January 14, 2026 • 58 mins
Have you ever heard the story of "shrunken heads"? In the West, a ton of people sadly associate this with their own self-centric pop-culture experiences. However -- as Ben, Matt and Noel discover in tonight's episode -- the ancient practice of creating tsantsas is far more fascinating than any nostalgia reference. Tune in to learn the true conspiracy behind the popularity of "shrunken heads".
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
guest producer Max the freight Train Williams. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Guys, we're recording on
January fifth, twenty twenty six. And it's weird to say it,
(00:51):
but what a year already.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
It's not weird at all. I mean, it's true, it's
not a weird year, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Noel. For the break, Ben and I had a conversation
about the National Endowment for Democracy, and in that episode
we had a bit of a discussion about Venezuela and
some stuff's been happening.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Oh yeah, I've heard rumblings.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
We recorded on December nineteenth, and then you wake up,
you know, just after Christmas, just as the New Year's
were ringing in, you know, Head of State gets abducted.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
It's cool, before a lot of Saddami type era stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Uh huh, Yeah, I remember sending that text to the
group chat saying, sorry, we all have to wake up
to this because you remember.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
What I of doom and the text thread.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
The alerts come through at the worst times for us.
You're just like, oh no, Google, I can't right now.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Sorry, No, that's why I turn all alerts off. I
just like to, you know, find it on my own time.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well, we hope that everybody joining us today, friends and neighbors,
fellow conspiracy realists. We hope that you had a good
end of the year, and we hope that twenty twenty
six is treating you right so far. I got to
tell you, guys, just peek behind the curtain. It's very
unusual for us to go so long without hanging out
(02:18):
with each other and without recording. So I missed you guys.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
How do I even do this? I missed you too, Ben,
I missed all of you.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, well, I missed this thing we get to do
where we sit and talk about weird subjects. It was
like two weeks without it, and I'm really glad that
we're here.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
It was an amazing reset, though, I got to say,
especially considering what's transpired in the interim. Sometimes it's good
to just do a little you know, check out, And
now we're back and we're doing this video stuff, which
is like a whole new thing for us. So I'm
frankly pretty excited about the new year, all things considered.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yes, yeah, let's give it a chance. Let's take twenty
twenty six a chance. Yeah, oh well, we'll give pieces
of a chance. So geez, we're gearing up for twenty
twenty six, all the wonders and terrors that might hold,
and folks, we wanted to want to dive into something
that has always fascinated and confused us. As kids who
(03:14):
grew up reading all sorts of weird stuff, we're all
familiar with a curious, seemingly ghoulish cultural practice. It's captivated
Westerners for centuries, with all sorts of misunderstandings along the way.
We're finally doing it. This is one of those episodes
that we can't believe we haven't done earlier. The story
(03:35):
the story of sanses or shrunken heads.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I think maybe this is true for a lot of
folks in our age bracket, but my first exposure to
shrunken heads was that incredible scene in the movie Beetlejuice
where dude, yeah gets are not a dude, Beetlejuice himself
gets his head shrunk because he's like being a pill
in a waiting room.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
He's talking trash.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, nineteen eighty eight. You know, I was to come
to you guys with my first one that I remembered,
and it was a blip on a screen one time
when I watched Pee Wee's Big Adventure and.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
If that makes sense with Tim Burton, yeah, adjacent, There's
definitely was something in the air in those days.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Dude, he goes to a magic shop and the owner
of the magic shop is just going through a bunch
of gag things and he pulls out a shrunken head.
Then he goes through a normal head, giant head and
all that. But that's it was just that moment where
it pops into your your psyche, maybe as a child
watching something well, and that humor or.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
It is like a big part of how we experienced it.
It was this flippant almost gag thing, right.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, yeah, well, hearkening back by the way to the
exoticism and the other ring of Western civilizations. My first
experience you guys. I remember being in what we call
a curio shop and seeing some like behind glass there
was a thing that was a shrunken head, sansa and
it was probably fake, which we'll get into in a second.
(05:03):
This was going to be an episode that we uh,
we were going to play on our sisters show, Ridiculous History,
but we found that there are indeed conspiracies about shrunken heads.
This is also, by the way, a spiritual compliment to
our earlier episode on the Great US Brain Drain weird Out.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
There's there's interesting crossovers, and I'm excited to get to y'all.
Are you picturing too when you think of your earliest
memory of a shrunk head, just a little puckered coconut
of a thing that maybe has a tuft of hair
at the top, like a troll doll, three stitches on
the lips, right yeah, yeah, very very dark tone to
it as well, and sometimes like behind the leathery right
(05:42):
very much. So, well, let's you know what, we we've
talked about it.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Let's get into it. After word from our sponsors, heck.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, and we've returned. Uh, just want to jump into
a couple more examples of shrunken heads in popular culture,
because I think a few of these might hit home
with with some people listening right now. One that I
recalled was The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course, you remember
(06:14):
there's a little boy and Jack Skellington gives him a gift.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Third Tim Burton property. By the way, Holy crap, yo.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
He was super down with the shrunken heads.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well that was that was another thing pulls.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Out of a box, right, doesn't isn't that? It's like
a gift in that Christmas bit where like Jack Skellington
has taken over Christmas and little you know, human boy
is opening up a gift and there's like a shrunken
head in it, and he just sort of looks bewildered,
but not necessarily terrified. He like sort of pulls it
out very matter of factly.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, he shows it to his parents and they break
out very upsetting things. Another one that I wondered if
you guys remembered was the Super Mario Brothers, the original
motion picture from nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
Five or something with them.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, well, I wonder if you do you guys think
the goombas are a represent of sonzas in some way
or were.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Lizard people coded to me, but I hadn't seen it
in a long time. I'm kind of picturing them as
being weird, little squat lizard type dudes.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Here are the facts, right, what is a shrunken head?
I agree the Gooba thing was going for at least
some sort of zeitgeisty callback to a shrunken head.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Right, Yeah, they're little lizardy, but they definitely have like
a like a grin like a shrunken head. But if
you look at them, they really are kind of scaly.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Well, there's certainly lizards right there. They're supposed to be
lizards went through some machine that sends them back through revolution.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Dan, you remember a lot about the plot of the original.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Why do you? It was a big deal for me.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Okay, Dennis Hopper was my first exposure to Dennis Hopper,
that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well yeah, yeah, but you know, I just want to
in my mind there are representations of shrunken heads that
aren't outwardly said, hey, these are shrunken heads, I think
in other places. But then you also have something like
that Harry Potter universe has it has a shrunken head
on a bus at some point called dre head.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Right, He's like the rear view mirror danglely guy who
is in charge of the bus that picks up what
wizards in distress. I don't know if I told you
I've gotten into the Harry Potter universe recently in my forties.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I did not know that, but I guess just to
put out there, Ben, as you're talking about the exoticism
that occurred in the past, and all of a sudden
for some reason in the mid eighties to like the
early two thousands, there's this version of a shrunken head
that is just I don't know what word I would
put here. It's a fun thing to put in your movie.
(08:39):
That's like a fun nod to something, but it's not
It doesn't represent maybe the same things that an actual
shrunken head represents well.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
The Harry Potter version, though, I is also representative of
like perhaps this type of magic is part of the
extended wizarding world, you know, because that little dude is
definitely wielding some kind of magic and that has a
bit of a problematic cultural represent if I'm remembering correctly,
It definitely has a heavy kind of almost like Jamaican
type accent, like it's a little odd, but yeah, I
(09:07):
think that's the idea.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, so, I mean, I think we're onto something with
the idea of pop culture references in a kitchy way,
kind of teeky culture sort of stuff. That's that's that's
what we're that's what we're seeing a lot of times,
especially in the halcyon days of eighties pop entertainment. But
the human obsession with heads is surprisingly universal. Headhunting, true story,
(09:36):
was not always a corporate term. In fact, historians believe
the practice of haunting and hunting human murdering them and
they collecting their severed heads dates back into antiquity, across time,
across cultures, and yes, of course we got to say it.
Some cultures did prize other body parts, your scalps, your ears,
(09:59):
your noses, and you know, dogs, your bits, privates, your dongles,
your Australia's they were after that too. A lot of
European cultures would later go on to look at these
other cultural practices and say, hey, this means these people
that we don't like are savages. But they said this hypocritically,
(10:20):
because whether you're talking about the Europeans the ancient Romans
or the ancient Greeks, whatever, whenever they were criticizing people
they didn't care for, they were also doing their fair
share of hainus brutal stuff. At the same time. Shout
out to King Leopold.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Phil Oh, gosh, not a good dude. And forgive me.
If this is something that's been debunked, I don't I
think it is true. Weren't what wasn't there a practice
like in Vietnam of American soldiers taking trophies and things
like this, And I thought that, yeah, so I mean,
and that's a perfect example of like what you point
out in a second here on the outline ben of
our morality drives this type of stuff. We are superior. Therefore,
(11:01):
like the way we look at this, it's somehow above
the savage ways that we criticize and use to other.
Because we are the moral authority.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Our brutality makes sense. Our stuff is enlightened, it's sacro saked.
And let's point out, also, by the way, on the
note of literal headhunting, several modern countries still allow beheading
decapitation as a state approved means of execution. And we'll
leave you to guess which ones have fun on the internet.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, could it be the United States? Hopefully not yet,
hopefully not currently.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
I guess they get the obsession though, because it is
kind of just the bit that pops off and is
easy desert of associate with, like, this is where the
soul lies, you know, this is the representation of the
whole human creature.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Well yeah, it's a depiction of the personality of your enemy. Yes, right, right,
So that's why the heads on spikes thing was so popular.
As we're talking about here, there's a really interesting depiction
of that in the Fallout show on I.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Think it's on Prime. I think it's it's on Prime.
It's very good, y'all. Even if you're not into the games,
it's worth the watch. But if you're into the games,
you will be very pleased, I think with the way
they handle it. And there's a in the most recent episode,
I think there's some serious decapitation activity and heads on pikes.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
It's an old thing. I mean, not for nothing did
Shakespeare have that guy hold up a skull in one
of history's most famous plays, Egion.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
It's the Romans, the the whatever, the sect of folks,
Caesar worshippers, or what do they call him? Kaisar just
because they don't have a good pronunciation.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Guy.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, But the point of me even bringing that up, guys,
is because they are factions existing in a world after civilization,
attempting to regrow civilization. But one of the things they
still all agree is that heads of your enemies should
probably be displayed somehow.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
You gotta you know what I mean, you put the
work in. Why aren't you going to have the certificate
of completion hanging, you know, on your wall or outside
of your outside of your compound.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
It's weird to mention. It's a surefire way of letting
your enemies know who you've.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Got there, right, get Yeah. It's also awarding to the
people you're currently controlling. This is why headhunting is relatively
common throughout history, but head shrinking is way more specialized.
This is when you take your average severed head and
you say, hey, let me get a little fancy with it.
(13:42):
You know, I'm gonna remove the skull. I'm going to
use a specialized ritualistic process to shrink it way down,
and then I might have what some people see as
a trophy. I might have an artifact for further rituals.
I might have something to trade.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Key chain perhaps, or a hood ornament.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Or a mirrordically basically a coupon for a firearm a
couple of times in history.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
So I had to go through a lot of trial
and error to figure this out out.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
I think about that too. It's like the mushroom quandary.
It's like who figured out opium. It's also if we
get past the gore and the ethical concerns, it's honestly
this riveting marriage of science and spirituality, and forget everything
the cool adventure films told us folks. Actual headshrinking very rare,
(14:31):
extremely rare. It's an endangered ritual, and it's always been.
It's always been in a very small part of the Amazon,
at least where it's documented. It's in this little patch
of the northwestern region around Ecuador, Peru. You'll hear the
peoples who are known for practicing headshrinking. You'll hear them
(14:52):
called the Ivaruan or the shar s Hua r And
we'll probably use shar for most of this conversation. You
find other people rocking, shrunken heads, rock and sansa. But
the sure are the folks who are most well known
to ritualistically create them. They call them sansa and just
(15:18):
because you folks are so cool, will tell you how
they're made. But we cannot overemphasize you should not try
this at home.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
Definitely not.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, good thing or bad thing that headshrinking is endangered.
Let us know in the comments before we get.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
Into the procedural aspect of it. I just wanted to
make a tiny bit of space to talk about the
term headshrinking as a kind of term for psychology, maybe
a bit of a dismissive term that's sort of maybe
outdated at this point. I was reading up on Reddit
about it, and I think a lot of folks in
the profession do not appreciate being referred to as shrinks.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
No, not at all. Yes, and we want to give
a huge shout out to all our friends who work
in mental health and wellness. Uh, we don't think you're
shrinking it.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
Well no, I mean the idea I guess on the
one hand is it's deflating people's over inflated egos. But
also the dismissive and othering aspect of it is like
it's like voodoo. There's nothing to it. It's a you know,
a junk science.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Right, Yeah, it's like that old internet joke men will
do anything except go to therapy. Uh, there's there's a
real complex relationship there in the I guess that figurative
pejorative use of the term shrink, but when we're talking
about literal headshrinking, we're also seeing something pretty complex. Guys,
(16:44):
I propose we do this like a cookbook or one
of those ridiculous online recipe skrill skill. Here's how to
make a pound cake.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Still, mama, you know so many personal anecdotes you pointed
out Ben in the outline. It's all just to make
room for ads. But everyone knows the trick. Now, just
scroll scrosscroll, scroll, scroll until you see the bullet points
of the ingredients. Yes, and then you get to the
one through.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
And thanks to all of our online chefs who helpfully
put the link that says get to the recipe.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
You're the real heroes, folks.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
You know these people, they gotta make the money, they
got to make you.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And the recipes are great, the stories are great.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Not usually I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I'm a sucker for a weird anecdote. And here's here's
the recipe. As we understand it again. We cannot overemphasize this.
Do not try this at home.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Hit in a lab under proper supervision.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Maybe maybe you know, maybe you're filming a BBC or
PBS special and you're watching someone do it. That's fine,
but okay, all right, so here we are. Who do
we pick on today? Let's pick on our guest producer, Max.
So your Max the freight training Williams. You might have
murdered somebody, or you might have found someone whoa yeah,
(18:11):
or some cadaver either.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
Went from freight train to murder lickety split.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Generally, you've murdered a warrior from a warring tribe.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
This a neighboring warring rival tribe.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Before it became an industry.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
You have.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
You have murdered someone, and the corpse has to be
relatively fresh, So recipe voice. Don't go for frozen here,
ask your local igu butcher for help. If you're in
a pickle.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Fresh never frozen warrior head.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Okay, you got to remove the skull from the neck,
easily done, messy job.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Ailing right largely, that would be a way. I've never
really thought about it until twenty eight years later. So
excellent depictions of this very process, at least the removing
the flesh from the skull bits. It's a lot of
a lot of boiling in the sort of scraping.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Yeah, you cut from the back of the human ear
and you remove all the skin and flesh from the cranium.
And then it is interesting because we talked about the
visage right of asa on. So you've got to keep
the facial expression if you can. So you put these
seeds in the nostrils to keep the nostrils from collapsing
(19:23):
too much, and then you sew or pin the lips shut.
This prevents it's kind of gross, but it prevents the
mouth orifice from expanding across the flesh as you work.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
So I'm trying to understand, you are leaving the flesh
on the face. You're just removing the flesh from the
top and back and.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Side from your skull entirely.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah, it's a skull.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
You're dealing with a skull.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, Yeah, you start with the skull. You can get
the flesh off of the skull because it doesn't look
like a skull. It looks like a little shrinkydink heads.
I'm just obviously we're gonna get there yeah at the end, right,
and you again, we cannot overemphasize this. You gotta get
something in the nostrils. You gotta sow the mouth shut
so it doesn't expand that I'll give you a bad head,
(20:10):
and no one likes bad head, am I? Right? Folks,
you also want to okay, thanks, No, you also want
to keep your enemies face recognizable to you? Right, but noil,
you asked a good question. How does how does it
work to keep a spherical shape when you've removed you know,
(20:33):
the hard inner core you is a face.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
Like and not skull like?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Right? Yeah, it's because you, uh, you put a wooden
sphere under the flesh bag that the skinned face that
helped this helps it maintain form. And a small handball
will do in a pinch, and then you got your
secret sauce.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Okay, okay, I'm sorry to keep ask your clarification. So
you're removing, you're not just scraping the flesh off and
discarding it. You're like trying to remove it as cleanly
as possible from the skull. And then you have this
like you know, for lack of a better way of
describing it, mask of a face with nothing inside and
then that's what you're dealing with. You how do you
remove it without tearing it to shreds. That seems like
(21:16):
real tricky business.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
That's why you start behind the eard. Well.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
See, according to a lot of these, you start at
the top of like right at the back of the head,
and you go straight down to the neck. And then
that is the thing that gets pulled out, including the
ears and all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Yeah, not boiling it all specific You boil it. You
boil it to loosen perhas but not so much that
it like absolutely melts things.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
No more than an hour or two Okay, cool?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, according to the one I was looking at, you
you do that process. You tear the skin off, then
you boil it with herbs, and you get it to
whatever size you want it. And that's when you just
you put it it, said this one said, you didn't
put anything in it. You just basically attached the incision
again and it creates this shape a face.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And the herb, the secret spice mixture that you use
has to be heavy with tannins. That's that's part of
the chemistry there. And after you boil it again no
more than two hours, the head will be around a
third of its original size, it'll be darker in color,
and the skin will be kind of rubbery. This is
(22:22):
where we go to the drying and tanning process. This
is where you you take the take the flesh in,
you flip it inside out, and you start scraping away
the remaining interior gunk, that's the scientific word, the gunk.
And then you start molding it actively, which is which
(22:42):
is pretty fascinating. You use hot rocks and sand and
your whole thing while you're molding. This is to retain
those facial features as much as possible. Towards the end,
you'll properly coat the skin in a you'll flip it
back out and you'll coat the skin in ash from charcoal.
(23:04):
And that's part of why the sansa the native term
for the for the shrunken head. That's why it almost
always is going to have darker skin tones. Do all
that successfully, voila viola. Assuming you've done it right, you've
got a genuine shrunken head.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
I certainly haven't seen a lot of like legitimate shrunken
heads in my life, but the image I have of them,
they are a sort of uniform. They don't really have
much personality, Like it's hard to try, as you might
with the molding, You're not going to get a shrunken
head that, like one to one resembles the owner.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Yeah, you're not going to have like some guy making
a wink and a nod face, you know, or somebody
going uh oh.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
But you will have to note in these recipes that
what we told you now does not contain the appropriate
ritualistic incantations. You'll also have a lot of cleaning to do.
And sorry, Max, if the law gets wind of your enterprise,
you'll have some explaining to do as well.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And you know, according to the schwar people, some of
those some of the things we're talking about where you're
you're sewing up the mouth and the eyes and the
back of the head. Again, to put this whole thing
together as one piece is to prevent, at least according
to more modern members of the peoples, that it was
to prevent the soul from being released from this thing
(24:34):
you have created and causing harm, like further harm.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, and I'm glad you're saying that, Max, because that's
excellent foreshadowing to a big part of tonight's expiration. I mean, Okay,
As Nola was saying earlier, it's impressive that someone took
the time to figure this out, But it's also terrifying that,
you know, somebody took the time to figure this out.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Right, they had to come up with a solution to
the a very specific and niche problem, and boy did
they ever do it.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah, And that's a question. The next question is logically,
why would you do this? As far as grizzly artifacts go,
this one is a lot of work, especially knowing you
could just boil the gunk off the head of a
defeated enemy and just keep their skull. Classic Yorck stuff
right from Shakespeare. This is way less messy. But if
(25:25):
we answer that question why, it takes us deep into
the realm of spirituality and souls in the afterlife, And
that leads us to another question. If this is such
a rare phenomenon in the real world, then how did
it become so well known and so morbidly popular in
the West. We'll tell you after word from our sponsors.
(25:55):
Here's where it gets great. The story of shrunken heads
cultural popularity does come down to a conspiracy, Friends and neighbors.
That conspiracy is capitalism.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
The biggest one of all, the ultimate conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Yeah, So you if you take yourself back to anytime
before the eighteen hundreds, when the Schwar people are living
and carrying out this practice, and several other tribes in
that area are carrying out this practice, you were doing
it for these spiritual reasons. You were doing it for,
you know, the war reasons, all of these reasons that
(26:33):
have nothing to do with the currency, right, have nothing
to do with trade, have nothing to do with valuing
this thing outside of what it is meant to be
for your tribe.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Spiritual talisman, some way of wielding power over your enemy,
or at the very least, you know, intimidating, you know
those warning the warning aspect them.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Yeah, it's religion at this.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Point exactly, because we're talking about a days long process
to do this whole thing. It's not easy work, right,
and I mean it's to the point where younger members
of the tribe are going out and practicing on animals,
so practicing on a sloth or another animal that they
would come to contact with and see if they can
figure out how to do it right. And they're taught
(27:15):
how to do it.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, in these.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Ways So what happens when other people interact with your
tribe and they see these things, and for one reason
or another, they're a desired object.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Gotta have it.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Let's want one of those.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, it's the it's the lububu of its time, as
gross as that is to those are a little shrunk
and heads.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
Yeah with that, Rick Descrin.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, So the West first makes contact with the schwar
in particular in the fifteen hundreds. At this time, these
people are semi nomadic, moving through their area of the
rainforest with large autonomy right held together by only the
loosest minds of kinship or political agreement. And colonialism absolutely
(28:03):
wrecked the native lands of the Amazon. People lost their
existing culture, fighting disease and famine and slavery and Europeans
and then also each other. But the Europeans were mystified
by the practice of head shrinking. And if you fast
forward to the eighteen hundreds, as we're alluding to, you'll
(28:24):
see that this interest really explodes around the time collecting
Egyptian mummies and indeed consuming Egyptian mummies was in vogue.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I was thinking, too, this isn't that like megafar off
from the type of practices that the Egyptians would do
with mummification. You know, it's got taxidermy vibes to it
for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a good new Yeah. It is weird
to know that there was a pretty healthy trade going
on between Western cultures that were rolling through in the
shwar people. But it was stuff. They're trading, stuff that
you would imagine would be traded for, right like animals, skins.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Exact manufactured goods are huge. This is okay, Yeah, this
is the wild specialty item. This is why we're saying
capitalism is conspiracy. So the Europeans and the Americans of
this time, in this milieu, they learn about the sansa,
the shrunken head via these breathless travelogues and these wild
claims of adventurers. And those folks are not in the
(29:29):
business of ethnography nor anthropology. They're more into telling wild
stories and selling stuff. So they would take this real
practice shrinking heads, making sansa, and they embellished the heck
out of it. They never fact checked. This became this
huge tool in othering local populations and then being used
(29:50):
to rationalize all sorts of evil stuff against them. It
also created a boom economy because outsiders start showing up
and they're buying heads, and they're bartering valuable manufactured goods,
fine fabrics, tools, knives, firearms.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
When picture these imperialist like colonel types, you know, in
the hierarchy of a military invading force, and wanting to
have a few of these things on the wall of
their rumpus room back home, you know, to like along
with like a allion's head or something, to show that
they had braved these inhospitable places. And they you know,
it was a sign of their bravery in their kind
(30:31):
of ADVENTURESM.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You know, some cabinets of curiosity were really invoke.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Right, something to tell the boys at the Gentleman's Club, right, and.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
The Christmas Adventurers Club.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Me, yes, right. This was a game changing economic incentive.
But unlike some other economic fads tulips or what have you,
this trade was directly dependent upon death and dismemberment. Right.
You can't just play at the head in the ground
and grow more heads. People have tried, and I love that.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Isn't it weird to know that? I think? At least
according to Kata Koth, who wrote for Science dot Org,
a lot of this had to do with Jesuit missionaries
and the introduction of cattle. Yeah, so they would bring
cattle into the areas where a lot of the Western
other folks were living, you know, near where these tribes
(31:28):
were living, and they would bring cattle. So then they
no longer needed to trade that with the Shwar people.
They didn't need that from the Shwar people, right, So
basically the thing they're left with are these shrunken heads.
And it's so crazy, as you're saying, Ben, how do
you say, all right, guys, we need more shrunken heads.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
That's the yeah, by hook or by crook, right.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
You don't have to say it, you know, the what
is it? Supply and demand creates the situation that all
of a sudden they got to figure out where to
get more of these heads.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Picture, picture of the Jesuits, picture of the Europeans. Like
that Matthew McConaughey line in that old movie you got
any shrunken heads?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
Yon still did, what is that?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
What's that? I want to watch?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
That be a lot cooler if you did. That's what
they said to the shore. And this meant I'll find that,
Oh gosh, I'm blanking on the film all right, all right,
all right, all right, is it fast fast time?
Speaker 4 (32:26):
That was always days days and confused and fast times.
It's the one where he's like the they just get
getting older and I stay the same age. The other
way around, other way around.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
We'll fight, we'll fight it, we'll fix it a post
or not. But this meant that the sar had to
by hook or by crook find more heads. And remember
our recipe blog from earlier, these heads gotta be fresh baked.
So there's this huge increase in local warfare between various
groups of community and region, and it's being powered by
(32:58):
the more big curiosity of the Europeans, which itself is
powered by religious ideology. So we're seeing a clash of
two different religions attempting to commodify each other, and the
schwar have this deep inner social kinship. It's the oral
and lived history of all imaginable alley ship or slights
(33:22):
from the shared past. Now it's weaponized against them. European
fascination half worldweight created a killing spree.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Not much different from things like diamonds and obsession with
you know, gold and precious gems that all of a
sudden when you've got these indigenous folks that have those
or have access to those. It throws all of that
into disarray because now there's this demand for it and
I don't know, money and tools and wanting to be
the tribe that has the guns or that has the
(33:53):
you know, metal tools. That's a pretty powerful influence to
do some pretty wacky inhumane stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, it's a feedback loop. It's or burros because now
even if you originally don't want to go into the trade,
the next guy over has gone in now has a gun, yes,
and remembers that you are mean to his cousin twelve
years ago.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Direct threat to you and your people. Now unless you
get in on the hustle as well.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
That's an intense thing because where do you get those skulls?
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You know, you need skulls to make this thing that
is modernizing your group, that is making life better for everybody.
So you just got to go find enemies now, Yeah,
as it.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Could be anybody though, I mean, do you search outside
of your try Obviously you're inside of your tribe, but
you have to It seems like there's a finite amount
of available fresh heads.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Nailed it. Yeah, it's difficult because now you have to
further rationalize actions that you may not have ordinarily taken.
Let's think about it it in a more westernized example.
Let's say you are a regular at a coffee shop.
There is another regular that you don't care for because, again,
(35:10):
twelve years ago, this guy was rude to your cousin.
In most societies, with all things being equal, you would
let this slide right. You'd sit down, you'd get your
coffee or whatever, and then you would see the dude
and you'd think, ah, that jerks back again. But you
wouldn't do anything past that unless there was no real
(35:32):
consequence for killing him. And further, what if there was
in this coffee shop no real consequence for committing murder,
and the new guy from the fancy I'll say it,
Jesuit coffee shop a few blocks up is going to
give you the equivalent of two thousand dollars if only
you kill this guy the right way. Further, you know
(35:55):
everyone else at your regular coffee shop is already doing this,
and every time they do it, they get some more tools,
they get some more prosperity. That other guy in the
coffee shop, what if he is already looking at you
across the cafe, and he's thinking, Man, I hate that
guy's cousin from twelve years ago, and I could sell
(36:18):
his head right now.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
It's made me chuckle, Ben, And jeez, you know it's
funny though, I mean, surely sure in this example, if
we're gonna you know, come back to the tribal example,
there's no rule of law necessarily a consequence, but you're
also creating just like an unlimited amount of blood mendettas
between warring tribes that is then creating more war and
(36:44):
this you know, further feedback loop that is just causing
absolute devastation because there's you know, you're always mad at
somebody for like shrinking your cousin's head, Yeah, and.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Then you're mad at them for doing that, and they're
mad at you for retaliating. The feedback loop is real,
and take it ahead and creating SANSO would bring immediate
benefit to your kinship network, but it also puts a
target on your back. And eventually, because like that excellent
(37:16):
point you raised, eventually, because there was a finite amount
of heads that could be traditionally taken your enemies, homeboys
were not a big enough supply for the demand, so
folks began hunting women and children as well. And European
curio collectors who are looking for their cabinet contents, they
applaud all of this. They might publicly decry the practice,
(37:40):
but in private, at those gentlemen clubs we mentioned, they
crowed over these grisly momentums.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, that profit modive thing is hard to shake once
it takes all day.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
It's just wild how corrupting it is.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Well, you also got people who don't know the rituals
who are creating these sons us. Right, So you've got
people who don't like they don't they aren't doing any
of the ceremony. They aren't. It's a tourist.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Attraction at this point, y'all. I mean, it's like lost connection,
maybe even to its original religious purpose.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Ye for the West.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
At least you can go through this absolute trove of
shrunken heads that were made specifically for trade and just
see that the cuts aren't right and none of the
stuff is correct or done by the way the schwar
people would do it ceremonially. Yeah, and these things are
just literal. They're all over the planet.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
And I hate, I hate to say it, but ethics aside,
the quality goes down over time quickly.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Whatever happened to the craftsmanship with shrunken heads, you know,
it's it's a thing like.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
These save Europeans are blaming this shwar the entire time
for being naturally savage or roots, but they're ignoring the
fact that they created the situation in the first place.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
And then as so familiar, ben.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Right, Cobra affected anybody, well just.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
In general, like I mean, as you know, any invading
force tends to create the problem that they then blame
back on the people they invaded in the first place
and sell them a solution, you know.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
My throat, Oh it's venezuela, dude.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Well, and well, just think about what happens next to
the Schwar people, because what we're in the eighteen mid
eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, now we're in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
So now we're getting towards, uh, this era where the
Schwar people experience the things that a lot of indigenous
peoples across the world experienced, where certain churches, especially powerful
ones like the Catholic Church, rolls through and what do
they do, guys.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Oh, the most assimilate them or attempt to strip them
of their cultural identity.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Right to create a classic economy religiously motivated with the
people being vassals following the resource extraction demands. Tale as
old as time, sawing as old as rhyme.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yeah, and removing the beast yeah, and removing the you know,
the language of a people, which, as we've learned in
previous episodes, is one of the worst things you can do,
remove a language from a human people's.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Because you're removing an original technology. One of the first
technologies is language. You're also removing history, right, which means
you gave them to relate, a way for them to
be connected truly, you know, in a fundamental way, and
then you're just throwing them to the wolves.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
You are the wolves in this scenario.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
I guess, yeah, right, why do you keep making me
hit you, et cetera. I mean, additionally, because of these
high incentives, there is a boom in forgeries to meet
this insatiable demand, this boom economy. In fact, it's not
until the nineteen thirties that buying sansa, buying genuine shrunken
(41:04):
heads is finally outlawed in South America. So if you
attempt to buy us sansa now, please be aware you're
not only being kind of a dick, you're also probably
purchasing a forgery and violating the law. And at the time,
even now, these European markets also ignored the real reason
(41:27):
for creating sans in the first place. Let's what about this.
Let's take a break for a word from our sponsors
and then get into the spiritual aspects, the real reason
shrunken heads exist. No, we must, and we're back. Let's
(41:48):
talk about the religious aspects. You guys, it's weird that
the Europeans ignored basically everything the schwar told them about
Sansra's shrunken heads, and the whole time these people are saying,
these are not really trophies. These are containers for the
(42:08):
soul or the moist SoC of the victim m ui
sa k. So we're trapping the spirit of the enemy
inside the head as a defensive move to yes, acquire
acquire some stuff that we believe works, but also mainly
to prevent vengeance from beyond the greed.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
What a flex too. Wouldn't that deprive them of whatever
afterlife they believe in. They're like holding them in limbo
inside this vessel that you possess. It seems like an
aggressive tactic in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Yeah, you know, that's a great point in little because
essentially these folks were and are like every other human being.
They would rather not kill each other. So creating a
shrunken head is a way to prevent punishment for that
great transgression, that murder. There was this practical economic belief
(43:04):
that we have to get into as well, which is fascinating.
So the schwar society, especially at this time, the males
believe that acquiring these souls allows them power not just
for themselves, but for their wives and for their daughters
(43:25):
because the sansa, the power of the sansa can aid
women in their daily labor.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Wait, so by creating the shrunken head, they were in
some way absolving themselves from answering for answering for their crime.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Kind of like taking insurance like insurance against divine retribution
or ghostly retribution, and also aiding in day to day
life because the again we said, they're semi nomadic. Right
at this time, at the top, the women in the
civilization were cultivating valuable crops, and they were cultivating one
(44:05):
of the crops that provided most of the calories for
the average person's diet. So as a result, female labor
is mission critical. Anything that could be seen as helping
out with that became a top priority. So these folks
were not forget everything the Europeans say, and the travelogs
forget everything from the action films. These are not bloodthirsty monsters.
(44:29):
There are no way on intelligent savages. They've got a
consistent internal logic for a sacred ritualistic practice, and then
that practice got commodified via conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
But they're wielding these things in a way to have
a boon for their people, right, so they can use
this object of power to increase their abilities to be productive.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yes, okay, just one note on that crop, the cassava
root or yuka. Yeah, the tastiest thing yump fry up
or mixed with some uh you know, some moho.
Speaker 4 (45:06):
And a French fry.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, you can do anything with cassava. You know, I'm
not gonna bubb a gumpus here, but you can fry it,
you can boil it, you can just oh my gosh,
bake it. It's great.
Speaker 4 (45:18):
Dice it.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Just don't eat it raw.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
Don't eat it raw. Brought to you by cassava there's
also you know, we we took pains to look into
the academic anthropological perspectives of this, and there's one there's
one piece we have to recommend circulation, accumulation and the
power of Schwarz shrunken heads by a guy named Stephen
(45:43):
Lee Rubinstein out of the University of Liverpool.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
Right, And in his work he traces the long term
consequences of this form of othering and its place in
this new capitalist system that was more or less thrust
upon these people and created a whole, you know, new
way of framing this ritualistic thing and honestly increased its
(46:08):
prevalence and bastardized it in a way you know that
took away from the religious aspects of entirely. And I
was maybe pointing out earlier that there's no version of
this that doesn't also kind of remove the sacred aspects
of it from the people themselves. When you do something
purely commercially for so long, it almost stops to have
its original meaning.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
Yes, yes, very well, put Rubenstein says. Quote. By the
time Ecuadorian authorities put an end to the warfare in
the nineteen fifties, this shwar had exchanged all of their
songces with European and euro American collectors in return for
those trade goods. So the people again are losing their
history and culture. And now we've got it, as we said,
(46:54):
commodified into pop culture in the West, and people forgot
about the schwar entire as well as forgetting the ritual importance.
They were placed in private collections, you know, cabinets of
wonder curios, curiro shops, museums, and they were exhibited as
evidence of the benighted violence from these uncivilized natives. Oh
(47:18):
thank god someone came in and saved them and took
all their stuff and sold it to each other. There
is good news though, in that the Schwarp people, thank
you to all the activists involved, are able to get
some of the Sansa repatriated. And this is something we
(47:39):
talked about previously, Guys. I was attempting to remember when
we spoke about the great debate of museums and who
gets to keep what feels like it pops up every year.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
We talked about a while ago, and I think we
brought up the sans Of project, which is something that
started in twenty seventeen and ended its first I guess
phase in twenty nineteen and they were able to repatriate
a bunch of the Sanzas, but then in twenty twenty one.
In the past couple of years, even this past year
twenty twenty five, a lot of work was done to
(48:15):
get these sances out of these museums and back to
the indigenous tribes that own them. There is some weird
stuff though, because in the case of the Shwar people,
there's the Ashwar people who were the tribe that were
often attacked and turned into these shrunken heads. So there's
this kind of problem, Well, who does that head then
(48:38):
belong to the tribe?
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Not a monolithic group, absolutely bunch of different people, but
do always get along?
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Well yeah, but that's ahead of an individual that was
a part of one group, right, and it was that
person was killed by another group, and that group, the
one that killed him, is claiming ownership over it. But
then does it actually belong to the other group. There's
the sans of project is really interesting because again it's
people navigating the law as well as you know, these
(49:07):
relationships with museums and countries that control those museums. I
would highly recommend people check out something titled Reflections on
the Sansas Project. Rethinking schwer Object Collections Nationally and Internationally
by Maria Patricia Ordonez Alvarez. Very interesting read, just about
(49:28):
the specific the specifics of finding these things and then
putting them back where they should be.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
I love that. While you're online, folks, please check out
as well The Authentication and Repatriation of a ceremonial sanset
to its country of origin, Ecuador. The lead author of
that when Craig D. Byron explores the story of authenticating
a sansa and returning it to its home. But again,
(49:57):
that's a tricky question because where does go Imagine, you know,
our coffee shop example earlier, imagine one hundred plus years
have passed, right, and your great grandfather, your great uncle
was one of those people who got killed at the
coffee shop. Right, does that piece of their body go
(50:22):
back to you? Or do the authorities just say it
happened in the United States, So well, just give it
to the Spithsodian shoot.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
And I mean and the as we've mentioned too, the
traditions in the oral history and written history. Even if
a lot of these tribes were wiped out by Colin I,
so there might not even be enough breadcrumbs to follow
it even figure out who to return it to in
the first place.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Very much.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
So you've not just got two tribes. Also, it's often
written about as just these two tribes, but there are
several that Cramledon mentioned several that we didn't talk about today,
and so it's just it is not just a single
problem happening in Ecuador.
Speaker 3 (51:01):
Right right, because this is also a That's why we
took pains to say the are the most well documented
people's practicing the creation of sciences, but by no means,
by no means unique in the area. And because of
all the warfare, and because of the conspiracy of capitalism,
(51:24):
and because of that economic boom, it becomes very very
difficult to honestly give justice and repatriate these things the
right way, these artifacts, because they were living people, and
depending upon what you believe, there may still be a
soul inside them. You know. That's the thing that even
(51:47):
as a secular skeptical entity, that's the thing that bothers
me the most, you know what I mean, your soul
just remains.
Speaker 4 (51:58):
You know, They're very very important to religious beliefs, you know,
no matter what the religious background might be. Yeah, I
was just doing a little googling and I came across
a popular nineteen seventies Milton Bradley product called Shrunken Heads,
and it was a craft kit that was pitched or
I guess advertised promoted by Vincent Price where you would
(52:21):
take an apple and it was like this heated cone thing.
You'd hollow it out and stick it on the cone
and it would shrink the apple and then you decorate
it and put hair on it and make it into
a little bobble and it's horrific.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
I'm sure it aged very well, oh very much so, Yice.
We also, I guess we should say this too as
we're wrapping up. We love museums. Longtime listeners, you know this.
We hope you love museums as well. Anytime we were
on the road, which is often, we try to visit
a local museum and as such we applaud the efforts
(52:57):
of the activists, the curators, the academic the researchers who
are across the planet right now seeking justice and dignity
for exploited peoples. Often, to be fair, a museum might
not know what they have in storage, so it is
not as if they are conspiring to actively rob people
(53:19):
of their own history. This is a huge debate in
the world of museums, like does the British National Museum
really know everything in their collection?
Speaker 4 (53:30):
Oh, surely not, And especially when some of these organizations
are so underfunded these days. So you have to have
human people to sift through all of this stuff and
catalog it and then you know, follow those breadcrumbs, and
that can often take a really long time and be
very difficult.
Speaker 2 (53:44):
Well, you've also got individuals at these organizations like the
University of Oxford and the pitt Rivers Museum is taking
great pains to return these sances to the right hold
owners through the Proecto sanso I think that's what it's called.
That's what they call it there, the pitt Rivers. And
it is good just to see that there is kind
of an agreeance, at least not fully across the board,
(54:06):
but to large, to the large extent, that this kind
of thing is worth this kind of work is worth doing,
going through the backlogs, going in and seeing what you
got and returning that stuff.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, looking through the looking through the back room or
the basement, blowing the dust off one of those containers,
and saying, oh crap, we should give this back. This
is how it happens. The debate continues, and please, folks,
we hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember every time you
(54:40):
encounter a lurid tail, savages or cannibal tribes or anything
like that, there is something more to the story. And
for Europeans in the eighteen hundreds, that was indeed the
stuff they don't want you to know. We had a
lot of fun with this one. Can you guys believe
we're on Netflix now?
Speaker 2 (55:00):
It's crazy. It's also it is.
Speaker 4 (55:01):
Good to be back, y'all. I missed you and we
missed you out there in conspiracy realist land. But it
is crazy, it's cool, it's fun to do a new
thing video wise.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Yeah, sure, back to our roots.
Speaker 2 (55:14):
Well, if you're just finding us on this platform, maybe
you've missed our nineteen one hundred episodes. I think now
that exists on all the all the places where you
can listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4 (55:26):
From the before times.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yes, we'll definitely check those out.
Speaker 4 (55:30):
Oh yeah, please do.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
All our videos. That's how we started and that's why
we're excited to be returning in twenty twenty six. You
are our favorite part of the show. Fellow conspiracy Realist.
We're so glad you joined us. As we say, you
can catch us wherever you find your favorite shows on
the lines. You can call us on the phone. You
(55:53):
can always send us an email. No riddle me this.
What do people do? Should they sip the Social needs right?
Speaker 4 (56:01):
Should you have a taste for blood aka social needs?
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show
on x FKA, Twitter, on Facebook with our Facebook group
Here's where it gets crazy, and on YouTube where we
have tons of videos for you to enjoy. On Instagram
and TikTok. However, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show, and I think
there's like there's one one more way, two more ways?
What you got, Matt?
Speaker 2 (56:21):
This is kind of weird. Look, I'm gonna we're gonna
ask you to get out your phone. Okay, type into
that phone the following one eight, three three st d WYTK.
That's the part of your phone that you can dial
numbers in there, and then you can call numbers like
with a phone. Do that. That's our voicemail line. When
(56:41):
you get in, you got three minutes, give yourself a
cool nickname. Let us know, you know, if we can
use your name and message on one of our listener
mail episodes that appear in the audio form of this show,
and uh, hey, have fun. We can't wait to hear
from you. What do you think? Do you have an
idea for a new episode? Tell us anything and everything.
We are listening. If you want to send us an email,
(57:02):
you can do that too.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware of leaning into the camera.
Be well aware the void writes back. There is no
limit on what you can say. Send us the links,
send us the leads, take us to the edge of
the rabbit hole, and will do the rest. Bonus point.
(57:24):
If you would like a random fact unrelated to anything
we've discussed, hit us up in an email and tell
us if the random fact is interesting. We'll see you
out here in the darch Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (57:58):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
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From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
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Speaker 2 (00:27):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
They call me Ben. We're joined as always with our
guest producer Max the freight Train Williams. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff
they don't want you to know. Guys, we're recording on
January fifth, twenty twenty six. And it's weird to say it,
(00:51):
but what a year already.
Speaker 4 (00:54):
It's not weird at all. I mean, it's true, it's
not a weird year, that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Noel. For the break, Ben and I had a conversation
about the National Endowment for Democracy, and in that episode
we had a bit of a discussion about Venezuela and
some stuff's been happening.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Oh yeah, I've heard rumblings.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
We recorded on December nineteenth, and then you wake up,
you know, just after Christmas, just as the New Year's
were ringing in, you know, Head of State gets abducted.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
It's cool, before a lot of Saddami type era stuff.
Speaker 3 (01:33):
Uh huh, Yeah, I remember sending that text to the
group chat saying, sorry, we all have to wake up
to this because you remember.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
What I of doom and the text thread.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
The alerts come through at the worst times for us.
You're just like, oh no, Google, I can't right now.
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Sorry, No, that's why I turn all alerts off. I
just like to, you know, find it on my own time.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
Well, we hope that everybody joining us today, friends and neighbors,
fellow conspiracy realists. We hope that you had a good
end of the year, and we hope that twenty twenty
six is treating you right so far. I got to
tell you, guys, just peek behind the curtain. It's very
unusual for us to go so long without hanging out
(02:18):
with each other and without recording. So I missed you guys.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
How do I even do this? I missed you too, Ben,
I missed all of you.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Yeah, well, I missed this thing we get to do
where we sit and talk about weird subjects. It was
like two weeks without it, and I'm really glad that
we're here.
Speaker 4 (02:34):
It was an amazing reset, though, I got to say,
especially considering what's transpired in the interim. Sometimes it's good
to just do a little you know, check out, And
now we're back and we're doing this video stuff, which
is like a whole new thing for us. So I'm
frankly pretty excited about the new year, all things considered.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
Yes, yeah, let's give it a chance. Let's take twenty
twenty six a chance. Yeah, oh well, we'll give pieces
of a chance. So geez, we're gearing up for twenty
twenty six, all the wonders and terrors that might hold,
and folks, we wanted to want to dive into something
that has always fascinated and confused us. As kids who
(03:14):
grew up reading all sorts of weird stuff, we're all
familiar with a curious, seemingly ghoulish cultural practice. It's captivated
Westerners for centuries, with all sorts of misunderstandings along the way.
We're finally doing it. This is one of those episodes
that we can't believe we haven't done earlier. The story
(03:35):
the story of sanses or shrunken heads.
Speaker 4 (03:38):
I think maybe this is true for a lot of
folks in our age bracket, but my first exposure to
shrunken heads was that incredible scene in the movie Beetlejuice
where dude, yeah gets are not a dude, Beetlejuice himself
gets his head shrunk because he's like being a pill
in a waiting room.
Speaker 3 (03:55):
He's talking trash.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, nineteen eighty eight. You know, I was to come
to you guys with my first one that I remembered,
and it was a blip on a screen one time
when I watched Pee Wee's Big Adventure and.
Speaker 4 (04:08):
If that makes sense with Tim Burton, yeah, adjacent, There's
definitely was something in the air in those days.
Speaker 2 (04:13):
Dude, he goes to a magic shop and the owner
of the magic shop is just going through a bunch
of gag things and he pulls out a shrunken head.
Then he goes through a normal head, giant head and
all that. But that's it was just that moment where
it pops into your your psyche, maybe as a child
watching something well, and that humor or.
Speaker 4 (04:32):
It is like a big part of how we experienced it.
It was this flippant almost gag thing, right.
Speaker 3 (04:38):
Yeah, yeah, well, hearkening back by the way to the
exoticism and the other ring of Western civilizations. My first
experience you guys. I remember being in what we call
a curio shop and seeing some like behind glass there
was a thing that was a shrunken head, sansa and
it was probably fake, which we'll get into in a second.
(05:03):
This was going to be an episode that we uh,
we were going to play on our sisters show, Ridiculous History,
but we found that there are indeed conspiracies about shrunken heads.
This is also, by the way, a spiritual compliment to
our earlier episode on the Great US Brain Drain weird Out.
Speaker 4 (05:21):
There's there's interesting crossovers, and I'm excited to get to y'all.
Are you picturing too when you think of your earliest
memory of a shrunk head, just a little puckered coconut
of a thing that maybe has a tuft of hair
at the top, like a troll doll, three stitches on
the lips, right yeah, yeah, very very dark tone to
it as well, and sometimes like behind the leathery right
(05:42):
very much. So, well, let's you know what, we we've
talked about it.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
Let's get into it. After word from our sponsors, heck.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
Yeah, and we've returned. Uh, just want to jump into
a couple more examples of shrunken heads in popular culture,
because I think a few of these might hit home
with with some people listening right now. One that I
recalled was The Nightmare Before Christmas. Of course, you remember
(06:14):
there's a little boy and Jack Skellington gives him a gift.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
Third Tim Burton property. By the way, Holy crap, yo.
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I didn't realize that.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
He was super down with the shrunken heads.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Well that was that was another thing pulls.
Speaker 4 (06:26):
Out of a box, right, doesn't isn't that? It's like
a gift in that Christmas bit where like Jack Skellington
has taken over Christmas and little you know, human boy
is opening up a gift and there's like a shrunken
head in it, and he just sort of looks bewildered,
but not necessarily terrified. He like sort of pulls it
out very matter of factly.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
Yeah, he shows it to his parents and they break
out very upsetting things. Another one that I wondered if
you guys remembered was the Super Mario Brothers, the original
motion picture from nineteen ninety.
Speaker 4 (06:54):
Five or something with them.
Speaker 2 (06:56):
Yeah, well, I wonder if you do you guys think
the goombas are a represent of sonzas in some way
or were.
Speaker 4 (07:03):
Lizard people coded to me, but I hadn't seen it
in a long time. I'm kind of picturing them as
being weird, little squat lizard type dudes.
Speaker 3 (07:11):
Here are the facts, right, what is a shrunken head?
I agree the Gooba thing was going for at least
some sort of zeitgeisty callback to a shrunken head.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Right, Yeah, they're little lizardy, but they definitely have like
a like a grin like a shrunken head. But if
you look at them, they really are kind of scaly.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
Well, there's certainly lizards right there. They're supposed to be
lizards went through some machine that sends them back through revolution.
Speaker 4 (07:37):
Dan, you remember a lot about the plot of the original.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Why do you? It was a big deal for me.
Speaker 4 (07:41):
Okay, Dennis Hopper was my first exposure to Dennis Hopper,
that's for sure.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Well yeah, yeah, but you know, I just want to
in my mind there are representations of shrunken heads that
aren't outwardly said, hey, these are shrunken heads, I think
in other places. But then you also have something like
that Harry Potter universe has it has a shrunken head
on a bus at some point called dre head.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
Right, He's like the rear view mirror danglely guy who
is in charge of the bus that picks up what
wizards in distress. I don't know if I told you
I've gotten into the Harry Potter universe recently in my forties.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
I did not know that, but I guess just to
put out there, Ben, as you're talking about the exoticism
that occurred in the past, and all of a sudden
for some reason in the mid eighties to like the
early two thousands, there's this version of a shrunken head
that is just I don't know what word I would
put here. It's a fun thing to put in your movie.
(08:39):
That's like a fun nod to something, but it's not
It doesn't represent maybe the same things that an actual
shrunken head represents well.
Speaker 4 (08:46):
The Harry Potter version, though, I is also representative of
like perhaps this type of magic is part of the
extended wizarding world, you know, because that little dude is
definitely wielding some kind of magic and that has a
bit of a problematic cultural represent if I'm remembering correctly,
It definitely has a heavy kind of almost like Jamaican
type accent, like it's a little odd, but yeah, I
(09:07):
think that's the idea.
Speaker 3 (09:09):
Yeah, so, I mean, I think we're onto something with
the idea of pop culture references in a kitchy way,
kind of teeky culture sort of stuff. That's that's that's
what we're that's what we're seeing a lot of times,
especially in the halcyon days of eighties pop entertainment. But
the human obsession with heads is surprisingly universal. Headhunting, true story,
(09:36):
was not always a corporate term. In fact, historians believe
the practice of haunting and hunting human murdering them and
they collecting their severed heads dates back into antiquity, across time,
across cultures, and yes, of course we got to say it.
Some cultures did prize other body parts, your scalps, your ears,
(09:59):
your noses, and you know, dogs, your bits, privates, your dongles,
your Australia's they were after that too. A lot of
European cultures would later go on to look at these
other cultural practices and say, hey, this means these people
that we don't like are savages. But they said this hypocritically,
(10:20):
because whether you're talking about the Europeans the ancient Romans
or the ancient Greeks, whatever, whenever they were criticizing people
they didn't care for, they were also doing their fair
share of hainus brutal stuff. At the same time. Shout
out to King Leopold.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
Phil Oh, gosh, not a good dude. And forgive me.
If this is something that's been debunked, I don't I
think it is true. Weren't what wasn't there a practice
like in Vietnam of American soldiers taking trophies and things
like this, And I thought that, yeah, so I mean,
and that's a perfect example of like what you point
out in a second here on the outline ben of
our morality drives this type of stuff. We are superior. Therefore,
(11:01):
like the way we look at this, it's somehow above
the savage ways that we criticize and use to other.
Because we are the moral authority.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Our brutality makes sense. Our stuff is enlightened, it's sacro saked.
And let's point out, also, by the way, on the
note of literal headhunting, several modern countries still allow beheading
decapitation as a state approved means of execution. And we'll
leave you to guess which ones have fun on the internet.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Yeah, could it be the United States? Hopefully not yet,
hopefully not currently.
Speaker 4 (11:41):
I guess they get the obsession though, because it is
kind of just the bit that pops off and is
easy desert of associate with, like, this is where the
soul lies, you know, this is the representation of the
whole human creature.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
Well yeah, it's a depiction of the personality of your enemy. Yes, right, right,
So that's why the heads on spikes thing was so popular.
As we're talking about here, there's a really interesting depiction
of that in the Fallout show on I.
Speaker 4 (12:08):
Think it's on Prime. I think it's it's on Prime.
It's very good, y'all. Even if you're not into the games,
it's worth the watch. But if you're into the games,
you will be very pleased, I think with the way
they handle it. And there's a in the most recent episode,
I think there's some serious decapitation activity and heads on pikes.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
It's an old thing. I mean, not for nothing did
Shakespeare have that guy hold up a skull in one
of history's most famous plays, Egion.
Speaker 4 (12:35):
It's the Romans, the the whatever, the sect of folks,
Caesar worshippers, or what do they call him? Kaisar just
because they don't have a good pronunciation.
Speaker 3 (12:46):
Guy.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah, But the point of me even bringing that up, guys,
is because they are factions existing in a world after civilization,
attempting to regrow civilization. But one of the things they
still all agree is that heads of your enemies should
probably be displayed somehow.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
You gotta you know what I mean, you put the
work in. Why aren't you going to have the certificate
of completion hanging, you know, on your wall or outside
of your outside of your compound.
Speaker 4 (13:15):
It's weird to mention. It's a surefire way of letting
your enemies know who you've.
Speaker 3 (13:20):
Got there, right, get Yeah. It's also awarding to the
people you're currently controlling. This is why headhunting is relatively
common throughout history, but head shrinking is way more specialized.
This is when you take your average severed head and
you say, hey, let me get a little fancy with it.
(13:42):
You know, I'm gonna remove the skull. I'm going to
use a specialized ritualistic process to shrink it way down,
and then I might have what some people see as
a trophy. I might have an artifact for further rituals.
I might have something to trade.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Key chain perhaps, or a hood ornament.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Or a mirrordically basically a coupon for a firearm a
couple of times in history.
Speaker 4 (14:06):
So I had to go through a lot of trial
and error to figure this out out.
Speaker 3 (14:09):
I think about that too. It's like the mushroom quandary.
It's like who figured out opium. It's also if we
get past the gore and the ethical concerns, it's honestly
this riveting marriage of science and spirituality, and forget everything
the cool adventure films told us folks. Actual headshrinking very rare,
(14:31):
extremely rare. It's an endangered ritual, and it's always been.
It's always been in a very small part of the Amazon,
at least where it's documented. It's in this little patch
of the northwestern region around Ecuador, Peru. You'll hear the
peoples who are known for practicing headshrinking. You'll hear them
(14:52):
called the Ivaruan or the shar s Hua r And
we'll probably use shar for most of this conversation. You
find other people rocking, shrunken heads, rock and sansa. But
the sure are the folks who are most well known
to ritualistically create them. They call them sansa and just
(15:18):
because you folks are so cool, will tell you how
they're made. But we cannot overemphasize you should not try
this at home.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
Definitely not.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
Yeah, good thing or bad thing that headshrinking is endangered.
Let us know in the comments before we get.
Speaker 4 (15:35):
Into the procedural aspect of it. I just wanted to
make a tiny bit of space to talk about the
term headshrinking as a kind of term for psychology, maybe
a bit of a dismissive term that's sort of maybe
outdated at this point. I was reading up on Reddit
about it, and I think a lot of folks in
the profession do not appreciate being referred to as shrinks.
Speaker 3 (15:54):
No, not at all. Yes, and we want to give
a huge shout out to all our friends who work
in mental health and wellness. Uh, we don't think you're
shrinking it.
Speaker 4 (16:06):
Well no, I mean the idea I guess on the
one hand is it's deflating people's over inflated egos. But
also the dismissive and othering aspect of it is like
it's like voodoo. There's nothing to it. It's a you know,
a junk science.
Speaker 3 (16:21):
Right, Yeah, it's like that old internet joke men will
do anything except go to therapy. Uh, there's there's a
real complex relationship there in the I guess that figurative
pejorative use of the term shrink, but when we're talking
about literal headshrinking, we're also seeing something pretty complex. Guys,
(16:44):
I propose we do this like a cookbook or one
of those ridiculous online recipe skrill skill. Here's how to
make a pound cake.
Speaker 4 (16:55):
Still, mama, you know so many personal anecdotes you pointed
out Ben in the outline. It's all just to make
room for ads. But everyone knows the trick. Now, just
scroll scrosscroll, scroll, scroll until you see the bullet points
of the ingredients. Yes, and then you get to the
one through.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
And thanks to all of our online chefs who helpfully
put the link that says get to the recipe.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (17:24):
You're the real heroes, folks.
Speaker 4 (17:26):
You know these people, they gotta make the money, they
got to make you.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
And the recipes are great, the stories are great.
Speaker 4 (17:32):
Not usually I don't know.
Speaker 3 (17:34):
I'm a sucker for a weird anecdote. And here's here's
the recipe. As we understand it again. We cannot overemphasize this.
Do not try this at home.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
Hit in a lab under proper supervision.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
Maybe maybe you know, maybe you're filming a BBC or
PBS special and you're watching someone do it. That's fine,
but okay, all right, so here we are. Who do
we pick on today? Let's pick on our guest producer, Max.
So your Max the freight training Williams. You might have
murdered somebody, or you might have found someone whoa yeah,
(18:11):
or some cadaver either.
Speaker 4 (18:12):
Went from freight train to murder lickety split.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Generally, you've murdered a warrior from a warring tribe.
Speaker 4 (18:19):
This a neighboring warring rival tribe.
Speaker 3 (18:22):
Before it became an industry.
Speaker 4 (18:25):
You have.
Speaker 3 (18:26):
You have murdered someone, and the corpse has to be
relatively fresh, So recipe voice. Don't go for frozen here,
ask your local igu butcher for help. If you're in
a pickle.
Speaker 4 (18:38):
Fresh never frozen warrior head.
Speaker 3 (18:42):
Okay, you got to remove the skull from the neck,
easily done, messy job.
Speaker 4 (18:47):
Ailing right largely, that would be a way. I've never
really thought about it until twenty eight years later. So
excellent depictions of this very process, at least the removing
the flesh from the skull bits. It's a lot of
a lot of boiling in the sort of scraping.
Speaker 3 (19:01):
Yeah, you cut from the back of the human ear
and you remove all the skin and flesh from the cranium.
And then it is interesting because we talked about the
visage right of asa on. So you've got to keep
the facial expression if you can. So you put these
seeds in the nostrils to keep the nostrils from collapsing
(19:23):
too much, and then you sew or pin the lips shut.
This prevents it's kind of gross, but it prevents the
mouth orifice from expanding across the flesh as you work.
Speaker 4 (19:36):
So I'm trying to understand, you are leaving the flesh
on the face. You're just removing the flesh from the
top and back and.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Side from your skull entirely.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Yeah, it's a skull.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
You're dealing with a skull.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Yeah, Yeah, you start with the skull. You can get
the flesh off of the skull because it doesn't look
like a skull. It looks like a little shrinkydink heads.
I'm just obviously we're gonna get there yeah at the end, right,
and you again, we cannot overemphasize this. You gotta get
something in the nostrils. You gotta sow the mouth shut
so it doesn't expand that I'll give you a bad head,
(20:10):
and no one likes bad head, am I? Right? Folks,
you also want to okay, thanks, No, you also want
to keep your enemies face recognizable to you? Right, but noil,
you asked a good question. How does how does it
work to keep a spherical shape when you've removed you know,
(20:33):
the hard inner core you is a face.
Speaker 4 (20:37):
Like and not skull like?
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Right? Yeah, it's because you, uh, you put a wooden
sphere under the flesh bag that the skinned face that
helped this helps it maintain form. And a small handball
will do in a pinch, and then you got your
secret sauce.
Speaker 4 (20:55):
Okay, okay, I'm sorry to keep ask your clarification. So
you're removing, you're not just scraping the flesh off and
discarding it. You're like trying to remove it as cleanly
as possible from the skull. And then you have this
like you know, for lack of a better way of
describing it, mask of a face with nothing inside and
then that's what you're dealing with. You how do you
remove it without tearing it to shreds. That seems like
(21:16):
real tricky business.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
That's why you start behind the eard. Well.
Speaker 2 (21:20):
See, according to a lot of these, you start at
the top of like right at the back of the head,
and you go straight down to the neck. And then
that is the thing that gets pulled out, including the
ears and all of that stuff.
Speaker 4 (21:30):
Yeah, not boiling it all specific You boil it. You
boil it to loosen perhas but not so much that
it like absolutely melts things.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
No more than an hour or two Okay, cool?
Speaker 2 (21:41):
Yeah, according to the one I was looking at, you
you do that process. You tear the skin off, then
you boil it with herbs, and you get it to
whatever size you want it. And that's when you just
you put it it, said this one said, you didn't
put anything in it. You just basically attached the incision
again and it creates this shape a face.
Speaker 3 (22:01):
And the herb, the secret spice mixture that you use
has to be heavy with tannins. That's that's part of
the chemistry there. And after you boil it again no
more than two hours, the head will be around a
third of its original size, it'll be darker in color,
and the skin will be kind of rubbery. This is
(22:22):
where we go to the drying and tanning process. This
is where you you take the take the flesh in,
you flip it inside out, and you start scraping away
the remaining interior gunk, that's the scientific word, the gunk.
And then you start molding it actively, which is which
(22:42):
is pretty fascinating. You use hot rocks and sand and
your whole thing while you're molding. This is to retain
those facial features as much as possible. Towards the end,
you'll properly coat the skin in a you'll flip it
back out and you'll coat the skin in ash from charcoal.
(23:04):
And that's part of why the sansa the native term
for the for the shrunken head. That's why it almost
always is going to have darker skin tones. Do all
that successfully, voila viola. Assuming you've done it right, you've
got a genuine shrunken head.
Speaker 4 (23:22):
I certainly haven't seen a lot of like legitimate shrunken
heads in my life, but the image I have of them,
they are a sort of uniform. They don't really have
much personality, Like it's hard to try, as you might
with the molding, You're not going to get a shrunken
head that, like one to one resembles the owner.
Speaker 3 (23:38):
Yeah, you're not going to have like some guy making
a wink and a nod face, you know, or somebody
going uh oh.
Speaker 2 (23:47):
Right.
Speaker 3 (23:48):
But you will have to note in these recipes that
what we told you now does not contain the appropriate
ritualistic incantations. You'll also have a lot of cleaning to do.
And sorry, Max, if the law gets wind of your enterprise,
you'll have some explaining to do as well.
Speaker 4 (24:09):
Yeah, quite a bit.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
And you know, according to the schwar people, some of
those some of the things we're talking about where you're
you're sewing up the mouth and the eyes and the
back of the head. Again, to put this whole thing
together as one piece is to prevent, at least according
to more modern members of the peoples, that it was
to prevent the soul from being released from this thing
(24:34):
you have created and causing harm, like further harm.
Speaker 3 (24:37):
Yeah, and I'm glad you're saying that, Max, because that's
excellent foreshadowing to a big part of tonight's expiration. I mean, Okay,
As Nola was saying earlier, it's impressive that someone took
the time to figure this out, But it's also terrifying that,
you know, somebody took the time to figure this out.
Speaker 4 (24:56):
Right, they had to come up with a solution to
the a very specific and niche problem, and boy did
they ever do it.
Speaker 3 (25:04):
Yeah, And that's a question. The next question is logically,
why would you do this? As far as grizzly artifacts go,
this one is a lot of work, especially knowing you
could just boil the gunk off the head of a
defeated enemy and just keep their skull. Classic Yorck stuff
right from Shakespeare. This is way less messy. But if
(25:25):
we answer that question why, it takes us deep into
the realm of spirituality and souls in the afterlife, And
that leads us to another question. If this is such
a rare phenomenon in the real world, then how did
it become so well known and so morbidly popular in
the West. We'll tell you after word from our sponsors.
(25:55):
Here's where it gets great. The story of shrunken heads
cultural popularity does come down to a conspiracy, Friends and neighbors.
That conspiracy is capitalism.
Speaker 4 (26:08):
The biggest one of all, the ultimate conspiracy.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
Yeah, So you if you take yourself back to anytime
before the eighteen hundreds, when the Schwar people are living
and carrying out this practice, and several other tribes in
that area are carrying out this practice, you were doing
it for these spiritual reasons. You were doing it for,
you know, the war reasons, all of these reasons that
(26:33):
have nothing to do with the currency, right, have nothing
to do with trade, have nothing to do with valuing
this thing outside of what it is meant to be
for your tribe.
Speaker 4 (26:43):
Spiritual talisman, some way of wielding power over your enemy,
or at the very least, you know, intimidating, you know
those warning the warning aspect them.
Speaker 3 (26:53):
Yeah, it's religion at this.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
Point exactly, because we're talking about a days long process
to do this whole thing. It's not easy work, right,
and I mean it's to the point where younger members
of the tribe are going out and practicing on animals,
so practicing on a sloth or another animal that they
would come to contact with and see if they can
figure out how to do it right. And they're taught
(27:15):
how to do it.
Speaker 3 (27:16):
Yeah, in these.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Ways So what happens when other people interact with your
tribe and they see these things, and for one reason
or another, they're a desired object.
Speaker 3 (27:27):
Gotta have it.
Speaker 4 (27:28):
Let's want one of those.
Speaker 3 (27:30):
Yeah, it's the it's the lububu of its time, as
gross as that is to those are a little shrunk
and heads.
Speaker 4 (27:36):
Yeah with that, Rick Descrin.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Yeah, So the West first makes contact with the schwar
in particular in the fifteen hundreds. At this time, these
people are semi nomadic, moving through their area of the
rainforest with large autonomy right held together by only the
loosest minds of kinship or political agreement. And colonialism absolutely
(28:03):
wrecked the native lands of the Amazon. People lost their
existing culture, fighting disease and famine and slavery and Europeans
and then also each other. But the Europeans were mystified
by the practice of head shrinking. And if you fast
forward to the eighteen hundreds, as we're alluding to, you'll
(28:24):
see that this interest really explodes around the time collecting
Egyptian mummies and indeed consuming Egyptian mummies was in vogue.
Speaker 4 (28:36):
I was thinking, too, this isn't that like megafar off
from the type of practices that the Egyptians would do
with mummification. You know, it's got taxidermy vibes to it
for sure.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a good new Yeah. It is weird
to know that there was a pretty healthy trade going
on between Western cultures that were rolling through in the
shwar people. But it was stuff. They're trading, stuff that
you would imagine would be traded for, right like animals, skins.
Speaker 3 (29:05):
Exact manufactured goods are huge. This is okay, Yeah, this
is the wild specialty item. This is why we're saying
capitalism is conspiracy. So the Europeans and the Americans of
this time, in this milieu, they learn about the sansa,
the shrunken head via these breathless travelogues and these wild
claims of adventurers. And those folks are not in the
(29:29):
business of ethnography nor anthropology. They're more into telling wild
stories and selling stuff. So they would take this real
practice shrinking heads, making sansa, and they embellished the heck
out of it. They never fact checked. This became this
huge tool in othering local populations and then being used
(29:50):
to rationalize all sorts of evil stuff against them. It
also created a boom economy because outsiders start showing up
and they're buying heads, and they're bartering valuable manufactured goods,
fine fabrics, tools, knives, firearms.
Speaker 4 (30:09):
When picture these imperialist like colonel types, you know, in
the hierarchy of a military invading force, and wanting to
have a few of these things on the wall of
their rumpus room back home, you know, to like along
with like a allion's head or something, to show that
they had braved these inhospitable places. And they you know,
it was a sign of their bravery in their kind
(30:31):
of ADVENTURESM.
Speaker 3 (30:33):
Yeah, right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
You know, some cabinets of curiosity were really invoke.
Speaker 3 (30:37):
Right, something to tell the boys at the Gentleman's Club, right, and.
Speaker 4 (30:42):
The Christmas Adventurers Club.
Speaker 3 (30:43):
Me, yes, right. This was a game changing economic incentive.
But unlike some other economic fads tulips or what have you,
this trade was directly dependent upon death and dismemberment. Right.
You can't just play at the head in the ground
and grow more heads. People have tried, and I love that.
Speaker 2 (31:06):
Isn't it weird to know that? I think? At least
according to Kata Koth, who wrote for Science dot Org,
a lot of this had to do with Jesuit missionaries
and the introduction of cattle. Yeah, so they would bring
cattle into the areas where a lot of the Western
other folks were living, you know, near where these tribes
(31:28):
were living, and they would bring cattle. So then they
no longer needed to trade that with the Shwar people.
They didn't need that from the Shwar people, right, So
basically the thing they're left with are these shrunken heads.
And it's so crazy, as you're saying, Ben, how do
you say, all right, guys, we need more shrunken heads.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
That's the yeah, by hook or by crook, right.
Speaker 4 (31:51):
You don't have to say it, you know, the what
is it? Supply and demand creates the situation that all
of a sudden they got to figure out where to
get more of these heads.
Speaker 3 (31:59):
Picture, picture of the Jesuits, picture of the Europeans. Like
that Matthew McConaughey line in that old movie you got
any shrunken heads?
Speaker 4 (32:09):
Yon still did, what is that?
Speaker 2 (32:14):
What's that? I want to watch?
Speaker 3 (32:15):
That be a lot cooler if you did. That's what
they said to the shore. And this meant I'll find that,
Oh gosh, I'm blanking on the film all right, all right,
all right, all right, is it fast fast time?
Speaker 4 (32:26):
That was always days days and confused and fast times.
It's the one where he's like the they just get
getting older and I stay the same age. The other
way around, other way around.
Speaker 3 (32:35):
We'll fight, we'll fight it, we'll fix it a post
or not. But this meant that the sar had to
by hook or by crook find more heads. And remember
our recipe blog from earlier, these heads gotta be fresh baked.
So there's this huge increase in local warfare between various
groups of community and region, and it's being powered by
(32:58):
the more big curiosity of the Europeans, which itself is
powered by religious ideology. So we're seeing a clash of
two different religions attempting to commodify each other, and the
schwar have this deep inner social kinship. It's the oral
and lived history of all imaginable alley ship or slights
(33:22):
from the shared past. Now it's weaponized against them. European
fascination half worldweight created a killing spree.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
Not much different from things like diamonds and obsession with
you know, gold and precious gems that all of a
sudden when you've got these indigenous folks that have those
or have access to those. It throws all of that
into disarray because now there's this demand for it and
I don't know, money and tools and wanting to be
the tribe that has the guns or that has the
(33:53):
you know, metal tools. That's a pretty powerful influence to
do some pretty wacky inhumane stuff.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Yeah, it's a feedback loop. It's or burros because now
even if you originally don't want to go into the trade,
the next guy over has gone in now has a gun, yes,
and remembers that you are mean to his cousin twelve
years ago.
Speaker 4 (34:16):
Direct threat to you and your people. Now unless you
get in on the hustle as well.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
That's an intense thing because where do you get those skulls?
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Right?
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You know, you need skulls to make this thing that
is modernizing your group, that is making life better for everybody.
So you just got to go find enemies now, Yeah,
as it.
Speaker 4 (34:39):
Could be anybody though, I mean, do you search outside
of your try Obviously you're inside of your tribe, but
you have to It seems like there's a finite amount
of available fresh heads.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Nailed it. Yeah, it's difficult because now you have to
further rationalize actions that you may not have ordinarily taken.
Let's think about it it in a more westernized example.
Let's say you are a regular at a coffee shop.
There is another regular that you don't care for because, again,
(35:10):
twelve years ago, this guy was rude to your cousin.
In most societies, with all things being equal, you would
let this slide right. You'd sit down, you'd get your
coffee or whatever, and then you would see the dude
and you'd think, ah, that jerks back again. But you
wouldn't do anything past that unless there was no real
(35:32):
consequence for killing him. And further, what if there was
in this coffee shop no real consequence for committing murder,
and the new guy from the fancy I'll say it,
Jesuit coffee shop a few blocks up is going to
give you the equivalent of two thousand dollars if only
you kill this guy the right way. Further, you know
(35:55):
everyone else at your regular coffee shop is already doing this,
and every time they do it, they get some more tools,
they get some more prosperity. That other guy in the
coffee shop, what if he is already looking at you
across the cafe, and he's thinking, Man, I hate that
guy's cousin from twelve years ago, and I could sell
(36:18):
his head right now.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
It's made me chuckle, Ben, And jeez, you know it's
funny though, I mean, surely sure in this example, if
we're gonna you know, come back to the tribal example,
there's no rule of law necessarily a consequence, but you're
also creating just like an unlimited amount of blood mendettas
between warring tribes that is then creating more war and
(36:44):
this you know, further feedback loop that is just causing
absolute devastation because there's you know, you're always mad at
somebody for like shrinking your cousin's head, Yeah, and.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
Then you're mad at them for doing that, and they're
mad at you for retaliating. The feedback loop is real,
and take it ahead and creating SANSO would bring immediate
benefit to your kinship network, but it also puts a
target on your back. And eventually, because like that excellent
(37:16):
point you raised, eventually, because there was a finite amount
of heads that could be traditionally taken your enemies, homeboys
were not a big enough supply for the demand, so
folks began hunting women and children as well. And European
curio collectors who are looking for their cabinet contents, they
applaud all of this. They might publicly decry the practice,
(37:40):
but in private, at those gentlemen clubs we mentioned, they
crowed over these grisly momentums.
Speaker 2 (37:46):
Yeah, that profit modive thing is hard to shake once
it takes all day.
Speaker 4 (37:52):
It's just wild how corrupting it is.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Well, you also got people who don't know the rituals
who are creating these sons us. Right, So you've got
people who don't like they don't they aren't doing any
of the ceremony. They aren't. It's a tourist.
Speaker 4 (38:06):
Attraction at this point, y'all. I mean, it's like lost connection,
maybe even to its original religious purpose.
Speaker 3 (38:12):
Ye for the West.
Speaker 2 (38:13):
At least you can go through this absolute trove of
shrunken heads that were made specifically for trade and just
see that the cuts aren't right and none of the
stuff is correct or done by the way the schwar
people would do it ceremonially. Yeah, and these things are
just literal. They're all over the planet.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
And I hate, I hate to say it, but ethics aside,
the quality goes down over time quickly.
Speaker 4 (38:40):
Whatever happened to the craftsmanship with shrunken heads, you know,
it's it's a thing like.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
These save Europeans are blaming this shwar the entire time
for being naturally savage or roots, but they're ignoring the
fact that they created the situation in the first place.
Speaker 4 (39:01):
And then as so familiar, ben.
Speaker 3 (39:02):
Right, Cobra affected anybody, well just.
Speaker 4 (39:06):
In general, like I mean, as you know, any invading
force tends to create the problem that they then blame
back on the people they invaded in the first place
and sell them a solution, you know.
Speaker 3 (39:19):
My throat, Oh it's venezuela, dude.
Speaker 2 (39:23):
Well, and well, just think about what happens next to
the Schwar people, because what we're in the eighteen mid
eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, now we're in the eighteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (39:31):
So now we're getting towards, uh, this era where the
Schwar people experience the things that a lot of indigenous
peoples across the world experienced, where certain churches, especially powerful
ones like the Catholic Church, rolls through and what do
they do, guys.
Speaker 4 (39:49):
Oh, the most assimilate them or attempt to strip them
of their cultural identity.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Right to create a classic economy religiously motivated with the
people being vassals following the resource extraction demands. Tale as
old as time, sawing as old as rhyme.
Speaker 2 (40:10):
Yeah, and removing the beast yeah, and removing the you know,
the language of a people, which, as we've learned in
previous episodes, is one of the worst things you can do,
remove a language from a human people's.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Because you're removing an original technology. One of the first
technologies is language. You're also removing history, right, which means
you gave them to relate, a way for them to
be connected truly, you know, in a fundamental way, and
then you're just throwing them to the wolves.
Speaker 4 (40:42):
You are the wolves in this scenario.
Speaker 3 (40:43):
I guess, yeah, right, why do you keep making me
hit you, et cetera. I mean, additionally, because of these
high incentives, there is a boom in forgeries to meet
this insatiable demand, this boom economy. In fact, it's not
until the nineteen thirties that buying sansa, buying genuine shrunken
(41:04):
heads is finally outlawed in South America. So if you
attempt to buy us sansa now, please be aware you're
not only being kind of a dick, you're also probably
purchasing a forgery and violating the law. And at the time,
even now, these European markets also ignored the real reason
(41:27):
for creating sans in the first place. Let's what about this.
Let's take a break for a word from our sponsors
and then get into the spiritual aspects, the real reason
shrunken heads exist. No, we must, and we're back. Let's
(41:48):
talk about the religious aspects. You guys, it's weird that
the Europeans ignored basically everything the schwar told them about
Sansra's shrunken heads, and the whole time these people are saying,
these are not really trophies. These are containers for the
(42:08):
soul or the moist SoC of the victim m ui
sa k. So we're trapping the spirit of the enemy
inside the head as a defensive move to yes, acquire
acquire some stuff that we believe works, but also mainly
to prevent vengeance from beyond the greed.
Speaker 4 (42:31):
What a flex too. Wouldn't that deprive them of whatever
afterlife they believe in. They're like holding them in limbo
inside this vessel that you possess. It seems like an
aggressive tactic in and of itself.
Speaker 3 (42:43):
Yeah, you know, that's a great point in little because
essentially these folks were and are like every other human being.
They would rather not kill each other. So creating a
shrunken head is a way to prevent punishment for that
great transgression, that murder. There was this practical economic belief
(43:04):
that we have to get into as well, which is fascinating.
So the schwar society, especially at this time, the males
believe that acquiring these souls allows them power not just
for themselves, but for their wives and for their daughters
(43:25):
because the sansa, the power of the sansa can aid
women in their daily labor.
Speaker 4 (43:32):
Wait, so by creating the shrunken head, they were in
some way absolving themselves from answering for answering for their crime.
Speaker 3 (43:40):
Kind of like taking insurance like insurance against divine retribution
or ghostly retribution, and also aiding in day to day
life because the again we said, they're semi nomadic. Right
at this time, at the top, the women in the
civilization were cultivating valuable crops, and they were cultivating one
(44:05):
of the crops that provided most of the calories for
the average person's diet. So as a result, female labor
is mission critical. Anything that could be seen as helping
out with that became a top priority. So these folks
were not forget everything the Europeans say, and the travelogs
forget everything from the action films. These are not bloodthirsty monsters.
(44:29):
There are no way on intelligent savages. They've got a
consistent internal logic for a sacred ritualistic practice, and then
that practice got commodified via conspiracy.
Speaker 4 (44:42):
But they're wielding these things in a way to have
a boon for their people, right, so they can use
this object of power to increase their abilities to be productive.
Speaker 2 (44:54):
Yes, okay, just one note on that crop, the cassava
root or yuka. Yeah, the tastiest thing yump fry up
or mixed with some uh you know, some moho.
Speaker 4 (45:06):
And a French fry.
Speaker 3 (45:07):
Yeah, you can do anything with cassava. You know, I'm
not gonna bubb a gumpus here, but you can fry it,
you can boil it, you can just oh my gosh,
bake it. It's great.
Speaker 4 (45:18):
Dice it.
Speaker 2 (45:19):
Just don't eat it raw.
Speaker 3 (45:20):
Don't eat it raw. Brought to you by cassava there's
also you know, we we took pains to look into
the academic anthropological perspectives of this, and there's one there's
one piece we have to recommend circulation, accumulation and the
power of Schwarz shrunken heads by a guy named Stephen
(45:43):
Lee Rubinstein out of the University of Liverpool.
Speaker 4 (45:48):
Right, And in his work he traces the long term
consequences of this form of othering and its place in
this new capitalist system that was more or less thrust
upon these people and created a whole, you know, new
way of framing this ritualistic thing and honestly increased its
(46:08):
prevalence and bastardized it in a way you know that
took away from the religious aspects of entirely. And I
was maybe pointing out earlier that there's no version of
this that doesn't also kind of remove the sacred aspects
of it from the people themselves. When you do something
purely commercially for so long, it almost stops to have
its original meaning.
Speaker 3 (46:30):
Yes, yes, very well, put Rubenstein says. Quote. By the
time Ecuadorian authorities put an end to the warfare in
the nineteen fifties, this shwar had exchanged all of their
songces with European and euro American collectors in return for
those trade goods. So the people again are losing their
history and culture. And now we've got it, as we said,
(46:54):
commodified into pop culture in the West, and people forgot
about the schwar entire as well as forgetting the ritual importance.
They were placed in private collections, you know, cabinets of
wonder curios, curiro shops, museums, and they were exhibited as
evidence of the benighted violence from these uncivilized natives. Oh
(47:18):
thank god someone came in and saved them and took
all their stuff and sold it to each other. There
is good news though, in that the Schwarp people, thank
you to all the activists involved, are able to get
some of the Sansa repatriated. And this is something we
(47:39):
talked about previously, Guys. I was attempting to remember when
we spoke about the great debate of museums and who
gets to keep what feels like it pops up every year.
Speaker 2 (47:53):
We talked about a while ago, and I think we
brought up the sans Of project, which is something that
started in twenty seventeen and ended its first I guess
phase in twenty nineteen and they were able to repatriate
a bunch of the Sanzas, but then in twenty twenty one.
In the past couple of years, even this past year
twenty twenty five, a lot of work was done to
(48:15):
get these sances out of these museums and back to
the indigenous tribes that own them. There is some weird
stuff though, because in the case of the Shwar people,
there's the Ashwar people who were the tribe that were
often attacked and turned into these shrunken heads. So there's
this kind of problem, Well, who does that head then
(48:38):
belong to the tribe?
Speaker 3 (48:40):
Not a monolithic group, absolutely bunch of different people, but
do always get along?
Speaker 2 (48:46):
Well yeah, but that's ahead of an individual that was
a part of one group, right, and it was that
person was killed by another group, and that group, the
one that killed him, is claiming ownership over it. But
then does it actually belong to the other group. There's
the sans of project is really interesting because again it's
people navigating the law as well as you know, these
(49:07):
relationships with museums and countries that control those museums. I
would highly recommend people check out something titled Reflections on
the Sansas Project. Rethinking schwer Object Collections Nationally and Internationally
by Maria Patricia Ordonez Alvarez. Very interesting read, just about
(49:28):
the specific the specifics of finding these things and then
putting them back where they should be.
Speaker 3 (49:35):
I love that. While you're online, folks, please check out
as well The Authentication and Repatriation of a ceremonial sanset
to its country of origin, Ecuador. The lead author of
that when Craig D. Byron explores the story of authenticating
a sansa and returning it to its home. But again,
(49:57):
that's a tricky question because where does go Imagine, you know,
our coffee shop example earlier, imagine one hundred plus years
have passed, right, and your great grandfather, your great uncle
was one of those people who got killed at the
coffee shop. Right, does that piece of their body go
(50:22):
back to you? Or do the authorities just say it
happened in the United States, So well, just give it
to the Spithsodian shoot.
Speaker 4 (50:31):
And I mean and the as we've mentioned too, the
traditions in the oral history and written history. Even if
a lot of these tribes were wiped out by Colin I,
so there might not even be enough breadcrumbs to follow
it even figure out who to return it to in
the first place.
Speaker 3 (50:46):
Very much.
Speaker 2 (50:46):
So you've not just got two tribes. Also, it's often
written about as just these two tribes, but there are
several that Cramledon mentioned several that we didn't talk about today,
and so it's just it is not just a single
problem happening in Ecuador.
Speaker 3 (51:01):
Right right, because this is also a That's why we
took pains to say the are the most well documented
people's practicing the creation of sciences, but by no means,
by no means unique in the area. And because of
all the warfare, and because of the conspiracy of capitalism,
(51:24):
and because of that economic boom, it becomes very very
difficult to honestly give justice and repatriate these things the
right way, these artifacts, because they were living people, and
depending upon what you believe, there may still be a
soul inside them. You know. That's the thing that even
(51:47):
as a secular skeptical entity, that's the thing that bothers
me the most, you know what I mean, your soul
just remains.
Speaker 4 (51:58):
You know, They're very very important to religious beliefs, you know,
no matter what the religious background might be. Yeah, I
was just doing a little googling and I came across
a popular nineteen seventies Milton Bradley product called Shrunken Heads,
and it was a craft kit that was pitched or
I guess advertised promoted by Vincent Price where you would
(52:21):
take an apple and it was like this heated cone thing.
You'd hollow it out and stick it on the cone
and it would shrink the apple and then you decorate
it and put hair on it and make it into
a little bobble and it's horrific.
Speaker 3 (52:34):
I'm sure it aged very well, oh very much so, Yice.
We also, I guess we should say this too as
we're wrapping up. We love museums. Longtime listeners, you know this.
We hope you love museums as well. Anytime we were
on the road, which is often, we try to visit
a local museum and as such we applaud the efforts
(52:57):
of the activists, the curators, the academic the researchers who
are across the planet right now seeking justice and dignity
for exploited peoples. Often, to be fair, a museum might
not know what they have in storage, so it is
not as if they are conspiring to actively rob people
(53:19):
of their own history. This is a huge debate in
the world of museums, like does the British National Museum
really know everything in their collection?
Speaker 4 (53:30):
Oh, surely not, And especially when some of these organizations
are so underfunded these days. So you have to have
human people to sift through all of this stuff and
catalog it and then you know, follow those breadcrumbs, and
that can often take a really long time and be
very difficult.
Speaker 2 (53:44):
Well, you've also got individuals at these organizations like the
University of Oxford and the pitt Rivers Museum is taking
great pains to return these sances to the right hold
owners through the Proecto sanso I think that's what it's called.
That's what they call it there, the pitt Rivers. And
it is good just to see that there is kind
of an agreeance, at least not fully across the board,
(54:06):
but to large, to the large extent, that this kind
of thing is worth this kind of work is worth doing,
going through the backlogs, going in and seeing what you
got and returning that stuff.
Speaker 3 (54:17):
Yeah, looking through the looking through the back room or
the basement, blowing the dust off one of those containers,
and saying, oh crap, we should give this back. This
is how it happens. The debate continues, and please, folks,
we hope you enjoyed this episode. Remember every time you
(54:40):
encounter a lurid tail, savages or cannibal tribes or anything
like that, there is something more to the story. And
for Europeans in the eighteen hundreds, that was indeed the
stuff they don't want you to know. We had a
lot of fun with this one. Can you guys believe
we're on Netflix now?
Speaker 2 (55:00):
It's crazy. It's also it is.
Speaker 4 (55:01):
Good to be back, y'all. I missed you and we
missed you out there in conspiracy realist land. But it
is crazy, it's cool, it's fun to do a new
thing video wise.
Speaker 3 (55:13):
Yeah, sure, back to our roots.
Speaker 2 (55:14):
Well, if you're just finding us on this platform, maybe
you've missed our nineteen one hundred episodes. I think now
that exists on all the all the places where you
can listen to podcasts.
Speaker 4 (55:26):
From the before times.
Speaker 2 (55:28):
Yes, we'll definitely check those out.
Speaker 4 (55:30):
Oh yeah, please do.
Speaker 3 (55:31):
All our videos. That's how we started and that's why
we're excited to be returning in twenty twenty six. You
are our favorite part of the show. Fellow conspiracy Realist.
We're so glad you joined us. As we say, you
can catch us wherever you find your favorite shows on
the lines. You can call us on the phone. You
(55:53):
can always send us an email. No riddle me this.
What do people do? Should they sip the Social needs right?
Speaker 4 (56:01):
Should you have a taste for blood aka social needs?
You can find us at the handle Conspiracy Stuff Show
on x FKA, Twitter, on Facebook with our Facebook group
Here's where it gets crazy, and on YouTube where we
have tons of videos for you to enjoy. On Instagram
and TikTok. However, we're Conspiracy Stuff Show, and I think
there's like there's one one more way, two more ways?
What you got, Matt?
Speaker 2 (56:21):
This is kind of weird. Look, I'm gonna we're gonna
ask you to get out your phone. Okay, type into
that phone the following one eight, three three st d WYTK.
That's the part of your phone that you can dial
numbers in there, and then you can call numbers like
with a phone. Do that. That's our voicemail line. When
(56:41):
you get in, you got three minutes, give yourself a
cool nickname. Let us know, you know, if we can
use your name and message on one of our listener
mail episodes that appear in the audio form of this show,
and uh, hey, have fun. We can't wait to hear
from you. What do you think? Do you have an
idea for a new episode? Tell us anything and everything.
We are listening. If you want to send us an email,
(57:02):
you can do that too.
Speaker 3 (57:03):
We are the entities that read each piece of correspondence
we receive. Be well aware of leaning into the camera.
Be well aware the void writes back. There is no
limit on what you can say. Send us the links,
send us the leads, take us to the edge of
the rabbit hole, and will do the rest. Bonus point.
(57:24):
If you would like a random fact unrelated to anything
we've discussed, hit us up in an email and tell
us if the random fact is interesting. We'll see you
out here in the darch Conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (57:58):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff They Don't Want You To Know News
Hosts And Creators
Matt Frederick
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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