspeakable horrors in the underground. And the story very much leaves you feeling that you don’t know what happened to him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> At the center of a lot of the online discussion was one question — was it real? The story had all these supernatural elements, but it also felt believable. The gear, the technical descriptions of caving, the photos. It read like a real caving journal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> Just when you thought there’s a chance that this was baloney, he threw up a photo. Critical thinking aside, that inclusion of photos drew you right back in, and it made everything that came after it even scarier. And of course we were experiencing this in real time. If you were there when it happened, this wasn’t a story you picked up years later. This was a man this was actually happening to, and you couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching someone sleepwalk into traffic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But you couldn’t ask Ted. For years, no one could confirm who he was, or whether his name was even Ted. Authorship of the story was disputed, with several people taking credit. Eventually, the real Ted emerged and began posting intermittently on some online forums. In 2015, Craig decided to track him down in person. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> All I had to go on was the original post and some forums on the internet where he had appeared. And the way I found him was via reverse image search. He used the same picture, I believe he was standing on train tracks, maybe with his dog, and it was the same pictures of him on every forum that he used. I tracked him down to a disc golf course. I had the guy at the country club there, because they have a golf course and a disc golf and I had them hand Ted my information on a cocktail napkin. And the next thing you know, Ted’s calling me. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig commissioned Ted to write an original horror story for an anthology he was putting together. It was only the second horror story Ted had ever written. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Ted Hegemann. I am the author of the story that is now known as “Ted the Caver.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> His story about the terrors lurking in Mystery Cave was his first. Ted is now 62 and lives in Utah. These days, he spends his free time playing disc golf. It’s the latest in a string of obsessions. 25 years ago, he was obsessed with caving. And, as it turns out, a lot of the story is based on real experiences. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> So, my buddy, Brad and I — who is B in the story — we went out to this cave that’s right on the border of Utah and Nevada. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Ted and Brad really did open up an entrance to a new passage. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It took us numerous trips, I think eight trips before I was able to get past the opening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The squeeze through Floyd’s tomb? Ted says it happened just how he wrote it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was literally exhaling my lungs and scooting with my feet, with my arms down to my side to keep my shoulders down. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Technically, he did the squeeze twice. By the second time, they had opened the passage up a little wider, and he was able to fit through with slightly more ease. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was keeping a journal the entire time — a caving journal — as well as updating friends and family, you know, as to the progress. It was kind of a neat thing. And when we were done, I thought rather than telling everyone about it, I’ll just upload my journal on a — find a website — and put it up. And then I had the idea that it’d be kind of fun to embellish a little bit. And so that’s where the story came from. So much of it is just directly out of my caving journal. And then the creepy parts were invented, of course. But the idea didn’t come until after we had gone into the cave. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> A lot of the eerie details were rooted in his actual experience, too. Like the air blowing through the hole. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We knew about the hole because we would stop there, because the wind blew out and you generally worked up a little bit of a sweat getting to that point in the cave. So we would stop and just let the cool air cool us off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And the low rumbling. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We figured it was I-80 — just trucks or whatever — because it wasn’t constant. It was just every once in a while. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And they really brought a Jack Russell terrier into the cave. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Demon dog, oh my goodness, it nipped at me so many times. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But the part about it whimpering and refusing to go near the hole, that was embellished. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It was having a good time running around exploring. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> I asked Ted at what point the story became complete fiction. I’m thinking of — there’s the terrifying scream that you both hear. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> The scream. The grinding noise that we would hear inside, the smell when I went in there, and the round rock. There was no round rock, sadly. Oh, and the little hieroglyph thing that was in there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> It took Ted almost a year to write the whole thing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> And at one point, I gave up on it. I thought, “Oh, this is dumb. Who’s going to want to read this?” But then I sucked it up and thought, “Yeah, at least finish it. And then who cares? You know, if nothing happens.” But yeah, little did I know. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> He posted it, one update at a time, through the spring of 2001, and he knew the story had attracted a decent readership. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I did have a hidden counter on there and got up into the tens of thousands of views. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The story simmered underground, making its way through different communities, but never going viral the way things might today. And then, a few years after he posted the story, someone sent him a link to a caving forum where it was being discussed. After that, he started digging around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> That was one of the cooler weekends of my life. I remember our internet was really slow. So I went to the library and I just kept searching and found all these forums where they’re talking about it. And it just blew me away. How many people liked it. So many people said it scared them to death in very colorful ways. It was just so fun to know that that people were reading it and enjoying it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> For Ted, who’s not even a big horror fan, the fact that this story he posted 25 years ago keeps coming up is a lasting source of enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I just discovered this like last year. I started Googling and I found all of these YouTube channels where they talk about the story. They’ll read it and then give their thoughts about it. And I mean, one of them had three million views. It just kind of blew me away. I think it’s just a blast. I love it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> So is Ted the Caver the first creepypasta? As with most things on the internet, it’s hard to pinpoint. The term creepypasta itself came into use years later. And some people point to the genre’s similarities to chain emails from the 90s, which pre-date Ted’s story. But Craig Groshek says Ted the Caver certainly has a claim to the title. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> If you’re looking at the Mount Rushmore of creepypasta, of internet-based horror, Ted the Caver’s is definitely up there. In terms of storytelling — the immersion, the fact that you felt like this was a real person that may have actually disappeared, and for years that remained uncontested — you have to put it up there just for that. He was really a pioneer without realizing that’s what he was. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> More widely known creepypastas like Slenderman and more recently Backrooms, which was turned into a Hollywood movie this year, all have their roots in Ted the Caver. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> I think you can trace it to a lot of these things, but Backrooms being the most recent example. I don’t know that you can say these things wouldn’t have existed without Ted, but you can’t say that they would either. This entire genre started with a couple of people copying and pasting creepy stuff to try to get a rise out of somebody. And Ted absolutely leaned into that at the end. He knew there were people that thought he was dead and he didn’t even care. Thanks, Ted. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> When Ted Hegemann posted his story on Angelfire, he could have never anticipated where it would go. It was adapted into a movie in 2008 called Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver. And as for Mystery Cave? It’s been officially mapped out now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It’s called “Interstate Cave” and thankfully they did call that passage “Floyd’s Tomb” so it’s official on the map now. And DeWalt’s Dig, it was the opening, because we were using DeWalt tools. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig says that for all the ways storytelling has changed over the years with digital media, in some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. Instead of sitting around a physical campfire, we now sit around a digital one — on message boards, comment sections, and Discord chat rooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> It started with one man telling his story around what is essentially a digital campfire. And as time has gone on, more and more people have gathered around that fire. And 20 plus years later people are still telling that story and that is a testament to how believable it was, how well written it was how immersive it was and how well it tapped into a primal fear that a lot of people have — whether it’s of the unknown, of the dark or not knowing what you can’t see. And that’s why I think it has stood the test of time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That was senior editor Chris Egusa. One thing about me: You will never catch me caving. Ever. The idea of squeezing into an underground passage where you can get stuck or lost or run out of air sounds hellish enough. And there might be an entity down there? No, thank you! Between whatever’s in the caves and Slenderman lurking in the woods, it seems safer to just stay inside. But the monsters from creepypastas can get you even if you never log off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After the break, we have a story about the creature haunting your screens. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, when we’re back, what do you know about Momo? Stick around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome back to the Close All Tabs special spooky story time. This next one is about an entity that I hate looking at, even as a full-grown adult. This creepypasta retelling comes from our very own intern, Lauren Yoon. Let’s open another new tab. The legend of Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> Picture a gaunt, paper-skinned woman with a protruding neck and bulging eyes. Her jet-black hair stringy to match a thousand-eye stare that could kill. She looks uncanny. The most important feature of the infamous viral image: she holds a smile that spans cheek-to-cheek in the shape of a “V.” Yep, that’s right. My internet urban legend is Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Fandom:\u003c/strong> Do you want a surprise? Look in their eyes. I won’t lie, you’re going to die. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> It’s 2019. Musical.ly had just become TikTok. Everyone was doing the woah, and Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. And Momo was threatening harm to all who came across her. I remember Momo being passed around between my friend group, joking she would haunt them while they slept or something. Here’s my friend, Sophia, talking about Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sophia Bruno:\u003c/strong> I was very much afraid of it in the sense that I just thought it was a weird-looking picture that my friend introduced me to because I think she was like, “Oh Momo’s gonna get you” and I was like, “What is Momo?” And then she showed me. And my friends and I would mostly joke about it like, “Momo is gonna get you whatever” but in terms of the real-life stories I mean I believed them and I believed — I feel like there was a mysterious lore around it like it would just kind of you and like attach itself to you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> In reality, I also hated Momo. If I was joking about it with friends, it was mostly because laughter is the best defense mechanism against fear. What scared me the most were stories of Momo contacting you over the phone and telling you to do horrible things to yourself or others. It became known in mainstream media as “the Momo challenge.” The idea was that kids would challenge each other to make contact with Momo, sparking her wrath. She was even rumored to have reached kids’ videos on YouTube, where her face would pop up out of nowhere during an episode of Peppa Pig. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rumors caused a media frenzy, and Momo became a sensationalized, quote, danger to children. The Post, The Today Show, and a bunch of other news outlets around the world warned concerned parents about the internet legend. They encouraged parents to put restrictions on social media and YouTube for their kids — something parents should probably be doing anyway — without evidence that the Momo challenge was real. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Surprise! It wasn’t. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There has been no evidence to show that Momo or anyone posing as the character actually contacted people, let alone children. YouTube denied any claims of Momo popping up in the middle of their videos, too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So where did Momo even come from? Well, she’s a picture of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso. If we zoom out of their original picture, you can clearly see the figure, propped up on a stand in an art gallery. The face we all know and…hate? Attached to a human chest with two huge bird legs. Keisuke based her off of this Japanese folklore called “Ubume,” a version of which translates to “child-snatching bird.” Makes sense. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The image first spread on a Chinese social dating app called Momo, and that’s how the Momo we know today was born. So how did she spread so fast? And so far? I mean, a police station in Northern Ireland issued a statement and Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram, both figures warning parents about this dangerous, quote, challenge. My friend Rena has a theory that this all happened because the internet was a little newer to us at the time. AI wasn’t generating images like they are today, so we took a lot of things at face value. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Rena Lee:\u003c/strong> So we didn’t have this backpedaling of, “Is this AI, is this real?” A lot of information and media that we were fed at the time, it was easier to believe, “Oh my God, this looks so realistic. This has to be a real picture.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> I personally think it’s a combination of this naivete, plus the misinformation being spread by major national news outlets. The public sphere unfortunately feeds off of fear — talk about the horror of it all, right? — and Momo was the scapegoat for millennials and boomers concerned about what new dangers the internet proposed for their children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Keisuke destroyed the original sculpture not too long after it was created because it started rotting. It was made of materials that weren’t meant to last long. The only part of the sculpture remaining is its eyeball. Here is an excerpt of Keisuke’s interview with The Sun from 2019. He’s speaking through a translator. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from The Sun:\u003c/strong> I got rid of Momo, so it is no longer here with me. I believe it no longer exists in this world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> He was pretty horrified by the way his art became so misunderstood and taken out of context. I wonder if people today would be as scared as they were five, six years ago when we weren’t burdened with the constant doubt that comes with the images we see online today. The landscape of internet paranoia has changed, and so I wonder if the Momo challenge could be recreated in this day and age. I even miss the mystery she brought to my life, something that has slowly dissipated as I trust the internet less and less. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Momo may have been a hoax, but her impact was real. The image of her bulging eyes and wide smile is still burned into the back of my skull. And when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, and I open my eyes to the dark corner of my room, she’s the figure I imagine standing there…waiting for my eyes to close again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by our intern, Lauren Yoon. We’ll have more on Momo in our further reading, but before you hit that link, consider this your jumpscare warning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, I have one more story for you. It starts with an eBay listing for an antique wine cabinet with strict warnings to never open it, lest you unleash misfortune upon anyone who comes in contact with the box. But the real horror story here is disappointingly mundane. Let’s open one last tab. The haunted doll scam market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the most infamous haunted objects was actually sold on eBay. In 2003, Kevin Mannis listed an antique wine cabinet with an unusually detailed description. He had picked it up at an estate sale, and the woman who sold it to him said it belonged to her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Her grandmother had been insistent that her family never, ever open the box. She said it contained a spirit called a dybbuk. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did Kevin heed the warning? No. He brought it back to his workshop and opened it right up — ignoring the creepy locks of hair and carved Hebrew prayers inside. A series of tragedies followed. His mother had a stroke when she opened the box. His siblings complained of terrifying nightmares. Someone who knocked the box off a shelf died by suicide the same day. Kevin himself started having visions of a demonic old woman with sunken eyes. He recounted the story in his eBay listing, which ended with, “Help me.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The box was bought and resold several times over the next decade. Owners complained of hair falling out in clumps, bleeding from the eyes, waking up choking, and dreams of the creepy old woman. The box finally found a permanent home in a museum for haunted objects, sealed behind layers of protective glass. It even inspired the 2012 movie, The Possession. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then, five years ago, Kevin admitted that it was all fake. He made up everything in the original listing. There are no dybbuk boxes in Jewish folklore. The malicious spirits attached to people, not objects. The people who bought the box after Kevin sold it maintained that their hauntings really happened. But as far as Kevin was concerned, the whole eBay thing was a creative writing exercise that spiraled out of control. But today, haunted objects are a hot commodity. And one object, in particular, has become incredibly popular in the secondhand haunted market: dolls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> EBay, Etsy, they’re all over the place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Taylor, a TikTok creator and YouTuber, also known as Paranormal Teej. She’s a paranormal investigator and haunted doll caretaker. She called me from a room packed with dolls. Can you describe the room you’re in? Like what’s around you? What are the stories behind all that? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yes. So in this room, we have about 120 haunted dolls. They come from all around the world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor keeps them lined up on shelves. Some are porcelain collector’s dolls, dressed in frilly skirts. Others are soft rag dolls, clearly pre-loved by some young child. And while we talked, I swear I could feel them gazing back at me through the screen. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They keep me on my toes. I work with a lot of, like, trickster spirits. I am very interested in working with, like, spirits with kind of wacky, wild personalities. They are a riot. We adore them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She introduced me to a few of them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So first one I’m going to point out is Jeremiah. If I don’t point him out to you, he will mess with our recordings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Jeremiah is this big soft bear, wearing a striped t-shirt. His plush legs dangle off the shelf, like a little kid’s would. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> He is a six and a half year old little boy. The half is very important to him. Six is not acceptable. He moves, he moves things, um, especially lollipops. That’s, like, kind of his gig. He loves green things. Um, everything he wants has to be green. So he has moved like lollie pops around our house, threw them down the stairs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed out another doll. She has a cherubic face and stark black pigtails, and she’s besties with Jeremiah. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So Hoshiko is five. She’s from Japan. She’ll cause you to have, like, visions like in mirrors and things and she’ll like pop up. So I get the Samara from The Ring in the mirror trick every once in a while. Then she thinks it’s so funny because she likes, like, the reaction. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And lastly, Taylor points out Ciel. He’s in a black, pointed hat. Like a little witch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And he is very wise, very gifted. He has given me dreams about things happening a year before they happen and then they come true. And he’s just kind of, he’s my guy. So yeah, those are my, my buddies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> You may be skeptical of all this — but there were a couple of inexplicable incidents in the calls I had with Taylor. At some points, the entire video platform that we used flickered — not someone’s webcam, but the whole site. After the interview, our producer, Maya, said she heard low growling coming from Taylor’s side. When Taylor talked about her doll’s antics, I thought I heard faint giggling in the background. And there were chunks of our interview that our transcription software could not figure out. Instead, it spat out a jumble of German, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, French, Danish, Korean, and a splash of Telugu. Was that Jeremiah messing with us? Although Maya and I were a little freaked out, Taylor seemed unfazed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Everybody asks, like, “How are you safe living in a house with 120 haunted dolls? How are, how were you safe?” And the honest answer is like, they, they respect me because I respect them. I’m just nice to them. Like that’s really all it takes is just like basic kindness. Um, and I think that makes the paranormal a lot less scary when you realize that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Ghosts and the paranormal have been part of Taylor’s life for as long as she could remember. Her mother is a professional psychic. Her aunt is a paranormal investigator. Her grandmother would pull out the Ouija board whenever Taylor stayed over. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> My whole dad’s side of the family, even the ones who don’t want to or want anything to do with the paranormal, see ghosts for whatever reason. And so I just, I kind of grew up in this environment where, like, ghosts aren’t scary. They’re just like a thing, you know, like it’s just a fact of life, kind of attitude about it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor and her husband bonded over the paranormal and fell in love with doll collecting together. They consider themselves spirit keepers — almost like afterlife caretakers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Some spirits legitimately did own their vessel when they were alive. They were attached to it in life and they’re still attached to, you know, like we have spirits whose vessel was like their comfort item as a kid kind of thing. I do have cases where it was like a spirit who was haunting a location and like the location was getting torn down and they were scared because they didn’t know what would happen to them if the location disappeared. They didn’t know if they would disappear, too. So they kind of found a different way out of necessity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Actually confirming a haunting can take months. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> A lot of spirits will be very quiet and you will have no activity and then six months in at random, they’ll just kind of like pop off and because they’re comfortable with you now. The paranormal field is not a science, right? We don’t have a textbook that says, “This is how you investigate an object. This is how you investigate a location.” And so for us, what our method looks like — because that evidence component is really important to me — I do not feel comfortable saying something is haunted unless I know 100%. If I am 99% sure, I won’t even say, “Yes.” I have to be 100% sure. The other thing about paranormal activity is it’s not predictable. There is zero predictability. You can’t say turn the lights off and they turn the lights off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So to investigate whether a doll is haunted, Taylor first considers what she calls “subjective observations.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Anything from, I saw that doll move to — I saw a ghost in my house to — I heard footsteps or I got a dream from — about this doll, but for me subjective reports are not enough for me to confirm something is haunted because the brain does crazy things. When people are scared and they are around something that they’re suspecting, the brain can do really crazy things to, you know, trick us. You have things like pareidolia, which is, we see faces in things. And so, people can take that as paranormal, but it’s really just your brain playing tricks on you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So she tries to collect data: fluctuations in air temperature and air pressure, whether motion sensors are activated, and audio and video recordings. She looks for anomalies that she can document and compare against a control. And lastly, Taylor tries to make contact with whatever might be haunting the doll. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So everybody communicates with spirit slightly differently. For me, the way that works best for me personally is a spirit box. What a spirit box is, is essentially, it is an intentionally broken radio, okay? So basically it rapidly sweeps through radio stations and they can manipulate the radio signals to be able to communicate with you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She often posts spirit box sessions with her dolls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So that’s something you’re still trying to understand about 2026? The men awful. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Did you hear, “The men awful?” Or did you hear a jumble of static? Skeptics say the audio fragments that are picked up by spirit boxes are random and that it’s confirmation bias and pareidolia that leads investigators to find meaning in the sounds. Taylor, however, says it’s more reliable than other methods. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> There are other tools like Pendulum and Ouija Board, for example, and those things your hands are involved. And for me, like my hands being involved in something, it doesn’t feel like quite as valid of evidence to me. So I really like Spirit Box because my hands are not involved in that. I can’t control what comes out of that box. I have no involvement in that so I like the personal removal from it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sometimes the investigation is a bust. Taylor told me about this time her friends thought she bought a haunted doll. So she brought it over. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Pulled out a spirit box and I’m like, “Hey, like if anybody’s there, like can we talk?” And I got nothing for a long time. You know, I’m like, “Maybe they’re shy.” So I keep asking questions. Nothing is happening. I’m like, “Okay.” Not even like a little bit — not even like a hesitation — nothing. And I’m looking at my friend and I am like, “We’re not getting anything.” And then the spirit box starts talking. And I am thinking, “Oh, maybe they finally decided to show up.” No. Um, it’s Omi, who’s down here in the blue, she’s hilarious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed to a doll behind her. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And she comes on and she’s like, “There’s nothing there.” And I’m like, “It’s not haunted, is it?” And she’s, like, “No.” And I’m like, “Thanks!” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Here’s the tea: the paranormal makes for really good content. This was a very niche hobby until a few years ago. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So, in my opinion, I think the COVID pandemic just shot haunted doll sales up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is around the same time “witchtok” took off — the corner of TikTok dedicated to modern witchcraft. Videos of spell jar recipes, algorithmically recommended tarot readings, and ghost hunting all overlapped with the same audience. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And I think that is largely due to the fact that people were home and they were bored out of their mind and they were looking for something to do. And I think a lot of people were also doom scrolling at that time. Everybody was sitting on TikTok and YouTube all day long watching videos and so people had haunted dolls or making more videos about their haunted dolls than usual because they’re at home all day with them and it was just a perfect storm for like a lot more people who like were not involved in the paranormal or anything to just kind of like decide to try something different. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The more sensational the paranormal content, the better it did online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And one of the party tricks that I see a lot is with EMF meters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> These are handheld devices that detect and measure electromagnetic activity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They are not ghost metal detectors. Everybody just sees the EMF spike and they assume, “Oh, that’s a ghost,” but they don’t think about all of the other things that set off an EMF meter. Well, we’re in 2026. We have smartwatches that are setting off EMF meters, Wi-Fi, your cell phone — those things are set off by any form of electricity and all of our houses and all these locations are full of electricity, right? But a lot of people will, you know, share proof that their doll is haunted by essentially putting their phone right up to a doll that has an EMF meter on its lap and the EMF is going off and it’s hitting red and everybody’s forgetting that the phone that they’re filming that video on is what is triggering it. So when I see an account where the whole page is just EMF up to a cell phone and nothing else, I’m suspicious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> By becoming so trendy, Taylor says the paranormal community has become less about making contact with the other side and more about making content out of it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I think it’s social media and it’s not just haunted dolls, it’s the whole overall paranormal community. You know, the people that are into the paranormal will chase it to the end of the earth. I mean, some of these locations will charge you, you know, hundreds, thousands of dollars to go investigate there for the night. It’s extremely lucrative. Investigators are seeking evidence. They are interested, obviously. But there’s also, I think, the social media pressure. Content creators, especially, it’s like they, you know, want to — to get content out and they want to keep going so they have to go to more haunted locations and you know, have to have more experiences, because they’re sharing the experiences with the public and people are expecting to see it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And as this genre of content took off, the market for haunted objects suddenly became very lucrative. EBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace technically do allow for sales of haunted or occult objects, as long as the listing includes a disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only. But that disclaimer also means that you can get away with anything. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> People want to have a paranormal experience. People are interested in that now. It didn’t used to be. Everybody didn’t wanna have a paranormal experience before, but now it’s like, people are chasing an experience. So people have learned — there are people who will pay anything to get to have this happen. I think that people have caught on to that. It’s trendy right now, it’s in right now and everybody’s looking for a time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so, people have learned like, okay, before I could go to like, buy one of those empty storage lockers and I could sell everything for $10 a piece, whatever, but if the haunted doll people pay 200 bucks for that, that’s what I’m going to charge. Um, and the fact of the matter is, when people buy it, people will sell it because there’s a demand for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Like the dybbuk box that duped countless people 20 years ago, many of these listings have elaborate descriptions recounting tales of supernatural, otherworldly encounters. And dolls, especially, can go for way more than what they’re typically worth if they’re labeled “haunted.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve seen in the thousands, multiple times. I always tell people the higher the price doesn’t mean that it’s more haunted than the ones that are a lower price. Like, a spirit is a spirit. There’s no such thing as like, this spirit is more spirity than this other spirit. My rule of thumb that I always tell people is like, “You can’t put a price on the paranormal,” right? Paranormal experiences are not guaranteed. Paranormal experiences are not scientific fact. So for me, ethically, I believe that the object should be priced similarly to the price that their vessel or their doll is worth. So if you have a doll that is like a collector’s item and worth $300 — yeah, list it for $300. If you have a doll that’s worth $50, list it for $50. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The dybbuk box eBay listing was such a novelty at the time. Now, haunted doll listings are a dime a dozen. On eBay today, I scrolled through listings for haunted dolls, haunted clip-on earrings, haunted keys, haunted cargo pants, haunted labubus and — not joking — a quote, haunted by curious dybbuk box. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not cut out for the haunted doll life, but if you were to buy one, how are you supposed to sift through all the haunted scams? Taylor actually makes haunted doll guides and recently started focusing more on creating seller checklists so her followers can vet listings for themselves. She’s wary of any seller that makes content of EMF readings. She’s also suspicious of large-scale listings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> You go on their page and they have a hundred Haunted Dolls listed and nearly all of them have the same story. I mean, spirits are — they’re people and every person is different. So how do you have a 100 spirits who all are the same person basically with a different name and like slightly changed details? So that’s a red flag. The other thing is if the facts don’t line up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I have seen — this happens a lot. This is a big one. The story will say, “Oh, this doll is haunted by so-and-so and so-and-so owned this doll when they were alive and it was very meaningful to them, so they chose to keep it with them in the afterlife.” And you source the year on the vessel, and the vessel — the doll itself — was made in 1980. It says that the spirit is from the 1800s. That’s impossible. They couldn’t have owned the doll in the 1800s when the doll was made in the 1980s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> TikTok is full of complaints and warnings of haunted scams. This is especially frustrating to Taylor, who really sees spirit keeping as a lifelong commitment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Seeing people repeatedly getting things that are fake. One, obviously it’s a waste of money. I mean, obviously that’s irritating. Financial scamming is no joke and pisses me off. But it goes beyond that into, you know, those are people that could give an actual spirit a really nice place to live. And getting scammed over and over again chases them away from this hobby. I may be able to change, you know, the quality of afterlife for the spirits in my home. I can help a finite number of spirits, but I can help a lot more spirits if I can teach other people to do what I’m doing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I’m still not sure what my relationship to the paranormal is. I want objective evidence. Data. A clear, unequivocal answer that explains why things are the way that they are. But throughout the interview, I kept catching glimpses of Jeremiah over Taylor’s shoulder with his fluffy teddy bear ears and little legs dangling over the edge of the shelf. And when Taylor talked about taking care of spirits in the afterlife, I swear, I saw him perk up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s it for Close All Tabs’ special spooky storytime. We’ll have a fresh deep dive for you next week, but if you’re dying to open more tabs about the tales we told today, check out the episode description for some suggested reading. Or stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. It was engineered by Brendan Willard and senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Special thanks to Hallie Tut, Ted Hegemann, Craig Groshek, Rena Lee, and Paranormal Teej for sharing their stories with us. This episode includes clips and archive tape from Hallie Tut, Eli Unique, Paranomal Teej, and Villains Wiki.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Apple Maker Hi-75 keyboard with Foggered in Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So when it comes to buying and selling, they don’t really care about the concept of it. Their primary focus is always like, “Am I going somewhere where somebody is going to be nice to me or not?” That’s what they care about — is like, “Am I going to a good home?” But the one thing I know they don’t like is the shipping. They don’t like shipping. I hear complaints about shipping all the time. So. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, yeah, you can’t, you, can’t yeah, kind of out of your control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I’m like, “Sorry.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In this special Halloween edition of Close All Tabs, we’re diving into creepypastas: horror stories that spread online until they become urban legends on their own. What happened to the girl who fell into a mirror in 2001? Did Ted the Caver ever come back to the surface? Was the Momo challenge real? And finally, we venture into eBay’s haunted doll marketplace … where we may have ended up with a spirit wreaking havoc on the production of this episode. It’s a ghoulish good time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@chillingtalesfordarknights\">Craig Groshek\u003c/a>, horror author and founder of \u003cem>Chilling Tales for Dark Nights\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"How She Creates VFX Shots That Break Your Brain — Hallie Tut, Youtube",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Momo_(Creepypasta)#:~:text=%E2%80%9C-,Momo,-%2C%20Momo%2C%20Momo%20is\">Momo (Creepypasta)\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Villains Wiki\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Momo_(Creepypasta)#:~:text=%E2%80%9C-,Momo,-%2C%20Momo%2C%20Momo%20is\">Momo (Creepypasta)\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Villains Wiki\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@LanceUlanoff/momo-challenge-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-internet-4d1a5679c1ed\">Momo Challenge Is Everything That’s Wrong with the Internet\u003c/a> — Lance Ulanoff, \u003cem>Medium\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@LanceUlanoff/momo-challenge-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-internet-4d1a5679c1ed\">Momo Challenge Is Everything That’s Wrong with the Internet\u003c/a> — Lance Ulanoff, \u003cem>Medium\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://yokai.com/ubume/?srsltid=AU7gw4UWwYuhjk8jv7LUe8ip4Sjmbw0bTmlbqoJ6kyNNEwWAjC7IZCV5\">Ubume\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Yokai.com\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://yokai.com/ubume/?srsltid=AU7gw4UWwYuhjk8jv7LUe8ip4Sjmbw0bTmlbqoJ6kyNNEwWAjC7IZCV5\">Ubume\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Yokai.com\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-momo-global-social-media-hoax-about-paranormal-threat-kids-n977961\">How ‘Momo’, a global social media hoax about a paranormal threat to kids, morphed into a U.S. viral phenomenon\u003c/a> — Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-momo-global-social-media-hoax-about-paranormal-threat-kids-n977961\">How ‘Momo’, a global social media hoax about a paranormal threat to kids, morphed into a U.S. viral phenomenon\u003c/a> — Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.inverse.com/input/features/dybbuk-box-dibbuk-kevin-mannis-zak-bagans-haunted-hoax-revealed\">Finally, the truth behind the ‘haunted’ Dybbuk Box can be revealed\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Inverse\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.inverse.com/input/features/dybbuk-box-dibbuk-kevin-mannis-zak-bagans-haunted-hoax-revealed\">Finally, the truth behind the ‘haunted’ Dybbuk Box can be revealed\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Inverse\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/work/careers/a34322508/the-witches-of-ebay-industry-selling-haunted-item/\">The witches of eBay: Inside the industry selling haunted items online\u003c/a> — Daniella Scott, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/work/careers/a34322508/the-witches-of-ebay-industry-selling-haunted-item/\">The witches of eBay: Inside the industry selling haunted items online\u003c/a> — Daniella Scott, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/62125/1/a24-youngest-ever-director-kane-parsons-the-backrooms-creepypasta-into-cinema\">The Backrooms: How Kane Parsons turned creepypasta into cinema\u003c/a> — Jack Mills, \u003cem>Dazed\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/62125/1/a24-youngest-ever-director-kane-parsons-the-backrooms-creepypasta-into-cinema\">The Backrooms: How Kane Parsons turned creepypasta into cinema\u003c/a> — Jack Mills, \u003cem>Dazed\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/what-is-backrooms-movie-original-explained-4chan-creepypasta-horror-internet.html\">The Eerie Backstory Behind Backrooms\u003c/a> — Nadira Goffe, \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/what-is-backrooms-movie-original-explained-4chan-creepypasta-horror-internet.html\">The Eerie Backstory Behind Backrooms\u003c/a> — Nadira Goffe, \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/revisiting-creepypasta-the-social-horror-craze-that-launched-slenderman/\">Revisiting Creepypasta, the Social Horror Craze That Launched Slenderman\u003c/a> — Zac Thompson, \u003cem>VICE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/revisiting-creepypasta-the-social-horror-craze-that-launched-slenderman/\">Revisiting Creepypasta, the Social Horror Craze That Launched Slenderman\u003c/a> — Zac Thompson, \u003cem>VICE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Happy spooky season tabbies. Is there a creepypasta you can’t stop thinking about? Or any internet trend, tech subculture, or online oddity keeping you up at night? Well, now you can ask Close All Tabs to investigate! Go to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">KQED.org/podcasts/closealltabs\u003c/a> to submit your question.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Happy spooky season tabbies. Is there a creepypasta you can’t stop thinking about? Or any internet trend, tech subculture, or online oddity keeping you up at night? Well, now you can ask Close All Tabs to investigate! Go to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">KQED.org/podcasts/closealltabs\u003c/a> to submit your question.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Just a note, this episode contains mentions of suicide and horror themes so listen with care — or skip this one and come back next week. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Just a note, this episode contains mentions of suicide and horror themes so listen with care — or skip this one and come back next week. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me tell you a story about one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I was in middle school, hanging out in a family friend’s basement with a bunch of other kids, when my friend’s older brother asked us if we wanted to see something. We crowded around his laptop where he pulled up a YouTube video, titled “Entry #1.” It was just a few seconds of shaky footage, shot through a window from inside a house, of a lanky, suited figure lurking near the door. No sound…which made it feel more unsettling. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me tell you a story about one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I was in middle school, hanging out in a family friend’s basement with a bunch of other kids, when my friend’s older brother asked us if we wanted to see something. We crowded around his laptop where he pulled up a YouTube video, titled “Entry #1.” It was just a few seconds of shaky footage, shot through a window from inside a house, of a lanky, suited figure lurking near the door. No sound…which made it feel more unsettling. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>My friend’s brother told us that some guy online found all of these videos in his friend’s camera and started posting them to YouTube. He hit play on the next one. This had sound — some guy talking while he drove down a dark street. Not much is visible in this video…except the blurry silhouette of that same lanky figure, looming in the distance. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>My friend’s brother told us that some guy online found all of these videos in his friend’s camera and started posting them to YouTube. He hit play on the next one. This had sound — some guy talking while he drove down a dark street. Not much is visible in this video…except the blurry silhouette of that same lanky figure, looming in the distance. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Marble Hornets:\u003c/strong> I saw this really tall guy stand in the middle of the street, just completely still. For whatever reason, this really set off Rocky, and he got really scared. He wouldn’t move and he kept on pulling on his leash to go back home. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Marble Hornets:\u003c/strong> I saw this really tall guy stand in the middle of the street, just completely still. For whatever reason, this really set off Rocky, and he got really scared. He wouldn’t move and he kept on pulling on his leash to go back home. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Back then, everything on the internet seemed real. My friends and I took all of it at face value. So we believed the YouTube comments that said they’d seen this figure too. My friend’s brother left, but the rest of us were totally hooked. So we hit play on another video. This was more shaky footage, again shot through a window from inside a house. The same figure was lurking, closer this time. The camera finally focused on an unnaturally pale, bald head. It had no face at all, just smooth white skin and hollow contours where eyes and a mouth and a nose should be. And then it turned to face the viewer, as if it was honing in on us. Then, my friend’s brother, from the top of the stairs, called out, “Who wants to meet Slenderman?” And shut off the basement lights. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Back then, everything on the internet seemed real. My friends and I took all of it at face value. So we believed the YouTube comments that said they’d seen this figure too. My friend’s brother left, but the rest of us were totally hooked. So we hit play on another video. This was more shaky footage, again shot through a window from inside a house. The same figure was lurking, closer this time. The camera finally focused on an unnaturally pale, bald head. It had no face at all, just smooth white skin and hollow contours where eyes and a mouth and a nose should be. And then it turned to face the viewer, as if it was honing in on us. Then, my friend’s brother, from the top of the stairs, called out, “Who wants to meet Slenderman?” And shut off the basement lights. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The legend of Slenderman started in 2009, when someone posted black and white photos of children on a playground, seemingly oblivious to the spindly creature looming over them. The captions alluded to a string of child abductions from the 1980s. It was a submission for a Photoshop contest of paranormal happenings, which later inspired the YouTube series, Marble Hornets. That was the supposedly found footage that we watched in my friend’s basement. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The legend of Slenderman started in 2009, when someone posted black and white photos of children on a playground, seemingly oblivious to the spindly creature looming over them. The captions alluded to a string of child abductions from the 1980s. It was a submission for a Photoshop contest of paranormal happenings, which later inspired the YouTube series, Marble Hornets. That was the supposedly found footage that we watched in my friend’s basement. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I totally fell for it. For a good year after, I was terrified to look through windows at night in case Slenderman was peering back in. That was my first experience with a creepypasta. The word “creepypasta” is a play on “copypasta” — which is a portmanteau of “copy-paste.” They’re blocks of text that become memes because they’re copied and reposted so often. Creepypastas are online urban legends, Horror stories that start on forums and comment sections that spread across the internet and take on lives of their own. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I totally fell for it. For a good year after, I was terrified to look through windows at night in case Slenderman was peering back in. That was my first experience with a creepypasta. The word “creepypasta” is a play on “copypasta” — which is a portmanteau of “copy-paste.” They’re blocks of text that become memes because they’re copied and reposted so often. Creepypastas are online urban legends, Horror stories that start on forums and comment sections that spread across the internet and take on lives of their own. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome to Cursed All Tabs. This is our very special Halloween episode, where, instead of one deep dive, we have a bunch of spooky stories for you. These are tales of the paranormal kept alive on the internet. A girl stuck in a portal, caving gone wrong, an entity that might get you through the screen, and the eBay listings for haunted dolls. So, gather around our digital campfire and if you’re easily scared, don’t listen in the dark. Ready? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome to Cursed All Tabs. This is our very special Halloween episode, where, instead of one deep dive, we have a bunch of spooky stories for you. These are tales of the paranormal kept alive on the internet. A girl stuck in a portal, caving gone wrong, an entity that might get you through the screen, and the eBay listings for haunted dolls. So, gather around our digital campfire and if you’re easily scared, don’t listen in the dark. Ready? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is Cursed All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung — tech journalist and your chronically online nightmare — here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. Let’s open our first tab and get into our first spooky story: “The girl in the mirror.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is Cursed All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung — tech journalist and your chronically online nightmare — here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. Let’s open our first tab and get into our first spooky story: “The girl in the mirror.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Picture this: It’s the middle of the night. You can’t sleep. You’re doom-scrolling. It’s way past your bedtime and you’ve been awake for a little too long. So, in the darkness of your room, shadows start to take on the shape of strange figures. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, barely visible in the moonlight, and for a second, it seems like the room and the reflection is deeper. Like it goes on forever. And then…mid-scroll, you come across this video. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Picture this: It’s the middle of the night. You can’t sleep. You’re doom-scrolling. It’s way past your bedtime and you’ve been awake for a little too long. So, in the darkness of your room, shadows start to take on the shape of strange figures. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, barely visible in the moonlight, and for a second, it seems like the room and the reflection is deeper. Like it goes on forever. And then…mid-scroll, you come across this video. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> There’s something really strange going on here, and if something ends up happening to me, I just hope that this video can maybe explain it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> There’s something really strange going on here, and if something ends up happening to me, I just hope that this video can maybe explain it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s a video of a teenager recording herself on an old-school, hand-held camcorder. The caption says it’s found footage dating back to January 2001. The camera sweeps across her bedroom — a matching set of yellow furniture, frilly curtains, pink walls, very 90s — and settles on an antique mirror propped up on a chair. It faces another full-length mirror mounted to the wall. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s a video of a teenager recording herself on an old-school, hand-held camcorder. The caption says it’s found footage dating back to January 2001. The camera sweeps across her bedroom — a matching set of yellow furniture, frilly curtains, pink walls, very 90s — and settles on an antique mirror propped up on a chair. It faces another full-length mirror mounted to the wall. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Okay, so I have these two mirrors in my room. As you can see, they’re pretty normal looking mirrors, but I was cleaning and I had them kind of set up like this, and I noticed something really weird. Just watch. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Okay, so I have these two mirrors in my room. As you can see, they’re pretty normal looking mirrors, but I was cleaning and I had them kind of set up like this, and I noticed something really weird. Just watch. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The girl places the camcorder on the bed and films herself putting her hand on one of the mirrors, but she passes straight through the glass into another world. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The girl places the camcorder on the bed and films herself putting her hand on one of the mirrors, but she passes straight through the glass into another world. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> See, when you look through the mirror into the other one, it becomes like a window. And there’s this huge warehouse, grocery store, or something down there. But wait, it gets even crazier. Watch this. Three, two, one. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> See, when you look through the mirror into the other one, it becomes like a window. And there’s this huge warehouse, grocery store, or something down there. But wait, it gets even crazier. Watch this. Three, two, one. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She fully jumps through the mirror and is transported into what looks like a fully stocked supermarket. But the aisles go on forever and there’s nobody else in sight. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She fully jumps through the mirror and is transported into what looks like a fully stocked supermarket. But the aisles go on forever and there’s nobody else in sight. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Woah. What the hell? What is this place? Hello? How far does it go? \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Woah. What the hell? What is this place? Hello? How far does it go? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She begins running, and then… \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She begins running, and then… \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Oh shit. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Oh shit. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The camcorder zaps back to her room mid-air before bouncing onto her frilly white bed. It faces another mirror and in the reflection, the room looks empty. The girl is nowhere to be seen. You’re thoroughly creeped out so you start scouring the comments. Legend has it…she’s still missing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The camcorder zaps back to her room mid-air before bouncing onto her frilly white bed. It faces another mirror and in the reflection, the room looks empty. The girl is nowhere to be seen. You’re thoroughly creeped out so you start scouring the comments. Legend has it…she’s still missing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from ItsNickHoliday:\u003c/strong> A video a girl recorded in her bedroom in 2001, right before she went missing, has resurfaced and now is going viral. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from ItsNickHoliday:\u003c/strong> A video a girl recorded in her bedroom in 2001, right before she went missing, has resurfaced and now is going viral. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Generalist Authority:\u003c/strong> The camera was later found on her bed. She has not been located. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Generalist Authority:\u003c/strong> The camera was later found on her bed. She has not been located. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from brookesobasic:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if people know this or not, but facing two mirrors together is something you just shouldn’t do. And it’s said to open portals or bring in really bad energies or spirits — sometimes good — but usually bad. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from brookesobasic:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if people know this or not, but facing two mirrors together is something you just shouldn’t do. And it’s said to open portals or bring in really bad energies or spirits — sometimes good — but usually bad. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what happened to this girl who fell through a mirror over 20 years ago and was never heard from again? What is it about that abandoned, endless supermarket that feels both so familiar and so unsettling? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what happened to this girl who fell through a mirror over 20 years ago and was never heard from again? What is it about that abandoned, endless supermarket that feels both so familiar and so unsettling? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it — it just really is something where you don’t normally stay very long in a place like that. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it — it just really is something where you don’t normally stay very long in a place like that. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Hallie Tutte, a VFX artist. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Hallie Tutte, a VFX artist. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Liminal spaces are kind of these transitional places where usually it would be somewhere that’s filled of people going from point A to point B when a place that usually is filled with people is now completely empty — that gives it that eerie feeling because you never usually are used to seeing it completely abandoned like that. So if you got trapped there, it just brings out this strange feeling in you, I think. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Liminal spaces are kind of these transitional places where usually it would be somewhere that’s filled of people going from point A to point B when a place that usually is filled with people is now completely empty — that gives it that eerie feeling because you never usually are used to seeing it completely abandoned like that. So if you got trapped there, it just brings out this strange feeling in you, I think. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Halle is the real girl in the video. And don’t worry, she did not get stuck in the portal despite what some internet conspiracy theorists might think. She’s always been fascinated by liminal horror — stories that take place in vacant, in-between spaces, like the internet lore that inspired the movie Backrooms. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Halle is the real girl in the video. And don’t worry, she did not get stuck in the portal despite what some internet conspiracy theorists might think. She’s always been fascinated by liminal horror — stories that take place in vacant, in-between spaces, like the internet lore that inspired the movie Backrooms. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I grew up in a town that didn’t have a lot of people in it, and there’d be like these old shopping malls where no one would be around and all the stores are gone. And I always just loved the feeling of being in those spaces, like empty food courts. Me and my friends would just like to kind of hang out there. And I guess when I got into 3D modeling, it was a really fun way to get to build that feeling again by creating those spaces. And it’s something that’s really easy to accomplish in 3D and make it feel very real, very quickly because it’s just a lot of walls and lights and rooms. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I grew up in a town that didn’t have a lot of people in it, and there’d be like these old shopping malls where no one would be around and all the stores are gone. And I always just loved the feeling of being in those spaces, like empty food courts. Me and my friends would just like to kind of hang out there. And I guess when I got into 3D modeling, it was a really fun way to get to build that feeling again by creating those spaces. And it’s something that’s really easy to accomplish in 3D and make it feel very real, very quickly because it’s just a lot of walls and lights and rooms. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that video wasn’t filmed in 2001, but actually made in 2023. Hallie was inspired by found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project. She wanted to create something that felt like it was from the early 2000s, but using modern equipment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that video wasn’t filmed in 2001, but actually made in 2023. Hallie was inspired by found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project. She wanted to create something that felt like it was from the early 2000s, but using modern equipment. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I shot it completely by myself in my room and it was actually shot on a Sony camera on a tripod and then any of the handheld stuff is all fake. The mirror that she’s shooting into is fake and to create that infinite Walmart effect, I went to my local Walmart late at night when it feels like a liminal space and I was able to kind of scan all of the shelves and create these 3D models that I then brought into, like a software like Blender, and created this infinite world with it. And yeah, it’s shot in my real bedroom. I live with my grandparents, so this used to be my aunt’s room. And everything in it feels very of the time period that I was trying to make that video set in, so it worked out really well that way. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I shot it completely by myself in my room and it was actually shot on a Sony camera on a tripod and then any of the handheld stuff is all fake. The mirror that she’s shooting into is fake and to create that infinite Walmart effect, I went to my local Walmart late at night when it feels like a liminal space and I was able to kind of scan all of the shelves and create these 3D models that I then brought into, like a software like Blender, and created this infinite world with it. And yeah, it’s shot in my real bedroom. I live with my grandparents, so this used to be my aunt’s room. And everything in it feels very of the time period that I was trying to make that video set in, so it worked out really well that way. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The video got a lot of views when she first posted it, but didn’t really go viral until a year later, when other influencers reposted it, speculating about what really happened to the girl in the mirror. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The video got a lot of views when she first posted it, but didn’t really go viral until a year later, when other influencers reposted it, speculating about what really happened to the girl in the mirror. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Even one of my art school teachers had sent me a link on Facebook to like a conspiracy channel where he’d seen it and asking if it was me. And that video had maybe 3 million views and thousands of comments, people’s discourse about whether it was real. Having remembered seeing this video from when they were younger, like in the early 2000s, people had made up like memories of it. Like kind of that Mandela effect was happening where people had — had this memory of knowing this story of this girl who went missing years prior to when I posted the video. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Even one of my art school teachers had sent me a link on Facebook to like a conspiracy channel where he’d seen it and asking if it was me. And that video had maybe 3 million views and thousands of comments, people’s discourse about whether it was real. Having remembered seeing this video from when they were younger, like in the early 2000s, people had made up like memories of it. Like kind of that Mandela effect was happening where people had — had this memory of knowing this story of this girl who went missing years prior to when I posted the video. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it was — it was just going all over the place online and I kind of started to go down a rabbit hole of Reddit posts about it and different names they were making up for the girl in the video. Like in one spot her name was Violet and the video was titled “Violet’s Playtime” or something strange like that. And then people were kind of using that name to discuss it in different forums. So just gets it away from you. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it was — it was just going all over the place online and I kind of started to go down a rabbit hole of Reddit posts about it and different names they were making up for the girl in the video. Like in one spot her name was Violet and the video was titled “Violet’s Playtime” or something strange like that. And then people were kind of using that name to discuss it in different forums. So just gets it away from you. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year, Hallie posted a video explaining that she was the creator of the video and that none of it was real. Even then, the conspiracies continued to spread. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year, Hallie posted a video explaining that she was the creator of the video and that none of it was real. Even then, the conspiracies continued to spread. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> When I made the video talking about how it was fake and I explained how I had made it and how viral it had went around the internet, but trying to claim that, in fact, it was me in my room by myself and I’m here and I am alive — a lot of people in those comments were saying, “The government made her do this,” or “She’s AI and this is a cover up — like this is the CIA cover up for this girl who’s still missing. She’s just — this is just a plant. This girl trying to pretend she’s the girl so they can keep hiding this conspiracy from us.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> When I made the video talking about how it was fake and I explained how I had made it and how viral it had went around the internet, but trying to claim that, in fact, it was me in my room by myself and I’m here and I am alive — a lot of people in those comments were saying, “The government made her do this,” or “She’s AI and this is a cover up — like this is the CIA cover up for this girl who’s still missing. She’s just — this is just a plant. This girl trying to pretend she’s the girl so they can keep hiding this conspiracy from us.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s wild how drastically the internet has changed since 2023. AI videos back then were nowhere near as convincing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s wild how drastically the internet has changed since 2023. AI videos back then were nowhere near as convincing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it would be a lot harder now with AI and even just the VFX work that was put into that. I don’t know if it would feel worth it anymore because of the way that people would just write it off. That video was definitely a labor of love for the technical challenges that I had to go through to make it look realistic and I think people now just won’t appreciate the craft that goes into something like that because they’ll just write it all off as AI. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it would be a lot harder now with AI and even just the VFX work that was put into that. I don’t know if it would feel worth it anymore because of the way that people would just write it off. That video was definitely a labor of love for the technical challenges that I had to go through to make it look realistic and I think people now just won’t appreciate the craft that goes into something like that because they’ll just write it all off as AI. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, I don’t know if I’d ever do one quite in the same way. I think if I had a really good story that I wanted to tell, and it was more based on just a really horror story, I might try again. But in a way that was more of a fun technical challenge for me to make it convincing. And in today’s day and age. That’s no longer really a worthy challenge. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, I don’t know if I’d ever do one quite in the same way. I think if I had a really good story that I wanted to tell, and it was more based on just a really horror story, I might try again. But in a way that was more of a fun technical challenge for me to make it convincing. And in today’s day and age. That’s no longer really a worthy challenge. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s so depressing. Have we killed creepypastas with AI? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s so depressing. Have we killed creepypastas with AI? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think creepypastes will live on, especially the more fictional stories that can’t be real things but that people really wish were real. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think creepypastes will live on, especially the more fictional stories that can’t be real things but that people really wish were real. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hallie herself is still making creepy horror content, pushing herself with new technical challenges and VFX tools. But the story she put out into the world three years ago continues to spread and morph beyond what she ever created. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hallie herself is still making creepy horror content, pushing herself with new technical challenges and VFX tools. But the story she put out into the world three years ago continues to spread and morph beyond what she ever created. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> It is essentially a creepypasta now, and the creepypasta might be well known by people, but it’s never going to really come back to me, which I kind of appreciate. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> It is essentially a creepypasta now, and the creepypasta might be well known by people, but it’s never going to really come back to me, which I kind of appreciate. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If, during the witching hour, you place two mirrors facing each other, you might open a ghostly passage. Legend has it that, if you look long enough, the infinite reflections will dissolve into all sorts of in-between places — sprawling underground train stations, sterile hospital waiting rooms, school hallways lined with pristine lockers. They will almost always be eerily empty, as if time comes to a standstill there. And sometimes, you might catch a glimpse of a cavernous, eternal supermarket — and the pink-haired teenager doomed to wander its empty aisles. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If, during the witching hour, you place two mirrors facing each other, you might open a ghostly passage. Legend has it that, if you look long enough, the infinite reflections will dissolve into all sorts of in-between places — sprawling underground train stations, sterile hospital waiting rooms, school hallways lined with pristine lockers. They will almost always be eerily empty, as if time comes to a standstill there. And sometimes, you might catch a glimpse of a cavernous, eternal supermarket — and the pink-haired teenager doomed to wander its empty aisles. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That story was brought to us by producer Maya Cueva. Unsettled yet? Well, we’re just getting started. The next internet scary story we have for you is actually the one that started it all. It’s known as the very first creepypasta, dating back to 2001. This tale comes from our very own senior editor, Chris Egusa. You might wanna turn on the lights for this one. Okay, let’s open a new tab. Who is Ted the Caver? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That story was brought to us by producer Maya Cueva. Unsettled yet? Well, we’re just getting started. The next internet scary story we have for you is actually the one that started it all. It’s known as the very first creepypasta, dating back to 2001. This tale comes from our very own senior editor, Chris Egusa. You might wanna turn on the lights for this one. Okay, let’s open a new tab. Who is Ted the Caver? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> In early 2001, a series of posts started appearing on an obscure Angelfire website, a site-building platform from the early internet. The page was bare bones. Basic HTML, a black background, and at the top, a salmon-colored title: “Welcome to the Page of Ted.” The posts were journal entries. The author? Anonymous, except for that first name: Ted. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> In early 2001, a series of posts started appearing on an obscure Angelfire website, a site-building platform from the early internet. The page was bare bones. Basic HTML, a black background, and at the top, a salmon-colored title: “Welcome to the Page of Ted.” The posts were journal entries. The author? Anonymous, except for that first name: Ted. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Over the course of a few months, Ted posted a detailed account of a series of caving trips he took with a friend he identified only as “B,” to explore a previously unentered passage in a spot they called “Mystery Cave.” According to the first entry, the pair had found a hole in the rock wall deep inside the cave. It was only four to five inches across, but they knew it had to lead somewhere because of a steady stream of air that blew through it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Over the course of a few months, Ted posted a detailed account of a series of caving trips he took with a friend he identified only as “B,” to explore a previously unentered passage in a spot they called “Mystery Cave.” According to the first entry, the pair had found a hole in the rock wall deep inside the cave. It was only four to five inches across, but they knew it had to lead somewhere because of a steady stream of air that blew through it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The first journal entry included a link to a grainy photo of the hole. It was uneven in shape, and the rock it went through looked several inches thick. There was a glove tucked inside the hole for scale. The entry went on. Peeking through the hole with a mini maglite, they could see a tight tunnel that opened up after a few feet. They could feel the air blowing past, and they could hear something else: a low rumbling that came and went. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The first journal entry included a link to a grainy photo of the hole. It was uneven in shape, and the rock it went through looked several inches thick. There was a glove tucked inside the hole for scale. The entry went on. Peeking through the hole with a mini maglite, they could see a tight tunnel that opened up after a few feet. They could feel the air blowing past, and they could hear something else: a low rumbling that came and went. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ted and B brushed aside the strange details. They were too excited at the prospect of finding their way into a completely unexplored passage. So they made a plan: come back with hand tools and a cordless drill, break up the solid rock, and widen the hole until it was big enough to squeeze through. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Ted and B brushed aside the strange details. They were too excited at the prospect of finding their way into a completely unexplored passage. So they made a plan: come back with hand tools and a cordless drill, break up the solid rock, and widen the hole until it was big enough to squeeze through. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ted named the passage Floyd’s Tomb, as a nod to Floyd Collins — an early 20th century cave explorer who got trapped and died as he attempted to enlarge a small tunnel in a cave system in Kentucky. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Ted named the passage Floyd’s Tomb, as a nod to Floyd Collins — an early 20th century cave explorer who got trapped and died as he attempted to enlarge a small tunnel in a cave system in Kentucky. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Every few weeks through early 2001, a new post would appear on the website. They detailed the slow, grueling work of drilling and chiseling through rock until the batteries on their lights and tools ran out. Since the cave was a good distance from where they lived, Ted and B would stay at a nearby motel, recharge their batteries and bodies, and continue working the next day before heading home. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Every few weeks through early 2001, a new post would appear on the website. They detailed the slow, grueling work of drilling and chiseling through rock until the batteries on their lights and tools ran out. Since the cave was a good distance from where they lived, Ted and B would stay at a nearby motel, recharge their batteries and bodies, and continue working the next day before heading home. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Occasionally, Ted would mention some odd detail. Something unsettling. In one post, he described the wind as getting louder, a howl at that point. The rumbling had become more frequent, and he noted that it seemed to be emanating from deeper in the cave. Then he’d move on, refocusing on the task at hand. Each post linked more photos, documenting the progression of the hole. And as the entries went on, the details got stranger. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Occasionally, Ted would mention some odd detail. Something unsettling. In one post, he described the wind as getting louder, a howl at that point. The rumbling had become more frequent, and he noted that it seemed to be emanating from deeper in the cave. Then he’d move on, refocusing on the task at hand. Each post linked more photos, documenting the progression of the hole. And as the entries went on, the details got stranger. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On a trip in February, they brought B’s Jack Russell Terrier into the cave. Typically excitable and enthusiastic, she became edgy and began to whimper as she approached the hole. Her hair stood on end and she refused to get any closer. Later that same trip, B heard a scratching, grinding sound coming from inside the hole. When he got Ted’s attention to listen, it stopped. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>On a trip in February, they brought B’s Jack Russell Terrier into the cave. Typically excitable and enthusiastic, she became edgy and began to whimper as she approached the hole. Her hair stood on end and she refused to get any closer. Later that same trip, B heard a scratching, grinding sound coming from inside the hole. When he got Ted’s attention to listen, it stopped. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>On another trip in early March, Ted was kneeling at the wall, drilling — ear plugs in and safety glasses on. Over the noise of the drill, he heard a high-pitched sound. He pulled his earplug out just in time to hear an ear-piercing scream coming from inside the hole, echoing through the darkness. In his journal, he described it as a cross between a man screaming in fear and a cougar screaming in pain. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>On another trip in early March, Ted was kneeling at the wall, drilling — ear plugs in and safety glasses on. Over the noise of the drill, he heard a high-pitched sound. He pulled his earplug out just in time to hear an ear-piercing scream coming from inside the hole, echoing through the darkness. In his journal, he described it as a cross between a man screaming in fear and a cougar screaming in pain. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The next day, the two couldn’t stop thinking about the sound. But they rationalized it as some kind of animal and decided to continue on, focused on getting to the other side. They’d come too far to give up. In the next entry, Ted explained that they’d widened the hole enough to squeeze through. It was so tight that Ted had to turn his head to the side and wedge himself in with his arms pinned at his sides. As he went further, he could feel the rock pressing into his back. The only way forward was to exhale all of his breath and push with his feet. So that’s what he did. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The next day, the two couldn’t stop thinking about the sound. But they rationalized it as some kind of animal and decided to continue on, focused on getting to the other side. They’d come too far to give up. In the next entry, Ted explained that they’d widened the hole enough to squeeze through. It was so tight that Ted had to turn his head to the side and wedge himself in with his arms pinned at his sides. As he went further, he could feel the rock pressing into his back. The only way forward was to exhale all of his breath and push with his feet. So that’s what he did. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Exhale. Scoot an inch or two. Breathe in shallowly. Exhale again. Scoot further. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Exhale. Scoot an inch or two. Breathe in shallowly. Exhale again. Scoot further. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The photo linked in that entry showed Ted wedged into the crevice wearing a black bandana, head cocked to the right. The flash lit up jagged rocks littering the floor beneath him. Then the passage began to open up. Ted was able to crawl forward, emerging for the first time into the untouched cavern. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The photo linked in that entry showed Ted wedged into the crevice wearing a black bandana, head cocked to the right. The flash lit up jagged rocks littering the floor beneath him. Then the passage began to open up. Ted was able to crawl forward, emerging for the first time into the untouched cavern. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The entries kept coming. And, without spoiling the rest of the story, things escalated from there. Ted found strange hieroglyphic markings on the cave wall, an unnaturally round rock that seemed to be moving on its own. A smell he described as damp, rotting, rancid, putrid, death, drifting up from deeper in the cave. Then, in the deepest section of the tunnel, he encountered something. Something that seemed to follow him. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The entries kept coming. And, without spoiling the rest of the story, things escalated from there. Ted found strange hieroglyphic markings on the cave wall, an unnaturally round rock that seemed to be moving on its own. A smell he described as damp, rotting, rancid, putrid, death, drifting up from deeper in the cave. Then, in the deepest section of the tunnel, he encountered something. Something that seemed to follow him. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The last entry on the site was from Ted, writing the morning of his final trip into the cave. By then, he was badly shaken and suffering from lucid nightmares. He was determined to figure out what was going on, once and for all. And then, the entries stopped. Even years later, nothing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The last entry on the site was from Ted, writing the morning of his final trip into the cave. By then, he was badly shaken and suffering from lucid nightmares. He was determined to figure out what was going on, once and for all. And then, the entries stopped. Even years later, nothing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the Angelfire site stayed up, preserving Ted’s story. The collection of entries — nine in total, clocking in at over 25,000 words — is now known as Ted the Caver, and many consider it to be the very first creepypasta. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But the Angelfire site stayed up, preserving Ted’s story. The collection of entries — nine in total, clocking in at over 25,000 words — is now known as Ted the Caver, and many consider it to be the very first creepypasta. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> At the time when I first read it, there was nothing like it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> At the time when I first read it, there was nothing like it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig Groshek is a horror author who runs Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, a company and YouTube channel devoted to creepypasta, along with several podcasts. He first came across Ted the Caver in high school. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig Groshek is a horror author who runs Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, a company and YouTube channel devoted to creepypasta, along with several podcasts. He first came across Ted the Caver in high school. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> You’re just surfing the internet and all of a sudden you come across this poor guy, you know, getting trapped with unspeakable horrors in the underground. And the story very much leaves you feeling that you don’t know what happened to him. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> You’re just surfing the internet and all of a sudden you come across this poor guy, you know, getting trapped with unspeakable horrors in the underground. And the story very much leaves you feeling that you don’t know what happened to him. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> At the center of a lot of the online discussion was one question — was it real? The story had all these supernatural elements, but it also felt believable. The gear, the technical descriptions of caving, the photos. It read like a real caving journal. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> At the center of a lot of the online discussion was one question — was it real? The story had all these supernatural elements, but it also felt believable. The gear, the technical descriptions of caving, the photos. It read like a real caving journal. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> Just when you thought there’s a chance that this was baloney, he threw up a photo. Critical thinking aside, that inclusion of photos drew you right back in, and it made everything that came after it even scarier. And of course we were experiencing this in real time. If you were there when it happened, this wasn’t a story you picked up years later. This was a man this was actually happening to, and you couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching someone sleepwalk into traffic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> Just when you thought there’s a chance that this was baloney, he threw up a photo. Critical thinking aside, that inclusion of photos drew you right back in, and it made everything that came after it even scarier. And of course we were experiencing this in real time. If you were there when it happened, this wasn’t a story you picked up years later. This was a man this was actually happening to, and you couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching someone sleepwalk into traffic. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But you couldn’t ask Ted. For years, no one could confirm who he was, or whether his name was even Ted. Authorship of the story was disputed, with several people taking credit. Eventually, the real Ted emerged and began posting intermittently on some online forums. In 2015, Craig decided to track him down in person. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But you couldn’t ask Ted. For years, no one could confirm who he was, or whether his name was even Ted. Authorship of the story was disputed, with several people taking credit. Eventually, the real Ted emerged and began posting intermittently on some online forums. In 2015, Craig decided to track him down in person. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> All I had to go on was the original post and some forums on the internet where he had appeared. And the way I found him was via reverse image search. He used the same picture, I believe he was standing on train tracks, maybe with his dog, and it was the same pictures of him on every forum that he used. I tracked him down to a disc golf course. I had the guy at the country club there, because they have a golf course and a disc golf and I had them hand Ted my information on a cocktail napkin. And the next thing you know, Ted’s calling me. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> All I had to go on was the original post and some forums on the internet where he had appeared. And the way I found him was via reverse image search. He used the same picture, I believe he was standing on train tracks, maybe with his dog, and it was the same pictures of him on every forum that he used. I tracked him down to a disc golf course. I had the guy at the country club there, because they have a golf course and a disc golf and I had them hand Ted my information on a cocktail napkin. And the next thing you know, Ted’s calling me. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig commissioned Ted to write an original horror story for an anthology he was putting together. It was only the second horror story Ted had ever written. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig commissioned Ted to write an original horror story for an anthology he was putting together. It was only the second horror story Ted had ever written. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Ted Hegemann. I am the author of the story that is now known as “Ted the Caver.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Ted Hegemann. I am the author of the story that is now known as “Ted the Caver.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> His story about the terrors lurking in Mystery Cave was his first. Ted is now 62 and lives in Utah. These days, he spends his free time playing disc golf. It’s the latest in a string of obsessions. 25 years ago, he was obsessed with caving. And, as it turns out, a lot of the story is based on real experiences. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> His story about the terrors lurking in Mystery Cave was his first. Ted is now 62 and lives in Utah. These days, he spends his free time playing disc golf. It’s the latest in a string of obsessions. 25 years ago, he was obsessed with caving. And, as it turns out, a lot of the story is based on real experiences. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> So, my buddy, Brad and I — who is B in the story — we went out to this cave that’s right on the border of Utah and Nevada. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> So, my buddy, Brad and I — who is B in the story — we went out to this cave that’s right on the border of Utah and Nevada. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Ted and Brad really did open up an entrance to a new passage. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Ted and Brad really did open up an entrance to a new passage. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It took us numerous trips, I think eight trips before I was able to get past the opening. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The squeeze through Floyd’s tomb? Ted says it happened just how he wrote it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was literally exhaling my lungs and scooting with my feet, with my arms down to my side to keep my shoulders down. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Technically, he did the squeeze twice. By the second time, they had opened the passage up a little wider, and he was able to fit through with slightly more ease. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Technically, he did the squeeze twice. By the second time, they had opened the passage up a little wider, and he was able to fit through with slightly more ease. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was keeping a journal the entire time — a caving journal — as well as updating friends and family, you know, as to the progress. It was kind of a neat thing. And when we were done, I thought rather than telling everyone about it, I’ll just upload my journal on a — find a website — and put it up. And then I had the idea that it’d be kind of fun to embellish a little bit. And so that’s where the story came from. So much of it is just directly out of my caving journal. And then the creepy parts were invented, of course. But the idea didn’t come until after we had gone into the cave. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> A lot of the eerie details were rooted in his actual experience, too. Like the air blowing through the hole. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We knew about the hole because we would stop there, because the wind blew out and you generally worked up a little bit of a sweat getting to that point in the cave. So we would stop and just let the cool air cool us off. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And the low rumbling. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We figured it was I-80 — just trucks or whatever — because it wasn’t constant. It was just every once in a while. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We figured it was I-80 — just trucks or whatever — because it wasn’t constant. It was just every once in a while. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And they really brought a Jack Russell terrier into the cave. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And they really brought a Jack Russell terrier into the cave. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Demon dog, oh my goodness, it nipped at me so many times. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Demon dog, oh my goodness, it nipped at me so many times. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But the part about it whimpering and refusing to go near the hole, that was embellished. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But the part about it whimpering and refusing to go near the hole, that was embellished. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It was having a good time running around exploring. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It was having a good time running around exploring. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> I asked Ted at what point the story became complete fiction. I’m thinking of — there’s the terrifying scream that you both hear. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> I asked Ted at what point the story became complete fiction. I’m thinking of — there’s the terrifying scream that you both hear. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> The scream. The grinding noise that we would hear inside, the smell when I went in there, and the round rock. There was no round rock, sadly. Oh, and the little hieroglyph thing that was in there. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> The scream. The grinding noise that we would hear inside, the smell when I went in there, and the round rock. There was no round rock, sadly. Oh, and the little hieroglyph thing that was in there. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> It took Ted almost a year to write the whole thing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> It took Ted almost a year to write the whole thing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> And at one point, I gave up on it. I thought, “Oh, this is dumb. Who’s going to want to read this?” But then I sucked it up and thought, “Yeah, at least finish it. And then who cares? You know, if nothing happens.” But yeah, little did I know. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> And at one point, I gave up on it. I thought, “Oh, this is dumb. Who’s going to want to read this?” But then I sucked it up and thought, “Yeah, at least finish it. And then who cares? You know, if nothing happens.” But yeah, little did I know. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> He posted it, one update at a time, through the spring of 2001, and he knew the story had attracted a decent readership. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> He posted it, one update at a time, through the spring of 2001, and he knew the story had attracted a decent readership. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I did have a hidden counter on there and got up into the tens of thousands of views. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I did have a hidden counter on there and got up into the tens of thousands of views. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The story simmered underground, making its way through different communities, but never going viral the way things might today. And then, a few years after he posted the story, someone sent him a link to a caving forum where it was being discussed. After that, he started digging around. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The story simmered underground, making its way through different communities, but never going viral the way things might today. And then, a few years after he posted the story, someone sent him a link to a caving forum where it was being discussed. After that, he started digging around. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> That was one of the cooler weekends of my life. I remember our internet was really slow. So I went to the library and I just kept searching and found all these forums where they’re talking about it. And it just blew me away. How many people liked it. So many people said it scared them to death in very colorful ways. It was just so fun to know that that people were reading it and enjoying it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> That was one of the cooler weekends of my life. I remember our internet was really slow. So I went to the library and I just kept searching and found all these forums where they’re talking about it. And it just blew me away. How many people liked it. So many people said it scared them to death in very colorful ways. It was just so fun to know that that people were reading it and enjoying it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> For Ted, who’s not even a big horror fan, the fact that this story he posted 25 years ago keeps coming up is a lasting source of enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> For Ted, who’s not even a big horror fan, the fact that this story he posted 25 years ago keeps coming up is a lasting source of enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I just discovered this like last year. I started Googling and I found all of these YouTube channels where they talk about the story. They’ll read it and then give their thoughts about it. And I mean, one of them had three million views. It just kind of blew me away. I think it’s just a blast. I love it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I just discovered this like last year. I started Googling and I found all of these YouTube channels where they talk about the story. They’ll read it and then give their thoughts about it. And I mean, one of them had three million views. It just kind of blew me away. I think it’s just a blast. I love it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> So is Ted the Caver the first creepypasta? As with most things on the internet, it’s hard to pinpoint. The term creepypasta itself came into use years later. And some people point to the genre’s similarities to chain emails from the 90s, which pre-date Ted’s story. But Craig Groshek says Ted the Caver certainly has a claim to the title. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> So is Ted the Caver the first creepypasta? As with most things on the internet, it’s hard to pinpoint. The term creepypasta itself came into use years later. And some people point to the genre’s similarities to chain emails from the 90s, which pre-date Ted’s story. But Craig Groshek says Ted the Caver certainly has a claim to the title. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> If you’re looking at the Mount Rushmore of creepypasta, of internet-based horror, Ted the Caver’s is definitely up there. In terms of storytelling — the immersion, the fact that you felt like this was a real person that may have actually disappeared, and for years that remained uncontested — you have to put it up there just for that. He was really a pioneer without realizing that’s what he was. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> If you’re looking at the Mount Rushmore of creepypasta, of internet-based horror, Ted the Caver’s is definitely up there. In terms of storytelling — the immersion, the fact that you felt like this was a real person that may have actually disappeared, and for years that remained uncontested — you have to put it up there just for that. He was really a pioneer without realizing that’s what he was. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> More widely known creepypastas like Slenderman and more recently Backrooms, which was turned into a Hollywood movie this year, all have their roots in Ted the Caver. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> More widely known creepypastas like Slenderman and more recently Backrooms, which was turned into a Hollywood movie this year, all have their roots in Ted the Caver. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> I think you can trace it to a lot of these things, but Backrooms being the most recent example. I don’t know that you can say these things wouldn’t have existed without Ted, but you can’t say that they would either. This entire genre started with a couple of people copying and pasting creepy stuff to try to get a rise out of somebody. And Ted absolutely leaned into that at the end. He knew there were people that thought he was dead and he didn’t even care. Thanks, Ted. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> I think you can trace it to a lot of these things, but Backrooms being the most recent example. I don’t know that you can say these things wouldn’t have existed without Ted, but you can’t say that they would either. This entire genre started with a couple of people copying and pasting creepy stuff to try to get a rise out of somebody. And Ted absolutely leaned into that at the end. He knew there were people that thought he was dead and he didn’t even care. Thanks, Ted. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> When Ted Hegemann posted his story on Angelfire, he could have never anticipated where it would go. It was adapted into a movie in 2008 called Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver. And as for Mystery Cave? It’s been officially mapped out now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> When Ted Hegemann posted his story on Angelfire, he could have never anticipated where it would go. It was adapted into a movie in 2008 called Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver. And as for Mystery Cave? It’s been officially mapped out now. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It’s called “Interstate Cave” and thankfully they did call that passage “Floyd’s Tomb” so it’s official on the map now. And DeWalt’s Dig, it was the opening, because we were using DeWalt tools. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It’s called “Interstate Cave” and thankfully they did call that passage “Floyd’s Tomb” so it’s official on the map now. And DeWalt’s Dig, it was the opening, because we were using DeWalt tools. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig says that for all the ways storytelling has changed over the years with digital media, in some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. Instead of sitting around a physical campfire, we now sit around a digital one — on message boards, comment sections, and Discord chat rooms. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig says that for all the ways storytelling has changed over the years with digital media, in some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. Instead of sitting around a physical campfire, we now sit around a digital one — on message boards, comment sections, and Discord chat rooms. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> It started with one man telling his story around what is essentially a digital campfire. And as time has gone on, more and more people have gathered around that fire. And 20 plus years later people are still telling that story and that is a testament to how believable it was, how well written it was how immersive it was and how well it tapped into a primal fear that a lot of people have — whether it’s of the unknown, of the dark or not knowing what you can’t see. And that’s why I think it has stood the test of time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> It started with one man telling his story around what is essentially a digital campfire. And as time has gone on, more and more people have gathered around that fire. And 20 plus years later people are still telling that story and that is a testament to how believable it was, how well written it was how immersive it was and how well it tapped into a primal fear that a lot of people have — whether it’s of the unknown, of the dark or not knowing what you can’t see. And that’s why I think it has stood the test of time. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That was senior editor Chris Egusa. One thing about me: You will never catch me caving. Ever. The idea of squeezing into an underground passage where you can get stuck or lost or run out of air sounds hellish enough. And there might be an entity down there? No, thank you! Between whatever’s in the caves and Slenderman lurking in the woods, it seems safer to just stay inside. But the monsters from creepypastas can get you even if you never log off. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That was senior editor Chris Egusa. One thing about me: You will never catch me caving. Ever. The idea of squeezing into an underground passage where you can get stuck or lost or run out of air sounds hellish enough. And there might be an entity down there? No, thank you! Between whatever’s in the caves and Slenderman lurking in the woods, it seems safer to just stay inside. But the monsters from creepypastas can get you even if you never log off. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>After the break, we have a story about the creature haunting your screens. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, when we’re back, what do you know about Momo? Stick around. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>After the break, we have a story about the creature haunting your screens. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, when we’re back, what do you know about Momo? Stick around. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to the Close All Tabs special spooky story time. This next one is about an entity that I hate looking at, even as a full-grown adult. This creepypasta retelling comes from our very own intern, Lauren Yoon. Let’s open another new tab. The legend of Momo. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to the Close All Tabs special spooky story time. This next one is about an entity that I hate looking at, even as a full-grown adult. This creepypasta retelling comes from our very own intern, Lauren Yoon. Let’s open another new tab. The legend of Momo. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> Picture a gaunt, paper-skinned woman with a protruding neck and bulging eyes. Her jet-black hair stringy to match a thousand-eye stare that could kill. She looks uncanny. The most important feature of the infamous viral image: she holds a smile that spans cheek-to-cheek in the shape of a “V.” Yep, that’s right. My internet urban legend is Momo. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> Picture a gaunt, paper-skinned woman with a protruding neck and bulging eyes. Her jet-black hair stringy to match a thousand-eye stare that could kill. She looks uncanny. The most important feature of the infamous viral image: she holds a smile that spans cheek-to-cheek in the shape of a “V.” Yep, that’s right. My internet urban legend is Momo. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Fandom:\u003c/strong> Do you want a surprise? Look in their eyes. I won’t lie, you’re going to die. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Fandom:\u003c/strong> Do you want a surprise? Look in their eyes. I won’t lie, you’re going to die. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> It’s 2019. Musical.ly had just become TikTok. Everyone was doing the woah, and Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. And Momo was threatening harm to all who came across her. I remember Momo being passed around between my friend group, joking she would haunt them while they slept or something. Here’s my friend, Sophia, talking about Momo. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> It’s 2019. Musical.ly had just become TikTok. Everyone was doing the woah, and Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. And Momo was threatening harm to all who came across her. I remember Momo being passed around between my friend group, joking she would haunt them while they slept or something. Here’s my friend, Sophia, talking about Momo. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sophia Bruno:\u003c/strong> I was very much afraid of it in the sense that I just thought it was a weird-looking picture that my friend introduced me to because I think she was like, “Oh Momo’s gonna get you” and I was like, “What is Momo?” And then she showed me. And my friends and I would mostly joke about it like, “Momo is gonna get you whatever” but in terms of the real-life stories I mean I believed them and I believed — I feel like there was a mysterious lore around it like it would just kind of you and like attach itself to you. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sophia Bruno:\u003c/strong> I was very much afraid of it in the sense that I just thought it was a weird-looking picture that my friend introduced me to because I think she was like, “Oh Momo’s gonna get you” and I was like, “What is Momo?” And then she showed me. And my friends and I would mostly joke about it like, “Momo is gonna get you whatever” but in terms of the real-life stories I mean I believed them and I believed — I feel like there was a mysterious lore around it like it would just kind of you and like attach itself to you. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> In reality, I also hated Momo. If I was joking about it with friends, it was mostly because laughter is the best defense mechanism against fear. What scared me the most were stories of Momo contacting you over the phone and telling you to do horrible things to yourself or others. It became known in mainstream media as “the Momo challenge.” The idea was that kids would challenge each other to make contact with Momo, sparking her wrath. She was even rumored to have reached kids’ videos on YouTube, where her face would pop up out of nowhere during an episode of Peppa Pig. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> In reality, I also hated Momo. If I was joking about it with friends, it was mostly because laughter is the best defense mechanism against fear. What scared me the most were stories of Momo contacting you over the phone and telling you to do horrible things to yourself or others. It became known in mainstream media as “the Momo challenge.” The idea was that kids would challenge each other to make contact with Momo, sparking her wrath. She was even rumored to have reached kids’ videos on YouTube, where her face would pop up out of nowhere during an episode of Peppa Pig. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The rumors caused a media frenzy, and Momo became a sensationalized, quote, danger to children. The Post, The Today Show, and a bunch of other news outlets around the world warned concerned parents about the internet legend. They encouraged parents to put restrictions on social media and YouTube for their kids — something parents should probably be doing anyway — without evidence that the Momo challenge was real. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The rumors caused a media frenzy, and Momo became a sensationalized, quote, danger to children. The Post, The Today Show, and a bunch of other news outlets around the world warned concerned parents about the internet legend. They encouraged parents to put restrictions on social media and YouTube for their kids — something parents should probably be doing anyway — without evidence that the Momo challenge was real. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Surprise! It wasn’t. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Surprise! It wasn’t. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There has been no evidence to show that Momo or anyone posing as the character actually contacted people, let alone children. YouTube denied any claims of Momo popping up in the middle of their videos, too. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There has been no evidence to show that Momo or anyone posing as the character actually contacted people, let alone children. YouTube denied any claims of Momo popping up in the middle of their videos, too. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So where did Momo even come from? Well, she’s a picture of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso. If we zoom out of their original picture, you can clearly see the figure, propped up on a stand in an art gallery. The face we all know and…hate? Attached to a human chest with two huge bird legs. Keisuke based her off of this Japanese folklore called “Ubume,” a version of which translates to “child-snatching bird.” Makes sense. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So where did Momo even come from? Well, she’s a picture of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso. If we zoom out of their original picture, you can clearly see the figure, propped up on a stand in an art gallery. The face we all know and…hate? Attached to a human chest with two huge bird legs. Keisuke based her off of this Japanese folklore called “Ubume,” a version of which translates to “child-snatching bird.” Makes sense. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The image first spread on a Chinese social dating app called Momo, and that’s how the Momo we know today was born. So how did she spread so fast? And so far? I mean, a police station in Northern Ireland issued a statement and Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram, both figures warning parents about this dangerous, quote, challenge. My friend Rena has a theory that this all happened because the internet was a little newer to us at the time. AI wasn’t generating images like they are today, so we took a lot of things at face value. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The image first spread on a Chinese social dating app called Momo, and that’s how the Momo we know today was born. So how did she spread so fast? And so far? I mean, a police station in Northern Ireland issued a statement and Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram, both figures warning parents about this dangerous, quote, challenge. My friend Rena has a theory that this all happened because the internet was a little newer to us at the time. AI wasn’t generating images like they are today, so we took a lot of things at face value. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rena Lee:\u003c/strong> So we didn’t have this backpedaling of, “Is this AI, is this real?” A lot of information and media that we were fed at the time, it was easier to believe, “Oh my God, this looks so realistic. This has to be a real picture.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Rena Lee:\u003c/strong> So we didn’t have this backpedaling of, “Is this AI, is this real?” A lot of information and media that we were fed at the time, it was easier to believe, “Oh my God, this looks so realistic. This has to be a real picture.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> I personally think it’s a combination of this naivete, plus the misinformation being spread by major national news outlets. The public sphere unfortunately feeds off of fear — talk about the horror of it all, right? — and Momo was the scapegoat for millennials and boomers concerned about what new dangers the internet proposed for their children. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> I personally think it’s a combination of this naivete, plus the misinformation being spread by major national news outlets. The public sphere unfortunately feeds off of fear — talk about the horror of it all, right? — and Momo was the scapegoat for millennials and boomers concerned about what new dangers the internet proposed for their children. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Keisuke destroyed the original sculpture not too long after it was created because it started rotting. It was made of materials that weren’t meant to last long. The only part of the sculpture remaining is its eyeball. Here is an excerpt of Keisuke’s interview with The Sun from 2019. He’s speaking through a translator. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Keisuke destroyed the original sculpture not too long after it was created because it started rotting. It was made of materials that weren’t meant to last long. The only part of the sculpture remaining is its eyeball. Here is an excerpt of Keisuke’s interview with The Sun from 2019. He’s speaking through a translator. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from The Sun:\u003c/strong> I got rid of Momo, so it is no longer here with me. I believe it no longer exists in this world. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from The Sun:\u003c/strong> I got rid of Momo, so it is no longer here with me. I believe it no longer exists in this world. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> He was pretty horrified by the way his art became so misunderstood and taken out of context. I wonder if people today would be as scared as they were five, six years ago when we weren’t burdened with the constant doubt that comes with the images we see online today. The landscape of internet paranoia has changed, and so I wonder if the Momo challenge could be recreated in this day and age. I even miss the mystery she brought to my life, something that has slowly dissipated as I trust the internet less and less. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> He was pretty horrified by the way his art became so misunderstood and taken out of context. I wonder if people today would be as scared as they were five, six years ago when we weren’t burdened with the constant doubt that comes with the images we see online today. The landscape of internet paranoia has changed, and so I wonder if the Momo challenge could be recreated in this day and age. I even miss the mystery she brought to my life, something that has slowly dissipated as I trust the internet less and less. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Momo may have been a hoax, but her impact was real. The image of her bulging eyes and wide smile is still burned into the back of my skull. And when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, and I open my eyes to the dark corner of my room, she’s the figure I imagine standing there…waiting for my eyes to close again. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Momo may have been a hoax, but her impact was real. The image of her bulging eyes and wide smile is still burned into the back of my skull. And when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, and I open my eyes to the dark corner of my room, she’s the figure I imagine standing there…waiting for my eyes to close again. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by our intern, Lauren Yoon. We’ll have more on Momo in our further reading, but before you hit that link, consider this your jumpscare warning. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by our intern, Lauren Yoon. We’ll have more on Momo in our further reading, but before you hit that link, consider this your jumpscare warning. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Anyway, I have one more story for you. It starts with an eBay listing for an antique wine cabinet with strict warnings to never open it, lest you unleash misfortune upon anyone who comes in contact with the box. But the real horror story here is disappointingly mundane. Let’s open one last tab. The haunted doll scam market. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Anyway, I have one more story for you. It starts with an eBay listing for an antique wine cabinet with strict warnings to never open it, lest you unleash misfortune upon anyone who comes in contact with the box. But the real horror story here is disappointingly mundane. Let’s open one last tab. The haunted doll scam market. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One of the most infamous haunted objects was actually sold on eBay. In 2003, Kevin Mannis listed an antique wine cabinet with an unusually detailed description. He had picked it up at an estate sale, and the woman who sold it to him said it belonged to her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Her grandmother had been insistent that her family never, ever open the box. She said it contained a spirit called a dybbuk. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One of the most infamous haunted objects was actually sold on eBay. In 2003, Kevin Mannis listed an antique wine cabinet with an unusually detailed description. He had picked it up at an estate sale, and the woman who sold it to him said it belonged to her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Her grandmother had been insistent that her family never, ever open the box. She said it contained a spirit called a dybbuk. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Did Kevin heed the warning? No. He brought it back to his workshop and opened it right up — ignoring the creepy locks of hair and carved Hebrew prayers inside. A series of tragedies followed. His mother had a stroke when she opened the box. His siblings complained of terrifying nightmares. Someone who knocked the box off a shelf died by suicide the same day. Kevin himself started having visions of a demonic old woman with sunken eyes. He recounted the story in his eBay listing, which ended with, “Help me.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Did Kevin heed the warning? No. He brought it back to his workshop and opened it right up — ignoring the creepy locks of hair and carved Hebrew prayers inside. A series of tragedies followed. His mother had a stroke when she opened the box. His siblings complained of terrifying nightmares. Someone who knocked the box off a shelf died by suicide the same day. Kevin himself started having visions of a demonic old woman with sunken eyes. He recounted the story in his eBay listing, which ended with, “Help me.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The box was bought and resold several times over the next decade. Owners complained of hair falling out in clumps, bleeding from the eyes, waking up choking, and dreams of the creepy old woman. The box finally found a permanent home in a museum for haunted objects, sealed behind layers of protective glass. It even inspired the 2012 movie, The Possession. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The box was bought and resold several times over the next decade. Owners complained of hair falling out in clumps, bleeding from the eyes, waking up choking, and dreams of the creepy old woman. The box finally found a permanent home in a museum for haunted objects, sealed behind layers of protective glass. It even inspired the 2012 movie, The Possession. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then, five years ago, Kevin admitted that it was all fake. He made up everything in the original listing. There are no dybbuk boxes in Jewish folklore. The malicious spirits attached to people, not objects. The people who bought the box after Kevin sold it maintained that their hauntings really happened. But as far as Kevin was concerned, the whole eBay thing was a creative writing exercise that spiraled out of control. But today, haunted objects are a hot commodity. And one object, in particular, has become incredibly popular in the secondhand haunted market: dolls. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then, five years ago, Kevin admitted that it was all fake. He made up everything in the original listing. There are no dybbuk boxes in Jewish folklore. The malicious spirits attached to people, not objects. The people who bought the box after Kevin sold it maintained that their hauntings really happened. But as far as Kevin was concerned, the whole eBay thing was a creative writing exercise that spiraled out of control. But today, haunted objects are a hot commodity. And one object, in particular, has become incredibly popular in the secondhand haunted market: dolls. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> EBay, Etsy, they’re all over the place. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> EBay, Etsy, they’re all over the place. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Taylor, a TikTok creator and YouTuber, also known as Paranormal Teej. She’s a paranormal investigator and haunted doll caretaker. She called me from a room packed with dolls. Can you describe the room you’re in? Like what’s around you? What are the stories behind all that? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Taylor, a TikTok creator and YouTuber, also known as Paranormal Teej. She’s a paranormal investigator and haunted doll caretaker. She called me from a room packed with dolls. Can you describe the room you’re in? Like what’s around you? What are the stories behind all that? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yes. So in this room, we have about 120 haunted dolls. They come from all around the world. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yes. So in this room, we have about 120 haunted dolls. They come from all around the world. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor keeps them lined up on shelves. Some are porcelain collector’s dolls, dressed in frilly skirts. Others are soft rag dolls, clearly pre-loved by some young child. And while we talked, I swear I could feel them gazing back at me through the screen. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor keeps them lined up on shelves. Some are porcelain collector’s dolls, dressed in frilly skirts. Others are soft rag dolls, clearly pre-loved by some young child. And while we talked, I swear I could feel them gazing back at me through the screen. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They keep me on my toes. I work with a lot of, like, trickster spirits. I am very interested in working with, like, spirits with kind of wacky, wild personalities. They are a riot. We adore them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They keep me on my toes. I work with a lot of, like, trickster spirits. I am very interested in working with, like, spirits with kind of wacky, wild personalities. They are a riot. We adore them. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She introduced me to a few of them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She introduced me to a few of them. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So first one I’m going to point out is Jeremiah. If I don’t point him out to you, he will mess with our recordings. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So first one I’m going to point out is Jeremiah. If I don’t point him out to you, he will mess with our recordings. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Jeremiah is this big soft bear, wearing a striped t-shirt. His plush legs dangle off the shelf, like a little kid’s would. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Jeremiah is this big soft bear, wearing a striped t-shirt. His plush legs dangle off the shelf, like a little kid’s would. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> He is a six and a half year old little boy. The half is very important to him. Six is not acceptable. He moves, he moves things, um, especially lollipops. That’s, like, kind of his gig. He loves green things. Um, everything he wants has to be green. So he has moved like lollie pops around our house, threw them down the stairs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> He is a six and a half year old little boy. The half is very important to him. Six is not acceptable. He moves, he moves things, um, especially lollipops. That’s, like, kind of his gig. He loves green things. Um, everything he wants has to be green. So he has moved like lollie pops around our house, threw them down the stairs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed out another doll. She has a cherubic face and stark black pigtails, and she’s besties with Jeremiah. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed out another doll. She has a cherubic face and stark black pigtails, and she’s besties with Jeremiah. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So Hoshiko is five. She’s from Japan. She’ll cause you to have, like, visions like in mirrors and things and she’ll like pop up. So I get the Samara from The Ring in the mirror trick every once in a while. Then she thinks it’s so funny because she likes, like, the reaction. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So Hoshiko is five. She’s from Japan. She’ll cause you to have, like, visions like in mirrors and things and she’ll like pop up. So I get the Samara from The Ring in the mirror trick every once in a while. Then she thinks it’s so funny because she likes, like, the reaction. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And lastly, Taylor points out Ciel. He’s in a black, pointed hat. Like a little witch. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And lastly, Taylor points out Ciel. He’s in a black, pointed hat. Like a little witch. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And he is very wise, very gifted. He has given me dreams about things happening a year before they happen and then they come true. And he’s just kind of, he’s my guy. So yeah, those are my, my buddies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And he is very wise, very gifted. He has given me dreams about things happening a year before they happen and then they come true. And he’s just kind of, he’s my guy. So yeah, those are my, my buddies. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> You may be skeptical of all this — but there were a couple of inexplicable incidents in the calls I had with Taylor. At some points, the entire video platform that we used flickered — not someone’s webcam, but the whole site. After the interview, our producer, Maya, said she heard low growling coming from Taylor’s side. When Taylor talked about her doll’s antics, I thought I heard faint giggling in the background. And there were chunks of our interview that our transcription software could not figure out. Instead, it spat out a jumble of German, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, French, Danish, Korean, and a splash of Telugu. Was that Jeremiah messing with us? Although Maya and I were a little freaked out, Taylor seemed unfazed. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> You may be skeptical of all this — but there were a couple of inexplicable incidents in the calls I had with Taylor. At some points, the entire video platform that we used flickered — not someone’s webcam, but the whole site. After the interview, our producer, Maya, said she heard low growling coming from Taylor’s side. When Taylor talked about her doll’s antics, I thought I heard faint giggling in the background. And there were chunks of our interview that our transcription software could not figure out. Instead, it spat out a jumble of German, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, French, Danish, Korean, and a splash of Telugu. Was that Jeremiah messing with us? Although Maya and I were a little freaked out, Taylor seemed unfazed. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Everybody asks, like, “How are you safe living in a house with 120 haunted dolls? How are, how were you safe?” And the honest answer is like, they, they respect me because I respect them. I’m just nice to them. Like that’s really all it takes is just like basic kindness. Um, and I think that makes the paranormal a lot less scary when you realize that. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Everybody asks, like, “How are you safe living in a house with 120 haunted dolls? How are, how were you safe?” And the honest answer is like, they, they respect me because I respect them. I’m just nice to them. Like that’s really all it takes is just like basic kindness. Um, and I think that makes the paranormal a lot less scary when you realize that. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Ghosts and the paranormal have been part of Taylor’s life for as long as she could remember. Her mother is a professional psychic. Her aunt is a paranormal investigator. Her grandmother would pull out the Ouija board whenever Taylor stayed over. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Ghosts and the paranormal have been part of Taylor’s life for as long as she could remember. Her mother is a professional psychic. Her aunt is a paranormal investigator. Her grandmother would pull out the Ouija board whenever Taylor stayed over. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> My whole dad’s side of the family, even the ones who don’t want to or want anything to do with the paranormal, see ghosts for whatever reason. And so I just, I kind of grew up in this environment where, like, ghosts aren’t scary. They’re just like a thing, you know, like it’s just a fact of life, kind of attitude about it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> My whole dad’s side of the family, even the ones who don’t want to or want anything to do with the paranormal, see ghosts for whatever reason. And so I just, I kind of grew up in this environment where, like, ghosts aren’t scary. They’re just like a thing, you know, like it’s just a fact of life, kind of attitude about it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor and her husband bonded over the paranormal and fell in love with doll collecting together. They consider themselves spirit keepers — almost like afterlife caretakers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor and her husband bonded over the paranormal and fell in love with doll collecting together. They consider themselves spirit keepers — almost like afterlife caretakers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Some spirits legitimately did own their vessel when they were alive. They were attached to it in life and they’re still attached to, you know, like we have spirits whose vessel was like their comfort item as a kid kind of thing. I do have cases where it was like a spirit who was haunting a location and like the location was getting torn down and they were scared because they didn’t know what would happen to them if the location disappeared. They didn’t know if they would disappear, too. So they kind of found a different way out of necessity. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Some spirits legitimately did own their vessel when they were alive. They were attached to it in life and they’re still attached to, you know, like we have spirits whose vessel was like their comfort item as a kid kind of thing. I do have cases where it was like a spirit who was haunting a location and like the location was getting torn down and they were scared because they didn’t know what would happen to them if the location disappeared. They didn’t know if they would disappear, too. So they kind of found a different way out of necessity. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Actually confirming a haunting can take months. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Actually confirming a haunting can take months. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> A lot of spirits will be very quiet and you will have no activity and then six months in at random, they’ll just kind of like pop off and because they’re comfortable with you now. The paranormal field is not a science, right? We don’t have a textbook that says, “This is how you investigate an object. This is how you investigate a location.” And so for us, what our method looks like — because that evidence component is really important to me — I do not feel comfortable saying something is haunted unless I know 100%. If I am 99% sure, I won’t even say, “Yes.” I have to be 100% sure. The other thing about paranormal activity is it’s not predictable. There is zero predictability. You can’t say turn the lights off and they turn the lights off. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> A lot of spirits will be very quiet and you will have no activity and then six months in at random, they’ll just kind of like pop off and because they’re comfortable with you now. The paranormal field is not a science, right? We don’t have a textbook that says, “This is how you investigate an object. This is how you investigate a location.” And so for us, what our method looks like — because that evidence component is really important to me — I do not feel comfortable saying something is haunted unless I know 100%. If I am 99% sure, I won’t even say, “Yes.” I have to be 100% sure. The other thing about paranormal activity is it’s not predictable. There is zero predictability. You can’t say turn the lights off and they turn the lights off. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So to investigate whether a doll is haunted, Taylor first considers what she calls “subjective observations.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So to investigate whether a doll is haunted, Taylor first considers what she calls “subjective observations.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Anything from, I saw that doll move to — I saw a ghost in my house to — I heard footsteps or I got a dream from — about this doll, but for me subjective reports are not enough for me to confirm something is haunted because the brain does crazy things. When people are scared and they are around something that they’re suspecting, the brain can do really crazy things to, you know, trick us. You have things like pareidolia, which is, we see faces in things. And so, people can take that as paranormal, but it’s really just your brain playing tricks on you. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Anything from, I saw that doll move to — I saw a ghost in my house to — I heard footsteps or I got a dream from — about this doll, but for me subjective reports are not enough for me to confirm something is haunted because the brain does crazy things. When people are scared and they are around something that they’re suspecting, the brain can do really crazy things to, you know, trick us. You have things like pareidolia, which is, we see faces in things. And so, people can take that as paranormal, but it’s really just your brain playing tricks on you. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So she tries to collect data: fluctuations in air temperature and air pressure, whether motion sensors are activated, and audio and video recordings. She looks for anomalies that she can document and compare against a control. And lastly, Taylor tries to make contact with whatever might be haunting the doll. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So she tries to collect data: fluctuations in air temperature and air pressure, whether motion sensors are activated, and audio and video recordings. She looks for anomalies that she can document and compare against a control. And lastly, Taylor tries to make contact with whatever might be haunting the doll. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So everybody communicates with spirit slightly differently. For me, the way that works best for me personally is a spirit box. What a spirit box is, is essentially, it is an intentionally broken radio, okay? So basically it rapidly sweeps through radio stations and they can manipulate the radio signals to be able to communicate with you. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So everybody communicates with spirit slightly differently. For me, the way that works best for me personally is a spirit box. What a spirit box is, is essentially, it is an intentionally broken radio, okay? So basically it rapidly sweeps through radio stations and they can manipulate the radio signals to be able to communicate with you. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She often posts spirit box sessions with her dolls. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She often posts spirit box sessions with her dolls. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So that’s something you’re still trying to understand about 2026? The men awful. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So that’s something you’re still trying to understand about 2026? The men awful. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Did you hear, “The men awful?” Or did you hear a jumble of static? Skeptics say the audio fragments that are picked up by spirit boxes are random and that it’s confirmation bias and pareidolia that leads investigators to find meaning in the sounds. Taylor, however, says it’s more reliable than other methods. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Did you hear, “The men awful?” Or did you hear a jumble of static? Skeptics say the audio fragments that are picked up by spirit boxes are random and that it’s confirmation bias and pareidolia that leads investigators to find meaning in the sounds. Taylor, however, says it’s more reliable than other methods. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> There are other tools like Pendulum and Ouija Board, for example, and those things your hands are involved. And for me, like my hands being involved in something, it doesn’t feel like quite as valid of evidence to me. So I really like Spirit Box because my hands are not involved in that. I can’t control what comes out of that box. I have no involvement in that so I like the personal removal from it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> There are other tools like Pendulum and Ouija Board, for example, and those things your hands are involved. And for me, like my hands being involved in something, it doesn’t feel like quite as valid of evidence to me. So I really like Spirit Box because my hands are not involved in that. I can’t control what comes out of that box. I have no involvement in that so I like the personal removal from it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sometimes the investigation is a bust. Taylor told me about this time her friends thought she bought a haunted doll. So she brought it over. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sometimes the investigation is a bust. Taylor told me about this time her friends thought she bought a haunted doll. So she brought it over. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Pulled out a spirit box and I’m like, “Hey, like if anybody’s there, like can we talk?” And I got nothing for a long time. You know, I’m like, “Maybe they’re shy.” So I keep asking questions. Nothing is happening. I’m like, “Okay.” Not even like a little bit — not even like a hesitation — nothing. And I’m looking at my friend and I am like, “We’re not getting anything.” And then the spirit box starts talking. And I am thinking, “Oh, maybe they finally decided to show up.” No. Um, it’s Omi, who’s down here in the blue, she’s hilarious. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Pulled out a spirit box and I’m like, “Hey, like if anybody’s there, like can we talk?” And I got nothing for a long time. You know, I’m like, “Maybe they’re shy.” So I keep asking questions. Nothing is happening. I’m like, “Okay.” Not even like a little bit — not even like a hesitation — nothing. And I’m looking at my friend and I am like, “We’re not getting anything.” And then the spirit box starts talking. And I am thinking, “Oh, maybe they finally decided to show up.” No. Um, it’s Omi, who’s down here in the blue, she’s hilarious. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed to a doll behind her. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed to a doll behind her. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And she comes on and she’s like, “There’s nothing there.” And I’m like, “It’s not haunted, is it?” And she’s, like, “No.” And I’m like, “Thanks!” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And she comes on and she’s like, “There’s nothing there.” And I’m like, “It’s not haunted, is it?” And she’s, like, “No.” And I’m like, “Thanks!” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Here’s the tea: the paranormal makes for really good content. This was a very niche hobby until a few years ago. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Here’s the tea: the paranormal makes for really good content. This was a very niche hobby until a few years ago. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So, in my opinion, I think the COVID pandemic just shot haunted doll sales up. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So, in my opinion, I think the COVID pandemic just shot haunted doll sales up. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is around the same time “witchtok” took off — the corner of TikTok dedicated to modern witchcraft. Videos of spell jar recipes, algorithmically recommended tarot readings, and ghost hunting all overlapped with the same audience. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is around the same time “witchtok” took off — the corner of TikTok dedicated to modern witchcraft. Videos of spell jar recipes, algorithmically recommended tarot readings, and ghost hunting all overlapped with the same audience. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And I think that is largely due to the fact that people were home and they were bored out of their mind and they were looking for something to do. And I think a lot of people were also doom scrolling at that time. Everybody was sitting on TikTok and YouTube all day long watching videos and so people had haunted dolls or making more videos about their haunted dolls than usual because they’re at home all day with them and it was just a perfect storm for like a lot more people who like were not involved in the paranormal or anything to just kind of like decide to try something different. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And I think that is largely due to the fact that people were home and they were bored out of their mind and they were looking for something to do. And I think a lot of people were also doom scrolling at that time. Everybody was sitting on TikTok and YouTube all day long watching videos and so people had haunted dolls or making more videos about their haunted dolls than usual because they’re at home all day with them and it was just a perfect storm for like a lot more people who like were not involved in the paranormal or anything to just kind of like decide to try something different. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The more sensational the paranormal content, the better it did online. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The more sensational the paranormal content, the better it did online. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And one of the party tricks that I see a lot is with EMF meters. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And one of the party tricks that I see a lot is with EMF meters. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> These are handheld devices that detect and measure electromagnetic activity. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> These are handheld devices that detect and measure electromagnetic activity. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They are not ghost metal detectors. Everybody just sees the EMF spike and they assume, “Oh, that’s a ghost,” but they don’t think about all of the other things that set off an EMF meter. Well, we’re in 2026. We have smartwatches that are setting off EMF meters, Wi-Fi, your cell phone — those things are set off by any form of electricity and all of our houses and all these locations are full of electricity, right? But a lot of people will, you know, share proof that their doll is haunted by essentially putting their phone right up to a doll that has an EMF meter on its lap and the EMF is going off and it’s hitting red and everybody’s forgetting that the phone that they’re filming that video on is what is triggering it. So when I see an account where the whole page is just EMF up to a cell phone and nothing else, I’m suspicious. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They are not ghost metal detectors. Everybody just sees the EMF spike and they assume, “Oh, that’s a ghost,” but they don’t think about all of the other things that set off an EMF meter. Well, we’re in 2026. We have smartwatches that are setting off EMF meters, Wi-Fi, your cell phone — those things are set off by any form of electricity and all of our houses and all these locations are full of electricity, right? But a lot of people will, you know, share proof that their doll is haunted by essentially putting their phone right up to a doll that has an EMF meter on its lap and the EMF is going off and it’s hitting red and everybody’s forgetting that the phone that they’re filming that video on is what is triggering it. So when I see an account where the whole page is just EMF up to a cell phone and nothing else, I’m suspicious. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> By becoming so trendy, Taylor says the paranormal community has become less about making contact with the other side and more about making content out of it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> By becoming so trendy, Taylor says the paranormal community has become less about making contact with the other side and more about making content out of it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I think it’s social media and it’s not just haunted dolls, it’s the whole overall paranormal community. You know, the people that are into the paranormal will chase it to the end of the earth. I mean, some of these locations will charge you, you know, hundreds, thousands of dollars to go investigate there for the night. It’s extremely lucrative. Investigators are seeking evidence. They are interested, obviously. But there’s also, I think, the social media pressure. Content creators, especially, it’s like they, you know, want to — to get content out and they want to keep going so they have to go to more haunted locations and you know, have to have more experiences, because they’re sharing the experiences with the public and people are expecting to see it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I think it’s social media and it’s not just haunted dolls, it’s the whole overall paranormal community. You know, the people that are into the paranormal will chase it to the end of the earth. I mean, some of these locations will charge you, you know, hundreds, thousands of dollars to go investigate there for the night. It’s extremely lucrative. Investigators are seeking evidence. They are interested, obviously. But there’s also, I think, the social media pressure. Content creators, especially, it’s like they, you know, want to — to get content out and they want to keep going so they have to go to more haunted locations and you know, have to have more experiences, because they’re sharing the experiences with the public and people are expecting to see it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And as this genre of content took off, the market for haunted objects suddenly became very lucrative. EBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace technically do allow for sales of haunted or occult objects, as long as the listing includes a disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only. But that disclaimer also means that you can get away with anything. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And as this genre of content took off, the market for haunted objects suddenly became very lucrative. EBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace technically do allow for sales of haunted or occult objects, as long as the listing includes a disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only. But that disclaimer also means that you can get away with anything. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> People want to have a paranormal experience. People are interested in that now. It didn’t used to be. Everybody didn’t wanna have a paranormal experience before, but now it’s like, people are chasing an experience. So people have learned — there are people who will pay anything to get to have this happen. I think that people have caught on to that. It’s trendy right now, it’s in right now and everybody’s looking for a time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> People want to have a paranormal experience. People are interested in that now. It didn’t used to be. Everybody didn’t wanna have a paranormal experience before, but now it’s like, people are chasing an experience. So people have learned — there are people who will pay anything to get to have this happen. I think that people have caught on to that. It’s trendy right now, it’s in right now and everybody’s looking for a time. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so, people have learned like, okay, before I could go to like, buy one of those empty storage lockers and I could sell everything for $10 a piece, whatever, but if the haunted doll people pay 200 bucks for that, that’s what I’m going to charge. Um, and the fact of the matter is, when people buy it, people will sell it because there’s a demand for it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so, people have learned like, okay, before I could go to like, buy one of those empty storage lockers and I could sell everything for $10 a piece, whatever, but if the haunted doll people pay 200 bucks for that, that’s what I’m going to charge. Um, and the fact of the matter is, when people buy it, people will sell it because there’s a demand for it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Like the dybbuk box that duped countless people 20 years ago, many of these listings have elaborate descriptions recounting tales of supernatural, otherworldly encounters. And dolls, especially, can go for way more than what they’re typically worth if they’re labeled “haunted.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Like the dybbuk box that duped countless people 20 years ago, many of these listings have elaborate descriptions recounting tales of supernatural, otherworldly encounters. And dolls, especially, can go for way more than what they’re typically worth if they’re labeled “haunted.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve seen in the thousands, multiple times. I always tell people the higher the price doesn’t mean that it’s more haunted than the ones that are a lower price. Like, a spirit is a spirit. There’s no such thing as like, this spirit is more spirity than this other spirit. My rule of thumb that I always tell people is like, “You can’t put a price on the paranormal,” right? Paranormal experiences are not guaranteed. Paranormal experiences are not scientific fact. So for me, ethically, I believe that the object should be priced similarly to the price that their vessel or their doll is worth. So if you have a doll that is like a collector’s item and worth $300 — yeah, list it for $300. If you have a doll that’s worth $50, list it for $50. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve seen in the thousands, multiple times. I always tell people the higher the price doesn’t mean that it’s more haunted than the ones that are a lower price. Like, a spirit is a spirit. There’s no such thing as like, this spirit is more spirity than this other spirit. My rule of thumb that I always tell people is like, “You can’t put a price on the paranormal,” right? Paranormal experiences are not guaranteed. Paranormal experiences are not scientific fact. So for me, ethically, I believe that the object should be priced similarly to the price that their vessel or their doll is worth. So if you have a doll that is like a collector’s item and worth $300 — yeah, list it for $300. If you have a doll that’s worth $50, list it for $50. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The dybbuk box eBay listing was such a novelty at the time. Now, haunted doll listings are a dime a dozen. On eBay today, I scrolled through listings for haunted dolls, haunted clip-on earrings, haunted keys, haunted cargo pants, haunted labubus and — not joking — a quote, haunted by curious dybbuk box. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The dybbuk box eBay listing was such a novelty at the time. Now, haunted doll listings are a dime a dozen. On eBay today, I scrolled through listings for haunted dolls, haunted clip-on earrings, haunted keys, haunted cargo pants, haunted labubus and — not joking — a quote, haunted by curious dybbuk box. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I am not cut out for the haunted doll life, but if you were to buy one, how are you supposed to sift through all the haunted scams? Taylor actually makes haunted doll guides and recently started focusing more on creating seller checklists so her followers can vet listings for themselves. She’s wary of any seller that makes content of EMF readings. She’s also suspicious of large-scale listings. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I am not cut out for the haunted doll life, but if you were to buy one, how are you supposed to sift through all the haunted scams? Taylor actually makes haunted doll guides and recently started focusing more on creating seller checklists so her followers can vet listings for themselves. She’s wary of any seller that makes content of EMF readings. She’s also suspicious of large-scale listings. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> You go on their page and they have a hundred Haunted Dolls listed and nearly all of them have the same story. I mean, spirits are — they’re people and every person is different. So how do you have a 100 spirits who all are the same person basically with a different name and like slightly changed details? So that’s a red flag. The other thing is if the facts don’t line up. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> You go on their page and they have a hundred Haunted Dolls listed and nearly all of them have the same story. I mean, spirits are — they’re people and every person is different. So how do you have a 100 spirits who all are the same person basically with a different name and like slightly changed details? So that’s a red flag. The other thing is if the facts don’t line up. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I have seen — this happens a lot. This is a big one. The story will say, “Oh, this doll is haunted by so-and-so and so-and-so owned this doll when they were alive and it was very meaningful to them, so they chose to keep it with them in the afterlife.” And you source the year on the vessel, and the vessel — the doll itself — was made in 1980. It says that the spirit is from the 1800s. That’s impossible. They couldn’t have owned the doll in the 1800s when the doll was made in the 1980s. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I have seen — this happens a lot. This is a big one. The story will say, “Oh, this doll is haunted by so-and-so and so-and-so owned this doll when they were alive and it was very meaningful to them, so they chose to keep it with them in the afterlife.” And you source the year on the vessel, and the vessel — the doll itself — was made in 1980. It says that the spirit is from the 1800s. That’s impossible. They couldn’t have owned the doll in the 1800s when the doll was made in the 1980s. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> TikTok is full of complaints and warnings of haunted scams. This is especially frustrating to Taylor, who really sees spirit keeping as a lifelong commitment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> TikTok is full of complaints and warnings of haunted scams. This is especially frustrating to Taylor, who really sees spirit keeping as a lifelong commitment. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Seeing people repeatedly getting things that are fake. One, obviously it’s a waste of money. I mean, obviously that’s irritating. Financial scamming is no joke and pisses me off. But it goes beyond that into, you know, those are people that could give an actual spirit a really nice place to live. And getting scammed over and over again chases them away from this hobby. I may be able to change, you know, the quality of afterlife for the spirits in my home. I can help a finite number of spirits, but I can help a lot more spirits if I can teach other people to do what I’m doing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Seeing people repeatedly getting things that are fake. One, obviously it’s a waste of money. I mean, obviously that’s irritating. Financial scamming is no joke and pisses me off. But it goes beyond that into, you know, those are people that could give an actual spirit a really nice place to live. And getting scammed over and over again chases them away from this hobby. I may be able to change, you know, the quality of afterlife for the spirits in my home. I can help a finite number of spirits, but I can help a lot more spirits if I can teach other people to do what I’m doing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I’m still not sure what my relationship to the paranormal is. I want objective evidence. Data. A clear, unequivocal answer that explains why things are the way that they are. But throughout the interview, I kept catching glimpses of Jeremiah over Taylor’s shoulder with his fluffy teddy bear ears and little legs dangling over the edge of the shelf. And when Taylor talked about taking care of spirits in the afterlife, I swear, I saw him perk up. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I’m still not sure what my relationship to the paranormal is. I want objective evidence. Data. A clear, unequivocal answer that explains why things are the way that they are. But throughout the interview, I kept catching glimpses of Jeremiah over Taylor’s shoulder with his fluffy teddy bear ears and little legs dangling over the edge of the shelf. And when Taylor talked about taking care of spirits in the afterlife, I swear, I saw him perk up. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s it for Close All Tabs’ special spooky storytime. We’ll have a fresh deep dive for you next week, but if you’re dying to open more tabs about the tales we told today, check out the episode description for some suggested reading. Or stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That’s it for Close All Tabs’ special spooky storytime. We’ll have a fresh deep dive for you next week, but if you’re dying to open more tabs about the tales we told today, check out the episode description for some suggested reading. Or stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. It was engineered by Brendan Willard and senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. It was engineered by Brendan Willard and senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Special thanks to Hallie Tut, Ted Hegemann, Craig Groshek, Rena Lee, and Paranormal Teej for sharing their stories with us. This episode includes clips and archive tape from Hallie Tut, Eli Unique, Paranomal Teej, and Villains Wiki.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Special thanks to Hallie Tut, Ted Hegemann, Craig Groshek, Rena Lee, and Paranormal Teej for sharing their stories with us. This episode includes clips and archive tape from Hallie Tut, Eli Unique, Paranomal Teej, and Villains Wiki.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Apple Maker Hi-75 keyboard with Foggered in Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Apple Maker Hi-75 keyboard with Foggered in Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So when it comes to buying and selling, they don’t really care about the concept of it. Their primary focus is always like, “Am I going somewhere where somebody is going to be nice to me or not?” That’s what they care about — is like, “Am I going to a good home?” But the one thing I know they don’t like is the shipping. They don’t like shipping. I hear complaints about shipping all the time. So. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So when it comes to buying and selling, they don’t really care about the concept of it. Their primary focus is always like, “Am I going somewhere where somebody is going to be nice to me or not?” That’s what they care about — is like, “Am I going to a good home?” But the one thing I know they don’t like is the shipping. They don’t like shipping. I hear complaints about shipping all the time. So. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, yeah, you can’t, you, can’t yeah, kind of out of your control. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, yeah, you can’t, you, can’t yeah, kind of out of your control. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I’m like, “Sorry.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this special Halloween edition of Close All Tabs, we’re diving into creepypastas: horror stories that spread online until they become urban legends on their own. What happened to the girl who fell into a mirror in 2001? Did Ted the Caver ever come back to the surface? Was the Momo challenge real? And finally, we venture into eBay’s haunted doll marketplace … where we may have ended up with a spirit wreaking havoc on the production of this episode. It’s a ghoulish good time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Guests\u003c/strong>:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@hallietut\">Hallie Tut\u003c/a>, visual effects artist, and digital content creator\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@chillingtalesfordarknights\">Craig Groshek\u003c/a>, horror author and founder of \u003cem>Chilling Tales for Dark Nights\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://tedthecaverfan.com\">Ted Hegemann\u003c/a>, author of “Ted the Caver”\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>Rena Lee, social media manager\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophia-bruno-846358286/\">Sophia Bruno\u003c/a>, educational nonprofit coordinator\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/@paranormalteej\">Paranormal Teej\u003c/a>, haunted doll collector & paranormal investigator\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlaXgi-Jpdo\">How She Creates VFX Shots That Break Your Brain\u003c/a> — Hallie Tut, \u003cem>Youtube\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://tedthecaverfan.com\">Ted the Caver\u003c/a> — Ted Hegemann\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Momo_(Creepypasta)#:~:text=%E2%80%9C-,Momo,-%2C%20Momo%2C%20Momo%20is\">Momo (Creepypasta)\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Villains Wiki\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://medium.com/@LanceUlanoff/momo-challenge-is-everything-thats-wrong-with-the-internet-4d1a5679c1ed\">Momo Challenge Is Everything That’s Wrong with the Internet\u003c/a> — Lance Ulanoff, \u003cem>Medium\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://yokai.com/ubume/?srsltid=AU7gw4UWwYuhjk8jv7LUe8ip4Sjmbw0bTmlbqoJ6kyNNEwWAjC7IZCV5\">Ubume\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Yokai.com\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-momo-global-social-media-hoax-about-paranormal-threat-kids-n977961\">How ‘Momo’, a global social media hoax about a paranormal threat to kids, morphed into a U.S. viral phenomenon\u003c/a> — Ben Collins and Shoshana Wodinsky, \u003cem>NBC News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.inverse.com/input/features/dybbuk-box-dibbuk-kevin-mannis-zak-bagans-haunted-hoax-revealed\">Finally, the truth behind the ‘haunted’ Dybbuk Box can be revealed\u003c/a> — \u003cem>Inverse\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/work/careers/a34322508/the-witches-of-ebay-industry-selling-haunted-item/\">The witches of eBay: Inside the industry selling haunted items online\u003c/a> — Daniella Scott, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.dazeddigital.com/film-tv/article/62125/1/a24-youngest-ever-director-kane-parsons-the-backrooms-creepypasta-into-cinema\">The Backrooms: How Kane Parsons turned creepypasta into cinema\u003c/a> — Jack Mills, \u003cem>Dazed\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://slate.com/culture/2026/05/what-is-backrooms-movie-original-explained-4chan-creepypasta-horror-internet.html\">The Eerie Backstory Behind Backrooms\u003c/a> — Nadira Goffe, \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.vice.com/en/article/revisiting-creepypasta-the-social-horror-craze-that-launched-slenderman/\">Revisiting Creepypasta, the Social Horror Craze That Launched Slenderman\u003c/a> — Zac Thompson, \u003cem>VICE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Happy spooky season tabbies. Is there a creepypasta you can’t stop thinking about? Or any internet trend, tech subculture, or online oddity keeping you up at night? Well, now you can ask Close All Tabs to investigate! Go to \u003ca href=\"http://kqed.org/podcasts/closealltabs\">KQED.org/podcasts/closealltabs\u003c/a> to submit your question.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Just a note, this episode contains mentions of suicide and horror themes so listen with care — or skip this one and come back next week. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Let me tell you a story about one of the most terrifying moments of my life. I was in middle school, hanging out in a family friend’s basement with a bunch of other kids, when my friend’s older brother asked us if we wanted to see something. We crowded around his laptop where he pulled up a YouTube video, titled “Entry #1.” It was just a few seconds of shaky footage, shot through a window from inside a house, of a lanky, suited figure lurking near the door. No sound…which made it feel more unsettling. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">My friend’s brother told us that some guy online found all of these videos in his friend’s camera and started posting them to YouTube. He hit play on the next one. This had sound — some guy talking while he drove down a dark street. Not much is visible in this video…except the blurry silhouette of that same lanky figure, looming in the distance. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Marble Hornets:\u003c/strong> I saw this really tall guy stand in the middle of the street, just completely still. For whatever reason, this really set off Rocky, and he got really scared. He wouldn’t move and he kept on pulling on his leash to go back home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Back then, everything on the internet seemed real. My friends and I took all of it at face value. So we believed the YouTube comments that said they’d seen this figure too. My friend’s brother left, but the rest of us were totally hooked. So we hit play on another video. This was more shaky footage, again shot through a window from inside a house. The same figure was lurking, closer this time. The camera finally focused on an unnaturally pale, bald head. It had no face at all, just smooth white skin and hollow contours where eyes and a mouth and a nose should be. And then it turned to face the viewer, as if it was honing in on us. Then, my friend’s brother, from the top of the stairs, called out, “Who wants to meet Slenderman?” And shut off the basement lights. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The legend of Slenderman started in 2009, when someone posted black and white photos of children on a playground, seemingly oblivious to the spindly creature looming over them. The captions alluded to a string of child abductions from the 1980s. It was a submission for a Photoshop contest of paranormal happenings, which later inspired the YouTube series, Marble Hornets. That was the supposedly found footage that we watched in my friend’s basement. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I totally fell for it. For a good year after, I was terrified to look through windows at night in case Slenderman was peering back in. That was my first experience with a creepypasta. The word “creepypasta” is a play on “copypasta” — which is a portmanteau of “copy-paste.” They’re blocks of text that become memes because they’re copied and reposted so often. Creepypastas are online urban legends, Horror stories that start on forums and comment sections that spread across the internet and take on lives of their own. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome to Cursed All Tabs. This is our very special Halloween episode, where, instead of one deep dive, we have a bunch of spooky stories for you. These are tales of the paranormal kept alive on the internet. A girl stuck in a portal, caving gone wrong, an entity that might get you through the screen, and the eBay listings for haunted dolls. So, gather around our digital campfire and if you’re easily scared, don’t listen in the dark. Ready? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This is Cursed All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung — tech journalist and your chronically online nightmare — here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. Let’s open our first tab and get into our first spooky story: “The girl in the mirror.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Picture this: It’s the middle of the night. You can’t sleep. You’re doom-scrolling. It’s way past your bedtime and you’ve been awake for a little too long. So, in the darkness of your room, shadows start to take on the shape of strange figures. You catch a glimpse of yourself in the mirror, barely visible in the moonlight, and for a second, it seems like the room and the reflection is deeper. Like it goes on forever. And then…mid-scroll, you come across this video. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> There’s something really strange going on here, and if something ends up happening to me, I just hope that this video can maybe explain it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s a video of a teenager recording herself on an old-school, hand-held camcorder. The caption says it’s found footage dating back to January 2001. The camera sweeps across her bedroom — a matching set of yellow furniture, frilly curtains, pink walls, very 90s — and settles on an antique mirror propped up on a chair. It faces another full-length mirror mounted to the wall. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Okay, so I have these two mirrors in my room. As you can see, they’re pretty normal looking mirrors, but I was cleaning and I had them kind of set up like this, and I noticed something really weird. Just watch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The girl places the camcorder on the bed and films herself putting her hand on one of the mirrors, but she passes straight through the glass into another world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> See, when you look through the mirror into the other one, it becomes like a window. And there’s this huge warehouse, grocery store, or something down there. But wait, it gets even crazier. Watch this. Three, two, one. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She fully jumps through the mirror and is transported into what looks like a fully stocked supermarket. But the aisles go on forever and there’s nobody else in sight. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Woah. What the hell? What is this place? Hello? How far does it go? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She begins running, and then… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Oh shit. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The camcorder zaps back to her room mid-air before bouncing onto her frilly white bed. It faces another mirror and in the reflection, the room looks empty. The girl is nowhere to be seen. You’re thoroughly creeped out so you start scouring the comments. Legend has it…she’s still missing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from ItsNickHoliday:\u003c/strong> A video a girl recorded in her bedroom in 2001, right before she went missing, has resurfaced and now is going viral. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Generalist Authority:\u003c/strong> The camera was later found on her bed. She has not been located. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from brookesobasic:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if people know this or not, but facing two mirrors together is something you just shouldn’t do. And it’s said to open portals or bring in really bad energies or spirits — sometimes good — but usually bad. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what happened to this girl who fell through a mirror over 20 years ago and was never heard from again? What is it about that abandoned, endless supermarket that feels both so familiar and so unsettling? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it — it just really is something where you don’t normally stay very long in a place like that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Hallie Tutte, a VFX artist. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Liminal spaces are kind of these transitional places where usually it would be somewhere that’s filled of people going from point A to point B when a place that usually is filled with people is now completely empty — that gives it that eerie feeling because you never usually are used to seeing it completely abandoned like that. So if you got trapped there, it just brings out this strange feeling in you, I think. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Halle is the real girl in the video. And don’t worry, she did not get stuck in the portal despite what some internet conspiracy theorists might think. She’s always been fascinated by liminal horror — stories that take place in vacant, in-between spaces, like the internet lore that inspired the movie Backrooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I grew up in a town that didn’t have a lot of people in it, and there’d be like these old shopping malls where no one would be around and all the stores are gone. And I always just loved the feeling of being in those spaces, like empty food courts. Me and my friends would just like to kind of hang out there. And I guess when I got into 3D modeling, it was a really fun way to get to build that feeling again by creating those spaces. And it’s something that’s really easy to accomplish in 3D and make it feel very real, very quickly because it’s just a lot of walls and lights and rooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that video wasn’t filmed in 2001, but actually made in 2023. Hallie was inspired by found footage movies like The Blair Witch Project. She wanted to create something that felt like it was from the early 2000s, but using modern equipment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I shot it completely by myself in my room and it was actually shot on a Sony camera on a tripod and then any of the handheld stuff is all fake. The mirror that she’s shooting into is fake and to create that infinite Walmart effect, I went to my local Walmart late at night when it feels like a liminal space and I was able to kind of scan all of the shelves and create these 3D models that I then brought into, like a software like Blender, and created this infinite world with it. And yeah, it’s shot in my real bedroom. I live with my grandparents, so this used to be my aunt’s room. And everything in it feels very of the time period that I was trying to make that video set in, so it worked out really well that way. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The video got a lot of views when she first posted it, but didn’t really go viral until a year later, when other influencers reposted it, speculating about what really happened to the girl in the mirror. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> Even one of my art school teachers had sent me a link on Facebook to like a conspiracy channel where he’d seen it and asking if it was me. And that video had maybe 3 million views and thousands of comments, people’s discourse about whether it was real. Having remembered seeing this video from when they were younger, like in the early 2000s, people had made up like memories of it. Like kind of that Mandela effect was happening where people had — had this memory of knowing this story of this girl who went missing years prior to when I posted the video. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So it was — it was just going all over the place online and I kind of started to go down a rabbit hole of Reddit posts about it and different names they were making up for the girl in the video. Like in one spot her name was Violet and the video was titled “Violet’s Playtime” or something strange like that. And then people were kind of using that name to discuss it in different forums. So just gets it away from you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year, Hallie posted a video explaining that she was the creator of the video and that none of it was real. Even then, the conspiracies continued to spread. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> When I made the video talking about how it was fake and I explained how I had made it and how viral it had went around the internet, but trying to claim that, in fact, it was me in my room by myself and I’m here and I am alive — a lot of people in those comments were saying, “The government made her do this,” or “She’s AI and this is a cover up — like this is the CIA cover up for this girl who’s still missing. She’s just — this is just a plant. This girl trying to pretend she’s the girl so they can keep hiding this conspiracy from us.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> It’s wild how drastically the internet has changed since 2023. AI videos back then were nowhere near as convincing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think it would be a lot harder now with AI and even just the VFX work that was put into that. I don’t know if it would feel worth it anymore because of the way that people would just write it off. That video was definitely a labor of love for the technical challenges that I had to go through to make it look realistic and I think people now just won’t appreciate the craft that goes into something like that because they’ll just write it all off as AI. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So, I don’t know if I’d ever do one quite in the same way. I think if I had a really good story that I wanted to tell, and it was more based on just a really horror story, I might try again. But in a way that was more of a fun technical challenge for me to make it convincing. And in today’s day and age. That’s no longer really a worthy challenge. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s so depressing. Have we killed creepypastas with AI? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> I think creepypastes will live on, especially the more fictional stories that can’t be real things but that people really wish were real. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hallie herself is still making creepy horror content, pushing herself with new technical challenges and VFX tools. But the story she put out into the world three years ago continues to spread and morph beyond what she ever created. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Hallie Tut:\u003c/strong> It is essentially a creepypasta now, and the creepypasta might be well known by people, but it’s never going to really come back to me, which I kind of appreciate. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If, during the witching hour, you place two mirrors facing each other, you might open a ghostly passage. Legend has it that, if you look long enough, the infinite reflections will dissolve into all sorts of in-between places — sprawling underground train stations, sterile hospital waiting rooms, school hallways lined with pristine lockers. They will almost always be eerily empty, as if time comes to a standstill there. And sometimes, you might catch a glimpse of a cavernous, eternal supermarket — and the pink-haired teenager doomed to wander its empty aisles. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That story was brought to us by producer Maya Cueva. Unsettled yet? Well, we’re just getting started. The next internet scary story we have for you is actually the one that started it all. It’s known as the very first creepypasta, dating back to 2001. This tale comes from our very own senior editor, Chris Egusa. You might wanna turn on the lights for this one. Okay, let’s open a new tab. Who is Ted the Caver? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> In early 2001, a series of posts started appearing on an obscure Angelfire website, a site-building platform from the early internet. The page was bare bones. Basic HTML, a black background, and at the top, a salmon-colored title: “Welcome to the Page of Ted.” The posts were journal entries. The author? Anonymous, except for that first name: Ted. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Over the course of a few months, Ted posted a detailed account of a series of caving trips he took with a friend he identified only as “B,” to explore a previously unentered passage in a spot they called “Mystery Cave.” According to the first entry, the pair had found a hole in the rock wall deep inside the cave. It was only four to five inches across, but they knew it had to lead somewhere because of a steady stream of air that blew through it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The first journal entry included a link to a grainy photo of the hole. It was uneven in shape, and the rock it went through looked several inches thick. There was a glove tucked inside the hole for scale. The entry went on. Peeking through the hole with a mini maglite, they could see a tight tunnel that opened up after a few feet. They could feel the air blowing past, and they could hear something else: a low rumbling that came and went. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ted and B brushed aside the strange details. They were too excited at the prospect of finding their way into a completely unexplored passage. So they made a plan: come back with hand tools and a cordless drill, break up the solid rock, and widen the hole until it was big enough to squeeze through. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Ted named the passage Floyd’s Tomb, as a nod to Floyd Collins — an early 20th century cave explorer who got trapped and died as he attempted to enlarge a small tunnel in a cave system in Kentucky. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Every few weeks through early 2001, a new post would appear on the website. They detailed the slow, grueling work of drilling and chiseling through rock until the batteries on their lights and tools ran out. Since the cave was a good distance from where they lived, Ted and B would stay at a nearby motel, recharge their batteries and bodies, and continue working the next day before heading home. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Occasionally, Ted would mention some odd detail. Something unsettling. In one post, he described the wind as getting louder, a howl at that point. The rumbling had become more frequent, and he noted that it seemed to be emanating from deeper in the cave. Then he’d move on, refocusing on the task at hand. Each post linked more photos, documenting the progression of the hole. And as the entries went on, the details got stranger. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On a trip in February, they brought B’s Jack Russell Terrier into the cave. Typically excitable and enthusiastic, she became edgy and began to whimper as she approached the hole. Her hair stood on end and she refused to get any closer. Later that same trip, B heard a scratching, grinding sound coming from inside the hole. When he got Ted’s attention to listen, it stopped. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">On another trip in early March, Ted was kneeling at the wall, drilling — ear plugs in and safety glasses on. Over the noise of the drill, he heard a high-pitched sound. He pulled his earplug out just in time to hear an ear-piercing scream coming from inside the hole, echoing through the darkness. In his journal, he described it as a cross between a man screaming in fear and a cougar screaming in pain. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The next day, the two couldn’t stop thinking about the sound. But they rationalized it as some kind of animal and decided to continue on, focused on getting to the other side. They’d come too far to give up. In the next entry, Ted explained that they’d widened the hole enough to squeeze through. It was so tight that Ted had to turn his head to the side and wedge himself in with his arms pinned at his sides. As he went further, he could feel the rock pressing into his back. The only way forward was to exhale all of his breath and push with his feet. So that’s what he did. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Exhale. Scoot an inch or two. Breathe in shallowly. Exhale again. Scoot further. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The photo linked in that entry showed Ted wedged into the crevice wearing a black bandana, head cocked to the right. The flash lit up jagged rocks littering the floor beneath him. Then the passage began to open up. Ted was able to crawl forward, emerging for the first time into the untouched cavern. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The entries kept coming. And, without spoiling the rest of the story, things escalated from there. Ted found strange hieroglyphic markings on the cave wall, an unnaturally round rock that seemed to be moving on its own. A smell he described as damp, rotting, rancid, putrid, death, drifting up from deeper in the cave. Then, in the deepest section of the tunnel, he encountered something. Something that seemed to follow him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The last entry on the site was from Ted, writing the morning of his final trip into the cave. By then, he was badly shaken and suffering from lucid nightmares. He was determined to figure out what was going on, once and for all. And then, the entries stopped. Even years later, nothing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the Angelfire site stayed up, preserving Ted’s story. The collection of entries — nine in total, clocking in at over 25,000 words — is now known as Ted the Caver, and many consider it to be the very first creepypasta. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> At the time when I first read it, there was nothing like it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig Groshek is a horror author who runs Chilling Tales for Dark Nights, a company and YouTube channel devoted to creepypasta, along with several podcasts. He first came across Ted the Caver in high school. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> You’re just surfing the internet and all of a sudden you come across this poor guy, you know, getting trapped with unspeakable horrors in the underground. And the story very much leaves you feeling that you don’t know what happened to him. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> At the center of a lot of the online discussion was one question — was it real? The story had all these supernatural elements, but it also felt believable. The gear, the technical descriptions of caving, the photos. It read like a real caving journal. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> Just when you thought there’s a chance that this was baloney, he threw up a photo. Critical thinking aside, that inclusion of photos drew you right back in, and it made everything that came after it even scarier. And of course we were experiencing this in real time. If you were there when it happened, this wasn’t a story you picked up years later. This was a man this was actually happening to, and you couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching someone sleepwalk into traffic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But you couldn’t ask Ted. For years, no one could confirm who he was, or whether his name was even Ted. Authorship of the story was disputed, with several people taking credit. Eventually, the real Ted emerged and began posting intermittently on some online forums. In 2015, Craig decided to track him down in person. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> All I had to go on was the original post and some forums on the internet where he had appeared. And the way I found him was via reverse image search. He used the same picture, I believe he was standing on train tracks, maybe with his dog, and it was the same pictures of him on every forum that he used. I tracked him down to a disc golf course. I had the guy at the country club there, because they have a golf course and a disc golf and I had them hand Ted my information on a cocktail napkin. And the next thing you know, Ted’s calling me. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig commissioned Ted to write an original horror story for an anthology he was putting together. It was only the second horror story Ted had ever written. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Ted Hegemann. I am the author of the story that is now known as “Ted the Caver.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> His story about the terrors lurking in Mystery Cave was his first. Ted is now 62 and lives in Utah. These days, he spends his free time playing disc golf. It’s the latest in a string of obsessions. 25 years ago, he was obsessed with caving. And, as it turns out, a lot of the story is based on real experiences. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> So, my buddy, Brad and I — who is B in the story — we went out to this cave that’s right on the border of Utah and Nevada. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Ted and Brad really did open up an entrance to a new passage. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It took us numerous trips, I think eight trips before I was able to get past the opening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The squeeze through Floyd’s tomb? Ted says it happened just how he wrote it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was literally exhaling my lungs and scooting with my feet, with my arms down to my side to keep my shoulders down. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Technically, he did the squeeze twice. By the second time, they had opened the passage up a little wider, and he was able to fit through with slightly more ease. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I was keeping a journal the entire time — a caving journal — as well as updating friends and family, you know, as to the progress. It was kind of a neat thing. And when we were done, I thought rather than telling everyone about it, I’ll just upload my journal on a — find a website — and put it up. And then I had the idea that it’d be kind of fun to embellish a little bit. And so that’s where the story came from. So much of it is just directly out of my caving journal. And then the creepy parts were invented, of course. But the idea didn’t come until after we had gone into the cave. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> A lot of the eerie details were rooted in his actual experience, too. Like the air blowing through the hole. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We knew about the hole because we would stop there, because the wind blew out and you generally worked up a little bit of a sweat getting to that point in the cave. So we would stop and just let the cool air cool us off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And the low rumbling. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> We figured it was I-80 — just trucks or whatever — because it wasn’t constant. It was just every once in a while. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> And they really brought a Jack Russell terrier into the cave. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> Demon dog, oh my goodness, it nipped at me so many times. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> But the part about it whimpering and refusing to go near the hole, that was embellished. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It was having a good time running around exploring. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> I asked Ted at what point the story became complete fiction. I’m thinking of — there’s the terrifying scream that you both hear. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> The scream. The grinding noise that we would hear inside, the smell when I went in there, and the round rock. There was no round rock, sadly. Oh, and the little hieroglyph thing that was in there. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> It took Ted almost a year to write the whole thing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> And at one point, I gave up on it. I thought, “Oh, this is dumb. Who’s going to want to read this?” But then I sucked it up and thought, “Yeah, at least finish it. And then who cares? You know, if nothing happens.” But yeah, little did I know. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> He posted it, one update at a time, through the spring of 2001, and he knew the story had attracted a decent readership. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I did have a hidden counter on there and got up into the tens of thousands of views. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> The story simmered underground, making its way through different communities, but never going viral the way things might today. And then, a few years after he posted the story, someone sent him a link to a caving forum where it was being discussed. After that, he started digging around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> That was one of the cooler weekends of my life. I remember our internet was really slow. So I went to the library and I just kept searching and found all these forums where they’re talking about it. And it just blew me away. How many people liked it. So many people said it scared them to death in very colorful ways. It was just so fun to know that that people were reading it and enjoying it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> For Ted, who’s not even a big horror fan, the fact that this story he posted 25 years ago keeps coming up is a lasting source of enjoyment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> I just discovered this like last year. I started Googling and I found all of these YouTube channels where they talk about the story. They’ll read it and then give their thoughts about it. And I mean, one of them had three million views. It just kind of blew me away. I think it’s just a blast. I love it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> So is Ted the Caver the first creepypasta? As with most things on the internet, it’s hard to pinpoint. The term creepypasta itself came into use years later. And some people point to the genre’s similarities to chain emails from the 90s, which pre-date Ted’s story. But Craig Groshek says Ted the Caver certainly has a claim to the title. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> If you’re looking at the Mount Rushmore of creepypasta, of internet-based horror, Ted the Caver’s is definitely up there. In terms of storytelling — the immersion, the fact that you felt like this was a real person that may have actually disappeared, and for years that remained uncontested — you have to put it up there just for that. He was really a pioneer without realizing that’s what he was. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> More widely known creepypastas like Slenderman and more recently Backrooms, which was turned into a Hollywood movie this year, all have their roots in Ted the Caver. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> I think you can trace it to a lot of these things, but Backrooms being the most recent example. I don’t know that you can say these things wouldn’t have existed without Ted, but you can’t say that they would either. This entire genre started with a couple of people copying and pasting creepy stuff to try to get a rise out of somebody. And Ted absolutely leaned into that at the end. He knew there were people that thought he was dead and he didn’t even care. Thanks, Ted. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> When Ted Hegemann posted his story on Angelfire, he could have never anticipated where it would go. It was adapted into a movie in 2008 called Living Dark: The Story of Ted the Caver. And as for Mystery Cave? It’s been officially mapped out now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Ted Hegemann:\u003c/strong> It’s called “Interstate Cave” and thankfully they did call that passage “Floyd’s Tomb” so it’s official on the map now. And DeWalt’s Dig, it was the opening, because we were using DeWalt tools. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Chris Egusa:\u003c/strong> Craig says that for all the ways storytelling has changed over the years with digital media, in some ways, it hasn’t changed at all. Instead of sitting around a physical campfire, we now sit around a digital one — on message boards, comment sections, and Discord chat rooms. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Craig Groshek:\u003c/strong> It started with one man telling his story around what is essentially a digital campfire. And as time has gone on, more and more people have gathered around that fire. And 20 plus years later people are still telling that story and that is a testament to how believable it was, how well written it was how immersive it was and how well it tapped into a primal fear that a lot of people have — whether it’s of the unknown, of the dark or not knowing what you can’t see. And that’s why I think it has stood the test of time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That was senior editor Chris Egusa. One thing about me: You will never catch me caving. Ever. The idea of squeezing into an underground passage where you can get stuck or lost or run out of air sounds hellish enough. And there might be an entity down there? No, thank you! Between whatever’s in the caves and Slenderman lurking in the woods, it seems safer to just stay inside. But the monsters from creepypastas can get you even if you never log off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">After the break, we have a story about the creature haunting your screens. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you to keep us going. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. Okay, when we’re back, what do you know about Momo? Stick around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Welcome back to the Close All Tabs special spooky story time. This next one is about an entity that I hate looking at, even as a full-grown adult. This creepypasta retelling comes from our very own intern, Lauren Yoon. Let’s open another new tab. The legend of Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> Picture a gaunt, paper-skinned woman with a protruding neck and bulging eyes. Her jet-black hair stringy to match a thousand-eye stare that could kill. She looks uncanny. The most important feature of the infamous viral image: she holds a smile that spans cheek-to-cheek in the shape of a “V.” Yep, that’s right. My internet urban legend is Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Fandom:\u003c/strong> Do you want a surprise? Look in their eyes. I won’t lie, you’re going to die. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> It’s 2019. Musical.ly had just become TikTok. Everyone was doing the woah, and Avengers: Endgame was in theaters. And Momo was threatening harm to all who came across her. I remember Momo being passed around between my friend group, joking she would haunt them while they slept or something. Here’s my friend, Sophia, talking about Momo. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sophia Bruno:\u003c/strong> I was very much afraid of it in the sense that I just thought it was a weird-looking picture that my friend introduced me to because I think she was like, “Oh Momo’s gonna get you” and I was like, “What is Momo?” And then she showed me. And my friends and I would mostly joke about it like, “Momo is gonna get you whatever” but in terms of the real-life stories I mean I believed them and I believed — I feel like there was a mysterious lore around it like it would just kind of you and like attach itself to you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> In reality, I also hated Momo. If I was joking about it with friends, it was mostly because laughter is the best defense mechanism against fear. What scared me the most were stories of Momo contacting you over the phone and telling you to do horrible things to yourself or others. It became known in mainstream media as “the Momo challenge.” The idea was that kids would challenge each other to make contact with Momo, sparking her wrath. She was even rumored to have reached kids’ videos on YouTube, where her face would pop up out of nowhere during an episode of Peppa Pig. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The rumors caused a media frenzy, and Momo became a sensationalized, quote, danger to children. The Post, The Today Show, and a bunch of other news outlets around the world warned concerned parents about the internet legend. They encouraged parents to put restrictions on social media and YouTube for their kids — something parents should probably be doing anyway — without evidence that the Momo challenge was real. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Surprise! It wasn’t. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There has been no evidence to show that Momo or anyone posing as the character actually contacted people, let alone children. YouTube denied any claims of Momo popping up in the middle of their videos, too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So where did Momo even come from? Well, she’s a picture of a sculpture called “Mother Bird,” created by Japanese artist Keisuke Aiso. If we zoom out of their original picture, you can clearly see the figure, propped up on a stand in an art gallery. The face we all know and…hate? Attached to a human chest with two huge bird legs. Keisuke based her off of this Japanese folklore called “Ubume,” a version of which translates to “child-snatching bird.” Makes sense. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The image first spread on a Chinese social dating app called Momo, and that’s how the Momo we know today was born. So how did she spread so fast? And so far? I mean, a police station in Northern Ireland issued a statement and Kim Kardashian posted on Instagram, both figures warning parents about this dangerous, quote, challenge. My friend Rena has a theory that this all happened because the internet was a little newer to us at the time. AI wasn’t generating images like they are today, so we took a lot of things at face value. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Rena Lee:\u003c/strong> So we didn’t have this backpedaling of, “Is this AI, is this real?” A lot of information and media that we were fed at the time, it was easier to believe, “Oh my God, this looks so realistic. This has to be a real picture.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> I personally think it’s a combination of this naivete, plus the misinformation being spread by major national news outlets. The public sphere unfortunately feeds off of fear — talk about the horror of it all, right? — and Momo was the scapegoat for millennials and boomers concerned about what new dangers the internet proposed for their children. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Keisuke destroyed the original sculpture not too long after it was created because it started rotting. It was made of materials that weren’t meant to last long. The only part of the sculpture remaining is its eyeball. Here is an excerpt of Keisuke’s interview with The Sun from 2019. He’s speaking through a translator. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from The Sun:\u003c/strong> I got rid of Momo, so it is no longer here with me. I believe it no longer exists in this world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Lauren Yoon:\u003c/strong> He was pretty horrified by the way his art became so misunderstood and taken out of context. I wonder if people today would be as scared as they were five, six years ago when we weren’t burdened with the constant doubt that comes with the images we see online today. The landscape of internet paranoia has changed, and so I wonder if the Momo challenge could be recreated in this day and age. I even miss the mystery she brought to my life, something that has slowly dissipated as I trust the internet less and less. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Momo may have been a hoax, but her impact was real. The image of her bulging eyes and wide smile is still burned into the back of my skull. And when I’m trying to fall asleep at night, and I open my eyes to the dark corner of my room, she’s the figure I imagine standing there…waiting for my eyes to close again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That story was brought to you by our intern, Lauren Yoon. We’ll have more on Momo in our further reading, but before you hit that link, consider this your jumpscare warning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, I have one more story for you. It starts with an eBay listing for an antique wine cabinet with strict warnings to never open it, lest you unleash misfortune upon anyone who comes in contact with the box. But the real horror story here is disappointingly mundane. Let’s open one last tab. The haunted doll scam market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One of the most infamous haunted objects was actually sold on eBay. In 2003, Kevin Mannis listed an antique wine cabinet with an unusually detailed description. He had picked it up at an estate sale, and the woman who sold it to him said it belonged to her grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. Her grandmother had been insistent that her family never, ever open the box. She said it contained a spirit called a dybbuk. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Did Kevin heed the warning? No. He brought it back to his workshop and opened it right up — ignoring the creepy locks of hair and carved Hebrew prayers inside. A series of tragedies followed. His mother had a stroke when she opened the box. His siblings complained of terrifying nightmares. Someone who knocked the box off a shelf died by suicide the same day. Kevin himself started having visions of a demonic old woman with sunken eyes. He recounted the story in his eBay listing, which ended with, “Help me.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The box was bought and resold several times over the next decade. Owners complained of hair falling out in clumps, bleeding from the eyes, waking up choking, and dreams of the creepy old woman. The box finally found a permanent home in a museum for haunted objects, sealed behind layers of protective glass. It even inspired the 2012 movie, The Possession. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And then, five years ago, Kevin admitted that it was all fake. He made up everything in the original listing. There are no dybbuk boxes in Jewish folklore. The malicious spirits attached to people, not objects. The people who bought the box after Kevin sold it maintained that their hauntings really happened. But as far as Kevin was concerned, the whole eBay thing was a creative writing exercise that spiraled out of control. But today, haunted objects are a hot commodity. And one object, in particular, has become incredibly popular in the secondhand haunted market: dolls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> EBay, Etsy, they’re all over the place. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Taylor, a TikTok creator and YouTuber, also known as Paranormal Teej. She’s a paranormal investigator and haunted doll caretaker. She called me from a room packed with dolls. Can you describe the room you’re in? Like what’s around you? What are the stories behind all that? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yes. So in this room, we have about 120 haunted dolls. They come from all around the world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor keeps them lined up on shelves. Some are porcelain collector’s dolls, dressed in frilly skirts. Others are soft rag dolls, clearly pre-loved by some young child. And while we talked, I swear I could feel them gazing back at me through the screen. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They keep me on my toes. I work with a lot of, like, trickster spirits. I am very interested in working with, like, spirits with kind of wacky, wild personalities. They are a riot. We adore them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She introduced me to a few of them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So first one I’m going to point out is Jeremiah. If I don’t point him out to you, he will mess with our recordings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Jeremiah is this big soft bear, wearing a striped t-shirt. His plush legs dangle off the shelf, like a little kid’s would. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> He is a six and a half year old little boy. The half is very important to him. Six is not acceptable. He moves, he moves things, um, especially lollipops. That’s, like, kind of his gig. He loves green things. Um, everything he wants has to be green. So he has moved like lollie pops around our house, threw them down the stairs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed out another doll. She has a cherubic face and stark black pigtails, and she’s besties with Jeremiah. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So Hoshiko is five. She’s from Japan. She’ll cause you to have, like, visions like in mirrors and things and she’ll like pop up. So I get the Samara from The Ring in the mirror trick every once in a while. Then she thinks it’s so funny because she likes, like, the reaction. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And lastly, Taylor points out Ciel. He’s in a black, pointed hat. Like a little witch. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And he is very wise, very gifted. He has given me dreams about things happening a year before they happen and then they come true. And he’s just kind of, he’s my guy. So yeah, those are my, my buddies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> You may be skeptical of all this — but there were a couple of inexplicable incidents in the calls I had with Taylor. At some points, the entire video platform that we used flickered — not someone’s webcam, but the whole site. After the interview, our producer, Maya, said she heard low growling coming from Taylor’s side. When Taylor talked about her doll’s antics, I thought I heard faint giggling in the background. And there were chunks of our interview that our transcription software could not figure out. Instead, it spat out a jumble of German, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Brazilian, Portuguese, French, Danish, Korean, and a splash of Telugu. Was that Jeremiah messing with us? Although Maya and I were a little freaked out, Taylor seemed unfazed. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Everybody asks, like, “How are you safe living in a house with 120 haunted dolls? How are, how were you safe?” And the honest answer is like, they, they respect me because I respect them. I’m just nice to them. Like that’s really all it takes is just like basic kindness. Um, and I think that makes the paranormal a lot less scary when you realize that. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Ghosts and the paranormal have been part of Taylor’s life for as long as she could remember. Her mother is a professional psychic. Her aunt is a paranormal investigator. Her grandmother would pull out the Ouija board whenever Taylor stayed over. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> My whole dad’s side of the family, even the ones who don’t want to or want anything to do with the paranormal, see ghosts for whatever reason. And so I just, I kind of grew up in this environment where, like, ghosts aren’t scary. They’re just like a thing, you know, like it’s just a fact of life, kind of attitude about it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor and her husband bonded over the paranormal and fell in love with doll collecting together. They consider themselves spirit keepers — almost like afterlife caretakers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Some spirits legitimately did own their vessel when they were alive. They were attached to it in life and they’re still attached to, you know, like we have spirits whose vessel was like their comfort item as a kid kind of thing. I do have cases where it was like a spirit who was haunting a location and like the location was getting torn down and they were scared because they didn’t know what would happen to them if the location disappeared. They didn’t know if they would disappear, too. So they kind of found a different way out of necessity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Actually confirming a haunting can take months. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> A lot of spirits will be very quiet and you will have no activity and then six months in at random, they’ll just kind of like pop off and because they’re comfortable with you now. The paranormal field is not a science, right? We don’t have a textbook that says, “This is how you investigate an object. This is how you investigate a location.” And so for us, what our method looks like — because that evidence component is really important to me — I do not feel comfortable saying something is haunted unless I know 100%. If I am 99% sure, I won’t even say, “Yes.” I have to be 100% sure. The other thing about paranormal activity is it’s not predictable. There is zero predictability. You can’t say turn the lights off and they turn the lights off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So to investigate whether a doll is haunted, Taylor first considers what she calls “subjective observations.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Anything from, I saw that doll move to — I saw a ghost in my house to — I heard footsteps or I got a dream from — about this doll, but for me subjective reports are not enough for me to confirm something is haunted because the brain does crazy things. When people are scared and they are around something that they’re suspecting, the brain can do really crazy things to, you know, trick us. You have things like pareidolia, which is, we see faces in things. And so, people can take that as paranormal, but it’s really just your brain playing tricks on you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So she tries to collect data: fluctuations in air temperature and air pressure, whether motion sensors are activated, and audio and video recordings. She looks for anomalies that she can document and compare against a control. And lastly, Taylor tries to make contact with whatever might be haunting the doll. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So everybody communicates with spirit slightly differently. For me, the way that works best for me personally is a spirit box. What a spirit box is, is essentially, it is an intentionally broken radio, okay? So basically it rapidly sweeps through radio stations and they can manipulate the radio signals to be able to communicate with you. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She often posts spirit box sessions with her dolls. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So that’s something you’re still trying to understand about 2026? The men awful. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Did you hear, “The men awful?” Or did you hear a jumble of static? Skeptics say the audio fragments that are picked up by spirit boxes are random and that it’s confirmation bias and pareidolia that leads investigators to find meaning in the sounds. Taylor, however, says it’s more reliable than other methods. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> There are other tools like Pendulum and Ouija Board, for example, and those things your hands are involved. And for me, like my hands being involved in something, it doesn’t feel like quite as valid of evidence to me. So I really like Spirit Box because my hands are not involved in that. I can’t control what comes out of that box. I have no involvement in that so I like the personal removal from it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sometimes the investigation is a bust. Taylor told me about this time her friends thought she bought a haunted doll. So she brought it over. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Pulled out a spirit box and I’m like, “Hey, like if anybody’s there, like can we talk?” And I got nothing for a long time. You know, I’m like, “Maybe they’re shy.” So I keep asking questions. Nothing is happening. I’m like, “Okay.” Not even like a little bit — not even like a hesitation — nothing. And I’m looking at my friend and I am like, “We’re not getting anything.” And then the spirit box starts talking. And I am thinking, “Oh, maybe they finally decided to show up.” No. Um, it’s Omi, who’s down here in the blue, she’s hilarious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Taylor pointed to a doll behind her. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And she comes on and she’s like, “There’s nothing there.” And I’m like, “It’s not haunted, is it?” And she’s, like, “No.” And I’m like, “Thanks!” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Here’s the tea: the paranormal makes for really good content. This was a very niche hobby until a few years ago. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So, in my opinion, I think the COVID pandemic just shot haunted doll sales up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is around the same time “witchtok” took off — the corner of TikTok dedicated to modern witchcraft. Videos of spell jar recipes, algorithmically recommended tarot readings, and ghost hunting all overlapped with the same audience. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And I think that is largely due to the fact that people were home and they were bored out of their mind and they were looking for something to do. And I think a lot of people were also doom scrolling at that time. Everybody was sitting on TikTok and YouTube all day long watching videos and so people had haunted dolls or making more videos about their haunted dolls than usual because they’re at home all day with them and it was just a perfect storm for like a lot more people who like were not involved in the paranormal or anything to just kind of like decide to try something different. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The more sensational the paranormal content, the better it did online. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> And one of the party tricks that I see a lot is with EMF meters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> These are handheld devices that detect and measure electromagnetic activity. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> They are not ghost metal detectors. Everybody just sees the EMF spike and they assume, “Oh, that’s a ghost,” but they don’t think about all of the other things that set off an EMF meter. Well, we’re in 2026. We have smartwatches that are setting off EMF meters, Wi-Fi, your cell phone — those things are set off by any form of electricity and all of our houses and all these locations are full of electricity, right? But a lot of people will, you know, share proof that their doll is haunted by essentially putting their phone right up to a doll that has an EMF meter on its lap and the EMF is going off and it’s hitting red and everybody’s forgetting that the phone that they’re filming that video on is what is triggering it. So when I see an account where the whole page is just EMF up to a cell phone and nothing else, I’m suspicious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> By becoming so trendy, Taylor says the paranormal community has become less about making contact with the other side and more about making content out of it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I think it’s social media and it’s not just haunted dolls, it’s the whole overall paranormal community. You know, the people that are into the paranormal will chase it to the end of the earth. I mean, some of these locations will charge you, you know, hundreds, thousands of dollars to go investigate there for the night. It’s extremely lucrative. Investigators are seeking evidence. They are interested, obviously. But there’s also, I think, the social media pressure. Content creators, especially, it’s like they, you know, want to — to get content out and they want to keep going so they have to go to more haunted locations and you know, have to have more experiences, because they’re sharing the experiences with the public and people are expecting to see it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And as this genre of content took off, the market for haunted objects suddenly became very lucrative. EBay, Etsy, and Facebook Marketplace technically do allow for sales of haunted or occult objects, as long as the listing includes a disclaimer that it’s for entertainment purposes only. But that disclaimer also means that you can get away with anything. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> People want to have a paranormal experience. People are interested in that now. It didn’t used to be. Everybody didn’t wanna have a paranormal experience before, but now it’s like, people are chasing an experience. So people have learned — there are people who will pay anything to get to have this happen. I think that people have caught on to that. It’s trendy right now, it’s in right now and everybody’s looking for a time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And so, people have learned like, okay, before I could go to like, buy one of those empty storage lockers and I could sell everything for $10 a piece, whatever, but if the haunted doll people pay 200 bucks for that, that’s what I’m going to charge. Um, and the fact of the matter is, when people buy it, people will sell it because there’s a demand for it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Like the dybbuk box that duped countless people 20 years ago, many of these listings have elaborate descriptions recounting tales of supernatural, otherworldly encounters. And dolls, especially, can go for way more than what they’re typically worth if they’re labeled “haunted.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve seen in the thousands, multiple times. I always tell people the higher the price doesn’t mean that it’s more haunted than the ones that are a lower price. Like, a spirit is a spirit. There’s no such thing as like, this spirit is more spirity than this other spirit. My rule of thumb that I always tell people is like, “You can’t put a price on the paranormal,” right? Paranormal experiences are not guaranteed. Paranormal experiences are not scientific fact. So for me, ethically, I believe that the object should be priced similarly to the price that their vessel or their doll is worth. So if you have a doll that is like a collector’s item and worth $300 — yeah, list it for $300. If you have a doll that’s worth $50, list it for $50. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The dybbuk box eBay listing was such a novelty at the time. Now, haunted doll listings are a dime a dozen. On eBay today, I scrolled through listings for haunted dolls, haunted clip-on earrings, haunted keys, haunted cargo pants, haunted labubus and — not joking — a quote, haunted by curious dybbuk box. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I am not cut out for the haunted doll life, but if you were to buy one, how are you supposed to sift through all the haunted scams? Taylor actually makes haunted doll guides and recently started focusing more on creating seller checklists so her followers can vet listings for themselves. She’s wary of any seller that makes content of EMF readings. She’s also suspicious of large-scale listings. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> You go on their page and they have a hundred Haunted Dolls listed and nearly all of them have the same story. I mean, spirits are — they’re people and every person is different. So how do you have a 100 spirits who all are the same person basically with a different name and like slightly changed details? So that’s a red flag. The other thing is if the facts don’t line up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So I have seen — this happens a lot. This is a big one. The story will say, “Oh, this doll is haunted by so-and-so and so-and-so owned this doll when they were alive and it was very meaningful to them, so they chose to keep it with them in the afterlife.” And you source the year on the vessel, and the vessel — the doll itself — was made in 1980. It says that the spirit is from the 1800s. That’s impossible. They couldn’t have owned the doll in the 1800s when the doll was made in the 1980s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> TikTok is full of complaints and warnings of haunted scams. This is especially frustrating to Taylor, who really sees spirit keeping as a lifelong commitment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Seeing people repeatedly getting things that are fake. One, obviously it’s a waste of money. I mean, obviously that’s irritating. Financial scamming is no joke and pisses me off. But it goes beyond that into, you know, those are people that could give an actual spirit a really nice place to live. And getting scammed over and over again chases them away from this hobby. I may be able to change, you know, the quality of afterlife for the spirits in my home. I can help a finite number of spirits, but I can help a lot more spirits if I can teach other people to do what I’m doing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I’m still not sure what my relationship to the paranormal is. I want objective evidence. Data. A clear, unequivocal answer that explains why things are the way that they are. But throughout the interview, I kept catching glimpses of Jeremiah over Taylor’s shoulder with his fluffy teddy bear ears and little legs dangling over the edge of the shelf. And when Taylor talked about taking care of spirits in the afterlife, I swear, I saw him perk up. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">That’s it for Close All Tabs’ special spooky storytime. We’ll have a fresh deep dive for you next week, but if you’re dying to open more tabs about the tales we told today, check out the episode description for some suggested reading. Or stick around after the credits for some bonus content. Okay, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Maya Cueva and edited by Chris Hambrick. It was engineered by Brendan Willard and senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. Additional production support by Cayla Mihalovich. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor-in-Chief. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Special thanks to Hallie Tut, Ted Hegemann, Craig Groshek, Rena Lee, and Paranormal Teej for sharing their stories with us. This episode includes clips and archive tape from Hallie Tut, Eli Unique, Paranomal Teej, and Villains Wiki.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran and recorded on his white Apple Maker Hi-75 keyboard with Foggered in Red Samurai keycaps and Gator on Milky Yellow Pro V2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> So when it comes to buying and selling, they don’t really care about the concept of it. Their primary focus is always like, “Am I going somewhere where somebody is going to be nice to me or not?” That’s what they care about — is like, “Am I going to a good home?” But the one thing I know they don’t like is the shipping. They don’t like shipping. I hear complaints about shipping all the time. So. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, yeah, you can’t, you, can’t yeah, kind of out of your control. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paranormal Teej:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I’m like, “Sorry.” \u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "behind-the-viral-nun-podcast",
"title": "“Sister, yesss!” What’s Behind the Viral Nun Podcast?",
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"headTitle": "“Sister, yesss!” What’s Behind the Viral Nun Podcast? | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year’s internet breakout star was an order of Catholic sisters with a podcast. Within weeks of launching, Dominican Sisters Open Mic went mega viral. Clips and fan edits of host Sister Miriam saying “Sister, yesss!” spread across social media. Secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a “nun girl summer.” At the same time, some have criticized the order behind the podcast for the conservative ideology baked into its educational content. In this episode, we explore how the Dominican Sisters of Mary rose to viral fame, the beliefs behind their easy charm and infectious laughter, and what it all says about the cultural moment we’re in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guests: \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>Paul Dailey, director of marketing at Openlight Media\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://cara.georgetown.edu/sr-thu-t-do-lhc-phd\">Sister Thu T. Do\u003c/a>, Sister of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Hanoi and Research Associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://triciabruce.com/\">Dr. Tricia Bruce\u003c/a>, Sociology of Religion and Director of Social Science Research, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/\">Matthew Remski\u003c/a>, religion and politics journalist, co-host of Conspirituality and author of \u003cem>Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/style/nuns-podcast-ultimate-frisbee-tiktok.html\">Don’t Call Them Nuns. They’re Podcasters.\u003c/a> — Madison Malone Kircher, \u003cem>NYT\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/dominican-sisters-podcast/688395/\">Why Are So Many People Listening to a Podcast About Living in a Convent?\u003c/a> — Luis Parrales, \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a71668183/tiktok-nuns/\">The TikTok Nuns Have Everyone in a Chokehold\u003c/a> — Christen A. Johnson, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nun-girl-summer-rules_uk_6a55fbfee4b0ac1765ef704f\">The Next Hot Trend Might Just Be ‘Nun Girl Summer’\u003c/a> — Amy Glover, \u003cem>Huffington Post\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hello, do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends, tell your frenemies, stir up some drama and while you’re at it, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year’s internet breakout star was not a family vlogger, or a fashion influencer, or a Hype House type creator collective, but an order of Catholic nuns with a podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister 1: Mary is so uncomplicated and we are.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister 2: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Dominican Sisters Open Mic, a podcast from the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. They’re an order based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Within weeks of launching their podcast, they went mega viral. I personally cannot stop saying, Sister, yessss, whenever I agree with a friend’s take. Just like the host Sister Miriam does in this iconic clip. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: I love cooking!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, teach me your ways!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That phrase is the internet earworm of the year. It has its own fan edits. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok User@whsprtz]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And fan reenactments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user @whoismikecentanni]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Person 1: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 2: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 1: Sister, Yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, they technically aren’t nuns, since they aren’t cloistered in a convent. Here’s Sister Louise Marie explaining it in another viral clip. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Louise Marie: We go out and teach, so we’re not just remaining in the convent and so we’re called Sister.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But still, both secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a nun-girl summer, undoubtedly thanks to the popularity of these religious sisters. One commenter claimed, “They sound like a healed, regulated nervous system.” Others pointed out how the clips of these joyful and relaxed sisters are conspicuously devoid of men. But, at its core their popularity seems to stem from the fact that so many people online yearn for the life these sisters portray in their podcast clips. They talk about cooking dinner for each other. They play ultimate frisbee together. They’re always supporting their fellow sisters and complimenting each other’s virtues. Who wouldn’t want a joyful communal living experience like that? But the full story isn’t so simple. Their virality comes at a really unique moment for both secular culture and the Catholic Church. Under that shiny, wholesome exterior, some critics have questioned the political motivations of the Sisters’ religious order. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Whenever I’m charmed, I try to see what the catch is, and so I went beyond the clips to see what they’re doing politically. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So, who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? Why is everyone obsessed with them? Today, we’re looking at how they rose to viral fame, what that says about the cultural moment we’re in, and what some critics see behind their infectious laughter. Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> As usual, let’s open a new tab. Who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? To understand the sisters, we have to understand charisms. In Catholicism, a charism is a divine spiritual gift given by God so that a person can serve others and the church. It’s the driving force behind their mission, and Catholic orders are often organized around them. Some are focused on running community hospitals. Others are focused missionary outreach. And many, like the Dominican Sisters, work in education. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> So, Dominican sisters follow the Dominican charism, which was established by Saint Dominic. And Dominicans place a lot of emphasis on virtue and virtue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Paul Dailey, the Director of Marketing for Open Light Media, the communications arm for the order. It’s the media company that produces the Sisters’ podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are supposed to be teachers and preachers spreading the word of God, how to teach future generations how to live a virtuous life. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This specific order behind Open Light Media—the Dominican Sisters of Mary, mother of the Eucharist—is actually relatively young for a Catholic order. Their mission began in July 1996, when Pope John Paul II called for sisters and priests to be more present in local communities. So four Dominican Sisters from Nashville started looking for a place to establish a new order. Dailey says their origins can be traced back to pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I think it was Sister Joseph Andrew who saw a USA Today article. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They were visiting friends in Chicago when, stopping for gas, she saw a photo of Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> She said, we should just go talk to him because he certainly seems like he would have maybe some money to help us establish an order. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Monaghan was a devout Catholic and already deeply involved in Catholic philanthropy. One of the sisters actually knew him through a Catholic business network that he founded. The sisters were enroute to New York, and the Domino’s headquarters were on the way. So they decided to stop by and say hello. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And so they just went and without really scheduling a call or anything, walked into his office and ended up meeting with Tom Monaghan, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And he was interested in establishing some Catholic schools in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And who better to run your Catholic schools than a bunch of Dominican Sisters. So that was how it ended up in Ann Arbor, and it’s grown to, I believe we’re at over 140 sisters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Daly says that while their mission has remained consistent over the years, how they approach it has evolved. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> Their goal is to preach in the town square, right? And today, it’s not like you have a physical town square that you go to and everybody’s there listening to what’s going on. The internet has really become the town square. It’s not too often you see a religious sister pop up on TikTok, but that’s the whole point is you’re not supposed to just talk to people who believe the same things as you. You’re supposed to go out there into the public square and talk to everybody. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which is why they saw an opportunity to spread their religious message through a podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Maria: I wonder if Mary, she would ever mess with Jesus when he was little, you know, like joke around? Come on, she had to. Every mother does. Like she’d go, where did Messiah go? There he is! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: My all time favorite, this is an outdoor game, but in the summers when we’re all home together is playing ultimate frisbee.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister and you are so good at that. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: I heard of one sister for Lent, she tried to drive the speed limit like the whole time.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: So she gave up speeding? \u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: Yeah, she gave up speeding. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We weren’t able to sit down with any of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, but we did talk to Sister Thu Do, a research associate for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, CARA for short. Sister Thu theorizes that the reason the podcast is so popular is because it shatters stereotypes people have about religious sisterhood.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Popular culture, uh, has painted religious life as like somber or rigid, uh, for far too long. So by projecting authentic joy, the sisters show single women that giving your life to God doesn’t mean losing your personality or joy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And it offers an alternative vision to the isolation many people feel today. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Showing the beauty of community living makes the vocation feel human, touchable and, of course, deeply attractive. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The podcast launched in February this year, and within a couple of weeks, the first viral clip took off. Back in June, Cosmopolitan reported that Dominican Sisters Open Mic listenership is up 3500% since launch, according to Spotify. Millennials and Gen Z make up 84% of the podcast’s audience on the platform. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> This has been a total shock. Sister Miriam always jokes. She said, “when we first started, I told myself, at least my mom will watch this.” She really did not know if anybody was gonna be interested. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But as it turns out, everyone loves these sisters. I mean, the diva edits speak for themselves. These are the fan-made videos remixing clips from the podcast with sick beats and sparkly filters. Fans usually make these edits for pop stars, but in this case, it’s Catholic Sisters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@enzoiio]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>[music] Do you have a hobby? Cooking. Sister, yesss! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They’re so authentically kind and they make you feel like you’re the only person in the whole world even though you know that they interact with like hundreds or thousands of people and yet they’ll still remember fun facts about you. And that just speaks to who they are and the way that they live. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> I think it really captured the imagination of folks who suddenly see these women laughing and saw them as very human and relatable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Dr. Trisha Bruce, a sociologist of religion who studies Catholicism and social change. She pointed out that the average age of religious sisters in the U.S. is around 80 years old. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> This group is not like that. These are younger women. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The sisters interviewed on the podcast are typically in their 30s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> These are women who were thinking about the here and now and the future. They’re influencers, but they don’t live a life or act like influencers other than having the influence that they have. So there are all sorts of contradictions and unique things about them that I think really spark curiosity and attention and intrigue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> According to Dr. Bruce, it’s also… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Showcasing a different story for what religion is or also for how, in this case, younger women for whom this is a deeply meaningful experience. So I think they show something in a bright light that has otherwise been fairly treated with skepticism and uncertainty for so many years, given all of the trouble, of course, that religion has been in, too, in different ways. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Women have always been part of the Catholic media landscape, from developing programming to managing communications to helping write and distribute diocese newspapers. Back in 1981, Mother Angelica established the Catholic Media Empire by launching EWTN, which turned into a global religious broadcasting network. She herself appeared in broadcasts, answering questions and giving advice from her rocking chair. Her show was revolutionary because it was so casual. The vibe wasn’t that different from what the Dominican Sisters are doing with their podcasts today. Mother Angelica was so influential that she herself has gotten the diva edit TikTok treatment, years after her passing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from TikTok user @giramoficiall]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Mother Angelica: I’ve always said, God was very, very good to some man when he gave me a religious vocation. [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Mother Angelica was an outlier. Dr. Bruce says that historically, men were front and center in Catholic media. They were the voices of the church, speaking on Catholic radio, writing Catholic op-eds, and appearing on Catholic television broadcasts. Today, media has evolved, drastically. The great shift to digital has given others a chance to share their voices too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think we’re seeing here an example of a group of religious sisters who has very wisely seen, ah, there’s a gap, there is an opening. The people are here, the messaging is over here. So we need to take the message and put it into these new spaces. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The Dominican Sisters have actually been working on their media presence for years. The podcast is just the latest in several efforts they’ve made to spread their message and fundraise, using the media to their advantage, like going on the Oprah Winfrey Show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Oprah correspondent Lisa Ling: Why did you want to pursue this life? \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is a clip from their first appearance on Oprah in 2010. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: God wanted me here, and he made it very clear to me.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Lisa Ling: How do you know? Like, do you hear a voice?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister: It’s right here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Five years after that appearance, Oprah aired an update and interviewed the Dominican Sisters of Mary. Some of them were actually viewers. They said they were inspired to answer the call after watching that first segment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: Now we’re known as the Oprah nuns, so if you put into Google or any search engine the Oprah Nuns, we will come right up. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Obviously, virality is not a Catholic charism. The Dominican Sisters’ ultimate mission goes beyond getting on Oprah or building a TikTok following. They’re really focused on education and they’ve been incredibly digitally adept in that field too. They run Open Light Media, a subscription platform of Catholic educational content. And this is where things start to get complicated. Matthew Remski was also taken by the Sisters’ easy charm and joyful conversations. But as a cradle Catholic and writer who reports on religion and authoritarian extremism, he had to dig deeper. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think they really offer a fantastic package, and then they also hide what they believe too, and they have to, because if you really scratch the surface on what fairly conservative Catholic nuns believe, it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of the women that are actually really thrilled by contemplating this communal life. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what isn’t reflected in the podcast clips going viral on TikTok? After the break, we’re driving into open light media and some of the ideology baked into its educational content. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. When we’re back, we are getting into the politics behind the clips. Stick around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, we’re back. Let’s open a new tab. What do the Dominican Sisters believe? While the sisters have definitely gotten a lot of attention for their viral success, others are looking beyond the charm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Now the press coverage has focused on the vibes without a single question raised about their politics. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Matthew Remski again, a researcher and writer who reports on authoritarian extremism, spiritual influence, and religion. He’s critiqued the sisters on his own show, the Conspirituality Podcast, and on TikTok. He, too, grew up Catholic, in a very particular school of Catholic thought. That experience shaped his viewpoint on organized religion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> There’s a pugnacious part of me that says, yeah, I’m absolutely still Catholic, but I’m the kind of Catholic that I learned how to be initially when I was introduced to the church through liberation theology back in the 1970s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Liberation theology is a religious movement. It emphasizes not just serving the poor, but also dismantling social injustice and economic inequality. It’s a very political approach to religion. It actually originated in Latin American Marxist movements. And this is important, because this is central to Matthew’s criticism of Dominican Sisters Open Mic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think that they’ve done an incredible job at providing people, women especially, younger women especially with a vision of, you know, productivity and communal life and shared purpose in the world that is also, you now, about shared resources. And I think they really put together an attractive vision of an alternative to the precarious. Uh, an alternative to, um, you know, Instagram and tech talk life. I also knew at the same time that they were, uh, concealing what they’re really about, uh in a particular way that, that I wanted to make clear. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Because while the sisters talk about playing frisbee and cooking and the joys of communal living for a higher purpose, Matthew has qualms about the ideology of the Catholic order they serve under. Chief among his concerns is Open Light Media, the media company that produces their podcast. The podcast is actually just a side project. Open Light’s main focus is producing educational content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> If you look at their product page, that is their main output, right? They sell these courses to Catholic educators and homeschoolers. It is an anti-public education, anti-secular industry. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Open Light Media produces a faith-based Catholic alternative to something called social emotional learning. Social emotional learning is an educational framework that revolves around teaching children relationship building skills, responsible decision making, and emotional regulation. This method has been widely adopted by American public schools, many of which implement classroom-wide life skill lessons and daily check-ins, as well as individualized behavioral support for students who need it. There’s a lot of focus on identifying feelings, empathy for others, and affirmation, which has been criticized by some conservatives, including many Catholic organizations, who say \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Look, you know, all of this touchy-feely, no-God-centered, secular, psychological stuff that you guys are doing with kids are really leaving them unanchored. They’re leading kids astray. They are not giving them a grounding of the truth of the gospel, which is that there are two genders or, you can’t really change your sex or whatever, or that it’s not really natural to be queer. If you’re going to be a queer, you can’t really act on it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They actually addressed this in the very first episode of Dominican Sisters Open Mic, when one sister interviewed Catholic psychologists about the dangers of secular education. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: I think Tik Tok was essentially responsible for this kind of transgender movement.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: And creating a generation that had been manipulated\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: to think about gender in this very relative way. We’re just leaving them in this state of confusion because they’ve been manipulated in this way.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Brett Salkeld: Right. And then, and then when we put them in this state, and then we affirm. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Instead of affirmation culture, as one of the podcast guests put it, Open Light’s educational programs focus on virtues and faith. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski:\u003c/strong> Which they believe should replace the secular version of social-emotional learning in public schools because they believe that social- emotional learning in public school is the kind of thing that just allows kids to explore themselves in a way that might make them understand that they’re trans. Like they’re using a kind of quasi-intellectual take on an educational practice to try to persuade people that in order to be a well-rounded teacher who nurtures well-rounded children, you really have to give them a kind of social-emotional context that’s based in God. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Of course, this conservative religious ideology isn’t obvious from the clips going viral on TikTok. As Matthew noted, the podcast didn’t blow up until Sister Miriam took the reins as host, and they pivoted from lengthy discussions on Catholic education to one-on-one interviews with other sisters about their own lives. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Andre: Some people like to play scripture roulette, right? Do the, like, flip through the Bible and like finger point. I mean, that’s one way. Actually, sometimes God has really spoken to me in that way. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some people on ex-Catholic forums on Reddit have questioned the authenticity of the sisters’ joy. Commenters have speculated that they’re under pressure to come off as fun and that the podcast is just propaganda. And while Matthew agrees that the clips are propaganda for the Catholic Church, he doesn’t agree with all of the detractors’ assumptions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I don’t want to dismiss them personally because they seem like really lovely people who, you know, I would love to hang out with. And I don’t t get any sense that anybody is trying to be deceptive or anybody is trying to be, you know, manipulative and recruiting. I think they are really presenting their best lives and I don t know how conscious they are of, you know, concealing the ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But what does bother him is that this portrayal of Catholicism is what consistently goes viral, a palatable version that isn’t upfront about a belief system that younger viewers on social media might find far less appealing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> And while they’re doing that, they are not, to my knowledge, engaging in any of the social justice work that generations of prior religious women in the United States have been engaged in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Religious sisters have taken on different types of social justice work throughout modern American history. In 1965, a group of Catholic sisters marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights for all. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Catholic sisters in Oakland fought to build affordable housing for patients who needed live-in medical care. In 2012, sisters known as the Nuns on the Bus traveled across the country in protest of federal budget cuts that would have affected vulnerable, low-income Americans. And more recently, religious sisters have been fighting ICE deportation efforts across the country, funding passports for children who’ve been separated from their deported parents. And organizing demonstrations outside of ICE detention centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> This is the liberation theology legacy that exists within Catholic religious life, which has now become a kind of minority demographic and now which is being outshadowed by the high production values of, you know, convents and monastic communities that have better social media skills and, you now, may well be supported by conservative Catholics. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that glitzy, polished Catholic media costs money. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> You need support for that. You need cultural support for that. And we also know that, you know, especially in the United States, wealthy Catholics are responsible for supporting all kinds of politicized reactionary religious efforts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We asked Paul Daly, Open Light Media’s Director of Marketing, about some of the critiques of the organization’s ideology. He wasn’t surprised. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I mean, no matter what, if you’re going into the public space in any way, there’s going to be critiques, right? If somebody disagrees with something that the sisters say, the whole point is that the sisters are not saying necessarily that you have to agree with them in order to still listen to them. And keep in mind, a majority of these sisters are teachers. And so, they’re out throughout the country working at different schools. And of course, they work at Catholic schools, but you don’t have to be Catholic to go to Catholic school. So, they have tons of students, you know, who have different viewpoints. And so, they’re very used to interacting with people who disagree with them, even dislike them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But he did acknowledge that religious sisterhood is deeper than what viewers see in short vertical video clips. Committing to religious life is far from an easy choice. And for many, it comes with great personal sacrifice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are joyful and happy and you know, but we also don’t want to, you know, sell short just how hard they work. Cause it really is definitely not just hanging out playing frisbee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We followed up with Paul after our interview, giving him another opportunity to respond to critiques of Open Light Media and asking him whether the Dominican Sisters of Mary have engaged in any type of social justice work. We didn’t hear back though. So what does the sisters’ virality say about religious life in the U.S. though? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s a new tab. What is “nun girl summer” really about? While the Dominican Sisters of Mary kicked off “nun girl summer” earlier this year, Catholic influence appears to have made waves in pop culture across America, both on and offline. Convents in New York are reporting long waitlists for prayer retreats. Birkenstock rolled out these stop-motion ads this summer, featuring nuns doing hopscotch in slides. Catholic Kitsch has made a comeback. Cutesy, nostalgic, novelty prayer candles and glittery Jesus statues are prime meme material. In other words, Catholicism is really up right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> My mom, a baby boomer, she grew up in a very Catholic world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Tricia Bruce again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think for a lot of Catholics who grew up in that world, your neighborhood was Catholic. You called your neighborhood by the name of your parish. Oftentimes, this was very intertwined with ethnic identity. religion, Catholicism was everywhere. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Fast forward, and religious life in the US looks very different now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Many kids today, of course, are being raised in non-religious households, non- religious families. So. Religion is less of a forefront reality in home, in the neighborhood, in the broader culture. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If organized religion is no longer mainstream, then… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> It makes it feel countercultural. It makes that look different. It makes it feels intriguing and mysterious or maybe even a way to connect to something bigger than oneself in a world that feels so isolating and lonely. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Think about the vintage marketplace today. For some, their grail is a 90s-era purse that someone’s grandma probably has in her closet. For others, it’s a mid-century table lamp that was once common in every university library. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> They’re a treasure to one generation. They get thrown out as trash to the next. And then suddenly, another generation looks around and is like, oh, this is super cool. There’s something here. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We’re trying to dig around for something authentic and real. And in that, there becomes… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> An opening there for an intrigue around religion that I think is likewise helping to give Catholicism this kind of moment. It is certainly an invitation to learn more and for some to take action. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Bruce says that people have been distrustful and skeptical of religion and religious institutions for valid reasons. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Because, of course, you have instances of abuse or discrimination or inauthenticity that have really been a reckoning for many institutions. And I think now the religion and other institutions are undergoing a massive project to rebuild trust and people talk about looking for authenticity. And so I think the podcast by these Dominican sisters is in some ways a reflection of authenticity or a desire to showcase a more transparent experience and message around religion and a re-invitation to see as trustworthy, something like religion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sister Thu agrees. In her research at CARA at Georgetown, she’s found that Millennials and Gen Z are reporting historic levels of isolation and anxiety. The Dominican Sisters podcast emerged in the midst of that cold. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> It is responding directly to a hunger for belonging and meaning, especially among the younger generations, as they always search for meaning and real connection. We are seeing a remarkable spiritual surge. Dioceses and campus ministries across the country reported significant surges in baptisms and new candidates last Easter. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She says that what the sisters are doing with their podcast is really in line with what the whole universal Catholic Church is doing. CARA reports that adults 18 to 35 spend hours online searching for connection, so it makes sense to reach them where they’re at. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> And that is the digital evangelization tool in the modern town square, which today happens to be TikTok and YouTube feeds. Right, so by showing up in these digital spaces, the sisters fulfill their religious mandate to meet believers, you know, seekers and non-believers alike where they already spend their time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Is it actually bringing anyone into religious sisterhood though? Well, it takes a really long time to become a sister. It’s a years long process. But while it’s too early to tell if podcast listeners will be inspired to join the Catholic order, like Oprah viewers were 16 years ago, there is a lot of interest in it. Paul from Open Light Media said that after going viral, the Dominican sisters have seen an uptick in young women reaching out for discernment. That’s a process of examining whether it’s God’s will to do something, like becoming a nun. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And there’s actually a link specifically for that because we saw that happening on our link tree. The process of becoming a sister is very drawn out. It takes years to become a fully professed sister. I anticipate that 10, 15 years down the line, we will probably have a handful of sisters who first heard about the order from the podcast. I really do. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Matthew Remski urges people to look beyond the viral clips, the fan edits, and the esthetic mood boards, to really investigate what religious sisterhood means and what the organization, the viral content is coming from, stands for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Religious life is punk rock. There’s something really cool about it. And let’s just be clear about what it all entails, right? I would say that what they are showing is the delight they have in communal life. And they’re not showing what the ideological price is for that. Like, I think most people will watch the clip about Ultimate Frisbee or any other activity that they have or like Bingo Night or Games Night or whatever they’re talking about, they’re talking how much fun they have together. And that’s really wonderful and heartwarming. But I think that when you understand that, oh, they actually have a straightforward Catholic ideology that’s driving their faith and their intellectual output and you learn what that ideology teaches and you learned that it’s exclusionary, the conviviality, the thing that people are attracted to, I just wanna say it comes at a price and you gotta know what the price is. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This doesn’t mean that you can’t watch the sisters’ content or find solace in their joy. Will I stop saying, ‘sister, yes’ every time I agree with my literal sister? No. But it is worth considering where the content on your feed really comes from and digging deeper beyond viral clips, even if their laughter is infectious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic] \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>[Laughter] Sister, yes! [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> With that, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon, additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is executive director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local. This episode includes clips from Open Light Media and Matthew Remske, AKA Anti-Fascist Dad, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. It also includes clips from the TikTok accounts @Whsprtz, @whoismikecentanni, @Rag_dti, @thawestt, @editzz103d, @enzoiio, and @giramoficial. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran. And recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> It’s really meant for people who, maybe they grew up Catholic and they just don’t really go to church anymore. Maybe they grew up without any religion at all and they see a sister pop up in their TikTok feed and they’re like, I didn’t realize that nuns had podcasts, which is a pretty common comment that we get.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This year’s internet breakout star was an order of Catholic sisters with a podcast. Within weeks of launching, Dominican Sisters Open Mic went mega viral. Clips and fan edits of host Sister Miriam saying “Sister, yesss!” spread across social media. Secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a “nun girl summer.” At the same time, some have criticized the order behind the podcast for the conservative ideology baked into its educational content. In this episode, we explore how the Dominican Sisters of Mary rose to viral fame, the beliefs behind their easy charm and infectious laughter, and what it all says about the cultural moment we’re in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This year’s internet breakout star was an order of Catholic sisters with a podcast. Within weeks of launching, Dominican Sisters Open Mic went mega viral. Clips and fan edits of host Sister Miriam saying “Sister, yesss!” spread across social media. Secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a “nun girl summer.” At the same time, some have criticized the order behind the podcast for the conservative ideology baked into its educational content. In this episode, we explore how the Dominican Sisters of Mary rose to viral fame, the beliefs behind their easy charm and infectious laughter, and what it all says about the cultural moment we’re in.\u003c/p>\n"
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"Don’t Call Them Nuns. They’re Podcasters. — Madison Malone Kircher, NYT",
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"The TikTok Nuns Have Everyone in a Chokehold — Christen A. Johnson, Cosmopolitan",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hello, do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends, tell your frenemies, stir up some drama and while you’re at it, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hello, do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends, tell your frenemies, stir up some drama and while you’re at it, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year’s internet breakout star was not a family vlogger, or a fashion influencer, or a Hype House type creator collective, but an order of Catholic nuns with a podcast. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year’s internet breakout star was not a family vlogger, or a fashion influencer, or a Hype House type creator collective, but an order of Catholic nuns with a podcast. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister 1: Mary is so uncomplicated and we are.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister 2: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister 1: Mary is so uncomplicated and we are.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister 2: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Dominican Sisters Open Mic, a podcast from the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. They’re an order based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Within weeks of launching their podcast, they went mega viral. I personally cannot stop saying, Sister, yessss, whenever I agree with a friend’s take. Just like the host Sister Miriam does in this iconic clip. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Dominican Sisters Open Mic, a podcast from the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. They’re an order based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Within weeks of launching their podcast, they went mega viral. I personally cannot stop saying, Sister, yessss, whenever I agree with a friend’s take. Just like the host Sister Miriam does in this iconic clip. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: I love cooking!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, teach me your ways!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: I love cooking!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, teach me your ways!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That phrase is the internet earworm of the year. It has its own fan edits. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That phrase is the internet earworm of the year. It has its own fan edits. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok User@whsprtz]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok User@whsprtz]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And fan reenactments. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And fan reenactments. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user @whoismikecentanni]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Person 1: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 2: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 1: Sister, Yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user @whoismikecentanni]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Person 1: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 2: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 1: Sister, Yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, they technically aren’t nuns, since they aren’t cloistered in a convent. Here’s Sister Louise Marie explaining it in another viral clip. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, they technically aren’t nuns, since they aren’t cloistered in a convent. Here’s Sister Louise Marie explaining it in another viral clip. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Louise Marie: We go out and teach, so we’re not just remaining in the convent and so we’re called Sister.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Louise Marie: We go out and teach, so we’re not just remaining in the convent and so we’re called Sister.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But still, both secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a nun-girl summer, undoubtedly thanks to the popularity of these religious sisters. One commenter claimed, “They sound like a healed, regulated nervous system.” Others pointed out how the clips of these joyful and relaxed sisters are conspicuously devoid of men. But, at its core their popularity seems to stem from the fact that so many people online yearn for the life these sisters portray in their podcast clips. They talk about cooking dinner for each other. They play ultimate frisbee together. They’re always supporting their fellow sisters and complimenting each other’s virtues. Who wouldn’t want a joyful communal living experience like that? But the full story isn’t so simple. Their virality comes at a really unique moment for both secular culture and the Catholic Church. Under that shiny, wholesome exterior, some critics have questioned the political motivations of the Sisters’ religious order. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But still, both secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a nun-girl summer, undoubtedly thanks to the popularity of these religious sisters. One commenter claimed, “They sound like a healed, regulated nervous system.” Others pointed out how the clips of these joyful and relaxed sisters are conspicuously devoid of men. But, at its core their popularity seems to stem from the fact that so many people online yearn for the life these sisters portray in their podcast clips. They talk about cooking dinner for each other. They play ultimate frisbee together. They’re always supporting their fellow sisters and complimenting each other’s virtues. Who wouldn’t want a joyful communal living experience like that? But the full story isn’t so simple. Their virality comes at a really unique moment for both secular culture and the Catholic Church. Under that shiny, wholesome exterior, some critics have questioned the political motivations of the Sisters’ religious order. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Whenever I’m charmed, I try to see what the catch is, and so I went beyond the clips to see what they’re doing politically. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Whenever I’m charmed, I try to see what the catch is, and so I went beyond the clips to see what they’re doing politically. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So, who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? Why is everyone obsessed with them? Today, we’re looking at how they rose to viral fame, what that says about the cultural moment we’re in, and what some critics see behind their infectious laughter. Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So, who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? Why is everyone obsessed with them? Today, we’re looking at how they rose to viral fame, what that says about the cultural moment we’re in, and what some critics see behind their infectious laughter. Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> As usual, let’s open a new tab. Who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? To understand the sisters, we have to understand charisms. In Catholicism, a charism is a divine spiritual gift given by God so that a person can serve others and the church. It’s the driving force behind their mission, and Catholic orders are often organized around them. Some are focused on running community hospitals. Others are focused missionary outreach. And many, like the Dominican Sisters, work in education. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> As usual, let’s open a new tab. Who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? To understand the sisters, we have to understand charisms. In Catholicism, a charism is a divine spiritual gift given by God so that a person can serve others and the church. It’s the driving force behind their mission, and Catholic orders are often organized around them. Some are focused on running community hospitals. Others are focused missionary outreach. And many, like the Dominican Sisters, work in education. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> So, Dominican sisters follow the Dominican charism, which was established by Saint Dominic. And Dominicans place a lot of emphasis on virtue and virtue. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> So, Dominican sisters follow the Dominican charism, which was established by Saint Dominic. And Dominicans place a lot of emphasis on virtue and virtue. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Paul Dailey, the Director of Marketing for Open Light Media, the communications arm for the order. It’s the media company that produces the Sisters’ podcast. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Paul Dailey, the Director of Marketing for Open Light Media, the communications arm for the order. It’s the media company that produces the Sisters’ podcast. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are supposed to be teachers and preachers spreading the word of God, how to teach future generations how to live a virtuous life. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are supposed to be teachers and preachers spreading the word of God, how to teach future generations how to live a virtuous life. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This specific order behind Open Light Media—the Dominican Sisters of Mary, mother of the Eucharist—is actually relatively young for a Catholic order. Their mission began in July 1996, when Pope John Paul II called for sisters and priests to be more present in local communities. So four Dominican Sisters from Nashville started looking for a place to establish a new order. Dailey says their origins can be traced back to pizza. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This specific order behind Open Light Media—the Dominican Sisters of Mary, mother of the Eucharist—is actually relatively young for a Catholic order. Their mission began in July 1996, when Pope John Paul II called for sisters and priests to be more present in local communities. So four Dominican Sisters from Nashville started looking for a place to establish a new order. Dailey says their origins can be traced back to pizza. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I think it was Sister Joseph Andrew who saw a USA Today article. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I think it was Sister Joseph Andrew who saw a USA Today article. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They were visiting friends in Chicago when, stopping for gas, she saw a photo of Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They were visiting friends in Chicago when, stopping for gas, she saw a photo of Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> She said, we should just go talk to him because he certainly seems like he would have maybe some money to help us establish an order. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> She said, we should just go talk to him because he certainly seems like he would have maybe some money to help us establish an order. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Monaghan was a devout Catholic and already deeply involved in Catholic philanthropy. One of the sisters actually knew him through a Catholic business network that he founded. The sisters were enroute to New York, and the Domino’s headquarters were on the way. So they decided to stop by and say hello. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Monaghan was a devout Catholic and already deeply involved in Catholic philanthropy. One of the sisters actually knew him through a Catholic business network that he founded. The sisters were enroute to New York, and the Domino’s headquarters were on the way. So they decided to stop by and say hello. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And so they just went and without really scheduling a call or anything, walked into his office and ended up meeting with Tom Monaghan, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And so they just went and without really scheduling a call or anything, walked into his office and ended up meeting with Tom Monaghan, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And he was interested in establishing some Catholic schools in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And he was interested in establishing some Catholic schools in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And who better to run your Catholic schools than a bunch of Dominican Sisters. So that was how it ended up in Ann Arbor, and it’s grown to, I believe we’re at over 140 sisters. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And who better to run your Catholic schools than a bunch of Dominican Sisters. So that was how it ended up in Ann Arbor, and it’s grown to, I believe we’re at over 140 sisters. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Daly says that while their mission has remained consistent over the years, how they approach it has evolved. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Daly says that while their mission has remained consistent over the years, how they approach it has evolved. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> Their goal is to preach in the town square, right? And today, it’s not like you have a physical town square that you go to and everybody’s there listening to what’s going on. The internet has really become the town square. It’s not too often you see a religious sister pop up on TikTok, but that’s the whole point is you’re not supposed to just talk to people who believe the same things as you. You’re supposed to go out there into the public square and talk to everybody. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> Their goal is to preach in the town square, right? And today, it’s not like you have a physical town square that you go to and everybody’s there listening to what’s going on. The internet has really become the town square. It’s not too often you see a religious sister pop up on TikTok, but that’s the whole point is you’re not supposed to just talk to people who believe the same things as you. You’re supposed to go out there into the public square and talk to everybody. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which is why they saw an opportunity to spread their religious message through a podcast. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which is why they saw an opportunity to spread their religious message through a podcast. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Maria: I wonder if Mary, she would ever mess with Jesus when he was little, you know, like joke around? Come on, she had to. Every mother does. Like she’d go, where did Messiah go? There he is! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Maria: I wonder if Mary, she would ever mess with Jesus when he was little, you know, like joke around? Come on, she had to. Every mother does. Like she’d go, where did Messiah go? There he is! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: My all time favorite, this is an outdoor game, but in the summers when we’re all home together is playing ultimate frisbee.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister and you are so good at that. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: My all time favorite, this is an outdoor game, but in the summers when we’re all home together is playing ultimate frisbee.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister and you are so good at that. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: I heard of one sister for Lent, she tried to drive the speed limit like the whole time.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: So she gave up speeding? \u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: Yeah, she gave up speeding. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: I heard of one sister for Lent, she tried to drive the speed limit like the whole time.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: So she gave up speeding? \u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: Yeah, she gave up speeding. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We weren’t able to sit down with any of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, but we did talk to Sister Thu Do, a research associate for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, CARA for short. Sister Thu theorizes that the reason the podcast is so popular is because it shatters stereotypes people have about religious sisterhood.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We weren’t able to sit down with any of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, but we did talk to Sister Thu Do, a research associate for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, CARA for short. Sister Thu theorizes that the reason the podcast is so popular is because it shatters stereotypes people have about religious sisterhood.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Popular culture, uh, has painted religious life as like somber or rigid, uh, for far too long. So by projecting authentic joy, the sisters show single women that giving your life to God doesn’t mean losing your personality or joy. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Popular culture, uh, has painted religious life as like somber or rigid, uh, for far too long. So by projecting authentic joy, the sisters show single women that giving your life to God doesn’t mean losing your personality or joy. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And it offers an alternative vision to the isolation many people feel today. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And it offers an alternative vision to the isolation many people feel today. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Showing the beauty of community living makes the vocation feel human, touchable and, of course, deeply attractive. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Showing the beauty of community living makes the vocation feel human, touchable and, of course, deeply attractive. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The podcast launched in February this year, and within a couple of weeks, the first viral clip took off. Back in June, Cosmopolitan reported that Dominican Sisters Open Mic listenership is up 3500% since launch, according to Spotify. Millennials and Gen Z make up 84% of the podcast’s audience on the platform. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The podcast launched in February this year, and within a couple of weeks, the first viral clip took off. Back in June, Cosmopolitan reported that Dominican Sisters Open Mic listenership is up 3500% since launch, according to Spotify. Millennials and Gen Z make up 84% of the podcast’s audience on the platform. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> This has been a total shock. Sister Miriam always jokes. She said, “when we first started, I told myself, at least my mom will watch this.” She really did not know if anybody was gonna be interested. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> This has been a total shock. Sister Miriam always jokes. She said, “when we first started, I told myself, at least my mom will watch this.” She really did not know if anybody was gonna be interested. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But as it turns out, everyone loves these sisters. I mean, the diva edits speak for themselves. These are the fan-made videos remixing clips from the podcast with sick beats and sparkly filters. Fans usually make these edits for pop stars, but in this case, it’s Catholic Sisters. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But as it turns out, everyone loves these sisters. I mean, the diva edits speak for themselves. These are the fan-made videos remixing clips from the podcast with sick beats and sparkly filters. Fans usually make these edits for pop stars, but in this case, it’s Catholic Sisters. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@enzoiio]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>[music] Do you have a hobby? Cooking. Sister, yesss! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@enzoiio]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>[music] Do you have a hobby? Cooking. Sister, yesss! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They’re so authentically kind and they make you feel like you’re the only person in the whole world even though you know that they interact with like hundreds or thousands of people and yet they’ll still remember fun facts about you. And that just speaks to who they are and the way that they live. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They’re so authentically kind and they make you feel like you’re the only person in the whole world even though you know that they interact with like hundreds or thousands of people and yet they’ll still remember fun facts about you. And that just speaks to who they are and the way that they live. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> I think it really captured the imagination of folks who suddenly see these women laughing and saw them as very human and relatable. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> I think it really captured the imagination of folks who suddenly see these women laughing and saw them as very human and relatable. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Dr. Trisha Bruce, a sociologist of religion who studies Catholicism and social change. She pointed out that the average age of religious sisters in the U.S. is around 80 years old. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Dr. Trisha Bruce, a sociologist of religion who studies Catholicism and social change. She pointed out that the average age of religious sisters in the U.S. is around 80 years old. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> This group is not like that. These are younger women. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> This group is not like that. These are younger women. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The sisters interviewed on the podcast are typically in their 30s. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The sisters interviewed on the podcast are typically in their 30s. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> These are women who were thinking about the here and now and the future. They’re influencers, but they don’t live a life or act like influencers other than having the influence that they have. So there are all sorts of contradictions and unique things about them that I think really spark curiosity and attention and intrigue. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> These are women who were thinking about the here and now and the future. They’re influencers, but they don’t live a life or act like influencers other than having the influence that they have. So there are all sorts of contradictions and unique things about them that I think really spark curiosity and attention and intrigue. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> According to Dr. Bruce, it’s also… \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> According to Dr. Bruce, it’s also… \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Showcasing a different story for what religion is or also for how, in this case, younger women for whom this is a deeply meaningful experience. So I think they show something in a bright light that has otherwise been fairly treated with skepticism and uncertainty for so many years, given all of the trouble, of course, that religion has been in, too, in different ways. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Showcasing a different story for what religion is or also for how, in this case, younger women for whom this is a deeply meaningful experience. So I think they show something in a bright light that has otherwise been fairly treated with skepticism and uncertainty for so many years, given all of the trouble, of course, that religion has been in, too, in different ways. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Women have always been part of the Catholic media landscape, from developing programming to managing communications to helping write and distribute diocese newspapers. Back in 1981, Mother Angelica established the Catholic Media Empire by launching EWTN, which turned into a global religious broadcasting network. She herself appeared in broadcasts, answering questions and giving advice from her rocking chair. Her show was revolutionary because it was so casual. The vibe wasn’t that different from what the Dominican Sisters are doing with their podcasts today. Mother Angelica was so influential that she herself has gotten the diva edit TikTok treatment, years after her passing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Women have always been part of the Catholic media landscape, from developing programming to managing communications to helping write and distribute diocese newspapers. Back in 1981, Mother Angelica established the Catholic Media Empire by launching EWTN, which turned into a global religious broadcasting network. She herself appeared in broadcasts, answering questions and giving advice from her rocking chair. Her show was revolutionary because it was so casual. The vibe wasn’t that different from what the Dominican Sisters are doing with their podcasts today. Mother Angelica was so influential that she herself has gotten the diva edit TikTok treatment, years after her passing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from TikTok user @giramoficiall]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Mother Angelica: I’ve always said, God was very, very good to some man when he gave me a religious vocation. [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Clip from TikTok user @giramoficiall]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Mother Angelica: I’ve always said, God was very, very good to some man when he gave me a religious vocation. [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Mother Angelica was an outlier. Dr. Bruce says that historically, men were front and center in Catholic media. They were the voices of the church, speaking on Catholic radio, writing Catholic op-eds, and appearing on Catholic television broadcasts. Today, media has evolved, drastically. The great shift to digital has given others a chance to share their voices too. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Mother Angelica was an outlier. Dr. Bruce says that historically, men were front and center in Catholic media. They were the voices of the church, speaking on Catholic radio, writing Catholic op-eds, and appearing on Catholic television broadcasts. Today, media has evolved, drastically. The great shift to digital has given others a chance to share their voices too. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think we’re seeing here an example of a group of religious sisters who has very wisely seen, ah, there’s a gap, there is an opening. The people are here, the messaging is over here. So we need to take the message and put it into these new spaces. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think we’re seeing here an example of a group of religious sisters who has very wisely seen, ah, there’s a gap, there is an opening. The people are here, the messaging is over here. So we need to take the message and put it into these new spaces. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The Dominican Sisters have actually been working on their media presence for years. The podcast is just the latest in several efforts they’ve made to spread their message and fundraise, using the media to their advantage, like going on the Oprah Winfrey Show. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The Dominican Sisters have actually been working on their media presence for years. The podcast is just the latest in several efforts they’ve made to spread their message and fundraise, using the media to their advantage, like going on the Oprah Winfrey Show. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Oprah correspondent Lisa Ling: Why did you want to pursue this life? \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Oprah correspondent Lisa Ling: Why did you want to pursue this life? \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is a clip from their first appearance on Oprah in 2010. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is a clip from their first appearance on Oprah in 2010. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: God wanted me here, and he made it very clear to me.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Lisa Ling: How do you know? Like, do you hear a voice?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister: It’s right here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: God wanted me here, and he made it very clear to me.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Lisa Ling: How do you know? Like, do you hear a voice?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister: It’s right here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Five years after that appearance, Oprah aired an update and interviewed the Dominican Sisters of Mary. Some of them were actually viewers. They said they were inspired to answer the call after watching that first segment. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Five years after that appearance, Oprah aired an update and interviewed the Dominican Sisters of Mary. Some of them were actually viewers. They said they were inspired to answer the call after watching that first segment. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: Now we’re known as the Oprah nuns, so if you put into Google or any search engine the Oprah Nuns, we will come right up. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: Now we’re known as the Oprah nuns, so if you put into Google or any search engine the Oprah Nuns, we will come right up. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Obviously, virality is not a Catholic charism. The Dominican Sisters’ ultimate mission goes beyond getting on Oprah or building a TikTok following. They’re really focused on education and they’ve been incredibly digitally adept in that field too. They run Open Light Media, a subscription platform of Catholic educational content. And this is where things start to get complicated. Matthew Remski was also taken by the Sisters’ easy charm and joyful conversations. But as a cradle Catholic and writer who reports on religion and authoritarian extremism, he had to dig deeper. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Obviously, virality is not a Catholic charism. The Dominican Sisters’ ultimate mission goes beyond getting on Oprah or building a TikTok following. They’re really focused on education and they’ve been incredibly digitally adept in that field too. They run Open Light Media, a subscription platform of Catholic educational content. And this is where things start to get complicated. Matthew Remski was also taken by the Sisters’ easy charm and joyful conversations. But as a cradle Catholic and writer who reports on religion and authoritarian extremism, he had to dig deeper. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think they really offer a fantastic package, and then they also hide what they believe too, and they have to, because if you really scratch the surface on what fairly conservative Catholic nuns believe, it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of the women that are actually really thrilled by contemplating this communal life. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think they really offer a fantastic package, and then they also hide what they believe too, and they have to, because if you really scratch the surface on what fairly conservative Catholic nuns believe, it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of the women that are actually really thrilled by contemplating this communal life. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what isn’t reflected in the podcast clips going viral on TikTok? After the break, we’re driving into open light media and some of the ideology baked into its educational content. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. When we’re back, we are getting into the politics behind the clips. Stick around. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what isn’t reflected in the podcast clips going viral on TikTok? After the break, we’re driving into open light media and some of the ideology baked into its educational content. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. When we’re back, we are getting into the politics behind the clips. Stick around. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, we’re back. Let’s open a new tab. What do the Dominican Sisters believe? While the sisters have definitely gotten a lot of attention for their viral success, others are looking beyond the charm. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, we’re back. Let’s open a new tab. What do the Dominican Sisters believe? While the sisters have definitely gotten a lot of attention for their viral success, others are looking beyond the charm. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Now the press coverage has focused on the vibes without a single question raised about their politics. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Now the press coverage has focused on the vibes without a single question raised about their politics. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Matthew Remski again, a researcher and writer who reports on authoritarian extremism, spiritual influence, and religion. He’s critiqued the sisters on his own show, the Conspirituality Podcast, and on TikTok. He, too, grew up Catholic, in a very particular school of Catholic thought. That experience shaped his viewpoint on organized religion. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Matthew Remski again, a researcher and writer who reports on authoritarian extremism, spiritual influence, and religion. He’s critiqued the sisters on his own show, the Conspirituality Podcast, and on TikTok. He, too, grew up Catholic, in a very particular school of Catholic thought. That experience shaped his viewpoint on organized religion. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> There’s a pugnacious part of me that says, yeah, I’m absolutely still Catholic, but I’m the kind of Catholic that I learned how to be initially when I was introduced to the church through liberation theology back in the 1970s. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> There’s a pugnacious part of me that says, yeah, I’m absolutely still Catholic, but I’m the kind of Catholic that I learned how to be initially when I was introduced to the church through liberation theology back in the 1970s. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Liberation theology is a religious movement. It emphasizes not just serving the poor, but also dismantling social injustice and economic inequality. It’s a very political approach to religion. It actually originated in Latin American Marxist movements. And this is important, because this is central to Matthew’s criticism of Dominican Sisters Open Mic. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Liberation theology is a religious movement. It emphasizes not just serving the poor, but also dismantling social injustice and economic inequality. It’s a very political approach to religion. It actually originated in Latin American Marxist movements. And this is important, because this is central to Matthew’s criticism of Dominican Sisters Open Mic. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think that they’ve done an incredible job at providing people, women especially, younger women especially with a vision of, you know, productivity and communal life and shared purpose in the world that is also, you now, about shared resources. And I think they really put together an attractive vision of an alternative to the precarious. Uh, an alternative to, um, you know, Instagram and tech talk life. I also knew at the same time that they were, uh, concealing what they’re really about, uh in a particular way that, that I wanted to make clear. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think that they’ve done an incredible job at providing people, women especially, younger women especially with a vision of, you know, productivity and communal life and shared purpose in the world that is also, you now, about shared resources. And I think they really put together an attractive vision of an alternative to the precarious. Uh, an alternative to, um, you know, Instagram and tech talk life. I also knew at the same time that they were, uh, concealing what they’re really about, uh in a particular way that, that I wanted to make clear. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Because while the sisters talk about playing frisbee and cooking and the joys of communal living for a higher purpose, Matthew has qualms about the ideology of the Catholic order they serve under. Chief among his concerns is Open Light Media, the media company that produces their podcast. The podcast is actually just a side project. Open Light’s main focus is producing educational content. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Because while the sisters talk about playing frisbee and cooking and the joys of communal living for a higher purpose, Matthew has qualms about the ideology of the Catholic order they serve under. Chief among his concerns is Open Light Media, the media company that produces their podcast. The podcast is actually just a side project. Open Light’s main focus is producing educational content. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> If you look at their product page, that is their main output, right? They sell these courses to Catholic educators and homeschoolers. It is an anti-public education, anti-secular industry. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> If you look at their product page, that is their main output, right? They sell these courses to Catholic educators and homeschoolers. It is an anti-public education, anti-secular industry. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Open Light Media produces a faith-based Catholic alternative to something called social emotional learning. Social emotional learning is an educational framework that revolves around teaching children relationship building skills, responsible decision making, and emotional regulation. This method has been widely adopted by American public schools, many of which implement classroom-wide life skill lessons and daily check-ins, as well as individualized behavioral support for students who need it. There’s a lot of focus on identifying feelings, empathy for others, and affirmation, which has been criticized by some conservatives, including many Catholic organizations, who say \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Open Light Media produces a faith-based Catholic alternative to something called social emotional learning. Social emotional learning is an educational framework that revolves around teaching children relationship building skills, responsible decision making, and emotional regulation. This method has been widely adopted by American public schools, many of which implement classroom-wide life skill lessons and daily check-ins, as well as individualized behavioral support for students who need it. There’s a lot of focus on identifying feelings, empathy for others, and affirmation, which has been criticized by some conservatives, including many Catholic organizations, who say \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Look, you know, all of this touchy-feely, no-God-centered, secular, psychological stuff that you guys are doing with kids are really leaving them unanchored. They’re leading kids astray. They are not giving them a grounding of the truth of the gospel, which is that there are two genders or, you can’t really change your sex or whatever, or that it’s not really natural to be queer. If you’re going to be a queer, you can’t really act on it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Look, you know, all of this touchy-feely, no-God-centered, secular, psychological stuff that you guys are doing with kids are really leaving them unanchored. They’re leading kids astray. They are not giving them a grounding of the truth of the gospel, which is that there are two genders or, you can’t really change your sex or whatever, or that it’s not really natural to be queer. If you’re going to be a queer, you can’t really act on it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They actually addressed this in the very first episode of Dominican Sisters Open Mic, when one sister interviewed Catholic psychologists about the dangers of secular education. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They actually addressed this in the very first episode of Dominican Sisters Open Mic, when one sister interviewed Catholic psychologists about the dangers of secular education. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: I think Tik Tok was essentially responsible for this kind of transgender movement.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: And creating a generation that had been manipulated\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: to think about gender in this very relative way. We’re just leaving them in this state of confusion because they’ve been manipulated in this way.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Brett Salkeld: Right. And then, and then when we put them in this state, and then we affirm. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: I think Tik Tok was essentially responsible for this kind of transgender movement.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: And creating a generation that had been manipulated\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: to think about gender in this very relative way. We’re just leaving them in this state of confusion because they’ve been manipulated in this way.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Brett Salkeld: Right. And then, and then when we put them in this state, and then we affirm. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Instead of affirmation culture, as one of the podcast guests put it, Open Light’s educational programs focus on virtues and faith. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Instead of affirmation culture, as one of the podcast guests put it, Open Light’s educational programs focus on virtues and faith. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski:\u003c/strong> Which they believe should replace the secular version of social-emotional learning in public schools because they believe that social- emotional learning in public school is the kind of thing that just allows kids to explore themselves in a way that might make them understand that they’re trans. Like they’re using a kind of quasi-intellectual take on an educational practice to try to persuade people that in order to be a well-rounded teacher who nurtures well-rounded children, you really have to give them a kind of social-emotional context that’s based in God. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski:\u003c/strong> Which they believe should replace the secular version of social-emotional learning in public schools because they believe that social- emotional learning in public school is the kind of thing that just allows kids to explore themselves in a way that might make them understand that they’re trans. Like they’re using a kind of quasi-intellectual take on an educational practice to try to persuade people that in order to be a well-rounded teacher who nurtures well-rounded children, you really have to give them a kind of social-emotional context that’s based in God. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Of course, this conservative religious ideology isn’t obvious from the clips going viral on TikTok. As Matthew noted, the podcast didn’t blow up until Sister Miriam took the reins as host, and they pivoted from lengthy discussions on Catholic education to one-on-one interviews with other sisters about their own lives. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Of course, this conservative religious ideology isn’t obvious from the clips going viral on TikTok. As Matthew noted, the podcast didn’t blow up until Sister Miriam took the reins as host, and they pivoted from lengthy discussions on Catholic education to one-on-one interviews with other sisters about their own lives. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Andre: Some people like to play scripture roulette, right? Do the, like, flip through the Bible and like finger point. I mean, that’s one way. Actually, sometimes God has really spoken to me in that way. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Andre: Some people like to play scripture roulette, right? Do the, like, flip through the Bible and like finger point. I mean, that’s one way. Actually, sometimes God has really spoken to me in that way. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some people on ex-Catholic forums on Reddit have questioned the authenticity of the sisters’ joy. Commenters have speculated that they’re under pressure to come off as fun and that the podcast is just propaganda. And while Matthew agrees that the clips are propaganda for the Catholic Church, he doesn’t agree with all of the detractors’ assumptions. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some people on ex-Catholic forums on Reddit have questioned the authenticity of the sisters’ joy. Commenters have speculated that they’re under pressure to come off as fun and that the podcast is just propaganda. And while Matthew agrees that the clips are propaganda for the Catholic Church, he doesn’t agree with all of the detractors’ assumptions. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I don’t want to dismiss them personally because they seem like really lovely people who, you know, I would love to hang out with. And I don’t t get any sense that anybody is trying to be deceptive or anybody is trying to be, you know, manipulative and recruiting. I think they are really presenting their best lives and I don t know how conscious they are of, you know, concealing the ideology. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I don’t want to dismiss them personally because they seem like really lovely people who, you know, I would love to hang out with. And I don’t t get any sense that anybody is trying to be deceptive or anybody is trying to be, you know, manipulative and recruiting. I think they are really presenting their best lives and I don t know how conscious they are of, you know, concealing the ideology. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But what does bother him is that this portrayal of Catholicism is what consistently goes viral, a palatable version that isn’t upfront about a belief system that younger viewers on social media might find far less appealing. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But what does bother him is that this portrayal of Catholicism is what consistently goes viral, a palatable version that isn’t upfront about a belief system that younger viewers on social media might find far less appealing. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> And while they’re doing that, they are not, to my knowledge, engaging in any of the social justice work that generations of prior religious women in the United States have been engaged in. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> And while they’re doing that, they are not, to my knowledge, engaging in any of the social justice work that generations of prior religious women in the United States have been engaged in. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Religious sisters have taken on different types of social justice work throughout modern American history. In 1965, a group of Catholic sisters marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights for all. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Catholic sisters in Oakland fought to build affordable housing for patients who needed live-in medical care. In 2012, sisters known as the Nuns on the Bus traveled across the country in protest of federal budget cuts that would have affected vulnerable, low-income Americans. And more recently, religious sisters have been fighting ICE deportation efforts across the country, funding passports for children who’ve been separated from their deported parents. And organizing demonstrations outside of ICE detention centers. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Religious sisters have taken on different types of social justice work throughout modern American history. In 1965, a group of Catholic sisters marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights for all. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Catholic sisters in Oakland fought to build affordable housing for patients who needed live-in medical care. In 2012, sisters known as the Nuns on the Bus traveled across the country in protest of federal budget cuts that would have affected vulnerable, low-income Americans. And more recently, religious sisters have been fighting ICE deportation efforts across the country, funding passports for children who’ve been separated from their deported parents. And organizing demonstrations outside of ICE detention centers. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> This is the liberation theology legacy that exists within Catholic religious life, which has now become a kind of minority demographic and now which is being outshadowed by the high production values of, you know, convents and monastic communities that have better social media skills and, you now, may well be supported by conservative Catholics. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> This is the liberation theology legacy that exists within Catholic religious life, which has now become a kind of minority demographic and now which is being outshadowed by the high production values of, you know, convents and monastic communities that have better social media skills and, you now, may well be supported by conservative Catholics. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that glitzy, polished Catholic media costs money. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that glitzy, polished Catholic media costs money. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> You need support for that. You need cultural support for that. And we also know that, you know, especially in the United States, wealthy Catholics are responsible for supporting all kinds of politicized reactionary religious efforts. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> You need support for that. You need cultural support for that. And we also know that, you know, especially in the United States, wealthy Catholics are responsible for supporting all kinds of politicized reactionary religious efforts. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We asked Paul Daly, Open Light Media’s Director of Marketing, about some of the critiques of the organization’s ideology. He wasn’t surprised. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We asked Paul Daly, Open Light Media’s Director of Marketing, about some of the critiques of the organization’s ideology. He wasn’t surprised. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I mean, no matter what, if you’re going into the public space in any way, there’s going to be critiques, right? If somebody disagrees with something that the sisters say, the whole point is that the sisters are not saying necessarily that you have to agree with them in order to still listen to them. And keep in mind, a majority of these sisters are teachers. And so, they’re out throughout the country working at different schools. And of course, they work at Catholic schools, but you don’t have to be Catholic to go to Catholic school. So, they have tons of students, you know, who have different viewpoints. And so, they’re very used to interacting with people who disagree with them, even dislike them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I mean, no matter what, if you’re going into the public space in any way, there’s going to be critiques, right? If somebody disagrees with something that the sisters say, the whole point is that the sisters are not saying necessarily that you have to agree with them in order to still listen to them. And keep in mind, a majority of these sisters are teachers. And so, they’re out throughout the country working at different schools. And of course, they work at Catholic schools, but you don’t have to be Catholic to go to Catholic school. So, they have tons of students, you know, who have different viewpoints. And so, they’re very used to interacting with people who disagree with them, even dislike them. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But he did acknowledge that religious sisterhood is deeper than what viewers see in short vertical video clips. Committing to religious life is far from an easy choice. And for many, it comes with great personal sacrifice. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But he did acknowledge that religious sisterhood is deeper than what viewers see in short vertical video clips. Committing to religious life is far from an easy choice. And for many, it comes with great personal sacrifice. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are joyful and happy and you know, but we also don’t want to, you know, sell short just how hard they work. Cause it really is definitely not just hanging out playing frisbee. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are joyful and happy and you know, but we also don’t want to, you know, sell short just how hard they work. Cause it really is definitely not just hanging out playing frisbee. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We followed up with Paul after our interview, giving him another opportunity to respond to critiques of Open Light Media and asking him whether the Dominican Sisters of Mary have engaged in any type of social justice work. We didn’t hear back though. So what does the sisters’ virality say about religious life in the U.S. though? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We followed up with Paul after our interview, giving him another opportunity to respond to critiques of Open Light Media and asking him whether the Dominican Sisters of Mary have engaged in any type of social justice work. We didn’t hear back though. So what does the sisters’ virality say about religious life in the U.S. though? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s a new tab. What is “nun girl summer” really about? While the Dominican Sisters of Mary kicked off “nun girl summer” earlier this year, Catholic influence appears to have made waves in pop culture across America, both on and offline. Convents in New York are reporting long waitlists for prayer retreats. Birkenstock rolled out these stop-motion ads this summer, featuring nuns doing hopscotch in slides. Catholic Kitsch has made a comeback. Cutesy, nostalgic, novelty prayer candles and glittery Jesus statues are prime meme material. In other words, Catholicism is really up right now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s a new tab. What is “nun girl summer” really about? While the Dominican Sisters of Mary kicked off “nun girl summer” earlier this year, Catholic influence appears to have made waves in pop culture across America, both on and offline. Convents in New York are reporting long waitlists for prayer retreats. Birkenstock rolled out these stop-motion ads this summer, featuring nuns doing hopscotch in slides. Catholic Kitsch has made a comeback. Cutesy, nostalgic, novelty prayer candles and glittery Jesus statues are prime meme material. In other words, Catholicism is really up right now. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> My mom, a baby boomer, she grew up in a very Catholic world. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> My mom, a baby boomer, she grew up in a very Catholic world. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Tricia Bruce again. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Tricia Bruce again. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think for a lot of Catholics who grew up in that world, your neighborhood was Catholic. You called your neighborhood by the name of your parish. Oftentimes, this was very intertwined with ethnic identity. religion, Catholicism was everywhere. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think for a lot of Catholics who grew up in that world, your neighborhood was Catholic. You called your neighborhood by the name of your parish. Oftentimes, this was very intertwined with ethnic identity. religion, Catholicism was everywhere. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Fast forward, and religious life in the US looks very different now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Fast forward, and religious life in the US looks very different now. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Many kids today, of course, are being raised in non-religious households, non- religious families. So. Religion is less of a forefront reality in home, in the neighborhood, in the broader culture. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Many kids today, of course, are being raised in non-religious households, non- religious families. So. Religion is less of a forefront reality in home, in the neighborhood, in the broader culture. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If organized religion is no longer mainstream, then… \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If organized religion is no longer mainstream, then… \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> It makes it feel countercultural. It makes that look different. It makes it feels intriguing and mysterious or maybe even a way to connect to something bigger than oneself in a world that feels so isolating and lonely. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> It makes it feel countercultural. It makes that look different. It makes it feels intriguing and mysterious or maybe even a way to connect to something bigger than oneself in a world that feels so isolating and lonely. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Think about the vintage marketplace today. For some, their grail is a 90s-era purse that someone’s grandma probably has in her closet. For others, it’s a mid-century table lamp that was once common in every university library. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Think about the vintage marketplace today. For some, their grail is a 90s-era purse that someone’s grandma probably has in her closet. For others, it’s a mid-century table lamp that was once common in every university library. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> They’re a treasure to one generation. They get thrown out as trash to the next. And then suddenly, another generation looks around and is like, oh, this is super cool. There’s something here. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> They’re a treasure to one generation. They get thrown out as trash to the next. And then suddenly, another generation looks around and is like, oh, this is super cool. There’s something here. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We’re trying to dig around for something authentic and real. And in that, there becomes… \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We’re trying to dig around for something authentic and real. And in that, there becomes… \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> An opening there for an intrigue around religion that I think is likewise helping to give Catholicism this kind of moment. It is certainly an invitation to learn more and for some to take action. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> An opening there for an intrigue around religion that I think is likewise helping to give Catholicism this kind of moment. It is certainly an invitation to learn more and for some to take action. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Bruce says that people have been distrustful and skeptical of religion and religious institutions for valid reasons. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Bruce says that people have been distrustful and skeptical of religion and religious institutions for valid reasons. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Because, of course, you have instances of abuse or discrimination or inauthenticity that have really been a reckoning for many institutions. And I think now the religion and other institutions are undergoing a massive project to rebuild trust and people talk about looking for authenticity. And so I think the podcast by these Dominican sisters is in some ways a reflection of authenticity or a desire to showcase a more transparent experience and message around religion and a re-invitation to see as trustworthy, something like religion. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Because, of course, you have instances of abuse or discrimination or inauthenticity that have really been a reckoning for many institutions. And I think now the religion and other institutions are undergoing a massive project to rebuild trust and people talk about looking for authenticity. And so I think the podcast by these Dominican sisters is in some ways a reflection of authenticity or a desire to showcase a more transparent experience and message around religion and a re-invitation to see as trustworthy, something like religion. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sister Thu agrees. In her research at CARA at Georgetown, she’s found that Millennials and Gen Z are reporting historic levels of isolation and anxiety. The Dominican Sisters podcast emerged in the midst of that cold. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sister Thu agrees. In her research at CARA at Georgetown, she’s found that Millennials and Gen Z are reporting historic levels of isolation and anxiety. The Dominican Sisters podcast emerged in the midst of that cold. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> It is responding directly to a hunger for belonging and meaning, especially among the younger generations, as they always search for meaning and real connection. We are seeing a remarkable spiritual surge. Dioceses and campus ministries across the country reported significant surges in baptisms and new candidates last Easter. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> It is responding directly to a hunger for belonging and meaning, especially among the younger generations, as they always search for meaning and real connection. We are seeing a remarkable spiritual surge. Dioceses and campus ministries across the country reported significant surges in baptisms and new candidates last Easter. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She says that what the sisters are doing with their podcast is really in line with what the whole universal Catholic Church is doing. CARA reports that adults 18 to 35 spend hours online searching for connection, so it makes sense to reach them where they’re at. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She says that what the sisters are doing with their podcast is really in line with what the whole universal Catholic Church is doing. CARA reports that adults 18 to 35 spend hours online searching for connection, so it makes sense to reach them where they’re at. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> And that is the digital evangelization tool in the modern town square, which today happens to be TikTok and YouTube feeds. Right, so by showing up in these digital spaces, the sisters fulfill their religious mandate to meet believers, you know, seekers and non-believers alike where they already spend their time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> And that is the digital evangelization tool in the modern town square, which today happens to be TikTok and YouTube feeds. Right, so by showing up in these digital spaces, the sisters fulfill their religious mandate to meet believers, you know, seekers and non-believers alike where they already spend their time. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Is it actually bringing anyone into religious sisterhood though? Well, it takes a really long time to become a sister. It’s a years long process. But while it’s too early to tell if podcast listeners will be inspired to join the Catholic order, like Oprah viewers were 16 years ago, there is a lot of interest in it. Paul from Open Light Media said that after going viral, the Dominican sisters have seen an uptick in young women reaching out for discernment. That’s a process of examining whether it’s God’s will to do something, like becoming a nun. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Is it actually bringing anyone into religious sisterhood though? Well, it takes a really long time to become a sister. It’s a years long process. But while it’s too early to tell if podcast listeners will be inspired to join the Catholic order, like Oprah viewers were 16 years ago, there is a lot of interest in it. Paul from Open Light Media said that after going viral, the Dominican sisters have seen an uptick in young women reaching out for discernment. That’s a process of examining whether it’s God’s will to do something, like becoming a nun. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And there’s actually a link specifically for that because we saw that happening on our link tree. The process of becoming a sister is very drawn out. It takes years to become a fully professed sister. I anticipate that 10, 15 years down the line, we will probably have a handful of sisters who first heard about the order from the podcast. I really do. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And there’s actually a link specifically for that because we saw that happening on our link tree. The process of becoming a sister is very drawn out. It takes years to become a fully professed sister. I anticipate that 10, 15 years down the line, we will probably have a handful of sisters who first heard about the order from the podcast. I really do. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Matthew Remski urges people to look beyond the viral clips, the fan edits, and the esthetic mood boards, to really investigate what religious sisterhood means and what the organization, the viral content is coming from, stands for. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Matthew Remski urges people to look beyond the viral clips, the fan edits, and the esthetic mood boards, to really investigate what religious sisterhood means and what the organization, the viral content is coming from, stands for. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Religious life is punk rock. There’s something really cool about it. And let’s just be clear about what it all entails, right? I would say that what they are showing is the delight they have in communal life. And they’re not showing what the ideological price is for that. Like, I think most people will watch the clip about Ultimate Frisbee or any other activity that they have or like Bingo Night or Games Night or whatever they’re talking about, they’re talking how much fun they have together. And that’s really wonderful and heartwarming. But I think that when you understand that, oh, they actually have a straightforward Catholic ideology that’s driving their faith and their intellectual output and you learn what that ideology teaches and you learned that it’s exclusionary, the conviviality, the thing that people are attracted to, I just wanna say it comes at a price and you gotta know what the price is. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Religious life is punk rock. There’s something really cool about it. And let’s just be clear about what it all entails, right? I would say that what they are showing is the delight they have in communal life. And they’re not showing what the ideological price is for that. Like, I think most people will watch the clip about Ultimate Frisbee or any other activity that they have or like Bingo Night or Games Night or whatever they’re talking about, they’re talking how much fun they have together. And that’s really wonderful and heartwarming. But I think that when you understand that, oh, they actually have a straightforward Catholic ideology that’s driving their faith and their intellectual output and you learn what that ideology teaches and you learned that it’s exclusionary, the conviviality, the thing that people are attracted to, I just wanna say it comes at a price and you gotta know what the price is. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This doesn’t mean that you can’t watch the sisters’ content or find solace in their joy. Will I stop saying, ‘sister, yes’ every time I agree with my literal sister? No. But it is worth considering where the content on your feed really comes from and digging deeper beyond viral clips, even if their laughter is infectious. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This doesn’t mean that you can’t watch the sisters’ content or find solace in their joy. Will I stop saying, ‘sister, yes’ every time I agree with my literal sister? No. But it is worth considering where the content on your feed really comes from and digging deeper beyond viral clips, even if their laughter is infectious. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic] \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic] \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Laughter] Sister, yes! [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Laughter] Sister, yes! [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> With that, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> With that, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon, additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is executive director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon, additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is executive director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local. This episode includes clips from Open Light Media and Matthew Remske, AKA Anti-Fascist Dad, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. It also includes clips from the TikTok accounts @Whsprtz, @whoismikecentanni, @Rag_dti, @thawestt, @editzz103d, @enzoiio, and @giramoficial. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran. And recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local. This episode includes clips from Open Light Media and Matthew Remske, AKA Anti-Fascist Dad, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. It also includes clips from the TikTok accounts @Whsprtz, @whoismikecentanni, @Rag_dti, @thawestt, @editzz103d, @enzoiio, and @giramoficial. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran. And recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> It’s really meant for people who, maybe they grew up Catholic and they just don’t really go to church anymore. Maybe they grew up without any religion at all and they see a sister pop up in their TikTok feed and they’re like, I didn’t realize that nuns had podcasts, which is a pretty common comment that we get.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> It’s really meant for people who, maybe they grew up Catholic and they just don’t really go to church anymore. Maybe they grew up without any religion at all and they see a sister pop up in their TikTok feed and they’re like, I didn’t realize that nuns had podcasts, which is a pretty common comment that we get.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">This year’s internet breakout star was an order of Catholic sisters with a podcast. Within weeks of launching, Dominican Sisters Open Mic went mega viral. Clips and fan edits of host Sister Miriam saying “Sister, yesss!” spread across social media. Secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a “nun girl summer.” At the same time, some have criticized the order behind the podcast for the conservative ideology baked into its educational content. In this episode, we explore how the Dominican Sisters of Mary rose to viral fame, the beliefs behind their easy charm and infectious laughter, and what it all says about the cultural moment we’re in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guests: \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>Paul Dailey, director of marketing at Openlight Media\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://cara.georgetown.edu/sr-thu-t-do-lhc-phd\">Sister Thu T. Do\u003c/a>, Sister of the Lovers of the Holy Cross of Hanoi and Research Associate at the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, Georgetown University\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://triciabruce.com/\">Dr. Tricia Bruce\u003c/a>, Sociology of Religion and Director of Social Science Research, Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://matthewremski.com/wordpress/\">Matthew Remski\u003c/a>, religion and politics journalist, co-host of Conspirituality and author of \u003cem>Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/28/style/nuns-podcast-ultimate-frisbee-tiktok.html\">Don’t Call Them Nuns. They’re Podcasters.\u003c/a> — Madison Malone Kircher, \u003cem>NYT\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/08/dominican-sisters-podcast/688395/\">Why Are So Many People Listening to a Podcast About Living in a Convent?\u003c/a> — Luis Parrales, \u003cem>The Atlantic\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.cosmopolitan.com/lifestyle/a71668183/tiktok-nuns/\">The TikTok Nuns Have Everyone in a Chokehold\u003c/a> — Christen A. Johnson, \u003cem>Cosmopolitan\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/nun-girl-summer-rules_uk_6a55fbfee4b0ac1765ef704f\">The Next Hot Trend Might Just Be ‘Nun Girl Summer’\u003c/a> — Amy Glover, \u003cem>Huffington Post\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 id=\"episode-transcript\" class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Hello, do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show. And tell your friends, tell your frenemies, stir up some drama and while you’re at it, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Okay, let’s get to the show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This year’s internet breakout star was not a family vlogger, or a fashion influencer, or a Hype House type creator collective, but an order of Catholic nuns with a podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister 1: Mary is so uncomplicated and we are.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister 2: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is Dominican Sisters Open Mic, a podcast from the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. They’re an order based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Within weeks of launching their podcast, they went mega viral. I personally cannot stop saying, Sister, yessss, whenever I agree with a friend’s take. Just like the host Sister Miriam does in this iconic clip. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: I love cooking!\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, teach me your ways!\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That phrase is the internet earworm of the year. It has its own fan edits. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok User@whsprtz]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mercedes: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister, yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And fan reenactments. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user @whoismikecentanni]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Person 1: Do you have a hobby?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 2: Cooking.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>Person 1: Sister, Yes! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, they technically aren’t nuns, since they aren’t cloistered in a convent. Here’s Sister Louise Marie explaining it in another viral clip. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Louise Marie: We go out and teach, so we’re not just remaining in the convent and so we’re called Sister.\u003c/em> \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But still, both secular women’s magazines and Catholic media alike dubbed this year a nun-girl summer, undoubtedly thanks to the popularity of these religious sisters. One commenter claimed, “They sound like a healed, regulated nervous system.” Others pointed out how the clips of these joyful and relaxed sisters are conspicuously devoid of men. But, at its core their popularity seems to stem from the fact that so many people online yearn for the life these sisters portray in their podcast clips. They talk about cooking dinner for each other. They play ultimate frisbee together. They’re always supporting their fellow sisters and complimenting each other’s virtues. Who wouldn’t want a joyful communal living experience like that? But the full story isn’t so simple. Their virality comes at a really unique moment for both secular culture and the Catholic Church. Under that shiny, wholesome exterior, some critics have questioned the political motivations of the Sisters’ religious order. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Whenever I’m charmed, I try to see what the catch is, and so I went beyond the clips to see what they’re doing politically. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So, who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? Why is everyone obsessed with them? Today, we’re looking at how they rose to viral fame, what that says about the cultural moment we’re in, and what some critics see behind their infectious laughter. Ready? This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist, and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> As usual, let’s open a new tab. Who are the Dominican Sisters of Mary? To understand the sisters, we have to understand charisms. In Catholicism, a charism is a divine spiritual gift given by God so that a person can serve others and the church. It’s the driving force behind their mission, and Catholic orders are often organized around them. Some are focused on running community hospitals. Others are focused missionary outreach. And many, like the Dominican Sisters, work in education. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> So, Dominican sisters follow the Dominican charism, which was established by Saint Dominic. And Dominicans place a lot of emphasis on virtue and virtue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Paul Dailey, the Director of Marketing for Open Light Media, the communications arm for the order. It’s the media company that produces the Sisters’ podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are supposed to be teachers and preachers spreading the word of God, how to teach future generations how to live a virtuous life. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This specific order behind Open Light Media—the Dominican Sisters of Mary, mother of the Eucharist—is actually relatively young for a Catholic order. Their mission began in July 1996, when Pope John Paul II called for sisters and priests to be more present in local communities. So four Dominican Sisters from Nashville started looking for a place to establish a new order. Dailey says their origins can be traced back to pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I think it was Sister Joseph Andrew who saw a USA Today article. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They were visiting friends in Chicago when, stopping for gas, she saw a photo of Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> She said, we should just go talk to him because he certainly seems like he would have maybe some money to help us establish an order. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Monaghan was a devout Catholic and already deeply involved in Catholic philanthropy. One of the sisters actually knew him through a Catholic business network that he founded. The sisters were enroute to New York, and the Domino’s headquarters were on the way. So they decided to stop by and say hello. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And so they just went and without really scheduling a call or anything, walked into his office and ended up meeting with Tom Monaghan, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And he was interested in establishing some Catholic schools in his hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And who better to run your Catholic schools than a bunch of Dominican Sisters. So that was how it ended up in Ann Arbor, and it’s grown to, I believe we’re at over 140 sisters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Daly says that while their mission has remained consistent over the years, how they approach it has evolved. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> Their goal is to preach in the town square, right? And today, it’s not like you have a physical town square that you go to and everybody’s there listening to what’s going on. The internet has really become the town square. It’s not too often you see a religious sister pop up on TikTok, but that’s the whole point is you’re not supposed to just talk to people who believe the same things as you. You’re supposed to go out there into the public square and talk to everybody. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which is why they saw an opportunity to spread their religious message through a podcast. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Maria: I wonder if Mary, she would ever mess with Jesus when he was little, you know, like joke around? Come on, she had to. Every mother does. Like she’d go, where did Messiah go? There he is! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: My all time favorite, this is an outdoor game, but in the summers when we’re all home together is playing ultimate frisbee.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: Sister and you are so good at that. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: I heard of one sister for Lent, she tried to drive the speed limit like the whole time.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Miriam: So she gave up speeding? \u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister Mary Bethany: Yeah, she gave up speeding. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We weren’t able to sit down with any of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, but we did talk to Sister Thu Do, a research associate for the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University, CARA for short. Sister Thu theorizes that the reason the podcast is so popular is because it shatters stereotypes people have about religious sisterhood.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Popular culture, uh, has painted religious life as like somber or rigid, uh, for far too long. So by projecting authentic joy, the sisters show single women that giving your life to God doesn’t mean losing your personality or joy. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And it offers an alternative vision to the isolation many people feel today. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> Showing the beauty of community living makes the vocation feel human, touchable and, of course, deeply attractive. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The podcast launched in February this year, and within a couple of weeks, the first viral clip took off. Back in June, Cosmopolitan reported that Dominican Sisters Open Mic listenership is up 3500% since launch, according to Spotify. Millennials and Gen Z make up 84% of the podcast’s audience on the platform. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> This has been a total shock. Sister Miriam always jokes. She said, “when we first started, I told myself, at least my mom will watch this.” She really did not know if anybody was gonna be interested. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But as it turns out, everyone loves these sisters. I mean, the diva edits speak for themselves. These are the fan-made videos remixing clips from the podcast with sick beats and sparkly filters. Fans usually make these edits for pop stars, but in this case, it’s Catholic Sisters. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@enzoiio]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>[music] Do you have a hobby? Cooking. Sister, yesss! \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They’re so authentically kind and they make you feel like you’re the only person in the whole world even though you know that they interact with like hundreds or thousands of people and yet they’ll still remember fun facts about you. And that just speaks to who they are and the way that they live. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> I think it really captured the imagination of folks who suddenly see these women laughing and saw them as very human and relatable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Dr. Trisha Bruce, a sociologist of religion who studies Catholicism and social change. She pointed out that the average age of religious sisters in the U.S. is around 80 years old. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> This group is not like that. These are younger women. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The sisters interviewed on the podcast are typically in their 30s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> These are women who were thinking about the here and now and the future. They’re influencers, but they don’t live a life or act like influencers other than having the influence that they have. So there are all sorts of contradictions and unique things about them that I think really spark curiosity and attention and intrigue. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> According to Dr. Bruce, it’s also… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Showcasing a different story for what religion is or also for how, in this case, younger women for whom this is a deeply meaningful experience. So I think they show something in a bright light that has otherwise been fairly treated with skepticism and uncertainty for so many years, given all of the trouble, of course, that religion has been in, too, in different ways. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Women have always been part of the Catholic media landscape, from developing programming to managing communications to helping write and distribute diocese newspapers. Back in 1981, Mother Angelica established the Catholic Media Empire by launching EWTN, which turned into a global religious broadcasting network. She herself appeared in broadcasts, answering questions and giving advice from her rocking chair. Her show was revolutionary because it was so casual. The vibe wasn’t that different from what the Dominican Sisters are doing with their podcasts today. Mother Angelica was so influential that she herself has gotten the diva edit TikTok treatment, years after her passing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Clip from TikTok user @giramoficiall]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Mother Angelica: I’ve always said, God was very, very good to some man when he gave me a religious vocation. [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Mother Angelica was an outlier. Dr. Bruce says that historically, men were front and center in Catholic media. They were the voices of the church, speaking on Catholic radio, writing Catholic op-eds, and appearing on Catholic television broadcasts. Today, media has evolved, drastically. The great shift to digital has given others a chance to share their voices too. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think we’re seeing here an example of a group of religious sisters who has very wisely seen, ah, there’s a gap, there is an opening. The people are here, the messaging is over here. So we need to take the message and put it into these new spaces. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> The Dominican Sisters have actually been working on their media presence for years. The podcast is just the latest in several efforts they’ve made to spread their message and fundraise, using the media to their advantage, like going on the Oprah Winfrey Show. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Oprah correspondent Lisa Ling: Why did you want to pursue this life? \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This is a clip from their first appearance on Oprah in 2010. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: God wanted me here, and he made it very clear to me.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Lisa Ling: How do you know? Like, do you hear a voice?\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Sister: It’s right here.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Five years after that appearance, Oprah aired an update and interviewed the Dominican Sisters of Mary. Some of them were actually viewers. They said they were inspired to answer the call after watching that first segment. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Oprah Show]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister: Now we’re known as the Oprah nuns, so if you put into Google or any search engine the Oprah Nuns, we will come right up. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Obviously, virality is not a Catholic charism. The Dominican Sisters’ ultimate mission goes beyond getting on Oprah or building a TikTok following. They’re really focused on education and they’ve been incredibly digitally adept in that field too. They run Open Light Media, a subscription platform of Catholic educational content. And this is where things start to get complicated. Matthew Remski was also taken by the Sisters’ easy charm and joyful conversations. But as a cradle Catholic and writer who reports on religion and authoritarian extremism, he had to dig deeper. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think they really offer a fantastic package, and then they also hide what they believe too, and they have to, because if you really scratch the surface on what fairly conservative Catholic nuns believe, it’s not going to be appealing to a lot of the women that are actually really thrilled by contemplating this communal life. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> So what isn’t reflected in the podcast clips going viral on TikTok? After the break, we’re driving into open light media and some of the ideology baked into its educational content. But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you. To become a member and support the show, go to donate.kqed.org/podcasts. When we’re back, we are getting into the politics behind the clips. Stick around. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Okay, we’re back. Let’s open a new tab. What do the Dominican Sisters believe? While the sisters have definitely gotten a lot of attention for their viral success, others are looking beyond the charm. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from TikTok user@antifascistdad]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Matthew Remski: Now the press coverage has focused on the vibes without a single question raised about their politics. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s Matthew Remski again, a researcher and writer who reports on authoritarian extremism, spiritual influence, and religion. He’s critiqued the sisters on his own show, the Conspirituality Podcast, and on TikTok. He, too, grew up Catholic, in a very particular school of Catholic thought. That experience shaped his viewpoint on organized religion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> There’s a pugnacious part of me that says, yeah, I’m absolutely still Catholic, but I’m the kind of Catholic that I learned how to be initially when I was introduced to the church through liberation theology back in the 1970s. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Liberation theology is a religious movement. It emphasizes not just serving the poor, but also dismantling social injustice and economic inequality. It’s a very political approach to religion. It actually originated in Latin American Marxist movements. And this is important, because this is central to Matthew’s criticism of Dominican Sisters Open Mic. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I think that they’ve done an incredible job at providing people, women especially, younger women especially with a vision of, you know, productivity and communal life and shared purpose in the world that is also, you now, about shared resources. And I think they really put together an attractive vision of an alternative to the precarious. Uh, an alternative to, um, you know, Instagram and tech talk life. I also knew at the same time that they were, uh, concealing what they’re really about, uh in a particular way that, that I wanted to make clear. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Because while the sisters talk about playing frisbee and cooking and the joys of communal living for a higher purpose, Matthew has qualms about the ideology of the Catholic order they serve under. Chief among his concerns is Open Light Media, the media company that produces their podcast. The podcast is actually just a side project. Open Light’s main focus is producing educational content. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> If you look at their product page, that is their main output, right? They sell these courses to Catholic educators and homeschoolers. It is an anti-public education, anti-secular industry. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Open Light Media produces a faith-based Catholic alternative to something called social emotional learning. Social emotional learning is an educational framework that revolves around teaching children relationship building skills, responsible decision making, and emotional regulation. This method has been widely adopted by American public schools, many of which implement classroom-wide life skill lessons and daily check-ins, as well as individualized behavioral support for students who need it. There’s a lot of focus on identifying feelings, empathy for others, and affirmation, which has been criticized by some conservatives, including many Catholic organizations, who say \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Look, you know, all of this touchy-feely, no-God-centered, secular, psychological stuff that you guys are doing with kids are really leaving them unanchored. They’re leading kids astray. They are not giving them a grounding of the truth of the gospel, which is that there are two genders or, you can’t really change your sex or whatever, or that it’s not really natural to be queer. If you’re going to be a queer, you can’t really act on it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> They actually addressed this in the very first episode of Dominican Sisters Open Mic, when one sister interviewed Catholic psychologists about the dangers of secular education. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: I think Tik Tok was essentially responsible for this kind of transgender movement.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: And creating a generation that had been manipulated\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Brett Salkeld: Right\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Dr. Karen Villa: to think about gender in this very relative way. We’re just leaving them in this state of confusion because they’ve been manipulated in this way.\u003c/em> \u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Brett Salkeld: Right. And then, and then when we put them in this state, and then we affirm. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Instead of affirmation culture, as one of the podcast guests put it, Open Light’s educational programs focus on virtues and faith. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski:\u003c/strong> Which they believe should replace the secular version of social-emotional learning in public schools because they believe that social- emotional learning in public school is the kind of thing that just allows kids to explore themselves in a way that might make them understand that they’re trans. Like they’re using a kind of quasi-intellectual take on an educational practice to try to persuade people that in order to be a well-rounded teacher who nurtures well-rounded children, you really have to give them a kind of social-emotional context that’s based in God. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Of course, this conservative religious ideology isn’t obvious from the clips going viral on TikTok. As Matthew noted, the podcast didn’t blow up until Sister Miriam took the reins as host, and they pivoted from lengthy discussions on Catholic education to one-on-one interviews with other sisters about their own lives. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic]\u003c/strong> \u003cstrong>\u003cbr>\u003c/strong>\u003cem>Sister Mary Andre: Some people like to play scripture roulette, right? Do the, like, flip through the Bible and like finger point. I mean, that’s one way. Actually, sometimes God has really spoken to me in that way. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some people on ex-Catholic forums on Reddit have questioned the authenticity of the sisters’ joy. Commenters have speculated that they’re under pressure to come off as fun and that the podcast is just propaganda. And while Matthew agrees that the clips are propaganda for the Catholic Church, he doesn’t agree with all of the detractors’ assumptions. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> I don’t want to dismiss them personally because they seem like really lovely people who, you know, I would love to hang out with. And I don’t t get any sense that anybody is trying to be deceptive or anybody is trying to be, you know, manipulative and recruiting. I think they are really presenting their best lives and I don t know how conscious they are of, you know, concealing the ideology. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But what does bother him is that this portrayal of Catholicism is what consistently goes viral, a palatable version that isn’t upfront about a belief system that younger viewers on social media might find far less appealing. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> And while they’re doing that, they are not, to my knowledge, engaging in any of the social justice work that generations of prior religious women in the United States have been engaged in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Religious sisters have taken on different types of social justice work throughout modern American history. In 1965, a group of Catholic sisters marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Alabama to support voting rights for all. During the peak of the AIDS epidemic, Catholic sisters in Oakland fought to build affordable housing for patients who needed live-in medical care. In 2012, sisters known as the Nuns on the Bus traveled across the country in protest of federal budget cuts that would have affected vulnerable, low-income Americans. And more recently, religious sisters have been fighting ICE deportation efforts across the country, funding passports for children who’ve been separated from their deported parents. And organizing demonstrations outside of ICE detention centers. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> This is the liberation theology legacy that exists within Catholic religious life, which has now become a kind of minority demographic and now which is being outshadowed by the high production values of, you know, convents and monastic communities that have better social media skills and, you now, may well be supported by conservative Catholics. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> And that glitzy, polished Catholic media costs money. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> You need support for that. You need cultural support for that. And we also know that, you know, especially in the United States, wealthy Catholics are responsible for supporting all kinds of politicized reactionary religious efforts. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We asked Paul Daly, Open Light Media’s Director of Marketing, about some of the critiques of the organization’s ideology. He wasn’t surprised. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> I mean, no matter what, if you’re going into the public space in any way, there’s going to be critiques, right? If somebody disagrees with something that the sisters say, the whole point is that the sisters are not saying necessarily that you have to agree with them in order to still listen to them. And keep in mind, a majority of these sisters are teachers. And so, they’re out throughout the country working at different schools. And of course, they work at Catholic schools, but you don’t have to be Catholic to go to Catholic school. So, they have tons of students, you know, who have different viewpoints. And so, they’re very used to interacting with people who disagree with them, even dislike them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But he did acknowledge that religious sisterhood is deeper than what viewers see in short vertical video clips. Committing to religious life is far from an easy choice. And for many, it comes with great personal sacrifice. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> They are joyful and happy and you know, but we also don’t want to, you know, sell short just how hard they work. Cause it really is definitely not just hanging out playing frisbee. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We followed up with Paul after our interview, giving him another opportunity to respond to critiques of Open Light Media and asking him whether the Dominican Sisters of Mary have engaged in any type of social justice work. We didn’t hear back though. So what does the sisters’ virality say about religious life in the U.S. though? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> That’s a new tab. What is “nun girl summer” really about? While the Dominican Sisters of Mary kicked off “nun girl summer” earlier this year, Catholic influence appears to have made waves in pop culture across America, both on and offline. Convents in New York are reporting long waitlists for prayer retreats. Birkenstock rolled out these stop-motion ads this summer, featuring nuns doing hopscotch in slides. Catholic Kitsch has made a comeback. Cutesy, nostalgic, novelty prayer candles and glittery Jesus statues are prime meme material. In other words, Catholicism is really up right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> My mom, a baby boomer, she grew up in a very Catholic world. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Tricia Bruce again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> And I think for a lot of Catholics who grew up in that world, your neighborhood was Catholic. You called your neighborhood by the name of your parish. Oftentimes, this was very intertwined with ethnic identity. religion, Catholicism was everywhere. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Fast forward, and religious life in the US looks very different now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Many kids today, of course, are being raised in non-religious households, non- religious families. So. Religion is less of a forefront reality in home, in the neighborhood, in the broader culture. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> If organized religion is no longer mainstream, then… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> It makes it feel countercultural. It makes that look different. It makes it feels intriguing and mysterious or maybe even a way to connect to something bigger than oneself in a world that feels so isolating and lonely. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Think about the vintage marketplace today. For some, their grail is a 90s-era purse that someone’s grandma probably has in her closet. For others, it’s a mid-century table lamp that was once common in every university library. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> They’re a treasure to one generation. They get thrown out as trash to the next. And then suddenly, another generation looks around and is like, oh, this is super cool. There’s something here. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> We’re trying to dig around for something authentic and real. And in that, there becomes… \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> An opening there for an intrigue around religion that I think is likewise helping to give Catholicism this kind of moment. It is certainly an invitation to learn more and for some to take action. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Dr. Bruce says that people have been distrustful and skeptical of religion and religious institutions for valid reasons. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Tricia Bruce:\u003c/strong> Because, of course, you have instances of abuse or discrimination or inauthenticity that have really been a reckoning for many institutions. And I think now the religion and other institutions are undergoing a massive project to rebuild trust and people talk about looking for authenticity. And so I think the podcast by these Dominican sisters is in some ways a reflection of authenticity or a desire to showcase a more transparent experience and message around religion and a re-invitation to see as trustworthy, something like religion. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Sister Thu agrees. In her research at CARA at Georgetown, she’s found that Millennials and Gen Z are reporting historic levels of isolation and anxiety. The Dominican Sisters podcast emerged in the midst of that cold. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> It is responding directly to a hunger for belonging and meaning, especially among the younger generations, as they always search for meaning and real connection. We are seeing a remarkable spiritual surge. Dioceses and campus ministries across the country reported significant surges in baptisms and new candidates last Easter. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> She says that what the sisters are doing with their podcast is really in line with what the whole universal Catholic Church is doing. CARA reports that adults 18 to 35 spend hours online searching for connection, so it makes sense to reach them where they’re at. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Sister Thu:\u003c/strong> And that is the digital evangelization tool in the modern town square, which today happens to be TikTok and YouTube feeds. Right, so by showing up in these digital spaces, the sisters fulfill their religious mandate to meet believers, you know, seekers and non-believers alike where they already spend their time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Is it actually bringing anyone into religious sisterhood though? Well, it takes a really long time to become a sister. It’s a years long process. But while it’s too early to tell if podcast listeners will be inspired to join the Catholic order, like Oprah viewers were 16 years ago, there is a lot of interest in it. Paul from Open Light Media said that after going viral, the Dominican sisters have seen an uptick in young women reaching out for discernment. That’s a process of examining whether it’s God’s will to do something, like becoming a nun. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> And there’s actually a link specifically for that because we saw that happening on our link tree. The process of becoming a sister is very drawn out. It takes years to become a fully professed sister. I anticipate that 10, 15 years down the line, we will probably have a handful of sisters who first heard about the order from the podcast. I really do. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> But Matthew Remski urges people to look beyond the viral clips, the fan edits, and the esthetic mood boards, to really investigate what religious sisterhood means and what the organization, the viral content is coming from, stands for. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Matthew Remski: \u003c/strong> Religious life is punk rock. There’s something really cool about it. And let’s just be clear about what it all entails, right? I would say that what they are showing is the delight they have in communal life. And they’re not showing what the ideological price is for that. Like, I think most people will watch the clip about Ultimate Frisbee or any other activity that they have or like Bingo Night or Games Night or whatever they’re talking about, they’re talking how much fun they have together. And that’s really wonderful and heartwarming. But I think that when you understand that, oh, they actually have a straightforward Catholic ideology that’s driving their faith and their intellectual output and you learn what that ideology teaches and you learned that it’s exclusionary, the conviviality, the thing that people are attracted to, I just wanna say it comes at a price and you gotta know what the price is. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> This doesn’t mean that you can’t watch the sisters’ content or find solace in their joy. Will I stop saying, ‘sister, yes’ every time I agree with my literal sister? No. But it is worth considering where the content on your feed really comes from and digging deeper beyond viral clips, even if their laughter is infectious. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>[Clip from Dominican Sisters Open Mic] \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cem>[Laughter] Sister, yes! [laughter]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> With that, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva It was edited by Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music. The Close All tabs team also includes editor Chris Hambrick and audio engineer, Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon, additional music by APM. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is executive director of podcasts, and Ethan Toven Lindsey is our editor-in-chief. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California local. This episode includes clips from Open Light Media and Matthew Remske, AKA Anti-Fascist Dad, and the Oprah Winfrey Show. It also includes clips from the TikTok accounts @Whsprtz, @whoismikecentanni, @Rag_dti, @thawestt, @editzz103d, @enzoiio, and @giramoficial. This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran. And recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches.Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">\u003cstrong>Paul Dailey:\u003c/strong> It’s really meant for people who, maybe they grew up Catholic and they just don’t really go to church anymore. Maybe they grew up without any religion at all and they see a sister pop up in their TikTok feed and they’re like, I didn’t realize that nuns had podcasts, which is a pretty common comment that we get.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"slug": "understanding-the-corruption-trial-of-oaklands-former-mayor-sheng-thao",
"title": "Understanding the Corruption Trial of Oakland’s Former Mayor Sheng Thao",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 10, 2026 at 9 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The long-awaited federal corruption trial of former Oakland mayor Sheng Thao kicked off last week, with prosecutors arguing that Thao put her power up for sale and defense attorneys attacking the credibility of key government witnesses. It’s been nearly two years since a federal grand jury indicted Thao and three codefendants in an alleged “pay to play” scheme. Thao — alongside her former romantic partner Andre Jones, California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong — have pleaded not guilty to charges that include bribery and conspiracy. We’ll talk about the alleged scheme, how the case is unfolding and what to expect from the six-week trial.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall,\u003c/strong> enterprise and accountability reporter. KQED\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg,\u003c/strong> law professor and co-director of Criminal Justice Center, Stanford Law School\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt,\u003c/strong> government ethics director of The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University; former mayor of Belmont\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Sheng Thao had an incredible biography for a mayor. She had a rough childhood in Stockton, spending time homeless in her youth. But she forged ahead, found a home in Oakland City Hall, and began to move up the political ranks. Her rise culminated in a surprising mayoral win over Loren Taylor by just a few hundred votes, making her the first Hmong American mayor of a major U.S. city.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From the beginning, her administration faced major headwinds. Oakland’s fitful attempts at recovering from the pandemic were hampered by a staggering rise in crime, just when it was falling across the rest of the Bay Area. Less than a year into her term, a recall campaign began, and then, six months later, the FBI raided her house. A few months after that, the recall succeeded, and a few months after that, she was indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now, a year and a half later, she gets her day in court, a day that technically may last many weeks. Here to describe the court case and what we might learn in the months ahead, we’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. Welcome, Alex.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’ve also got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, also former mayor of Belmont. Welcome, Davina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> And we’ve got Robert Weisberg, who’s a professor of criminal law at Stanford. Welcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So, Alex, let’s go through a little bit of the basics. Who’s on trial? Because it’s not just Sheng Thao. What charges are they facing?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Thao is on trial with three other co-defendants. One is Andre Jones, her longtime romantic partner. David Duong is the CEO of California Waste Solutions, which is Oakland’s current curbside recycling provider. And his son, Andy Duong, is also charged in the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re facing a combination of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud charges: honest services mail fraud, honest services wire fraud. Andy Duong is also charged with an additional count of making false statements to a government agency, so essentially lying to the FBI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> How unusual is it, Robert Weisberg, for a group of people like this to be charged and not just have sort of one trial at a time?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, it’s not unusual. In all kinds of cases, gang cases and various kinds of organized crime cases, but certainly in some white-collar cases, it’s quite common for several defendants to be charged together. It’s pretty much the choice of the prosecutor, as long as the charges against each are reasonably interlinked and so long as no one defendant convinces the judge that it is utterly prejudicial for that person to be in the same trial. So it’s really not unusual.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Alex, how can you try and describe the alleged scheme, how it was supposed to work? Who was being bribed to do what, how, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. So prosecutors are alleging that in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election, the defendants agreed to a corruption scheme. And the alleged deal was essentially this: the Duongs would finance negative campaign mailers that targeted Thao’s opponents in that mayoral race, and they would pay Jones money through a no-show job with their nascent housing company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In exchange, Thao allegedly promised that if she won that election, she would take certain steps as mayor to benefit the Duongs’ companies. That included extending California Waste Solutions’ contract with the city of Oakland, committing the city of Oakland to purchasing housing units from Evolutionary Homes, which was this housing company that the Duongs and another individual, I’m sure we’ll talk about Mario Juarez, had recently started to convert shipping containers into housing for the homeless and market them to local Bay Area governments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And also, she allegedly agreed to allow the Duongs and Juarez to influence the appointment of high-level city officials to high-up positions in city government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So how exactly did we end up finding out about this scheme? It all seems to come down to Mario Juarez, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a great question at a great time, because we just heard in court yesterday from an FBI special agent, Katherine Barclay, who disclosed in the most detail we’ve heard to date how exactly this case got on the FBI’s radar.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said that the Oakland Public Ethics Commission came to the FBI with information about a print shop owner who had been hired to print negative campaign mailers by a man who had supposedly made statements about expecting certain things in exchange for the political candidate he was supporting. And that individual was Mario Juarez. And that candidate was, according to prosecutors, Sheng Thao.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As for how the public found out about the investigation, there were very public FBI raids in the summer of 2024. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out about what the federal government was actually interested in. You know, Sheng Thao was adamant that she was innocent. At that point, of course, she hadn’t been charged with a crime.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the following months, there were certain clues that emerged through the U.S. Attorney’s Office subpoenaing the city of Oakland for records. The names they were interested in kind of provided hints about what they might be looking for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Later on, we found out that the FBI was interviewing all kinds of people. People were being called to testify before a grand jury. And in November of 2024, we know Sheng Thao was recalled by voters, and two months later, she was officially indicted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Right before she was recalled, she came on for an event on October 18, 2024. Keep in mind, at the time, there were many hard things going on in Oakland. Her mayorship was not going well. We asked her how these events were impacting her day-to-day work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sheng Thao:\u003c/strong> At the end of the day, I’m innocent, so I’m not worried. This doesn’t actually overshadow anything I do from a day-to-day perspective. It’s frustrating and it’s annoying, but I’m innocent, so there’s nothing to hide. You know, I have nothing to hide, so I carry on with my day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And again, I don’t wake up worried about the FBI raid. I wake up worrying about whether it’s going to be a red-flag day and whether there’s going to be a wildfire. I worry about, you know, how many lives can we protect on our streets? And so those are the things that I’m focused on, and it’s really showing through the results that we see.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> That was Sheng Thao, October 18, 2024, here in conversation with me on \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, talking about trying to be the mayor under the shadow of the FBI raid that turned into what is now the trial going on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by KQED’s Alex Hall. We also have Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what’s going on? What kind of impact do you think this alleged bribery scheme has had on the city of Oakland and its residents, not to mention other people here in the Bay Area who do business and more than business in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, you know, one time I had Aaron Peskin on the show, a San Francisco politician, and I asked him, you know, what’s the thing that he’s found most important in his career in city politics? And he said something like, “Stay away from the trash companies and the recycling companies.” He was just adamant that it’s an area where there’s a lot of corruption in local government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Based on what you have heard, let’s imagine that these allegations of what happened are correct. How out of the ordinary do you think this sort of arrangement would have been?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s a great question. Out of the ordinary? Not really. This is somewhat an issue of political access, which is pretty routine. But the ethical question that this turns on, about being independent, fair, and explainable, is where there’s a lot of concern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think you’ll hear a lot of reaction from the community. These cases, they’re not unprecedented. And, in fact, relationships are what get you elected, but it’s how far those relationships go. Whether it’s recycling or it’s a local business down the street, once you take that oath of office, there’s a real need to have safeguards and separate the duties of them helping you get elected from being accountable to the public at large.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, Robert Weisberg, is there a specific standard that needs to be met that changes something from being like, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine,” to bribery, conspiracy, these types of things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> The language you always hear, the phrase you always hear from the courts, is \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>. Now, particularly during the phase when Thao was running for office, she’s allowed to collect campaign contributions. The question is, did she make highly specific promises that she would take very specific official acts in exchange for the campaign contribution?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, frankly, the same thing can occur after her election. In federal law, there’s a separate charge for federal officials. That’s not what we have here. It’s called gratuities, where sometimes it’s a kind of intermediate crime where there’s just an understanding that good things will be done for those who give money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But for federal bribery and mail fraud like this, the government is going to have to prove that this wasn’t winks and nods. It wasn’t vague promises and representations. It was virtually an explicit contract, orally, but still pretty explicit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So they have to basically find a text message or have someone saying, “Sheng Thao said that this would happen in exchange for that”?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Yes, of course. You know, in certain situations like this, language can be somewhat guarded, even coded. So the prosecutor is going to likely put together a great number of messages, some of them a little vague, some of them ambiguous, some of them coded. But it’s still within the jury’s power to infer that this was a pretty clear deal of \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who’s on trial with her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter at KQED. You just heard Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. We’ve also got Davina Hurt, who’s government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Alexis Madrigal here. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, on trial with several other people as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford; Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara; and Alex Hall, of course, KQED enterprise and accountability reporter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, Alex, I mean, one of the reasons I think people were really interested in this case, and if you’re interested in this case, you can ask your questions of our panel here at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. If you’re interested in these things, it’s because not only is it the corruption trial and the bribery, but also all the things that are going to come out about the innards of how a city like Oakland works around these kinds of things, and all the evidence that’s going to get put out there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like we had, say, in the trial between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, all this stuff comes out outside of just the core allegations. So what are we starting to learn? What’s the picture that’s sort of emerging from the documents that have come to light and the things that are coming up in court?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the indictment paints a picture of a timeline that prosecutors appear to be piecing together through, in large part, text messages. And most of the text messages that I think are the most interesting are really between Mario Juarez, an Oakland businessman and political operative who’s pleaded guilty to participating in this alleged scheme, and Andy Duong, one of the defendants.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Text messages such as, “We may go to jail, but we are $100 million richer.” That’s the one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> So I think that, you know, we’ve been kind of waiting to see how the defense explains those texts. You know, there are also, for example, Juarez supposedly wrote an Apple Note describing the terms of the deal and sent it to Andy Duong. And, you know, obviously we’re scrutinizing very closely what his response was and what that says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> There’s really no one involved in this who watched \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>. I feel like this is just wild. I mean, one of the questions that I have about this Juarez text is, like, the numbers, the dollar amounts here are many digits off, right? I mean, what Juarez actually bankrolled was a $75,000 mailer campaign to get Thao into office, to help her get into office. But then where does this $100 million come from?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I think he’s referring to Evolutionary Homes. Allegedly, the deal was that Thao would commit the city of Oakland to purchasing these housing units from Evolutionary Homes, and so I think that he’s referencing that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The prosecution alleges that the deal evolved over time. So at first, they were saying that Andre Jones would receive up to $300,000 over time for the supposed no-show job. And later, as the defendants continued to meet and discuss this alleged bribery scheme, that number jumped up to $3 million. The prosecution says that Jones was ultimately only paid $95,000.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But even some of these texts are kind of like — there’s a lot of typos and numbers here and there that are just kind of, like, I think, haphazard communication.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But even after the indictment, I mean, we’ve definitely seen a lot of clues. Obviously, we don’t know what the prosecution’s case is, all the evidence that they have. And that’s why I think this trial is so interesting. We really haven’t known what the defense’s case was going to be. The prosecution has disclosed way more hints leading up to the trial, mainly because they have the burden of proof in this case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But there have been a lot of recordings that the FBI seized from Andy Duong’s phone, including a video that appears to show Juarez talking about payments that the Duongs supposedly, he says, made to individuals in exchange for getting help with getting the contract with the city of Oakland, their recycling contract, years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and city officials, including Sheng Thao, current Oakland City Council member Kevin Jenkins, and current Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who at the time was an Oakland City Council member. And the phone calls appear to have been recorded without the officials’ knowledge. So they’re very candid, and they appear to be very revealing as to these seemingly really close relationships between Andy Duong and elected officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other interesting thing, like you mentioned, is that there are going to be quite a few current and former elected officials and city staffers who are expected to testify in this trial. So we don’t know what’s going to come out. We’ve had two days of witness testimony so far. The first witness was Lee Hanson, who is Thao’s former chief of staff. And, you know, I mean, she saw a lot that went on behind closed doors and had a lot of interesting things to say.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, has there already been surprising testimony from people? Tell us a little bit about that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think that Hanson’s testimony, in my opinion, was very interesting because even though she was a government witness, she almost seemed like a defense witness. She had a lot of glowing things to say about Thao, her leadership, her administration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She also said a lot about Andre Jones’ role in the mayor’s office. He was never a city employee, but she testified that he would join meetings with city staffers. A couple of examples that she mentioned were when a prospective hire she was interviewing over Zoom, I think it was someone who would be advising on housing in the mayor’s office, and she says that Jones just joined the Zoom meeting and didn’t come on camera, but was audio only. She had no awareness that he was going to join ahead of time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Also, she mentioned a meeting where they were discussing Thao’s decision to put then-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on administrative leave. Hanson said that, in her experience, she expected this decision to be litigated, and with Oakland’s city attorney in the room, the staffers would be protected by attorney-client privilege. But because Jones was there, they would essentially lose some of those protections, and she was concerned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She testified that Jones made a comment. She said that when she expressed that concern and eventually walked out, he said, “We’ll see which one of us is left at the end of the day.” And she took that to mean a threat to her position.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Davina Hurt, I mean, we see political spouses and partners get involved in various capacities with their elected officials quite often, actually, I would say. How unusual do you think it is to have a spouse or a romantic partner show up in a city meeting like this? With your government accountability hat on, are you just like, “No way, this cannot happen”?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It is very rare and shouldn’t happen at all. And it goes to this idea of guardrails that you’re supposed to put up, not only with the public but also with your family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For someone to bring their own ideas, when they were not elected by the public, and put pressure on decisions involving public business, it definitely is a huge red flag. It’s not respecting the vote and the sacred space of governance for those who have been elected to serve. Yeah, prime example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Robert Weisberg, if I were Sheng Thao’s defense attorney, doesn’t it make sense to try to pin this on Andre Jones? To just distance herself? Because if she didn’t actually give the command, but there were sort of a rogue person out there trading on her name, then it wouldn’t be her fault, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And just to expand on that, on the question of what the defense will do, there will be four defenses because there are four defendants. And yes, Thao could certainly concede, through the lawyers and evidence, that bribery and fraud occurred, and conspiracy, just that she wasn’t part of it. She was just being mentioned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But mind you, you can have other combinations where any defendant can become, in effect, a prosecutor against other defendants, because they don’t have to create reasonable doubt necessarily about whether any crime occurred. They just have to create reasonable doubt about whether they were involved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I noticed yesterday, I believe Mr. Chan, who is, I believe, the attorney for David Duong, the father, seemed to be suggesting that some allegation raised by Ms. Hanson really applied to his son Andy and not to him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Wow. So we’ve got basically a father-son combo, and then we’ve got former romantic partners. It’s so intense, Alex Hall, the storylines here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One other thing that has come up were allegations of sex trafficking that somehow are making their way into this, apparently on a trip to Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s something that came up that was pretty interesting. Just to give some background, Thao and a number of other East Bay officials took this trip to Vietnam in the summer of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Supposed to be like a trade and goodwill kind of thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> And, you know, when they returned from the trip, Hanson testified that a reporter called the mayor’s office with some questions, and one of the questions that Thao’s then-chief of communications relayed to her was in regard to sex trafficking of minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She also said that there was a concern that some individuals on the trip had been stopped by customs on the way out. There was a concern about drug paraphernalia and involvement with young women.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hanson said that when she and the other staff member told Thao about this, she was very upset and said, “I hate that playboy.” She used an expletive. “He has always been trouble. He’s going to ruin my career.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Andy Duong’s attorney, Winston Chan, was pretty upset about this. There was some discussion, not in front of the jury, but after they had left the room, about how Chan didn’t want to draw attention to this, but that his understanding was that the government had told Hanson not to mention anything to do with minors, and that she could mention prostitution, but not anything to do with minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was some back-and-forth between both sides over the weekend. And then, when they came back on Monday, they decided to strike that from the record.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Chan questioned Hanson again and tried to point out that the reporter was really interested in former San Leandro City Council member Brian Azevedo, right? He even tried to show her some document. I think it might have been an FBI 302 form showing, you know, this is what you had told the Department of Justice previously. Doesn’t it show that you really said she was upset at David Duong?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And she stuck to her guns and was like, “I remember her being upset at Andy Duong.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Geez. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, and the various other people caught up in it as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve got KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and we’ve got professor of criminal law at Stanford, Robert Weisberg.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’ve got questions about the trial, I mean, we were getting a lot of comments that sound something like this. Steve writes, “This morning’s show about Oakland’s former mayor and corruption is sadly comical compared to the giant, widespread corruption of the current Trump administration. Will Trump be next? I doubt it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s a small sampling of the kinds of comments like that. If you have other questions, or if you were a Sheng Thao supporter, how are these allegations making you feel about that support?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786, \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Robert, I wanted to ask you about how much of the case we think actually rests on Mario Juarez. This is something that I’m not actually sure about. I mean, he seems to be the guy who’s pointing the finger and saying, “They promised us this.” He’s providing the link between what seems like a corrupt scheme and Thao herself. Does he have to be seen as someone who’s telling the truth in order for the government to win this case?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Well, some degree of truth. He is really a fascinating character in all this. He played a role in a lot of the dealmaking, or attempted dealmaking. He engaged in a lot of the communications. He was heavily involved in this rather bizarre mailer campaign that actually is what started the FBI investigating the whole thing. And, of course, he’s been, in effect, ratting out everybody else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he’ll have to be the major prosecution witness, to be sure. The prosecutor, because this is going to happen anyway from the defense, will elicit from Juarez an acknowledgment that he has pleaded guilty, at least to a conspiracy charge, and indeed that how much leniency he gets in ultimate sentencing, because he hasn’t been sentenced yet, depends on just how much of a contribution he makes to the prosecution’s case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So pretty much all the defendants are going to try to slice him and dice him. It’s interesting, the point raised earlier about the different amounts. Now, it doesn’t really matter, once you get past a few thousand dollars, how much was really at issue. What matters is that a substantial amount of money is exchanged.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the very fact that there were some inconsistencies means that the various defense lawyers will say, “Well, you know, on day X you said this amount, on day Y you said that amount. Why can’t you keep your story straight?” He is crucial to the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s amazing, though. I have to say, when you look into his background, it’s just like all these lawsuits, all this stuff. It’s really made me wonder, Alex Hall, why any Oakland official, why any city official of any kind, would come within a mile of this guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a fascinating question. I’ve wondered that myself. You know, when I’ve talked to people, I’ve definitely gotten the sense that he is a charismatic individual. He obviously has a reputation. I think you’d have to ask the people who have gone into business with him, honestly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, my raw speculation was just that people needed someone to do some dirty work, and he was a guy who seemed willing to do that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That’s literally the language that the prosecution has used. They said that he did the Duongs’ dirty work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was really interesting listening to opening statements because he came up in every one. It’s not just the prosecution and one defense attorney making opening statements. It’s the prosecution and one attorney from each team of attorneys for each defendant. So we had five opening statements, and Juarez came up in every single one of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The prosecution made sure to almost get ahead of it and tell the jury, “You’re going to hear about Mario Juarez saying he’s no angel.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andy Duong’s attorney called him a consummate hustler. He said his face should be in the dictionary under “hustler.” Other attorneys said, you know, he’s the narrator of this story. The case lives or dies on Mario Juarez.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s really interesting because even just in the last year, the defense has really focused quite a bit on Mario Juarez, on his credibility, indicating that they will likely try to impeach him as a witness before the jury.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’ve talked about, in their words, his decades-long history of fraud, that he has this documented, quote-unquote, counterattack history in which he’ll go into business with people and then, if he walks away with their money and they try to contact the police, he files a restraining order. Basically, in their words, he accuses others of wrongdoing or misconduct in reaction to accusations against him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of that does appear to be substantiated by court records. If you look up Mario Juarez and Alameda County Superior Court, there are a lot of cases that do appear to paint that kind of pattern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it’s also really interesting because some of the things he says turn out to be corroborated by other evidence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For example, there’s this really important moment in the timeline of this case in which Mario Juarez had a falling-out with the Duongs because they had gone into business together. There was a confrontation that took place in May of 2024 at California Waste Solutions. Juarez said that the Duongs ordered a group of men to beat him up and that they stole his watch and chain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll come to find out that when the FBI raided the defendants’ homes, they found Juarez’s watch and chain in a bag in Andy Duong’s garage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions’ David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall from KQED, of course, Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Taking your questions on the trial itself or the impact you think it could have on local politics. Give us a call at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal, here with KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Of course, we’ve got all of you out there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re looking at this federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who obviously served before Barbara Lee.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kyle writes, “Coming out of the pandemic and into Thao’s term, I watched as trash piled up, crime skyrocketed, and our city’s fortunes declined. It infuriates me that while all this was happening, Thao and her conspirators were busy lining their pockets instead of guiding the city out of a dark time. Occupancy rates are insane, San Francisco is rising, Oakland desperately trying to dig its way out. That’s the real crime.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think one question that many listeners have, and certainly people I’ve talked to in Oakland, too, is, Alex Hall, how much shrapnel could this send across Oakland politics? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me like Sheng Thao is a mastermind of these things. It seems like, just based on what we’re hearing, things were happening in the city, and she’s in this whole kind of title movement of, like, “Oh, I guess this is just how politics works in this place.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t think that it’s going to be detrimental to Oakland city government. I do think that Oakland residents have had distrust and, I think, a loss of faith to a certain extent over the years, just with everything that’s gone on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But pretty soon after Thao was indicted, Barbara Lee was running for mayor, along with a number of other candidates in the special election to replace Thao after she was recalled. And I definitely got the sense that pretty much every elected official and politician distanced themselves from Thao.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As different evidence has been filed in this case, we’ve kind of gotten the sense that that might not be the full picture. Because, like I said, there have been recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and Kevin Jenkins or Nikki Fortunato Bas that seem like, well, they seem to have a close working relationship or at least be on friendly terms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That, to me, seemed like maybe the Duongs do have a much more constant presence in Oakland government than most Oakland city officials would maybe admit once the indictment was filed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I get the sense that now that Lee has become mayor, it kind of seems like the city has moved on. But, like I said, now that there are all these city officials and East Bay officials who could testify in this trial, maybe they’ll raise new questions. You know, we really don’t know what they’re going to say.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve just wondered if it’s going to spread to other cities, too. California Waste Solutions, as I mentioned, does have other customers, including the city of San Jose, where it serves 175,000 single-family homes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you’ve got a whole bunch of people. Rob Bonta has been mentioned in the same breath, I suppose, as some of these other folks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, I wanted to ask you this. One of our listeners writes in to say, “Do we have any sense about how corrupt Oakland is compared to other cities? Because I have a sense that it doesn’t function well, but I don’t know if that’s just a matter of policy or if there are really institutional problems with the Oakland government.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Well, I would say you could have all the ethics rules on the books, and that doesn’t change an unethical culture. I would say that Oakland reveals issues that are in other cities as well. I wouldn’t say they’re unique, but they do have many different problems layered on top of others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As I think about this opportunity that we have with the trial, it’s to pull the covers back, open the doors to how the city does run. There’s an Ethics Commission, there’s an Ethics Act, there is a city auditor. What happened where none of these agencies within the government caught these acts or stepped in to advise better ways of moving forward?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s a lot to learn. Other cities that don’t have ethics commissions should consider them as ways to ensure that people are serving the public and moving forward in ways that protect the interests of those who are in need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> You know, Alex Hall, a listener, Alan, writes in to say, “What are the chances that there are other areas where city contracts in Oakland might deserve investigation? For example, road repairs or other cases where companies are given city contracts?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, when Lee was running for mayor, because it is hard to find — there aren’t, at least to my knowledge, when I was covering Oakland politics and government much more closely, all the contracts just listed on the website. There wasn’t some all-encompassing, comprehensive system for looking at them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Lee, when she was campaigning, said that she wanted to do a forensic audit of the contracts with the city of Oakland. That kind of seemed to show that she would be taking more accountability for Oakland’s budget, but also probably in reaction to this criminal case and the concerns about ethics in Oakland city government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It does appear that the city is taking steps in that direction to actually conduct that audit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, as you mentioned, California Waste Solutions does have an active contract with the city of Oakland. If the CEO of that contractor were to be convicted of federal crimes, would that change the calculus for the city of Oakland? I don’t know exactly what the terms of that contract are or whether they would allow the city to end it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, one has to hope that might be something they wrote into the contract. If someone goes down for federal bribery, maybe this contract is null. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know. You know, it is a family-run business, so presumably one of the other members of the Duong family could take over. But when Lee was running for mayor, I actually did ask her about that, you know, if she would consider reopening, amending, or canceling any part of the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, what are the potential punishments that could come out of this? Could it be that each defendant gets their own sentence, let’s say they are convicted, they’re eventually found guilty? And are they long sentences here? What would a typical sentence be in a case like this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> First of all, there will be four separate sentences. Indeed, there will be five, because Mario Juarez will ultimately be sentenced, although presumably for less time than the others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It may be that not every defendant is convicted of every one of the six or seven charges, so that will also affect how much anyone gets.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is the thing about federal sentencing. First of all, at least on paper, the sentences are really, really long. Some of the charges have a maximum sentence of 20 years, some 10 years, and some 5 years. In theory, but in very theoretical theory, a particular defendant could get consecutive sentences on all of those charges, and that would be, in effect, a life sentence, and more so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the federal sentencing guidelines call for something called grouping, so that more often the main sentence will be for the most serious crime that the person is convicted of. We won’t keep augmenting them consecutively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Even then, although there are a lot of formulas in the federal sentencing guidelines that would suggest a calculation on the part of the judge, because of various legal changes, the guidelines, however rigid and severe they always looked, are now deemed, quote-unquote, advisory. When all is said and done, the judge has plenty of discretion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The best one can say is that if you compare this to white-collar crime cases around the country, and this is just sort of an impressionistic assessment of how serious the crime is and how much any one individual was a leader of it, I could imagine sentences in the 10- to 15-year range.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Wow, wow. I mean, have we seen anything like that in a Bay Area corruption case? Does anybody know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t heard of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, yeah, that would be quite something. And that would include Sheng Thao, you think, Robert Weisberg?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, in theory, she’s exposed to every one of those charges and all those maximum sentences. It may turn out, as suggested earlier, that she can avoid conviction on some or all counts by trying to make the case that she was more in the shadows of this and didn’t know completely what was going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not always easy for a leader to say, “Well, I didn’t really know what was going on,” because the prosecutor might say, “Well, aren’t you supposed to be in charge of everything that’s going on among the government and among your confederates?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But again, everybody’s going to be accusing everybody else. That’s what can happen in a multi-defendant trial. Her lawyer is going to attack witnesses who actually say good things about the other defendants, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Also, I can’t remember how much money actually changed hands here, right? Because Andre Jones did get some money for this job, which the prosecution calls a no-show job with Evolutionary Homes. So was it supposed to be $300,000 a year? At least that was the first number I heard. Do we know how much he actually ever got?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> The prosecution says that he was ultimately paid only $95,000.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, Robert Weisberg, when I hear the numbers, like, oh, okay, so we had $75,000 go to Juarez, we had $95,000. These don’t look like enormous numbers, and yet it’s the nature of this kind of conspiracy that’s alleged that would lead to this much larger, much longer sentence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Right. Well, first of all, if the prosecution is conceding, let’s say with Jones, a maximum of $90,000, that will keep his sentence a little lower than otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But here’s the reason why the amount of money is not the decisive thing here. The government’s case is really based — although there’s a federal bribery charge based on the city being a government contractor — the really serious charge is mail and wire fraud under this thing called honest services deprivation, which is a bizarre thing that Congress came up with many years ago. But here’s the gist of it: what is stolen here, because fraud is a kind of theft, is not so much an amount of money, but rather the right of the people of Oakland to have good government. So, the breach of governmental fiduciary duty, and, of course, aided and abetted by certain people like the Duongs who are not government officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s really the heart of the matter, and that’s why, although the amount of money is important, it’s back to that specificity of the \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Man, it’s actually quite dramatic when you put it in those terms, you know? Like, they stole our trust in the government is essentially what the charge is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Charges are based on that when it involves federal prosecutors prosecuting state and local officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Wow. Do you think, Alex Hall, that this hurt the progressive movement in Oakland, or more broadly, given that Sheng Thao was sort of the standard-bearer for this in the city?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if I really fully know the answer to that question. I don’t perceive any indication of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I remember when, I think it was the week after Thao was indicted, I went to a campaign event for Barbara Lee at a bar in downtown Oakland where I had gone to other election-night parties for Sheng Thao and Oakland City Council members. A lot of local elected officials, Democratic politicians, showed up, and they were all the same officials who showed up to Sheng Thao’s event, showing up to Barbara Lee’s event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So to me, it kind of felt like there’s — I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I did not have the indication that this was going to somehow — and, you know, this is Oakland. I mean, people have their political views, and I don’t think that distrust in one public official is going to destroy their opinion of the whole party or whether these officials have the ability to represent their interests.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Let’s bring in Judith in Oakland. Welcome, Judith.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Hi. Yeah, I was just commenting and can ask a question about the impact this has. It does, for me, on my vote, in regard to Barbara Lee’s request for more executive power. And, like Barbara Lee, I think, well, if this can happen to Sheng Thao, and you look at Trump and his massive corruption, it’s having an impact on me. Does anyone have any idea what’s happening in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, one thing I’ll say, I think related to Oakland politics, thank you for this, Judith, is people do seem to have baseline lower levels of trust in the government than before. And, of course, when Barbara Lee is trying to be able to move more quickly as mayor, I think some people are thinking about it like Judith is here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me ask one other thing, because we have a long way to go on this trial, Alex Hall. What are you looking out for? The prosecution has given a list of up to 70 witnesses. They may not call them all, but they could call up to 70 people. Are there any in particular that you think might be crucial?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, Mario Juarez. I think Mario Juarez’s testimony is going to be fascinating, not only what he says, but also what the defense attorneys ask him. They’re going to be asking about his track record and what he said. And what they respond with, I think, is going to be really, really interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m going to look for what evidence the government has that undeniably corroborates that this scheme played out the way they’re alleging that it did, that does not come from Juarez.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another thing that I’m going to be looking out for is we’ve seen a number of videos and audio recordings that prosecutors have filed in federal court.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> But we haven’t actually seen them, right? Oh, yeah, we have. Oh, okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Some. But there’s been descriptions of other recordings that we haven’t seen that I think will be very interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Supposedly, we’re going to hear the FBI’s interview with Andy Duong. There have been descriptions of other recordings of conversations that Andy Duong allegedly recorded with elected officials that will be really interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But supposedly, there are recordings of Evolutionary Homes’ board meetings in which the scheme was allegedly discussed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then I think it will be interesting to see how Juarez’s allegations of broader corruption come up in this trial. There’s this video of him talking about the Duongs supposedly receiving payment or paying individuals who supposedly helped them get this city of Oakland contract for the recycling company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He also told the FBI that he saw people lining up outside California Waste Solutions, getting bags of cash from David Duong, that they’ve been involved in money laundering, and that he’s witnessed them deleting evidence from security footage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think how those allegations of broader corruption in Oakland come up in the trial is going to be really interesting. And, yeah, just Juarez in general. I think a lot of people are waiting to hear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, just with our last 30 seconds here, do you think the government’s going to win its case here against at least some of the defendants?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> I don’t like to predict, but the government has a lot of strong evidence against a lot of people. So I don’t think a mixed verdict is out of the question, mixed in the sense that a particular individual doesn’t get busted on all counts and that different people get busted on different counts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it looks like a very strong case, except so much of it assumes that Mario Juarez has credibility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much, Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Davina Hurt, thank you as well, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and former mayor of Belmont. And thank you, Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. I feel like I understand what’s going on a lot better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last listener comment. A listener writes on Bluesky, “As a native of Chicago, is it hard for me to believe that the history of corruption in Oakland begins and ends with Sheng Thao? Was she just bad at covering her tracks?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> ahead with Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The long-awaited federal corruption trial of former Oakland mayor Sheng Thao kicked off last week, with prosecutors arguing that Thao put her power up for sale and defense attorneys attacking the credibility of key government witnesses. It’s been nearly two years since a federal grand jury indicted Thao and three codefendants in an alleged “pay to play” scheme. Thao — alongside her former romantic partner Andre Jones, California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong — have pleaded not guilty to charges that include bribery and conspiracy. We’ll talk about the alleged scheme, how the case is unfolding and what to expect from the six-week trial.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Sheng Thao had an incredible biography for a mayor. She had a rough childhood in Stockton, spending time homeless in her youth. But she forged ahead, found a home in Oakland City Hall, and began to move up the political ranks. Her rise culminated in a surprising mayoral win over Loren Taylor by just a few hundred votes, making her the first Hmong American mayor of a major U.S. city.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Sheng Thao had an incredible biography for a mayor. She had a rough childhood in Stockton, spending time homeless in her youth. But she forged ahead, found a home in Oakland City Hall, and began to move up the political ranks. Her rise culminated in a surprising mayoral win over Loren Taylor by just a few hundred votes, making her the first Hmong American mayor of a major U.S. city.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>From the beginning, her administration faced major headwinds. Oakland’s fitful attempts at recovering from the pandemic were hampered by a staggering rise in crime, just when it was falling across the rest of the Bay Area. Less than a year into her term, a recall campaign began, and then, six months later, the FBI raided her house. A few months after that, the recall succeeded, and a few months after that, she was indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>From the beginning, her administration faced major headwinds. Oakland’s fitful attempts at recovering from the pandemic were hampered by a staggering rise in crime, just when it was falling across the rest of the Bay Area. Less than a year into her term, a recall campaign began, and then, six months later, the FBI raided her house. A few months after that, the recall succeeded, and a few months after that, she was indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And now, a year and a half later, she gets her day in court, a day that technically may last many weeks. Here to describe the court case and what we might learn in the months ahead, we’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. Welcome, Alex.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And now, a year and a half later, she gets her day in court, a day that technically may last many weeks. Here to describe the court case and what we might learn in the months ahead, we’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. Welcome, Alex.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’ve also got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, also former mayor of Belmont. Welcome, Davina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’ve also got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, also former mayor of Belmont. Welcome, Davina.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> And we’ve got Robert Weisberg, who’s a professor of criminal law at Stanford. Welcome.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> And we’ve got Robert Weisberg, who’s a professor of criminal law at Stanford. Welcome.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So, Alex, let’s go through a little bit of the basics. Who’s on trial? Because it’s not just Sheng Thao. What charges are they facing?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So, Alex, let’s go through a little bit of the basics. Who’s on trial? Because it’s not just Sheng Thao. What charges are they facing?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Thao is on trial with three other co-defendants. One is Andre Jones, her longtime romantic partner. David Duong is the CEO of California Waste Solutions, which is Oakland’s current curbside recycling provider. And his son, Andy Duong, is also charged in the case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Thao is on trial with three other co-defendants. One is Andre Jones, her longtime romantic partner. David Duong is the CEO of California Waste Solutions, which is Oakland’s current curbside recycling provider. And his son, Andy Duong, is also charged in the case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’re facing a combination of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud charges: honest services mail fraud, honest services wire fraud. Andy Duong is also charged with an additional count of making false statements to a government agency, so essentially lying to the FBI.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They’re facing a combination of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud charges: honest services mail fraud, honest services wire fraud. Andy Duong is also charged with an additional count of making false statements to a government agency, so essentially lying to the FBI.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> How unusual is it, Robert Weisberg, for a group of people like this to be charged and not just have sort of one trial at a time?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> How unusual is it, Robert Weisberg, for a group of people like this to be charged and not just have sort of one trial at a time?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, it’s not unusual. In all kinds of cases, gang cases and various kinds of organized crime cases, but certainly in some white-collar cases, it’s quite common for several defendants to be charged together. It’s pretty much the choice of the prosecutor, as long as the charges against each are reasonably interlinked and so long as no one defendant convinces the judge that it is utterly prejudicial for that person to be in the same trial. So it’s really not unusual.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, it’s not unusual. In all kinds of cases, gang cases and various kinds of organized crime cases, but certainly in some white-collar cases, it’s quite common for several defendants to be charged together. It’s pretty much the choice of the prosecutor, as long as the charges against each are reasonably interlinked and so long as no one defendant convinces the judge that it is utterly prejudicial for that person to be in the same trial. So it’s really not unusual.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Alex, how can you try and describe the alleged scheme, how it was supposed to work? Who was being bribed to do what, how, you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Alex, how can you try and describe the alleged scheme, how it was supposed to work? Who was being bribed to do what, how, you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. So prosecutors are alleging that in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election, the defendants agreed to a corruption scheme. And the alleged deal was essentially this: the Duongs would finance negative campaign mailers that targeted Thao’s opponents in that mayoral race, and they would pay Jones money through a no-show job with their nascent housing company.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. So prosecutors are alleging that in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election, the defendants agreed to a corruption scheme. And the alleged deal was essentially this: the Duongs would finance negative campaign mailers that targeted Thao’s opponents in that mayoral race, and they would pay Jones money through a no-show job with their nascent housing company.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In exchange, Thao allegedly promised that if she won that election, she would take certain steps as mayor to benefit the Duongs’ companies. That included extending California Waste Solutions’ contract with the city of Oakland, committing the city of Oakland to purchasing housing units from Evolutionary Homes, which was this housing company that the Duongs and another individual, I’m sure we’ll talk about Mario Juarez, had recently started to convert shipping containers into housing for the homeless and market them to local Bay Area governments.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In exchange, Thao allegedly promised that if she won that election, she would take certain steps as mayor to benefit the Duongs’ companies. That included extending California Waste Solutions’ contract with the city of Oakland, committing the city of Oakland to purchasing housing units from Evolutionary Homes, which was this housing company that the Duongs and another individual, I’m sure we’ll talk about Mario Juarez, had recently started to convert shipping containers into housing for the homeless and market them to local Bay Area governments.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And also, she allegedly agreed to allow the Duongs and Juarez to influence the appointment of high-level city officials to high-up positions in city government.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And also, she allegedly agreed to allow the Duongs and Juarez to influence the appointment of high-level city officials to high-up positions in city government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So how exactly did we end up finding out about this scheme? It all seems to come down to Mario Juarez, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So how exactly did we end up finding out about this scheme? It all seems to come down to Mario Juarez, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a great question at a great time, because we just heard in court yesterday from an FBI special agent, Katherine Barclay, who disclosed in the most detail we’ve heard to date how exactly this case got on the FBI’s radar.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a great question at a great time, because we just heard in court yesterday from an FBI special agent, Katherine Barclay, who disclosed in the most detail we’ve heard to date how exactly this case got on the FBI’s radar.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She said that the Oakland Public Ethics Commission came to the FBI with information about a print shop owner who had been hired to print negative campaign mailers by a man who had supposedly made statements about expecting certain things in exchange for the political candidate he was supporting. And that individual was Mario Juarez. And that candidate was, according to prosecutors, Sheng Thao.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She said that the Oakland Public Ethics Commission came to the FBI with information about a print shop owner who had been hired to print negative campaign mailers by a man who had supposedly made statements about expecting certain things in exchange for the political candidate he was supporting. And that individual was Mario Juarez. And that candidate was, according to prosecutors, Sheng Thao.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>As for how the public found out about the investigation, there were very public FBI raids in the summer of 2024. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out about what the federal government was actually interested in. You know, Sheng Thao was adamant that she was innocent. At that point, of course, she hadn’t been charged with a crime.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>As for how the public found out about the investigation, there were very public FBI raids in the summer of 2024. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out about what the federal government was actually interested in. You know, Sheng Thao was adamant that she was innocent. At that point, of course, she hadn’t been charged with a crime.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Over the following months, there were certain clues that emerged through the U.S. Attorney’s Office subpoenaing the city of Oakland for records. The names they were interested in kind of provided hints about what they might be looking for.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Over the following months, there were certain clues that emerged through the U.S. Attorney’s Office subpoenaing the city of Oakland for records. The names they were interested in kind of provided hints about what they might be looking for.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Later on, we found out that the FBI was interviewing all kinds of people. People were being called to testify before a grand jury. And in November of 2024, we know Sheng Thao was recalled by voters, and two months later, she was officially indicted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Later on, we found out that the FBI was interviewing all kinds of people. People were being called to testify before a grand jury. And in November of 2024, we know Sheng Thao was recalled by voters, and two months later, she was officially indicted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Right before she was recalled, she came on for an event on October 18, 2024. Keep in mind, at the time, there were many hard things going on in Oakland. Her mayorship was not going well. We asked her how these events were impacting her day-to-day work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Right before she was recalled, she came on for an event on October 18, 2024. Keep in mind, at the time, there were many hard things going on in Oakland. Her mayorship was not going well. We asked her how these events were impacting her day-to-day work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sheng Thao:\u003c/strong> At the end of the day, I’m innocent, so I’m not worried. This doesn’t actually overshadow anything I do from a day-to-day perspective. It’s frustrating and it’s annoying, but I’m innocent, so there’s nothing to hide. You know, I have nothing to hide, so I carry on with my day.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sheng Thao:\u003c/strong> At the end of the day, I’m innocent, so I’m not worried. This doesn’t actually overshadow anything I do from a day-to-day perspective. It’s frustrating and it’s annoying, but I’m innocent, so there’s nothing to hide. You know, I have nothing to hide, so I carry on with my day.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And again, I don’t wake up worried about the FBI raid. I wake up worrying about whether it’s going to be a red-flag day and whether there’s going to be a wildfire. I worry about, you know, how many lives can we protect on our streets? And so those are the things that I’m focused on, and it’s really showing through the results that we see.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And again, I don’t wake up worried about the FBI raid. I wake up worrying about whether it’s going to be a red-flag day and whether there’s going to be a wildfire. I worry about, you know, how many lives can we protect on our streets? And so those are the things that I’m focused on, and it’s really showing through the results that we see.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> That was Sheng Thao, October 18, 2024, here in conversation with me on \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, talking about trying to be the mayor under the shadow of the FBI raid that turned into what is now the trial going on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> That was Sheng Thao, October 18, 2024, here in conversation with me on \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, talking about trying to be the mayor under the shadow of the FBI raid that turned into what is now the trial going on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re joined by KQED’s Alex Hall. We also have Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re joined by KQED’s Alex Hall. We also have Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what’s going on? What kind of impact do you think this alleged bribery scheme has had on the city of Oakland and its residents, not to mention other people here in the Bay Area who do business and more than business in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what’s going on? What kind of impact do you think this alleged bribery scheme has had on the city of Oakland and its residents, not to mention other people here in the Bay Area who do business and more than business in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, you know, one time I had Aaron Peskin on the show, a San Francisco politician, and I asked him, you know, what’s the thing that he’s found most important in his career in city politics? And he said something like, “Stay away from the trash companies and the recycling companies.” He was just adamant that it’s an area where there’s a lot of corruption in local government.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, you know, one time I had Aaron Peskin on the show, a San Francisco politician, and I asked him, you know, what’s the thing that he’s found most important in his career in city politics? And he said something like, “Stay away from the trash companies and the recycling companies.” He was just adamant that it’s an area where there’s a lot of corruption in local government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Based on what you have heard, let’s imagine that these allegations of what happened are correct. How out of the ordinary do you think this sort of arrangement would have been?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Based on what you have heard, let’s imagine that these allegations of what happened are correct. How out of the ordinary do you think this sort of arrangement would have been?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s a great question. Out of the ordinary? Not really. This is somewhat an issue of political access, which is pretty routine. But the ethical question that this turns on, about being independent, fair, and explainable, is where there’s a lot of concern.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s a great question. Out of the ordinary? Not really. This is somewhat an issue of political access, which is pretty routine. But the ethical question that this turns on, about being independent, fair, and explainable, is where there’s a lot of concern.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think you’ll hear a lot of reaction from the community. These cases, they’re not unprecedented. And, in fact, relationships are what get you elected, but it’s how far those relationships go. Whether it’s recycling or it’s a local business down the street, once you take that oath of office, there’s a real need to have safeguards and separate the duties of them helping you get elected from being accountable to the public at large.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think you’ll hear a lot of reaction from the community. These cases, they’re not unprecedented. And, in fact, relationships are what get you elected, but it’s how far those relationships go. Whether it’s recycling or it’s a local business down the street, once you take that oath of office, there’s a real need to have safeguards and separate the duties of them helping you get elected from being accountable to the public at large.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, Robert Weisberg, is there a specific standard that needs to be met that changes something from being like, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine,” to bribery, conspiracy, these types of things?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, Robert Weisberg, is there a specific standard that needs to be met that changes something from being like, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine,” to bribery, conspiracy, these types of things?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> The language you always hear, the phrase you always hear from the courts, is \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>. Now, particularly during the phase when Thao was running for office, she’s allowed to collect campaign contributions. The question is, did she make highly specific promises that she would take very specific official acts in exchange for the campaign contribution?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> The language you always hear, the phrase you always hear from the courts, is \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>. Now, particularly during the phase when Thao was running for office, she’s allowed to collect campaign contributions. The question is, did she make highly specific promises that she would take very specific official acts in exchange for the campaign contribution?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And, frankly, the same thing can occur after her election. In federal law, there’s a separate charge for federal officials. That’s not what we have here. It’s called gratuities, where sometimes it’s a kind of intermediate crime where there’s just an understanding that good things will be done for those who give money.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And, frankly, the same thing can occur after her election. In federal law, there’s a separate charge for federal officials. That’s not what we have here. It’s called gratuities, where sometimes it’s a kind of intermediate crime where there’s just an understanding that good things will be done for those who give money.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But for federal bribery and mail fraud like this, the government is going to have to prove that this wasn’t winks and nods. It wasn’t vague promises and representations. It was virtually an explicit contract, orally, but still pretty explicit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But for federal bribery and mail fraud like this, the government is going to have to prove that this wasn’t winks and nods. It wasn’t vague promises and representations. It was virtually an explicit contract, orally, but still pretty explicit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So they have to basically find a text message or have someone saying, “Sheng Thao said that this would happen in exchange for that”?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So they have to basically find a text message or have someone saying, “Sheng Thao said that this would happen in exchange for that”?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Yes, of course. You know, in certain situations like this, language can be somewhat guarded, even coded. So the prosecutor is going to likely put together a great number of messages, some of them a little vague, some of them ambiguous, some of them coded. But it’s still within the jury’s power to infer that this was a pretty clear deal of \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Yes, of course. You know, in certain situations like this, language can be somewhat guarded, even coded. So the prosecutor is going to likely put together a great number of messages, some of them a little vague, some of them ambiguous, some of them coded. But it’s still within the jury’s power to infer that this was a pretty clear deal of \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who’s on trial with her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who’s on trial with her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter at KQED. You just heard Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. We’ve also got Davina Hurt, who’s government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter at KQED. You just heard Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. We’ve also got Davina Hurt, who’s government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Alexis Madrigal here. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, on trial with several other people as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Alexis Madrigal here. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, on trial with several other people as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford; Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara; and Alex Hall, of course, KQED enterprise and accountability reporter.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford; Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara; and Alex Hall, of course, KQED enterprise and accountability reporter.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, Alex, I mean, one of the reasons I think people were really interested in this case, and if you’re interested in this case, you can ask your questions of our panel here at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. If you’re interested in these things, it’s because not only is it the corruption trial and the bribery, but also all the things that are going to come out about the innards of how a city like Oakland works around these kinds of things, and all the evidence that’s going to get put out there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, Alex, I mean, one of the reasons I think people were really interested in this case, and if you’re interested in this case, you can ask your questions of our panel here at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. If you’re interested in these things, it’s because not only is it the corruption trial and the bribery, but also all the things that are going to come out about the innards of how a city like Oakland works around these kinds of things, and all the evidence that’s going to get put out there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Like we had, say, in the trial between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, all this stuff comes out outside of just the core allegations. So what are we starting to learn? What’s the picture that’s sort of emerging from the documents that have come to light and the things that are coming up in court?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Like we had, say, in the trial between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, all this stuff comes out outside of just the core allegations. So what are we starting to learn? What’s the picture that’s sort of emerging from the documents that have come to light and the things that are coming up in court?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the indictment paints a picture of a timeline that prosecutors appear to be piecing together through, in large part, text messages. And most of the text messages that I think are the most interesting are really between Mario Juarez, an Oakland businessman and political operative who’s pleaded guilty to participating in this alleged scheme, and Andy Duong, one of the defendants.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the indictment paints a picture of a timeline that prosecutors appear to be piecing together through, in large part, text messages. And most of the text messages that I think are the most interesting are really between Mario Juarez, an Oakland businessman and political operative who’s pleaded guilty to participating in this alleged scheme, and Andy Duong, one of the defendants.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Text messages such as, “We may go to jail, but we are $100 million richer.” That’s the one.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Text messages such as, “We may go to jail, but we are $100 million richer.” That’s the one.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> So I think that, you know, we’ve been kind of waiting to see how the defense explains those texts. You know, there are also, for example, Juarez supposedly wrote an Apple Note describing the terms of the deal and sent it to Andy Duong. And, you know, obviously we’re scrutinizing very closely what his response was and what that says.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> So I think that, you know, we’ve been kind of waiting to see how the defense explains those texts. You know, there are also, for example, Juarez supposedly wrote an Apple Note describing the terms of the deal and sent it to Andy Duong. And, you know, obviously we’re scrutinizing very closely what his response was and what that says.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> There’s really no one involved in this who watched \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>. I feel like this is just wild. I mean, one of the questions that I have about this Juarez text is, like, the numbers, the dollar amounts here are many digits off, right? I mean, what Juarez actually bankrolled was a $75,000 mailer campaign to get Thao into office, to help her get into office. But then where does this $100 million come from?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> There’s really no one involved in this who watched \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>. I feel like this is just wild. I mean, one of the questions that I have about this Juarez text is, like, the numbers, the dollar amounts here are many digits off, right? I mean, what Juarez actually bankrolled was a $75,000 mailer campaign to get Thao into office, to help her get into office. But then where does this $100 million come from?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I think he’s referring to Evolutionary Homes. Allegedly, the deal was that Thao would commit the city of Oakland to purchasing these housing units from Evolutionary Homes, and so I think that he’s referencing that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I think he’s referring to Evolutionary Homes. Allegedly, the deal was that Thao would commit the city of Oakland to purchasing these housing units from Evolutionary Homes, and so I think that he’s referencing that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The prosecution alleges that the deal evolved over time. So at first, they were saying that Andre Jones would receive up to $300,000 over time for the supposed no-show job. And later, as the defendants continued to meet and discuss this alleged bribery scheme, that number jumped up to $3 million. The prosecution says that Jones was ultimately only paid $95,000.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The prosecution alleges that the deal evolved over time. So at first, they were saying that Andre Jones would receive up to $300,000 over time for the supposed no-show job. And later, as the defendants continued to meet and discuss this alleged bribery scheme, that number jumped up to $3 million. The prosecution says that Jones was ultimately only paid $95,000.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But even some of these texts are kind of like — there’s a lot of typos and numbers here and there that are just kind of, like, I think, haphazard communication.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>But even some of these texts are kind of like — there’s a lot of typos and numbers here and there that are just kind of, like, I think, haphazard communication.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But even after the indictment, I mean, we’ve definitely seen a lot of clues. Obviously, we don’t know what the prosecution’s case is, all the evidence that they have. And that’s why I think this trial is so interesting. We really haven’t known what the defense’s case was going to be. The prosecution has disclosed way more hints leading up to the trial, mainly because they have the burden of proof in this case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But even after the indictment, I mean, we’ve definitely seen a lot of clues. Obviously, we don’t know what the prosecution’s case is, all the evidence that they have. And that’s why I think this trial is so interesting. We really haven’t known what the defense’s case was going to be. The prosecution has disclosed way more hints leading up to the trial, mainly because they have the burden of proof in this case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But there have been a lot of recordings that the FBI seized from Andy Duong’s phone, including a video that appears to show Juarez talking about payments that the Duongs supposedly, he says, made to individuals in exchange for getting help with getting the contract with the city of Oakland, their recycling contract, years ago.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But there have been a lot of recordings that the FBI seized from Andy Duong’s phone, including a video that appears to show Juarez talking about payments that the Duongs supposedly, he says, made to individuals in exchange for getting help with getting the contract with the city of Oakland, their recycling contract, years ago.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and city officials, including Sheng Thao, current Oakland City Council member Kevin Jenkins, and current Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who at the time was an Oakland City Council member. And the phone calls appear to have been recorded without the officials’ knowledge. So they’re very candid, and they appear to be very revealing as to these seemingly really close relationships between Andy Duong and elected officials.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and city officials, including Sheng Thao, current Oakland City Council member Kevin Jenkins, and current Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who at the time was an Oakland City Council member. And the phone calls appear to have been recorded without the officials’ knowledge. So they’re very candid, and they appear to be very revealing as to these seemingly really close relationships between Andy Duong and elected officials.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The other interesting thing, like you mentioned, is that there are going to be quite a few current and former elected officials and city staffers who are expected to testify in this trial. So we don’t know what’s going to come out. We’ve had two days of witness testimony so far. The first witness was Lee Hanson, who is Thao’s former chief of staff. And, you know, I mean, she saw a lot that went on behind closed doors and had a lot of interesting things to say.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The other interesting thing, like you mentioned, is that there are going to be quite a few current and former elected officials and city staffers who are expected to testify in this trial. So we don’t know what’s going to come out. We’ve had two days of witness testimony so far. The first witness was Lee Hanson, who is Thao’s former chief of staff. And, you know, I mean, she saw a lot that went on behind closed doors and had a lot of interesting things to say.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, has there already been surprising testimony from people? Tell us a little bit about that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, has there already been surprising testimony from people? Tell us a little bit about that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think that Hanson’s testimony, in my opinion, was very interesting because even though she was a government witness, she almost seemed like a defense witness. She had a lot of glowing things to say about Thao, her leadership, her administration.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think that Hanson’s testimony, in my opinion, was very interesting because even though she was a government witness, she almost seemed like a defense witness. She had a lot of glowing things to say about Thao, her leadership, her administration.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She also said a lot about Andre Jones’ role in the mayor’s office. He was never a city employee, but she testified that he would join meetings with city staffers. A couple of examples that she mentioned were when a prospective hire she was interviewing over Zoom, I think it was someone who would be advising on housing in the mayor’s office, and she says that Jones just joined the Zoom meeting and didn’t come on camera, but was audio only. She had no awareness that he was going to join ahead of time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She also said a lot about Andre Jones’ role in the mayor’s office. He was never a city employee, but she testified that he would join meetings with city staffers. A couple of examples that she mentioned were when a prospective hire she was interviewing over Zoom, I think it was someone who would be advising on housing in the mayor’s office, and she says that Jones just joined the Zoom meeting and didn’t come on camera, but was audio only. She had no awareness that he was going to join ahead of time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Also, she mentioned a meeting where they were discussing Thao’s decision to put then-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on administrative leave. Hanson said that, in her experience, she expected this decision to be litigated, and with Oakland’s city attorney in the room, the staffers would be protected by attorney-client privilege. But because Jones was there, they would essentially lose some of those protections, and she was concerned.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Also, she mentioned a meeting where they were discussing Thao’s decision to put then-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on administrative leave. Hanson said that, in her experience, she expected this decision to be litigated, and with Oakland’s city attorney in the room, the staffers would be protected by attorney-client privilege. But because Jones was there, they would essentially lose some of those protections, and she was concerned.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She testified that Jones made a comment. She said that when she expressed that concern and eventually walked out, he said, “We’ll see which one of us is left at the end of the day.” And she took that to mean a threat to her position.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She testified that Jones made a comment. She said that when she expressed that concern and eventually walked out, he said, “We’ll see which one of us is left at the end of the day.” And she took that to mean a threat to her position.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Davina Hurt, I mean, we see political spouses and partners get involved in various capacities with their elected officials quite often, actually, I would say. How unusual do you think it is to have a spouse or a romantic partner show up in a city meeting like this? With your government accountability hat on, are you just like, “No way, this cannot happen”?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Davina Hurt, I mean, we see political spouses and partners get involved in various capacities with their elected officials quite often, actually, I would say. How unusual do you think it is to have a spouse or a romantic partner show up in a city meeting like this? With your government accountability hat on, are you just like, “No way, this cannot happen”?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It is very rare and shouldn’t happen at all. And it goes to this idea of guardrails that you’re supposed to put up, not only with the public but also with your family.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It is very rare and shouldn’t happen at all. And it goes to this idea of guardrails that you’re supposed to put up, not only with the public but also with your family.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For someone to bring their own ideas, when they were not elected by the public, and put pressure on decisions involving public business, it definitely is a huge red flag. It’s not respecting the vote and the sacred space of governance for those who have been elected to serve. Yeah, prime example.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For someone to bring their own ideas, when they were not elected by the public, and put pressure on decisions involving public business, it definitely is a huge red flag. It’s not respecting the vote and the sacred space of governance for those who have been elected to serve. Yeah, prime example.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Robert Weisberg, if I were Sheng Thao’s defense attorney, doesn’t it make sense to try to pin this on Andre Jones? To just distance herself? Because if she didn’t actually give the command, but there were sort of a rogue person out there trading on her name, then it wouldn’t be her fault, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Robert Weisberg, if I were Sheng Thao’s defense attorney, doesn’t it make sense to try to pin this on Andre Jones? To just distance herself? Because if she didn’t actually give the command, but there were sort of a rogue person out there trading on her name, then it wouldn’t be her fault, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And just to expand on that, on the question of what the defense will do, there will be four defenses because there are four defendants. And yes, Thao could certainly concede, through the lawyers and evidence, that bribery and fraud occurred, and conspiracy, just that she wasn’t part of it. She was just being mentioned.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And just to expand on that, on the question of what the defense will do, there will be four defenses because there are four defendants. And yes, Thao could certainly concede, through the lawyers and evidence, that bribery and fraud occurred, and conspiracy, just that she wasn’t part of it. She was just being mentioned.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But mind you, you can have other combinations where any defendant can become, in effect, a prosecutor against other defendants, because they don’t have to create reasonable doubt necessarily about whether any crime occurred. They just have to create reasonable doubt about whether they were involved.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But mind you, you can have other combinations where any defendant can become, in effect, a prosecutor against other defendants, because they don’t have to create reasonable doubt necessarily about whether any crime occurred. They just have to create reasonable doubt about whether they were involved.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I noticed yesterday, I believe Mr. Chan, who is, I believe, the attorney for David Duong, the father, seemed to be suggesting that some allegation raised by Ms. Hanson really applied to his son Andy and not to him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I noticed yesterday, I believe Mr. Chan, who is, I believe, the attorney for David Duong, the father, seemed to be suggesting that some allegation raised by Ms. Hanson really applied to his son Andy and not to him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Wow. So we’ve got basically a father-son combo, and then we’ve got former romantic partners. It’s so intense, Alex Hall, the storylines here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Wow. So we’ve got basically a father-son combo, and then we’ve got former romantic partners. It’s so intense, Alex Hall, the storylines here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One other thing that has come up were allegations of sex trafficking that somehow are making their way into this, apparently on a trip to Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>One other thing that has come up were allegations of sex trafficking that somehow are making their way into this, apparently on a trip to Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s something that came up that was pretty interesting. Just to give some background, Thao and a number of other East Bay officials took this trip to Vietnam in the summer of 2023.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s something that came up that was pretty interesting. Just to give some background, Thao and a number of other East Bay officials took this trip to Vietnam in the summer of 2023.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Supposed to be like a trade and goodwill kind of thing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Supposed to be like a trade and goodwill kind of thing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> And, you know, when they returned from the trip, Hanson testified that a reporter called the mayor’s office with some questions, and one of the questions that Thao’s then-chief of communications relayed to her was in regard to sex trafficking of minors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> And, you know, when they returned from the trip, Hanson testified that a reporter called the mayor’s office with some questions, and one of the questions that Thao’s then-chief of communications relayed to her was in regard to sex trafficking of minors.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She also said that there was a concern that some individuals on the trip had been stopped by customs on the way out. There was a concern about drug paraphernalia and involvement with young women.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She also said that there was a concern that some individuals on the trip had been stopped by customs on the way out. There was a concern about drug paraphernalia and involvement with young women.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Hanson said that when she and the other staff member told Thao about this, she was very upset and said, “I hate that playboy.” She used an expletive. “He has always been trouble. He’s going to ruin my career.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Hanson said that when she and the other staff member told Thao about this, she was very upset and said, “I hate that playboy.” She used an expletive. “He has always been trouble. He’s going to ruin my career.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Andy Duong’s attorney, Winston Chan, was pretty upset about this. There was some discussion, not in front of the jury, but after they had left the room, about how Chan didn’t want to draw attention to this, but that his understanding was that the government had told Hanson not to mention anything to do with minors, and that she could mention prostitution, but not anything to do with minors.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And Andy Duong’s attorney, Winston Chan, was pretty upset about this. There was some discussion, not in front of the jury, but after they had left the room, about how Chan didn’t want to draw attention to this, but that his understanding was that the government had told Hanson not to mention anything to do with minors, and that she could mention prostitution, but not anything to do with minors.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There was some back-and-forth between both sides over the weekend. And then, when they came back on Monday, they decided to strike that from the record.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There was some back-and-forth between both sides over the weekend. And then, when they came back on Monday, they decided to strike that from the record.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Chan questioned Hanson again and tried to point out that the reporter was really interested in former San Leandro City Council member Brian Azevedo, right? He even tried to show her some document. I think it might have been an FBI 302 form showing, you know, this is what you had told the Department of Justice previously. Doesn’t it show that you really said she was upset at David Duong?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Chan questioned Hanson again and tried to point out that the reporter was really interested in former San Leandro City Council member Brian Azevedo, right? He even tried to show her some document. I think it might have been an FBI 302 form showing, you know, this is what you had told the Department of Justice previously. Doesn’t it show that you really said she was upset at David Duong?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And she stuck to her guns and was like, “I remember her being upset at Andy Duong.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And she stuck to her guns and was like, “I remember her being upset at Andy Duong.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Geez. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, and the various other people caught up in it as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Geez. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, and the various other people caught up in it as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ve got KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and we’ve got professor of criminal law at Stanford, Robert Weisberg.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ve got KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and we’ve got professor of criminal law at Stanford, Robert Weisberg.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you’ve got questions about the trial, I mean, we were getting a lot of comments that sound something like this. Steve writes, “This morning’s show about Oakland’s former mayor and corruption is sadly comical compared to the giant, widespread corruption of the current Trump administration. Will Trump be next? I doubt it.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you’ve got questions about the trial, I mean, we were getting a lot of comments that sound something like this. Steve writes, “This morning’s show about Oakland’s former mayor and corruption is sadly comical compared to the giant, widespread corruption of the current Trump administration. Will Trump be next? I doubt it.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that’s a small sampling of the kinds of comments like that. If you have other questions, or if you were a Sheng Thao supporter, how are these allegations making you feel about that support?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And that’s a small sampling of the kinds of comments like that. If you have other questions, or if you were a Sheng Thao supporter, how are these allegations making you feel about that support?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786, \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786, \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Robert, I wanted to ask you about how much of the case we think actually rests on Mario Juarez. This is something that I’m not actually sure about. I mean, he seems to be the guy who’s pointing the finger and saying, “They promised us this.” He’s providing the link between what seems like a corrupt scheme and Thao herself. Does he have to be seen as someone who’s telling the truth in order for the government to win this case?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Robert, I wanted to ask you about how much of the case we think actually rests on Mario Juarez. This is something that I’m not actually sure about. I mean, he seems to be the guy who’s pointing the finger and saying, “They promised us this.” He’s providing the link between what seems like a corrupt scheme and Thao herself. Does he have to be seen as someone who’s telling the truth in order for the government to win this case?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Well, some degree of truth. He is really a fascinating character in all this. He played a role in a lot of the dealmaking, or attempted dealmaking. He engaged in a lot of the communications. He was heavily involved in this rather bizarre mailer campaign that actually is what started the FBI investigating the whole thing. And, of course, he’s been, in effect, ratting out everybody else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Well, some degree of truth. He is really a fascinating character in all this. He played a role in a lot of the dealmaking, or attempted dealmaking. He engaged in a lot of the communications. He was heavily involved in this rather bizarre mailer campaign that actually is what started the FBI investigating the whole thing. And, of course, he’s been, in effect, ratting out everybody else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So he’ll have to be the major prosecution witness, to be sure. The prosecutor, because this is going to happen anyway from the defense, will elicit from Juarez an acknowledgment that he has pleaded guilty, at least to a conspiracy charge, and indeed that how much leniency he gets in ultimate sentencing, because he hasn’t been sentenced yet, depends on just how much of a contribution he makes to the prosecution’s case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So he’ll have to be the major prosecution witness, to be sure. The prosecutor, because this is going to happen anyway from the defense, will elicit from Juarez an acknowledgment that he has pleaded guilty, at least to a conspiracy charge, and indeed that how much leniency he gets in ultimate sentencing, because he hasn’t been sentenced yet, depends on just how much of a contribution he makes to the prosecution’s case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So pretty much all the defendants are going to try to slice him and dice him. It’s interesting, the point raised earlier about the different amounts. Now, it doesn’t really matter, once you get past a few thousand dollars, how much was really at issue. What matters is that a substantial amount of money is exchanged.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So pretty much all the defendants are going to try to slice him and dice him. It’s interesting, the point raised earlier about the different amounts. Now, it doesn’t really matter, once you get past a few thousand dollars, how much was really at issue. What matters is that a substantial amount of money is exchanged.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the very fact that there were some inconsistencies means that the various defense lawyers will say, “Well, you know, on day X you said this amount, on day Y you said that amount. Why can’t you keep your story straight?” He is crucial to the case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But the very fact that there were some inconsistencies means that the various defense lawyers will say, “Well, you know, on day X you said this amount, on day Y you said that amount. Why can’t you keep your story straight?” He is crucial to the case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s amazing, though. I have to say, when you look into his background, it’s just like all these lawsuits, all this stuff. It’s really made me wonder, Alex Hall, why any Oakland official, why any city official of any kind, would come within a mile of this guy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s amazing, though. I have to say, when you look into his background, it’s just like all these lawsuits, all this stuff. It’s really made me wonder, Alex Hall, why any Oakland official, why any city official of any kind, would come within a mile of this guy.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a fascinating question. I’ve wondered that myself. You know, when I’ve talked to people, I’ve definitely gotten the sense that he is a charismatic individual. He obviously has a reputation. I think you’d have to ask the people who have gone into business with him, honestly.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a fascinating question. I’ve wondered that myself. You know, when I’ve talked to people, I’ve definitely gotten the sense that he is a charismatic individual. He obviously has a reputation. I think you’d have to ask the people who have gone into business with him, honestly.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, my raw speculation was just that people needed someone to do some dirty work, and he was a guy who seemed willing to do that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, my raw speculation was just that people needed someone to do some dirty work, and he was a guy who seemed willing to do that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That’s literally the language that the prosecution has used. They said that he did the Duongs’ dirty work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That’s literally the language that the prosecution has used. They said that he did the Duongs’ dirty work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It was really interesting listening to opening statements because he came up in every one. It’s not just the prosecution and one defense attorney making opening statements. It’s the prosecution and one attorney from each team of attorneys for each defendant. So we had five opening statements, and Juarez came up in every single one of them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It was really interesting listening to opening statements because he came up in every one. It’s not just the prosecution and one defense attorney making opening statements. It’s the prosecution and one attorney from each team of attorneys for each defendant. So we had five opening statements, and Juarez came up in every single one of them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The prosecution made sure to almost get ahead of it and tell the jury, “You’re going to hear about Mario Juarez saying he’s no angel.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The prosecution made sure to almost get ahead of it and tell the jury, “You’re going to hear about Mario Juarez saying he’s no angel.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Andy Duong’s attorney called him a consummate hustler. He said his face should be in the dictionary under “hustler.” Other attorneys said, you know, he’s the narrator of this story. The case lives or dies on Mario Juarez.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Andy Duong’s attorney called him a consummate hustler. He said his face should be in the dictionary under “hustler.” Other attorneys said, you know, he’s the narrator of this story. The case lives or dies on Mario Juarez.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s really interesting because even just in the last year, the defense has really focused quite a bit on Mario Juarez, on his credibility, indicating that they will likely try to impeach him as a witness before the jury.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s really interesting because even just in the last year, the defense has really focused quite a bit on Mario Juarez, on his credibility, indicating that they will likely try to impeach him as a witness before the jury.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’ve talked about, in their words, his decades-long history of fraud, that he has this documented, quote-unquote, counterattack history in which he’ll go into business with people and then, if he walks away with their money and they try to contact the police, he files a restraining order. Basically, in their words, he accuses others of wrongdoing or misconduct in reaction to accusations against him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They’ve talked about, in their words, his decades-long history of fraud, that he has this documented, quote-unquote, counterattack history in which he’ll go into business with people and then, if he walks away with their money and they try to contact the police, he files a restraining order. Basically, in their words, he accuses others of wrongdoing or misconduct in reaction to accusations against him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lot of that does appear to be substantiated by court records. If you look up Mario Juarez and Alameda County Superior Court, there are a lot of cases that do appear to paint that kind of pattern.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A lot of that does appear to be substantiated by court records. If you look up Mario Juarez and Alameda County Superior Court, there are a lot of cases that do appear to paint that kind of pattern.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it’s also really interesting because some of the things he says turn out to be corroborated by other evidence.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But it’s also really interesting because some of the things he says turn out to be corroborated by other evidence.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For example, there’s this really important moment in the timeline of this case in which Mario Juarez had a falling-out with the Duongs because they had gone into business together. There was a confrontation that took place in May of 2024 at California Waste Solutions. Juarez said that the Duongs ordered a group of men to beat him up and that they stole his watch and chain.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For example, there’s this really important moment in the timeline of this case in which Mario Juarez had a falling-out with the Duongs because they had gone into business together. There was a confrontation that took place in May of 2024 at California Waste Solutions. Juarez said that the Duongs ordered a group of men to beat him up and that they stole his watch and chain.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ll come to find out that when the FBI raided the defendants’ homes, they found Juarez’s watch and chain in a bag in Andy Duong’s garage.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>We’ll come to find out that when the FBI raided the defendants’ homes, they found Juarez’s watch and chain in a bag in Andy Duong’s garage.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions’ David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions’ David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall from KQED, of course, Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall from KQED, of course, Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Taking your questions on the trial itself or the impact you think it could have on local politics. Give us a call at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Taking your questions on the trial itself or the impact you think it could have on local politics. Give us a call at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal, here with KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Of course, we’ve got all of you out there.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal, here with KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Of course, we’ve got all of you out there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re looking at this federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who obviously served before Barbara Lee.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>We’re looking at this federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who obviously served before Barbara Lee.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Kyle writes, “Coming out of the pandemic and into Thao’s term, I watched as trash piled up, crime skyrocketed, and our city’s fortunes declined. It infuriates me that while all this was happening, Thao and her conspirators were busy lining their pockets instead of guiding the city out of a dark time. Occupancy rates are insane, San Francisco is rising, Oakland desperately trying to dig its way out. That’s the real crime.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Kyle writes, “Coming out of the pandemic and into Thao’s term, I watched as trash piled up, crime skyrocketed, and our city’s fortunes declined. It infuriates me that while all this was happening, Thao and her conspirators were busy lining their pockets instead of guiding the city out of a dark time. Occupancy rates are insane, San Francisco is rising, Oakland desperately trying to dig its way out. That’s the real crime.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think one question that many listeners have, and certainly people I’ve talked to in Oakland, too, is, Alex Hall, how much shrapnel could this send across Oakland politics? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me like Sheng Thao is a mastermind of these things. It seems like, just based on what we’re hearing, things were happening in the city, and she’s in this whole kind of title movement of, like, “Oh, I guess this is just how politics works in this place.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think one question that many listeners have, and certainly people I’ve talked to in Oakland, too, is, Alex Hall, how much shrapnel could this send across Oakland politics? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me like Sheng Thao is a mastermind of these things. It seems like, just based on what we’re hearing, things were happening in the city, and she’s in this whole kind of title movement of, like, “Oh, I guess this is just how politics works in this place.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t think that it’s going to be detrimental to Oakland city government. I do think that Oakland residents have had distrust and, I think, a loss of faith to a certain extent over the years, just with everything that’s gone on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t think that it’s going to be detrimental to Oakland city government. I do think that Oakland residents have had distrust and, I think, a loss of faith to a certain extent over the years, just with everything that’s gone on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But pretty soon after Thao was indicted, Barbara Lee was running for mayor, along with a number of other candidates in the special election to replace Thao after she was recalled. And I definitely got the sense that pretty much every elected official and politician distanced themselves from Thao.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But pretty soon after Thao was indicted, Barbara Lee was running for mayor, along with a number of other candidates in the special election to replace Thao after she was recalled. And I definitely got the sense that pretty much every elected official and politician distanced themselves from Thao.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>As different evidence has been filed in this case, we’ve kind of gotten the sense that that might not be the full picture. Because, like I said, there have been recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and Kevin Jenkins or Nikki Fortunato Bas that seem like, well, they seem to have a close working relationship or at least be on friendly terms.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>As different evidence has been filed in this case, we’ve kind of gotten the sense that that might not be the full picture. Because, like I said, there have been recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and Kevin Jenkins or Nikki Fortunato Bas that seem like, well, they seem to have a close working relationship or at least be on friendly terms.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That, to me, seemed like maybe the Duongs do have a much more constant presence in Oakland government than most Oakland city officials would maybe admit once the indictment was filed.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>That, to me, seemed like maybe the Duongs do have a much more constant presence in Oakland government than most Oakland city officials would maybe admit once the indictment was filed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I get the sense that now that Lee has become mayor, it kind of seems like the city has moved on. But, like I said, now that there are all these city officials and East Bay officials who could testify in this trial, maybe they’ll raise new questions. You know, we really don’t know what they’re going to say.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I get the sense that now that Lee has become mayor, it kind of seems like the city has moved on. But, like I said, now that there are all these city officials and East Bay officials who could testify in this trial, maybe they’ll raise new questions. You know, we really don’t know what they’re going to say.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve just wondered if it’s going to spread to other cities, too. California Waste Solutions, as I mentioned, does have other customers, including the city of San Jose, where it serves 175,000 single-family homes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve just wondered if it’s going to spread to other cities, too. California Waste Solutions, as I mentioned, does have other customers, including the city of San Jose, where it serves 175,000 single-family homes.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you’ve got a whole bunch of people. Rob Bonta has been mentioned in the same breath, I suppose, as some of these other folks.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So you’ve got a whole bunch of people. Rob Bonta has been mentioned in the same breath, I suppose, as some of these other folks.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, I wanted to ask you this. One of our listeners writes in to say, “Do we have any sense about how corrupt Oakland is compared to other cities? Because I have a sense that it doesn’t function well, but I don’t know if that’s just a matter of policy or if there are really institutional problems with the Oakland government.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, I wanted to ask you this. One of our listeners writes in to say, “Do we have any sense about how corrupt Oakland is compared to other cities? Because I have a sense that it doesn’t function well, but I don’t know if that’s just a matter of policy or if there are really institutional problems with the Oakland government.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Well, I would say you could have all the ethics rules on the books, and that doesn’t change an unethical culture. I would say that Oakland reveals issues that are in other cities as well. I wouldn’t say they’re unique, but they do have many different problems layered on top of others.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Well, I would say you could have all the ethics rules on the books, and that doesn’t change an unethical culture. I would say that Oakland reveals issues that are in other cities as well. I wouldn’t say they’re unique, but they do have many different problems layered on top of others.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>As I think about this opportunity that we have with the trial, it’s to pull the covers back, open the doors to how the city does run. There’s an Ethics Commission, there’s an Ethics Act, there is a city auditor. What happened where none of these agencies within the government caught these acts or stepped in to advise better ways of moving forward?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>As I think about this opportunity that we have with the trial, it’s to pull the covers back, open the doors to how the city does run. There’s an Ethics Commission, there’s an Ethics Act, there is a city auditor. What happened where none of these agencies within the government caught these acts or stepped in to advise better ways of moving forward?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So there’s a lot to learn. Other cities that don’t have ethics commissions should consider them as ways to ensure that people are serving the public and moving forward in ways that protect the interests of those who are in need.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So there’s a lot to learn. Other cities that don’t have ethics commissions should consider them as ways to ensure that people are serving the public and moving forward in ways that protect the interests of those who are in need.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> You know, Alex Hall, a listener, Alan, writes in to say, “What are the chances that there are other areas where city contracts in Oakland might deserve investigation? For example, road repairs or other cases where companies are given city contracts?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> You know, Alex Hall, a listener, Alan, writes in to say, “What are the chances that there are other areas where city contracts in Oakland might deserve investigation? For example, road repairs or other cases where companies are given city contracts?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, when Lee was running for mayor, because it is hard to find — there aren’t, at least to my knowledge, when I was covering Oakland politics and government much more closely, all the contracts just listed on the website. There wasn’t some all-encompassing, comprehensive system for looking at them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, when Lee was running for mayor, because it is hard to find — there aren’t, at least to my knowledge, when I was covering Oakland politics and government much more closely, all the contracts just listed on the website. There wasn’t some all-encompassing, comprehensive system for looking at them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Lee, when she was campaigning, said that she wanted to do a forensic audit of the contracts with the city of Oakland. That kind of seemed to show that she would be taking more accountability for Oakland’s budget, but also probably in reaction to this criminal case and the concerns about ethics in Oakland city government.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Lee, when she was campaigning, said that she wanted to do a forensic audit of the contracts with the city of Oakland. That kind of seemed to show that she would be taking more accountability for Oakland’s budget, but also probably in reaction to this criminal case and the concerns about ethics in Oakland city government.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It does appear that the city is taking steps in that direction to actually conduct that audit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It does appear that the city is taking steps in that direction to actually conduct that audit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But, as you mentioned, California Waste Solutions does have an active contract with the city of Oakland. If the CEO of that contractor were to be convicted of federal crimes, would that change the calculus for the city of Oakland? I don’t know exactly what the terms of that contract are or whether they would allow the city to end it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But, as you mentioned, California Waste Solutions does have an active contract with the city of Oakland. If the CEO of that contractor were to be convicted of federal crimes, would that change the calculus for the city of Oakland? I don’t know exactly what the terms of that contract are or whether they would allow the city to end it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, one has to hope that might be something they wrote into the contract. If someone goes down for federal bribery, maybe this contract is null. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, one has to hope that might be something they wrote into the contract. If someone goes down for federal bribery, maybe this contract is null. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know. You know, it is a family-run business, so presumably one of the other members of the Duong family could take over. But when Lee was running for mayor, I actually did ask her about that, you know, if she would consider reopening, amending, or canceling any part of the —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know. You know, it is a family-run business, so presumably one of the other members of the Duong family could take over. But when Lee was running for mayor, I actually did ask her about that, you know, if she would consider reopening, amending, or canceling any part of the —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, what are the potential punishments that could come out of this? Could it be that each defendant gets their own sentence, let’s say they are convicted, they’re eventually found guilty? And are they long sentences here? What would a typical sentence be in a case like this?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, what are the potential punishments that could come out of this? Could it be that each defendant gets their own sentence, let’s say they are convicted, they’re eventually found guilty? And are they long sentences here? What would a typical sentence be in a case like this?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> First of all, there will be four separate sentences. Indeed, there will be five, because Mario Juarez will ultimately be sentenced, although presumably for less time than the others.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> First of all, there will be four separate sentences. Indeed, there will be five, because Mario Juarez will ultimately be sentenced, although presumably for less time than the others.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It may be that not every defendant is convicted of every one of the six or seven charges, so that will also affect how much anyone gets.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It may be that not every defendant is convicted of every one of the six or seven charges, so that will also affect how much anyone gets.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is the thing about federal sentencing. First of all, at least on paper, the sentences are really, really long. Some of the charges have a maximum sentence of 20 years, some 10 years, and some 5 years. In theory, but in very theoretical theory, a particular defendant could get consecutive sentences on all of those charges, and that would be, in effect, a life sentence, and more so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is the thing about federal sentencing. First of all, at least on paper, the sentences are really, really long. Some of the charges have a maximum sentence of 20 years, some 10 years, and some 5 years. In theory, but in very theoretical theory, a particular defendant could get consecutive sentences on all of those charges, and that would be, in effect, a life sentence, and more so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the federal sentencing guidelines call for something called grouping, so that more often the main sentence will be for the most serious crime that the person is convicted of. We won’t keep augmenting them consecutively.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>But the federal sentencing guidelines call for something called grouping, so that more often the main sentence will be for the most serious crime that the person is convicted of. We won’t keep augmenting them consecutively.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Even then, although there are a lot of formulas in the federal sentencing guidelines that would suggest a calculation on the part of the judge, because of various legal changes, the guidelines, however rigid and severe they always looked, are now deemed, quote-unquote, advisory. When all is said and done, the judge has plenty of discretion.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Even then, although there are a lot of formulas in the federal sentencing guidelines that would suggest a calculation on the part of the judge, because of various legal changes, the guidelines, however rigid and severe they always looked, are now deemed, quote-unquote, advisory. When all is said and done, the judge has plenty of discretion.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The best one can say is that if you compare this to white-collar crime cases around the country, and this is just sort of an impressionistic assessment of how serious the crime is and how much any one individual was a leader of it, I could imagine sentences in the 10- to 15-year range.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The best one can say is that if you compare this to white-collar crime cases around the country, and this is just sort of an impressionistic assessment of how serious the crime is and how much any one individual was a leader of it, I could imagine sentences in the 10- to 15-year range.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Wow, wow. I mean, have we seen anything like that in a Bay Area corruption case? Does anybody know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Wow, wow. I mean, have we seen anything like that in a Bay Area corruption case? Does anybody know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t heard of that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t heard of that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, yeah, that would be quite something. And that would include Sheng Thao, you think, Robert Weisberg?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, yeah, that would be quite something. And that would include Sheng Thao, you think, Robert Weisberg?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, in theory, she’s exposed to every one of those charges and all those maximum sentences. It may turn out, as suggested earlier, that she can avoid conviction on some or all counts by trying to make the case that she was more in the shadows of this and didn’t know completely what was going on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, in theory, she’s exposed to every one of those charges and all those maximum sentences. It may turn out, as suggested earlier, that she can avoid conviction on some or all counts by trying to make the case that she was more in the shadows of this and didn’t know completely what was going on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s not always easy for a leader to say, “Well, I didn’t really know what was going on,” because the prosecutor might say, “Well, aren’t you supposed to be in charge of everything that’s going on among the government and among your confederates?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s not always easy for a leader to say, “Well, I didn’t really know what was going on,” because the prosecutor might say, “Well, aren’t you supposed to be in charge of everything that’s going on among the government and among your confederates?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But again, everybody’s going to be accusing everybody else. That’s what can happen in a multi-defendant trial. Her lawyer is going to attack witnesses who actually say good things about the other defendants, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But again, everybody’s going to be accusing everybody else. That’s what can happen in a multi-defendant trial. Her lawyer is going to attack witnesses who actually say good things about the other defendants, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Also, I can’t remember how much money actually changed hands here, right? Because Andre Jones did get some money for this job, which the prosecution calls a no-show job with Evolutionary Homes. So was it supposed to be $300,000 a year? At least that was the first number I heard. Do we know how much he actually ever got?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Also, I can’t remember how much money actually changed hands here, right? Because Andre Jones did get some money for this job, which the prosecution calls a no-show job with Evolutionary Homes. So was it supposed to be $300,000 a year? At least that was the first number I heard. Do we know how much he actually ever got?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> The prosecution says that he was ultimately paid only $95,000.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> The prosecution says that he was ultimately paid only $95,000.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, Robert Weisberg, when I hear the numbers, like, oh, okay, so we had $75,000 go to Juarez, we had $95,000. These don’t look like enormous numbers, and yet it’s the nature of this kind of conspiracy that’s alleged that would lead to this much larger, much longer sentence.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, Robert Weisberg, when I hear the numbers, like, oh, okay, so we had $75,000 go to Juarez, we had $95,000. These don’t look like enormous numbers, and yet it’s the nature of this kind of conspiracy that’s alleged that would lead to this much larger, much longer sentence.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Right. Well, first of all, if the prosecution is conceding, let’s say with Jones, a maximum of $90,000, that will keep his sentence a little lower than otherwise.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Right. Well, first of all, if the prosecution is conceding, let’s say with Jones, a maximum of $90,000, that will keep his sentence a little lower than otherwise.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But here’s the reason why the amount of money is not the decisive thing here. The government’s case is really based — although there’s a federal bribery charge based on the city being a government contractor — the really serious charge is mail and wire fraud under this thing called honest services deprivation, which is a bizarre thing that Congress came up with many years ago. But here’s the gist of it: what is stolen here, because fraud is a kind of theft, is not so much an amount of money, but rather the right of the people of Oakland to have good government. So, the breach of governmental fiduciary duty, and, of course, aided and abetted by certain people like the Duongs who are not government officials.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But here’s the reason why the amount of money is not the decisive thing here. The government’s case is really based — although there’s a federal bribery charge based on the city being a government contractor — the really serious charge is mail and wire fraud under this thing called honest services deprivation, which is a bizarre thing that Congress came up with many years ago. But here’s the gist of it: what is stolen here, because fraud is a kind of theft, is not so much an amount of money, but rather the right of the people of Oakland to have good government. So, the breach of governmental fiduciary duty, and, of course, aided and abetted by certain people like the Duongs who are not government officials.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That’s really the heart of the matter, and that’s why, although the amount of money is important, it’s back to that specificity of the \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>That’s really the heart of the matter, and that’s why, although the amount of money is important, it’s back to that specificity of the \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Man, it’s actually quite dramatic when you put it in those terms, you know? Like, they stole our trust in the government is essentially what the charge is.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Man, it’s actually quite dramatic when you put it in those terms, you know? Like, they stole our trust in the government is essentially what the charge is.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Charges are based on that when it involves federal prosecutors prosecuting state and local officials.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Charges are based on that when it involves federal prosecutors prosecuting state and local officials.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Wow. Do you think, Alex Hall, that this hurt the progressive movement in Oakland, or more broadly, given that Sheng Thao was sort of the standard-bearer for this in the city?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Wow. Do you think, Alex Hall, that this hurt the progressive movement in Oakland, or more broadly, given that Sheng Thao was sort of the standard-bearer for this in the city?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if I really fully know the answer to that question. I don’t perceive any indication of that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if I really fully know the answer to that question. I don’t perceive any indication of that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I remember when, I think it was the week after Thao was indicted, I went to a campaign event for Barbara Lee at a bar in downtown Oakland where I had gone to other election-night parties for Sheng Thao and Oakland City Council members. A lot of local elected officials, Democratic politicians, showed up, and they were all the same officials who showed up to Sheng Thao’s event, showing up to Barbara Lee’s event.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I remember when, I think it was the week after Thao was indicted, I went to a campaign event for Barbara Lee at a bar in downtown Oakland where I had gone to other election-night parties for Sheng Thao and Oakland City Council members. A lot of local elected officials, Democratic politicians, showed up, and they were all the same officials who showed up to Sheng Thao’s event, showing up to Barbara Lee’s event.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So to me, it kind of felt like there’s — I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So to me, it kind of felt like there’s — I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I did not have the indication that this was going to somehow — and, you know, this is Oakland. I mean, people have their political views, and I don’t think that distrust in one public official is going to destroy their opinion of the whole party or whether these officials have the ability to represent their interests.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I did not have the indication that this was going to somehow — and, you know, this is Oakland. I mean, people have their political views, and I don’t think that distrust in one public official is going to destroy their opinion of the whole party or whether these officials have the ability to represent their interests.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Let’s bring in Judith in Oakland. Welcome, Judith.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Let’s bring in Judith in Oakland. Welcome, Judith.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Hi. Yeah, I was just commenting and can ask a question about the impact this has. It does, for me, on my vote, in regard to Barbara Lee’s request for more executive power. And, like Barbara Lee, I think, well, if this can happen to Sheng Thao, and you look at Trump and his massive corruption, it’s having an impact on me. Does anyone have any idea what’s happening in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Hi. Yeah, I was just commenting and can ask a question about the impact this has. It does, for me, on my vote, in regard to Barbara Lee’s request for more executive power. And, like Barbara Lee, I think, well, if this can happen to Sheng Thao, and you look at Trump and his massive corruption, it’s having an impact on me. Does anyone have any idea what’s happening in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, one thing I’ll say, I think related to Oakland politics, thank you for this, Judith, is people do seem to have baseline lower levels of trust in the government than before. And, of course, when Barbara Lee is trying to be able to move more quickly as mayor, I think some people are thinking about it like Judith is here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, one thing I’ll say, I think related to Oakland politics, thank you for this, Judith, is people do seem to have baseline lower levels of trust in the government than before. And, of course, when Barbara Lee is trying to be able to move more quickly as mayor, I think some people are thinking about it like Judith is here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me ask one other thing, because we have a long way to go on this trial, Alex Hall. What are you looking out for? The prosecution has given a list of up to 70 witnesses. They may not call them all, but they could call up to 70 people. Are there any in particular that you think might be crucial?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me ask one other thing, because we have a long way to go on this trial, Alex Hall. What are you looking out for? The prosecution has given a list of up to 70 witnesses. They may not call them all, but they could call up to 70 people. Are there any in particular that you think might be crucial?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, Mario Juarez. I think Mario Juarez’s testimony is going to be fascinating, not only what he says, but also what the defense attorneys ask him. They’re going to be asking about his track record and what he said. And what they respond with, I think, is going to be really, really interesting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, Mario Juarez. I think Mario Juarez’s testimony is going to be fascinating, not only what he says, but also what the defense attorneys ask him. They’re going to be asking about his track record and what he said. And what they respond with, I think, is going to be really, really interesting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m going to look for what evidence the government has that undeniably corroborates that this scheme played out the way they’re alleging that it did, that does not come from Juarez.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m going to look for what evidence the government has that undeniably corroborates that this scheme played out the way they’re alleging that it did, that does not come from Juarez.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another thing that I’m going to be looking out for is we’ve seen a number of videos and audio recordings that prosecutors have filed in federal court.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Another thing that I’m going to be looking out for is we’ve seen a number of videos and audio recordings that prosecutors have filed in federal court.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> But we haven’t actually seen them, right? Oh, yeah, we have. Oh, okay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> But we haven’t actually seen them, right? Oh, yeah, we have. Oh, okay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Some. But there’s been descriptions of other recordings that we haven’t seen that I think will be very interesting.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Some. But there’s been descriptions of other recordings that we haven’t seen that I think will be very interesting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Supposedly, we’re going to hear the FBI’s interview with Andy Duong. There have been descriptions of other recordings of conversations that Andy Duong allegedly recorded with elected officials that will be really interesting.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Supposedly, we’re going to hear the FBI’s interview with Andy Duong. There have been descriptions of other recordings of conversations that Andy Duong allegedly recorded with elected officials that will be really interesting.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But supposedly, there are recordings of Evolutionary Homes’ board meetings in which the scheme was allegedly discussed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But supposedly, there are recordings of Evolutionary Homes’ board meetings in which the scheme was allegedly discussed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then I think it will be interesting to see how Juarez’s allegations of broader corruption come up in this trial. There’s this video of him talking about the Duongs supposedly receiving payment or paying individuals who supposedly helped them get this city of Oakland contract for the recycling company.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then I think it will be interesting to see how Juarez’s allegations of broader corruption come up in this trial. There’s this video of him talking about the Duongs supposedly receiving payment or paying individuals who supposedly helped them get this city of Oakland contract for the recycling company.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He also told the FBI that he saw people lining up outside California Waste Solutions, getting bags of cash from David Duong, that they’ve been involved in money laundering, and that he’s witnessed them deleting evidence from security footage.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He also told the FBI that he saw people lining up outside California Waste Solutions, getting bags of cash from David Duong, that they’ve been involved in money laundering, and that he’s witnessed them deleting evidence from security footage.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I think how those allegations of broader corruption in Oakland come up in the trial is going to be really interesting. And, yeah, just Juarez in general. I think a lot of people are waiting to hear.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I think how those allegations of broader corruption in Oakland come up in the trial is going to be really interesting. And, yeah, just Juarez in general. I think a lot of people are waiting to hear.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, just with our last 30 seconds here, do you think the government’s going to win its case here against at least some of the defendants?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, just with our last 30 seconds here, do you think the government’s going to win its case here against at least some of the defendants?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> I don’t like to predict, but the government has a lot of strong evidence against a lot of people. So I don’t think a mixed verdict is out of the question, mixed in the sense that a particular individual doesn’t get busted on all counts and that different people get busted on different counts.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> I don’t like to predict, but the government has a lot of strong evidence against a lot of people. So I don’t think a mixed verdict is out of the question, mixed in the sense that a particular individual doesn’t get busted on all counts and that different people get busted on different counts.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But it looks like a very strong case, except so much of it assumes that Mario Juarez has credibility.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But it looks like a very strong case, except so much of it assumes that Mario Juarez has credibility.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much, Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Davina Hurt, thank you as well, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and former mayor of Belmont. And thank you, Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. I feel like I understand what’s going on a lot better.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much, Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Davina Hurt, thank you as well, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and former mayor of Belmont. And thank you, Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. I feel like I understand what’s going on a lot better.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Last listener comment. A listener writes on Bluesky, “As a native of Chicago, is it hard for me to believe that the history of corruption in Oakland begins and ends with Sheng Thao? Was she just bad at covering her tracks?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Last listener comment. A listener writes on Bluesky, “As a native of Chicago, is it hard for me to believe that the history of corruption in Oakland begins and ends with Sheng Thao? Was she just bad at covering her tracks?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> ahead with Mina.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 10, 2026 at 9 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The long-awaited federal corruption trial of former Oakland mayor Sheng Thao kicked off last week, with prosecutors arguing that Thao put her power up for sale and defense attorneys attacking the credibility of key government witnesses. It’s been nearly two years since a federal grand jury indicted Thao and three codefendants in an alleged “pay to play” scheme. Thao — alongside her former romantic partner Andre Jones, California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong — have pleaded not guilty to charges that include bribery and conspiracy. We’ll talk about the alleged scheme, how the case is unfolding and what to expect from the six-week trial.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall,\u003c/strong> enterprise and accountability reporter. KQED\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg,\u003c/strong> law professor and co-director of Criminal Justice Center, Stanford Law School\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt,\u003c/strong> government ethics director of The Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University; former mayor of Belmont\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. Sheng Thao had an incredible biography for a mayor. She had a rough childhood in Stockton, spending time homeless in her youth. But she forged ahead, found a home in Oakland City Hall, and began to move up the political ranks. Her rise culminated in a surprising mayoral win over Loren Taylor by just a few hundred votes, making her the first Hmong American mayor of a major U.S. city.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>From the beginning, her administration faced major headwinds. Oakland’s fitful attempts at recovering from the pandemic were hampered by a staggering rise in crime, just when it was falling across the rest of the Bay Area. Less than a year into her term, a recall campaign began, and then, six months later, the FBI raided her house. A few months after that, the recall succeeded, and a few months after that, she was indicted by a grand jury on bribery charges.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now, a year and a half later, she gets her day in court, a day that technically may last many weeks. Here to describe the court case and what we might learn in the months ahead, we’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. Welcome, Alex.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’ve also got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, also former mayor of Belmont. Welcome, Davina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Good morning.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> And we’ve got Robert Weisberg, who’s a professor of criminal law at Stanford. Welcome.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So, Alex, let’s go through a little bit of the basics. Who’s on trial? Because it’s not just Sheng Thao. What charges are they facing?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so Thao is on trial with three other co-defendants. One is Andre Jones, her longtime romantic partner. David Duong is the CEO of California Waste Solutions, which is Oakland’s current curbside recycling provider. And his son, Andy Duong, is also charged in the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’re facing a combination of bribery, conspiracy, and fraud charges: honest services mail fraud, honest services wire fraud. Andy Duong is also charged with an additional count of making false statements to a government agency, so essentially lying to the FBI.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> How unusual is it, Robert Weisberg, for a group of people like this to be charged and not just have sort of one trial at a time?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, it’s not unusual. In all kinds of cases, gang cases and various kinds of organized crime cases, but certainly in some white-collar cases, it’s quite common for several defendants to be charged together. It’s pretty much the choice of the prosecutor, as long as the charges against each are reasonably interlinked and so long as no one defendant convinces the judge that it is utterly prejudicial for that person to be in the same trial. So it’s really not unusual.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Alex, how can you try and describe the alleged scheme, how it was supposed to work? Who was being bribed to do what, how, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, absolutely. So prosecutors are alleging that in the lead-up to the 2022 Oakland mayoral election, the defendants agreed to a corruption scheme. And the alleged deal was essentially this: the Duongs would finance negative campaign mailers that targeted Thao’s opponents in that mayoral race, and they would pay Jones money through a no-show job with their nascent housing company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In exchange, Thao allegedly promised that if she won that election, she would take certain steps as mayor to benefit the Duongs’ companies. That included extending California Waste Solutions’ contract with the city of Oakland, committing the city of Oakland to purchasing housing units from Evolutionary Homes, which was this housing company that the Duongs and another individual, I’m sure we’ll talk about Mario Juarez, had recently started to convert shipping containers into housing for the homeless and market them to local Bay Area governments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And also, she allegedly agreed to allow the Duongs and Juarez to influence the appointment of high-level city officials to high-up positions in city government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So how exactly did we end up finding out about this scheme? It all seems to come down to Mario Juarez, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a great question at a great time, because we just heard in court yesterday from an FBI special agent, Katherine Barclay, who disclosed in the most detail we’ve heard to date how exactly this case got on the FBI’s radar.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She said that the Oakland Public Ethics Commission came to the FBI with information about a print shop owner who had been hired to print negative campaign mailers by a man who had supposedly made statements about expecting certain things in exchange for the political candidate he was supporting. And that individual was Mario Juarez. And that candidate was, according to prosecutors, Sheng Thao.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As for how the public found out about the investigation, there were very public FBI raids in the summer of 2024. At the time, there wasn’t a lot of information out about what the federal government was actually interested in. You know, Sheng Thao was adamant that she was innocent. At that point, of course, she hadn’t been charged with a crime.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Over the following months, there were certain clues that emerged through the U.S. Attorney’s Office subpoenaing the city of Oakland for records. The names they were interested in kind of provided hints about what they might be looking for.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Later on, we found out that the FBI was interviewing all kinds of people. People were being called to testify before a grand jury. And in November of 2024, we know Sheng Thao was recalled by voters, and two months later, she was officially indicted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Right before she was recalled, she came on for an event on October 18, 2024. Keep in mind, at the time, there were many hard things going on in Oakland. Her mayorship was not going well. We asked her how these events were impacting her day-to-day work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sheng Thao:\u003c/strong> At the end of the day, I’m innocent, so I’m not worried. This doesn’t actually overshadow anything I do from a day-to-day perspective. It’s frustrating and it’s annoying, but I’m innocent, so there’s nothing to hide. You know, I have nothing to hide, so I carry on with my day.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And again, I don’t wake up worried about the FBI raid. I wake up worrying about whether it’s going to be a red-flag day and whether there’s going to be a wildfire. I worry about, you know, how many lives can we protect on our streets? And so those are the things that I’m focused on, and it’s really showing through the results that we see.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> That was Sheng Thao, October 18, 2024, here in conversation with me on \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, talking about trying to be the mayor under the shadow of the FBI raid that turned into what is now the trial going on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by KQED’s Alex Hall. We also have Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to hear from you. What questions do you have about what’s going on? What kind of impact do you think this alleged bribery scheme has had on the city of Oakland and its residents, not to mention other people here in the Bay Area who do business and more than business in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Give us a call at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, you know, one time I had Aaron Peskin on the show, a San Francisco politician, and I asked him, you know, what’s the thing that he’s found most important in his career in city politics? And he said something like, “Stay away from the trash companies and the recycling companies.” He was just adamant that it’s an area where there’s a lot of corruption in local government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Based on what you have heard, let’s imagine that these allegations of what happened are correct. How out of the ordinary do you think this sort of arrangement would have been?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it’s a great question. Out of the ordinary? Not really. This is somewhat an issue of political access, which is pretty routine. But the ethical question that this turns on, about being independent, fair, and explainable, is where there’s a lot of concern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think you’ll hear a lot of reaction from the community. These cases, they’re not unprecedented. And, in fact, relationships are what get you elected, but it’s how far those relationships go. Whether it’s recycling or it’s a local business down the street, once you take that oath of office, there’s a real need to have safeguards and separate the duties of them helping you get elected from being accountable to the public at large.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, Robert Weisberg, is there a specific standard that needs to be met that changes something from being like, “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine,” to bribery, conspiracy, these types of things?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> The language you always hear, the phrase you always hear from the courts, is \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>. Now, particularly during the phase when Thao was running for office, she’s allowed to collect campaign contributions. The question is, did she make highly specific promises that she would take very specific official acts in exchange for the campaign contribution?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And, frankly, the same thing can occur after her election. In federal law, there’s a separate charge for federal officials. That’s not what we have here. It’s called gratuities, where sometimes it’s a kind of intermediate crime where there’s just an understanding that good things will be done for those who give money.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But for federal bribery and mail fraud like this, the government is going to have to prove that this wasn’t winks and nods. It wasn’t vague promises and representations. It was virtually an explicit contract, orally, but still pretty explicit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So they have to basically find a text message or have someone saying, “Sheng Thao said that this would happen in exchange for that”?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Yes, of course. You know, in certain situations like this, language can be somewhat guarded, even coded. So the prosecutor is going to likely put together a great number of messages, some of them a little vague, some of them ambiguous, some of them coded. But it’s still within the jury’s power to infer that this was a pretty clear deal of \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who’s on trial with her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions CEO David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter at KQED. You just heard Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. We’ve also got Davina Hurt, who’s government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. Alexis Madrigal here. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, on trial with several other people as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford; Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara; and Alex Hall, of course, KQED enterprise and accountability reporter.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, Alex, I mean, one of the reasons I think people were really interested in this case, and if you’re interested in this case, you can ask your questions of our panel here at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. If you’re interested in these things, it’s because not only is it the corruption trial and the bribery, but also all the things that are going to come out about the innards of how a city like Oakland works around these kinds of things, and all the evidence that’s going to get put out there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Like we had, say, in the trial between Sam Altman and Elon Musk, all this stuff comes out outside of just the core allegations. So what are we starting to learn? What’s the picture that’s sort of emerging from the documents that have come to light and the things that are coming up in court?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so the indictment paints a picture of a timeline that prosecutors appear to be piecing together through, in large part, text messages. And most of the text messages that I think are the most interesting are really between Mario Juarez, an Oakland businessman and political operative who’s pleaded guilty to participating in this alleged scheme, and Andy Duong, one of the defendants.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Text messages such as, “We may go to jail, but we are $100 million richer.” That’s the one.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> So I think that, you know, we’ve been kind of waiting to see how the defense explains those texts. You know, there are also, for example, Juarez supposedly wrote an Apple Note describing the terms of the deal and sent it to Andy Duong. And, you know, obviously we’re scrutinizing very closely what his response was and what that says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> There’s really no one involved in this who watched \u003cem>The Wire\u003c/em>. I feel like this is just wild. I mean, one of the questions that I have about this Juarez text is, like, the numbers, the dollar amounts here are many digits off, right? I mean, what Juarez actually bankrolled was a $75,000 mailer campaign to get Thao into office, to help her get into office. But then where does this $100 million come from?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I think he’s referring to Evolutionary Homes. Allegedly, the deal was that Thao would commit the city of Oakland to purchasing these housing units from Evolutionary Homes, and so I think that he’s referencing that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The prosecution alleges that the deal evolved over time. So at first, they were saying that Andre Jones would receive up to $300,000 over time for the supposed no-show job. And later, as the defendants continued to meet and discuss this alleged bribery scheme, that number jumped up to $3 million. The prosecution says that Jones was ultimately only paid $95,000.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But even some of these texts are kind of like — there’s a lot of typos and numbers here and there that are just kind of, like, I think, haphazard communication.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But even after the indictment, I mean, we’ve definitely seen a lot of clues. Obviously, we don’t know what the prosecution’s case is, all the evidence that they have. And that’s why I think this trial is so interesting. We really haven’t known what the defense’s case was going to be. The prosecution has disclosed way more hints leading up to the trial, mainly because they have the burden of proof in this case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But there have been a lot of recordings that the FBI seized from Andy Duong’s phone, including a video that appears to show Juarez talking about payments that the Duongs supposedly, he says, made to individuals in exchange for getting help with getting the contract with the city of Oakland, their recycling contract, years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and city officials, including Sheng Thao, current Oakland City Council member Kevin Jenkins, and current Alameda County Supervisor Nikki Fortunato Bas, who at the time was an Oakland City Council member. And the phone calls appear to have been recorded without the officials’ knowledge. So they’re very candid, and they appear to be very revealing as to these seemingly really close relationships between Andy Duong and elected officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The other interesting thing, like you mentioned, is that there are going to be quite a few current and former elected officials and city staffers who are expected to testify in this trial. So we don’t know what’s going to come out. We’ve had two days of witness testimony so far. The first witness was Lee Hanson, who is Thao’s former chief of staff. And, you know, I mean, she saw a lot that went on behind closed doors and had a lot of interesting things to say.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, has there already been surprising testimony from people? Tell us a little bit about that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I mean, I think that Hanson’s testimony, in my opinion, was very interesting because even though she was a government witness, she almost seemed like a defense witness. She had a lot of glowing things to say about Thao, her leadership, her administration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She also said a lot about Andre Jones’ role in the mayor’s office. He was never a city employee, but she testified that he would join meetings with city staffers. A couple of examples that she mentioned were when a prospective hire she was interviewing over Zoom, I think it was someone who would be advising on housing in the mayor’s office, and she says that Jones just joined the Zoom meeting and didn’t come on camera, but was audio only. She had no awareness that he was going to join ahead of time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Also, she mentioned a meeting where they were discussing Thao’s decision to put then-Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on administrative leave. Hanson said that, in her experience, she expected this decision to be litigated, and with Oakland’s city attorney in the room, the staffers would be protected by attorney-client privilege. But because Jones was there, they would essentially lose some of those protections, and she was concerned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She testified that Jones made a comment. She said that when she expressed that concern and eventually walked out, he said, “We’ll see which one of us is left at the end of the day.” And she took that to mean a threat to her position.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Davina Hurt, I mean, we see political spouses and partners get involved in various capacities with their elected officials quite often, actually, I would say. How unusual do you think it is to have a spouse or a romantic partner show up in a city meeting like this? With your government accountability hat on, are you just like, “No way, this cannot happen”?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Yeah. It is very rare and shouldn’t happen at all. And it goes to this idea of guardrails that you’re supposed to put up, not only with the public but also with your family.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For someone to bring their own ideas, when they were not elected by the public, and put pressure on decisions involving public business, it definitely is a huge red flag. It’s not respecting the vote and the sacred space of governance for those who have been elected to serve. Yeah, prime example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Robert Weisberg, if I were Sheng Thao’s defense attorney, doesn’t it make sense to try to pin this on Andre Jones? To just distance herself? Because if she didn’t actually give the command, but there were sort of a rogue person out there trading on her name, then it wouldn’t be her fault, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. And just to expand on that, on the question of what the defense will do, there will be four defenses because there are four defendants. And yes, Thao could certainly concede, through the lawyers and evidence, that bribery and fraud occurred, and conspiracy, just that she wasn’t part of it. She was just being mentioned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But mind you, you can have other combinations where any defendant can become, in effect, a prosecutor against other defendants, because they don’t have to create reasonable doubt necessarily about whether any crime occurred. They just have to create reasonable doubt about whether they were involved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I noticed yesterday, I believe Mr. Chan, who is, I believe, the attorney for David Duong, the father, seemed to be suggesting that some allegation raised by Ms. Hanson really applied to his son Andy and not to him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Hmm. Wow. So we’ve got basically a father-son combo, and then we’ve got former romantic partners. It’s so intense, Alex Hall, the storylines here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One other thing that has come up were allegations of sex trafficking that somehow are making their way into this, apparently on a trip to Vietnam.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s something that came up that was pretty interesting. Just to give some background, Thao and a number of other East Bay officials took this trip to Vietnam in the summer of 2023.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Supposed to be like a trade and goodwill kind of thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> And, you know, when they returned from the trip, Hanson testified that a reporter called the mayor’s office with some questions, and one of the questions that Thao’s then-chief of communications relayed to her was in regard to sex trafficking of minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She also said that there was a concern that some individuals on the trip had been stopped by customs on the way out. There was a concern about drug paraphernalia and involvement with young women.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Hanson said that when she and the other staff member told Thao about this, she was very upset and said, “I hate that playboy.” She used an expletive. “He has always been trouble. He’s going to ruin my career.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Andy Duong’s attorney, Winston Chan, was pretty upset about this. There was some discussion, not in front of the jury, but after they had left the room, about how Chan didn’t want to draw attention to this, but that his understanding was that the government had told Hanson not to mention anything to do with minors, and that she could mention prostitution, but not anything to do with minors.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was some back-and-forth between both sides over the weekend. And then, when they came back on Monday, they decided to strike that from the record.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Chan questioned Hanson again and tried to point out that the reporter was really interested in former San Leandro City Council member Brian Azevedo, right? He even tried to show her some document. I think it might have been an FBI 302 form showing, you know, this is what you had told the Department of Justice previously. Doesn’t it show that you really said she was upset at David Duong?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And she stuck to her guns and was like, “I remember her being upset at Andy Duong.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Geez. We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, and the various other people caught up in it as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve got KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and we’ve got professor of criminal law at Stanford, Robert Weisberg.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’ve got questions about the trial, I mean, we were getting a lot of comments that sound something like this. Steve writes, “This morning’s show about Oakland’s former mayor and corruption is sadly comical compared to the giant, widespread corruption of the current Trump administration. Will Trump be next? I doubt it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s a small sampling of the kinds of comments like that. If you have other questions, or if you were a Sheng Thao supporter, how are these allegations making you feel about that support?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786, \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>. You can find us on social media, Bluesky, Instagram, and Discord. We’re KQED \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Robert, I wanted to ask you about how much of the case we think actually rests on Mario Juarez. This is something that I’m not actually sure about. I mean, he seems to be the guy who’s pointing the finger and saying, “They promised us this.” He’s providing the link between what seems like a corrupt scheme and Thao herself. Does he have to be seen as someone who’s telling the truth in order for the government to win this case?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Well, some degree of truth. He is really a fascinating character in all this. He played a role in a lot of the dealmaking, or attempted dealmaking. He engaged in a lot of the communications. He was heavily involved in this rather bizarre mailer campaign that actually is what started the FBI investigating the whole thing. And, of course, he’s been, in effect, ratting out everybody else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So he’ll have to be the major prosecution witness, to be sure. The prosecutor, because this is going to happen anyway from the defense, will elicit from Juarez an acknowledgment that he has pleaded guilty, at least to a conspiracy charge, and indeed that how much leniency he gets in ultimate sentencing, because he hasn’t been sentenced yet, depends on just how much of a contribution he makes to the prosecution’s case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So pretty much all the defendants are going to try to slice him and dice him. It’s interesting, the point raised earlier about the different amounts. Now, it doesn’t really matter, once you get past a few thousand dollars, how much was really at issue. What matters is that a substantial amount of money is exchanged.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the very fact that there were some inconsistencies means that the various defense lawyers will say, “Well, you know, on day X you said this amount, on day Y you said that amount. Why can’t you keep your story straight?” He is crucial to the case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, it’s amazing, though. I have to say, when you look into his background, it’s just like all these lawsuits, all this stuff. It’s really made me wonder, Alex Hall, why any Oakland official, why any city official of any kind, would come within a mile of this guy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That is a fascinating question. I’ve wondered that myself. You know, when I’ve talked to people, I’ve definitely gotten the sense that he is a charismatic individual. He obviously has a reputation. I think you’d have to ask the people who have gone into business with him, honestly.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, my raw speculation was just that people needed someone to do some dirty work, and he was a guy who seemed willing to do that sort of stuff.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> That’s literally the language that the prosecution has used. They said that he did the Duongs’ dirty work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was really interesting listening to opening statements because he came up in every one. It’s not just the prosecution and one defense attorney making opening statements. It’s the prosecution and one attorney from each team of attorneys for each defendant. So we had five opening statements, and Juarez came up in every single one of them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The prosecution made sure to almost get ahead of it and tell the jury, “You’re going to hear about Mario Juarez saying he’s no angel.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Andy Duong’s attorney called him a consummate hustler. He said his face should be in the dictionary under “hustler.” Other attorneys said, you know, he’s the narrator of this story. The case lives or dies on Mario Juarez.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s really interesting because even just in the last year, the defense has really focused quite a bit on Mario Juarez, on his credibility, indicating that they will likely try to impeach him as a witness before the jury.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’ve talked about, in their words, his decades-long history of fraud, that he has this documented, quote-unquote, counterattack history in which he’ll go into business with people and then, if he walks away with their money and they try to contact the police, he files a restraining order. Basically, in their words, he accuses others of wrongdoing or misconduct in reaction to accusations against him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of that does appear to be substantiated by court records. If you look up Mario Juarez and Alameda County Superior Court, there are a lot of cases that do appear to paint that kind of pattern.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it’s also really interesting because some of the things he says turn out to be corroborated by other evidence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For example, there’s this really important moment in the timeline of this case in which Mario Juarez had a falling-out with the Duongs because they had gone into business together. There was a confrontation that took place in May of 2024 at California Waste Solutions. Juarez said that the Duongs ordered a group of men to beat him up and that they stole his watch and chain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ll come to find out that when the FBI raided the defendants’ homes, they found Juarez’s watch and chain in a bag in Andy Duong’s garage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, her former romantic partner, Andre Jones, and California Waste Solutions’ David Duong and his son, Andy Duong.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re joined by Alex Hall from KQED, of course, Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Taking your questions on the trial itself or the impact you think it could have on local politics. Give us a call at 866-733-6786 or email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal, here with KQED’s Alex Hall. We’ve got Davina Hurt, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. We’ve got Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Of course, we’ve got all of you out there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re looking at this federal corruption trial of Oakland’s former mayor, Sheng Thao, who obviously served before Barbara Lee.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kyle writes, “Coming out of the pandemic and into Thao’s term, I watched as trash piled up, crime skyrocketed, and our city’s fortunes declined. It infuriates me that while all this was happening, Thao and her conspirators were busy lining their pockets instead of guiding the city out of a dark time. Occupancy rates are insane, San Francisco is rising, Oakland desperately trying to dig its way out. That’s the real crime.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think one question that many listeners have, and certainly people I’ve talked to in Oakland, too, is, Alex Hall, how much shrapnel could this send across Oakland politics? I mean, it doesn’t seem to me like Sheng Thao is a mastermind of these things. It seems like, just based on what we’re hearing, things were happening in the city, and she’s in this whole kind of title movement of, like, “Oh, I guess this is just how politics works in this place.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t think that it’s going to be detrimental to Oakland city government. I do think that Oakland residents have had distrust and, I think, a loss of faith to a certain extent over the years, just with everything that’s gone on in Oakland.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But pretty soon after Thao was indicted, Barbara Lee was running for mayor, along with a number of other candidates in the special election to replace Thao after she was recalled. And I definitely got the sense that pretty much every elected official and politician distanced themselves from Thao.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As different evidence has been filed in this case, we’ve kind of gotten the sense that that might not be the full picture. Because, like I said, there have been recorded phone calls between Andy Duong and Kevin Jenkins or Nikki Fortunato Bas that seem like, well, they seem to have a close working relationship or at least be on friendly terms.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That, to me, seemed like maybe the Duongs do have a much more constant presence in Oakland government than most Oakland city officials would maybe admit once the indictment was filed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I get the sense that now that Lee has become mayor, it kind of seems like the city has moved on. But, like I said, now that there are all these city officials and East Bay officials who could testify in this trial, maybe they’ll raise new questions. You know, we really don’t know what they’re going to say.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I’ve just wondered if it’s going to spread to other cities, too. California Waste Solutions, as I mentioned, does have other customers, including the city of San Jose, where it serves 175,000 single-family homes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you’ve got a whole bunch of people. Rob Bonta has been mentioned in the same breath, I suppose, as some of these other folks.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Davina Hurt, I wanted to ask you this. One of our listeners writes in to say, “Do we have any sense about how corrupt Oakland is compared to other cities? Because I have a sense that it doesn’t function well, but I don’t know if that’s just a matter of policy or if there are really institutional problems with the Oakland government.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Davina Hurt:\u003c/strong> Well, I would say you could have all the ethics rules on the books, and that doesn’t change an unethical culture. I would say that Oakland reveals issues that are in other cities as well. I wouldn’t say they’re unique, but they do have many different problems layered on top of others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>As I think about this opportunity that we have with the trial, it’s to pull the covers back, open the doors to how the city does run. There’s an Ethics Commission, there’s an Ethics Act, there is a city auditor. What happened where none of these agencies within the government caught these acts or stepped in to advise better ways of moving forward?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s a lot to learn. Other cities that don’t have ethics commissions should consider them as ways to ensure that people are serving the public and moving forward in ways that protect the interests of those who are in need.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> You know, Alex Hall, a listener, Alan, writes in to say, “What are the chances that there are other areas where city contracts in Oakland might deserve investigation? For example, road repairs or other cases where companies are given city contracts?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, you know, when Lee was running for mayor, because it is hard to find — there aren’t, at least to my knowledge, when I was covering Oakland politics and government much more closely, all the contracts just listed on the website. There wasn’t some all-encompassing, comprehensive system for looking at them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Lee, when she was campaigning, said that she wanted to do a forensic audit of the contracts with the city of Oakland. That kind of seemed to show that she would be taking more accountability for Oakland’s budget, but also probably in reaction to this criminal case and the concerns about ethics in Oakland city government.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It does appear that the city is taking steps in that direction to actually conduct that audit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But, as you mentioned, California Waste Solutions does have an active contract with the city of Oakland. If the CEO of that contractor were to be convicted of federal crimes, would that change the calculus for the city of Oakland? I don’t know exactly what the terms of that contract are or whether they would allow the city to end it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, one has to hope that might be something they wrote into the contract. If someone goes down for federal bribery, maybe this contract is null. I don’t know.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know. You know, it is a family-run business, so presumably one of the other members of the Duong family could take over. But when Lee was running for mayor, I actually did ask her about that, you know, if she would consider reopening, amending, or canceling any part of the —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, what are the potential punishments that could come out of this? Could it be that each defendant gets their own sentence, let’s say they are convicted, they’re eventually found guilty? And are they long sentences here? What would a typical sentence be in a case like this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> First of all, there will be four separate sentences. Indeed, there will be five, because Mario Juarez will ultimately be sentenced, although presumably for less time than the others.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It may be that not every defendant is convicted of every one of the six or seven charges, so that will also affect how much anyone gets.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is the thing about federal sentencing. First of all, at least on paper, the sentences are really, really long. Some of the charges have a maximum sentence of 20 years, some 10 years, and some 5 years. In theory, but in very theoretical theory, a particular defendant could get consecutive sentences on all of those charges, and that would be, in effect, a life sentence, and more so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the federal sentencing guidelines call for something called grouping, so that more often the main sentence will be for the most serious crime that the person is convicted of. We won’t keep augmenting them consecutively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Even then, although there are a lot of formulas in the federal sentencing guidelines that would suggest a calculation on the part of the judge, because of various legal changes, the guidelines, however rigid and severe they always looked, are now deemed, quote-unquote, advisory. When all is said and done, the judge has plenty of discretion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The best one can say is that if you compare this to white-collar crime cases around the country, and this is just sort of an impressionistic assessment of how serious the crime is and how much any one individual was a leader of it, I could imagine sentences in the 10- to 15-year range.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Wow, wow. I mean, have we seen anything like that in a Bay Area corruption case? Does anybody know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I haven’t heard of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, yeah, that would be quite something. And that would include Sheng Thao, you think, Robert Weisberg?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Oh, in theory, she’s exposed to every one of those charges and all those maximum sentences. It may turn out, as suggested earlier, that she can avoid conviction on some or all counts by trying to make the case that she was more in the shadows of this and didn’t know completely what was going on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not always easy for a leader to say, “Well, I didn’t really know what was going on,” because the prosecutor might say, “Well, aren’t you supposed to be in charge of everything that’s going on among the government and among your confederates?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But again, everybody’s going to be accusing everybody else. That’s what can happen in a multi-defendant trial. Her lawyer is going to attack witnesses who actually say good things about the other defendants, and vice versa.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Also, I can’t remember how much money actually changed hands here, right? Because Andre Jones did get some money for this job, which the prosecution calls a no-show job with Evolutionary Homes. So was it supposed to be $300,000 a year? At least that was the first number I heard. Do we know how much he actually ever got?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> The prosecution says that he was ultimately paid only $95,000.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. So, Robert Weisberg, when I hear the numbers, like, oh, okay, so we had $75,000 go to Juarez, we had $95,000. These don’t look like enormous numbers, and yet it’s the nature of this kind of conspiracy that’s alleged that would lead to this much larger, much longer sentence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Right. Well, first of all, if the prosecution is conceding, let’s say with Jones, a maximum of $90,000, that will keep his sentence a little lower than otherwise.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But here’s the reason why the amount of money is not the decisive thing here. The government’s case is really based — although there’s a federal bribery charge based on the city being a government contractor — the really serious charge is mail and wire fraud under this thing called honest services deprivation, which is a bizarre thing that Congress came up with many years ago. But here’s the gist of it: what is stolen here, because fraud is a kind of theft, is not so much an amount of money, but rather the right of the people of Oakland to have good government. So, the breach of governmental fiduciary duty, and, of course, aided and abetted by certain people like the Duongs who are not government officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That’s really the heart of the matter, and that’s why, although the amount of money is important, it’s back to that specificity of the \u003cem>quid pro quo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Man, it’s actually quite dramatic when you put it in those terms, you know? Like, they stole our trust in the government is essentially what the charge is.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> Charges are based on that when it involves federal prosecutors prosecuting state and local officials.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Wow. Do you think, Alex Hall, that this hurt the progressive movement in Oakland, or more broadly, given that Sheng Thao was sort of the standard-bearer for this in the city?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I don’t know if I really fully know the answer to that question. I don’t perceive any indication of that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I remember when, I think it was the week after Thao was indicted, I went to a campaign event for Barbara Lee at a bar in downtown Oakland where I had gone to other election-night parties for Sheng Thao and Oakland City Council members. A lot of local elected officials, Democratic politicians, showed up, and they were all the same officials who showed up to Sheng Thao’s event, showing up to Barbara Lee’s event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So to me, it kind of felt like there’s — I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Mm-hmm.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> I did not have the indication that this was going to somehow — and, you know, this is Oakland. I mean, people have their political views, and I don’t think that distrust in one public official is going to destroy their opinion of the whole party or whether these officials have the ability to represent their interests.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Let’s bring in Judith in Oakland. Welcome, Judith.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Judith:\u003c/strong> Hi. Yeah, I was just commenting and can ask a question about the impact this has. It does, for me, on my vote, in regard to Barbara Lee’s request for more executive power. And, like Barbara Lee, I think, well, if this can happen to Sheng Thao, and you look at Trump and his massive corruption, it’s having an impact on me. Does anyone have any idea what’s happening in Oakland?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, one thing I’ll say, I think related to Oakland politics, thank you for this, Judith, is people do seem to have baseline lower levels of trust in the government than before. And, of course, when Barbara Lee is trying to be able to move more quickly as mayor, I think some people are thinking about it like Judith is here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me ask one other thing, because we have a long way to go on this trial, Alex Hall. What are you looking out for? The prosecution has given a list of up to 70 witnesses. They may not call them all, but they could call up to 70 people. Are there any in particular that you think might be crucial?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Well, Mario Juarez. I think Mario Juarez’s testimony is going to be fascinating, not only what he says, but also what the defense attorneys ask him. They’re going to be asking about his track record and what he said. And what they respond with, I think, is going to be really, really interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m going to look for what evidence the government has that undeniably corroborates that this scheme played out the way they’re alleging that it did, that does not come from Juarez.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another thing that I’m going to be looking out for is we’ve seen a number of videos and audio recordings that prosecutors have filed in federal court.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> But we haven’t actually seen them, right? Oh, yeah, we have. Oh, okay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alex Hall:\u003c/strong> Some. But there’s been descriptions of other recordings that we haven’t seen that I think will be very interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Supposedly, we’re going to hear the FBI’s interview with Andy Duong. There have been descriptions of other recordings of conversations that Andy Duong allegedly recorded with elected officials that will be really interesting.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But supposedly, there are recordings of Evolutionary Homes’ board meetings in which the scheme was allegedly discussed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then I think it will be interesting to see how Juarez’s allegations of broader corruption come up in this trial. There’s this video of him talking about the Duongs supposedly receiving payment or paying individuals who supposedly helped them get this city of Oakland contract for the recycling company.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He also told the FBI that he saw people lining up outside California Waste Solutions, getting bags of cash from David Duong, that they’ve been involved in money laundering, and that he’s witnessed them deleting evidence from security footage.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I think how those allegations of broader corruption in Oakland come up in the trial is going to be really interesting. And, yeah, just Juarez in general. I think a lot of people are waiting to hear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Robert Weisberg, just with our last 30 seconds here, do you think the government’s going to win its case here against at least some of the defendants?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Robert Weisberg:\u003c/strong> I don’t like to predict, but the government has a lot of strong evidence against a lot of people. So I don’t think a mixed verdict is out of the question, mixed in the sense that a particular individual doesn’t get busted on all counts and that different people get busted on different counts.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But it looks like a very strong case, except so much of it assumes that Mario Juarez has credibility.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Thanks so much, Robert Weisberg, professor of criminal law at Stanford. Davina Hurt, thank you as well, government ethics director at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and former mayor of Belmont. And thank you, Alex Hall, enterprise and accountability reporter here at KQED. I feel like I understand what’s going on a lot better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Last listener comment. A listener writes on Bluesky, “As a native of Chicago, is it hard for me to believe that the history of corruption in Oakland begins and ends with Sheng Thao? Was she just bad at covering her tracks?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> ahead with Mina.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Amid the news of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike and the Pentagon saying it will live-stream its execution of an army psychiatrist convicted of a mass shooting, Gov. Gavin Newsom is said to be considering commuting the sentences of the 563 people currently on death row in California. The state is home to a quarter of all American prisoners awaiting the death penalty, though a moratorium on executions has been in place since 2019. We’ll talk about what factors Newsom is weighing and hear how commuting death penalty sentences could affect Newsom’s national political profile and the broader conversation about capital punishment in the United States. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker,\u003c/strong> facilitator, California Anti Death Penalty Coalition\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah,\u003c/strong> staff writer, The Marshall Project\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen,\u003c/strong> founder, Victim Advocate Angels\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. With 563 prisoners on death row, California has a quarter of the nation’s population sentenced to death. And Governor Gavin Newsom is facing pressure to address this before he leaves office. In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on executions, in part, he said then, out of concern over wrongful convictions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I can’t be party to that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Now, advocates want him to commute those death sentences as he prepares to step down in January. Here he is on his podcast this month.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I have to prepare for my own conscience, my rocking chair test. Do I commute the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> For more, I am joined by Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project. Welcome, Maurice.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Hi. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what would it mean if Newsom did this? I mean, I imagine it would not mean that suddenly 563 people are released from prison.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, absolutely not. And in fact, all these folks who were previously on death row in California were transferred to the general population some years ago. So they’re effectively living out their lives in prison already, and that’s what they would continue to do if their sentences were commuted. They would all presumably get life sentences without the possibility of parole, but they would no longer be under the threat of execution under a future governor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So why would Newsom do this now? Why would it make sense for him to do this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, he said that it has to do with his own sense of morality. I mean, he’s about to leave office and leave the governorship, and so it’s sort of his last chance to take this major swing against the death penalty, which is a policy area where he’s been very clear for pretty much his entire time in office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So this would be the chance, basically, to land that blow against the punishment before he leaves. But, of course, there are also the political pros he could maybe get out of it as he prepares to run, as we all kind of imagine he will, for president.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, the political pros. I imagine there are also political cons to this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. I mean, the attack ads really write themselves. You can imagine a Republican running against him saying, “Look at all these people whom a jury sentenced to death, whom the people of California wanted to see executed, and Newsom deprived them of that chance.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could he do this with just a stroke of a pen in California?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> He can’t. He can do it for over a hundred of these people, but California has some quirks in its laws such that the California Supreme Court would actually have to approve all of these commutations, make sure that there’s no conflict of interest, the way that you hear about in Washington with the president. But the folks that I’ve talked to in my reporting suggest that that is likely to happen. So if Newsom goes for it, he can expect the court to hopefully play along.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And will he, I guess, is the question. You noted sort of his moral convictions on this, or his personal convictions, as he stated them. But what is his history on this issue? What has he done?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, in the last month, he has apparently told some people close to him, according to reporting by \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, that he’s explicitly considering doing it. And that didn’t surprise me, because really his whole time in office, he has pushed against the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right after he came into office, about eight years ago, he declared a moratorium on executions, which meant that people were still on death row and still technically could face execution. But he actually had the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison, outside San Francisco, ripped down, basically. There were these photos of a lethal injection gurney and a chair that had been in a gas chamber literally being hoisted onto trucks and driven away. And the symbolism of that was quite clear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also note that he’s expressed concern over the death penalty’s geographic arbitrariness in California. In what ways?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, what we mean by that — and I should say this is based on a data analysis that my colleague at The Marshall Project, Jill Castellano, did — is that whether you are sentenced to death if you commit a homicide has less to do with the severity of the homicide itself and more to do with where you committed it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you committed a homicide these days in Riverside County, California, you are, I think, four times more likely to receive a death sentence than in Los Angeles. This reflects years and years of data. Now, which counties are more committed to death sentences shifts over time. It is entirely based on who has been elected in that county to be the district attorney and also whether jurors in those counties agree to sentence people to death.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the outcome is that whether someone goes to death row is much more a product of geography. Critics of the death penalty tend to say this is arbitrary, that it shouldn’t matter where you live, and that the idea of the death penalty, really, in its foundations, was to have a little bit more clarity, a little more sense of justice around who is sentenced to death and who is not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah. We want to hear from you, listeners. Do you think Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of California’s death row population? And would you support that or not? What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. And you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Maurice, as Newsom is mulling this over, there are things happening nationally that are really bringing this issue of capital punishment to the forefront of people’s minds. One of them is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has confirmed that the execution of a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 will be carried out by firing squad and live-streamed to the public. Is this reflective of anything broader in the public, or just a reflection of the administration?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, I think the death penalty increasingly, over the last five to 10 years, has kind of come back into the national foreground. Those who remember the 1980s and ’90s will remember that the death penalty was in the national news all the time. There were a lot of prominent cases. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, and he had overseen lots of executions in Texas. This was central to my own early years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what I see now, basically, is a return to a debate. The death penalty has managed to kind of go quiet, but it’s been there all along. You know, there’s under 40, let’s say, but more than 20 executions most years. And a lot of those executions are done by lethal injection. They’re done sort of behind the scenes, behind the closed doors of prisons in just a handful of states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so it’s easy for most Americans to kind of ignore the death penalty and really only engage with it when a particularly gruesome crime is reported on in the news or there’s a high-profile case, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now you’re seeing both sides of the political aisle see a certain amount of political value in bringing the death penalty to the foreground again. On the one hand, you have the Trump administration, which really promotes a highly punitive response to crime and a much stronger sense of state control, a sense of spectacle, seeing value in carrying out an execution by firing squad, which is, of course, much bloodier than lethal injection, and doing it live-streamed, as they’re claiming they’re going to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then even the states that try to keep executions behind closed doors are having trouble because of this growing difficulty carrying out lethal injections. So a couple of weeks ago — it already seems like ancient news now — Christa Pike became one of the first, or the first, person to survive an execution, really raising questions about the efficacy of how we’ve been doing it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and questions, I think, about our nation’s ability to actually carry out executions safely or effectively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the humanity of doing so, right? I think for a long time, lethal injections looked like these quiet medical procedures, and so we could pretend that it’s not kind of painful and gruesome to kill someone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now that the lethal injections are not working as they had been planned, and there’s a turn back toward methods like gas chambers and firing squads, there’s sort of a sense of the veil coming off of the death penalty, and the country really having to decide and reckon more clearly with: Do we want to kill people, and this is what it looks like?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And can we just step back first? I mean, can you tell me what your reaction was when you heard the announcement about an execution open to the public and live-streamed online?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it struck me as a step into the past, into the deep past. So, of course, live-streaming and the internet are recent phenomena, but it was about a hundred years ago that executions were regularly held in public, and there were stories of tens of thousands of people all going to see someone hang in scenes that really looked very, very close to lynchings, which were, of course, illegal but also carried out in public, and also carried out with the consent, usually, of the local leadership, usually against Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And this firing squad is against a Muslim American. So really, my first reaction was, wow, I feel like I’ve stepped into 100 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, it’s certainly drawn a lot of reaction. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, “I would expect this” — meaning a live-streamed execution — “from terrorists and dictators, but not here in America. It would give this individual, who deserves no further notoriety, the martyrdom he seeks.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have listeners weighing in. This listener, Douglas on Discord, writes, “From a personal viewpoint, the death penalty has always felt like a political response to a criminal act. It’s often used for political reasons, both to the wider audience and to end the lives of dissidents.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener writes, “Given our history of unequal justice and false convictions, I am 100% against the death penalty.” And that’s from Discord user Steve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>MJ on Bluesky writes, “Commuting everyone on death row would be equivalent to Trump’s pardoning every January 6th arrestee. Some murders were too heinous to deserve mercy. Commutation should take place on a case-by-case basis, not wholesale.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me ask you this: Given the number, the very large number of people, would it be possible for Newsom and a team to be able to look at each individual case and determine whether or not that someone’s sentence should be commuted?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Technically speaking, absolutely. This is what governors typically do. But practically speaking, there just isn’t time, right? You imagine the depth and complexity of these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m thinking of just one in particular, a man facing a death sentence in California, Kevin Cooper, whose case has been in the news over the last 10 to 20 years. And that is one where there are lots of questions about his guilt. It has been evaluated over and over again by courts, by a commission Newsom appointed, and to this day, there’s still debate around, you know, did they get it right or not?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you just imagine that kind of debate playing out in more than 500 cases, and Newsom has really run out the clock there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah about Governor Newsom considering whether to commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California, and we’re hearing your thoughts and reactions to it as well. Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshall Project. We’ll have more with him and you listeners after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Listeners, we’re talking about whether Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California. He’s been grappling with it publicly as he prepares to leave office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice Chammah is with us, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and so are you, our listeners. Join the conversation at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, on our social channels at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Laura in San Bernardino. Laura, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura:\u003c/strong> Hi. Um, yeah, my name is Laura. I am from San Bernardino. I’m actually a wife. My husband is on death row. He has been there for 25 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I am absolutely for universal clemency, and not just for my husband, but for everybody. I just want to give a little background. My husband was found guilty, and the judge and the district attorney knew that he had not killed anybody, but they tied him in due to enhancements with the others, the typical defendants. So this happens often, and I don’t think that should be punished by execution, obviously.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And in my county, San Bernardino County, and in Riverside County, we have, like, the highest numbers of Latino and Black men on death row. So there’s a big racial bias right there, right? And we know this is happening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the other thing is, 70% of people on death row don’t even have lawyers, the habeas lawyers. So my husband’s been on death row for 25 years, and we haven’t even had a direct appeal yet to try and rectify this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, Laura, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and connection to this. I really appreciate it. Maurice, it sounds like Laura’s underscoring especially your point earlier about geographic arbitrariness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> And racial arbitrariness. So another piece of this story is that, in the last few years, a coalition of civil rights groups has mounted a lawsuit basically claiming that the California death penalty system is full of racial disparities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They have gotten these academic studies that show that Black people are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges, and Latino people are 6.2 times more likely.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in addition to this idea of geographic arbitrariness, there’s also floating around Newsom — and Newsom knows this — an idea that the death penalty in California falls harder on people of color.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we’re going to get some reaction now to this news from two others who are very invested in the outcome of this as well. Let me start with Natasha Minsker, facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition and an attorney. Natasha, thanks so much for joining us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your group is calling on Newsom to commute before he ends his term. Why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> We are at an inflection point on the death penalty here in this nation. As Maurice noted, a couple of weeks ago, we had this terrible, torturous, failed execution in Tennessee, followed by the announcement, Mina, as you noted, that the federal government intends to carry out a firing squad execution and live-stream this event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Together, these events have ripped the veneer off the idea that the death penalty in the United States can be carried out in a dignified or humane manner. We have seen through these events the last few weeks the reality that the death penalty is an act of violence, and we cannot end violence by responding with more violence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Here in California, we are living in limbo. We have the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. We have not carried out an execution in more than 20 years. And let’s be honest, we’re not going to carry out an execution. There’s really no legal or practical way for us to do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So why do we keep lying and promising victims that we’re going to do something that’s going to bring them healing when we are not going to, and it is not going to help?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What do you mean by there is no legal or practical way to carry them out?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Well, I think the events in Tennessee demonstrated to us that the idea that it is a simple procedure to kill someone through lethal injection is absolutely not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve had botched executions here in California. We’ve never had someone survive, but we’ve had significantly botched executions where people were tortured to death. And that’s why executions were originally halted 20 years ago. The federal courts found that the way California was carrying out executions amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment and violated the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s initially why our executions were put on hold. And then Governor Newsom came into office in 2019 and put the moratorium in place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have seen state after state have botched executions and try to switch to other execution procedures. This has been going on for decades. Every new execution procedure we attempt has its own problems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we don’t have a way of carrying out executions properly. Medical professionals refuse to participate in executions for ethical reasons. The companies that control the lethal injection drugs refuse to sell them to states for execution purposes, so the states have to buy these drugs on the gray market or make them themselves.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we know that there’s no easy way to kill someone, and it’s never going to be a clean or humane process. We really need to stop trying.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You have also noted that timing is of the essence, not only because you have an outgoing governor who is against the death penalty, but also because timing is of the essence for the state Supreme Court. Can you talk about why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> As Maurice explained, in California, the process is not a simple, one-step process. For example, when Governor Ryan in Illinois commuted all death sentences, there had been a dozen governors who had commuted death sentences in their states. In most of those states, the governors have the power to act unilaterally.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Here in California, there’s a process that involves the Supreme Court, and the governor needs to act in time for the Supreme Court to go through its process and do its due diligence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you think realistically the Supreme Court would have the time to go through two-thirds of the cases on California’s death row?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> If the governor presents this as a universal action, where he’s commuting all death sentences, and the reason he is acting is because of the problems with the death penalty, then yes, absolutely. The presentation of the request for the Supreme Court’s approval of the clemency action is based on one argument, which is that the death penalty is inhumane and unjust and that we should not have anyone under sentence of death in California any longer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You asked if there would be time for the court to review the cases one by one. The biggest problem here is that, as the caller pointed out, 70% of the people on death row don’t have a lawyer or funding for their legal team to work on their case. So for 70% of the cases, there’s no advocate there to present the case for why that person should be commuted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is one of the most significant disparities we have in the death penalty here in California. We’re living in this limbo.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What have you estimated, Natasha, is the cost of all of this to Californians in dollars?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Great question. And it’s not my estimate. It’s the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which does these official estimates here in California, and they’ve told us that we spend $150 million every year on the death penalty in California, for a system that everyone agrees has failed us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Natasha Minsker is an attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to bring into the conversation now Alexa Hansen, founder of the organization Victim Advocate Angels. Alexa, thanks so much for being on. I was very sorry to learn about your sister. Tell us about your organization and your connection to this work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m the founder and CEO of Victim Advocate Angels, a nonprofit organization created by survivors for survivors of homicide and other violent crimes. We provide emotional support, courtroom advocacy, guidance through the criminal justice system, and a voice for families who often feel very defeated and forgotten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I founded this organization after my little sister, as you mentioned, who was 28 years old. She was raped, beaten, and then burned alive in 2018, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, whom I adopted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Through that experience, I saw firsthand just how broken our justice system can be and how little support victims and their families actually receive. Families like mine are left trying to navigate the incredibly complicated system while experiencing the most traumatic experience of their lives that they’re ever going to face.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I realized that the system meant to deliver justice often leaves survivors feeling forgotten and unheard and forced to fight for themselves, which, again, should never be the case. During the hardest and most traumatic times of our lives, we didn’t receive the support and guidance or help that we desperately needed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I can’t change what my family went through, but I can make sure other families facing the same unimaginable loss don’t have to fight that battle alone. Victims’ voices are the least heard throughout this entire ordeal, and that’s why we do what we do, because victims deserve more than justice in a courtroom. They deserve support, compassion, and someone standing beside them every step of the way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Alexa, what was your reaction to the news of the governor considering commutations?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> So it wasn’t necessarily a shock for us. You know, we live in California, and so the laws are ever-changing for us, unfortunately. Again, the victims are always the last voice to be heard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I believe the death penalty should remain an option for the most extreme and horrific crimes, because for some surviving families, it represents a level of accountability that life without parole simply doesn’t carry in the same way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think for a lot of families that I represent — I’ve worked with hundreds of families — I have not heard one yet say that they would not want to have the death sentence carried out in their cases. Now, we do understand that that’s not always going to be the case. There is a level of things that need to be met to get to that death sentence, so it’s not always even going to be on the table for a lot of these families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when we heard that that was going to be taken away, it’s kind of like, excuse me? Taking away the ultimate accountability for some of the most egregious crimes that can possibly be there. So it was like a punch to the gut for these families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, I’ve often heard from people who are also against the death penalty as an option that it is unfair to victims to be in a system where there is so much uncertainty, so much dysfunction with regard to actually being able to carry out these sentences, and that it would be better to know it’s not going to happen than to be in limbo. Is that how you feel?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Um, I don’t necessarily think that that really resonates with families. And the reason for that is that we are forever in limbo until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think for people who have not walked through what we have walked through, they don’t really understand that, because no matter what the sentence is, whether it’s death or life without parole or 25 to life, no matter what, if that person is still alive, we are still faced with appeals. We’re still faced with their sentences getting commuted, et cetera, et cetera. You could go down that line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it doesn’t matter what that sentence is. But for us, the finality of a death sentence carries a lot more weight and accountability than life without parole and other sentences, where once you commute a death sentence, it then gets dropped down to life without parole or, in certain circumstances, it could be dropped down to time served.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There have even been cases that have gone from a death sentence to, “We’re going to give you 30 to life, but you’ve already done that, so we’re going to go ahead and just let you out.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So for us, the accountability, like I said, comes with showing we’re giving you the max sentence, the most punishable sentence available by law, which is the death sentence. Now, if they can come up with a different sentence that is not the death penalty, that is not life without parole, that has that same severity, then that could be something that victims and their families could sit better with.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when it comes to this, it’s just, like I said, a slap in the face to these victims and these families that have had to sit through all of this time and time again, and will continue to have to do that no matter what the sentence is, until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, you’ve talked about how victims are often the least heard. What do you think people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a victim advocate in California, with California’s troubled system?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lack of empathy and a lack of people really truly understanding what it’s like to sit in that seat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Almost every family that I’ve worked with has sat in a courtroom over 30 or 40 times. People don’t understand it can take years to even get to a trial. And once you get to that trial, then what? Then you get to the sentencing. And then again, when that sentence happens, then what? Then there’s the appeal process. Then there’s all these things that come with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What they’re not understanding is that this type of grief is different from any other grief that anyone will ever experience. I consider it to be like a scab that can’t heal because it keeps getting picked at.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s no guarantee for that family. Like I said, if that person is still alive, if they are found guilty, a jury trial has happened, there’s been a lot of weight put on that, and they sat through that. It’s getting picked at and picked at.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So even once that trial is over, now, again, we’re facing the appeal process. How long are they actually going to be in jail? The early release programs that keep happening. We’re faced with all of those, the parole board hearings, all of these things. That scab keeps getting picked.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s no true healing. There’s no true closure for any of these families because it keeps getting picked at. Until that person is no longer here, that scab is going to continuously be picked at, whether they’re in jail, whether they reform, whatever the case may be, they’re still here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If that person is indeed the person who did that act, it’s never going to make it okay. They’ll never actually have any closure or anything like that. And that’s the hard part that people don’t understand. You know, they say, “It’s been 20 years. Why haven’t you moved on?” It’s been 30 years. How are you still grieving?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s because our scab is continuously being picked at. It’s not like being in a car accident or having cancer, where there are still so many questions that are answered. And then there’s, again, that person’s still here, so there’s never any finality for us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels. Thank you so much for talking with us as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We also have listeners weighing in. Listener Carolyn in Redwood City writes, “Claiming that life without the possibility of parole is an adequate substitute is wrong. There are many vicious murderers who had their death sentences changed to life who’ve been released from prison. Ted Bundy couldn’t victimize any more women because he was executed, and we were all saved from repeated board appearances and repeated court appeals.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener, Moira, writes, “Killing people is wrong. I deeply support Newsom in commuting all the death sentences. A caller compared this to the January 6th pardon. No, these people got a pardon and were able to leave jail. Those on death row would still serve their life sentences. One innocent person killed by our society is too many. We should not have the state in the business of killing ever. People are imperfect. The system is imperfect. Death is final and cannot be reversed.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, where are Californians when it comes to the death penalty? Has there been recent polling on this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, not that recent. About 10 years ago, Californians had an opportunity to abolish the death penalty, and they chose not to. This was Prop 62, and it was defeated 53 to 46.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then, three years later, in 2019, there was a poll, and 41% of Californians said they preferred the death penalty, while 48% said they preferred life in prison. Obviously, those numbers don’t add up to 100, and 2019 was — what is that, seven years ago? So it really is hard to know what Californians would say today if given another chance to consider the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we definitely appreciate listeners telling us what you would say today, at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Also tell us if you think Governor Newsom will do it, based on the way that he’s been behaving, and whether or not you would support commuting the sentences of all of California’s death row population: 563 prisoners in total, 18 of whom are women.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases? And have recent news events affected the way you think about capital punishment or attitudes toward it in America? We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us. I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Governor Gavin Newsom is considering commuting all 563 death row sentences in California. And here he is grappling with the issue on his podcast recently with Bryan Stevenson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> What do you say? And I’m getting all those people in my ear: “Don’t do it, don’t do it. Politics.” That’s the best I can do is the politics. But also the victims. What do I say?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When I did the moratorium, I met with victims. And I’ll never forget, they didn’t know why they were meeting me. And I will never forget one well-known father, a wonderful man. I’ll never forget. It still stings me today. He got up, said how disgusted he was with me, and walked out. And he said much more than that. And just, what do I say to the victims?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786, on our social channels at KQED Forum, and at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Violet in Monterey is with us. Violet, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Violet:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Violet, and my daughter was murdered in October of 2021. And the part when it comes to the death penalty reminds me of what we say when we pledge allegiance to the flag: “Justice for all.” That should include the victims. That should include the ones that were murdered. That should include the ones who are suffering, left behind.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the fact that some of these commentators, some of these people who make careers out of supporting getting people off the death penalty, is absolutely sickening. They’re not taking into consideration the suffering that they claim the prisoners would get. They’re not taking into consideration the families. They’re not taking into consideration their children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have an 11-year-old daughter who refused to go to school because she wanted to come with me on October 1st to the Capitol to advocate for herself and her rights when she lost her sister, so that she does not have to face the person who killed her sister again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And these are the problems that people are not seeing. They’re not seeing our pain. There’s no numbers supporting victims’ families. All they see are the numbers of the prisoners. I mean, the fact that there’s empathy for these prisoners, that there is empathy and there’s talk about the torture that they go through, being euthanized, being shot. They’re not taking into consideration the torture —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Violet, I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter, and I really appreciate your call. Let me go next to caller Curtis in Richmond, who’s on the line with us. Curtis, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes. I definitely empathize with victims. There’s no question about it. But when you have a judicial system that is arbitrarily biased, racially motivated, the numbers are three to one if the victim is white and the perpetrator is Black, three to five to one. They’re automatically going to, if there’s any inkling of a special circumstance, make one up, add one, and it’s just lopsided.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In my particular case, the jury was rigged, period. And they do this in California regularly. You know, the DAs have their regular conferences, yearly conferences, and they get together and say, “Hey, this is where you get a conviction.” You know, you just leave Blacks, minorities, and Jews off of juries because they empathize with anybody that, at the time I was with the trial, anybody that may get gassed. Understandable why Jewish Americans feel this way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Curtis, am I right that you told our screener that you were on death row?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes. I came from jeopardy. Yes, in my case, nearly 40 years. My conviction was vacated because my jury had just been rigged. It was plain and simple, and it took nearly 30-plus years to go before a tribunal that would see what actually happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I went to the state Supreme Court. They had this mantra that, hey, if — what do they call it? I had a word for it. At any rate, it meant, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty or not. The jury finds you guilty, so you’re guilty. It’s just that simple.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a saying for it, they coined the phrase throughout the U.S. But believe me, all victims do have the right to be heard, do have a right for retribution. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But there’s just so much injustice within the justice system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Curtis, I can’t thank you enough as well for calling. All of these people with direct and profound experiences, I really do appreciate it a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, based on what Curtis is saying, what do we know about the number of people on death row who’ve been wrongly convicted?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Frankly, we don’t know that number for California. And part of it is that California’s court system has been so clogged with these cases, in the ways that we described earlier in this hour, because there is such underfunding for defense lawyers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t certainly feel confident saying what number of innocent people have been exonerated — or, I’m sorry, are innocent. But that said, the national picture is that about 2% of all people sentenced to death since the early 1970s have been exonerated, basically by the courts finding them innocent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, in California, it’s about half that number proportionally, about 1%. But to me, that’s less a function of California having fewer innocent people on death row and more a function of the courts kind of struggling to make their way through all these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Jerome in Alameda writes, “The fact that such a judgment is invariably made by human beings, and human beings are capable of error, is the real deal breaker for my condoning the death penalty. Think of all the prisoners who’ve been discovered to be innocent via DNA tests. Putting someone to death is the ultimate irreversible decision. I can’t support it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Listener Chris asks, “Years ago, I read about how much it cost to jail a prisoner for life versus death row with appeals, et cetera. Are there current statistics on this?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What can you tell us, Maurice, about how much it costs? You know, is it less expensive to execute people or for them to live out their lives in prison?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, it’s actually much more expensive to seek the death penalty against someone. This is kind of a hidden element, I think, in the story of the death penalty, but it can cost millions and millions of dollars in every case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I saw one analysis from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which represents people on death row in California, saying that it would cost more than half a billion dollars to resolve all of the death penalty cases in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s because, in order to really weed out those people who may be innocent or whose constitutional rights were strongly violated through, let’s say, racism in jury selection or a defense lawyer who really didn’t do their job at trial, in order to weed out all those cases, it takes a lot of back-and-forth between prosecutors and defense lawyers on appeal. And lawyers cost money. Over the course of years, those costs really balloon and far outstrip what it would cost to house someone in prison for the rest of their lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and you note that California has spent some $6 billion on a death penalty system since ’78 that has executed 13 people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Natasha suggested, also, that the botched execution attempts of Christa Pike are reflective of broader issues with that. Is she right that California has had botched executions? And has the state changed the system since?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It is my understanding that there were botched executions that were litigated over in the ’90s in California. And obviously, because Newsom has, and governors before him have, stopped carrying out executions, it’s impossible to just sort of go right back to how things were done in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California would have to start from scratch in carrying out executions, and it would be subject to all of the difficulties that we’ve seen state after state have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some states have decided to carry out lethal injections, where you have problems of people like Christa Pike surviving those execution attempts, or other people sort of screaming and groaning from the gurney.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then you have other states that have attempted executions that have a lower likelihood of being botched, like firing squads, but then, of course, bring with them a whole host of other issues in terms of just the cultural squeamishness about the grisly realities of death.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andrea in Point Richmond. Andrea, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea:\u003c/strong> Yes. Thank you. As I told the screener, my husband was murdered 14 and a half years ago on the driveway of our Berkeley home. I witnessed part of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The perpetrator was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic who was apprehended within an hour. He’s now serving 35 years in Napa State. My life has been destroyed, shattered by this young man, but I cannot imagine wanting to witness his death. It will not bring anyone back or stop him from murdering someone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Our legal system, our mental health care system, our society in general, our racial and economic inequality, I believe, are responsible. No one should be executed. Because they killed, we kill, and that doesn’t make sense. It makes us killers as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Andrea, I’m very sorry to learn about your husband, and I really appreciate you coming on to share your story as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are definitely very varied views in the victim community, Maurice, as I’m sure you’ve encountered as well, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. We’ve already actually seen some victims in the Nidal Hasan case, the potential live-streamed execution, saying that they abhor that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen a lot of people who want a death sentence and, over the course of decades, feel like that death sentence has really kind of been a lie from society to them, right? They were promised this outcome, and 10, 20, 30 years go by, and society can’t deliver it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it’s not because people aren’t sympathetic and don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s because we balance that, as a country, against people’s constitutional rights and working through making sure innocent people aren’t executed, making sure these are done legally and don’t really look like extrajudicial killings, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It takes a lot of time and money, and we as a society have really not delivered that. So many victim families are coming to be opposed to the death penalty, both on moral and religious grounds and also because they feel like the state is just not capable of it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, listener Vanessa writes, “My father was murdered when I was a child. His murderers were sentenced to death originally. Then the sentences were reduced to life without parole for one and life with the possibility of parole for another. The one with the possibility of parole was released after 30 years, which was devastating because every other year up until that point, I was in court fighting for justice for my father.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think people don’t understand the pain that you go through, and your guest who described it as a scab that is always picked, that is absolutely spot-on. I will never have relief until these men are dead.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, how does America compare with other countries in its approach to capital punishment, would you say?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s a great question. So the United States is relatively alone among Western democracies in having the death penalty. The death penalty is, of course, very common in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. But we are really out of step with, let’s say, the Western European countries, where they haven’t had the death penalty in decades — France, England, Germany, what have you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what you see in those countries is not a large-scale victims’ rights movement to bring it back. You see actually more resources for victims to kind of heal from these crimes and deal with them, as opposed to the kind of promise of the death penalty that is never delivered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was actually one study. So I should say that we don’t even have to look that far away to compare the United States. We can just compare states with the death penalty, like California, Texas, and Florida, to the many states here that just don’t have it at all: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there’s been a little bit of academic study of victim families between these states in homicide cases. And it’s found, basically, that when the death penalty is handed out, it can remove or impede the ability of victim families to deal with the case and find healing because, again, like our guest said, the scab is being picked over and over and over by appeals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas in states — Minnesota, in one study I’m thinking of — where somebody is sentenced to life without parole, the victim’s family really can believe that the person will never get out of prison and heal in whatever ways they need to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s been interesting to see the national polling with regard to the death penalty. I think there was a Gallup poll last year that showed that 52% of Americans support the death penalty as a punishment for murder, but that’s actually significantly down from the mid-’90s, when it was as high as 80%.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That said, though, as you talk about states, there are states that look like they’re moving in that direction. I spoke with Elizabeth Bruenig a while ago about states that are starting to ramp up the number of executions they’re doing. Is that true?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> I think that is true. So for every Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor who is against the death penalty, you have red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in my state, Texas, who believe in the death penalty and also believe that it’s politically advantageous to them to really try to serve that 52% of Americans who believe in the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think they’re also taking their cues a little bit from President Trump, who has proven himself the most pro-death-penalty president in maybe not all of American history, but certainly in the last hundred-plus years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And his open support for the death penalty, I think, is trickling down to state leaders who say, “I want to get the same political value as the president out of this.” And DeSantis, I think, is really the standard-bearer. They are ramping up executions in Florida, which carried out, I think, more than a dozen last year, way up from years prior.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me see if I can squeeze in David quickly in Santa Rosa. David, your question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Yes, so I’m curious to know whether there’s anything other than politics at play here, because I’m generally a Gavin supporter, but this seems like a political move just before the election, since it’s not going to change any future sentences to death row.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Your thoughts on that, Maurice?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think Newsom would say it’s all he can do, right? That it’s ultimately the California voters who would have to abolish the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I also think that it’s pretty typical for governors to do this on their way out of office, regardless of what next office they’re seeking. But certainly Newsom is open to the criticism that he could have done this five, six, seven, eight years ago and is only now doing it, suspiciously close to a presidential run.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Listen, Lubov wants us to clarify before the show’s over that a commutation and a pardon are two very different things. A commuted sentence only eliminates the execution, but not confinement. A pardon frees people from incarceration and releases them from confinement. Newsom leaves them in prison. Trump lets them out to threaten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, we did clarify that at the very top of the show, but appreciate Lubov wanting us to do that again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Maurice, really appreciate you coming on to explain all of this to us. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. My thanks as well to Natasha Minsker, attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, and to Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels, and also to our listeners who called in today with such closeness to this topic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kayla Mihaljevic produced today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. With 563 prisoners on death row, California has a quarter of the nation’s population sentenced to death. And Governor Gavin Newsom is facing pressure to address this before he leaves office. In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on executions, in part, he said then, out of concern over wrongful convictions.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. With 563 prisoners on death row, California has a quarter of the nation’s population sentenced to death. And Governor Gavin Newsom is facing pressure to address this before he leaves office. In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on executions, in part, he said then, out of concern over wrongful convictions.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I can’t be party to that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I can’t be party to that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Now, advocates want him to commute those death sentences as he prepares to step down in January. Here he is on his podcast this month.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Now, advocates want him to commute those death sentences as he prepares to step down in January. Here he is on his podcast this month.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I have to prepare for my own conscience, my rocking chair test. Do I commute the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I have to prepare for my own conscience, my rocking chair test. Do I commute the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> For more, I am joined by Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project. Welcome, Maurice.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> For more, I am joined by Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project. Welcome, Maurice.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Hi. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Hi. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what would it mean if Newsom did this? I mean, I imagine it would not mean that suddenly 563 people are released from prison.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what would it mean if Newsom did this? I mean, I imagine it would not mean that suddenly 563 people are released from prison.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, absolutely not. And in fact, all these folks who were previously on death row in California were transferred to the general population some years ago. So they’re effectively living out their lives in prison already, and that’s what they would continue to do if their sentences were commuted. They would all presumably get life sentences without the possibility of parole, but they would no longer be under the threat of execution under a future governor.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, absolutely not. And in fact, all these folks who were previously on death row in California were transferred to the general population some years ago. So they’re effectively living out their lives in prison already, and that’s what they would continue to do if their sentences were commuted. They would all presumably get life sentences without the possibility of parole, but they would no longer be under the threat of execution under a future governor.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So why would Newsom do this now? Why would it make sense for him to do this?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So why would Newsom do this now? Why would it make sense for him to do this?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, he said that it has to do with his own sense of morality. I mean, he’s about to leave office and leave the governorship, and so it’s sort of his last chance to take this major swing against the death penalty, which is a policy area where he’s been very clear for pretty much his entire time in office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, he said that it has to do with his own sense of morality. I mean, he’s about to leave office and leave the governorship, and so it’s sort of his last chance to take this major swing against the death penalty, which is a policy area where he’s been very clear for pretty much his entire time in office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So this would be the chance, basically, to land that blow against the punishment before he leaves. But, of course, there are also the political pros he could maybe get out of it as he prepares to run, as we all kind of imagine he will, for president.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So this would be the chance, basically, to land that blow against the punishment before he leaves. But, of course, there are also the political pros he could maybe get out of it as he prepares to run, as we all kind of imagine he will, for president.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, the political pros. I imagine there are also political cons to this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, the political pros. I imagine there are also political cons to this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. I mean, the attack ads really write themselves. You can imagine a Republican running against him saying, “Look at all these people whom a jury sentenced to death, whom the people of California wanted to see executed, and Newsom deprived them of that chance.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. I mean, the attack ads really write themselves. You can imagine a Republican running against him saying, “Look at all these people whom a jury sentenced to death, whom the people of California wanted to see executed, and Newsom deprived them of that chance.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could he do this with just a stroke of a pen in California?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> He can’t. He can do it for over a hundred of these people, but California has some quirks in its laws such that the California Supreme Court would actually have to approve all of these commutations, make sure that there’s no conflict of interest, the way that you hear about in Washington with the president. But the folks that I’ve talked to in my reporting suggest that that is likely to happen. So if Newsom goes for it, he can expect the court to hopefully play along.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> He can’t. He can do it for over a hundred of these people, but California has some quirks in its laws such that the California Supreme Court would actually have to approve all of these commutations, make sure that there’s no conflict of interest, the way that you hear about in Washington with the president. But the folks that I’ve talked to in my reporting suggest that that is likely to happen. So if Newsom goes for it, he can expect the court to hopefully play along.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And will he, I guess, is the question. You noted sort of his moral convictions on this, or his personal convictions, as he stated them. But what is his history on this issue? What has he done?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And will he, I guess, is the question. You noted sort of his moral convictions on this, or his personal convictions, as he stated them. But what is his history on this issue? What has he done?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, in the last month, he has apparently told some people close to him, according to reporting by \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, that he’s explicitly considering doing it. And that didn’t surprise me, because really his whole time in office, he has pushed against the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, in the last month, he has apparently told some people close to him, according to reporting by \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, that he’s explicitly considering doing it. And that didn’t surprise me, because really his whole time in office, he has pushed against the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So right after he came into office, about eight years ago, he declared a moratorium on executions, which meant that people were still on death row and still technically could face execution. But he actually had the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison, outside San Francisco, ripped down, basically. There were these photos of a lethal injection gurney and a chair that had been in a gas chamber literally being hoisted onto trucks and driven away. And the symbolism of that was quite clear.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So right after he came into office, about eight years ago, he declared a moratorium on executions, which meant that people were still on death row and still technically could face execution. But he actually had the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison, outside San Francisco, ripped down, basically. There were these photos of a lethal injection gurney and a chair that had been in a gas chamber literally being hoisted onto trucks and driven away. And the symbolism of that was quite clear.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also note that he’s expressed concern over the death penalty’s geographic arbitrariness in California. In what ways?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also note that he’s expressed concern over the death penalty’s geographic arbitrariness in California. In what ways?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, what we mean by that — and I should say this is based on a data analysis that my colleague at The Marshall Project, Jill Castellano, did — is that whether you are sentenced to death if you commit a homicide has less to do with the severity of the homicide itself and more to do with where you committed it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, what we mean by that — and I should say this is based on a data analysis that my colleague at The Marshall Project, Jill Castellano, did — is that whether you are sentenced to death if you commit a homicide has less to do with the severity of the homicide itself and more to do with where you committed it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if you committed a homicide these days in Riverside County, California, you are, I think, four times more likely to receive a death sentence than in Los Angeles. This reflects years and years of data. Now, which counties are more committed to death sentences shifts over time. It is entirely based on who has been elected in that county to be the district attorney and also whether jurors in those counties agree to sentence people to death.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if you committed a homicide these days in Riverside County, California, you are, I think, four times more likely to receive a death sentence than in Los Angeles. This reflects years and years of data. Now, which counties are more committed to death sentences shifts over time. It is entirely based on who has been elected in that county to be the district attorney and also whether jurors in those counties agree to sentence people to death.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But the outcome is that whether someone goes to death row is much more a product of geography. Critics of the death penalty tend to say this is arbitrary, that it shouldn’t matter where you live, and that the idea of the death penalty, really, in its foundations, was to have a little bit more clarity, a little more sense of justice around who is sentenced to death and who is not.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But the outcome is that whether someone goes to death row is much more a product of geography. Critics of the death penalty tend to say this is arbitrary, that it shouldn’t matter where you live, and that the idea of the death penalty, really, in its foundations, was to have a little bit more clarity, a little more sense of justice around who is sentenced to death and who is not.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah. We want to hear from you, listeners. Do you think Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of California’s death row population? And would you support that or not? What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah. We want to hear from you, listeners. Do you think Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of California’s death row population? And would you support that or not? What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. And you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. And you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, Maurice, as Newsom is mulling this over, there are things happening nationally that are really bringing this issue of capital punishment to the forefront of people’s minds. One of them is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has confirmed that the execution of a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 will be carried out by firing squad and live-streamed to the public. Is this reflective of anything broader in the public, or just a reflection of the administration?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, Maurice, as Newsom is mulling this over, there are things happening nationally that are really bringing this issue of capital punishment to the forefront of people’s minds. One of them is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has confirmed that the execution of a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 will be carried out by firing squad and live-streamed to the public. Is this reflective of anything broader in the public, or just a reflection of the administration?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, I think the death penalty increasingly, over the last five to 10 years, has kind of come back into the national foreground. Those who remember the 1980s and ’90s will remember that the death penalty was in the national news all the time. There were a lot of prominent cases. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, and he had overseen lots of executions in Texas. This was central to my own early years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, I think the death penalty increasingly, over the last five to 10 years, has kind of come back into the national foreground. Those who remember the 1980s and ’90s will remember that the death penalty was in the national news all the time. There were a lot of prominent cases. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, and he had overseen lots of executions in Texas. This was central to my own early years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And what I see now, basically, is a return to a debate. The death penalty has managed to kind of go quiet, but it’s been there all along. You know, there’s under 40, let’s say, but more than 20 executions most years. And a lot of those executions are done by lethal injection. They’re done sort of behind the scenes, behind the closed doors of prisons in just a handful of states.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And what I see now, basically, is a return to a debate. The death penalty has managed to kind of go quiet, but it’s been there all along. You know, there’s under 40, let’s say, but more than 20 executions most years. And a lot of those executions are done by lethal injection. They’re done sort of behind the scenes, behind the closed doors of prisons in just a handful of states.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so it’s easy for most Americans to kind of ignore the death penalty and really only engage with it when a particularly gruesome crime is reported on in the news or there’s a high-profile case, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so it’s easy for most Americans to kind of ignore the death penalty and really only engage with it when a particularly gruesome crime is reported on in the news or there’s a high-profile case, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now you’re seeing both sides of the political aisle see a certain amount of political value in bringing the death penalty to the foreground again. On the one hand, you have the Trump administration, which really promotes a highly punitive response to crime and a much stronger sense of state control, a sense of spectacle, seeing value in carrying out an execution by firing squad, which is, of course, much bloodier than lethal injection, and doing it live-streamed, as they’re claiming they’re going to do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But now you’re seeing both sides of the political aisle see a certain amount of political value in bringing the death penalty to the foreground again. On the one hand, you have the Trump administration, which really promotes a highly punitive response to crime and a much stronger sense of state control, a sense of spectacle, seeing value in carrying out an execution by firing squad, which is, of course, much bloodier than lethal injection, and doing it live-streamed, as they’re claiming they’re going to do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then even the states that try to keep executions behind closed doors are having trouble because of this growing difficulty carrying out lethal injections. So a couple of weeks ago — it already seems like ancient news now — Christa Pike became one of the first, or the first, person to survive an execution, really raising questions about the efficacy of how we’ve been doing it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then even the states that try to keep executions behind closed doors are having trouble because of this growing difficulty carrying out lethal injections. So a couple of weeks ago — it already seems like ancient news now — Christa Pike became one of the first, or the first, person to survive an execution, really raising questions about the efficacy of how we’ve been doing it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and questions, I think, about our nation’s ability to actually carry out executions safely or effectively.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and questions, I think, about our nation’s ability to actually carry out executions safely or effectively.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the humanity of doing so, right? I think for a long time, lethal injections looked like these quiet medical procedures, and so we could pretend that it’s not kind of painful and gruesome to kill someone.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the humanity of doing so, right? I think for a long time, lethal injections looked like these quiet medical procedures, and so we could pretend that it’s not kind of painful and gruesome to kill someone.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But now that the lethal injections are not working as they had been planned, and there’s a turn back toward methods like gas chambers and firing squads, there’s sort of a sense of the veil coming off of the death penalty, and the country really having to decide and reckon more clearly with: Do we want to kill people, and this is what it looks like?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But now that the lethal injections are not working as they had been planned, and there’s a turn back toward methods like gas chambers and firing squads, there’s sort of a sense of the veil coming off of the death penalty, and the country really having to decide and reckon more clearly with: Do we want to kill people, and this is what it looks like?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And can we just step back first? I mean, can you tell me what your reaction was when you heard the announcement about an execution open to the public and live-streamed online?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And can we just step back first? I mean, can you tell me what your reaction was when you heard the announcement about an execution open to the public and live-streamed online?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it struck me as a step into the past, into the deep past. So, of course, live-streaming and the internet are recent phenomena, but it was about a hundred years ago that executions were regularly held in public, and there were stories of tens of thousands of people all going to see someone hang in scenes that really looked very, very close to lynchings, which were, of course, illegal but also carried out in public, and also carried out with the consent, usually, of the local leadership, usually against Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it struck me as a step into the past, into the deep past. So, of course, live-streaming and the internet are recent phenomena, but it was about a hundred years ago that executions were regularly held in public, and there were stories of tens of thousands of people all going to see someone hang in scenes that really looked very, very close to lynchings, which were, of course, illegal but also carried out in public, and also carried out with the consent, usually, of the local leadership, usually against Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And this firing squad is against a Muslim American. So really, my first reaction was, wow, I feel like I’ve stepped into 100 years ago.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And this firing squad is against a Muslim American. So really, my first reaction was, wow, I feel like I’ve stepped into 100 years ago.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, it’s certainly drawn a lot of reaction. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, “I would expect this” — meaning a live-streamed execution — “from terrorists and dictators, but not here in America. It would give this individual, who deserves no further notoriety, the martyrdom he seeks.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, it’s certainly drawn a lot of reaction. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, “I would expect this” — meaning a live-streamed execution — “from terrorists and dictators, but not here in America. It would give this individual, who deserves no further notoriety, the martyrdom he seeks.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have listeners weighing in. This listener, Douglas on Discord, writes, “From a personal viewpoint, the death penalty has always felt like a political response to a criminal act. It’s often used for political reasons, both to the wider audience and to end the lives of dissidents.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We have listeners weighing in. This listener, Douglas on Discord, writes, “From a personal viewpoint, the death penalty has always felt like a political response to a criminal act. It’s often used for political reasons, both to the wider audience and to end the lives of dissidents.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another listener writes, “Given our history of unequal justice and false convictions, I am 100% against the death penalty.” And that’s from Discord user Steve.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Another listener writes, “Given our history of unequal justice and false convictions, I am 100% against the death penalty.” And that’s from Discord user Steve.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>MJ on Bluesky writes, “Commuting everyone on death row would be equivalent to Trump’s pardoning every January 6th arrestee. Some murders were too heinous to deserve mercy. Commutation should take place on a case-by-case basis, not wholesale.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>MJ on Bluesky writes, “Commuting everyone on death row would be equivalent to Trump’s pardoning every January 6th arrestee. Some murders were too heinous to deserve mercy. Commutation should take place on a case-by-case basis, not wholesale.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me ask you this: Given the number, the very large number of people, would it be possible for Newsom and a team to be able to look at each individual case and determine whether or not that someone’s sentence should be commuted?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me ask you this: Given the number, the very large number of people, would it be possible for Newsom and a team to be able to look at each individual case and determine whether or not that someone’s sentence should be commuted?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Technically speaking, absolutely. This is what governors typically do. But practically speaking, there just isn’t time, right? You imagine the depth and complexity of these cases.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Technically speaking, absolutely. This is what governors typically do. But practically speaking, there just isn’t time, right? You imagine the depth and complexity of these cases.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m thinking of just one in particular, a man facing a death sentence in California, Kevin Cooper, whose case has been in the news over the last 10 to 20 years. And that is one where there are lots of questions about his guilt. It has been evaluated over and over again by courts, by a commission Newsom appointed, and to this day, there’s still debate around, you know, did they get it right or not?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m thinking of just one in particular, a man facing a death sentence in California, Kevin Cooper, whose case has been in the news over the last 10 to 20 years. And that is one where there are lots of questions about his guilt. It has been evaluated over and over again by courts, by a commission Newsom appointed, and to this day, there’s still debate around, you know, did they get it right or not?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So you just imagine that kind of debate playing out in more than 500 cases, and Newsom has really run out the clock there.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>So you just imagine that kind of debate playing out in more than 500 cases, and Newsom has really run out the clock there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah about Governor Newsom considering whether to commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California, and we’re hearing your thoughts and reactions to it as well. Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshall Project. We’ll have more with him and you listeners after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah about Governor Newsom considering whether to commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California, and we’re hearing your thoughts and reactions to it as well. Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshall Project. We’ll have more with him and you listeners after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Listeners, we’re talking about whether Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California. He’s been grappling with it publicly as he prepares to leave office.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Listeners, we’re talking about whether Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California. He’s been grappling with it publicly as he prepares to leave office.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Maurice Chammah is with us, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and so are you, our listeners. Join the conversation at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, on our social channels at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Maurice Chammah is with us, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and so are you, our listeners. Join the conversation at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, on our social channels at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Laura in San Bernardino. Laura, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Laura in San Bernardino. Laura, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura:\u003c/strong> Hi. Um, yeah, my name is Laura. I am from San Bernardino. I’m actually a wife. My husband is on death row. He has been there for 25 years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura:\u003c/strong> Hi. Um, yeah, my name is Laura. I am from San Bernardino. I’m actually a wife. My husband is on death row. He has been there for 25 years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So I am absolutely for universal clemency, and not just for my husband, but for everybody. I just want to give a little background. My husband was found guilty, and the judge and the district attorney knew that he had not killed anybody, but they tied him in due to enhancements with the others, the typical defendants. So this happens often, and I don’t think that should be punished by execution, obviously.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So I am absolutely for universal clemency, and not just for my husband, but for everybody. I just want to give a little background. My husband was found guilty, and the judge and the district attorney knew that he had not killed anybody, but they tied him in due to enhancements with the others, the typical defendants. So this happens often, and I don’t think that should be punished by execution, obviously.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And in my county, San Bernardino County, and in Riverside County, we have, like, the highest numbers of Latino and Black men on death row. So there’s a big racial bias right there, right? And we know this is happening.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And in my county, San Bernardino County, and in Riverside County, we have, like, the highest numbers of Latino and Black men on death row. So there’s a big racial bias right there, right? And we know this is happening.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the other thing is, 70% of people on death row don’t even have lawyers, the habeas lawyers. So my husband’s been on death row for 25 years, and we haven’t even had a direct appeal yet to try and rectify this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the other thing is, 70% of people on death row don’t even have lawyers, the habeas lawyers. So my husband’s been on death row for 25 years, and we haven’t even had a direct appeal yet to try and rectify this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, Laura, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and connection to this. I really appreciate it. Maurice, it sounds like Laura’s underscoring especially your point earlier about geographic arbitrariness.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, Laura, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and connection to this. I really appreciate it. Maurice, it sounds like Laura’s underscoring especially your point earlier about geographic arbitrariness.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> And racial arbitrariness. So another piece of this story is that, in the last few years, a coalition of civil rights groups has mounted a lawsuit basically claiming that the California death penalty system is full of racial disparities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> And racial arbitrariness. So another piece of this story is that, in the last few years, a coalition of civil rights groups has mounted a lawsuit basically claiming that the California death penalty system is full of racial disparities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They have gotten these academic studies that show that Black people are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges, and Latino people are 6.2 times more likely.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>They have gotten these academic studies that show that Black people are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges, and Latino people are 6.2 times more likely.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So in addition to this idea of geographic arbitrariness, there’s also floating around Newsom — and Newsom knows this — an idea that the death penalty in California falls harder on people of color.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So in addition to this idea of geographic arbitrariness, there’s also floating around Newsom — and Newsom knows this — an idea that the death penalty in California falls harder on people of color.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we’re going to get some reaction now to this news from two others who are very invested in the outcome of this as well. Let me start with Natasha Minsker, facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition and an attorney. Natasha, thanks so much for joining us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we’re going to get some reaction now to this news from two others who are very invested in the outcome of this as well. Let me start with Natasha Minsker, facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition and an attorney. Natasha, thanks so much for joining us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your group is calling on Newsom to commute before he ends his term. Why?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your group is calling on Newsom to commute before he ends his term. Why?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> We are at an inflection point on the death penalty here in this nation. As Maurice noted, a couple of weeks ago, we had this terrible, torturous, failed execution in Tennessee, followed by the announcement, Mina, as you noted, that the federal government intends to carry out a firing squad execution and live-stream this event.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> We are at an inflection point on the death penalty here in this nation. As Maurice noted, a couple of weeks ago, we had this terrible, torturous, failed execution in Tennessee, followed by the announcement, Mina, as you noted, that the federal government intends to carry out a firing squad execution and live-stream this event.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Together, these events have ripped the veneer off the idea that the death penalty in the United States can be carried out in a dignified or humane manner. We have seen through these events the last few weeks the reality that the death penalty is an act of violence, and we cannot end violence by responding with more violence.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Together, these events have ripped the veneer off the idea that the death penalty in the United States can be carried out in a dignified or humane manner. We have seen through these events the last few weeks the reality that the death penalty is an act of violence, and we cannot end violence by responding with more violence.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Here in California, we are living in limbo. We have the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. We have not carried out an execution in more than 20 years. And let’s be honest, we’re not going to carry out an execution. There’s really no legal or practical way for us to do that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Here in California, we are living in limbo. We have the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. We have not carried out an execution in more than 20 years. And let’s be honest, we’re not going to carry out an execution. There’s really no legal or practical way for us to do that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So why do we keep lying and promising victims that we’re going to do something that’s going to bring them healing when we are not going to, and it is not going to help?\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>So why do we keep lying and promising victims that we’re going to do something that’s going to bring them healing when we are not going to, and it is not going to help?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What do you mean by there is no legal or practical way to carry them out?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What do you mean by there is no legal or practical way to carry them out?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Well, I think the events in Tennessee demonstrated to us that the idea that it is a simple procedure to kill someone through lethal injection is absolutely not true.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Well, I think the events in Tennessee demonstrated to us that the idea that it is a simple procedure to kill someone through lethal injection is absolutely not true.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’ve had botched executions here in California. We’ve never had someone survive, but we’ve had significantly botched executions where people were tortured to death. And that’s why executions were originally halted 20 years ago. The federal courts found that the way California was carrying out executions amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment and violated the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’ve had botched executions here in California. We’ve never had someone survive, but we’ve had significantly botched executions where people were tortured to death. And that’s why executions were originally halted 20 years ago. The federal courts found that the way California was carrying out executions amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment and violated the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that’s initially why our executions were put on hold. And then Governor Newsom came into office in 2019 and put the moratorium in place.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that’s initially why our executions were put on hold. And then Governor Newsom came into office in 2019 and put the moratorium in place.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We have seen state after state have botched executions and try to switch to other execution procedures. This has been going on for decades. Every new execution procedure we attempt has its own problems.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>We have seen state after state have botched executions and try to switch to other execution procedures. This has been going on for decades. Every new execution procedure we attempt has its own problems.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So we don’t have a way of carrying out executions properly. Medical professionals refuse to participate in executions for ethical reasons. The companies that control the lethal injection drugs refuse to sell them to states for execution purposes, so the states have to buy these drugs on the gray market or make them themselves.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So we don’t have a way of carrying out executions properly. Medical professionals refuse to participate in executions for ethical reasons. The companies that control the lethal injection drugs refuse to sell them to states for execution purposes, so the states have to buy these drugs on the gray market or make them themselves.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So we know that there’s no easy way to kill someone, and it’s never going to be a clean or humane process. We really need to stop trying.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>So we know that there’s no easy way to kill someone, and it’s never going to be a clean or humane process. We really need to stop trying.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You have also noted that timing is of the essence, not only because you have an outgoing governor who is against the death penalty, but also because timing is of the essence for the state Supreme Court. Can you talk about why?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You have also noted that timing is of the essence, not only because you have an outgoing governor who is against the death penalty, but also because timing is of the essence for the state Supreme Court. Can you talk about why?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> As Maurice explained, in California, the process is not a simple, one-step process. For example, when Governor Ryan in Illinois commuted all death sentences, there had been a dozen governors who had commuted death sentences in their states. In most of those states, the governors have the power to act unilaterally.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> As Maurice explained, in California, the process is not a simple, one-step process. For example, when Governor Ryan in Illinois commuted all death sentences, there had been a dozen governors who had commuted death sentences in their states. In most of those states, the governors have the power to act unilaterally.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Here in California, there’s a process that involves the Supreme Court, and the governor needs to act in time for the Supreme Court to go through its process and do its due diligence.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Here in California, there’s a process that involves the Supreme Court, and the governor needs to act in time for the Supreme Court to go through its process and do its due diligence.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you think realistically the Supreme Court would have the time to go through two-thirds of the cases on California’s death row?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you think realistically the Supreme Court would have the time to go through two-thirds of the cases on California’s death row?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> If the governor presents this as a universal action, where he’s commuting all death sentences, and the reason he is acting is because of the problems with the death penalty, then yes, absolutely. The presentation of the request for the Supreme Court’s approval of the clemency action is based on one argument, which is that the death penalty is inhumane and unjust and that we should not have anyone under sentence of death in California any longer.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> If the governor presents this as a universal action, where he’s commuting all death sentences, and the reason he is acting is because of the problems with the death penalty, then yes, absolutely. The presentation of the request for the Supreme Court’s approval of the clemency action is based on one argument, which is that the death penalty is inhumane and unjust and that we should not have anyone under sentence of death in California any longer.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You asked if there would be time for the court to review the cases one by one. The biggest problem here is that, as the caller pointed out, 70% of the people on death row don’t have a lawyer or funding for their legal team to work on their case. So for 70% of the cases, there’s no advocate there to present the case for why that person should be commuted.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You asked if there would be time for the court to review the cases one by one. The biggest problem here is that, as the caller pointed out, 70% of the people on death row don’t have a lawyer or funding for their legal team to work on their case. So for 70% of the cases, there’s no advocate there to present the case for why that person should be commuted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is one of the most significant disparities we have in the death penalty here in California. We’re living in this limbo.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is one of the most significant disparities we have in the death penalty here in California. We’re living in this limbo.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What have you estimated, Natasha, is the cost of all of this to Californians in dollars?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What have you estimated, Natasha, is the cost of all of this to Californians in dollars?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Great question. And it’s not my estimate. It’s the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which does these official estimates here in California, and they’ve told us that we spend $150 million every year on the death penalty in California, for a system that everyone agrees has failed us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Great question. And it’s not my estimate. It’s the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which does these official estimates here in California, and they’ve told us that we spend $150 million every year on the death penalty in California, for a system that everyone agrees has failed us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Natasha Minsker is an attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Natasha Minsker is an attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I want to bring into the conversation now Alexa Hansen, founder of the organization Victim Advocate Angels. Alexa, thanks so much for being on. I was very sorry to learn about your sister. Tell us about your organization and your connection to this work.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I want to bring into the conversation now Alexa Hansen, founder of the organization Victim Advocate Angels. Alexa, thanks so much for being on. I was very sorry to learn about your sister. Tell us about your organization and your connection to this work.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m the founder and CEO of Victim Advocate Angels, a nonprofit organization created by survivors for survivors of homicide and other violent crimes. We provide emotional support, courtroom advocacy, guidance through the criminal justice system, and a voice for families who often feel very defeated and forgotten.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m the founder and CEO of Victim Advocate Angels, a nonprofit organization created by survivors for survivors of homicide and other violent crimes. We provide emotional support, courtroom advocacy, guidance through the criminal justice system, and a voice for families who often feel very defeated and forgotten.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I founded this organization after my little sister, as you mentioned, who was 28 years old. She was raped, beaten, and then burned alive in 2018, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, whom I adopted.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>I founded this organization after my little sister, as you mentioned, who was 28 years old. She was raped, beaten, and then burned alive in 2018, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, whom I adopted.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Through that experience, I saw firsthand just how broken our justice system can be and how little support victims and their families actually receive. Families like mine are left trying to navigate the incredibly complicated system while experiencing the most traumatic experience of their lives that they’re ever going to face.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Through that experience, I saw firsthand just how broken our justice system can be and how little support victims and their families actually receive. Families like mine are left trying to navigate the incredibly complicated system while experiencing the most traumatic experience of their lives that they’re ever going to face.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I realized that the system meant to deliver justice often leaves survivors feeling forgotten and unheard and forced to fight for themselves, which, again, should never be the case. During the hardest and most traumatic times of our lives, we didn’t receive the support and guidance or help that we desperately needed.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I realized that the system meant to deliver justice often leaves survivors feeling forgotten and unheard and forced to fight for themselves, which, again, should never be the case. During the hardest and most traumatic times of our lives, we didn’t receive the support and guidance or help that we desperately needed.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I can’t change what my family went through, but I can make sure other families facing the same unimaginable loss don’t have to fight that battle alone. Victims’ voices are the least heard throughout this entire ordeal, and that’s why we do what we do, because victims deserve more than justice in a courtroom. They deserve support, compassion, and someone standing beside them every step of the way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I can’t change what my family went through, but I can make sure other families facing the same unimaginable loss don’t have to fight that battle alone. Victims’ voices are the least heard throughout this entire ordeal, and that’s why we do what we do, because victims deserve more than justice in a courtroom. They deserve support, compassion, and someone standing beside them every step of the way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Alexa, what was your reaction to the news of the governor considering commutations?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Alexa, what was your reaction to the news of the governor considering commutations?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> So it wasn’t necessarily a shock for us. You know, we live in California, and so the laws are ever-changing for us, unfortunately. Again, the victims are always the last voice to be heard.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> So it wasn’t necessarily a shock for us. You know, we live in California, and so the laws are ever-changing for us, unfortunately. Again, the victims are always the last voice to be heard.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I believe the death penalty should remain an option for the most extreme and horrific crimes, because for some surviving families, it represents a level of accountability that life without parole simply doesn’t carry in the same way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I believe the death penalty should remain an option for the most extreme and horrific crimes, because for some surviving families, it represents a level of accountability that life without parole simply doesn’t carry in the same way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think for a lot of families that I represent — I’ve worked with hundreds of families — I have not heard one yet say that they would not want to have the death sentence carried out in their cases. Now, we do understand that that’s not always going to be the case. There is a level of things that need to be met to get to that death sentence, so it’s not always even going to be on the table for a lot of these families.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think for a lot of families that I represent — I’ve worked with hundreds of families — I have not heard one yet say that they would not want to have the death sentence carried out in their cases. Now, we do understand that that’s not always going to be the case. There is a level of things that need to be met to get to that death sentence, so it’s not always even going to be on the table for a lot of these families.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So when we heard that that was going to be taken away, it’s kind of like, excuse me? Taking away the ultimate accountability for some of the most egregious crimes that can possibly be there. So it was like a punch to the gut for these families.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So when we heard that that was going to be taken away, it’s kind of like, excuse me? Taking away the ultimate accountability for some of the most egregious crimes that can possibly be there. So it was like a punch to the gut for these families.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, I’ve often heard from people who are also against the death penalty as an option that it is unfair to victims to be in a system where there is so much uncertainty, so much dysfunction with regard to actually being able to carry out these sentences, and that it would be better to know it’s not going to happen than to be in limbo. Is that how you feel?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, I’ve often heard from people who are also against the death penalty as an option that it is unfair to victims to be in a system where there is so much uncertainty, so much dysfunction with regard to actually being able to carry out these sentences, and that it would be better to know it’s not going to happen than to be in limbo. Is that how you feel?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Um, I don’t necessarily think that that really resonates with families. And the reason for that is that we are forever in limbo until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Um, I don’t necessarily think that that really resonates with families. And the reason for that is that we are forever in limbo until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think for people who have not walked through what we have walked through, they don’t really understand that, because no matter what the sentence is, whether it’s death or life without parole or 25 to life, no matter what, if that person is still alive, we are still faced with appeals. We’re still faced with their sentences getting commuted, et cetera, et cetera. You could go down that line.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think for people who have not walked through what we have walked through, they don’t really understand that, because no matter what the sentence is, whether it’s death or life without parole or 25 to life, no matter what, if that person is still alive, we are still faced with appeals. We’re still faced with their sentences getting commuted, et cetera, et cetera. You could go down that line.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So it doesn’t matter what that sentence is. But for us, the finality of a death sentence carries a lot more weight and accountability than life without parole and other sentences, where once you commute a death sentence, it then gets dropped down to life without parole or, in certain circumstances, it could be dropped down to time served.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So it doesn’t matter what that sentence is. But for us, the finality of a death sentence carries a lot more weight and accountability than life without parole and other sentences, where once you commute a death sentence, it then gets dropped down to life without parole or, in certain circumstances, it could be dropped down to time served.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There have even been cases that have gone from a death sentence to, “We’re going to give you 30 to life, but you’ve already done that, so we’re going to go ahead and just let you out.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There have even been cases that have gone from a death sentence to, “We’re going to give you 30 to life, but you’ve already done that, so we’re going to go ahead and just let you out.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So for us, the accountability, like I said, comes with showing we’re giving you the max sentence, the most punishable sentence available by law, which is the death sentence. Now, if they can come up with a different sentence that is not the death penalty, that is not life without parole, that has that same severity, then that could be something that victims and their families could sit better with.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So for us, the accountability, like I said, comes with showing we’re giving you the max sentence, the most punishable sentence available by law, which is the death sentence. Now, if they can come up with a different sentence that is not the death penalty, that is not life without parole, that has that same severity, then that could be something that victims and their families could sit better with.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But when it comes to this, it’s just, like I said, a slap in the face to these victims and these families that have had to sit through all of this time and time again, and will continue to have to do that no matter what the sentence is, until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>But when it comes to this, it’s just, like I said, a slap in the face to these victims and these families that have had to sit through all of this time and time again, and will continue to have to do that no matter what the sentence is, until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, you’ve talked about how victims are often the least heard. What do you think people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a victim advocate in California, with California’s troubled system?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, you’ve talked about how victims are often the least heard. What do you think people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a victim advocate in California, with California’s troubled system?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lack of empathy and a lack of people really truly understanding what it’s like to sit in that seat.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lack of empathy and a lack of people really truly understanding what it’s like to sit in that seat.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Almost every family that I’ve worked with has sat in a courtroom over 30 or 40 times. People don’t understand it can take years to even get to a trial. And once you get to that trial, then what? Then you get to the sentencing. And then again, when that sentence happens, then what? Then there’s the appeal process. Then there’s all these things that come with that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Almost every family that I’ve worked with has sat in a courtroom over 30 or 40 times. People don’t understand it can take years to even get to a trial. And once you get to that trial, then what? Then you get to the sentencing. And then again, when that sentence happens, then what? Then there’s the appeal process. Then there’s all these things that come with that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What they’re not understanding is that this type of grief is different from any other grief that anyone will ever experience. I consider it to be like a scab that can’t heal because it keeps getting picked at.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>What they’re not understanding is that this type of grief is different from any other grief that anyone will ever experience. I consider it to be like a scab that can’t heal because it keeps getting picked at.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So there’s no guarantee for that family. Like I said, if that person is still alive, if they are found guilty, a jury trial has happened, there’s been a lot of weight put on that, and they sat through that. It’s getting picked at and picked at.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So there’s no guarantee for that family. Like I said, if that person is still alive, if they are found guilty, a jury trial has happened, there’s been a lot of weight put on that, and they sat through that. It’s getting picked at and picked at.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So even once that trial is over, now, again, we’re facing the appeal process. How long are they actually going to be in jail? The early release programs that keep happening. We’re faced with all of those, the parole board hearings, all of these things. That scab keeps getting picked.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So even once that trial is over, now, again, we’re facing the appeal process. How long are they actually going to be in jail? The early release programs that keep happening. We’re faced with all of those, the parole board hearings, all of these things. That scab keeps getting picked.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So there’s no true healing. There’s no true closure for any of these families because it keeps getting picked at. Until that person is no longer here, that scab is going to continuously be picked at, whether they’re in jail, whether they reform, whatever the case may be, they’re still here.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So there’s no true healing. There’s no true closure for any of these families because it keeps getting picked at. Until that person is no longer here, that scab is going to continuously be picked at, whether they’re in jail, whether they reform, whatever the case may be, they’re still here.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If that person is indeed the person who did that act, it’s never going to make it okay. They’ll never actually have any closure or anything like that. And that’s the hard part that people don’t understand. You know, they say, “It’s been 20 years. Why haven’t you moved on?” It’s been 30 years. How are you still grieving?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If that person is indeed the person who did that act, it’s never going to make it okay. They’ll never actually have any closure or anything like that. And that’s the hard part that people don’t understand. You know, they say, “It’s been 20 years. Why haven’t you moved on?” It’s been 30 years. How are you still grieving?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s because our scab is continuously being picked at. It’s not like being in a car accident or having cancer, where there are still so many questions that are answered. And then there’s, again, that person’s still here, so there’s never any finality for us.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s because our scab is continuously being picked at. It’s not like being in a car accident or having cancer, where there are still so many questions that are answered. And then there’s, again, that person’s still here, so there’s never any finality for us.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels. Thank you so much for talking with us as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels. Thank you so much for talking with us as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We also have listeners weighing in. Listener Carolyn in Redwood City writes, “Claiming that life without the possibility of parole is an adequate substitute is wrong. There are many vicious murderers who had their death sentences changed to life who’ve been released from prison. Ted Bundy couldn’t victimize any more women because he was executed, and we were all saved from repeated board appearances and repeated court appeals.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We also have listeners weighing in. Listener Carolyn in Redwood City writes, “Claiming that life without the possibility of parole is an adequate substitute is wrong. There are many vicious murderers who had their death sentences changed to life who’ve been released from prison. Ted Bundy couldn’t victimize any more women because he was executed, and we were all saved from repeated board appearances and repeated court appeals.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Another listener, Moira, writes, “Killing people is wrong. I deeply support Newsom in commuting all the death sentences. A caller compared this to the January 6th pardon. No, these people got a pardon and were able to leave jail. Those on death row would still serve their life sentences. One innocent person killed by our society is too many. We should not have the state in the business of killing ever. People are imperfect. The system is imperfect. Death is final and cannot be reversed.”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Another listener, Moira, writes, “Killing people is wrong. I deeply support Newsom in commuting all the death sentences. A caller compared this to the January 6th pardon. No, these people got a pardon and were able to leave jail. Those on death row would still serve their life sentences. One innocent person killed by our society is too many. We should not have the state in the business of killing ever. People are imperfect. The system is imperfect. Death is final and cannot be reversed.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Maurice, where are Californians when it comes to the death penalty? Has there been recent polling on this?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Maurice, where are Californians when it comes to the death penalty? Has there been recent polling on this?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, not that recent. About 10 years ago, Californians had an opportunity to abolish the death penalty, and they chose not to. This was Prop 62, and it was defeated 53 to 46.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, not that recent. About 10 years ago, Californians had an opportunity to abolish the death penalty, and they chose not to. This was Prop 62, and it was defeated 53 to 46.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But then, three years later, in 2019, there was a poll, and 41% of Californians said they preferred the death penalty, while 48% said they preferred life in prison. Obviously, those numbers don’t add up to 100, and 2019 was — what is that, seven years ago? So it really is hard to know what Californians would say today if given another chance to consider the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But then, three years later, in 2019, there was a poll, and 41% of Californians said they preferred the death penalty, while 48% said they preferred life in prison. Obviously, those numbers don’t add up to 100, and 2019 was — what is that, seven years ago? So it really is hard to know what Californians would say today if given another chance to consider the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we definitely appreciate listeners telling us what you would say today, at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we definitely appreciate listeners telling us what you would say today, at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Also tell us if you think Governor Newsom will do it, based on the way that he’s been behaving, and whether or not you would support commuting the sentences of all of California’s death row population: 563 prisoners in total, 18 of whom are women.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Also tell us if you think Governor Newsom will do it, based on the way that he’s been behaving, and whether or not you would support commuting the sentences of all of California’s death row population: 563 prisoners in total, 18 of whom are women.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases? And have recent news events affected the way you think about capital punishment or attitudes toward it in America? We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us. I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases? And have recent news events affected the way you think about capital punishment or attitudes toward it in America? We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us. I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Governor Gavin Newsom is considering commuting all 563 death row sentences in California. And here he is grappling with the issue on his podcast recently with Bryan Stevenson.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Governor Gavin Newsom is considering commuting all 563 death row sentences in California. And here he is grappling with the issue on his podcast recently with Bryan Stevenson.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> What do you say? And I’m getting all those people in my ear: “Don’t do it, don’t do it. Politics.” That’s the best I can do is the politics. But also the victims. What do I say?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> What do you say? And I’m getting all those people in my ear: “Don’t do it, don’t do it. Politics.” That’s the best I can do is the politics. But also the victims. What do I say?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>When I did the moratorium, I met with victims. And I’ll never forget, they didn’t know why they were meeting me. And I will never forget one well-known father, a wonderful man. I’ll never forget. It still stings me today. He got up, said how disgusted he was with me, and walked out. And he said much more than that. And just, what do I say to the victims?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>When I did the moratorium, I met with victims. And I’ll never forget, they didn’t know why they were meeting me. And I will never forget one well-known father, a wonderful man. I’ll never forget. It still stings me today. He got up, said how disgusted he was with me, and walked out. And he said much more than that. And just, what do I say to the victims?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786, on our social channels at KQED Forum, and at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786, on our social channels at KQED Forum, and at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Violet in Monterey is with us. Violet, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Violet in Monterey is with us. Violet, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Violet:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Violet, and my daughter was murdered in October of 2021. And the part when it comes to the death penalty reminds me of what we say when we pledge allegiance to the flag: “Justice for all.” That should include the victims. That should include the ones that were murdered. That should include the ones who are suffering, left behind.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Violet:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Violet, and my daughter was murdered in October of 2021. And the part when it comes to the death penalty reminds me of what we say when we pledge allegiance to the flag: “Justice for all.” That should include the victims. That should include the ones that were murdered. That should include the ones who are suffering, left behind.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the fact that some of these commentators, some of these people who make careers out of supporting getting people off the death penalty, is absolutely sickening. They’re not taking into consideration the suffering that they claim the prisoners would get. They’re not taking into consideration the families. They’re not taking into consideration their children.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And the fact that some of these commentators, some of these people who make careers out of supporting getting people off the death penalty, is absolutely sickening. They’re not taking into consideration the suffering that they claim the prisoners would get. They’re not taking into consideration the families. They’re not taking into consideration their children.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I have an 11-year-old daughter who refused to go to school because she wanted to come with me on October 1st to the Capitol to advocate for herself and her rights when she lost her sister, so that she does not have to face the person who killed her sister again.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I have an 11-year-old daughter who refused to go to school because she wanted to come with me on October 1st to the Capitol to advocate for herself and her rights when she lost her sister, so that she does not have to face the person who killed her sister again.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And these are the problems that people are not seeing. They’re not seeing our pain. There’s no numbers supporting victims’ families. All they see are the numbers of the prisoners. I mean, the fact that there’s empathy for these prisoners, that there is empathy and there’s talk about the torture that they go through, being euthanized, being shot. They’re not taking into consideration the torture —\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And these are the problems that people are not seeing. They’re not seeing our pain. There’s no numbers supporting victims’ families. All they see are the numbers of the prisoners. I mean, the fact that there’s empathy for these prisoners, that there is empathy and there’s talk about the torture that they go through, being euthanized, being shot. They’re not taking into consideration the torture —\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Violet, I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter, and I really appreciate your call. Let me go next to caller Curtis in Richmond, who’s on the line with us. Curtis, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Violet, I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter, and I really appreciate your call. Let me go next to caller Curtis in Richmond, who’s on the line with us. Curtis, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes. I definitely empathize with victims. There’s no question about it. But when you have a judicial system that is arbitrarily biased, racially motivated, the numbers are three to one if the victim is white and the perpetrator is Black, three to five to one. They’re automatically going to, if there’s any inkling of a special circumstance, make one up, add one, and it’s just lopsided.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes. I definitely empathize with victims. There’s no question about it. But when you have a judicial system that is arbitrarily biased, racially motivated, the numbers are three to one if the victim is white and the perpetrator is Black, three to five to one. They’re automatically going to, if there’s any inkling of a special circumstance, make one up, add one, and it’s just lopsided.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In my particular case, the jury was rigged, period. And they do this in California regularly. You know, the DAs have their regular conferences, yearly conferences, and they get together and say, “Hey, this is where you get a conviction.” You know, you just leave Blacks, minorities, and Jews off of juries because they empathize with anybody that, at the time I was with the trial, anybody that may get gassed. Understandable why Jewish Americans feel this way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In my particular case, the jury was rigged, period. And they do this in California regularly. You know, the DAs have their regular conferences, yearly conferences, and they get together and say, “Hey, this is where you get a conviction.” You know, you just leave Blacks, minorities, and Jews off of juries because they empathize with anybody that, at the time I was with the trial, anybody that may get gassed. Understandable why Jewish Americans feel this way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Curtis, am I right that you told our screener that you were on death row?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Curtis, am I right that you told our screener that you were on death row?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes. I came from jeopardy. Yes, in my case, nearly 40 years. My conviction was vacated because my jury had just been rigged. It was plain and simple, and it took nearly 30-plus years to go before a tribunal that would see what actually happened.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes. I came from jeopardy. Yes, in my case, nearly 40 years. My conviction was vacated because my jury had just been rigged. It was plain and simple, and it took nearly 30-plus years to go before a tribunal that would see what actually happened.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I went to the state Supreme Court. They had this mantra that, hey, if — what do they call it? I had a word for it. At any rate, it meant, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty or not. The jury finds you guilty, so you’re guilty. It’s just that simple.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I went to the state Supreme Court. They had this mantra that, hey, if — what do they call it? I had a word for it. At any rate, it meant, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty or not. The jury finds you guilty, so you’re guilty. It’s just that simple.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It was a saying for it, they coined the phrase throughout the U.S. But believe me, all victims do have the right to be heard, do have a right for retribution. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But there’s just so much injustice within the justice system.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It was a saying for it, they coined the phrase throughout the U.S. But believe me, all victims do have the right to be heard, do have a right for retribution. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But there’s just so much injustice within the justice system.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Curtis, I can’t thank you enough as well for calling. All of these people with direct and profound experiences, I really do appreciate it a lot.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Curtis, I can’t thank you enough as well for calling. All of these people with direct and profound experiences, I really do appreciate it a lot.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Maurice, based on what Curtis is saying, what do we know about the number of people on death row who’ve been wrongly convicted?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Maurice, based on what Curtis is saying, what do we know about the number of people on death row who’ve been wrongly convicted?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Frankly, we don’t know that number for California. And part of it is that California’s court system has been so clogged with these cases, in the ways that we described earlier in this hour, because there is such underfunding for defense lawyers.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Frankly, we don’t know that number for California. And part of it is that California’s court system has been so clogged with these cases, in the ways that we described earlier in this hour, because there is such underfunding for defense lawyers.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I don’t certainly feel confident saying what number of innocent people have been exonerated — or, I’m sorry, are innocent. But that said, the national picture is that about 2% of all people sentenced to death since the early 1970s have been exonerated, basically by the courts finding them innocent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I don’t certainly feel confident saying what number of innocent people have been exonerated — or, I’m sorry, are innocent. But that said, the national picture is that about 2% of all people sentenced to death since the early 1970s have been exonerated, basically by the courts finding them innocent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Again, in California, it’s about half that number proportionally, about 1%. But to me, that’s less a function of California having fewer innocent people on death row and more a function of the courts kind of struggling to make their way through all these cases.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Again, in California, it’s about half that number proportionally, about 1%. But to me, that’s less a function of California having fewer innocent people on death row and more a function of the courts kind of struggling to make their way through all these cases.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Jerome in Alameda writes, “The fact that such a judgment is invariably made by human beings, and human beings are capable of error, is the real deal breaker for my condoning the death penalty. Think of all the prisoners who’ve been discovered to be innocent via DNA tests. Putting someone to death is the ultimate irreversible decision. I can’t support it.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Jerome in Alameda writes, “The fact that such a judgment is invariably made by human beings, and human beings are capable of error, is the real deal breaker for my condoning the death penalty. Think of all the prisoners who’ve been discovered to be innocent via DNA tests. Putting someone to death is the ultimate irreversible decision. I can’t support it.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Listener Chris asks, “Years ago, I read about how much it cost to jail a prisoner for life versus death row with appeals, et cetera. Are there current statistics on this?”\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Listener Chris asks, “Years ago, I read about how much it cost to jail a prisoner for life versus death row with appeals, et cetera. Are there current statistics on this?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>What can you tell us, Maurice, about how much it costs? You know, is it less expensive to execute people or for them to live out their lives in prison?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>What can you tell us, Maurice, about how much it costs? You know, is it less expensive to execute people or for them to live out their lives in prison?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, it’s actually much more expensive to seek the death penalty against someone. This is kind of a hidden element, I think, in the story of the death penalty, but it can cost millions and millions of dollars in every case.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, it’s actually much more expensive to seek the death penalty against someone. This is kind of a hidden element, I think, in the story of the death penalty, but it can cost millions and millions of dollars in every case.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I saw one analysis from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which represents people on death row in California, saying that it would cost more than half a billion dollars to resolve all of the death penalty cases in California.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I saw one analysis from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which represents people on death row in California, saying that it would cost more than half a billion dollars to resolve all of the death penalty cases in California.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that’s because, in order to really weed out those people who may be innocent or whose constitutional rights were strongly violated through, let’s say, racism in jury selection or a defense lawyer who really didn’t do their job at trial, in order to weed out all those cases, it takes a lot of back-and-forth between prosecutors and defense lawyers on appeal. And lawyers cost money. Over the course of years, those costs really balloon and far outstrip what it would cost to house someone in prison for the rest of their lives.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And that’s because, in order to really weed out those people who may be innocent or whose constitutional rights were strongly violated through, let’s say, racism in jury selection or a defense lawyer who really didn’t do their job at trial, in order to weed out all those cases, it takes a lot of back-and-forth between prosecutors and defense lawyers on appeal. And lawyers cost money. Over the course of years, those costs really balloon and far outstrip what it would cost to house someone in prison for the rest of their lives.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and you note that California has spent some $6 billion on a death penalty system since ’78 that has executed 13 people.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and you note that California has spent some $6 billion on a death penalty system since ’78 that has executed 13 people.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Natasha suggested, also, that the botched execution attempts of Christa Pike are reflective of broader issues with that. Is she right that California has had botched executions? And has the state changed the system since?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Natasha suggested, also, that the botched execution attempts of Christa Pike are reflective of broader issues with that. Is she right that California has had botched executions? And has the state changed the system since?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It is my understanding that there were botched executions that were litigated over in the ’90s in California. And obviously, because Newsom has, and governors before him have, stopped carrying out executions, it’s impossible to just sort of go right back to how things were done in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It is my understanding that there were botched executions that were litigated over in the ’90s in California. And obviously, because Newsom has, and governors before him have, stopped carrying out executions, it’s impossible to just sort of go right back to how things were done in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>California would have to start from scratch in carrying out executions, and it would be subject to all of the difficulties that we’ve seen state after state have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>California would have to start from scratch in carrying out executions, and it would be subject to all of the difficulties that we’ve seen state after state have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some states have decided to carry out lethal injections, where you have problems of people like Christa Pike surviving those execution attempts, or other people sort of screaming and groaning from the gurney.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Some states have decided to carry out lethal injections, where you have problems of people like Christa Pike surviving those execution attempts, or other people sort of screaming and groaning from the gurney.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then you have other states that have attempted executions that have a lower likelihood of being botched, like firing squads, but then, of course, bring with them a whole host of other issues in terms of just the cultural squeamishness about the grisly realities of death.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then you have other states that have attempted executions that have a lower likelihood of being botched, like firing squads, but then, of course, bring with them a whole host of other issues in terms of just the cultural squeamishness about the grisly realities of death.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andrea in Point Richmond. Andrea, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andrea in Point Richmond. Andrea, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea:\u003c/strong> Yes. Thank you. As I told the screener, my husband was murdered 14 and a half years ago on the driveway of our Berkeley home. I witnessed part of this.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea:\u003c/strong> Yes. Thank you. As I told the screener, my husband was murdered 14 and a half years ago on the driveway of our Berkeley home. I witnessed part of this.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The perpetrator was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic who was apprehended within an hour. He’s now serving 35 years in Napa State. My life has been destroyed, shattered by this young man, but I cannot imagine wanting to witness his death. It will not bring anyone back or stop him from murdering someone else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The perpetrator was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic who was apprehended within an hour. He’s now serving 35 years in Napa State. My life has been destroyed, shattered by this young man, but I cannot imagine wanting to witness his death. It will not bring anyone back or stop him from murdering someone else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Our legal system, our mental health care system, our society in general, our racial and economic inequality, I believe, are responsible. No one should be executed. Because they killed, we kill, and that doesn’t make sense. It makes us killers as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Our legal system, our mental health care system, our society in general, our racial and economic inequality, I believe, are responsible. No one should be executed. Because they killed, we kill, and that doesn’t make sense. It makes us killers as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Andrea, I’m very sorry to learn about your husband, and I really appreciate you coming on to share your story as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Andrea, I’m very sorry to learn about your husband, and I really appreciate you coming on to share your story as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There are definitely very varied views in the victim community, Maurice, as I’m sure you’ve encountered as well, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There are definitely very varied views in the victim community, Maurice, as I’m sure you’ve encountered as well, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. We’ve already actually seen some victims in the Nidal Hasan case, the potential live-streamed execution, saying that they abhor that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. We’ve already actually seen some victims in the Nidal Hasan case, the potential live-streamed execution, saying that they abhor that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen a lot of people who want a death sentence and, over the course of decades, feel like that death sentence has really kind of been a lie from society to them, right? They were promised this outcome, and 10, 20, 30 years go by, and society can’t deliver it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen a lot of people who want a death sentence and, over the course of decades, feel like that death sentence has really kind of been a lie from society to them, right? They were promised this outcome, and 10, 20, 30 years go by, and society can’t deliver it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And it’s not because people aren’t sympathetic and don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s because we balance that, as a country, against people’s constitutional rights and working through making sure innocent people aren’t executed, making sure these are done legally and don’t really look like extrajudicial killings, right?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And it’s not because people aren’t sympathetic and don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s because we balance that, as a country, against people’s constitutional rights and working through making sure innocent people aren’t executed, making sure these are done legally and don’t really look like extrajudicial killings, right?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It takes a lot of time and money, and we as a society have really not delivered that. So many victim families are coming to be opposed to the death penalty, both on moral and religious grounds and also because they feel like the state is just not capable of it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It takes a lot of time and money, and we as a society have really not delivered that. So many victim families are coming to be opposed to the death penalty, both on moral and religious grounds and also because they feel like the state is just not capable of it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Well, listener Vanessa writes, “My father was murdered when I was a child. His murderers were sentenced to death originally. Then the sentences were reduced to life without parole for one and life with the possibility of parole for another. The one with the possibility of parole was released after 30 years, which was devastating because every other year up until that point, I was in court fighting for justice for my father.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Well, listener Vanessa writes, “My father was murdered when I was a child. His murderers were sentenced to death originally. Then the sentences were reduced to life without parole for one and life with the possibility of parole for another. The one with the possibility of parole was released after 30 years, which was devastating because every other year up until that point, I was in court fighting for justice for my father.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>“I think people don’t understand the pain that you go through, and your guest who described it as a scab that is always picked, that is absolutely spot-on. I will never have relief until these men are dead.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>“I think people don’t understand the pain that you go through, and your guest who described it as a scab that is always picked, that is absolutely spot-on. I will never have relief until these men are dead.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Maurice, how does America compare with other countries in its approach to capital punishment, would you say?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Maurice, how does America compare with other countries in its approach to capital punishment, would you say?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s a great question. So the United States is relatively alone among Western democracies in having the death penalty. The death penalty is, of course, very common in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. But we are really out of step with, let’s say, the Western European countries, where they haven’t had the death penalty in decades — France, England, Germany, what have you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s a great question. So the United States is relatively alone among Western democracies in having the death penalty. The death penalty is, of course, very common in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. But we are really out of step with, let’s say, the Western European countries, where they haven’t had the death penalty in decades — France, England, Germany, what have you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And what you see in those countries is not a large-scale victims’ rights movement to bring it back. You see actually more resources for victims to kind of heal from these crimes and deal with them, as opposed to the kind of promise of the death penalty that is never delivered.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And what you see in those countries is not a large-scale victims’ rights movement to bring it back. You see actually more resources for victims to kind of heal from these crimes and deal with them, as opposed to the kind of promise of the death penalty that is never delivered.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There was actually one study. So I should say that we don’t even have to look that far away to compare the United States. We can just compare states with the death penalty, like California, Texas, and Florida, to the many states here that just don’t have it at all: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There was actually one study. So I should say that we don’t even have to look that far away to compare the United States. We can just compare states with the death penalty, like California, Texas, and Florida, to the many states here that just don’t have it at all: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And there’s been a little bit of academic study of victim families between these states in homicide cases. And it’s found, basically, that when the death penalty is handed out, it can remove or impede the ability of victim families to deal with the case and find healing because, again, like our guest said, the scab is being picked over and over and over by appeals.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And there’s been a little bit of academic study of victim families between these states in homicide cases. And it’s found, basically, that when the death penalty is handed out, it can remove or impede the ability of victim families to deal with the case and find healing because, again, like our guest said, the scab is being picked over and over and over by appeals.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Whereas in states — Minnesota, in one study I’m thinking of — where somebody is sentenced to life without parole, the victim’s family really can believe that the person will never get out of prison and heal in whatever ways they need to.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Whereas in states — Minnesota, in one study I’m thinking of — where somebody is sentenced to life without parole, the victim’s family really can believe that the person will never get out of prison and heal in whatever ways they need to.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s been interesting to see the national polling with regard to the death penalty. I think there was a Gallup poll last year that showed that 52% of Americans support the death penalty as a punishment for murder, but that’s actually significantly down from the mid-’90s, when it was as high as 80%.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s been interesting to see the national polling with regard to the death penalty. I think there was a Gallup poll last year that showed that 52% of Americans support the death penalty as a punishment for murder, but that’s actually significantly down from the mid-’90s, when it was as high as 80%.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That said, though, as you talk about states, there are states that look like they’re moving in that direction. I spoke with Elizabeth Bruenig a while ago about states that are starting to ramp up the number of executions they’re doing. Is that true?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That said, though, as you talk about states, there are states that look like they’re moving in that direction. I spoke with Elizabeth Bruenig a while ago about states that are starting to ramp up the number of executions they’re doing. Is that true?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> I think that is true. So for every Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor who is against the death penalty, you have red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in my state, Texas, who believe in the death penalty and also believe that it’s politically advantageous to them to really try to serve that 52% of Americans who believe in the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> I think that is true. So for every Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor who is against the death penalty, you have red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in my state, Texas, who believe in the death penalty and also believe that it’s politically advantageous to them to really try to serve that 52% of Americans who believe in the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think they’re also taking their cues a little bit from President Trump, who has proven himself the most pro-death-penalty president in maybe not all of American history, but certainly in the last hundred-plus years.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think they’re also taking their cues a little bit from President Trump, who has proven himself the most pro-death-penalty president in maybe not all of American history, but certainly in the last hundred-plus years.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And his open support for the death penalty, I think, is trickling down to state leaders who say, “I want to get the same political value as the president out of this.” And DeSantis, I think, is really the standard-bearer. They are ramping up executions in Florida, which carried out, I think, more than a dozen last year, way up from years prior.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And his open support for the death penalty, I think, is trickling down to state leaders who say, “I want to get the same political value as the president out of this.” And DeSantis, I think, is really the standard-bearer. They are ramping up executions in Florida, which carried out, I think, more than a dozen last year, way up from years prior.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me see if I can squeeze in David quickly in Santa Rosa. David, your question?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me see if I can squeeze in David quickly in Santa Rosa. David, your question?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Yes, so I’m curious to know whether there’s anything other than politics at play here, because I’m generally a Gavin supporter, but this seems like a political move just before the election, since it’s not going to change any future sentences to death row.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Yes, so I’m curious to know whether there’s anything other than politics at play here, because I’m generally a Gavin supporter, but this seems like a political move just before the election, since it’s not going to change any future sentences to death row.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Your thoughts on that, Maurice?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Your thoughts on that, Maurice?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think Newsom would say it’s all he can do, right? That it’s ultimately the California voters who would have to abolish the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think Newsom would say it’s all he can do, right? That it’s ultimately the California voters who would have to abolish the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I also think that it’s pretty typical for governors to do this on their way out of office, regardless of what next office they’re seeking. But certainly Newsom is open to the criticism that he could have done this five, six, seven, eight years ago and is only now doing it, suspiciously close to a presidential run.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I also think that it’s pretty typical for governors to do this on their way out of office, regardless of what next office they’re seeking. But certainly Newsom is open to the criticism that he could have done this five, six, seven, eight years ago and is only now doing it, suspiciously close to a presidential run.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Listen, Lubov wants us to clarify before the show’s over that a commutation and a pardon are two very different things. A commuted sentence only eliminates the execution, but not confinement. A pardon frees people from incarceration and releases them from confinement. Newsom leaves them in prison. Trump lets them out to threaten.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Listen, Lubov wants us to clarify before the show’s over that a commutation and a pardon are two very different things. A commuted sentence only eliminates the execution, but not confinement. A pardon frees people from incarceration and releases them from confinement. Newsom leaves them in prison. Trump lets them out to threaten.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Again, we did clarify that at the very top of the show, but appreciate Lubov wanting us to do that again.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Again, we did clarify that at the very top of the show, but appreciate Lubov wanting us to do that again.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Maurice, really appreciate you coming on to explain all of this to us. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And Maurice, really appreciate you coming on to explain all of this to us. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. My thanks as well to Natasha Minsker, attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, and to Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels, and also to our listeners who called in today with such closeness to this topic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. My thanks as well to Natasha Minsker, attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, and to Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels, and also to our listeners who called in today with such closeness to this topic.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Kayla Mihaljevic produced today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Kayla Mihaljevic produced today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, October 13, 2026 at 10 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Amid the news of Tennessee’s botched execution of Christa Pike and the Pentagon saying it will live-stream its execution of an army psychiatrist convicted of a mass shooting, Gov. Gavin Newsom is said to be considering commuting the sentences of the 563 people currently on death row in California. The state is home to a quarter of all American prisoners awaiting the death penalty, though a moratorium on executions has been in place since 2019. We’ll talk about what factors Newsom is weighing and hear how commuting death penalty sentences could affect Newsom’s national political profile and the broader conversation about capital punishment in the United States. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker,\u003c/strong> facilitator, California Anti Death Penalty Coalition\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah,\u003c/strong> staff writer, The Marshall Project\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen,\u003c/strong> founder, Victim Advocate Angels\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. With 563 prisoners on death row, California has a quarter of the nation’s population sentenced to death. And Governor Gavin Newsom is facing pressure to address this before he leaves office. In 2019, Newsom put a moratorium on executions, in part, he said then, out of concern over wrongful convictions.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I can’t be party to that. I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Now, advocates want him to commute those death sentences as he prepares to step down in January. Here he is on his podcast this month.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> I have to prepare for my own conscience, my rocking chair test. Do I commute the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> For more, I am joined by Maurice Chammah, a writer at The Marshall Project. Welcome, Maurice.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Hi. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what would it mean if Newsom did this? I mean, I imagine it would not mean that suddenly 563 people are released from prison.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, absolutely not. And in fact, all these folks who were previously on death row in California were transferred to the general population some years ago. So they’re effectively living out their lives in prison already, and that’s what they would continue to do if their sentences were commuted. They would all presumably get life sentences without the possibility of parole, but they would no longer be under the threat of execution under a future governor.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So why would Newsom do this now? Why would it make sense for him to do this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, he said that it has to do with his own sense of morality. I mean, he’s about to leave office and leave the governorship, and so it’s sort of his last chance to take this major swing against the death penalty, which is a policy area where he’s been very clear for pretty much his entire time in office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So this would be the chance, basically, to land that blow against the punishment before he leaves. But, of course, there are also the political pros he could maybe get out of it as he prepares to run, as we all kind of imagine he will, for president.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yes, the political pros. I imagine there are also political cons to this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. I mean, the attack ads really write themselves. You can imagine a Republican running against him saying, “Look at all these people whom a jury sentenced to death, whom the people of California wanted to see executed, and Newsom deprived them of that chance.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Could he do this with just a stroke of a pen in California?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> He can’t. He can do it for over a hundred of these people, but California has some quirks in its laws such that the California Supreme Court would actually have to approve all of these commutations, make sure that there’s no conflict of interest, the way that you hear about in Washington with the president. But the folks that I’ve talked to in my reporting suggest that that is likely to happen. So if Newsom goes for it, he can expect the court to hopefully play along.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. And will he, I guess, is the question. You noted sort of his moral convictions on this, or his personal convictions, as he stated them. But what is his history on this issue? What has he done?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, in the last month, he has apparently told some people close to him, according to reporting by \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em>, that he’s explicitly considering doing it. And that didn’t surprise me, because really his whole time in office, he has pushed against the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So right after he came into office, about eight years ago, he declared a moratorium on executions, which meant that people were still on death row and still technically could face execution. But he actually had the execution chamber at San Quentin Prison, outside San Francisco, ripped down, basically. There were these photos of a lethal injection gurney and a chair that had been in a gas chamber literally being hoisted onto trucks and driven away. And the symbolism of that was quite clear.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You also note that he’s expressed concern over the death penalty’s geographic arbitrariness in California. In what ways?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Well, what we mean by that — and I should say this is based on a data analysis that my colleague at The Marshall Project, Jill Castellano, did — is that whether you are sentenced to death if you commit a homicide has less to do with the severity of the homicide itself and more to do with where you committed it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you committed a homicide these days in Riverside County, California, you are, I think, four times more likely to receive a death sentence than in Los Angeles. This reflects years and years of data. Now, which counties are more committed to death sentences shifts over time. It is entirely based on who has been elected in that county to be the district attorney and also whether jurors in those counties agree to sentence people to death.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But the outcome is that whether someone goes to death row is much more a product of geography. Critics of the death penalty tend to say this is arbitrary, that it shouldn’t matter where you live, and that the idea of the death penalty, really, in its foundations, was to have a little bit more clarity, a little more sense of justice around who is sentenced to death and who is not.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah. We want to hear from you, listeners. Do you think Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of California’s death row population? And would you support that or not? What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram at KQED Forum. And you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, Maurice, as Newsom is mulling this over, there are things happening nationally that are really bringing this issue of capital punishment to the forefront of people’s minds. One of them is that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has confirmed that the execution of a former Army psychiatrist who killed 13 people at Fort Hood in 2009 will be carried out by firing squad and live-streamed to the public. Is this reflective of anything broader in the public, or just a reflection of the administration?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, I think the death penalty increasingly, over the last five to 10 years, has kind of come back into the national foreground. Those who remember the 1980s and ’90s will remember that the death penalty was in the national news all the time. There were a lot of prominent cases. George W. Bush was running for president in 2000, and he had overseen lots of executions in Texas. This was central to my own early years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what I see now, basically, is a return to a debate. The death penalty has managed to kind of go quiet, but it’s been there all along. You know, there’s under 40, let’s say, but more than 20 executions most years. And a lot of those executions are done by lethal injection. They’re done sort of behind the scenes, behind the closed doors of prisons in just a handful of states.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so it’s easy for most Americans to kind of ignore the death penalty and really only engage with it when a particularly gruesome crime is reported on in the news or there’s a high-profile case, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now you’re seeing both sides of the political aisle see a certain amount of political value in bringing the death penalty to the foreground again. On the one hand, you have the Trump administration, which really promotes a highly punitive response to crime and a much stronger sense of state control, a sense of spectacle, seeing value in carrying out an execution by firing squad, which is, of course, much bloodier than lethal injection, and doing it live-streamed, as they’re claiming they’re going to do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then even the states that try to keep executions behind closed doors are having trouble because of this growing difficulty carrying out lethal injections. So a couple of weeks ago — it already seems like ancient news now — Christa Pike became one of the first, or the first, person to survive an execution, really raising questions about the efficacy of how we’ve been doing it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and questions, I think, about our nation’s ability to actually carry out executions safely or effectively.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and the humanity of doing so, right? I think for a long time, lethal injections looked like these quiet medical procedures, and so we could pretend that it’s not kind of painful and gruesome to kill someone.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But now that the lethal injections are not working as they had been planned, and there’s a turn back toward methods like gas chambers and firing squads, there’s sort of a sense of the veil coming off of the death penalty, and the country really having to decide and reckon more clearly with: Do we want to kill people, and this is what it looks like?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And can we just step back first? I mean, can you tell me what your reaction was when you heard the announcement about an execution open to the public and live-streamed online?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it struck me as a step into the past, into the deep past. So, of course, live-streaming and the internet are recent phenomena, but it was about a hundred years ago that executions were regularly held in public, and there were stories of tens of thousands of people all going to see someone hang in scenes that really looked very, very close to lynchings, which were, of course, illegal but also carried out in public, and also carried out with the consent, usually, of the local leadership, usually against Black Americans.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And this firing squad is against a Muslim American. So really, my first reaction was, wow, I feel like I’ve stepped into 100 years ago.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Well, it’s certainly drawn a lot of reaction. Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said, “I would expect this” — meaning a live-streamed execution — “from terrorists and dictators, but not here in America. It would give this individual, who deserves no further notoriety, the martyrdom he seeks.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have listeners weighing in. This listener, Douglas on Discord, writes, “From a personal viewpoint, the death penalty has always felt like a political response to a criminal act. It’s often used for political reasons, both to the wider audience and to end the lives of dissidents.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener writes, “Given our history of unequal justice and false convictions, I am 100% against the death penalty.” And that’s from Discord user Steve.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>MJ on Bluesky writes, “Commuting everyone on death row would be equivalent to Trump’s pardoning every January 6th arrestee. Some murders were too heinous to deserve mercy. Commutation should take place on a case-by-case basis, not wholesale.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me ask you this: Given the number, the very large number of people, would it be possible for Newsom and a team to be able to look at each individual case and determine whether or not that someone’s sentence should be commuted?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Technically speaking, absolutely. This is what governors typically do. But practically speaking, there just isn’t time, right? You imagine the depth and complexity of these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m thinking of just one in particular, a man facing a death sentence in California, Kevin Cooper, whose case has been in the news over the last 10 to 20 years. And that is one where there are lots of questions about his guilt. It has been evaluated over and over again by courts, by a commission Newsom appointed, and to this day, there’s still debate around, you know, did they get it right or not?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So you just imagine that kind of debate playing out in more than 500 cases, and Newsom has really run out the clock there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Maurice Chammah about Governor Newsom considering whether to commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California, and we’re hearing your thoughts and reactions to it as well. Maurice Chammah, staff writer at The Marshall Project. We’ll have more with him and you listeners after the break. Stay with us. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Welcome back to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Listeners, we’re talking about whether Governor Gavin Newsom will commute the sentences of the more than 560 prisoners currently on death row in California. He’s been grappling with it publicly as he prepares to leave office.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice Chammah is with us, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, and so are you, our listeners. Join the conversation at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, and Instagram, on our social channels at KQED Forum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Let me go to caller Laura in San Bernardino. Laura, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Laura:\u003c/strong> Hi. Um, yeah, my name is Laura. I am from San Bernardino. I’m actually a wife. My husband is on death row. He has been there for 25 years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So I am absolutely for universal clemency, and not just for my husband, but for everybody. I just want to give a little background. My husband was found guilty, and the judge and the district attorney knew that he had not killed anybody, but they tied him in due to enhancements with the others, the typical defendants. So this happens often, and I don’t think that should be punished by execution, obviously.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And in my county, San Bernardino County, and in Riverside County, we have, like, the highest numbers of Latino and Black men on death row. So there’s a big racial bias right there, right? And we know this is happening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the other thing is, 70% of people on death row don’t even have lawyers, the habeas lawyers. So my husband’s been on death row for 25 years, and we haven’t even had a direct appeal yet to try and rectify this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You know, Laura, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story and connection to this. I really appreciate it. Maurice, it sounds like Laura’s underscoring especially your point earlier about geographic arbitrariness.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> And racial arbitrariness. So another piece of this story is that, in the last few years, a coalition of civil rights groups has mounted a lawsuit basically claiming that the California death penalty system is full of racial disparities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They have gotten these academic studies that show that Black people are up to 8.7 times more likely to be sentenced to death than others convicted on similar charges, and Latino people are 6.2 times more likely.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So in addition to this idea of geographic arbitrariness, there’s also floating around Newsom — and Newsom knows this — an idea that the death penalty in California falls harder on people of color.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we’re going to get some reaction now to this news from two others who are very invested in the outcome of this as well. Let me start with Natasha Minsker, facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition and an attorney. Natasha, thanks so much for joining us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Thank you for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So your group is calling on Newsom to commute before he ends his term. Why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> We are at an inflection point on the death penalty here in this nation. As Maurice noted, a couple of weeks ago, we had this terrible, torturous, failed execution in Tennessee, followed by the announcement, Mina, as you noted, that the federal government intends to carry out a firing squad execution and live-stream this event.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Together, these events have ripped the veneer off the idea that the death penalty in the United States can be carried out in a dignified or humane manner. We have seen through these events the last few weeks the reality that the death penalty is an act of violence, and we cannot end violence by responding with more violence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Here in California, we are living in limbo. We have the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere. We have not carried out an execution in more than 20 years. And let’s be honest, we’re not going to carry out an execution. There’s really no legal or practical way for us to do that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So why do we keep lying and promising victims that we’re going to do something that’s going to bring them healing when we are not going to, and it is not going to help?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What do you mean by there is no legal or practical way to carry them out?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Well, I think the events in Tennessee demonstrated to us that the idea that it is a simple procedure to kill someone through lethal injection is absolutely not true.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’ve had botched executions here in California. We’ve never had someone survive, but we’ve had significantly botched executions where people were tortured to death. And that’s why executions were originally halted 20 years ago. The federal courts found that the way California was carrying out executions amounted to cruel and inhumane treatment and violated the Constitution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s initially why our executions were put on hold. And then Governor Newsom came into office in 2019 and put the moratorium in place.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We have seen state after state have botched executions and try to switch to other execution procedures. This has been going on for decades. Every new execution procedure we attempt has its own problems.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we don’t have a way of carrying out executions properly. Medical professionals refuse to participate in executions for ethical reasons. The companies that control the lethal injection drugs refuse to sell them to states for execution purposes, so the states have to buy these drugs on the gray market or make them themselves.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So we know that there’s no easy way to kill someone, and it’s never going to be a clean or humane process. We really need to stop trying.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You have also noted that timing is of the essence, not only because you have an outgoing governor who is against the death penalty, but also because timing is of the essence for the state Supreme Court. Can you talk about why?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> As Maurice explained, in California, the process is not a simple, one-step process. For example, when Governor Ryan in Illinois commuted all death sentences, there had been a dozen governors who had commuted death sentences in their states. In most of those states, the governors have the power to act unilaterally.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Here in California, there’s a process that involves the Supreme Court, and the governor needs to act in time for the Supreme Court to go through its process and do its due diligence.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Do you think realistically the Supreme Court would have the time to go through two-thirds of the cases on California’s death row?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> If the governor presents this as a universal action, where he’s commuting all death sentences, and the reason he is acting is because of the problems with the death penalty, then yes, absolutely. The presentation of the request for the Supreme Court’s approval of the clemency action is based on one argument, which is that the death penalty is inhumane and unjust and that we should not have anyone under sentence of death in California any longer.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You asked if there would be time for the court to review the cases one by one. The biggest problem here is that, as the caller pointed out, 70% of the people on death row don’t have a lawyer or funding for their legal team to work on their case. So for 70% of the cases, there’s no advocate there to present the case for why that person should be commuted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is one of the most significant disparities we have in the death penalty here in California. We’re living in this limbo.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> What have you estimated, Natasha, is the cost of all of this to Californians in dollars?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Natasha Minsker:\u003c/strong> Great question. And it’s not my estimate. It’s the Legislative Analyst’s Office, which does these official estimates here in California, and they’ve told us that we spend $150 million every year on the death penalty in California, for a system that everyone agrees has failed us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Natasha Minsker is an attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition. I really appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I want to bring into the conversation now Alexa Hansen, founder of the organization Victim Advocate Angels. Alexa, thanks so much for being on. I was very sorry to learn about your sister. Tell us about your organization and your connection to this work.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. So I’m the founder and CEO of Victim Advocate Angels, a nonprofit organization created by survivors for survivors of homicide and other violent crimes. We provide emotional support, courtroom advocacy, guidance through the criminal justice system, and a voice for families who often feel very defeated and forgotten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I founded this organization after my little sister, as you mentioned, who was 28 years old. She was raped, beaten, and then burned alive in 2018, leaving behind her nine-year-old son, whom I adopted.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Through that experience, I saw firsthand just how broken our justice system can be and how little support victims and their families actually receive. Families like mine are left trying to navigate the incredibly complicated system while experiencing the most traumatic experience of their lives that they’re ever going to face.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I realized that the system meant to deliver justice often leaves survivors feeling forgotten and unheard and forced to fight for themselves, which, again, should never be the case. During the hardest and most traumatic times of our lives, we didn’t receive the support and guidance or help that we desperately needed.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I can’t change what my family went through, but I can make sure other families facing the same unimaginable loss don’t have to fight that battle alone. Victims’ voices are the least heard throughout this entire ordeal, and that’s why we do what we do, because victims deserve more than justice in a courtroom. They deserve support, compassion, and someone standing beside them every step of the way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So, Alexa, what was your reaction to the news of the governor considering commutations?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> So it wasn’t necessarily a shock for us. You know, we live in California, and so the laws are ever-changing for us, unfortunately. Again, the victims are always the last voice to be heard.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I believe the death penalty should remain an option for the most extreme and horrific crimes, because for some surviving families, it represents a level of accountability that life without parole simply doesn’t carry in the same way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think for a lot of families that I represent — I’ve worked with hundreds of families — I have not heard one yet say that they would not want to have the death sentence carried out in their cases. Now, we do understand that that’s not always going to be the case. There is a level of things that need to be met to get to that death sentence, so it’s not always even going to be on the table for a lot of these families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So when we heard that that was going to be taken away, it’s kind of like, excuse me? Taking away the ultimate accountability for some of the most egregious crimes that can possibly be there. So it was like a punch to the gut for these families.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, I’ve often heard from people who are also against the death penalty as an option that it is unfair to victims to be in a system where there is so much uncertainty, so much dysfunction with regard to actually being able to carry out these sentences, and that it would be better to know it’s not going to happen than to be in limbo. Is that how you feel?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Um, I don’t necessarily think that that really resonates with families. And the reason for that is that we are forever in limbo until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think for people who have not walked through what we have walked through, they don’t really understand that, because no matter what the sentence is, whether it’s death or life without parole or 25 to life, no matter what, if that person is still alive, we are still faced with appeals. We’re still faced with their sentences getting commuted, et cetera, et cetera. You could go down that line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So it doesn’t matter what that sentence is. But for us, the finality of a death sentence carries a lot more weight and accountability than life without parole and other sentences, where once you commute a death sentence, it then gets dropped down to life without parole or, in certain circumstances, it could be dropped down to time served.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There have even been cases that have gone from a death sentence to, “We’re going to give you 30 to life, but you’ve already done that, so we’re going to go ahead and just let you out.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So for us, the accountability, like I said, comes with showing we’re giving you the max sentence, the most punishable sentence available by law, which is the death sentence. Now, if they can come up with a different sentence that is not the death penalty, that is not life without parole, that has that same severity, then that could be something that victims and their families could sit better with.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when it comes to this, it’s just, like I said, a slap in the face to these victims and these families that have had to sit through all of this time and time again, and will continue to have to do that no matter what the sentence is, until that person is no longer here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa, you’ve talked about how victims are often the least heard. What do you think people don’t understand about what it’s like to be a victim advocate in California, with California’s troubled system?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I think the biggest thing is that there’s a lack of empathy and a lack of people really truly understanding what it’s like to sit in that seat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Almost every family that I’ve worked with has sat in a courtroom over 30 or 40 times. People don’t understand it can take years to even get to a trial. And once you get to that trial, then what? Then you get to the sentencing. And then again, when that sentence happens, then what? Then there’s the appeal process. Then there’s all these things that come with that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What they’re not understanding is that this type of grief is different from any other grief that anyone will ever experience. I consider it to be like a scab that can’t heal because it keeps getting picked at.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s no guarantee for that family. Like I said, if that person is still alive, if they are found guilty, a jury trial has happened, there’s been a lot of weight put on that, and they sat through that. It’s getting picked at and picked at.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So even once that trial is over, now, again, we’re facing the appeal process. How long are they actually going to be in jail? The early release programs that keep happening. We’re faced with all of those, the parole board hearings, all of these things. That scab keeps getting picked.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So there’s no true healing. There’s no true closure for any of these families because it keeps getting picked at. Until that person is no longer here, that scab is going to continuously be picked at, whether they’re in jail, whether they reform, whatever the case may be, they’re still here.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If that person is indeed the person who did that act, it’s never going to make it okay. They’ll never actually have any closure or anything like that. And that’s the hard part that people don’t understand. You know, they say, “It’s been 20 years. Why haven’t you moved on?” It’s been 30 years. How are you still grieving?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s because our scab is continuously being picked at. It’s not like being in a car accident or having cancer, where there are still so many questions that are answered. And then there’s, again, that person’s still here, so there’s never any finality for us.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels. Thank you so much for talking with us as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexa Hansen:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. Thank you so much.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We also have listeners weighing in. Listener Carolyn in Redwood City writes, “Claiming that life without the possibility of parole is an adequate substitute is wrong. There are many vicious murderers who had their death sentences changed to life who’ve been released from prison. Ted Bundy couldn’t victimize any more women because he was executed, and we were all saved from repeated board appearances and repeated court appeals.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Another listener, Moira, writes, “Killing people is wrong. I deeply support Newsom in commuting all the death sentences. A caller compared this to the January 6th pardon. No, these people got a pardon and were able to leave jail. Those on death row would still serve their life sentences. One innocent person killed by our society is too many. We should not have the state in the business of killing ever. People are imperfect. The system is imperfect. Death is final and cannot be reversed.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, where are Californians when it comes to the death penalty? Has there been recent polling on this?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, not that recent. About 10 years ago, Californians had an opportunity to abolish the death penalty, and they chose not to. This was Prop 62, and it was defeated 53 to 46.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But then, three years later, in 2019, there was a poll, and 41% of Californians said they preferred the death penalty, while 48% said they preferred life in prison. Obviously, those numbers don’t add up to 100, and 2019 was — what is that, seven years ago? So it really is hard to know what Californians would say today if given another chance to consider the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, we definitely appreciate listeners telling us what you would say today, at 866-733-6786, at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>, and on our social channels on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Also tell us if you think Governor Newsom will do it, based on the way that he’s been behaving, and whether or not you would support commuting the sentences of all of California’s death row population: 563 prisoners in total, 18 of whom are women.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What questions do you have about the way California handles death penalty cases? And have recent news events affected the way you think about capital punishment or attitudes toward it in America? We’ll have more after the break. Stay with us. I’m Mina Kim. This is \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Mina Kim. Governor Gavin Newsom is considering commuting all 563 death row sentences in California. And here he is grappling with the issue on his podcast recently with Bryan Stevenson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Gavin Newsom:\u003c/strong> What do you say? And I’m getting all those people in my ear: “Don’t do it, don’t do it. Politics.” That’s the best I can do is the politics. But also the victims. What do I say?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>When I did the moratorium, I met with victims. And I’ll never forget, they didn’t know why they were meeting me. And I will never forget one well-known father, a wonderful man. I’ll never forget. It still stings me today. He got up, said how disgusted he was with me, and walked out. And he said much more than that. And just, what do I say to the victims?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You, our listeners, are joining the conversation at 866-733-6786, on our social channels at KQED Forum, and at the email address \u003ca href=\"mailto:forum@kqed.org\">forum@kqed.org\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Violet in Monterey is with us. Violet, go ahead.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Violet:\u003c/strong> Hi, my name is Violet, and my daughter was murdered in October of 2021. And the part when it comes to the death penalty reminds me of what we say when we pledge allegiance to the flag: “Justice for all.” That should include the victims. That should include the ones that were murdered. That should include the ones who are suffering, left behind.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the fact that some of these commentators, some of these people who make careers out of supporting getting people off the death penalty, is absolutely sickening. They’re not taking into consideration the suffering that they claim the prisoners would get. They’re not taking into consideration the families. They’re not taking into consideration their children.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I have an 11-year-old daughter who refused to go to school because she wanted to come with me on October 1st to the Capitol to advocate for herself and her rights when she lost her sister, so that she does not have to face the person who killed her sister again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And these are the problems that people are not seeing. They’re not seeing our pain. There’s no numbers supporting victims’ families. All they see are the numbers of the prisoners. I mean, the fact that there’s empathy for these prisoners, that there is empathy and there’s talk about the torture that they go through, being euthanized, being shot. They’re not taking into consideration the torture —\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Violet, I’m so sorry to hear about your daughter, and I really appreciate your call. Let me go next to caller Curtis in Richmond, who’s on the line with us. Curtis, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes. I definitely empathize with victims. There’s no question about it. But when you have a judicial system that is arbitrarily biased, racially motivated, the numbers are three to one if the victim is white and the perpetrator is Black, three to five to one. They’re automatically going to, if there’s any inkling of a special circumstance, make one up, add one, and it’s just lopsided.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In my particular case, the jury was rigged, period. And they do this in California regularly. You know, the DAs have their regular conferences, yearly conferences, and they get together and say, “Hey, this is where you get a conviction.” You know, you just leave Blacks, minorities, and Jews off of juries because they empathize with anybody that, at the time I was with the trial, anybody that may get gassed. Understandable why Jewish Americans feel this way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Curtis, am I right that you told our screener that you were on death row?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Curtis:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes. I came from jeopardy. Yes, in my case, nearly 40 years. My conviction was vacated because my jury had just been rigged. It was plain and simple, and it took nearly 30-plus years to go before a tribunal that would see what actually happened.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I went to the state Supreme Court. They had this mantra that, hey, if — what do they call it? I had a word for it. At any rate, it meant, you know, it doesn’t matter whether you’re guilty or not. The jury finds you guilty, so you’re guilty. It’s just that simple.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a saying for it, they coined the phrase throughout the U.S. But believe me, all victims do have the right to be heard, do have a right for retribution. I agree with that wholeheartedly. But there’s just so much injustice within the justice system.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, Curtis, I can’t thank you enough as well for calling. All of these people with direct and profound experiences, I really do appreciate it a lot.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, based on what Curtis is saying, what do we know about the number of people on death row who’ve been wrongly convicted?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Frankly, we don’t know that number for California. And part of it is that California’s court system has been so clogged with these cases, in the ways that we described earlier in this hour, because there is such underfunding for defense lawyers.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I don’t certainly feel confident saying what number of innocent people have been exonerated — or, I’m sorry, are innocent. But that said, the national picture is that about 2% of all people sentenced to death since the early 1970s have been exonerated, basically by the courts finding them innocent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, in California, it’s about half that number proportionally, about 1%. But to me, that’s less a function of California having fewer innocent people on death row and more a function of the courts kind of struggling to make their way through all these cases.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Jerome in Alameda writes, “The fact that such a judgment is invariably made by human beings, and human beings are capable of error, is the real deal breaker for my condoning the death penalty. Think of all the prisoners who’ve been discovered to be innocent via DNA tests. Putting someone to death is the ultimate irreversible decision. I can’t support it.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Listener Chris asks, “Years ago, I read about how much it cost to jail a prisoner for life versus death row with appeals, et cetera. Are there current statistics on this?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>What can you tell us, Maurice, about how much it costs? You know, is it less expensive to execute people or for them to live out their lives in prison?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> No, it’s actually much more expensive to seek the death penalty against someone. This is kind of a hidden element, I think, in the story of the death penalty, but it can cost millions and millions of dollars in every case.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I saw one analysis from the Habeas Corpus Resource Center, which represents people on death row in California, saying that it would cost more than half a billion dollars to resolve all of the death penalty cases in California.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s because, in order to really weed out those people who may be innocent or whose constitutional rights were strongly violated through, let’s say, racism in jury selection or a defense lawyer who really didn’t do their job at trial, in order to weed out all those cases, it takes a lot of back-and-forth between prosecutors and defense lawyers on appeal. And lawyers cost money. Over the course of years, those costs really balloon and far outstrip what it would cost to house someone in prison for the rest of their lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, and you note that California has spent some $6 billion on a death penalty system since ’78 that has executed 13 people.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Natasha suggested, also, that the botched execution attempts of Christa Pike are reflective of broader issues with that. Is she right that California has had botched executions? And has the state changed the system since?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It is my understanding that there were botched executions that were litigated over in the ’90s in California. And obviously, because Newsom has, and governors before him have, stopped carrying out executions, it’s impossible to just sort of go right back to how things were done in the 1990s.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>California would have to start from scratch in carrying out executions, and it would be subject to all of the difficulties that we’ve seen state after state have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some states have decided to carry out lethal injections, where you have problems of people like Christa Pike surviving those execution attempts, or other people sort of screaming and groaning from the gurney.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then you have other states that have attempted executions that have a lower likelihood of being botched, like firing squads, but then, of course, bring with them a whole host of other issues in terms of just the cultural squeamishness about the grisly realities of death.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me go to caller Andrea in Point Richmond. Andrea, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Andrea:\u003c/strong> Yes. Thank you. As I told the screener, my husband was murdered 14 and a half years ago on the driveway of our Berkeley home. I witnessed part of this.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The perpetrator was an unmedicated paranoid schizophrenic who was apprehended within an hour. He’s now serving 35 years in Napa State. My life has been destroyed, shattered by this young man, but I cannot imagine wanting to witness his death. It will not bring anyone back or stop him from murdering someone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Our legal system, our mental health care system, our society in general, our racial and economic inequality, I believe, are responsible. No one should be executed. Because they killed, we kill, and that doesn’t make sense. It makes us killers as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Andrea, I’m very sorry to learn about your husband, and I really appreciate you coming on to share your story as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are definitely very varied views in the victim community, Maurice, as I’m sure you’ve encountered as well, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Oh, absolutely. We’ve already actually seen some victims in the Nidal Hasan case, the potential live-streamed execution, saying that they abhor that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But I’ve also seen a lot of people who want a death sentence and, over the course of decades, feel like that death sentence has really kind of been a lie from society to them, right? They were promised this outcome, and 10, 20, 30 years go by, and society can’t deliver it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And it’s not because people aren’t sympathetic and don’t believe in the death penalty. It’s because we balance that, as a country, against people’s constitutional rights and working through making sure innocent people aren’t executed, making sure these are done legally and don’t really look like extrajudicial killings, right?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It takes a lot of time and money, and we as a society have really not delivered that. So many victim families are coming to be opposed to the death penalty, both on moral and religious grounds and also because they feel like the state is just not capable of it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me remind listeners, you’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Well, listener Vanessa writes, “My father was murdered when I was a child. His murderers were sentenced to death originally. Then the sentences were reduced to life without parole for one and life with the possibility of parole for another. The one with the possibility of parole was released after 30 years, which was devastating because every other year up until that point, I was in court fighting for justice for my father.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>“I think people don’t understand the pain that you go through, and your guest who described it as a scab that is always picked, that is absolutely spot-on. I will never have relief until these men are dead.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Maurice, how does America compare with other countries in its approach to capital punishment, would you say?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s a great question. So the United States is relatively alone among Western democracies in having the death penalty. The death penalty is, of course, very common in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan. But we are really out of step with, let’s say, the Western European countries, where they haven’t had the death penalty in decades — France, England, Germany, what have you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what you see in those countries is not a large-scale victims’ rights movement to bring it back. You see actually more resources for victims to kind of heal from these crimes and deal with them, as opposed to the kind of promise of the death penalty that is never delivered.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was actually one study. So I should say that we don’t even have to look that far away to compare the United States. We can just compare states with the death penalty, like California, Texas, and Florida, to the many states here that just don’t have it at all: Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there’s been a little bit of academic study of victim families between these states in homicide cases. And it’s found, basically, that when the death penalty is handed out, it can remove or impede the ability of victim families to deal with the case and find healing because, again, like our guest said, the scab is being picked over and over and over by appeals.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas in states — Minnesota, in one study I’m thinking of — where somebody is sentenced to life without parole, the victim’s family really can believe that the person will never get out of prison and heal in whatever ways they need to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It’s been interesting to see the national polling with regard to the death penalty. I think there was a Gallup poll last year that showed that 52% of Americans support the death penalty as a punishment for murder, but that’s actually significantly down from the mid-’90s, when it was as high as 80%.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That said, though, as you talk about states, there are states that look like they’re moving in that direction. I spoke with Elizabeth Bruenig a while ago about states that are starting to ramp up the number of executions they’re doing. Is that true?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> I think that is true. So for every Gavin Newsom, a Democratic governor who is against the death penalty, you have red-state governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida and Greg Abbott in my state, Texas, who believe in the death penalty and also believe that it’s politically advantageous to them to really try to serve that 52% of Americans who believe in the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think they’re also taking their cues a little bit from President Trump, who has proven himself the most pro-death-penalty president in maybe not all of American history, but certainly in the last hundred-plus years.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And his open support for the death penalty, I think, is trickling down to state leaders who say, “I want to get the same political value as the president out of this.” And DeSantis, I think, is really the standard-bearer. They are ramping up executions in Florida, which carried out, I think, more than a dozen last year, way up from years prior.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Let me see if I can squeeze in David quickly in Santa Rosa. David, your question?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David:\u003c/strong> Yes, so I’m curious to know whether there’s anything other than politics at play here, because I’m generally a Gavin supporter, but this seems like a political move just before the election, since it’s not going to change any future sentences to death row.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Your thoughts on that, Maurice?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I mean, I think Newsom would say it’s all he can do, right? That it’s ultimately the California voters who would have to abolish the death penalty.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I also think that it’s pretty typical for governors to do this on their way out of office, regardless of what next office they’re seeking. But certainly Newsom is open to the criticism that he could have done this five, six, seven, eight years ago and is only now doing it, suspiciously close to a presidential run.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Listen, Lubov wants us to clarify before the show’s over that a commutation and a pardon are two very different things. A commuted sentence only eliminates the execution, but not confinement. A pardon frees people from incarceration and releases them from confinement. Newsom leaves them in prison. Trump lets them out to threaten.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, we did clarify that at the very top of the show, but appreciate Lubov wanting us to do that again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Maurice, really appreciate you coming on to explain all of this to us. Thank you.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Maurice Chammah:\u003c/strong> It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Maurice Chammah is a staff writer at The Marshall Project. My thanks as well to Natasha Minsker, attorney and facilitator of the California Anti-Death Penalty Coalition, and to Alexa Hansen, founder of Victim Advocate Angels, and also to our listeners who called in today with such closeness to this topic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Kayla Mihaljevic produced today’s segment. You’ve been listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Announcer:\u003c/strong> Funds for the production of \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em> are provided by the Jenerosity Family Fund and the members of KQED.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Influencers Are Peddling Peptides, but Is Tanmaxxing Worth the Risk?",
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"headTitle": "Influencers Are Peddling Peptides, but Is Tanmaxxing Worth the Risk? | KQED",
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"content": "\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guests:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ucsfhealth.org/providers/sungat-grewal\">Dr. Sungat Grewal\u003c/a>, double board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.carencampbellmd.com/?srsltid=AU7gw4XTOrftqgnQy6ysplZ8IdAO4P-TLRwup140ITmchvEhXpO36qrR\">Dr. Caren Campbell\u003c/a>, board-certified dermatologist\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/staff/sarah-todd/\">Sarah Todd\u003c/a>, reporter for \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/06/rfk-jr-apparent-contradiction-peptides-vaccines-medical-libertarianism/\">What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/24/fda-peptide-compounding-panel-backs-epitalon-rejects-emideltide/\">FDA advisory panel narrowly rejects compounding of one peptide, backs two others\u003c/a> — Lizzy Lawrence and Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/23/fda-panel-okays-peptides-compound-pharmacies-bpc-157-kpv/\">FDA panel backs compounded BPC-157, KPV peptides in win for RFK Jr.\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/06/rfk-jr-apparent-contradiction-peptides-vaccines-medical-libertarianism/\">What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/a73232620/tanmaxxing-trend-explained-interview-2026/\">Is Tanmaxxing an Addiction? A Dermatologist and Psychologist Explains\u003c/a> — Katie Berohn, \u003cem>ELLE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gq.com/story/inside-the-weird-new-world-of-peptide-tanning\">Inside the Weird New World of Peptide Tanning\u003c/a> — Savannah Sobrevilla, \u003cem>GQ\u003c/em> \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.axios.com/2026/06/29/barbie-drug-peptide-shot-tan\">Melanotan: The “Barbie drug” tanning peptide, explained\u003c/a> — Carly Mallenbaum, \u003cem>Axios\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/live-well/longevity/story/tanning-peptides-melanotan-vyleesi-pt141\">Inside the Viral Tanning Peptide That Accidentally Created Vyleesi’s FDA-Approved Low Sex Drive Drug\u003c/a> — Sara Kitnick, \u003cem>LA Times Studios\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.allure.com/story/fda-peptide-ban-reversal\">The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry\u003c/a> — Kara Nesvig, \u003cem>Allure\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.skincancer.org/press/the-skin-cancer-foundation-issues-warning-regarding-melanotan-ii/\">The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II\u003c/a> — Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, \u003cem>Skin Cancer Foundation\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Host, Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Hello! Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show! And tell your friends! Post about it! On Instagram, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Can I be honest? I am pretty vain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I take my skincare routine very seriously: Prescription-strength azelaic acid in the morning, and prescription-strength tretinoin at night. Lots of sunscreen and moisturizer and barrier creams in between, and every other night, I skip the tretinoin and spend three minutes under a red light mask. If I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll throw in a Korean gel mask and a jade roller. Do those do anything? I honestly can’t tell. But it feels nice! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t call myself a looksmaxxer, but I do spend a good amount of time on these beautification rituals. And as a woman who exists on the internet, I feel like my For You Page is constantly lobbing beauty trends at me, and like I’m always trying to avoid getting sucked into yet another fad. I have tried so many serums and face masks and supplements before finally settling into what I consider to be a pretty pared down beauty regiment. But the one thing I haven’t tried yet is a peptide. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It seems like everyone is on them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clips of influencers raving about peptides]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Speaker 1: This is, in my opinion, the most slept-on peptide on the market today. There’s two main benefits that have been life-changing for me . \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Speaker 2: You’re telling me there’s a botox alternative that’s easier on your wallet? Whoa! Let’s talk about Snap-8, the peptide that targets wrinkles without the needles. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Peptides are chemical signals that your body naturally makes to regulate all kinds of bodily functions, like digestion and recovery. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> So peptides are like text messages. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Sungat Grewal is a double board certified dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon. She’s the co-director of Laser Surgery and Cosmetic Dermatology at UCSF. And she’s been keeping an eye on the synthetic peptides people are taking to boost their bodies’ natural processes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>They’re not necessarily good or bad inherently, but it depends on who’s sending the message, what the message is, and who receives it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I’m not just talking about GLP-1s. Peptide stacking is really in right now. Retatrutide and Tesamorelin for weight loss, Ipamorelin for muscle growth, the “Wolverine Stack” of BPC-157 and TB-500 to boost healing after a gym sesh. If you throw in the copper peptide GHK-Cu, you’ve got a “Glow Stack,” the hot girl combo optimized for anti-aging collagen production. It’s a lot, right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some of these compounds are not cleared by the FDA, so the way people get a hold of them is a legal hit or miss. But peptides remain incredibly popular despite the gray market. And there’s one that’s \u003cem>really\u003c/em> blown up this summer: Melanotan II. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cbr>[Clip from Youtube User @SpaandTell]\u003cbr>Kylie says hi Kim your tan looks great. Thank you! I’ve been using the melanotan II peptide over the last month, and I’ve been going outside, and it’s been working like a charm, so excited. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>MT-2 for short — also known as “The Barbie peptide” or “the vacation drug.” It makes you tan, skinny, and horny (it’s a libido booster) — with no harmful UV exposure required. But Dr. Grewal says it also comes with legitimately concerning risks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>It’s pretty scary and it’s very sad, you know, when, um, people are chasing aesthetic goals and are being misdirected and exposing themselves to unknown risks or known risks, not only in the moment, but for future and forever forward, right? Some of these impacts have long-lasting effects.\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Today, we’re diving into the world of peptides: the dangers of tanmaxxing despite the influencer promotion, and RFK Jr’s crusade to reverse the peptide bans in the U.S. What does the peptide craze say about Americans’ relationship with health and risk? Let’s jump in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re starting with a new tab. What is melanotan?\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m part of a few weddings this year, and I wanted to look a little more sunkissed. But I’m inside like, all the time, and I have no interest in tanning beds because I don’t want to wrinkle. Again, vain! Sorry! So I started looking into self tanners. I looked up a few beauty influencers who reviewed tanning lotions … and that’s when my feed was inundated with people\u003cs> \u003c/s>recommending this miracle drug: MT-2.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @toxdaddy]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oh man, I’m super excited. I just got Melanotan 2 this morning and I’m really excited to try it.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @carlysnaxwell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I started taking MT2. I’m tan. I haven’t gone bed tanning in a while… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @itsdevync]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I’m now at two months of taking it. I’m obsessed. My tan is only getting better … \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Youtube user@SpaandTell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I am crazy impressed by this – by this, I mean, the Melanotan 2 peptide.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> And it’s not just the tan that makes it so appealing. Dr. Grewal says Melanotan II also has some specific side effects…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong> It’s marketed as the Barbie peptide because tanning might be the effect that you’re shopping for, but it’s not the only effect and some of them can translate into, um, increased libido or decreased appetite. \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>How does it do all that? Well, let’s talk about how peptides work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, peptides are the chemical signals for your body to perform certain functions. Your body has tons of receptors, and peptides can target specific ones, almost like sending a text to a specific phone number. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>You can think about two kinds, like natural versus synthetic. So our body makes peptides naturally. Some common examples would be like insulin or GLP-1. And synthetically, you know, we can create, uh, synthetic peptides to mimic those that are made naturally in the body to get a specific effect\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Melanotan I and Melanotan II are synthetic peptides that…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> …mimic a naturally occurring peptide in the body called alpha-MSH or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. And so there are receptors that are in numerous places in the body called melanocortin receptors that can respond to this signal or chain of events.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are five types of melanocortin receptors in the body. The first regulates hair and skin pigmentation, and it’s what triggers tans. And it’s also really important to understand what getting tan \u003cem>really\u003c/em> means for your body. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> It’s literally your nucleus and your cell saying, “Oh my God, save my DNA.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung : \u003c/strong>This is Dr. Caren Campbell, a board certified dermatologist who practices medical, surgical, and cosmetic dermatology in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s putting an umbrella over it. Your cell is saying, like, “Help me. Protect my DNA so I don’t mutate and cause cancer.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That little umbrella is called eumelanin, and it produces brown and black pigments in the body. It’s what causes darker colors in skin, eyes, and hair. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Melanotan I sends a text to that first melanocortin receptor, which tells your cells to pop their little umbrellas up to protect their DNA … which is what triggers a tan, without actual UV exposure. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Melanotan I is actually FDA-approved for a very, very specific, very rare skin condition that causes extreme sensitivity to light.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Erythropoietic protoporphyria\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Or EPP for short. It’s actually so rare that Dr. Grewal has never seen the condition in her medical career. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Its incidence has been estimated at two to five cases per million people. You would know if you had this because you have symptoms when you’re a young child. Children have very severe, painful, uh, photosensitivity after exposure to sunlight or even visible light, which can come from even indoor lights, laptop screens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>EPP causes extreme swelling, burning, and pain when exposed to certain light. So the FDA approved a prescription implant of Melanotan I for people with EPP, which stimulates their bodies to produce eumelanin. These little cell umbrellas absorb that light before it can damage their skin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, Melanotan II, which is the hot one right now, sends a group text to that first receptor. But remember, there are \u003cem>5\u003c/em> melanocortin receptors in the body. So it’s also sending that text to receptors three, four, and five as well. And these aren’t just in the skin. They’re all over the body, including in the central nervous system, which is why MT-2 can cause appetite suppression and boost libido. And because these receptors are all over the body, MT-2 can also cause unpredictable systemic changes … with unpleasant and even dangerous symptoms. Here’s Dr. Campbell again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> In men, that can lead to potentially what’s called priapism, which is where you have an erection that, you know, doesn’t go away, and there was a, a case report of someone needing to have that surgically drained in the emergency room.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, it, it also can cause nausea and vomiting. It’s also stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, which you can think about that like your fight or flight. So anything you needed to, like, run away from a predator, it does. So it dilates your pupils so you can see better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It causes, you know, increased heart rate so you can get running. It causes hypertension ’cause it constricts your blood vessels. Um, so that fight or flight response can be elevated and you can get what’s called rhabdomyolysis, which is where you get muscle breakdown, and it can be very dangerous, um, life-threatening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So those side effects are pretty rough. But Dr. Grewal says there’s also this main one … \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> We have seen reports of patients like breaking out in moles, for example, and breaking out in atypical or what we call funky looking moles, right? \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @\u003c/em>cablequeencourt]\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Let’s count how many moles we have on our face since taking MT2. So this one’s new. This is new …Yeah, um, and that’s not including what’s going on on my body….\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Moles are clusters of melanocytes, the skin cells that make pigment. Most are totally benign. But like Dr. Grewal said, Melanotan moles are … funky.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Because it’s stimulating the same pathway that can eventually lead to melanoma. And again, we don’t have causation yet, but we do not have long-term data. And so why would you subject yourself to that risk when you can use other methods to tan the skin safely without breaking out in moles? And the moles are not just darker, the moles, like, look concerning. They, they often have atypical features.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Those little cell umbrellas can only protect so much. And if you’re exposing them to harmful UV rays over and over again, they can mutate and become cancerous. One of the ways dermatologists evaluate moles for cancer is by checking if they’ve evolved — if they’re getting bigger, darker, and wonkier. This isn’t as much of a concern for patients who are prescribed MT-1 for EPP, since they’re generally not engaging in risky behavior that causes additional UV damage — like intentionally tanning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when it comes to the tanmaxxers … \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @sooshbrah]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>This is 2021, 2022, I was doing 500 micrograms of Melanotan and I was jumping in the tanning bed for 15 minutes. I literally changed race in like three sessions. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> I can’t say for certain that, you know, melanotan causes melanoma. But we do know based on what are, again, called case [00:23:00] reports, where we don’t have large numbers, but we have good evidence of people who’ve started melanotan and then as soon as two weeks noticed almost immediate darkening and irregularity of their moles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Campbell said that in this case report, one of the patients had used tanning beds and melanotan at the same time, and had five new moles biopsied. All five were cancerous. And there aren’t many clinical studies on the effects of long-term melanotan use, in a broad population of users who don’t have EPP. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Melanotan II was actually developed in the late 80s to early 90s, and in the early 2000s, researchers began testing it to treat sexual dysfunction. But Dr. Grewal says there’s a reason it never made it to market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Usually when a peptide or any product is on its way to becoming a drug, it goes through rigorous testing, and pharmaceuticals would love to sell it because they’re gonna profit immensely. So usually when it drops off the track, it’s because either it’s not providing the results that they’re hoping for or the safety is not promising\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Despite that, both MT-1 and MT-2 are still wildly popular on the gray market, as both a nasal spray and an injectable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>Unfortunately I am not surprised because, you know, the story of wanting tanner skin is a story we’ve heard before. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, you know, first it was tanning beds, now we know how dangerous those are in terms of increasing melanoma risk even with one use, you know, before the age of 30. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And as is the case with many unregulated, technically illegal peptides, vendors can sell them around the US thanks to a handy loophole: the “Research Use Only” pathway. Essentially saying, this product legally isn’t for human consumption, with no quality guarantee or regulatory oversight. But there’s really nothing that can stop buyers from using it on themselves. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> You have to remember that when it’s not FDA regulated, you really have no idea what’s in the bottle. What you’re getting in your bottle is like a crapshoot. So, you know, and historically we’ve seen issues with, um, sterility of products, contamination with unregulated products, and the concentration and the purity is also unknown.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that alone is like a huge reason why I would never advise anyone to take a non FDA-approved medication, whether or not it’s a peptide, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So knowing all of these risks, both healthwise and lookswise, why are people bent on taking Melanotan? And this is just one of many unregulated, very popular peptides! What’s driving the peptide boom in spite of medical experts’ warnings?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That is a whole new tab… for after this quick break. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you! To become a member and support the show, go to donate dot kqed dot org slash podcasts. Ok, after the break: we’re diving into medical libertarianism. Stick around.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome back! Time to open a new tab. Peptides and medical libertarianism. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>RFK Jr, the vaccine denier and guy in charge of our entire country’s health department, is also a pep pusher. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Yeah I mean I’m a big fan of peptides. I’ve used them myself. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was RFK Jr on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, where he spoke about the proliferation of unregulated peptides. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>A black market came out and the black market is run by companies that say they’re making the peptides for animal use or research purposes. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So basically when you buy peptides online you don’t have any guarantees about the safety and the quality of what you’re buying. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That’s Sarah Todd, a reporter at STAT News. She covers the business of health, which means she’s also been following the gray market peptide industry. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> New York Magazine had a bunch of peptides tested and found that about a third of them were mislabeled or under or overdosed or contaminated by bacteria. So those are all some of the potential health risks that you run into when you’re getting them off the gray and black market.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that hasn’t diminished people’s appetite for peptides. Sarah says this all falls in line with a concept called “medical libertarianism” — the idea that we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies regardless of what the government or medical establishment says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that extends to taking drugs like peptides that don’t have a lot of data behind them when it comes to their impacts on humans, either their benefits or their potential risks. But the idea with medical libertarianism is, like, that’s my choice, and if I’m willing to put my body on the line for the hopeful benefits that I can get, then I should be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s a very American mindset. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> It really goes along with this sort of all-American idea that we can control our own destinies and make our own choices, right? And a sort of suspicion about the government’s role in overseeing people’s lives, a desire to, you know, ward off the idea of the nanny state and the idea that people should be able to chase their own pursuit of happiness and the American dream.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if that includes self-optimizing your body and your health, then that’s something that people should be allowed to do, would be the argument that these people are making.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Americans have always had this attitude about health. In the 1970s, there was a huge backlash from the public when the government tried to regulate vitamin and supplement industries…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People wrote in and said, “Don’t take my vitamins away, “ and we wound up with the situation that we have today, where they’re still many people would argue, uh, largely unregulated or very under-regulated. I think that people really wanted to hold on to these kinds of products. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There have been ebbs and flows to medical libertarianism throughout modern American history. And then the COVID 19 pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People started self-experimenting with all kinds of things, like everything from ivermectin, which you m- may remember, to some sort of herbal medicines.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> On one hand, you had a lot of interest in sort of like experimentation with drugs to see what you could do to improve your own health, protect yourself potentially from COVID in various ways. We also saw a big boom in the rise of social media health influencers, health and wellness influencers during this time as well, and I think that has played a huge role.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many of the sort of man-fluencers like Joe Rogan and, and Gary Brecka and Andrew Huberman were already popular pre-pandemic, but sort of like became even more so, gained huge followings during, and I think that that’s had a lot to do with the sort of rising awareness of peptides and interest in trying them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>People started taking this “folk pharmacology” approach to medicine. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So that term folk pharmacology was mentioned by a researcher I spoke with for a story.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>His name is Luke Turnock, and he talked about how first it sort of started, uh, with peptides in the gym, with bodybuilders and powerlifters sort of sharing, like, “Oh, this, this drug is really helping me recover from this industry. This drug is making me stronger.” But he applies that to the way that people talk about peptides in online spaces and forums as well, where people are generally a lot more likely to believe somebody else on a Reddit forum than they might be to listen to a researcher who’s telling them there’s not enough data to support taking these drugs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it, it has to do with some of the decline of trust in science, and then it also has to do with the sort of, like, just stock that we put in recommendations from other people who we perceive as regular people, whether that’s, like, you know, somebody telling us, like, “Oh, I love this vacuum,” or in this case, “I love my Wolverine stack,” you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Make American Healthy Again movement is also pretty staunchly anti-vaccine. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When I first started thinking about this, I was like, “This seems like a huge contradiction.” I didn’t understand why the MAHA movement would be so skeptical toward vaccines and yet really welcoming toward peptides. But I think it comes back to what we were talking about with medical libertarianism.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of the MAHA people don’t necessarily want nobody to get vaccines. They say they are more wary of certain vaccine mandates. So there the idea again is like, “Don’t tell me what to do with my own body. It should be my choice whether or not I take it.” Peptides, again, they’re saying they don’t want everybody to have to take peptides.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They just wanna be able to take peptides if they want to. So that’s where it all sort of begins to make sense in an overall worldview.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this brand of medical libertarianism is applied pretty inconsistently. RFK Jr’s MAHA agenda is actively restricting access to trans healthcare, birth control, and abortion — issues that revolve around bodily autonomy. But when it comes to peptides? They believe the government should be hands-off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It goes back to a Biden-era decision.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So back in 2023, the Biden administration moved a bunch of peptides into a different category. That meant that compounding pharmacies could no longer produce them, and their reasons were basically, you know, what we’ve been talking about the typical warnings that we get from the medical community, that these drugs haven’t been studied enough to be able to say definitively that they are either going to do what they promise they’ll do or that they won’t cause some other big problem like cancer as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that was the reason for moving over the classification. Now what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to do is to reclassify some of those peptides so the compounding pharmacies can indeed begin producing them again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which means that they can be legally produced in the US, under \u003cem>some\u003c/em> regulatory oversight — unlike the facilities that are producing gray market peptides now. Compounding pharmacies at least have to be licensed and routinely inspected through state pharmacy boards. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>RFK JR. has been on this crusade to get the FDA to lift this Biden-era peptide ban — which he talked about on that same Joe Rogan podcast episode.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> He basically said that he is a fan of peptides. He wants to make them more accessible via compounding pharmacies. Uh, but the reason he says is not necessarily he understands that not all the science and data is out there on peptides yet, but he says that it’s gonna be safer for people to get them from compounding pharmacies than to get them off the gray and black market, and that’s sort of his logic for, for why it would make sense to, to reclassify them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And that is a new tab. Are peptides legal now? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I\u003c/strong>t’s complicated. We’re gonna start by explaining different kinds of pharmacies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, typical pharmacies make and dispense FDA-approved drugs. There are the retail pharmacies that sell over-the-counter allergy meds or fill your prescriptions for blood pressure pills. There are specialty pharmacies that manage medications for very rare, highly complex health conditions, which might require stricter protocols for handling, storing, and administering meds. Both of these types of pharmacies mainly deal with medications that have already been manufactured. The pharmacy makes sure they’re giving patients the right dosage and right amount of pre-made meds. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, compounding pharmacies mix the medications themselves. There are lots of reasons why people use them: maybe the commercial version of the drug includes ingredients they’re allergic to, or maybe they need a cream, not a gel. Maybe the only way to get the right dosage is by getting a custom mix. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Sometimes there are drug shortages, and compounding pharmacies can be an alternative as well then because they can custom make a particular drug that maybe, uh, isn’t available at the moment. It might also be, as was the case with GLP-1 weight loss drugs, uh, compounding pharmacies were making a lot of, uh, GLP-1 drugs that were alternatives to the more expensive ones, like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the idea h- here was, like, you sacrifice the sort of name brand, uh, aspect, but then you, you could get the, the drugs that would have, hopefully, the same effects for cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s another reason why people might turn to compounding pharmacies as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In recent years, compounding pharmacies have become wildly lucrative, thanks to the rise of for-profit telehealth. A lot of telehealth companies have in-house compounding pharmacies, and they sell all kinds of prescription meds: personalized topical creams with Tretinoin and Niacinamide for acne, chewable tablets of Finasteride and Minoxidil for hair loss, low-dose Vardenafil for erectile dysfunction, custom-mixed hormone replacement suppositories for menopause, and now, compounded GLP-1s for weight loss. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Compounding pharmacies can legally make anything … as long the ingredients they’re working are good with the FDA. The final product doesn’t have to be FDA-approved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The drugs that a compounding pharmacy makes do not necessarily have to have been authorized by the FDA. Um, as long as, you know, they have a prescription for that drug from a healthcare provider, they will, will produce the drugs. And then there’s certain, uh, substances that they’re not allowed to make, such as the peptides that are currently on the 503B substances list. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are 19 peptides on that 503B substances list, including Melanotan II. Earlier this year, the FDA announced that they were going to consider reclassifying \u003cem>some\u003c/em> of those banned peptides. This is not the same as FDA approval. They haven’t gone through clinical trials that guarantee safety or efficacy, and the FDA doesn’t verify the quality before they hit the market. But if they are reclassified, that means that compounding pharmacies are allowed to make and distribute medications that contain them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The argument that was probably most common from the people on the side of making peptides more accessible via compounding pharmacies was that it’s true that we don’t have all the data yet, and we do need more of it. However, we really don’t want people getting these drugs off the gray and black market because of the other health risks, you know, the risks of contamination, the risk of mislabeled drugs where you think that you’re getting one thing, you’re actually getting something else. And they basically said patients are demanding these drugs and we should make sure that if they’re going to take them, they’re taking it the safest way they can.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> In other words, it’s better to have Americans sourcing their peptides from regulated facilities, rather than overseas labs that may not be held to the same standards of sterility and quality.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In July, an FDA advisory panel met to discuss whether or not to recommend reclassification for seven peptides.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The advisory panel itself was really controversial. So this is a group of people who aren’t members of the FDA themselves, and the FDA doesn’t have to follow their recommendations, but typically, their recommendations carry a lot of weight, and typically, an advisory panel is made up of doctors, researchers, other experts in their field.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In this case the people who were appointed to the panel, a lot of them were people who had some sort of potential conflict of interest or stake in the outcome of the decision on peptides, people who are prescribing peptides themselves, people who are you know, affiliated with compounding pharmacies in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that immediately raised a lot of red flags for critics who said, “How can we trust the advice of an advisory panel if it’s people who would potentially stand to profit from what the outcome is?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pro-peptide crowd on the panel pointed out that patients are demanding these drugs, and that \u003cem>some \u003c/em>regulatory oversight is better than continuing to allow Americans to get their peptides from sketchy overseas labs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>Then the counterargument from the medical experts is basically that there, again, simply isn’t enough human data on these drugs. There’s a lot of concern about what it would mean to make it easier for people to take these drugs that are indeed in high demand but that we simply don’t know what kinds of short or long-term health effects they might have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there have been cases of people reporting getting sick, having injuries from peptide doses. So, you know there are real concerns about what should be done in order to monitor peptides better and make sure that they’re safe. And you could hear a lot of frustration from the medical experts who were on the advisory panel as each vote on each separate drug went down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They vote on each drug individually, so as they started seeing what was going to happen of those seven drugs, six got recommended to be reclassified so that compounding pharmacies could make them. So a lot of frustration from the medical experts saying like,’Once again, we don’t know enough about how these drugs will impact people. We’re really worried that this is gonna be dangerous and put people’s health and potentially even their lives at risk.’ And then they were outnumbered on the panel by the, the people who were affiliated with the peptide industry or prescription in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this is where it gets really dicey. Before the advisory panel met, the FDA itself came out and said, hey, we say no to allowing compounding pharmacies to make any of these peptides. This was a decision made by multiple FDA staff scientists. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that was directly in conflict with the outcome of the meeting, which said six out of these seven peptides, they do recommend changing classifications.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Advisory panels rarely go against the FDA staff recommendation. According to reports of that meeting, after the votes were tallied and the recommendation was announced, an audible gasp rippled through the room. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>So with that, it’s gonna be really interesting to see now what happens. The ultimate decision is up to the FDA. So normally, it would be even if the advisory panel had recommended against, if FDA staffers felt really strongly, they could do whatever they felt was right but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of course, is the head of the health department. He has a lot of power and influence, and I think a lot of outside observers are betting that even if FDA staff don’t think that this change should be made, that Kennedy may push it through which would obviously be quite bad for FDA morale as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Who will benefit from this decision? Well, like we talked about earlier, the telehealth industry and their in-house compounding pharmacies make a TON of money. And now they stand to make even more. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When you have people on the panel who it’s clear to see how they’re seeing a lot of patient demand. If they’re able to provide more prescriptions to patients for peptides, that is good for their business.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For the compounding pharmacies, it’s certainly huge for their bottom line. Hims and Hers announced that they’re looking to start offering peptides this year. Noom has also moved to start offering peptides. They purchased a compounding pharmacy business. So there are a lot of companies that certainly see an upside to giving into demand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But as one of the people who I spoke with pointed out, simply because people want drugs isn’t a good reason to authorize them, and simply because we don’t want them to get it off the gray market. If that were the case, then we would legalize heroin, which indeed actually some libertarians think we should, but which the majority of people think that there are good reasons to not do such a thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> so given the FDA’s, uh, I guess, like despite their tensions, um, what does the future of peptide stacking look like now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> For people who are enthusiastic about peptides, I think the future is bright in the sense of them being able to access them. I think it looks like more and more likely that there’s going to be a lot of regulatory interest under Kennedy as long as he’s in power in making these products more accessible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that in terms of what the future looks like from a health perspective, the reality is that we simply don’t know, and that’s kind of scary. We don’t know what kind of effects these are going to have, and we don’t really right now have a robust way of monitoring or surveying for those effects either.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So what you would really wanna see are clinical trials that are studying people who are taking peptides and researching those outcomes, and that is one thing that we don’t currently have right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But again, a recommendation isn’t the same as FDA approval. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Just because this, uh, the panel has said this, that doesn’t mean that compounding pharmacies now have the go-ahead to start producing them. The final decision is up to the FDA and the FDA rulemaking. I believe that outside experts think that process could take up to a year, so it’s not something that we would expect to see immediately happening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>What about Melanotan II? Unfortunately for the tanmaxxers, the Barbie pep was not included in this latest list of panel recommendations. But it will get its moment soon: The FDA is slated to evaluate Melanotan II and four more peptides for reclassification early next year. \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean it’s hard to get a hold of now, though. When I searched “Melanotan II near me,” I found dozens of medical spas across LA that advertise it as part of their “peptide therapy.” For $95, I could drive over to Beverly Hills and pick up a 5 mL vial at a clinic, or $150, I could get it delivered! Mobile IV clinics also offer it as an add-on to their on-demand IV services, so I could get my tan on, get a whole GLOW stack injected, and get a hangover cure administered at the same time, in my own living room! It’s like doordash for peptides! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though, Dr. Grewal does not find that as amusing as I do. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> My gut reaction is honestly mortified, terrified, but also not surprised. And again, it just really brings me back to the point of, you know, the body is really complicated and medicine is complicated.I think the most important thing is that you research the person that is endorsing a specific product or, um, or approach, right? So, like, I love that people research, but I would really encourage, and I’m an advocate of spending the most time researching your source, who you’re going to assign as being credible\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>As much as I love my skincare routine and gratuitous pursuit of beauty, I personally will be staying clear of the Barbie peptide. A little gradual tanning lotion and my trusty tanning mitt has never done me wrong. Plus, I don’t have to worry about breaking out into funky looking moles! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ok, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cbr>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Close All Tabs team also includes senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips from TikTok creators carlysnaxwell, itsdevnyc, and cablequeencourt, clips from the Instagram accounts ToxDaddy and sooshbrah, and YouTube clips from SpaAndTell and Joe Rogan Experience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, my ‘foryou’ page every day it’s like, “Who’s on Glow? Who’s on the Glow stack or the Barbie stack?” Like you can’t escape it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Yeah, all over.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ucsfhealth.org/providers/sungat-grewal\">Dr. Sungat Grewal\u003c/a>, double board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon\u003c/li>\n",
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"What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk — Sarah Todd, STAT News",
"FDA advisory panel narrowly rejects compounding of one peptide, backs two others — Lizzy Lawrence and Sarah Todd, STAT News",
"FDA panel backs compounded BPC-157, KPV peptides in win for RFK Jr. — Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence, STAT News",
"What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk — Sarah Todd, STAT News",
"Is Tanmaxxing an Addiction? A Dermatologist and Psychologist Explains — Katie Berohn, ELLE",
"Inside the Weird New World of Peptide Tanning — Savannah Sobrevilla, GQ ",
"Melanotan: The “Barbie drug” tanning peptide, explained — Carly Mallenbaum, Axios",
"Inside the Viral Tanning Peptide That Accidentally Created Vyleesi’s FDA-Approved Low Sex Drive Drug — Sara Kitnick, LA Times Studios",
"The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry — Kara Nesvig, Allure",
"The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II — Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, Skin Cancer Foundation"
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/a73232620/tanmaxxing-trend-explained-interview-2026/\">Is Tanmaxxing an Addiction? A Dermatologist and Psychologist Explains\u003c/a> — Katie Berohn, \u003cem>ELLE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/live-well/longevity/story/tanning-peptides-melanotan-vyleesi-pt141\">Inside the Viral Tanning Peptide That Accidentally Created Vyleesi’s FDA-Approved Low Sex Drive Drug\u003c/a> — Sara Kitnick, \u003cem>LA Times Studios\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.allure.com/story/fda-peptide-ban-reversal\">The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry\u003c/a> — Kara Nesvig, \u003cem>Allure\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.allure.com/story/fda-peptide-ban-reversal\">The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry\u003c/a> — Kara Nesvig, \u003cem>Allure\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.skincancer.org/press/the-skin-cancer-foundation-issues-warning-regarding-melanotan-ii/\">The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II\u003c/a> — Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, \u003cem>Skin Cancer Foundation\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n",
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"\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.skincancer.org/press/the-skin-cancer-foundation-issues-warning-regarding-melanotan-ii/\">The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II\u003c/a> — Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, \u003cem>Skin Cancer Foundation\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Host, Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Hello! Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show! And tell your friends! Post about it! On Instagram, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Host, Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Hello! Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show! And tell your friends! Post about it! On Instagram, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Can I be honest? I am pretty vain.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Can I be honest? I am pretty vain.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I take my skincare routine very seriously: Prescription-strength azelaic acid in the morning, and prescription-strength tretinoin at night. Lots of sunscreen and moisturizer and barrier creams in between, and every other night, I skip the tretinoin and spend three minutes under a red light mask. If I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll throw in a Korean gel mask and a jade roller. Do those do anything? I honestly can’t tell. But it feels nice! \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I take my skincare routine very seriously: Prescription-strength azelaic acid in the morning, and prescription-strength tretinoin at night. Lots of sunscreen and moisturizer and barrier creams in between, and every other night, I skip the tretinoin and spend three minutes under a red light mask. If I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll throw in a Korean gel mask and a jade roller. Do those do anything? I honestly can’t tell. But it feels nice! \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t call myself a looksmaxxer, but I do spend a good amount of time on these beautification rituals. And as a woman who exists on the internet, I feel like my For You Page is constantly lobbing beauty trends at me, and like I’m always trying to avoid getting sucked into yet another fad. I have tried so many serums and face masks and supplements before finally settling into what I consider to be a pretty pared down beauty regiment. But the one thing I haven’t tried yet is a peptide. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t call myself a looksmaxxer, but I do spend a good amount of time on these beautification rituals. And as a woman who exists on the internet, I feel like my For You Page is constantly lobbing beauty trends at me, and like I’m always trying to avoid getting sucked into yet another fad. I have tried so many serums and face masks and supplements before finally settling into what I consider to be a pretty pared down beauty regiment. But the one thing I haven’t tried yet is a peptide. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It seems like everyone is on them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clips of influencers raving about peptides]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Speaker 1: This is, in my opinion, the most slept-on peptide on the market today. There’s two main benefits that have been life-changing for me . \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Speaker 2: You’re telling me there’s a botox alternative that’s easier on your wallet? Whoa! Let’s talk about Snap-8, the peptide that targets wrinkles without the needles. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Speaker 2: You’re telling me there’s a botox alternative that’s easier on your wallet? Whoa! Let’s talk about Snap-8, the peptide that targets wrinkles without the needles. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Peptides are chemical signals that your body naturally makes to regulate all kinds of bodily functions, like digestion and recovery. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> So peptides are like text messages. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> So peptides are like text messages. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Sungat Grewal is a double board certified dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon. She’s the co-director of Laser Surgery and Cosmetic Dermatology at UCSF. And she’s been keeping an eye on the synthetic peptides people are taking to boost their bodies’ natural processes. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>They’re not necessarily good or bad inherently, but it depends on who’s sending the message, what the message is, and who receives it. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>They’re not necessarily good or bad inherently, but it depends on who’s sending the message, what the message is, and who receives it. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I’m not just talking about GLP-1s. Peptide stacking is really in right now. Retatrutide and Tesamorelin for weight loss, Ipamorelin for muscle growth, the “Wolverine Stack” of BPC-157 and TB-500 to boost healing after a gym sesh. If you throw in the copper peptide GHK-Cu, you’ve got a “Glow Stack,” the hot girl combo optimized for anti-aging collagen production. It’s a lot, right? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I’m not just talking about GLP-1s. Peptide stacking is really in right now. Retatrutide and Tesamorelin for weight loss, Ipamorelin for muscle growth, the “Wolverine Stack” of BPC-157 and TB-500 to boost healing after a gym sesh. If you throw in the copper peptide GHK-Cu, you’ve got a “Glow Stack,” the hot girl combo optimized for anti-aging collagen production. It’s a lot, right? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some of these compounds are not cleared by the FDA, so the way people get a hold of them is a legal hit or miss. But peptides remain incredibly popular despite the gray market. And there’s one that’s \u003cem>really\u003c/em> blown up this summer: Melanotan II. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Some of these compounds are not cleared by the FDA, so the way people get a hold of them is a legal hit or miss. But peptides remain incredibly popular despite the gray market. And there’s one that’s \u003cem>really\u003c/em> blown up this summer: Melanotan II. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cbr>[Clip from Youtube User @SpaandTell]\u003cbr>Kylie says hi Kim your tan looks great. Thank you! I’ve been using the melanotan II peptide over the last month, and I’ve been going outside, and it’s been working like a charm, so excited. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cbr>[Clip from Youtube User @SpaandTell]\u003cbr>Kylie says hi Kim your tan looks great. Thank you! I’ve been using the melanotan II peptide over the last month, and I’ve been going outside, and it’s been working like a charm, so excited. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>MT-2 for short — also known as “The Barbie peptide” or “the vacation drug.” It makes you tan, skinny, and horny (it’s a libido booster) — with no harmful UV exposure required. But Dr. Grewal says it also comes with legitimately concerning risks. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>MT-2 for short — also known as “The Barbie peptide” or “the vacation drug.” It makes you tan, skinny, and horny (it’s a libido booster) — with no harmful UV exposure required. But Dr. Grewal says it also comes with legitimately concerning risks. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>It’s pretty scary and it’s very sad, you know, when, um, people are chasing aesthetic goals and are being misdirected and exposing themselves to unknown risks or known risks, not only in the moment, but for future and forever forward, right? Some of these impacts have long-lasting effects.\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Today, we’re diving into the world of peptides: the dangers of tanmaxxing despite the influencer promotion, and RFK Jr’s crusade to reverse the peptide bans in the U.S. What does the peptide craze say about Americans’ relationship with health and risk? Let’s jump in. \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>It’s pretty scary and it’s very sad, you know, when, um, people are chasing aesthetic goals and are being misdirected and exposing themselves to unknown risks or known risks, not only in the moment, but for future and forever forward, right? Some of these impacts have long-lasting effects.\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Today, we’re diving into the world of peptides: the dangers of tanmaxxing despite the influencer promotion, and RFK Jr’s crusade to reverse the peptide bans in the U.S. What does the peptide craze say about Americans’ relationship with health and risk? Let’s jump in. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We’re starting with a new tab. What is melanotan?\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We’re starting with a new tab. What is melanotan?\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m part of a few weddings this year, and I wanted to look a little more sunkissed. But I’m inside like, all the time, and I have no interest in tanning beds because I don’t want to wrinkle. Again, vain! Sorry! So I started looking into self tanners. I looked up a few beauty influencers who reviewed tanning lotions … and that’s when my feed was inundated with people\u003cs> \u003c/s>recommending this miracle drug: MT-2.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I’m part of a few weddings this year, and I wanted to look a little more sunkissed. But I’m inside like, all the time, and I have no interest in tanning beds because I don’t want to wrinkle. Again, vain! Sorry! So I started looking into self tanners. I looked up a few beauty influencers who reviewed tanning lotions … and that’s when my feed was inundated with people\u003cs> \u003c/s>recommending this miracle drug: MT-2.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @toxdaddy]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @toxdaddy]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oh man, I’m super excited. I just got Melanotan 2 this morning and I’m really excited to try it.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oh man, I’m super excited. I just got Melanotan 2 this morning and I’m really excited to try it.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @carlysnaxwell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I started taking MT2. I’m tan. I haven’t gone bed tanning in a while… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @carlysnaxwell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I started taking MT2. I’m tan. I haven’t gone bed tanning in a while… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @itsdevync]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I’m now at two months of taking it. I’m obsessed. My tan is only getting better … \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @itsdevync]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I’m now at two months of taking it. I’m obsessed. My tan is only getting better … \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Youtube user@SpaandTell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I am crazy impressed by this – by this, I mean, the Melanotan 2 peptide.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Youtube user@SpaandTell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I am crazy impressed by this – by this, I mean, the Melanotan 2 peptide.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> And it’s not just the tan that makes it so appealing. Dr. Grewal says Melanotan II also has some specific side effects…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> And it’s not just the tan that makes it so appealing. Dr. Grewal says Melanotan II also has some specific side effects…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong> It’s marketed as the Barbie peptide because tanning might be the effect that you’re shopping for, but it’s not the only effect and some of them can translate into, um, increased libido or decreased appetite. \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong> It’s marketed as the Barbie peptide because tanning might be the effect that you’re shopping for, but it’s not the only effect and some of them can translate into, um, increased libido or decreased appetite. \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>How does it do all that? Well, let’s talk about how peptides work. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>How does it do all that? Well, let’s talk about how peptides work. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Again, peptides are the chemical signals for your body to perform certain functions. Your body has tons of receptors, and peptides can target specific ones, almost like sending a text to a specific phone number. \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Again, peptides are the chemical signals for your body to perform certain functions. Your body has tons of receptors, and peptides can target specific ones, almost like sending a text to a specific phone number. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>You can think about two kinds, like natural versus synthetic. So our body makes peptides naturally. Some common examples would be like insulin or GLP-1. And synthetically, you know, we can create, uh, synthetic peptides to mimic those that are made naturally in the body to get a specific effect\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>You can think about two kinds, like natural versus synthetic. So our body makes peptides naturally. Some common examples would be like insulin or GLP-1. And synthetically, you know, we can create, uh, synthetic peptides to mimic those that are made naturally in the body to get a specific effect\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Melanotan I and Melanotan II are synthetic peptides that…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Melanotan I and Melanotan II are synthetic peptides that…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> …mimic a naturally occurring peptide in the body called alpha-MSH or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. And so there are receptors that are in numerous places in the body called melanocortin receptors that can respond to this signal or chain of events.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> …mimic a naturally occurring peptide in the body called alpha-MSH or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. And so there are receptors that are in numerous places in the body called melanocortin receptors that can respond to this signal or chain of events.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are five types of melanocortin receptors in the body. The first regulates hair and skin pigmentation, and it’s what triggers tans. And it’s also really important to understand what getting tan \u003cem>really\u003c/em> means for your body. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are five types of melanocortin receptors in the body. The first regulates hair and skin pigmentation, and it’s what triggers tans. And it’s also really important to understand what getting tan \u003cem>really\u003c/em> means for your body. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> It’s literally your nucleus and your cell saying, “Oh my God, save my DNA.” \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> It’s literally your nucleus and your cell saying, “Oh my God, save my DNA.” \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung : \u003c/strong>This is Dr. Caren Campbell, a board certified dermatologist who practices medical, surgical, and cosmetic dermatology in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung : \u003c/strong>This is Dr. Caren Campbell, a board certified dermatologist who practices medical, surgical, and cosmetic dermatology in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s putting an umbrella over it. Your cell is saying, like, “Help me. Protect my DNA so I don’t mutate and cause cancer.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s putting an umbrella over it. Your cell is saying, like, “Help me. Protect my DNA so I don’t mutate and cause cancer.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That little umbrella is called eumelanin, and it produces brown and black pigments in the body. It’s what causes darker colors in skin, eyes, and hair. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That little umbrella is called eumelanin, and it produces brown and black pigments in the body. It’s what causes darker colors in skin, eyes, and hair. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So Melanotan I sends a text to that first melanocortin receptor, which tells your cells to pop their little umbrellas up to protect their DNA … which is what triggers a tan, without actual UV exposure. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So Melanotan I sends a text to that first melanocortin receptor, which tells your cells to pop their little umbrellas up to protect their DNA … which is what triggers a tan, without actual UV exposure. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Melanotan I is actually FDA-approved for a very, very specific, very rare skin condition that causes extreme sensitivity to light.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Melanotan I is actually FDA-approved for a very, very specific, very rare skin condition that causes extreme sensitivity to light.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Erythropoietic protoporphyria\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Erythropoietic protoporphyria\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Or EPP for short. It’s actually so rare that Dr. Grewal has never seen the condition in her medical career. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Or EPP for short. It’s actually so rare that Dr. Grewal has never seen the condition in her medical career. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Its incidence has been estimated at two to five cases per million people. You would know if you had this because you have symptoms when you’re a young child. Children have very severe, painful, uh, photosensitivity after exposure to sunlight or even visible light, which can come from even indoor lights, laptop screens.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Its incidence has been estimated at two to five cases per million people. You would know if you had this because you have symptoms when you’re a young child. Children have very severe, painful, uh, photosensitivity after exposure to sunlight or even visible light, which can come from even indoor lights, laptop screens.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>EPP causes extreme swelling, burning, and pain when exposed to certain light. So the FDA approved a prescription implant of Melanotan I for people with EPP, which stimulates their bodies to produce eumelanin. These little cell umbrellas absorb that light before it can damage their skin. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>EPP causes extreme swelling, burning, and pain when exposed to certain light. So the FDA approved a prescription implant of Melanotan I for people with EPP, which stimulates their bodies to produce eumelanin. These little cell umbrellas absorb that light before it can damage their skin. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, Melanotan II, which is the hot one right now, sends a group text to that first receptor. But remember, there are \u003cem>5\u003c/em> melanocortin receptors in the body. So it’s also sending that text to receptors three, four, and five as well. And these aren’t just in the skin. They’re all over the body, including in the central nervous system, which is why MT-2 can cause appetite suppression and boost libido. And because these receptors are all over the body, MT-2 can also cause unpredictable systemic changes … with unpleasant and even dangerous symptoms. Here’s Dr. Campbell again. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, Melanotan II, which is the hot one right now, sends a group text to that first receptor. But remember, there are \u003cem>5\u003c/em> melanocortin receptors in the body. So it’s also sending that text to receptors three, four, and five as well. And these aren’t just in the skin. They’re all over the body, including in the central nervous system, which is why MT-2 can cause appetite suppression and boost libido. And because these receptors are all over the body, MT-2 can also cause unpredictable systemic changes … with unpleasant and even dangerous symptoms. Here’s Dr. Campbell again. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> In men, that can lead to potentially what’s called priapism, which is where you have an erection that, you know, doesn’t go away, and there was a, a case report of someone needing to have that surgically drained in the emergency room.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> In men, that can lead to potentially what’s called priapism, which is where you have an erection that, you know, doesn’t go away, and there was a, a case report of someone needing to have that surgically drained in the emergency room.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Um, it, it also can cause nausea and vomiting. It’s also stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, which you can think about that like your fight or flight. So anything you needed to, like, run away from a predator, it does. So it dilates your pupils so you can see better.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Um, it, it also can cause nausea and vomiting. It’s also stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, which you can think about that like your fight or flight. So anything you needed to, like, run away from a predator, it does. So it dilates your pupils so you can see better.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It causes, you know, increased heart rate so you can get running. It causes hypertension ’cause it constricts your blood vessels. Um, so that fight or flight response can be elevated and you can get what’s called rhabdomyolysis, which is where you get muscle breakdown, and it can be very dangerous, um, life-threatening.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It causes, you know, increased heart rate so you can get running. It causes hypertension ’cause it constricts your blood vessels. Um, so that fight or flight response can be elevated and you can get what’s called rhabdomyolysis, which is where you get muscle breakdown, and it can be very dangerous, um, life-threatening.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So those side effects are pretty rough. But Dr. Grewal says there’s also this main one … \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So those side effects are pretty rough. But Dr. Grewal says there’s also this main one … \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> We have seen reports of patients like breaking out in moles, for example, and breaking out in atypical or what we call funky looking moles, right? \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> We have seen reports of patients like breaking out in moles, for example, and breaking out in atypical or what we call funky looking moles, right? \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @\u003c/em>cablequeencourt]\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Let’s count how many moles we have on our face since taking MT2. So this one’s new. This is new …Yeah, um, and that’s not including what’s going on on my body….\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @\u003c/em>cablequeencourt]\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Let’s count how many moles we have on our face since taking MT2. So this one’s new. This is new …Yeah, um, and that’s not including what’s going on on my body….\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Moles are clusters of melanocytes, the skin cells that make pigment. Most are totally benign. But like Dr. Grewal said, Melanotan moles are … funky.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Moles are clusters of melanocytes, the skin cells that make pigment. Most are totally benign. But like Dr. Grewal said, Melanotan moles are … funky.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Because it’s stimulating the same pathway that can eventually lead to melanoma. And again, we don’t have causation yet, but we do not have long-term data. And so why would you subject yourself to that risk when you can use other methods to tan the skin safely without breaking out in moles? And the moles are not just darker, the moles, like, look concerning. They, they often have atypical features.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Because it’s stimulating the same pathway that can eventually lead to melanoma. And again, we don’t have causation yet, but we do not have long-term data. And so why would you subject yourself to that risk when you can use other methods to tan the skin safely without breaking out in moles? And the moles are not just darker, the moles, like, look concerning. They, they often have atypical features.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Those little cell umbrellas can only protect so much. And if you’re exposing them to harmful UV rays over and over again, they can mutate and become cancerous. One of the ways dermatologists evaluate moles for cancer is by checking if they’ve evolved — if they’re getting bigger, darker, and wonkier. This isn’t as much of a concern for patients who are prescribed MT-1 for EPP, since they’re generally not engaging in risky behavior that causes additional UV damage — like intentionally tanning. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Those little cell umbrellas can only protect so much. And if you’re exposing them to harmful UV rays over and over again, they can mutate and become cancerous. One of the ways dermatologists evaluate moles for cancer is by checking if they’ve evolved — if they’re getting bigger, darker, and wonkier. This isn’t as much of a concern for patients who are prescribed MT-1 for EPP, since they’re generally not engaging in risky behavior that causes additional UV damage — like intentionally tanning. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But when it comes to the tanmaxxers … \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But when it comes to the tanmaxxers … \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @sooshbrah]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>This is 2021, 2022, I was doing 500 micrograms of Melanotan and I was jumping in the tanning bed for 15 minutes. I literally changed race in like three sessions. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @sooshbrah]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>This is 2021, 2022, I was doing 500 micrograms of Melanotan and I was jumping in the tanning bed for 15 minutes. I literally changed race in like three sessions. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> I can’t say for certain that, you know, melanotan causes melanoma. But we do know based on what are, again, called case [00:23:00] reports, where we don’t have large numbers, but we have good evidence of people who’ve started melanotan and then as soon as two weeks noticed almost immediate darkening and irregularity of their moles.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> I can’t say for certain that, you know, melanotan causes melanoma. But we do know based on what are, again, called case [00:23:00] reports, where we don’t have large numbers, but we have good evidence of people who’ve started melanotan and then as soon as two weeks noticed almost immediate darkening and irregularity of their moles.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Campbell said that in this case report, one of the patients had used tanning beds and melanotan at the same time, and had five new moles biopsied. All five were cancerous. And there aren’t many clinical studies on the effects of long-term melanotan use, in a broad population of users who don’t have EPP. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Campbell said that in this case report, one of the patients had used tanning beds and melanotan at the same time, and had five new moles biopsied. All five were cancerous. And there aren’t many clinical studies on the effects of long-term melanotan use, in a broad population of users who don’t have EPP. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Melanotan II was actually developed in the late 80s to early 90s, and in the early 2000s, researchers began testing it to treat sexual dysfunction. But Dr. Grewal says there’s a reason it never made it to market. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Melanotan II was actually developed in the late 80s to early 90s, and in the early 2000s, researchers began testing it to treat sexual dysfunction. But Dr. Grewal says there’s a reason it never made it to market. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Usually when a peptide or any product is on its way to becoming a drug, it goes through rigorous testing, and pharmaceuticals would love to sell it because they’re gonna profit immensely. So usually when it drops off the track, it’s because either it’s not providing the results that they’re hoping for or the safety is not promising\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Usually when a peptide or any product is on its way to becoming a drug, it goes through rigorous testing, and pharmaceuticals would love to sell it because they’re gonna profit immensely. So usually when it drops off the track, it’s because either it’s not providing the results that they’re hoping for or the safety is not promising\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Despite that, both MT-1 and MT-2 are still wildly popular on the gray market, as both a nasal spray and an injectable. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Despite that, both MT-1 and MT-2 are still wildly popular on the gray market, as both a nasal spray and an injectable. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>Unfortunately I am not surprised because, you know, the story of wanting tanner skin is a story we’ve heard before. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>Unfortunately I am not surprised because, you know, the story of wanting tanner skin is a story we’ve heard before. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Um, you know, first it was tanning beds, now we know how dangerous those are in terms of increasing melanoma risk even with one use, you know, before the age of 30. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Um, you know, first it was tanning beds, now we know how dangerous those are in terms of increasing melanoma risk even with one use, you know, before the age of 30. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And as is the case with many unregulated, technically illegal peptides, vendors can sell them around the US thanks to a handy loophole: the “Research Use Only” pathway. Essentially saying, this product legally isn’t for human consumption, with no quality guarantee or regulatory oversight. But there’s really nothing that can stop buyers from using it on themselves. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And as is the case with many unregulated, technically illegal peptides, vendors can sell them around the US thanks to a handy loophole: the “Research Use Only” pathway. Essentially saying, this product legally isn’t for human consumption, with no quality guarantee or regulatory oversight. But there’s really nothing that can stop buyers from using it on themselves. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> You have to remember that when it’s not FDA regulated, you really have no idea what’s in the bottle. What you’re getting in your bottle is like a crapshoot. So, you know, and historically we’ve seen issues with, um, sterility of products, contamination with unregulated products, and the concentration and the purity is also unknown.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> You have to remember that when it’s not FDA regulated, you really have no idea what’s in the bottle. What you’re getting in your bottle is like a crapshoot. So, you know, and historically we’ve seen issues with, um, sterility of products, contamination with unregulated products, and the concentration and the purity is also unknown.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that alone is like a huge reason why I would never advise anyone to take a non FDA-approved medication, whether or not it’s a peptide, you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that alone is like a huge reason why I would never advise anyone to take a non FDA-approved medication, whether or not it’s a peptide, you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So knowing all of these risks, both healthwise and lookswise, why are people bent on taking Melanotan? And this is just one of many unregulated, very popular peptides! What’s driving the peptide boom in spite of medical experts’ warnings?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So knowing all of these risks, both healthwise and lookswise, why are people bent on taking Melanotan? And this is just one of many unregulated, very popular peptides! What’s driving the peptide boom in spite of medical experts’ warnings?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That is a whole new tab… for after this quick break. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That is a whole new tab… for after this quick break. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you! To become a member and support the show, go to donate dot kqed dot org slash podcasts. Ok, after the break: we’re diving into medical libertarianism. Stick around.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you! To become a member and support the show, go to donate dot kqed dot org slash podcasts. Ok, after the break: we’re diving into medical libertarianism. Stick around.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome back! Time to open a new tab. Peptides and medical libertarianism. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome back! Time to open a new tab. Peptides and medical libertarianism. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>RFK Jr, the vaccine denier and guy in charge of our entire country’s health department, is also a pep pusher. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>RFK Jr, the vaccine denier and guy in charge of our entire country’s health department, is also a pep pusher. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Yeah I mean I’m a big fan of peptides. I’ve used them myself. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Yeah I mean I’m a big fan of peptides. I’ve used them myself. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was RFK Jr on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, where he spoke about the proliferation of unregulated peptides. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was RFK Jr on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, where he spoke about the proliferation of unregulated peptides. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>A black market came out and the black market is run by companies that say they’re making the peptides for animal use or research purposes. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>A black market came out and the black market is run by companies that say they’re making the peptides for animal use or research purposes. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So basically when you buy peptides online you don’t have any guarantees about the safety and the quality of what you’re buying. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So basically when you buy peptides online you don’t have any guarantees about the safety and the quality of what you’re buying. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That’s Sarah Todd, a reporter at STAT News. She covers the business of health, which means she’s also been following the gray market peptide industry. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That’s Sarah Todd, a reporter at STAT News. She covers the business of health, which means she’s also been following the gray market peptide industry. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> New York Magazine had a bunch of peptides tested and found that about a third of them were mislabeled or under or overdosed or contaminated by bacteria. So those are all some of the potential health risks that you run into when you’re getting them off the gray and black market.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> New York Magazine had a bunch of peptides tested and found that about a third of them were mislabeled or under or overdosed or contaminated by bacteria. So those are all some of the potential health risks that you run into when you’re getting them off the gray and black market.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that hasn’t diminished people’s appetite for peptides. Sarah says this all falls in line with a concept called “medical libertarianism” — the idea that we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies regardless of what the government or medical establishment says.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that hasn’t diminished people’s appetite for peptides. Sarah says this all falls in line with a concept called “medical libertarianism” — the idea that we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies regardless of what the government or medical establishment says.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that extends to taking drugs like peptides that don’t have a lot of data behind them when it comes to their impacts on humans, either their benefits or their potential risks. But the idea with medical libertarianism is, like, that’s my choice, and if I’m willing to put my body on the line for the hopeful benefits that I can get, then I should be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that extends to taking drugs like peptides that don’t have a lot of data behind them when it comes to their impacts on humans, either their benefits or their potential risks. But the idea with medical libertarianism is, like, that’s my choice, and if I’m willing to put my body on the line for the hopeful benefits that I can get, then I should be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s a very American mindset. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s a very American mindset. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> It really goes along with this sort of all-American idea that we can control our own destinies and make our own choices, right? And a sort of suspicion about the government’s role in overseeing people’s lives, a desire to, you know, ward off the idea of the nanny state and the idea that people should be able to chase their own pursuit of happiness and the American dream.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> It really goes along with this sort of all-American idea that we can control our own destinies and make our own choices, right? And a sort of suspicion about the government’s role in overseeing people’s lives, a desire to, you know, ward off the idea of the nanny state and the idea that people should be able to chase their own pursuit of happiness and the American dream.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And if that includes self-optimizing your body and your health, then that’s something that people should be allowed to do, would be the argument that these people are making.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And if that includes self-optimizing your body and your health, then that’s something that people should be allowed to do, would be the argument that these people are making.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Americans have always had this attitude about health. In the 1970s, there was a huge backlash from the public when the government tried to regulate vitamin and supplement industries…\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Americans have always had this attitude about health. In the 1970s, there was a huge backlash from the public when the government tried to regulate vitamin and supplement industries…\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People wrote in and said, “Don’t take my vitamins away, “ and we wound up with the situation that we have today, where they’re still many people would argue, uh, largely unregulated or very under-regulated. I think that people really wanted to hold on to these kinds of products. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People wrote in and said, “Don’t take my vitamins away, “ and we wound up with the situation that we have today, where they’re still many people would argue, uh, largely unregulated or very under-regulated. I think that people really wanted to hold on to these kinds of products. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There have been ebbs and flows to medical libertarianism throughout modern American history. And then the COVID 19 pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There have been ebbs and flows to medical libertarianism throughout modern American history. And then the COVID 19 pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People started self-experimenting with all kinds of things, like everything from ivermectin, which you m- may remember, to some sort of herbal medicines.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People started self-experimenting with all kinds of things, like everything from ivermectin, which you m- may remember, to some sort of herbal medicines.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> On one hand, you had a lot of interest in sort of like experimentation with drugs to see what you could do to improve your own health, protect yourself potentially from COVID in various ways. We also saw a big boom in the rise of social media health influencers, health and wellness influencers during this time as well, and I think that has played a huge role.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> On one hand, you had a lot of interest in sort of like experimentation with drugs to see what you could do to improve your own health, protect yourself potentially from COVID in various ways. We also saw a big boom in the rise of social media health influencers, health and wellness influencers during this time as well, and I think that has played a huge role.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Many of the sort of man-fluencers like Joe Rogan and, and Gary Brecka and Andrew Huberman were already popular pre-pandemic, but sort of like became even more so, gained huge followings during, and I think that that’s had a lot to do with the sort of rising awareness of peptides and interest in trying them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Many of the sort of man-fluencers like Joe Rogan and, and Gary Brecka and Andrew Huberman were already popular pre-pandemic, but sort of like became even more so, gained huge followings during, and I think that that’s had a lot to do with the sort of rising awareness of peptides and interest in trying them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>People started taking this “folk pharmacology” approach to medicine. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>People started taking this “folk pharmacology” approach to medicine. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So that term folk pharmacology was mentioned by a researcher I spoke with for a story.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So that term folk pharmacology was mentioned by a researcher I spoke with for a story.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>His name is Luke Turnock, and he talked about how first it sort of started, uh, with peptides in the gym, with bodybuilders and powerlifters sort of sharing, like, “Oh, this, this drug is really helping me recover from this industry. This drug is making me stronger.” But he applies that to the way that people talk about peptides in online spaces and forums as well, where people are generally a lot more likely to believe somebody else on a Reddit forum than they might be to listen to a researcher who’s telling them there’s not enough data to support taking these drugs.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>His name is Luke Turnock, and he talked about how first it sort of started, uh, with peptides in the gym, with bodybuilders and powerlifters sort of sharing, like, “Oh, this, this drug is really helping me recover from this industry. This drug is making me stronger.” But he applies that to the way that people talk about peptides in online spaces and forums as well, where people are generally a lot more likely to believe somebody else on a Reddit forum than they might be to listen to a researcher who’s telling them there’s not enough data to support taking these drugs.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think it, it has to do with some of the decline of trust in science, and then it also has to do with the sort of, like, just stock that we put in recommendations from other people who we perceive as regular people, whether that’s, like, you know, somebody telling us, like, “Oh, I love this vacuum,” or in this case, “I love my Wolverine stack,” you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think it, it has to do with some of the decline of trust in science, and then it also has to do with the sort of, like, just stock that we put in recommendations from other people who we perceive as regular people, whether that’s, like, you know, somebody telling us, like, “Oh, I love this vacuum,” or in this case, “I love my Wolverine stack,” you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Make American Healthy Again movement is also pretty staunchly anti-vaccine. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Make American Healthy Again movement is also pretty staunchly anti-vaccine. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When I first started thinking about this, I was like, “This seems like a huge contradiction.” I didn’t understand why the MAHA movement would be so skeptical toward vaccines and yet really welcoming toward peptides. But I think it comes back to what we were talking about with medical libertarianism.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When I first started thinking about this, I was like, “This seems like a huge contradiction.” I didn’t understand why the MAHA movement would be so skeptical toward vaccines and yet really welcoming toward peptides. But I think it comes back to what we were talking about with medical libertarianism.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lot of the MAHA people don’t necessarily want nobody to get vaccines. They say they are more wary of certain vaccine mandates. So there the idea again is like, “Don’t tell me what to do with my own body. It should be my choice whether or not I take it.” Peptides, again, they’re saying they don’t want everybody to have to take peptides.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A lot of the MAHA people don’t necessarily want nobody to get vaccines. They say they are more wary of certain vaccine mandates. So there the idea again is like, “Don’t tell me what to do with my own body. It should be my choice whether or not I take it.” Peptides, again, they’re saying they don’t want everybody to have to take peptides.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They just wanna be able to take peptides if they want to. So that’s where it all sort of begins to make sense in an overall worldview.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They just wanna be able to take peptides if they want to. So that’s where it all sort of begins to make sense in an overall worldview.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this brand of medical libertarianism is applied pretty inconsistently. RFK Jr’s MAHA agenda is actively restricting access to trans healthcare, birth control, and abortion — issues that revolve around bodily autonomy. But when it comes to peptides? They believe the government should be hands-off. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this brand of medical libertarianism is applied pretty inconsistently. RFK Jr’s MAHA agenda is actively restricting access to trans healthcare, birth control, and abortion — issues that revolve around bodily autonomy. But when it comes to peptides? They believe the government should be hands-off. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It goes back to a Biden-era decision.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It goes back to a Biden-era decision.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So back in 2023, the Biden administration moved a bunch of peptides into a different category. That meant that compounding pharmacies could no longer produce them, and their reasons were basically, you know, what we’ve been talking about the typical warnings that we get from the medical community, that these drugs haven’t been studied enough to be able to say definitively that they are either going to do what they promise they’ll do or that they won’t cause some other big problem like cancer as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So back in 2023, the Biden administration moved a bunch of peptides into a different category. That meant that compounding pharmacies could no longer produce them, and their reasons were basically, you know, what we’ve been talking about the typical warnings that we get from the medical community, that these drugs haven’t been studied enough to be able to say definitively that they are either going to do what they promise they’ll do or that they won’t cause some other big problem like cancer as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that was the reason for moving over the classification. Now what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to do is to reclassify some of those peptides so the compounding pharmacies can indeed begin producing them again.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that was the reason for moving over the classification. Now what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to do is to reclassify some of those peptides so the compounding pharmacies can indeed begin producing them again.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which means that they can be legally produced in the US, under \u003cem>some\u003c/em> regulatory oversight — unlike the facilities that are producing gray market peptides now. Compounding pharmacies at least have to be licensed and routinely inspected through state pharmacy boards. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which means that they can be legally produced in the US, under \u003cem>some\u003c/em> regulatory oversight — unlike the facilities that are producing gray market peptides now. Compounding pharmacies at least have to be licensed and routinely inspected through state pharmacy boards. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>RFK JR. has been on this crusade to get the FDA to lift this Biden-era peptide ban — which he talked about on that same Joe Rogan podcast episode.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>RFK JR. has been on this crusade to get the FDA to lift this Biden-era peptide ban — which he talked about on that same Joe Rogan podcast episode.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> He basically said that he is a fan of peptides. He wants to make them more accessible via compounding pharmacies. Uh, but the reason he says is not necessarily he understands that not all the science and data is out there on peptides yet, but he says that it’s gonna be safer for people to get them from compounding pharmacies than to get them off the gray and black market, and that’s sort of his logic for, for why it would make sense to, to reclassify them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> He basically said that he is a fan of peptides. He wants to make them more accessible via compounding pharmacies. Uh, but the reason he says is not necessarily he understands that not all the science and data is out there on peptides yet, but he says that it’s gonna be safer for people to get them from compounding pharmacies than to get them off the gray and black market, and that’s sort of his logic for, for why it would make sense to, to reclassify them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And that is a new tab. Are peptides legal now? \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And that is a new tab. Are peptides legal now? \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I\u003c/strong>t’s complicated. We’re gonna start by explaining different kinds of pharmacies. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I\u003c/strong>t’s complicated. We’re gonna start by explaining different kinds of pharmacies. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So, typical pharmacies make and dispense FDA-approved drugs. There are the retail pharmacies that sell over-the-counter allergy meds or fill your prescriptions for blood pressure pills. There are specialty pharmacies that manage medications for very rare, highly complex health conditions, which might require stricter protocols for handling, storing, and administering meds. Both of these types of pharmacies mainly deal with medications that have already been manufactured. The pharmacy makes sure they’re giving patients the right dosage and right amount of pre-made meds. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So, typical pharmacies make and dispense FDA-approved drugs. There are the retail pharmacies that sell over-the-counter allergy meds or fill your prescriptions for blood pressure pills. There are specialty pharmacies that manage medications for very rare, highly complex health conditions, which might require stricter protocols for handling, storing, and administering meds. Both of these types of pharmacies mainly deal with medications that have already been manufactured. The pharmacy makes sure they’re giving patients the right dosage and right amount of pre-made meds. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Now, compounding pharmacies mix the medications themselves. There are lots of reasons why people use them: maybe the commercial version of the drug includes ingredients they’re allergic to, or maybe they need a cream, not a gel. Maybe the only way to get the right dosage is by getting a custom mix. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Now, compounding pharmacies mix the medications themselves. There are lots of reasons why people use them: maybe the commercial version of the drug includes ingredients they’re allergic to, or maybe they need a cream, not a gel. Maybe the only way to get the right dosage is by getting a custom mix. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Sometimes there are drug shortages, and compounding pharmacies can be an alternative as well then because they can custom make a particular drug that maybe, uh, isn’t available at the moment. It might also be, as was the case with GLP-1 weight loss drugs, uh, compounding pharmacies were making a lot of, uh, GLP-1 drugs that were alternatives to the more expensive ones, like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the idea h- here was, like, you sacrifice the sort of name brand, uh, aspect, but then you, you could get the, the drugs that would have, hopefully, the same effects for cheaper.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Sometimes there are drug shortages, and compounding pharmacies can be an alternative as well then because they can custom make a particular drug that maybe, uh, isn’t available at the moment. It might also be, as was the case with GLP-1 weight loss drugs, uh, compounding pharmacies were making a lot of, uh, GLP-1 drugs that were alternatives to the more expensive ones, like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the idea h- here was, like, you sacrifice the sort of name brand, uh, aspect, but then you, you could get the, the drugs that would have, hopefully, the same effects for cheaper.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that’s another reason why people might turn to compounding pharmacies as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that’s another reason why people might turn to compounding pharmacies as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In recent years, compounding pharmacies have become wildly lucrative, thanks to the rise of for-profit telehealth. A lot of telehealth companies have in-house compounding pharmacies, and they sell all kinds of prescription meds: personalized topical creams with Tretinoin and Niacinamide for acne, chewable tablets of Finasteride and Minoxidil for hair loss, low-dose Vardenafil for erectile dysfunction, custom-mixed hormone replacement suppositories for menopause, and now, compounded GLP-1s for weight loss. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In recent years, compounding pharmacies have become wildly lucrative, thanks to the rise of for-profit telehealth. A lot of telehealth companies have in-house compounding pharmacies, and they sell all kinds of prescription meds: personalized topical creams with Tretinoin and Niacinamide for acne, chewable tablets of Finasteride and Minoxidil for hair loss, low-dose Vardenafil for erectile dysfunction, custom-mixed hormone replacement suppositories for menopause, and now, compounded GLP-1s for weight loss. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Compounding pharmacies can legally make anything … as long the ingredients they’re working are good with the FDA. The final product doesn’t have to be FDA-approved.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Compounding pharmacies can legally make anything … as long the ingredients they’re working are good with the FDA. The final product doesn’t have to be FDA-approved.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The drugs that a compounding pharmacy makes do not necessarily have to have been authorized by the FDA. Um, as long as, you know, they have a prescription for that drug from a healthcare provider, they will, will produce the drugs. And then there’s certain, uh, substances that they’re not allowed to make, such as the peptides that are currently on the 503B substances list. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The drugs that a compounding pharmacy makes do not necessarily have to have been authorized by the FDA. Um, as long as, you know, they have a prescription for that drug from a healthcare provider, they will, will produce the drugs. And then there’s certain, uh, substances that they’re not allowed to make, such as the peptides that are currently on the 503B substances list. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are 19 peptides on that 503B substances list, including Melanotan II. Earlier this year, the FDA announced that they were going to consider reclassifying \u003cem>some\u003c/em> of those banned peptides. This is not the same as FDA approval. They haven’t gone through clinical trials that guarantee safety or efficacy, and the FDA doesn’t verify the quality before they hit the market. But if they are reclassified, that means that compounding pharmacies are allowed to make and distribute medications that contain them. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are 19 peptides on that 503B substances list, including Melanotan II. Earlier this year, the FDA announced that they were going to consider reclassifying \u003cem>some\u003c/em> of those banned peptides. This is not the same as FDA approval. They haven’t gone through clinical trials that guarantee safety or efficacy, and the FDA doesn’t verify the quality before they hit the market. But if they are reclassified, that means that compounding pharmacies are allowed to make and distribute medications that contain them. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The argument that was probably most common from the people on the side of making peptides more accessible via compounding pharmacies was that it’s true that we don’t have all the data yet, and we do need more of it. However, we really don’t want people getting these drugs off the gray and black market because of the other health risks, you know, the risks of contamination, the risk of mislabeled drugs where you think that you’re getting one thing, you’re actually getting something else. And they basically said patients are demanding these drugs and we should make sure that if they’re going to take them, they’re taking it the safest way they can.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The argument that was probably most common from the people on the side of making peptides more accessible via compounding pharmacies was that it’s true that we don’t have all the data yet, and we do need more of it. However, we really don’t want people getting these drugs off the gray and black market because of the other health risks, you know, the risks of contamination, the risk of mislabeled drugs where you think that you’re getting one thing, you’re actually getting something else. And they basically said patients are demanding these drugs and we should make sure that if they’re going to take them, they’re taking it the safest way they can.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> In other words, it’s better to have Americans sourcing their peptides from regulated facilities, rather than overseas labs that may not be held to the same standards of sterility and quality.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> In other words, it’s better to have Americans sourcing their peptides from regulated facilities, rather than overseas labs that may not be held to the same standards of sterility and quality.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In July, an FDA advisory panel met to discuss whether or not to recommend reclassification for seven peptides.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In July, an FDA advisory panel met to discuss whether or not to recommend reclassification for seven peptides.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The advisory panel itself was really controversial. So this is a group of people who aren’t members of the FDA themselves, and the FDA doesn’t have to follow their recommendations, but typically, their recommendations carry a lot of weight, and typically, an advisory panel is made up of doctors, researchers, other experts in their field.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The advisory panel itself was really controversial. So this is a group of people who aren’t members of the FDA themselves, and the FDA doesn’t have to follow their recommendations, but typically, their recommendations carry a lot of weight, and typically, an advisory panel is made up of doctors, researchers, other experts in their field.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>In this case the people who were appointed to the panel, a lot of them were people who had some sort of potential conflict of interest or stake in the outcome of the decision on peptides, people who are prescribing peptides themselves, people who are you know, affiliated with compounding pharmacies in some way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>In this case the people who were appointed to the panel, a lot of them were people who had some sort of potential conflict of interest or stake in the outcome of the decision on peptides, people who are prescribing peptides themselves, people who are you know, affiliated with compounding pharmacies in some way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So that immediately raised a lot of red flags for critics who said, “How can we trust the advice of an advisory panel if it’s people who would potentially stand to profit from what the outcome is?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So that immediately raised a lot of red flags for critics who said, “How can we trust the advice of an advisory panel if it’s people who would potentially stand to profit from what the outcome is?”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pro-peptide crowd on the panel pointed out that patients are demanding these drugs, and that \u003cem>some \u003c/em>regulatory oversight is better than continuing to allow Americans to get their peptides from sketchy overseas labs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pro-peptide crowd on the panel pointed out that patients are demanding these drugs, and that \u003cem>some \u003c/em>regulatory oversight is better than continuing to allow Americans to get their peptides from sketchy overseas labs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>Then the counterargument from the medical experts is basically that there, again, simply isn’t enough human data on these drugs. There’s a lot of concern about what it would mean to make it easier for people to take these drugs that are indeed in high demand but that we simply don’t know what kinds of short or long-term health effects they might have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>Then the counterargument from the medical experts is basically that there, again, simply isn’t enough human data on these drugs. There’s a lot of concern about what it would mean to make it easier for people to take these drugs that are indeed in high demand but that we simply don’t know what kinds of short or long-term health effects they might have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And there have been cases of people reporting getting sick, having injuries from peptide doses. So, you know there are real concerns about what should be done in order to monitor peptides better and make sure that they’re safe. And you could hear a lot of frustration from the medical experts who were on the advisory panel as each vote on each separate drug went down.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And there have been cases of people reporting getting sick, having injuries from peptide doses. So, you know there are real concerns about what should be done in order to monitor peptides better and make sure that they’re safe. And you could hear a lot of frustration from the medical experts who were on the advisory panel as each vote on each separate drug went down.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They vote on each drug individually, so as they started seeing what was going to happen of those seven drugs, six got recommended to be reclassified so that compounding pharmacies could make them. So a lot of frustration from the medical experts saying like,’Once again, we don’t know enough about how these drugs will impact people. We’re really worried that this is gonna be dangerous and put people’s health and potentially even their lives at risk.’ And then they were outnumbered on the panel by the, the people who were affiliated with the peptide industry or prescription in some way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They vote on each drug individually, so as they started seeing what was going to happen of those seven drugs, six got recommended to be reclassified so that compounding pharmacies could make them. So a lot of frustration from the medical experts saying like,’Once again, we don’t know enough about how these drugs will impact people. We’re really worried that this is gonna be dangerous and put people’s health and potentially even their lives at risk.’ And then they were outnumbered on the panel by the, the people who were affiliated with the peptide industry or prescription in some way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this is where it gets really dicey. Before the advisory panel met, the FDA itself came out and said, hey, we say no to allowing compounding pharmacies to make any of these peptides. This was a decision made by multiple FDA staff scientists. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this is where it gets really dicey. Before the advisory panel met, the FDA itself came out and said, hey, we say no to allowing compounding pharmacies to make any of these peptides. This was a decision made by multiple FDA staff scientists. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that was directly in conflict with the outcome of the meeting, which said six out of these seven peptides, they do recommend changing classifications.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that was directly in conflict with the outcome of the meeting, which said six out of these seven peptides, they do recommend changing classifications.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Advisory panels rarely go against the FDA staff recommendation. According to reports of that meeting, after the votes were tallied and the recommendation was announced, an audible gasp rippled through the room. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Advisory panels rarely go against the FDA staff recommendation. According to reports of that meeting, after the votes were tallied and the recommendation was announced, an audible gasp rippled through the room. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>So with that, it’s gonna be really interesting to see now what happens. The ultimate decision is up to the FDA. So normally, it would be even if the advisory panel had recommended against, if FDA staffers felt really strongly, they could do whatever they felt was right but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of course, is the head of the health department. He has a lot of power and influence, and I think a lot of outside observers are betting that even if FDA staff don’t think that this change should be made, that Kennedy may push it through which would obviously be quite bad for FDA morale as well.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>So with that, it’s gonna be really interesting to see now what happens. The ultimate decision is up to the FDA. So normally, it would be even if the advisory panel had recommended against, if FDA staffers felt really strongly, they could do whatever they felt was right but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of course, is the head of the health department. He has a lot of power and influence, and I think a lot of outside observers are betting that even if FDA staff don’t think that this change should be made, that Kennedy may push it through which would obviously be quite bad for FDA morale as well.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Who will benefit from this decision? Well, like we talked about earlier, the telehealth industry and their in-house compounding pharmacies make a TON of money. And now they stand to make even more. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Who will benefit from this decision? Well, like we talked about earlier, the telehealth industry and their in-house compounding pharmacies make a TON of money. And now they stand to make even more. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When you have people on the panel who it’s clear to see how they’re seeing a lot of patient demand. If they’re able to provide more prescriptions to patients for peptides, that is good for their business.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When you have people on the panel who it’s clear to see how they’re seeing a lot of patient demand. If they’re able to provide more prescriptions to patients for peptides, that is good for their business.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>For the compounding pharmacies, it’s certainly huge for their bottom line. Hims and Hers announced that they’re looking to start offering peptides this year. Noom has also moved to start offering peptides. They purchased a compounding pharmacy business. So there are a lot of companies that certainly see an upside to giving into demand.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>For the compounding pharmacies, it’s certainly huge for their bottom line. Hims and Hers announced that they’re looking to start offering peptides this year. Noom has also moved to start offering peptides. They purchased a compounding pharmacy business. So there are a lot of companies that certainly see an upside to giving into demand.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But as one of the people who I spoke with pointed out, simply because people want drugs isn’t a good reason to authorize them, and simply because we don’t want them to get it off the gray market. If that were the case, then we would legalize heroin, which indeed actually some libertarians think we should, but which the majority of people think that there are good reasons to not do such a thing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But as one of the people who I spoke with pointed out, simply because people want drugs isn’t a good reason to authorize them, and simply because we don’t want them to get it off the gray market. If that were the case, then we would legalize heroin, which indeed actually some libertarians think we should, but which the majority of people think that there are good reasons to not do such a thing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> so given the FDA’s, uh, I guess, like despite their tensions, um, what does the future of peptide stacking look like now?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> so given the FDA’s, uh, I guess, like despite their tensions, um, what does the future of peptide stacking look like now?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> For people who are enthusiastic about peptides, I think the future is bright in the sense of them being able to access them. I think it looks like more and more likely that there’s going to be a lot of regulatory interest under Kennedy as long as he’s in power in making these products more accessible.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> For people who are enthusiastic about peptides, I think the future is bright in the sense of them being able to access them. I think it looks like more and more likely that there’s going to be a lot of regulatory interest under Kennedy as long as he’s in power in making these products more accessible.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think that in terms of what the future looks like from a health perspective, the reality is that we simply don’t know, and that’s kind of scary. We don’t know what kind of effects these are going to have, and we don’t really right now have a robust way of monitoring or surveying for those effects either.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think that in terms of what the future looks like from a health perspective, the reality is that we simply don’t know, and that’s kind of scary. We don’t know what kind of effects these are going to have, and we don’t really right now have a robust way of monitoring or surveying for those effects either.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So what you would really wanna see are clinical trials that are studying people who are taking peptides and researching those outcomes, and that is one thing that we don’t currently have right now. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So what you would really wanna see are clinical trials that are studying people who are taking peptides and researching those outcomes, and that is one thing that we don’t currently have right now. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But again, a recommendation isn’t the same as FDA approval. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But again, a recommendation isn’t the same as FDA approval. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Just because this, uh, the panel has said this, that doesn’t mean that compounding pharmacies now have the go-ahead to start producing them. The final decision is up to the FDA and the FDA rulemaking. I believe that outside experts think that process could take up to a year, so it’s not something that we would expect to see immediately happening.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Just because this, uh, the panel has said this, that doesn’t mean that compounding pharmacies now have the go-ahead to start producing them. The final decision is up to the FDA and the FDA rulemaking. I believe that outside experts think that process could take up to a year, so it’s not something that we would expect to see immediately happening.\u003c/p>\n"
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"text": "Morgan Sung: What about Melanotan II? Unfortunately for the tanmaxxers, the Barbie pep was not included in this latest list of panel recommendations. But it will get its moment soon: The FDA is slated to evaluate Melanotan II and four more peptides for reclassification early next year. ",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>What about Melanotan II? Unfortunately for the tanmaxxers, the Barbie pep was not included in this latest list of panel recommendations. But it will get its moment soon: The FDA is slated to evaluate Melanotan II and four more peptides for reclassification early next year. \u003c/h2>\n",
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"\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>What about Melanotan II? Unfortunately for the tanmaxxers, the Barbie pep was not included in this latest list of panel recommendations. But it will get its moment soon: The FDA is slated to evaluate Melanotan II and four more peptides for reclassification early next year. \u003c/h2>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean it’s hard to get a hold of now, though. When I searched “Melanotan II near me,” I found dozens of medical spas across LA that advertise it as part of their “peptide therapy.” For $95, I could drive over to Beverly Hills and pick up a 5 mL vial at a clinic, or $150, I could get it delivered! Mobile IV clinics also offer it as an add-on to their on-demand IV services, so I could get my tan on, get a whole GLOW stack injected, and get a hangover cure administered at the same time, in my own living room! It’s like doordash for peptides! \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean it’s hard to get a hold of now, though. When I searched “Melanotan II near me,” I found dozens of medical spas across LA that advertise it as part of their “peptide therapy.” For $95, I could drive over to Beverly Hills and pick up a 5 mL vial at a clinic, or $150, I could get it delivered! Mobile IV clinics also offer it as an add-on to their on-demand IV services, so I could get my tan on, get a whole GLOW stack injected, and get a hangover cure administered at the same time, in my own living room! It’s like doordash for peptides! \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Though, Dr. Grewal does not find that as amusing as I do. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Though, Dr. Grewal does not find that as amusing as I do. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> My gut reaction is honestly mortified, terrified, but also not surprised. And again, it just really brings me back to the point of, you know, the body is really complicated and medicine is complicated.I think the most important thing is that you research the person that is endorsing a specific product or, um, or approach, right? So, like, I love that people research, but I would really encourage, and I’m an advocate of spending the most time researching your source, who you’re going to assign as being credible\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> My gut reaction is honestly mortified, terrified, but also not surprised. And again, it just really brings me back to the point of, you know, the body is really complicated and medicine is complicated.I think the most important thing is that you research the person that is endorsing a specific product or, um, or approach, right? So, like, I love that people research, but I would really encourage, and I’m an advocate of spending the most time researching your source, who you’re going to assign as being credible\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>As much as I love my skincare routine and gratuitous pursuit of beauty, I personally will be staying clear of the Barbie peptide. A little gradual tanning lotion and my trusty tanning mitt has never done me wrong. Plus, I don’t have to worry about breaking out into funky looking moles! \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>As much as I love my skincare routine and gratuitous pursuit of beauty, I personally will be staying clear of the Barbie peptide. A little gradual tanning lotion and my trusty tanning mitt has never done me wrong. Plus, I don’t have to worry about breaking out into funky looking moles! \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Ok, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Ok, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cbr>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>\u003cbr>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The Close All Tabs team also includes senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>The Close All Tabs team also includes senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips from TikTok creators carlysnaxwell, itsdevnyc, and cablequeencourt, clips from the Instagram accounts ToxDaddy and sooshbrah, and YouTube clips from SpaAndTell and Joe Rogan Experience.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips from TikTok creators carlysnaxwell, itsdevnyc, and cablequeencourt, clips from the Instagram accounts ToxDaddy and sooshbrah, and YouTube clips from SpaAndTell and Joe Rogan Experience.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening! \u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, my ‘foryou’ page every day it’s like, “Who’s on Glow? Who’s on the Glow stack or the Barbie stack?” Like you can’t escape it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, my ‘foryou’ page every day it’s like, “Who’s on Glow? Who’s on the Glow stack or the Barbie stack?” Like you can’t escape it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Yeah, all over.\u003c/p>\n",
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"description": "Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>\u003ca href=\"#episode-transcript\">\u003cem>View the full episode transcript.\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Seems like everywhere you turn these days, influencers are gushing about their peptide use and how it’s done wonders for their appearance and health. One of the more popular ones, Melanotan II, also known as the “Barbie” peptide, is said to give you a tan without the harmful effects of sun exposure. But many of these substances aren’t approved by the FDA and are often sold through unregulated gray market sources. So, how safe is any of this stuff? And what does the peptide boom tell us about the risks people will take in the name of “looksmaxxing?” Morgan talks to skin cancer surgeon Dr. Sungat Grewal and board certified dermatologist Dr. Caren Campbell about the risks of taking peptides. Then Morgan and STAT News reporter Sarah Todd break down how American medical libertarianism and the MAHA movement led us to this very point in time. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Guests:\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.ucsfhealth.org/providers/sungat-grewal\">Dr. Sungat Grewal\u003c/a>, double board-certified dermatologist and Mohs surgeon\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.carencampbellmd.com/?srsltid=AU7gw4XTOrftqgnQy6ysplZ8IdAO4P-TLRwup140ITmchvEhXpO36qrR\">Dr. Caren Campbell\u003c/a>, board-certified dermatologist\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/staff/sarah-todd/\">Sarah Todd\u003c/a>, reporter for \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Further Reading/Listening:\u003c/strong>\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/06/rfk-jr-apparent-contradiction-peptides-vaccines-medical-libertarianism/\">What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/24/fda-peptide-compounding-panel-backs-epitalon-rejects-emideltide/\">FDA advisory panel narrowly rejects compounding of one peptide, backs two others\u003c/a> — Lizzy Lawrence and Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/07/23/fda-panel-okays-peptides-compound-pharmacies-bpc-157-kpv/\">FDA panel backs compounded BPC-157, KPV peptides in win for RFK Jr.\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd and Lizzy Lawrence, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.statnews.com/2026/04/06/rfk-jr-apparent-contradiction-peptides-vaccines-medical-libertarianism/\">What the peptide craze reveals about Americans’ relationship with risk\u003c/a> — Sarah Todd, \u003cem>STAT News\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.elle.com/beauty/health-fitness/a73232620/tanmaxxing-trend-explained-interview-2026/\">Is Tanmaxxing an Addiction? A Dermatologist and Psychologist Explains\u003c/a> — Katie Berohn, \u003cem>ELLE\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.gq.com/story/inside-the-weird-new-world-of-peptide-tanning\">Inside the Weird New World of Peptide Tanning\u003c/a> — Savannah Sobrevilla, \u003cem>GQ\u003c/em> \u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.axios.com/2026/06/29/barbie-drug-peptide-shot-tan\">Melanotan: The “Barbie drug” tanning peptide, explained\u003c/a> — Carly Mallenbaum, \u003cem>Axios\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.latimes.com/live-well/longevity/story/tanning-peptides-melanotan-vyleesi-pt141\">Inside the Viral Tanning Peptide That Accidentally Created Vyleesi’s FDA-Approved Low Sex Drive Drug\u003c/a> — Sara Kitnick, \u003cem>LA Times Studios\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.allure.com/story/fda-peptide-ban-reversal\">The FDA May Reverse a Ban on 14 Injectable Peptides—What That Means For the Beauty Industry\u003c/a> — Kara Nesvig, \u003cem>Allure\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003ca href=\"https://www.skincancer.org/press/the-skin-cancer-foundation-issues-warning-regarding-melanotan-ii/\">The Skin Cancer Foundation Issues Warning Regarding Melanotan II\u003c/a> — Deborah S. Sarnoff, MD, \u003cem>Skin Cancer Foundation\u003c/em>\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Want to give us feedback on the show? Shoot us an email at \u003ca href=\"mailto:CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\">CloseAllTabs@KQED.org\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Follow us on \u003ca href=\"https://www.instagram.com/closealltabspod/\">Instagram\u003c/a> and\u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@closealltabs\">TikTok\u003c/a>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-content post-body\">\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"episode-transcript\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cem>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/em>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Host, Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Hello! Do you like these deep dives? Do you want more? Then please rate and review Close All Tabs on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to the show! And tell your friends! Post about it! On Instagram, Bluesky, X, Discord, Reddit, the comments of whatever random recipe blog you start arguments in. Basically, it would be a huge help to get the word out. Ok, let’s get to the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Can I be honest? I am pretty vain.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I take my skincare routine very seriously: Prescription-strength azelaic acid in the morning, and prescription-strength tretinoin at night. Lots of sunscreen and moisturizer and barrier creams in between, and every other night, I skip the tretinoin and spend three minutes under a red light mask. If I’m feeling indulgent, I’ll throw in a Korean gel mask and a jade roller. Do those do anything? I honestly can’t tell. But it feels nice! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I wouldn’t call myself a looksmaxxer, but I do spend a good amount of time on these beautification rituals. And as a woman who exists on the internet, I feel like my For You Page is constantly lobbing beauty trends at me, and like I’m always trying to avoid getting sucked into yet another fad. I have tried so many serums and face masks and supplements before finally settling into what I consider to be a pretty pared down beauty regiment. But the one thing I haven’t tried yet is a peptide. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It seems like everyone is on them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clips of influencers raving about peptides]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Speaker 1: This is, in my opinion, the most slept-on peptide on the market today. There’s two main benefits that have been life-changing for me . \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Speaker 2: You’re telling me there’s a botox alternative that’s easier on your wallet? Whoa! Let’s talk about Snap-8, the peptide that targets wrinkles without the needles. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Peptides are chemical signals that your body naturally makes to regulate all kinds of bodily functions, like digestion and recovery. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> So peptides are like text messages. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Sungat Grewal is a double board certified dermatologist and skin cancer surgeon. She’s the co-director of Laser Surgery and Cosmetic Dermatology at UCSF. And she’s been keeping an eye on the synthetic peptides people are taking to boost their bodies’ natural processes. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>They’re not necessarily good or bad inherently, but it depends on who’s sending the message, what the message is, and who receives it. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And I’m not just talking about GLP-1s. Peptide stacking is really in right now. Retatrutide and Tesamorelin for weight loss, Ipamorelin for muscle growth, the “Wolverine Stack” of BPC-157 and TB-500 to boost healing after a gym sesh. If you throw in the copper peptide GHK-Cu, you’ve got a “Glow Stack,” the hot girl combo optimized for anti-aging collagen production. It’s a lot, right? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some of these compounds are not cleared by the FDA, so the way people get a hold of them is a legal hit or miss. But peptides remain incredibly popular despite the gray market. And there’s one that’s \u003cem>really\u003c/em> blown up this summer: Melanotan II. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cbr>[Clip from Youtube User @SpaandTell]\u003cbr>Kylie says hi Kim your tan looks great. Thank you! I’ve been using the melanotan II peptide over the last month, and I’ve been going outside, and it’s been working like a charm, so excited. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>MT-2 for short — also known as “The Barbie peptide” or “the vacation drug.” It makes you tan, skinny, and horny (it’s a libido booster) — with no harmful UV exposure required. But Dr. Grewal says it also comes with legitimately concerning risks. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>It’s pretty scary and it’s very sad, you know, when, um, people are chasing aesthetic goals and are being misdirected and exposing themselves to unknown risks or known risks, not only in the moment, but for future and forever forward, right? Some of these impacts have long-lasting effects.\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Today, we’re diving into the world of peptides: the dangers of tanmaxxing despite the influencer promotion, and RFK Jr’s crusade to reverse the peptide bans in the U.S. What does the peptide craze say about Americans’ relationship with health and risk? Let’s jump in. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We’re starting with a new tab. What is melanotan?\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m part of a few weddings this year, and I wanted to look a little more sunkissed. But I’m inside like, all the time, and I have no interest in tanning beds because I don’t want to wrinkle. Again, vain! Sorry! So I started looking into self tanners. I looked up a few beauty influencers who reviewed tanning lotions … and that’s when my feed was inundated with people\u003cs> \u003c/s>recommending this miracle drug: MT-2.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @toxdaddy]\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Oh man, I’m super excited. I just got Melanotan 2 this morning and I’m really excited to try it.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @carlysnaxwell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I started taking MT2. I’m tan. I haven’t gone bed tanning in a while… \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @itsdevync]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I’m now at two months of taking it. I’m obsessed. My tan is only getting better … \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Youtube user@SpaandTell]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>I am crazy impressed by this – by this, I mean, the Melanotan 2 peptide.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> And it’s not just the tan that makes it so appealing. Dr. Grewal says Melanotan II also has some specific side effects…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong> It’s marketed as the Barbie peptide because tanning might be the effect that you’re shopping for, but it’s not the only effect and some of them can translate into, um, increased libido or decreased appetite. \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>How does it do all that? Well, let’s talk about how peptides work. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Again, peptides are the chemical signals for your body to perform certain functions. Your body has tons of receptors, and peptides can target specific ones, almost like sending a text to a specific phone number. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>You can think about two kinds, like natural versus synthetic. So our body makes peptides naturally. Some common examples would be like insulin or GLP-1. And synthetically, you know, we can create, uh, synthetic peptides to mimic those that are made naturally in the body to get a specific effect\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Melanotan I and Melanotan II are synthetic peptides that…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> …mimic a naturally occurring peptide in the body called alpha-MSH or melanocyte-stimulating hormone. And so there are receptors that are in numerous places in the body called melanocortin receptors that can respond to this signal or chain of events.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are five types of melanocortin receptors in the body. The first regulates hair and skin pigmentation, and it’s what triggers tans. And it’s also really important to understand what getting tan \u003cem>really\u003c/em> means for your body. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest, Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> It’s literally your nucleus and your cell saying, “Oh my God, save my DNA.” \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung : \u003c/strong>This is Dr. Caren Campbell, a board certified dermatologist who practices medical, surgical, and cosmetic dermatology in San Francisco. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell: \u003c/strong>You know, it’s putting an umbrella over it. Your cell is saying, like, “Help me. Protect my DNA so I don’t mutate and cause cancer.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That little umbrella is called eumelanin, and it produces brown and black pigments in the body. It’s what causes darker colors in skin, eyes, and hair. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So Melanotan I sends a text to that first melanocortin receptor, which tells your cells to pop their little umbrellas up to protect their DNA … which is what triggers a tan, without actual UV exposure. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Melanotan I is actually FDA-approved for a very, very specific, very rare skin condition that causes extreme sensitivity to light.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Erythropoietic protoporphyria\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Or EPP for short. It’s actually so rare that Dr. Grewal has never seen the condition in her medical career. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Its incidence has been estimated at two to five cases per million people. You would know if you had this because you have symptoms when you’re a young child. Children have very severe, painful, uh, photosensitivity after exposure to sunlight or even visible light, which can come from even indoor lights, laptop screens.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>EPP causes extreme swelling, burning, and pain when exposed to certain light. So the FDA approved a prescription implant of Melanotan I for people with EPP, which stimulates their bodies to produce eumelanin. These little cell umbrellas absorb that light before it can damage their skin. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, Melanotan II, which is the hot one right now, sends a group text to that first receptor. But remember, there are \u003cem>5\u003c/em> melanocortin receptors in the body. So it’s also sending that text to receptors three, four, and five as well. And these aren’t just in the skin. They’re all over the body, including in the central nervous system, which is why MT-2 can cause appetite suppression and boost libido. And because these receptors are all over the body, MT-2 can also cause unpredictable systemic changes … with unpleasant and even dangerous symptoms. Here’s Dr. Campbell again. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> In men, that can lead to potentially what’s called priapism, which is where you have an erection that, you know, doesn’t go away, and there was a, a case report of someone needing to have that surgically drained in the emergency room.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, it, it also can cause nausea and vomiting. It’s also stimulates our sympathetic nervous system, which you can think about that like your fight or flight. So anything you needed to, like, run away from a predator, it does. So it dilates your pupils so you can see better.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It causes, you know, increased heart rate so you can get running. It causes hypertension ’cause it constricts your blood vessels. Um, so that fight or flight response can be elevated and you can get what’s called rhabdomyolysis, which is where you get muscle breakdown, and it can be very dangerous, um, life-threatening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So those side effects are pretty rough. But Dr. Grewal says there’s also this main one … \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> We have seen reports of patients like breaking out in moles, for example, and breaking out in atypical or what we call funky looking moles, right? \u003cs>\u003cbr>\u003c/s>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from TikTok user @\u003c/em>cablequeencourt]\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>Let’s count how many moles we have on our face since taking MT2. So this one’s new. This is new …Yeah, um, and that’s not including what’s going on on my body….\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Moles are clusters of melanocytes, the skin cells that make pigment. Most are totally benign. But like Dr. Grewal said, Melanotan moles are … funky.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Because it’s stimulating the same pathway that can eventually lead to melanoma. And again, we don’t have causation yet, but we do not have long-term data. And so why would you subject yourself to that risk when you can use other methods to tan the skin safely without breaking out in moles? And the moles are not just darker, the moles, like, look concerning. They, they often have atypical features.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Those little cell umbrellas can only protect so much. And if you’re exposing them to harmful UV rays over and over again, they can mutate and become cancerous. One of the ways dermatologists evaluate moles for cancer is by checking if they’ve evolved — if they’re getting bigger, darker, and wonkier. This isn’t as much of a concern for patients who are prescribed MT-1 for EPP, since they’re generally not engaging in risky behavior that causes additional UV damage — like intentionally tanning. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But when it comes to the tanmaxxers … \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[Clip from Instagram user @sooshbrah]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>This is 2021, 2022, I was doing 500 micrograms of Melanotan and I was jumping in the tanning bed for 15 minutes. I literally changed race in like three sessions. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Caren Campbell:\u003c/strong> I can’t say for certain that, you know, melanotan causes melanoma. But we do know based on what are, again, called case [00:23:00] reports, where we don’t have large numbers, but we have good evidence of people who’ve started melanotan and then as soon as two weeks noticed almost immediate darkening and irregularity of their moles.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Dr. Campbell said that in this case report, one of the patients had used tanning beds and melanotan at the same time, and had five new moles biopsied. All five were cancerous. And there aren’t many clinical studies on the effects of long-term melanotan use, in a broad population of users who don’t have EPP. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Melanotan II was actually developed in the late 80s to early 90s, and in the early 2000s, researchers began testing it to treat sexual dysfunction. But Dr. Grewal says there’s a reason it never made it to market. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> Usually when a peptide or any product is on its way to becoming a drug, it goes through rigorous testing, and pharmaceuticals would love to sell it because they’re gonna profit immensely. So usually when it drops off the track, it’s because either it’s not providing the results that they’re hoping for or the safety is not promising\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Despite that, both MT-1 and MT-2 are still wildly popular on the gray market, as both a nasal spray and an injectable. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal: \u003c/strong>Unfortunately I am not surprised because, you know, the story of wanting tanner skin is a story we’ve heard before. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Um, you know, first it was tanning beds, now we know how dangerous those are in terms of increasing melanoma risk even with one use, you know, before the age of 30. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And as is the case with many unregulated, technically illegal peptides, vendors can sell them around the US thanks to a handy loophole: the “Research Use Only” pathway. Essentially saying, this product legally isn’t for human consumption, with no quality guarantee or regulatory oversight. But there’s really nothing that can stop buyers from using it on themselves. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> You have to remember that when it’s not FDA regulated, you really have no idea what’s in the bottle. What you’re getting in your bottle is like a crapshoot. So, you know, and historically we’ve seen issues with, um, sterility of products, contamination with unregulated products, and the concentration and the purity is also unknown.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that alone is like a huge reason why I would never advise anyone to take a non FDA-approved medication, whether or not it’s a peptide, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>So knowing all of these risks, both healthwise and lookswise, why are people bent on taking Melanotan? And this is just one of many unregulated, very popular peptides! What’s driving the peptide boom in spite of medical experts’ warnings?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That is a whole new tab… for after this quick break. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But first, we wanted to remind you that Close All Tabs depends on listeners like you! To become a member and support the show, go to donate dot kqed dot org slash podcasts. Ok, after the break: we’re diving into medical libertarianism. Stick around.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Welcome back! Time to open a new tab. Peptides and medical libertarianism. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>RFK Jr, the vaccine denier and guy in charge of our entire country’s health department, is also a pep pusher. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cbr>\u003cem>Yeah I mean I’m a big fan of peptides. I’ve used them myself. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That was RFK Jr on Joe Rogan’s podcast earlier this year, where he spoke about the proliferation of unregulated peptides. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>[RFK Jr. speaking on the Joe Rogan Podcast]\u003c/em>\u003cem>\u003cbr>\u003c/em>\u003cem>A black market came out and the black market is run by companies that say they’re making the peptides for animal use or research purposes. \u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So basically when you buy peptides online you don’t have any guarantees about the safety and the quality of what you’re buying. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>That’s Sarah Todd, a reporter at STAT News. She covers the business of health, which means she’s also been following the gray market peptide industry. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> New York Magazine had a bunch of peptides tested and found that about a third of them were mislabeled or under or overdosed or contaminated by bacteria. So those are all some of the potential health risks that you run into when you’re getting them off the gray and black market.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But that hasn’t diminished people’s appetite for peptides. Sarah says this all falls in line with a concept called “medical libertarianism” — the idea that we should be allowed to do whatever we want with our bodies regardless of what the government or medical establishment says.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that extends to taking drugs like peptides that don’t have a lot of data behind them when it comes to their impacts on humans, either their benefits or their potential risks. But the idea with medical libertarianism is, like, that’s my choice, and if I’m willing to put my body on the line for the hopeful benefits that I can get, then I should be able to do so.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>It’s a very American mindset. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> It really goes along with this sort of all-American idea that we can control our own destinies and make our own choices, right? And a sort of suspicion about the government’s role in overseeing people’s lives, a desire to, you know, ward off the idea of the nanny state and the idea that people should be able to chase their own pursuit of happiness and the American dream.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And if that includes self-optimizing your body and your health, then that’s something that people should be allowed to do, would be the argument that these people are making.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Americans have always had this attitude about health. In the 1970s, there was a huge backlash from the public when the government tried to regulate vitamin and supplement industries…\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People wrote in and said, “Don’t take my vitamins away, “ and we wound up with the situation that we have today, where they’re still many people would argue, uh, largely unregulated or very under-regulated. I think that people really wanted to hold on to these kinds of products. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There have been ebbs and flows to medical libertarianism throughout modern American history. And then the COVID 19 pandemic hit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> People started self-experimenting with all kinds of things, like everything from ivermectin, which you m- may remember, to some sort of herbal medicines.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> On one hand, you had a lot of interest in sort of like experimentation with drugs to see what you could do to improve your own health, protect yourself potentially from COVID in various ways. We also saw a big boom in the rise of social media health influencers, health and wellness influencers during this time as well, and I think that has played a huge role.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Many of the sort of man-fluencers like Joe Rogan and, and Gary Brecka and Andrew Huberman were already popular pre-pandemic, but sort of like became even more so, gained huge followings during, and I think that that’s had a lot to do with the sort of rising awareness of peptides and interest in trying them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>People started taking this “folk pharmacology” approach to medicine. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So that term folk pharmacology was mentioned by a researcher I spoke with for a story.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>His name is Luke Turnock, and he talked about how first it sort of started, uh, with peptides in the gym, with bodybuilders and powerlifters sort of sharing, like, “Oh, this, this drug is really helping me recover from this industry. This drug is making me stronger.” But he applies that to the way that people talk about peptides in online spaces and forums as well, where people are generally a lot more likely to believe somebody else on a Reddit forum than they might be to listen to a researcher who’s telling them there’s not enough data to support taking these drugs.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think it, it has to do with some of the decline of trust in science, and then it also has to do with the sort of, like, just stock that we put in recommendations from other people who we perceive as regular people, whether that’s, like, you know, somebody telling us, like, “Oh, I love this vacuum,” or in this case, “I love my Wolverine stack,” you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The Make American Healthy Again movement is also pretty staunchly anti-vaccine. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When I first started thinking about this, I was like, “This seems like a huge contradiction.” I didn’t understand why the MAHA movement would be so skeptical toward vaccines and yet really welcoming toward peptides. But I think it comes back to what we were talking about with medical libertarianism.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of the MAHA people don’t necessarily want nobody to get vaccines. They say they are more wary of certain vaccine mandates. So there the idea again is like, “Don’t tell me what to do with my own body. It should be my choice whether or not I take it.” Peptides, again, they’re saying they don’t want everybody to have to take peptides.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They just wanna be able to take peptides if they want to. So that’s where it all sort of begins to make sense in an overall worldview.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this brand of medical libertarianism is applied pretty inconsistently. RFK Jr’s MAHA agenda is actively restricting access to trans healthcare, birth control, and abortion — issues that revolve around bodily autonomy. But when it comes to peptides? They believe the government should be hands-off. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It goes back to a Biden-era decision.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> So back in 2023, the Biden administration moved a bunch of peptides into a different category. That meant that compounding pharmacies could no longer produce them, and their reasons were basically, you know, what we’ve been talking about the typical warnings that we get from the medical community, that these drugs haven’t been studied enough to be able to say definitively that they are either going to do what they promise they’ll do or that they won’t cause some other big problem like cancer as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that was the reason for moving over the classification. Now what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is looking to do is to reclassify some of those peptides so the compounding pharmacies can indeed begin producing them again.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> Which means that they can be legally produced in the US, under \u003cem>some\u003c/em> regulatory oversight — unlike the facilities that are producing gray market peptides now. Compounding pharmacies at least have to be licensed and routinely inspected through state pharmacy boards. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>RFK JR. has been on this crusade to get the FDA to lift this Biden-era peptide ban — which he talked about on that same Joe Rogan podcast episode.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> He basically said that he is a fan of peptides. He wants to make them more accessible via compounding pharmacies. Uh, but the reason he says is not necessarily he understands that not all the science and data is out there on peptides yet, but he says that it’s gonna be safer for people to get them from compounding pharmacies than to get them off the gray and black market, and that’s sort of his logic for, for why it would make sense to, to reclassify them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And that is a new tab. Are peptides legal now? \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>I\u003c/strong>t’s complicated. We’re gonna start by explaining different kinds of pharmacies. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So, typical pharmacies make and dispense FDA-approved drugs. There are the retail pharmacies that sell over-the-counter allergy meds or fill your prescriptions for blood pressure pills. There are specialty pharmacies that manage medications for very rare, highly complex health conditions, which might require stricter protocols for handling, storing, and administering meds. Both of these types of pharmacies mainly deal with medications that have already been manufactured. The pharmacy makes sure they’re giving patients the right dosage and right amount of pre-made meds. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Now, compounding pharmacies mix the medications themselves. There are lots of reasons why people use them: maybe the commercial version of the drug includes ingredients they’re allergic to, or maybe they need a cream, not a gel. Maybe the only way to get the right dosage is by getting a custom mix. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Sometimes there are drug shortages, and compounding pharmacies can be an alternative as well then because they can custom make a particular drug that maybe, uh, isn’t available at the moment. It might also be, as was the case with GLP-1 weight loss drugs, uh, compounding pharmacies were making a lot of, uh, GLP-1 drugs that were alternatives to the more expensive ones, like Ozempic and Wegovy, and the idea h- here was, like, you sacrifice the sort of name brand, uh, aspect, but then you, you could get the, the drugs that would have, hopefully, the same effects for cheaper.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that’s another reason why people might turn to compounding pharmacies as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>In recent years, compounding pharmacies have become wildly lucrative, thanks to the rise of for-profit telehealth. A lot of telehealth companies have in-house compounding pharmacies, and they sell all kinds of prescription meds: personalized topical creams with Tretinoin and Niacinamide for acne, chewable tablets of Finasteride and Minoxidil for hair loss, low-dose Vardenafil for erectile dysfunction, custom-mixed hormone replacement suppositories for menopause, and now, compounded GLP-1s for weight loss. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Compounding pharmacies can legally make anything … as long the ingredients they’re working are good with the FDA. The final product doesn’t have to be FDA-approved.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The drugs that a compounding pharmacy makes do not necessarily have to have been authorized by the FDA. Um, as long as, you know, they have a prescription for that drug from a healthcare provider, they will, will produce the drugs. And then there’s certain, uh, substances that they’re not allowed to make, such as the peptides that are currently on the 503B substances list. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>There are 19 peptides on that 503B substances list, including Melanotan II. Earlier this year, the FDA announced that they were going to consider reclassifying \u003cem>some\u003c/em> of those banned peptides. This is not the same as FDA approval. They haven’t gone through clinical trials that guarantee safety or efficacy, and the FDA doesn’t verify the quality before they hit the market. But if they are reclassified, that means that compounding pharmacies are allowed to make and distribute medications that contain them. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The argument that was probably most common from the people on the side of making peptides more accessible via compounding pharmacies was that it’s true that we don’t have all the data yet, and we do need more of it. However, we really don’t want people getting these drugs off the gray and black market because of the other health risks, you know, the risks of contamination, the risk of mislabeled drugs where you think that you’re getting one thing, you’re actually getting something else. And they basically said patients are demanding these drugs and we should make sure that if they’re going to take them, they’re taking it the safest way they can.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> In other words, it’s better to have Americans sourcing their peptides from regulated facilities, rather than overseas labs that may not be held to the same standards of sterility and quality.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In July, an FDA advisory panel met to discuss whether or not to recommend reclassification for seven peptides.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> The advisory panel itself was really controversial. So this is a group of people who aren’t members of the FDA themselves, and the FDA doesn’t have to follow their recommendations, but typically, their recommendations carry a lot of weight, and typically, an advisory panel is made up of doctors, researchers, other experts in their field.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>In this case the people who were appointed to the panel, a lot of them were people who had some sort of potential conflict of interest or stake in the outcome of the decision on peptides, people who are prescribing peptides themselves, people who are you know, affiliated with compounding pharmacies in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So that immediately raised a lot of red flags for critics who said, “How can we trust the advice of an advisory panel if it’s people who would potentially stand to profit from what the outcome is?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>The pro-peptide crowd on the panel pointed out that patients are demanding these drugs, and that \u003cem>some \u003c/em>regulatory oversight is better than continuing to allow Americans to get their peptides from sketchy overseas labs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>Then the counterargument from the medical experts is basically that there, again, simply isn’t enough human data on these drugs. There’s a lot of concern about what it would mean to make it easier for people to take these drugs that are indeed in high demand but that we simply don’t know what kinds of short or long-term health effects they might have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And there have been cases of people reporting getting sick, having injuries from peptide doses. So, you know there are real concerns about what should be done in order to monitor peptides better and make sure that they’re safe. And you could hear a lot of frustration from the medical experts who were on the advisory panel as each vote on each separate drug went down.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They vote on each drug individually, so as they started seeing what was going to happen of those seven drugs, six got recommended to be reclassified so that compounding pharmacies could make them. So a lot of frustration from the medical experts saying like,’Once again, we don’t know enough about how these drugs will impact people. We’re really worried that this is gonna be dangerous and put people’s health and potentially even their lives at risk.’ And then they were outnumbered on the panel by the, the people who were affiliated with the peptide industry or prescription in some way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>And this is where it gets really dicey. Before the advisory panel met, the FDA itself came out and said, hey, we say no to allowing compounding pharmacies to make any of these peptides. This was a decision made by multiple FDA staff scientists. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> And that was directly in conflict with the outcome of the meeting, which said six out of these seven peptides, they do recommend changing classifications.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Advisory panels rarely go against the FDA staff recommendation. According to reports of that meeting, after the votes were tallied and the recommendation was announced, an audible gasp rippled through the room. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd: \u003c/strong>So with that, it’s gonna be really interesting to see now what happens. The ultimate decision is up to the FDA. So normally, it would be even if the advisory panel had recommended against, if FDA staffers felt really strongly, they could do whatever they felt was right but Robert F. Kennedy Jr., of course, is the head of the health department. He has a lot of power and influence, and I think a lot of outside observers are betting that even if FDA staff don’t think that this change should be made, that Kennedy may push it through which would obviously be quite bad for FDA morale as well.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>Who will benefit from this decision? Well, like we talked about earlier, the telehealth industry and their in-house compounding pharmacies make a TON of money. And now they stand to make even more. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> When you have people on the panel who it’s clear to see how they’re seeing a lot of patient demand. If they’re able to provide more prescriptions to patients for peptides, that is good for their business.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>For the compounding pharmacies, it’s certainly huge for their bottom line. Hims and Hers announced that they’re looking to start offering peptides this year. Noom has also moved to start offering peptides. They purchased a compounding pharmacy business. So there are a lot of companies that certainly see an upside to giving into demand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But as one of the people who I spoke with pointed out, simply because people want drugs isn’t a good reason to authorize them, and simply because we don’t want them to get it off the gray market. If that were the case, then we would legalize heroin, which indeed actually some libertarians think we should, but which the majority of people think that there are good reasons to not do such a thing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong> so given the FDA’s, uh, I guess, like despite their tensions, um, what does the future of peptide stacking look like now?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> For people who are enthusiastic about peptides, I think the future is bright in the sense of them being able to access them. I think it looks like more and more likely that there’s going to be a lot of regulatory interest under Kennedy as long as he’s in power in making these products more accessible.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think that in terms of what the future looks like from a health perspective, the reality is that we simply don’t know, and that’s kind of scary. We don’t know what kind of effects these are going to have, and we don’t really right now have a robust way of monitoring or surveying for those effects either.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So what you would really wanna see are clinical trials that are studying people who are taking peptides and researching those outcomes, and that is one thing that we don’t currently have right now. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>But again, a recommendation isn’t the same as FDA approval. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Just because this, uh, the panel has said this, that doesn’t mean that compounding pharmacies now have the go-ahead to start producing them. The final decision is up to the FDA and the FDA rulemaking. I believe that outside experts think that process could take up to a year, so it’s not something that we would expect to see immediately happening.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>What about Melanotan II? Unfortunately for the tanmaxxers, the Barbie pep was not included in this latest list of panel recommendations. But it will get its moment soon: The FDA is slated to evaluate Melanotan II and four more peptides for reclassification early next year. \u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That doesn’t mean it’s hard to get a hold of now, though. When I searched “Melanotan II near me,” I found dozens of medical spas across LA that advertise it as part of their “peptide therapy.” For $95, I could drive over to Beverly Hills and pick up a 5 mL vial at a clinic, or $150, I could get it delivered! Mobile IV clinics also offer it as an add-on to their on-demand IV services, so I could get my tan on, get a whole GLOW stack injected, and get a hangover cure administered at the same time, in my own living room! It’s like doordash for peptides! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Though, Dr. Grewal does not find that as amusing as I do. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Sungat Grewal:\u003c/strong> My gut reaction is honestly mortified, terrified, but also not surprised. And again, it just really brings me back to the point of, you know, the body is really complicated and medicine is complicated.I think the most important thing is that you research the person that is endorsing a specific product or, um, or approach, right? So, like, I love that people research, but I would really encourage, and I’m an advocate of spending the most time researching your source, who you’re going to assign as being credible\u003cbr>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung: \u003c/strong>As much as I love my skincare routine and gratuitous pursuit of beauty, I personally will be staying clear of the Barbie peptide. A little gradual tanning lotion and my trusty tanning mitt has never done me wrong. Plus, I don’t have to worry about breaking out into funky looking moles! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Ok, let’s close all these tabs. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cbr>Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios, and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode was produced by Cayla Mihalovich and Maya Cueva. It was edited by Chris Hambrick. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The Close All Tabs team also includes senior editor Chris Egusa, who also composed our theme song and credits music, and audio engineer Brendan Willard. Our intern is Lauren Yoon. Additional music by APM.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is Executive Director of Podcasts, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our Editor in Chief.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists. San Francisco Northern California Local.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode’s keyboard sounds were submitted by Alex Tran, and recorded on his white Epomaker Hi75 keyboard with Fogruaden red samurai keycaps and gateron milky yellow pro v2 switches. Thanks for listening. \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>This episode includes clips from TikTok creators carlysnaxwell, itsdevnyc, and cablequeencourt, clips from the Instagram accounts ToxDaddy and sooshbrah, and YouTube clips from SpaAndTell and Joe Rogan Experience.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Thanks for listening! \u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Morgan Sung:\u003c/strong> I mean, my ‘foryou’ page every day it’s like, “Who’s on Glow? Who’s on the Glow stack or the Barbie stack?” Like you can’t escape it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Todd:\u003c/strong> Yeah, all over.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>"
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some marriages don’t end with a blowup or betrayal. Instead, partners slowly become emotionally disconnected – more like roommates than lovers. It’s a phenomenon that’s been dubbed a “quiet divorce.” We talk with psychologists Thema Bryant and Eli Finkel about why relationships quietly come undone, how to rebuild connection and when it may be time to let go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Eli Finkel,\u003c/strong> professor of psychology, Northwestern University; host, “Love Factually” podcast; author, “The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Bes Marriages Work”\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant,\u003c/strong> psychologist and author, “Matters of the Heart”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. You’ve likely heard of quiet quitting, when it was all over social media, advocating for workers to do just the bare minimum in their jobs and focus on themselves instead. Now it seems applying that to romantic relationships is catching fire. Quiet divorcing is not ending the marriage legally, but emotionally disconnecting from it until lovers become more like roommates. And this hour we’ll look at why the phenomenon, while not new, is showing up these days on social media and the web.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Joining me first is psychologist Thema Bryant, who goes by Dr. Thema. She’s also author of \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Thema.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Oh, so good to be here. Thank you for covering this important topic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, so glad to be covering it with you. How would you, Dr. Thema, define quiet divorce?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Quiet divorce is when we remain physically present, legally present, but emotionally absent. So we have checked out, and it could be that both people are engaging in it, or it could be one person in the couple.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what does it look like in a relationship? What tend to be the signs that a couple is in a quiet divorce?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> When they are going through the motions of living together, functioning, getting things done that need to be done, perhaps around parenting or paying the bills, but there is a lack of emotional intimacy, sometimes, and usually also physical and sexual intimacy. And so they may function more as roommates. Some people aren’t even speaking anymore. So they may live in the same house but are not really engaging with each other. So maybe even in different rooms, like roommates?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They could be in different rooms, but they could also show up for each other. There are a range. So some couples really have turned into friends. There’s not a romantic aspect to it. And then some really are disconnected from each other and don’t do much at all together.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it sounds like you’re describing that it can be more of like a logistical relationship, or that the partners can be living together under the same roof, but maybe parallel lives as opposed to sort of intersecting lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. So there is not that level of active nourishment, being able to enjoy each other, being able to share on a deep level. So it has become very surface for any number of reasons.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I think you’re starting to answer my next question, which is what can lead people to the point where they’re disconnecting like that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes. So sometimes people associate the home responsibilities with too much tension, too much drama, too much friction. And so, especially if you’re an avoidant person, avoiding conflict, avoiding difficult conversations, then engaging with this person feels like it’s gonna be too intense, or you don’t feel you have the capacity for it or the desire for it, or don’t feel like there is a payoff to it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the shutting down. So avoidance can lead to it, also resentment and unresolved issues. So there could have been an attempt to address some of the conflict and then a person didn’t feel heard, likely multiple times, and so stopped trying. So this idea of it’s not worth it, even if I express myself or even if we have this level of deep conversation, nothing’s going to change, or this person isn’t going to. And so now I want to protect myself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A person may feel like, I am tired of being disappointed, tired of getting frustrated. So in an attempt to prevent, in their minds, I’m going to prevent further disappointment and frustration by protecting my heart, by disconnecting in that way. Sometimes that involves people who are looking for connection outside of the relationship and sometimes not. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It sounds like you’re almost — I’m so struck by the word protection — so it’s almost like this sort of self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yeah. It may feel like this is not a nourishing place for me, it’s not a fulfilling place for me, it’s a safe place for me. Usually, when I say safe in this way, I’m meaning emotionally. And so if I don’t enjoy it anymore, but for any number of reasons I have a barrier to leaving, then I will remain physically there and legally in it, but have already withdrawn.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Noelle writes on Discord, and let me invite listeners into the conversation. Do you think you might be in a quiet divorce or have questions about what it is? Have you been in one that led to a breakup or actual divorce, or for someone close to you, how did you know it was time to call it quits? And why do you think quiet divorce is resonating today?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Noelle writes, “Many still live together due to economic constraints these days.” So Dr. Thema, why might people decide they can still exist in this space, stay married, right, but exist in the quiet divorce space? What can it offer?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> So there can be familiarity. Some people are anxious, understandably, about the unknown. So even though this isn’t fulfilling for me, from what they hear from those who are outside in the dating world, they may feel like there’s not a lot that I would receive out there. So at least whatever I’m getting in here, I know it, I’m familiar with it. And I’ve adapted to it, that in some ways I’ve made peace with the parts that are missing, and I’m willing to live my life without those components.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Or part of me may have hope that down the road things could change. But for now, you know, I have my person. This person knows me. I know them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then you mentioned the financial piece, and I do want to say, for some people from religious communities, there can be a spiritual peace, of them saying, I promise God I would stay, and so I’m gonna honor the covenant and stay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so not every person has the financial freedom to walk away, as you say, and then there’s also the cultural expectations of not getting a divorce. I also read in one article that they describe quiet divorce as almost a bridge between what they cannot leave and what they can no longer keep doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, that it becomes the compromise, right? I can’t leave, but I also cannot keep putting myself through perhaps the emotional gymnastics of engaging with this person. And so I am present but absent, and that may feel like, for some people, the only solution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Rishi adds on Discord, “People also stay married due to factors like immigration and health insurance.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If the slow burn of a relationship, right, as I noted in the intro, isn’t new, why, Dr. Thema, do you think the quiet divorce phenomenon has gone viral recently? Why do you think that term is resonating with a lot of people?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> I think it goes with us living in an era where people are more transparent and honest, including with strangers. So the gift of social media, gift or curse, is people use it in the way that older generations would use a journal or use prayer. So people would write about it, they would pray about it. They may tell it to their best friend, but never tell anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now we’re in a season where people share kind of their innermost thoughts and feelings with the world. So I think the existence of it is not new, but the speaking about it openly is more new.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking this hour about quiet divorces, when couples stay together but become emotionally distant, more like roommates than lovers. And we’re talking about it with Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and author of the book \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>, and with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786, on our social channels, Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, and at the email address forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Let me go to caller Thomas in Santa Rosa. Thomas, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Caller:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes, good morning. So when I heard this program coming on, this is a new term that I’ve been hearing. And also, on top of it, a new term that I heard is gray divorce. And where people are, you know, in my case, in a situation with my spouse, we’ve been together for 35 years, married, and longer than that before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And at some point after the kids were born, and the one thing that I recall coming in between the conventional marriage was that the kids, you know, started sleeping in the bed and I was in a different room. I never left that other room. I never, you know, came back to… You know, we still continue to have a relationship that way. However, it starts there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then what happens in my case is we just became so nonconfrontational. We didn’t want to go into areas that were uncomfortable. And so we avoided them. And the avoidance was what kind of separated it out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we are still living together. We have separated and we continue to live together because we know each other. It doesn’t matter. It’s very amicable. So that’s the part that’s, you know, it almost, at some point, you give up the things that you always wanted, the sexual things. It’s all gone. At this point, at 65, this is great.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thomas, I so appreciate you sharing that story because it underscores so much, Dr. Thema, what you have been describing that can lead to that, but also why people, you know, might stay in it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Right. Absolutely. And I appreciate you sharing that, even the role that parenting plays, that sometimes people pour into their children but may neglect the relationship. And then when the kids get older, it’s looking like, well, you know, what do we have? What do we still have together? And can we even reconnect?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what I have found with couples is often both people have tried, but not at the same time. So one person may have been pursuing and the other was stepping away. So it’s really important to be—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Engaging in the investment or the trying together simultaneously, it sounds like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the phenomenon of quiet divorce. While not new, the term seems to be resonating with people, and we’re talking about why with Dr. Thema and with you, our listeners. Stay with us for more after the break. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. You’ve likely heard of quiet quitting, when it was all over social media, advocating for workers to do just the bare minimum in their jobs and focus on themselves instead. Now it seems applying that to romantic relationships is catching fire. Quiet divorcing is not ending the marriage legally, but emotionally disconnecting from it until lovers become more like roommates. And this hour we’ll look at why the phenomenon, while not new, is showing up these days on social media and the web.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Joining me first is psychologist Thema Bryant, who goes by Dr. Thema. She’s also author of \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Thema.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Oh, so good to be here. Thank you for covering this important topic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Quiet divorce is when we remain physically present, legally present, but emotionally absent. So we have checked out, and it could be that both people are engaging in it, or it could be one person in the couple.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what does it look like in a relationship? What tend to be the signs that a couple is in a quiet divorce?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it sounds like you’re describing that it can be more of like a logistical relationship, or that the partners can be living together under the same roof, but maybe parallel lives as opposed to sort of intersecting lives.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. So there is not that level of active nourishment, being able to enjoy each other, being able to share on a deep level. So it has become very surface for any number of reasons.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes. So sometimes people associate the home responsibilities with too much tension, too much drama, too much friction. And so, especially if you’re an avoidant person, avoiding conflict, avoiding difficult conversations, then engaging with this person feels like it’s gonna be too intense, or you don’t feel you have the capacity for it or the desire for it, or don’t feel like there is a payoff to it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And so the shutting down. So avoidance can lead to it, also resentment and unresolved issues. So there could have been an attempt to address some of the conflict and then a person didn’t feel heard, likely multiple times, and so stopped trying. So this idea of it’s not worth it, even if I express myself or even if we have this level of deep conversation, nothing’s going to change, or this person isn’t going to. And so now I want to protect myself.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And so the shutting down. So avoidance can lead to it, also resentment and unresolved issues. So there could have been an attempt to address some of the conflict and then a person didn’t feel heard, likely multiple times, and so stopped trying. So this idea of it’s not worth it, even if I express myself or even if we have this level of deep conversation, nothing’s going to change, or this person isn’t going to. And so now I want to protect myself.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A person may feel like, I am tired of being disappointed, tired of getting frustrated. So in an attempt to prevent, in their minds, I’m going to prevent further disappointment and frustration by protecting my heart, by disconnecting in that way. Sometimes that involves people who are looking for connection outside of the relationship and sometimes not. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A person may feel like, I am tired of being disappointed, tired of getting frustrated. So in an attempt to prevent, in their minds, I’m going to prevent further disappointment and frustration by protecting my heart, by disconnecting in that way. Sometimes that involves people who are looking for connection outside of the relationship and sometimes not. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It sounds like you’re almost — I’m so struck by the word protection — so it’s almost like this sort of self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It sounds like you’re almost — I’m so struck by the word protection — so it’s almost like this sort of self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yeah. It may feel like this is not a nourishing place for me, it’s not a fulfilling place for me, it’s a safe place for me. Usually, when I say safe in this way, I’m meaning emotionally. And so if I don’t enjoy it anymore, but for any number of reasons I have a barrier to leaving, then I will remain physically there and legally in it, but have already withdrawn.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yeah. It may feel like this is not a nourishing place for me, it’s not a fulfilling place for me, it’s a safe place for me. Usually, when I say safe in this way, I’m meaning emotionally. And so if I don’t enjoy it anymore, but for any number of reasons I have a barrier to leaving, then I will remain physically there and legally in it, but have already withdrawn.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Noelle writes on Discord, and let me invite listeners into the conversation. Do you think you might be in a quiet divorce or have questions about what it is? Have you been in one that led to a breakup or actual divorce, or for someone close to you, how did you know it was time to call it quits? And why do you think quiet divorce is resonating today?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Noelle writes on Discord, and let me invite listeners into the conversation. Do you think you might be in a quiet divorce or have questions about what it is? Have you been in one that led to a breakup or actual divorce, or for someone close to you, how did you know it was time to call it quits? And why do you think quiet divorce is resonating today?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Noelle writes, “Many still live together due to economic constraints these days.” So Dr. Thema, why might people decide they can still exist in this space, stay married, right, but exist in the quiet divorce space? What can it offer?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Noelle writes, “Many still live together due to economic constraints these days.” So Dr. Thema, why might people decide they can still exist in this space, stay married, right, but exist in the quiet divorce space? What can it offer?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> So there can be familiarity. Some people are anxious, understandably, about the unknown. So even though this isn’t fulfilling for me, from what they hear from those who are outside in the dating world, they may feel like there’s not a lot that I would receive out there. So at least whatever I’m getting in here, I know it, I’m familiar with it. And I’ve adapted to it, that in some ways I’ve made peace with the parts that are missing, and I’m willing to live my life without those components.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> So there can be familiarity. Some people are anxious, understandably, about the unknown. So even though this isn’t fulfilling for me, from what they hear from those who are outside in the dating world, they may feel like there’s not a lot that I would receive out there. So at least whatever I’m getting in here, I know it, I’m familiar with it. And I’ve adapted to it, that in some ways I’ve made peace with the parts that are missing, and I’m willing to live my life without those components.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Or part of me may have hope that down the road things could change. But for now, you know, I have my person. This person knows me. I know them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Or part of me may have hope that down the road things could change. But for now, you know, I have my person. This person knows me. I know them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then you mentioned the financial piece, and I do want to say, for some people from religious communities, there can be a spiritual peace, of them saying, I promise God I would stay, and so I’m gonna honor the covenant and stay.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then you mentioned the financial piece, and I do want to say, for some people from religious communities, there can be a spiritual peace, of them saying, I promise God I would stay, and so I’m gonna honor the covenant and stay.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so not every person has the financial freedom to walk away, as you say, and then there’s also the cultural expectations of not getting a divorce. I also read in one article that they describe quiet divorce as almost a bridge between what they cannot leave and what they can no longer keep doing.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so not every person has the financial freedom to walk away, as you say, and then there’s also the cultural expectations of not getting a divorce. I also read in one article that they describe quiet divorce as almost a bridge between what they cannot leave and what they can no longer keep doing.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, that it becomes the compromise, right? I can’t leave, but I also cannot keep putting myself through perhaps the emotional gymnastics of engaging with this person. And so I am present but absent, and that may feel like, for some people, the only solution.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, that it becomes the compromise, right? I can’t leave, but I also cannot keep putting myself through perhaps the emotional gymnastics of engaging with this person. And so I am present but absent, and that may feel like, for some people, the only solution.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Rishi adds on Discord, “People also stay married due to factors like immigration and health insurance.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Rishi adds on Discord, “People also stay married due to factors like immigration and health insurance.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If the slow burn of a relationship, right, as I noted in the intro, isn’t new, why, Dr. Thema, do you think the quiet divorce phenomenon has gone viral recently? Why do you think that term is resonating with a lot of people?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If the slow burn of a relationship, right, as I noted in the intro, isn’t new, why, Dr. Thema, do you think the quiet divorce phenomenon has gone viral recently? Why do you think that term is resonating with a lot of people?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> I think it goes with us living in an era where people are more transparent and honest, including with strangers. So the gift of social media, gift or curse, is people use it in the way that older generations would use a journal or use prayer. So people would write about it, they would pray about it. They may tell it to their best friend, but never tell anyone else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> I think it goes with us living in an era where people are more transparent and honest, including with strangers. So the gift of social media, gift or curse, is people use it in the way that older generations would use a journal or use prayer. So people would write about it, they would pray about it. They may tell it to their best friend, but never tell anyone else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And now we’re in a season where people share kind of their innermost thoughts and feelings with the world. So I think the existence of it is not new, but the speaking about it openly is more new.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And now we’re in a season where people share kind of their innermost thoughts and feelings with the world. So I think the existence of it is not new, but the speaking about it openly is more new.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking this hour about quiet divorces, when couples stay together but become emotionally distant, more like roommates than lovers. And we’re talking about it with Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and author of the book \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>, and with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786, on our social channels, Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, and at the email address forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking this hour about quiet divorces, when couples stay together but become emotionally distant, more like roommates than lovers. And we’re talking about it with Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and author of the book \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>, and with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786, on our social channels, Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, and at the email address forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Let me go to caller Thomas in Santa Rosa. Thomas, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Let me go to caller Thomas in Santa Rosa. Thomas, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Caller:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes, good morning. So when I heard this program coming on, this is a new term that I’ve been hearing. And also, on top of it, a new term that I heard is gray divorce. And where people are, you know, in my case, in a situation with my spouse, we’ve been together for 35 years, married, and longer than that before.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Caller:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes, good morning. So when I heard this program coming on, this is a new term that I’ve been hearing. And also, on top of it, a new term that I heard is gray divorce. And where people are, you know, in my case, in a situation with my spouse, we’ve been together for 35 years, married, and longer than that before.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And at some point after the kids were born, and the one thing that I recall coming in between the conventional marriage was that the kids, you know, started sleeping in the bed and I was in a different room. I never left that other room. I never, you know, came back to… You know, we still continue to have a relationship that way. However, it starts there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And at some point after the kids were born, and the one thing that I recall coming in between the conventional marriage was that the kids, you know, started sleeping in the bed and I was in a different room. I never left that other room. I never, you know, came back to… You know, we still continue to have a relationship that way. However, it starts there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then what happens in my case is we just became so nonconfrontational. We didn’t want to go into areas that were uncomfortable. And so we avoided them. And the avoidance was what kind of separated it out.\u003c/p>\n",
"innerContent": [
"\n\u003cp>And then what happens in my case is we just became so nonconfrontational. We didn’t want to go into areas that were uncomfortable. And so we avoided them. And the avoidance was what kind of separated it out.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we are still living together. We have separated and we continue to live together because we know each other. It doesn’t matter. It’s very amicable. So that’s the part that’s, you know, it almost, at some point, you give up the things that you always wanted, the sexual things. It’s all gone. At this point, at 65, this is great.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And we are still living together. We have separated and we continue to live together because we know each other. It doesn’t matter. It’s very amicable. So that’s the part that’s, you know, it almost, at some point, you give up the things that you always wanted, the sexual things. It’s all gone. At this point, at 65, this is great.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thomas, I so appreciate you sharing that story because it underscores so much, Dr. Thema, what you have been describing that can lead to that, but also why people, you know, might stay in it.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thomas, I so appreciate you sharing that story because it underscores so much, Dr. Thema, what you have been describing that can lead to that, but also why people, you know, might stay in it.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Right. Absolutely. And I appreciate you sharing that, even the role that parenting plays, that sometimes people pour into their children but may neglect the relationship. And then when the kids get older, it’s looking like, well, you know, what do we have? What do we still have together? And can we even reconnect?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Right. Absolutely. And I appreciate you sharing that, even the role that parenting plays, that sometimes people pour into their children but may neglect the relationship. And then when the kids get older, it’s looking like, well, you know, what do we have? What do we still have together? And can we even reconnect?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And what I have found with couples is often both people have tried, but not at the same time. So one person may have been pursuing and the other was stepping away. So it’s really important to be—\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And what I have found with couples is often both people have tried, but not at the same time. So one person may have been pursuing and the other was stepping away. So it’s really important to be—\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Engaging in the investment or the trying together simultaneously, it sounds like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the phenomenon of quiet divorce. While not new, the term seems to be resonating with people, and we’re talking about why with Dr. Thema and with you, our listeners. Stay with us for more after the break. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Tuesday, September 15, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Some marriages don’t end with a blowup or betrayal. Instead, partners slowly become emotionally disconnected – more like roommates than lovers. It’s a phenomenon that’s been dubbed a “quiet divorce.” We talk with psychologists Thema Bryant and Eli Finkel about why relationships quietly come undone, how to rebuild connection and when it may be time to let go.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Eli Finkel,\u003c/strong> professor of psychology, Northwestern University; host, “Love Factually” podcast; author, “The All-or-Nothing Marriage: How the Bes Marriages Work”\u003c/li>\n\n\n\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant,\u003c/strong> psychologist and author, “Matters of the Heart”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, I’m Mina Kim. You’ve likely heard of quiet quitting, when it was all over social media, advocating for workers to do just the bare minimum in their jobs and focus on themselves instead. Now it seems applying that to romantic relationships is catching fire. Quiet divorcing is not ending the marriage legally, but emotionally disconnecting from it until lovers become more like roommates. And this hour we’ll look at why the phenomenon, while not new, is showing up these days on social media and the web.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Joining me first is psychologist Thema Bryant, who goes by Dr. Thema. She’s also author of \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>. Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>, Dr. Thema.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Oh, so good to be here. Thank you for covering this important topic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, so glad to be covering it with you. How would you, Dr. Thema, define quiet divorce?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Quiet divorce is when we remain physically present, legally present, but emotionally absent. So we have checked out, and it could be that both people are engaging in it, or it could be one person in the couple.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So what does it look like in a relationship? What tend to be the signs that a couple is in a quiet divorce?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> When they are going through the motions of living together, functioning, getting things done that need to be done, perhaps around parenting or paying the bills, but there is a lack of emotional intimacy, sometimes, and usually also physical and sexual intimacy. And so they may function more as roommates. Some people aren’t even speaking anymore. So they may live in the same house but are not really engaging with each other. So maybe even in different rooms, like roommates?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They could be in different rooms, but they could also show up for each other. There are a range. So some couples really have turned into friends. There’s not a romantic aspect to it. And then some really are disconnected from each other and don’t do much at all together.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, it sounds like you’re describing that it can be more of like a logistical relationship, or that the partners can be living together under the same roof, but maybe parallel lives as opposed to sort of intersecting lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. So there is not that level of active nourishment, being able to enjoy each other, being able to share on a deep level. So it has become very surface for any number of reasons.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I think you’re starting to answer my next question, which is what can lead people to the point where they’re disconnecting like that?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes. So sometimes people associate the home responsibilities with too much tension, too much drama, too much friction. And so, especially if you’re an avoidant person, avoiding conflict, avoiding difficult conversations, then engaging with this person feels like it’s gonna be too intense, or you don’t feel you have the capacity for it or the desire for it, or don’t feel like there is a payoff to it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And so the shutting down. So avoidance can lead to it, also resentment and unresolved issues. So there could have been an attempt to address some of the conflict and then a person didn’t feel heard, likely multiple times, and so stopped trying. So this idea of it’s not worth it, even if I express myself or even if we have this level of deep conversation, nothing’s going to change, or this person isn’t going to. And so now I want to protect myself.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A person may feel like, I am tired of being disappointed, tired of getting frustrated. So in an attempt to prevent, in their minds, I’m going to prevent further disappointment and frustration by protecting my heart, by disconnecting in that way. Sometimes that involves people who are looking for connection outside of the relationship and sometimes not. Yeah.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> It sounds like you’re almost — I’m so struck by the word protection — so it’s almost like this sort of self-preservation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yeah. It may feel like this is not a nourishing place for me, it’s not a fulfilling place for me, it’s a safe place for me. Usually, when I say safe in this way, I’m meaning emotionally. And so if I don’t enjoy it anymore, but for any number of reasons I have a barrier to leaving, then I will remain physically there and legally in it, but have already withdrawn.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Well, Noelle writes on Discord, and let me invite listeners into the conversation. Do you think you might be in a quiet divorce or have questions about what it is? Have you been in one that led to a breakup or actual divorce, or for someone close to you, how did you know it was time to call it quits? And why do you think quiet divorce is resonating today?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can email forum@kqed.org, find us on Discord, Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram at KQED Forum, or call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Noelle writes, “Many still live together due to economic constraints these days.” So Dr. Thema, why might people decide they can still exist in this space, stay married, right, but exist in the quiet divorce space? What can it offer?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> So there can be familiarity. Some people are anxious, understandably, about the unknown. So even though this isn’t fulfilling for me, from what they hear from those who are outside in the dating world, they may feel like there’s not a lot that I would receive out there. So at least whatever I’m getting in here, I know it, I’m familiar with it. And I’ve adapted to it, that in some ways I’ve made peace with the parts that are missing, and I’m willing to live my life without those components.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Or part of me may have hope that down the road things could change. But for now, you know, I have my person. This person knows me. I know them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then you mentioned the financial piece, and I do want to say, for some people from religious communities, there can be a spiritual peace, of them saying, I promise God I would stay, and so I’m gonna honor the covenant and stay.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah, so not every person has the financial freedom to walk away, as you say, and then there’s also the cultural expectations of not getting a divorce. I also read in one article that they describe quiet divorce as almost a bridge between what they cannot leave and what they can no longer keep doing.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, that it becomes the compromise, right? I can’t leave, but I also cannot keep putting myself through perhaps the emotional gymnastics of engaging with this person. And so I am present but absent, and that may feel like, for some people, the only solution.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Yeah. Rishi adds on Discord, “People also stay married due to factors like immigration and health insurance.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If the slow burn of a relationship, right, as I noted in the intro, isn’t new, why, Dr. Thema, do you think the quiet divorce phenomenon has gone viral recently? Why do you think that term is resonating with a lot of people?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> I think it goes with us living in an era where people are more transparent and honest, including with strangers. So the gift of social media, gift or curse, is people use it in the way that older generations would use a journal or use prayer. So people would write about it, they would pray about it. They may tell it to their best friend, but never tell anyone else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And now we’re in a season where people share kind of their innermost thoughts and feelings with the world. So I think the existence of it is not new, but the speaking about it openly is more new.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Again, we’re talking this hour about quiet divorces, when couples stay together but become emotionally distant, more like roommates than lovers. And we’re talking about it with Dr. Thema Bryant, a psychologist and author of the book \u003cem>Matters of the Heart\u003c/em>, and with you, our listeners, at 866-733-6786, on our social channels, Discord, Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram, and at the email address forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And let me remind listeners, you are listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Let me go to caller Thomas in Santa Rosa. Thomas, go ahead. You’re on.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Caller:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes, good morning. So when I heard this program coming on, this is a new term that I’ve been hearing. And also, on top of it, a new term that I heard is gray divorce. And where people are, you know, in my case, in a situation with my spouse, we’ve been together for 35 years, married, and longer than that before.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And at some point after the kids were born, and the one thing that I recall coming in between the conventional marriage was that the kids, you know, started sleeping in the bed and I was in a different room. I never left that other room. I never, you know, came back to… You know, we still continue to have a relationship that way. However, it starts there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then what happens in my case is we just became so nonconfrontational. We didn’t want to go into areas that were uncomfortable. And so we avoided them. And the avoidance was what kind of separated it out.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we are still living together. We have separated and we continue to live together because we know each other. It doesn’t matter. It’s very amicable. So that’s the part that’s, you know, it almost, at some point, you give up the things that you always wanted, the sexual things. It’s all gone. At this point, at 65, this is great.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Thomas, I so appreciate you sharing that story because it underscores so much, Dr. Thema, what you have been describing that can lead to that, but also why people, you know, might stay in it.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Right. Absolutely. And I appreciate you sharing that, even the role that parenting plays, that sometimes people pour into their children but may neglect the relationship. And then when the kids get older, it’s looking like, well, you know, what do we have? What do we still have together? And can we even reconnect?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And what I have found with couples is often both people have tried, but not at the same time. So one person may have been pursuing and the other was stepping away. So it’s really important to be—\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Engaging in the investment or the trying together simultaneously, it sounds like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Dr. Thema Bryant:\u003c/strong> Yes, yes.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking about the phenomenon of quiet divorce. While not new, the term seems to be resonating with people, and we’re talking about why with Dr. Thema and with you, our listeners. Stay with us for more after the break. You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah Longwell says listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics — yet few people actually do it. That’s why she has spent the past eight years conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters across the political spectrum. A former Republican political strategist and founder of the media company The Bulwark, Longwell lays out a playbook to fight back and win in her new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.” We talk with Longwell about what she has learned from voters across the political spectrum, how Democrats can seize the moment and what it will take to defeat the MAGA movement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell, \u003c/strong>publisher, The Bulwark; host, The Focus Group podcast; author, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Donald Trump is back in the White House, but Sarah Longwell has spent the last decade talking to the voters who helped put him there. Longwell is a Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book, \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>, is about what she learned from voters, candidates, and the Republican Party during the Trump era.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah Longwell joins us now. Sarah, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Thank you so much for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s start with the voters. You’ve been talking to Trump voters for years now. What have you learned about what motivates them?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> You know, I think one of the things that I have learned is that we have a tendency to think that people vote on issues. And voters do care about issues, but they care much more about how they feel about the candidates and what those candidates represent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Trump is really good at making people feel like he understands them, that he sees them, that he’s fighting for them. And so when you talk to voters who support him, they often don’t talk about specific policies. They talk about how they feel about him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’ll say things like, “He’s authentic,” or, “He tells it like it is,” or, “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.” And those are really powerful things for people who feel like the political system has ignored them or looked down on them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But you’ve also heard voters criticize Trump. So what is it that keeps them with him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is that they don’t trust Democrats. And I think this is something Democrats really struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of Trump voters will tell you that they don’t like everything about Trump. They may think he’s too chaotic. They may think he’s mean. They may think he’s a bad person. But they think that the alternative is worse.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s really important. You don’t have to love a candidate to vote for them. You just have to believe that they’re better than the other person.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Republicans have spent a lot of time over the last several years convincing their voters that Democrats are not just wrong on policy, but that they’re dangerous. That they’re coming for their way of life, that they’re coming for their children, that they’re coming for their communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when people believe that, it makes it very hard to persuade them to vote for a Democrat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You helped launch Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020. What were you hearing from Republican voters then?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There was a really significant group of Republicans who were deeply uncomfortable with Trump. And I think one of the things that surprised me was how many of them were willing to vote for Joe Biden.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We talked to thousands and thousands of Republican voters, and what we heard over and over again was that they didn’t want to leave the Republican Party. They didn’t want to become Democrats. They wanted Republicans to nominate somebody else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they were worried about what Trump was doing to the country, but they were also worried about what Trump was doing to the Republican Party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And yet Trump won in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> He did. And I think one of the lessons for me is that you cannot simply assume that because people have concerns about Trump, those concerns will eventually cause them to leave him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There were a lot of voters who had concerns about Trump in 2020 who came back to him in 2024. Some of them thought the Biden years had been disappointing. Some of them thought the economy wasn’t working for them. Some of them were angry about immigration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Trump was able to capitalize on those frustrations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write in your book about spending years trying to understand voters by sitting in focus groups and listening to them talk. What does that tell you that polling doesn’t?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I love polling. Polling is incredibly important. But when you sit in a room with eight or ten people for two hours and you let them talk, you hear things that you would never hear in a poll.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can ask a voter, “What’s your number-one issue?” And they’ll tell you one thing. But then you listen to them for two hours and you realize that what they’re actually worried about is something else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You also hear the stories people tell themselves about why they believe what they believe. And that’s incredibly important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because if you’re trying to persuade somebody, you need to understand not just their position, but how they got there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’ve said that one of the biggest mistakes Democrats make is trying to persuade voters by giving them more information. Why doesn’t that work?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because people aren’t computers. You don’t just put more information into their heads and expect them to make a different decision.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>People make decisions based on emotion, identity, experience, trust. And then they use facts to support the conclusions they’ve already reached.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you want to persuade somebody, the first question is: Do they trust you?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If they don’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how many facts you have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Democrats right now. There are a lot of voters who simply don’t trust Democrats to understand their lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is that fixable?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it is. But it takes a long time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And one of the things that frustrates me is that political parties tend to think in election cycles. They want to know, what can we do between now and November? But trust doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you want people to believe that you understand them, you have to actually spend time with them. You have to show up. You have to listen to them when you’re not asking for their vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you have to be willing to hear things that you don’t like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You spent much of your career as a Republican strategist. When did you realize that you no longer recognized the party?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it happened gradually.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There wasn’t one moment where I woke up and said, “Oh, I’m not a Republican anymore.” It was more like watching the party change year after year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I worked in Republican politics because I believed in conservative ideas. I believed in limited government. I believed in free markets. I believed in institutions. I believed in the importance of American leadership in the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then Trump came along, and suddenly a lot of those things were negotiable if they got in the way of loyalty to him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That was very hard for me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write about loyalty a lot. Why is loyalty so important in today’s Republican Party?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because Trump has made loyalty the organizing principle of the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not really about ideology anymore. It’s about whether you are with him or against him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you see that with politicians. Somebody can have a long record of voting for conservative policies, but if they criticize Trump, they can become a pariah overnight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And conversely, somebody can have positions that would have been completely unacceptable to Republicans ten years ago, but if they are loyal to Trump, they’re welcomed into the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Does that mean ideology doesn’t matter anymore?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think ideology matters less than it used to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are still people who care deeply about policy. But for a lot of voters, the Republican Party has become much more of an identity than a set of policy commitments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s true of both parties, frankly. But Trump has taken it to another level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Sarah Longwell, Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book is \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’d like to join the conversation, you can email us at forum@kqed.org. You can also call us at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell, \u003c/strong>publisher, The Bulwark; host, The Focus Group podcast; author, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time”\u003c/li>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Donald Trump is back in the White House, but Sarah Longwell has spent the last decade talking to the voters who helped put him there. Longwell is a Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book, \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>, is about what she learned from voters, candidates, and the Republican Party during the Trump era.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Donald Trump is back in the White House, but Sarah Longwell has spent the last decade talking to the voters who helped put him there. Longwell is a Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book, \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>, is about what she learned from voters, candidates, and the Republican Party during the Trump era.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Sarah Longwell joins us now. Sarah, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Thank you so much for having me.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s start with the voters. You’ve been talking to Trump voters for years now. What have you learned about what motivates them?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s start with the voters. You’ve been talking to Trump voters for years now. What have you learned about what motivates them?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> You know, I think one of the things that I have learned is that we have a tendency to think that people vote on issues. And voters do care about issues, but they care much more about how they feel about the candidates and what those candidates represent.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> You know, I think one of the things that I have learned is that we have a tendency to think that people vote on issues. And voters do care about issues, but they care much more about how they feel about the candidates and what those candidates represent.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Trump is really good at making people feel like he understands them, that he sees them, that he’s fighting for them. And so when you talk to voters who support him, they often don’t talk about specific policies. They talk about how they feel about him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>They’ll say things like, “He’s authentic,” or, “He tells it like it is,” or, “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.” And those are really powerful things for people who feel like the political system has ignored them or looked down on them.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>They’ll say things like, “He’s authentic,” or, “He tells it like it is,” or, “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.” And those are really powerful things for people who feel like the political system has ignored them or looked down on them.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But you’ve also heard voters criticize Trump. So what is it that keeps them with him?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is that they don’t trust Democrats. And I think this is something Democrats really struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is that they don’t trust Democrats. And I think this is something Democrats really struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>A lot of Trump voters will tell you that they don’t like everything about Trump. They may think he’s too chaotic. They may think he’s mean. They may think he’s a bad person. But they think that the alternative is worse.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>A lot of Trump voters will tell you that they don’t like everything about Trump. They may think he’s too chaotic. They may think he’s mean. They may think he’s a bad person. But they think that the alternative is worse.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And that’s really important. You don’t have to love a candidate to vote for them. You just have to believe that they’re better than the other person.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Republicans have spent a lot of time over the last several years convincing their voters that Democrats are not just wrong on policy, but that they’re dangerous. That they’re coming for their way of life, that they’re coming for their children, that they’re coming for their communities.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And Republicans have spent a lot of time over the last several years convincing their voters that Democrats are not just wrong on policy, but that they’re dangerous. That they’re coming for their way of life, that they’re coming for their children, that they’re coming for their communities.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And when people believe that, it makes it very hard to persuade them to vote for a Democrat.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You helped launch Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020. What were you hearing from Republican voters then?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There was a really significant group of Republicans who were deeply uncomfortable with Trump. And I think one of the things that surprised me was how many of them were willing to vote for Joe Biden.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There was a really significant group of Republicans who were deeply uncomfortable with Trump. And I think one of the things that surprised me was how many of them were willing to vote for Joe Biden.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>We talked to thousands and thousands of Republican voters, and what we heard over and over again was that they didn’t want to leave the Republican Party. They didn’t want to become Democrats. They wanted Republicans to nominate somebody else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>We talked to thousands and thousands of Republican voters, and what we heard over and over again was that they didn’t want to leave the Republican Party. They didn’t want to become Democrats. They wanted Republicans to nominate somebody else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And they were worried about what Trump was doing to the country, but they were also worried about what Trump was doing to the Republican Party.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And yet Trump won in 2024.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> He did. And I think one of the lessons for me is that you cannot simply assume that because people have concerns about Trump, those concerns will eventually cause them to leave him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> He did. And I think one of the lessons for me is that you cannot simply assume that because people have concerns about Trump, those concerns will eventually cause them to leave him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There were a lot of voters who had concerns about Trump in 2020 who came back to him in 2024. Some of them thought the Biden years had been disappointing. Some of them thought the economy wasn’t working for them. Some of them were angry about immigration.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>There were a lot of voters who had concerns about Trump in 2020 who came back to him in 2024. Some of them thought the Biden years had been disappointing. Some of them thought the economy wasn’t working for them. Some of them were angry about immigration.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And Trump was able to capitalize on those frustrations.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write in your book about spending years trying to understand voters by sitting in focus groups and listening to them talk. What does that tell you that polling doesn’t?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write in your book about spending years trying to understand voters by sitting in focus groups and listening to them talk. What does that tell you that polling doesn’t?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I love polling. Polling is incredibly important. But when you sit in a room with eight or ten people for two hours and you let them talk, you hear things that you would never hear in a poll.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I love polling. Polling is incredibly important. But when you sit in a room with eight or ten people for two hours and you let them talk, you hear things that you would never hear in a poll.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You can ask a voter, “What’s your number-one issue?” And they’ll tell you one thing. But then you listen to them for two hours and you realize that what they’re actually worried about is something else.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You can ask a voter, “What’s your number-one issue?” And they’ll tell you one thing. But then you listen to them for two hours and you realize that what they’re actually worried about is something else.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You also hear the stories people tell themselves about why they believe what they believe. And that’s incredibly important.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You also hear the stories people tell themselves about why they believe what they believe. And that’s incredibly important.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Because if you’re trying to persuade somebody, you need to understand not just their position, but how they got there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Because if you’re trying to persuade somebody, you need to understand not just their position, but how they got there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’ve said that one of the biggest mistakes Democrats make is trying to persuade voters by giving them more information. Why doesn’t that work?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’ve said that one of the biggest mistakes Democrats make is trying to persuade voters by giving them more information. Why doesn’t that work?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because people aren’t computers. You don’t just put more information into their heads and expect them to make a different decision.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because people aren’t computers. You don’t just put more information into their heads and expect them to make a different decision.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>People make decisions based on emotion, identity, experience, trust. And then they use facts to support the conclusions they’ve already reached.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>People make decisions based on emotion, identity, experience, trust. And then they use facts to support the conclusions they’ve already reached.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>So if you want to persuade somebody, the first question is: Do they trust you?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>So if you want to persuade somebody, the first question is: Do they trust you?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If they don’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how many facts you have.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If they don’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how many facts you have.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Democrats right now. There are a lot of voters who simply don’t trust Democrats to understand their lives.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Democrats right now. There are a lot of voters who simply don’t trust Democrats to understand their lives.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is that fixable?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it is. But it takes a long time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it is. But it takes a long time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And one of the things that frustrates me is that political parties tend to think in election cycles. They want to know, what can we do between now and November? But trust doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And one of the things that frustrates me is that political parties tend to think in election cycles. They want to know, what can we do between now and November? But trust doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>If you want people to believe that you understand them, you have to actually spend time with them. You have to show up. You have to listen to them when you’re not asking for their vote.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>If you want people to believe that you understand them, you have to actually spend time with them. You have to show up. You have to listen to them when you’re not asking for their vote.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And you have to be willing to hear things that you don’t like.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You spent much of your career as a Republican strategist. When did you realize that you no longer recognized the party?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You spent much of your career as a Republican strategist. When did you realize that you no longer recognized the party?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it happened gradually.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it happened gradually.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There wasn’t one moment where I woke up and said, “Oh, I’m not a Republican anymore.” It was more like watching the party change year after year.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I worked in Republican politics because I believed in conservative ideas. I believed in limited government. I believed in free markets. I believed in institutions. I believed in the importance of American leadership in the world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I worked in Republican politics because I believed in conservative ideas. I believed in limited government. I believed in free markets. I believed in institutions. I believed in the importance of American leadership in the world.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then Trump came along, and suddenly a lot of those things were negotiable if they got in the way of loyalty to him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write about loyalty a lot. Why is loyalty so important in today’s Republican Party?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write about loyalty a lot. Why is loyalty so important in today’s Republican Party?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because Trump has made loyalty the organizing principle of the party.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because Trump has made loyalty the organizing principle of the party.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It’s not really about ideology anymore. It’s about whether you are with him or against him.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It’s not really about ideology anymore. It’s about whether you are with him or against him.\u003c/p>\n"
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Wednesday, September 9, 2026 at 10am\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah Longwell says listening to voters is a cheat code for understanding politics — yet few people actually do it. That’s why she has spent the past eight years conducting hundreds of focus groups with voters across the political spectrum. A former Republican political strategist and founder of the media company The Bulwark, Longwell lays out a playbook to fight back and win in her new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.” We talk with Longwell about what she has learned from voters across the political spectrum, how Democrats can seize the moment and what it will take to defeat the MAGA movement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guests:\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell, \u003c/strong>publisher, The Bulwark; host, The Focus Group podcast; author, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Mina Kim. Donald Trump is back in the White House, but Sarah Longwell has spent the last decade talking to the voters who helped put him there. Longwell is a Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book, \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>, is about what she learned from voters, candidates, and the Republican Party during the Trump era.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Sarah Longwell joins us now. Sarah, welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Thank you so much for having me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> So let’s start with the voters. You’ve been talking to Trump voters for years now. What have you learned about what motivates them?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> You know, I think one of the things that I have learned is that we have a tendency to think that people vote on issues. And voters do care about issues, but they care much more about how they feel about the candidates and what those candidates represent.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Trump is really good at making people feel like he understands them, that he sees them, that he’s fighting for them. And so when you talk to voters who support him, they often don’t talk about specific policies. They talk about how they feel about him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>They’ll say things like, “He’s authentic,” or, “He tells it like it is,” or, “He doesn’t care what anybody thinks.” And those are really powerful things for people who feel like the political system has ignored them or looked down on them.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> But you’ve also heard voters criticize Trump. So what is it that keeps them with him?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There are a lot of things. One of the biggest is that they don’t trust Democrats. And I think this is something Democrats really struggle to understand.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>A lot of Trump voters will tell you that they don’t like everything about Trump. They may think he’s too chaotic. They may think he’s mean. They may think he’s a bad person. But they think that the alternative is worse.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s really important. You don’t have to love a candidate to vote for them. You just have to believe that they’re better than the other person.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Republicans have spent a lot of time over the last several years convincing their voters that Democrats are not just wrong on policy, but that they’re dangerous. That they’re coming for their way of life, that they’re coming for their children, that they’re coming for their communities.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And when people believe that, it makes it very hard to persuade them to vote for a Democrat.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You helped launch Republican Voters Against Trump in 2020. What were you hearing from Republican voters then?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> There was a really significant group of Republicans who were deeply uncomfortable with Trump. And I think one of the things that surprised me was how many of them were willing to vote for Joe Biden.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>We talked to thousands and thousands of Republican voters, and what we heard over and over again was that they didn’t want to leave the Republican Party. They didn’t want to become Democrats. They wanted Republicans to nominate somebody else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And they were worried about what Trump was doing to the country, but they were also worried about what Trump was doing to the Republican Party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> And yet Trump won in 2024.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> He did. And I think one of the lessons for me is that you cannot simply assume that because people have concerns about Trump, those concerns will eventually cause them to leave him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There were a lot of voters who had concerns about Trump in 2020 who came back to him in 2024. Some of them thought the Biden years had been disappointing. Some of them thought the economy wasn’t working for them. Some of them were angry about immigration.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And Trump was able to capitalize on those frustrations.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write in your book about spending years trying to understand voters by sitting in focus groups and listening to them talk. What does that tell you that polling doesn’t?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I love polling. Polling is incredibly important. But when you sit in a room with eight or ten people for two hours and you let them talk, you hear things that you would never hear in a poll.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You can ask a voter, “What’s your number-one issue?” And they’ll tell you one thing. But then you listen to them for two hours and you realize that what they’re actually worried about is something else.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You also hear the stories people tell themselves about why they believe what they believe. And that’s incredibly important.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Because if you’re trying to persuade somebody, you need to understand not just their position, but how they got there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You’ve said that one of the biggest mistakes Democrats make is trying to persuade voters by giving them more information. Why doesn’t that work?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because people aren’t computers. You don’t just put more information into their heads and expect them to make a different decision.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>People make decisions based on emotion, identity, experience, trust. And then they use facts to support the conclusions they’ve already reached.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>So if you want to persuade somebody, the first question is: Do they trust you?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If they don’t trust you, it doesn’t matter how many facts you have.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I think that’s one of the biggest challenges for Democrats right now. There are a lot of voters who simply don’t trust Democrats to understand their lives.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Is that fixable?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it is. But it takes a long time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And one of the things that frustrates me is that political parties tend to think in election cycles. They want to know, what can we do between now and November? But trust doesn’t work that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you want people to believe that you understand them, you have to actually spend time with them. You have to show up. You have to listen to them when you’re not asking for their vote.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you have to be willing to hear things that you don’t like.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You spent much of your career as a Republican strategist. When did you realize that you no longer recognized the party?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think it happened gradually.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There wasn’t one moment where I woke up and said, “Oh, I’m not a Republican anymore.” It was more like watching the party change year after year.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I worked in Republican politics because I believed in conservative ideas. I believed in limited government. I believed in free markets. I believed in institutions. I believed in the importance of American leadership in the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then Trump came along, and suddenly a lot of those things were negotiable if they got in the way of loyalty to him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>That was very hard for me.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> You write about loyalty a lot. Why is loyalty so important in today’s Republican Party?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> Because Trump has made loyalty the organizing principle of the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It’s not really about ideology anymore. It’s about whether you are with him or against him.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And you see that with politicians. Somebody can have a long record of voting for conservative policies, but if they criticize Trump, they can become a pariah overnight.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And conversely, somebody can have positions that would have been completely unacceptable to Republicans ten years ago, but if they are loyal to Trump, they’re welcomed into the party.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> Does that mean ideology doesn’t matter anymore?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Sarah Longwell:\u003c/strong> I think ideology matters less than it used to.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There are still people who care deeply about policy. But for a lot of voters, the Republican Party has become much more of an identity than a set of policy commitments.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And that’s true of both parties, frankly. But Trump has taken it to another level.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Mina Kim:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with Sarah Longwell, Republican strategist and co-founder of Republican Voters Against Trump. Her new book is \u003cem>Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career in Republican Politics\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>If you’d like to join the conversation, you can email us at forum@kqed.org. You can also call us at 866-733-6786.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You’re listening to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Monday, August 31, 2026 at 9 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Growing up in San Rafael in the 80’s and 90’s, writer David Perlis sensed that he had just missed something incredible. “I wanted to know what happened here before I was born,” he writes. That kicked off a quest to uncover Marin County’s “seismic cultural awakening” throughout the midcentury that he chronicles in his new book “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast.” Perlis argues that what emerged from “the Marinaissance” was adopted by popular culture across America — yet its influence has been overlooked. We talk to Perlis about the long reach of Marin’s cultural influence and the legendary artists and thought leaders who found refuge there, including Alan Watts, Robin Williams, Anna Halprin, George Lucas and many more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>David Perlis\u003c/strong>, writer, musician, filmmaker and author, “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. To hear David Perlis tell it in his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>, the Marin thing really begins when some people started to party on an old ferry, emceed by Yonko Varda, down at the waterfront in Sausalito. And next thing you knew, Marin was a crucial artistic center known around the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>How? Why? Quote, “Because of the fault and the mountain, the moon and the tides, because for so long there were no bridges and then there were,” Perlis writes. “Because of the radio and small presses and breathtaking risk, Marin was the future. Maybe, too, because Eastern art, poetry and philosophy in many different guises began to diffuse into America from this place. For Pacific exchanges, what I learned can be summed up like this: Oakland was the port, but Marin was portal.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Perlis calls this time period, from about 1950-ish to 1980-ish, the Marinessance — a seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture and film. If that sounds grand, let me assure you that it might even undersell what happened in Marin right under the noses of the rich and mostly conservative people who lived up there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we have Perlis here with us in the studio. Welcome, David.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Alexis. Thanks for having me on the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So what’s your connection to Marin? What made you want to do this book?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, I grew up in suburban Spielberg in San Rafael, very much a “kids on bikes” neighborhood where an alien might land in your backyard, although unfortunately no alien ever did. I never got to bond in that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the short answer is because I had to, because there was a magic I sensed in the air in suburban San Rafael and the hills of Mill Valley, driving by the houseboats, Waldo Point, and looking out the window as a kid and saying, “What are those, and how long have they been there, and who made them?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a magic that called to me over the years until I was old enough to understand what it was asking. And that was to solve the mystery and to find the source of the magic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I looked around for a book that would explain that to me, and I found the answers scattered across hundreds, if not thousands, of books. And it felt important to put them all in one place. And I think maybe that’s what Marin was calling on me to do — put it all in one place, and so that other people could experience it and to solve the mystery and to find out that, in fact, yes, there was a divergent, distinctive awakening that took place in my hometown of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Do you think that one reason there hasn’t been this sort of regional explanation is that people who are, say, exploring the growth of nature writing and poetry in America in the mid-century are like, okay, it’s like Gary Snyder and it’s the Bolinas poets, or people who were approaching George Lucas in film are like — they go down that route. And what taking this regional approach allows you to do is to sort of draw all the connections individual disciplines don’t do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. There are many wonderful books written about the Grateful Dead. There are many books written by George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic and \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em>. But what they don’t have is the context to connect Philip K. Dick and Alan Watts and George Lucas and the Halprin family, Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Daria — to see that they were all part of the same awakening and that there were some common beliefs and values that underlie their work, which were shared and intrinsically tied to the landscape of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. What do you think were the values that informed the Marinessance?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, when we talk about the Marinessance, we are talking about almost a half century. And in some ways, maybe it’s still going. I do think that the embers still glow.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But — so we have to think about the beliefs and values as changing over that period of time, and the way that they were interpreted throughout the movement. But there are three that I think really consistently informed the movement from the beginning to the end.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One would be an embrace of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. And we have to see this in the context of World War II, because the artists who were embracing this were actually rebelling. They were rejecting the old world and they were embracing this Eastern mysticism and philosophy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was a long streak of anti-Asian racism in California going back to when the Chinese came over to build the railroad. And so these people embracing Buddhism, embracing Taoism, was an absolute rebellion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’d say a second core principle would be the idea of self-sufficiency. Yes, as advocated for by the transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, but more so and especially as practiced by Indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially the Coast Miwok of Marin County, because they exhibited a certain self-sufficiency in making their own clothes, their own shelters, growing their own food and having a deep respect for nature and seeing their resources as not bottomless.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas the old world had this attitude often that Indigenous cultures were somehow inferior, primitive, savage, the Marinessance was one of the first movements in America to see these cultures as equal to, if not superior to, the cultures, the so-called civilized cultures of the old world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I would say the third core principle that lasted throughout was this idea of human potential, which took the form of experimentation, which is where the drugs of the subtitle come in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And these drugs go back to the early Marinessance. Speed was huge, because think of the productivity that can be achieved while on speed. The instant enlightenment of acid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then I would also say experimentation, but also, as you mentioned earlier, risk-taking — human potential. Putting it all on the line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think too often these days artists do not put it all on the line in the name of achieving purity of artistic vision. These people risked their homes, they risked their livelihoods, they risked their sanity to achieve purity of artistic vision, which is really the truest and purest form of creation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with David Perlis about his book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Listen, we want to hear from you. You’re hearing David’s theory about how Marin came to be the cultural center that it is. What do you think? What is it about Marin that has generated such tremendous creativity over these decades?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, Discord or @KQEDForum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I sent out a note about the Marinessance in this book to my newsletter subscribers. Got a ton of people writing in, stories like this, for example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tom wrote in to say, “I was in the Navy from ’66 to ’70. Sometime during one of our import periods, a few of us decided to go to a concert, which was being held on Mount Tam. We drove over, parked, and then started the trek up to concert. As you can imagine, our haircut left no doubt that we were in the service. A few insults here and there as we walked up the road, and then this big convertible pulls up and asks us if we wanted a ride up. Came to find out he was a local disc jockey and was an emcee at the concert. We got in, got great access, and had a wonderful time. Just one of the smaller stories of the Marinessance there.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Why don’t we go to where you begin the book? So, you know, if you tell someone Eastern philosophy, self-sufficiency, interest in Indigenous — they might be like, “Flash, Gary Snyder.” But you have a bunch of other figures who were also crucial, even if they became not necessarily international or globally famous. Tell us about Elsa Gidlow and Violet Tommy, Henry Anderson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I would love to talk about Elsa Gidlow. The book does start with her for several reasons. And one is, basically, that she was one of the first artists to permanently reside there who held those core beliefs and values in Marin County, and she faced quite a lot of adversity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Elsa, for those of you who don’t know, was a poet and a radical feminist who was a co-founder of an intentional community called Druid Heights, on Mount Tamalpais. But before that, she came to the town of Fairfax, which was largely summer homes and things of that nature, and she established herself there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She is known for writing one of the first openly gay poetry volumes, called \u003cem>On a Grey Thread\u003c/em>. And she faced some persecution in Fairfax, which I thought was an interesting way to begin the story because while you did have an incredible artistic awakening in Marin County, some of Marin County’s mainstream Marin County was very conservative and resisted that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And she was actually scrutinized by the Tenney Committee for Un-American Activities because her neighbors didn’t like that she was hanging out with Chinese people, didn’t like that she was living with a woman. And though her name was ultimately cleared, it was more than enough for her to decide to go live up on top of the mountain and get out of Fairfax at that time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I feel like these people are all part of sort of the committee to promote anti-American activity. It’s kind of like the whole point of the thing, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, it’s interesting, too, because you note the kind of Sausalito boat life, too. That’s another one. I mean, Yonko Varda comes across in this book as deadbeat, libertine, bohemian, but also absolute heartbeat or soul of this early movement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I don’t like to use the word hippie because I think it can be perceived as a little derogatory to just the young people who are doing their own thing, you know. But Yonko was probably the first hippie, and long before — in 1949, 1950, way before the Summer of Love — Yonko was showing people how to dress the way they felt inside and to behave the way they felt inside and give permission.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was an authentic European bohemian in Sausalito. And, you know, you drive by Waldo Point now and all the houseboats are lined up in these neat little rows. But you have to think back to the 1950s. It was a jumble out there, you know. There were planks and gangways, and this is how people were getting across the boats, and they were flushing their sewage into the water and the tides weren’t quite carrying it out. So it might have smelled a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a wild and woolly place out there with Varda, who also held these wonderful parties. There were many kind of nexuses of the Marinessance, including Druid Heights, including the ferryboat \u003cem>Vallejo\u003c/em>, where Yonko Varda lived, that really brought people to Marin and brought the great minds of the Marinessance together to share and exchange ideas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I do love when Anne Halprin says, “All of us went to Varda’s barge all the time for wild parties. It wasn’t the drug period at all. It was just going to a party with your friends and having a good time.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Awesome!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Listen, we’re talking with David Perlis about his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Maybe you’ve got a Marinessance story to share with us. You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. Were you there? I bet you were. Forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Growing up in San Rafael in the 80’s and 90’s, writer David Perlis sensed that he had just missed something incredible. “I wanted to know what happened here before I was born,” he writes. That kicked off a quest to uncover Marin County’s “seismic cultural awakening” throughout the midcentury that he chronicles in his new book “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast.” Perlis argues that what emerged from “the Marinaissance” was adopted by popular culture across America — yet its influence has been overlooked. We talk to Perlis about the long reach of Marin’s cultural influence and the legendary artists and thought leaders who found refuge there, including Alan Watts, Robin Williams, Anna Halprin, George Lucas and many more.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. To hear David Perlis tell it in his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>, the Marin thing really begins when some people started to party on an old ferry, emceed by Yonko Varda, down at the waterfront in Sausalito. And next thing you knew, Marin was a crucial artistic center known around the world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. To hear David Perlis tell it in his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>, the Marin thing really begins when some people started to party on an old ferry, emceed by Yonko Varda, down at the waterfront in Sausalito. And next thing you knew, Marin was a crucial artistic center known around the world.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>How? Why? Quote, “Because of the fault and the mountain, the moon and the tides, because for so long there were no bridges and then there were,” Perlis writes. “Because of the radio and small presses and breathtaking risk, Marin was the future. Maybe, too, because Eastern art, poetry and philosophy in many different guises began to diffuse into America from this place. For Pacific exchanges, what I learned can be summed up like this: Oakland was the port, but Marin was portal.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>How? Why? Quote, “Because of the fault and the mountain, the moon and the tides, because for so long there were no bridges and then there were,” Perlis writes. “Because of the radio and small presses and breathtaking risk, Marin was the future. Maybe, too, because Eastern art, poetry and philosophy in many different guises began to diffuse into America from this place. For Pacific exchanges, what I learned can be summed up like this: Oakland was the port, but Marin was portal.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Perlis calls this time period, from about 1950-ish to 1980-ish, the Marinessance — a seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture and film. If that sounds grand, let me assure you that it might even undersell what happened in Marin right under the noses of the rich and mostly conservative people who lived up there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Perlis calls this time period, from about 1950-ish to 1980-ish, the Marinessance — a seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture and film. If that sounds grand, let me assure you that it might even undersell what happened in Marin right under the noses of the rich and mostly conservative people who lived up there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And we have Perlis here with us in the studio. Welcome, David.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Alexis. Thanks for having me on the show.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So what’s your connection to Marin? What made you want to do this book?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, I grew up in suburban Spielberg in San Rafael, very much a “kids on bikes” neighborhood where an alien might land in your backyard, although unfortunately no alien ever did. I never got to bond in that way.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And the short answer is because I had to, because there was a magic I sensed in the air in suburban San Rafael and the hills of Mill Valley, driving by the houseboats, Waldo Point, and looking out the window as a kid and saying, “What are those, and how long have they been there, and who made them?”\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It was a magic that called to me over the years until I was old enough to understand what it was asking. And that was to solve the mystery and to find the source of the magic.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I looked around for a book that would explain that to me, and I found the answers scattered across hundreds, if not thousands, of books. And it felt important to put them all in one place. And I think maybe that’s what Marin was calling on me to do — put it all in one place, and so that other people could experience it and to solve the mystery and to find out that, in fact, yes, there was a divergent, distinctive awakening that took place in my hometown of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Do you think that one reason there hasn’t been this sort of regional explanation is that people who are, say, exploring the growth of nature writing and poetry in America in the mid-century are like, okay, it’s like Gary Snyder and it’s the Bolinas poets, or people who were approaching George Lucas in film are like — they go down that route. And what taking this regional approach allows you to do is to sort of draw all the connections individual disciplines don’t do.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Do you think that one reason there hasn’t been this sort of regional explanation is that people who are, say, exploring the growth of nature writing and poetry in America in the mid-century are like, okay, it’s like Gary Snyder and it’s the Bolinas poets, or people who were approaching George Lucas in film are like — they go down that route. And what taking this regional approach allows you to do is to sort of draw all the connections individual disciplines don’t do.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. There are many wonderful books written about the Grateful Dead. There are many books written by George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic and \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em>. But what they don’t have is the context to connect Philip K. Dick and Alan Watts and George Lucas and the Halprin family, Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Daria — to see that they were all part of the same awakening and that there were some common beliefs and values that underlie their work, which were shared and intrinsically tied to the landscape of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. There are many wonderful books written about the Grateful Dead. There are many books written by George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic and \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em>. But what they don’t have is the context to connect Philip K. Dick and Alan Watts and George Lucas and the Halprin family, Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Daria — to see that they were all part of the same awakening and that there were some common beliefs and values that underlie their work, which were shared and intrinsically tied to the landscape of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. What do you think were the values that informed the Marinessance?\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, when we talk about the Marinessance, we are talking about almost a half century. And in some ways, maybe it’s still going. I do think that the embers still glow.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, when we talk about the Marinessance, we are talking about almost a half century. And in some ways, maybe it’s still going. I do think that the embers still glow.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>But — so we have to think about the beliefs and values as changing over that period of time, and the way that they were interpreted throughout the movement. But there are three that I think really consistently informed the movement from the beginning to the end.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>But — so we have to think about the beliefs and values as changing over that period of time, and the way that they were interpreted throughout the movement. But there are three that I think really consistently informed the movement from the beginning to the end.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>One would be an embrace of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. And we have to see this in the context of World War II, because the artists who were embracing this were actually rebelling. They were rejecting the old world and they were embracing this Eastern mysticism and philosophy.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>There was a long streak of anti-Asian racism in California going back to when the Chinese came over to build the railroad. And so these people embracing Buddhism, embracing Taoism, was an absolute rebellion.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’d say a second core principle would be the idea of self-sufficiency. Yes, as advocated for by the transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, but more so and especially as practiced by Indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially the Coast Miwok of Marin County, because they exhibited a certain self-sufficiency in making their own clothes, their own shelters, growing their own food and having a deep respect for nature and seeing their resources as not bottomless.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Whereas the old world had this attitude often that Indigenous cultures were somehow inferior, primitive, savage, the Marinessance was one of the first movements in America to see these cultures as equal to, if not superior to, the cultures, the so-called civilized cultures of the old world.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And I would say the third core principle that lasted throughout was this idea of human potential, which took the form of experimentation, which is where the drugs of the subtitle come in.\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And these drugs go back to the early Marinessance. Speed was huge, because think of the productivity that can be achieved while on speed. The instant enlightenment of acid.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And these drugs go back to the early Marinessance. Speed was huge, because think of the productivity that can be achieved while on speed. The instant enlightenment of acid.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And then I would also say experimentation, but also, as you mentioned earlier, risk-taking — human potential. Putting it all on the line.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And then I would also say experimentation, but also, as you mentioned earlier, risk-taking — human potential. Putting it all on the line.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I think too often these days artists do not put it all on the line in the name of achieving purity of artistic vision. These people risked their homes, they risked their livelihoods, they risked their sanity to achieve purity of artistic vision, which is really the truest and purest form of creation.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I think too often these days artists do not put it all on the line in the name of achieving purity of artistic vision. These people risked their homes, they risked their livelihoods, they risked their sanity to achieve purity of artistic vision, which is really the truest and purest form of creation.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with David Perlis about his book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Listen, we want to hear from you. You’re hearing David’s theory about how Marin came to be the cultural center that it is. What do you think? What is it about Marin that has generated such tremendous creativity over these decades?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with David Perlis about his book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Listen, we want to hear from you. You’re hearing David’s theory about how Marin came to be the cultural center that it is. What do you think? What is it about Marin that has generated such tremendous creativity over these decades?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, Discord or @KQEDForum.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, Discord or @KQEDForum.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I sent out a note about the Marinessance in this book to my newsletter subscribers. Got a ton of people writing in, stories like this, for example.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>I sent out a note about the Marinessance in this book to my newsletter subscribers. Got a ton of people writing in, stories like this, for example.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Tom wrote in to say, “I was in the Navy from ’66 to ’70. Sometime during one of our import periods, a few of us decided to go to a concert, which was being held on Mount Tam. We drove over, parked, and then started the trek up to concert. As you can imagine, our haircut left no doubt that we were in the service. A few insults here and there as we walked up the road, and then this big convertible pulls up and asks us if we wanted a ride up. Came to find out he was a local disc jockey and was an emcee at the concert. We got in, got great access, and had a wonderful time. Just one of the smaller stories of the Marinessance there.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Tom wrote in to say, “I was in the Navy from ’66 to ’70. Sometime during one of our import periods, a few of us decided to go to a concert, which was being held on Mount Tam. We drove over, parked, and then started the trek up to concert. As you can imagine, our haircut left no doubt that we were in the service. A few insults here and there as we walked up the road, and then this big convertible pulls up and asks us if we wanted a ride up. Came to find out he was a local disc jockey and was an emcee at the concert. We got in, got great access, and had a wonderful time. Just one of the smaller stories of the Marinessance there.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Why don’t we go to where you begin the book? So, you know, if you tell someone Eastern philosophy, self-sufficiency, interest in Indigenous — they might be like, “Flash, Gary Snyder.” But you have a bunch of other figures who were also crucial, even if they became not necessarily international or globally famous. Tell us about Elsa Gidlow and Violet Tommy, Henry Anderson.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Why don’t we go to where you begin the book? So, you know, if you tell someone Eastern philosophy, self-sufficiency, interest in Indigenous — they might be like, “Flash, Gary Snyder.” But you have a bunch of other figures who were also crucial, even if they became not necessarily international or globally famous. Tell us about Elsa Gidlow and Violet Tommy, Henry Anderson.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I would love to talk about Elsa Gidlow. The book does start with her for several reasons. And one is, basically, that she was one of the first artists to permanently reside there who held those core beliefs and values in Marin County, and she faced quite a lot of adversity.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I would love to talk about Elsa Gidlow. The book does start with her for several reasons. And one is, basically, that she was one of the first artists to permanently reside there who held those core beliefs and values in Marin County, and she faced quite a lot of adversity.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>Elsa, for those of you who don’t know, was a poet and a radical feminist who was a co-founder of an intentional community called Druid Heights, on Mount Tamalpais. But before that, she came to the town of Fairfax, which was largely summer homes and things of that nature, and she established herself there.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>Elsa, for those of you who don’t know, was a poet and a radical feminist who was a co-founder of an intentional community called Druid Heights, on Mount Tamalpais. But before that, she came to the town of Fairfax, which was largely summer homes and things of that nature, and she established herself there.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>She is known for writing one of the first openly gay poetry volumes, called \u003cem>On a Grey Thread\u003c/em>. And she faced some persecution in Fairfax, which I thought was an interesting way to begin the story because while you did have an incredible artistic awakening in Marin County, some of Marin County’s mainstream Marin County was very conservative and resisted that.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>She is known for writing one of the first openly gay poetry volumes, called \u003cem>On a Grey Thread\u003c/em>. And she faced some persecution in Fairfax, which I thought was an interesting way to begin the story because while you did have an incredible artistic awakening in Marin County, some of Marin County’s mainstream Marin County was very conservative and resisted that.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>And she was actually scrutinized by the Tenney Committee for Un-American Activities because her neighbors didn’t like that she was hanging out with Chinese people, didn’t like that she was living with a woman. And though her name was ultimately cleared, it was more than enough for her to decide to go live up on top of the mountain and get out of Fairfax at that time.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>And she was actually scrutinized by the Tenney Committee for Un-American Activities because her neighbors didn’t like that she was hanging out with Chinese people, didn’t like that she was living with a woman. And though her name was ultimately cleared, it was more than enough for her to decide to go live up on top of the mountain and get out of Fairfax at that time.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I feel like these people are all part of sort of the committee to promote anti-American activity. It’s kind of like the whole point of the thing, you know?\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I feel like these people are all part of sort of the committee to promote anti-American activity. It’s kind of like the whole point of the thing, you know?\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>You know, it’s interesting, too, because you note the kind of Sausalito boat life, too. That’s another one. I mean, Yonko Varda comes across in this book as deadbeat, libertine, bohemian, but also absolute heartbeat or soul of this early movement.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>You know, it’s interesting, too, because you note the kind of Sausalito boat life, too. That’s another one. I mean, Yonko Varda comes across in this book as deadbeat, libertine, bohemian, but also absolute heartbeat or soul of this early movement.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I don’t like to use the word hippie because I think it can be perceived as a little derogatory to just the young people who are doing their own thing, you know. But Yonko was probably the first hippie, and long before — in 1949, 1950, way before the Summer of Love — Yonko was showing people how to dress the way they felt inside and to behave the way they felt inside and give permission.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I don’t like to use the word hippie because I think it can be perceived as a little derogatory to just the young people who are doing their own thing, you know. But Yonko was probably the first hippie, and long before — in 1949, 1950, way before the Summer of Love — Yonko was showing people how to dress the way they felt inside and to behave the way they felt inside and give permission.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>He was an authentic European bohemian in Sausalito. And, you know, you drive by Waldo Point now and all the houseboats are lined up in these neat little rows. But you have to think back to the 1950s. It was a jumble out there, you know. There were planks and gangways, and this is how people were getting across the boats, and they were flushing their sewage into the water and the tides weren’t quite carrying it out. So it might have smelled a little bit.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>He was an authentic European bohemian in Sausalito. And, you know, you drive by Waldo Point now and all the houseboats are lined up in these neat little rows. But you have to think back to the 1950s. It was a jumble out there, you know. There were planks and gangways, and this is how people were getting across the boats, and they were flushing their sewage into the water and the tides weren’t quite carrying it out. So it might have smelled a little bit.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>It was a wild and woolly place out there with Varda, who also held these wonderful parties. There were many kind of nexuses of the Marinessance, including Druid Heights, including the ferryboat \u003cem>Vallejo\u003c/em>, where Yonko Varda lived, that really brought people to Marin and brought the great minds of the Marinessance together to share and exchange ideas.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>It was a wild and woolly place out there with Varda, who also held these wonderful parties. There were many kind of nexuses of the Marinessance, including Druid Heights, including the ferryboat \u003cem>Vallejo\u003c/em>, where Yonko Varda lived, that really brought people to Marin and brought the great minds of the Marinessance together to share and exchange ideas.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I do love when Anne Halprin says, “All of us went to Varda’s barge all the time for wild parties. It wasn’t the drug period at all. It was just going to a party with your friends and having a good time.”\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I do love when Anne Halprin says, “All of us went to Varda’s barge all the time for wild parties. It wasn’t the drug period at all. It was just going to a party with your friends and having a good time.”\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Awesome!\u003c/p>\n",
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Listen, we’re talking with David Perlis about his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Maybe you’ve got a Marinessance story to share with us. You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. Were you there? I bet you were. Forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n",
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"\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Listen, we’re talking with David Perlis about his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Maybe you’ve got a Marinessance story to share with us. You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. Were you there? I bet you were. Forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n"
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"innerHTML": "\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Airdate: Monday, August 31, 2026 at 9 AM\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Growing up in San Rafael in the 80’s and 90’s, writer David Perlis sensed that he had just missed something incredible. “I wanted to know what happened here before I was born,” he writes. That kicked off a quest to uncover Marin County’s “seismic cultural awakening” throughout the midcentury that he chronicles in his new book “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast.” Perlis argues that what emerged from “the Marinaissance” was adopted by popular culture across America — yet its influence has been overlooked. We talk to Perlis about the long reach of Marin’s cultural influence and the legendary artists and thought leaders who found refuge there, including Alan Watts, Robin Williams, Anna Halprin, George Lucas and many more.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Guest: \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n\u003cli>\u003cstrong>David Perlis\u003c/strong>, writer, musician, filmmaker and author, “Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast”\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\n\n\n\u003ch2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Episode Transcript\u003c/h2>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cem>\u003cstrong>This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.\u003c/strong>\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Welcome to \u003cem>Forum\u003c/em>. I’m Alexis Madrigal. To hear David Perlis tell it in his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>, the Marin thing really begins when some people started to party on an old ferry, emceed by Yonko Varda, down at the waterfront in Sausalito. And next thing you knew, Marin was a crucial artistic center known around the world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>How? Why? Quote, “Because of the fault and the mountain, the moon and the tides, because for so long there were no bridges and then there were,” Perlis writes. “Because of the radio and small presses and breathtaking risk, Marin was the future. Maybe, too, because Eastern art, poetry and philosophy in many different guises began to diffuse into America from this place. For Pacific exchanges, what I learned can be summed up like this: Oakland was the port, but Marin was portal.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Perlis calls this time period, from about 1950-ish to 1980-ish, the Marinessance — a seismic cultural awakening encompassing literature, music, dance, painting, philosophy, religion, architecture and film. If that sounds grand, let me assure you that it might even undersell what happened in Marin right under the noses of the rich and mostly conservative people who lived up there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And we have Perlis here with us in the studio. Welcome, David.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Thanks, Alexis. Thanks for having me on the show.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> So what’s your connection to Marin? What made you want to do this book?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, I grew up in suburban Spielberg in San Rafael, very much a “kids on bikes” neighborhood where an alien might land in your backyard, although unfortunately no alien ever did. I never got to bond in that way.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And the short answer is because I had to, because there was a magic I sensed in the air in suburban San Rafael and the hills of Mill Valley, driving by the houseboats, Waldo Point, and looking out the window as a kid and saying, “What are those, and how long have they been there, and who made them?”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a magic that called to me over the years until I was old enough to understand what it was asking. And that was to solve the mystery and to find the source of the magic.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I looked around for a book that would explain that to me, and I found the answers scattered across hundreds, if not thousands, of books. And it felt important to put them all in one place. And I think maybe that’s what Marin was calling on me to do — put it all in one place, and so that other people could experience it and to solve the mystery and to find out that, in fact, yes, there was a divergent, distinctive awakening that took place in my hometown of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Do you think that one reason there hasn’t been this sort of regional explanation is that people who are, say, exploring the growth of nature writing and poetry in America in the mid-century are like, okay, it’s like Gary Snyder and it’s the Bolinas poets, or people who were approaching George Lucas in film are like — they go down that route. And what taking this regional approach allows you to do is to sort of draw all the connections individual disciplines don’t do.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Absolutely. There are many wonderful books written about the Grateful Dead. There are many books written by George Lucas and Industrial Light & Magic and \u003cem>Star Wars\u003c/em>. But what they don’t have is the context to connect Philip K. Dick and Alan Watts and George Lucas and the Halprin family, Lawrence and Anna Halprin and Daria — to see that they were all part of the same awakening and that there were some common beliefs and values that underlie their work, which were shared and intrinsically tied to the landscape of Marin County.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Yeah. What do you think were the values that informed the Marinessance?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Well, when we talk about the Marinessance, we are talking about almost a half century. And in some ways, maybe it’s still going. I do think that the embers still glow.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>But — so we have to think about the beliefs and values as changing over that period of time, and the way that they were interpreted throughout the movement. But there are three that I think really consistently informed the movement from the beginning to the end.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>One would be an embrace of Eastern philosophy and mysticism. And we have to see this in the context of World War II, because the artists who were embracing this were actually rebelling. They were rejecting the old world and they were embracing this Eastern mysticism and philosophy.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>There was a long streak of anti-Asian racism in California going back to when the Chinese came over to build the railroad. And so these people embracing Buddhism, embracing Taoism, was an absolute rebellion.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’d say a second core principle would be the idea of self-sufficiency. Yes, as advocated for by the transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau, but more so and especially as practiced by Indigenous cultures of the Americas, especially the Coast Miwok of Marin County, because they exhibited a certain self-sufficiency in making their own clothes, their own shelters, growing their own food and having a deep respect for nature and seeing their resources as not bottomless.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Whereas the old world had this attitude often that Indigenous cultures were somehow inferior, primitive, savage, the Marinessance was one of the first movements in America to see these cultures as equal to, if not superior to, the cultures, the so-called civilized cultures of the old world.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And I would say the third core principle that lasted throughout was this idea of human potential, which took the form of experimentation, which is where the drugs of the subtitle come in.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And these drugs go back to the early Marinessance. Speed was huge, because think of the productivity that can be achieved while on speed. The instant enlightenment of acid.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And then I would also say experimentation, but also, as you mentioned earlier, risk-taking — human potential. Putting it all on the line.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I think too often these days artists do not put it all on the line in the name of achieving purity of artistic vision. These people risked their homes, they risked their livelihoods, they risked their sanity to achieve purity of artistic vision, which is really the truest and purest form of creation.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> We’re talking with David Perlis about his book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Listen, we want to hear from you. You’re hearing David’s theory about how Marin came to be the cultural center that it is. What do you think? What is it about Marin that has generated such tremendous creativity over these decades?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>The number is 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. You can email forum@kqed.org. You can find us on social media, BlueSky, Instagram, Discord or @KQEDForum.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I sent out a note about the Marinessance in this book to my newsletter subscribers. Got a ton of people writing in, stories like this, for example.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Tom wrote in to say, “I was in the Navy from ’66 to ’70. Sometime during one of our import periods, a few of us decided to go to a concert, which was being held on Mount Tam. We drove over, parked, and then started the trek up to concert. As you can imagine, our haircut left no doubt that we were in the service. A few insults here and there as we walked up the road, and then this big convertible pulls up and asks us if we wanted a ride up. Came to find out he was a local disc jockey and was an emcee at the concert. We got in, got great access, and had a wonderful time. Just one of the smaller stories of the Marinessance there.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Why don’t we go to where you begin the book? So, you know, if you tell someone Eastern philosophy, self-sufficiency, interest in Indigenous — they might be like, “Flash, Gary Snyder.” But you have a bunch of other figures who were also crucial, even if they became not necessarily international or globally famous. Tell us about Elsa Gidlow and Violet Tommy, Henry Anderson.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah, I would love to talk about Elsa Gidlow. The book does start with her for several reasons. And one is, basically, that she was one of the first artists to permanently reside there who held those core beliefs and values in Marin County, and she faced quite a lot of adversity.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>Elsa, for those of you who don’t know, was a poet and a radical feminist who was a co-founder of an intentional community called Druid Heights, on Mount Tamalpais. But before that, she came to the town of Fairfax, which was largely summer homes and things of that nature, and she established herself there.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>She is known for writing one of the first openly gay poetry volumes, called \u003cem>On a Grey Thread\u003c/em>. And she faced some persecution in Fairfax, which I thought was an interesting way to begin the story because while you did have an incredible artistic awakening in Marin County, some of Marin County’s mainstream Marin County was very conservative and resisted that.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>And she was actually scrutinized by the Tenney Committee for Un-American Activities because her neighbors didn’t like that she was hanging out with Chinese people, didn’t like that she was living with a woman. And though her name was ultimately cleared, it was more than enough for her to decide to go live up on top of the mountain and get out of Fairfax at that time.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I mean, I feel like these people are all part of sort of the committee to promote anti-American activity. It’s kind of like the whole point of the thing, you know?\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>You know, it’s interesting, too, because you note the kind of Sausalito boat life, too. That’s another one. I mean, Yonko Varda comes across in this book as deadbeat, libertine, bohemian, but also absolute heartbeat or soul of this early movement.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Yeah. I don’t like to use the word hippie because I think it can be perceived as a little derogatory to just the young people who are doing their own thing, you know. But Yonko was probably the first hippie, and long before — in 1949, 1950, way before the Summer of Love — Yonko was showing people how to dress the way they felt inside and to behave the way they felt inside and give permission.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>He was an authentic European bohemian in Sausalito. And, you know, you drive by Waldo Point now and all the houseboats are lined up in these neat little rows. But you have to think back to the 1950s. It was a jumble out there, you know. There were planks and gangways, and this is how people were getting across the boats, and they were flushing their sewage into the water and the tides weren’t quite carrying it out. So it might have smelled a little bit.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>It was a wild and woolly place out there with Varda, who also held these wonderful parties. There were many kind of nexuses of the Marinessance, including Druid Heights, including the ferryboat \u003cem>Vallejo\u003c/em>, where Yonko Varda lived, that really brought people to Marin and brought the great minds of the Marinessance together to share and exchange ideas.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> I do love when Anne Halprin says, “All of us went to Varda’s barge all the time for wild parties. It wasn’t the drug period at all. It was just going to a party with your friends and having a good time.”\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>David Perlis:\u003c/strong> Awesome!\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Alexis Madrigal:\u003c/strong> Listen, we’re talking with David Perlis about his new book, \u003cem>Morning in Marin: Zen, Drugs, and Ewoks on the California Coast\u003c/em>. Maybe you’ve got a Marinessance story to share with us. You can give us a call, 866-733-6786. Were you there? I bet you were. Forum@kqed.org.\u003c/p>\n\n\n\n\u003cp>I’m Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned.\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
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"possible": {
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"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
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"pri-the-world": {
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"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
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"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
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"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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"reveal": {
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"info": "Created by The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, Reveal is public radios first one-hour weekly radio show and podcast dedicated to investigative reporting. Credible, fact based and without a partisan agenda, Reveal combines the power and artistry of driveway moment storytelling with data-rich reporting on critically important issues. The result is stories that inform and inspire, arming our listeners with information to right injustices, hold the powerful accountable and improve lives.Reveal is hosted by Al Letson and showcases the award-winning work of CIR and newsrooms large and small across the nation. In a radio and podcast market crowded with choices, Reveal focuses on important and often surprising stories that illuminate the world for our listeners.",
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},
"rightnowish": {
"id": "rightnowish",
"title": "Rightnowish",
"tagline": "Art is where you find it",
"info": "Rightnowish digs into life in the Bay Area right now… ish. Journalist Pendarvis Harshaw takes us to galleries painted on the sides of liquor stores in West Oakland. We'll dance in warehouses in the Bayview, make smoothies with kids in South Berkeley, and listen to classical music in a 1984 Cutlass Supreme in Richmond. Every week, Pen talks to movers and shakers about how the Bay Area shapes what they create, and how they shape the place we call home.",
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},
"science-friday": {
"id": "science-friday",
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"info": "Science Friday is a weekly science talk show, broadcast live over public radio stations nationwide. Each week, the show focuses on science topics that are in the news and tries to bring an educated, balanced discussion to bear on the scientific issues at hand. Panels of expert guests join host Ira Flatow, a veteran science journalist, to discuss science and to take questions from listeners during the call-in portion of the program.",
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"snap-judgment": {
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"title": "Snap Judgment",
"tagline": "Real stories with killer beats",
"info": "The Snap Judgment radio show and podcast mixes real stories with killer beats to produce cinematic, dramatic radio. Snap's musical brand of storytelling dares listeners to see the world through the eyes of another. This is storytelling... with a BEAT!! Snap first aired on public radio stations nationwide in July 2010. Today, Snap Judgment airs on over 450 public radio stations and is brought to the airwaves by KQED & PRX.",
"airtime": "SAT 1pm-2pm, 9pm-10pm",
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