September 24, 2019 • 19 mins
Going to see your favorite musical act is getting pricier. Concerts are more expensive than ever, but fans keep paying up. The average price of a ticket to the 100 most popular tours in North America have quadrupled over the past two decades. Lucas Shaw, entertainment reporter at Bloomberg News, joins us for why ticket prices keep going up.
Next, politicians have been caught swearing since the beginning of politics, but according to a new analysis the number of swear words used by lawmakers on Twitter took a noticeable jump after 2016. Beto O’Rourke’s latest campaign T-shirt even has the F-word on it. J. Clara Chan, media and politics reporter at The Wrap, joins us for when profanity hits the campaign trail.
Finally, the CIA has declassified dozens of files from its attempts to create secret animal spies. By 1967 the CIA had three programs aimed at using dolphins, cats, dogs, and birds in secret spy missions. While not the most successful programs, it is an interesting look at how animals were being trained to perform a variety of tasks to help gather intel on the enemy. Paul Handley, national security correspondent at AFP news agency, joins us for more.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Tuesday, September. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the daily dive. Going to see your favorite
musical act is getting price here. Concerts are more expensive
than ever, but fans keep paying up. The average price
of a ticket to the one hundred most popular tours
(00:20):
in North America have quadrupled over the past two decades.
Lucas Shaw, entertainment reporter at Bloomberg News joins US for
white ticket prices are going up. Next. Politicians have been
caught swearing since the beginning of politics, but according to
a new analysis, the number of swear words used by
lawmakers on Twitter took a noticeable jump after Beto O'Rourke's
(00:44):
latest campaign t shirt even has the F word on it.
J Clara Chan, media and politics reporter at The Rap
joins us for when profanity hits the campaign trail. Finally,
the CIA has declassified dozens of files from its attempts
to create secret adam Most Spies. By nine seven, the
CIA had three programs aimed at using dolphins, cats and
(01:06):
dogs or birds, and Secret Spy Mission Well not the
most successful programs. It is an interesting look at how
animals are being trained to perform a variety of tasks
to help gather intel on the enemy. Paul Hanley, national
security correspondent at the a f E News Agency, joins
us for more. It's news without the noise. Let's dive
(01:27):
in right now. There's never been a greater collection of
people that were really more focused, very specifically on the
problems that the industry has had around fan identity and
how do we advantage fans, how do we give fans
a real shot to get access to the best tickets
in the best time. Joining us now is Lucas Shaw,
(01:48):
entertainment reporter at Bloomberg News. Thanks for joining us, Lucas,
Thanks having me. We're gonna be talking about concert tickets
and how they're just getting more and more expensive, and
the other side of it, fans are still paying up
all that money despite how much the prices are going up.
Right now, an average ticket price to the hundred most
(02:08):
popular tours in North America, it's just about a hundred dollars,
which is up from about twenty five dollars over the
past two decades. Tell us a little bit more about
how these ticket prices keep going up. Well, it's most
basic level supply and demand where you have a lot
of people who want to go and see their favorite acts,
and those acts only come to town one sort or
(02:31):
twice a year if that. And so you've seen a
concerted effort over the past couple of decades to raise
those prices. A lot of factors going in that. Part
of it is that the music industry saw what happened
in the sports sports and have moved on this first,
and they started raising prices to go and see basketball games,
baseball games, football games. I mean you try to get
a Laker ticket in l A. Those tickets started like
hundred fifty two dollars, and they said, why not us.
(02:52):
There was then the decline of the CD business and
in general record sales, which meant that artists were more
and more dependent on or touring business, and so they
felt a little less precious about raising prices because if
their fans were going to pay to buy their album, well,
then they were going to charge the stands more to
see them live. And then you had the development of
a couple of kind of more modern things, one being
(03:13):
really premium tickets and charging for v I P packages,
and the other being the resale market with on sites
like stub Hub and SeatGeek, and because scalpers were making
so much money from reselling the tickets at a higher price,
it told ticket sellers, and it told artists they could
charge more. There was clearly demand, and why shouldn't they
be getting the money that was instead going to scalpers,
(03:34):
some of whom were pretty unscrupulous. A lot of times
scalpers and other people will set up bots to kind
of lead the site to buy the tickets before you can,
and even if you log in right when tickets go
on sale, everything is sold out within seconds a lot
of times, and it's so frustrating because you can't get
the ticket. Then then you've got to go to the
resale sites and the ticket prices are ballooned even more there.
(03:55):
This has been a really vexing problem for the music
industry for at least a few years, maybe a decade now.
There have been some efforts to combat it. There has
been some legislation path limiting the use of both ticket
Master in particular, has this product called verified Fan pre sale,
where they know, based on a user's history kind of
buying tickets and listening, how likely they are to go
(04:16):
to see somebody, and they will invite them to be
part of the first batch of people to buy tickets
to show. This is something that Taylor Swift used a
lot on her most recent tour. But it's a problem
you can't solve perfectly because how diffuse it is. Let's
also talk about some of these premium experiences, these v
I P experiences where sometimes they cost thousands of dollars
(04:36):
and could be you know, ticket to the concert plus
a meet and greet. A lot of times these tickets
are available to and club members, like you've got to
be part of so and so's army or something like
that to get some advanced ticket sales and things like that.
These are the other element of this that's driving a
lot of ticket sales up. I think that, in particular
is what's driving that average price up, because if you
(04:56):
think about how the math on it works, if you
have a bunch of it gets at the top, it'll
skew the overall average, even if the vast majority of
the tickets are slightly cheaper. And I think what you've
seen is to what you said. Some of it is
definitely span clubs and engaging super fans, and some of
it is also just taking advantage of the fact that
there's some really rich people out there who will spend
(05:16):
out of any sum of money if it means that
they or their child gets the best seat in the house,
or get something signed, or maybe gets to go to
a meet and gate. You profiled in your article a
Pink super fan. And they started saving money well in
advance of any concert, just in the preparation for when
it did go on sale they would be able to
(05:37):
go and meet the prices that we're going to be
out there. So Bex Paul is a thirty two year
old woman who lives in London. She fell in love
with Pink when she was a teenager. When and saw
it her first Pink show in two two, she paid
eleven pounds and has in the years since then seen
Pink close to a hundred fifty times. At the end
of the most recent tour, which which wrapped in early
two fourteen jun a girlfriend set up a separate bank
(05:58):
account called Pink and and they just started saving money
wherever they could. By the time that Pink tickets actually
went on sale, they had saved more than six thousand pounds,
so about seven thousand dollars, and they used that to
buy tickets and travel and all that for seventeen shows.
They end up going to eleven, but they bought for seventeen.
She said it paid for all but the last one
or two. They had to get some money for friends.
But she was honestly just happy that she did not
(06:20):
have to go into debt. Gone are the days of
when you hear, hey, somebody's playing at the local club nearby,
and you can buy a ticket and just go. Now
you have to plan this stuff months in advance, get
the advanced notice, wait in that digital line to get
all your tickets, and it's just a crazy world, and
it's getting more and more expensive and increasingly harder to
see the people that you really love. Yes, although the
(06:42):
experiments in recent years with really jacking up the prices
to try to kill the resale market does make it
easier in some cases to get tickets to these shows,
because some shows aren't selling out quite as far in advance,
Like this is not going to apply for like the
hottest act on tour right now, Billie Eilish, who's shot
in the stratosphere this year. I don't think it would
apply to go and see her. But somebody like Taylor
(07:03):
Swift even last year with her tour, because they were
pricing so aggressively and because she's not quite as all
powerful as she used to be and she's playing these
massive venues. Per shows would not sell out way in advance,
and you could usually get tickets pretty close to that date.
So I think there is a little bit of a
silver lining in that sense that, yes, for a lot
of acts you need to sign up on day one,
(07:24):
and even then, to your point about bots, you might
not be able to get tickets, but with certain groups
you can still get tickets at the last minute. It
just depends on who it is and sort of what
stage of their career they're in. Lucas Shaw, Entertainment reporter
at Bloomberg News, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah. Thanks, family.
(07:47):
It's not sure how many gunmen. Not sure how many
people have been shot. I don't know how many people
have been killed, the condition of those who have survived.
I don't know what the motivation is, not yet know
the firearms that were used or how they acquire them.
Joining us now is j Clara Chen, media and politics
reporter for the Rap. Thanks for joining us, Clara, Hi,
(08:10):
thanks for having me. We're gonna be talking about an
interesting topic when profanity hits the campaign trail. We're noticing
this a little bit more in recent times, how some
of the candidates and just politicos in general are a
little bit looser with their language, and you're getting some
f bombs here and there, especially from Beto O'Rourke in
(08:33):
recent times. He actually has a shirt that he released
through his campaign says this is left up and it's
all about gun violence. But tell us a little bit
about this, Clara, just in general, how we've been noticing
more profanity. Sure, I mean there's actually some data to
back us up as well. There was this government research
company called predict and they've basically been looking at the
(08:56):
use of profanity by lawmakers on Twitter and so accounting
for words sort of like excuse my language here, sort
of things like that. They noticed that in specifically, there's
sort of been almost nineteen hundred times politicians have sworn
on Twitter. So there's actually numbers to back up this
sort of sense that what we're seeing from lawmakers is
(09:19):
an uptick in profanity that was just this year in
that number was a hundred and ninety three, And it
doesn't seem like a lot. You know nineteen hundred times
that lawmakers have sworn compared to all the other swear
words you constantly see on these platforms. But these are politicians,
These are lawmakers. These are people who are held to
a different standard. For the most part, people look up
(09:40):
to them things like that, So it is kind of
jarring when you hear or see them use this type
of language. I do think, though, that language norms over
time naturally evolved. And I had a great conversation with
this cognitive science professor at you See San Diego, and
he sort of specializes in cursing scholarship, and he's sort
(10:00):
of pointed to three sort of different factors as to
why we might be seeing sort of this uptick in
political profanity, if you might call it that. So, obviously
the first one is as time goes on, people view
language differently, and obviously it's subjective to each person in
their own sort of personal beliefs. But recent studies have
found that at least for our younger Americans run of
(10:23):
the mill quote unquote, profanity is sort of deemed as
less offensive to say, like millennial and Gen Z generations
than perhaps it was to boomers or Gen xers and
things like that, and so for politicians who might want to,
you know, appeal to younger demographic not censoring themselves might
make them seem more appealing to younger voters. And so
(10:44):
just to clarify, though, what run of the mills where
words mean, it's sort of related to three different areas.
So there's profanity related to sex, which could be a
word like bodily functions, so things like and then religion
and by that we mean they as I. You can
see that happen over time, these run of the mill
square words as you're mentioning, and you notice it in TV,
(11:07):
the word big is like easily toss around in most
shows that are appropriate kind of across the board, at
least with these parental ratings, that's one of the main
words that you've noticed kind of just ease its way
into the normal lexicon. So you definitely see that all
over the place. And then on social media you were
talking about how some of these politicians might use it
to make themselves a little more approachable to the younger crowd.
(11:30):
On social media, though, it's kind of this weird combination
of informal language because you're talking directly to your constituents,
your people. But it's written out there, so it's always
going to remain there, so you can always go back
to see it, especially when it comes to tools like Twitter,
for example. As you were saying, it is sort of
the strange both informal yet formal in the sense that
(11:52):
it's written so anyone can go back to it. I
think it's different from what happened in the past that
the politicians could Before what you would read from a
politician would probably be informal format like a book or
in a letter or newspaper or something like that. So
certainly there is more informal modes of communication that politicians
have been using in recent years. Lends this informality to
(12:15):
the way that they want to speak with the constituents,
and with that perhaps more inclinations to use profanity. What
are some of the other reasons we're saying that this
is creeping up a little bit more. This ties in
a little bit with sort of the twitterization of political discourse,
and I think we can't ignore sort of the role
that the current president has had in using Twitter obviously
(12:37):
as the main platform to release policy statements, to talk
to his constituents, to also throw insults at people, and
so I think Trump's language is sort of setting a
new norm for what was acceptable or allowable in political
discourse for politicians. So I think that's certainly another factor
that we've been seeing as contributing to why politicians might
(12:59):
be more informal and using profanity and publicatements and things
like that. J Clara Chan, media and politics reporter for
The RAP, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.
What the CIA documents show is how meticulous they were
(13:21):
in planning and thinking out all the kinds of problems
they had, but you still couldn't solve everything, like what
happens if the animals just went away and the pigeons
sometimes would fly off in tests and never come back
with the extensive camera. Joining us now is Paul Handley,
national security correspondent at a FP News Agency. Thanks for
joining us, Paul, Hi, how are you doing doing well?
(13:43):
Thank you. We're gonna be talking about some fun stuff.
The CIA has declassified details of its secret Cold War
spy pigeon missions and declassified other documents dealing with how
they were using animals, potentially training them to conduct other
kland Stein missions for the government. Think there was things
that involved dolphins and dogs, ravens, all sorts of stuff.
(14:07):
Paul start us Off tell us a little bit about
what the CIA d classified. Well, it's been known for
a long time that they experimented on animals in the
nineteen sixties. In nineteent but they let out some details
of the kinds of animals they were using, what they
were using them for, some of the targets, and it
was really interesting. We've known that pigeons have been used
in war and in spying and messaging for a couple
(14:29):
of thousand years. Even the Germans started to try to
use them for taking pictures in World War One. But
the CIA wanted to take that a lot farther, and
they wanted to mess around with a lot of other
animals and see what they could do. A lot of
these programs weren't necessarily the most successful. I know some
they tried right away, like they tried to do mind
control with dogs. That one didn't really go anywhere. Well,
(14:52):
what do we know about some of those The mind
control thing, I guess it was a little controversial. The
CIA didn't let out all the documents from the program,
but it was clear there were some dog lovers who
raised questions about animal rights during it. But then they
wanted to see if they could plant some kind of
electronics in their brains and then control them to go
on missions, and they tested them to go along a path.
(15:13):
But it really didn't tell you what happened with that.
I think maybe it was sensitive and maybe it really
didn't work. Another thing they tried to do those with cats.
It appears they wanted to see if they could put
some listening devices on cats or even the mind control things,
and see if they could just let them loose, wander
through maybe an office or someone's home, and transmit signals
(15:33):
about the discussion. They also didn't describe what happened was that,
but I imagine they found out what a lot of
people knows, you really can't train cats. A lot of
this does center on the birds. Obviously, the pigeons was
one of their main focuses. I guess they had a
lot of success with that, but even still some of
those programs died off after a bit. With the pigeons, specifically,
(15:54):
they would outfit them with little cameras and a lot
of times maybe half of the pictures that they were
set up to take, you know, surveillance type pictures. About
half of those came out okay and the other half
did not. The ce I was investing a lot of
money in small cameras and high speed film, the best
stuff you could get, and outfit them on pigeons and
of courses, the cameras got better, you could get better pictures,
(16:16):
and that was ideal and they had a whole range
of possibilities for that. But what they shifted up and
tried other birds. They spent a lot of time collecting
some birds of prey and ravens and crows. They wanted
to see how they could train them to carry cameras,
also to drop off things, or to do simple missions.
(16:37):
With the ravens, they wanted to see if they could
have one deposits a listening device on a window sill
outside of room where presumably there were Russians or someone talking,
they could get some information, and they experimented on that.
In one case, they sent the raven off and he
dropped the listening device where it was the wrong window sill,
even though they were using lasers to point off. In
(16:58):
another one they said that in Germany, they send it
off and the raven did the mission, and then the
listening device didn't work. What the c i A documents
show is how meticulous they were in planning and thinking
out all the kinds of problems they had, but you
still couldn't solve everything, like what happens if the animals
just went away. And the pigeons sometimes would fly off
(17:19):
in tests and never come back. With the expensive cameras,
they even named the most promising raven that they were
working with, Dooda, but that one unfortunately fell to the
attack of other ravens. So they had this camp on
an island offshore California, and they had a whole slew
of birds. They had some hawks, some falcons, and they
(17:41):
had this raven they named Duda, and they were seeing
how far they could go and perform a mission. So
they take them out on a boat and see if
it would fly back to the island. And they go
out on the boat and see if the bird would
fly to the boat. And increasingly they were expanding the
distances from a quarter mile to a half mile, to
beyond a few miles to where the boat couldn't be seen,
(18:02):
and they were getting pretty good results. They had problems.
A couple of falcons just often up and died on them.
One hawk got something on his feet to some kind
of infections, and he was out, and then he molted
and they couldn't use him because his feathers weren't there.
All sorts of troubles that he might not think of,
but they ran into and then they had this raven
doda and they mapped out. You could see in these
(18:24):
documents they really liked it, and they would really right
the bird, and they were really making progress, and you
could see in the schedule how many more miles he
flew every week and the week, and they were really
confident that they could get him up to the thirteen
mile goal that was needed for some kind of Michigan
Eastern Europe or Russia. And he went off and they
were following, and he disappeared over the rise and they
(18:46):
weren't worried, and then he didn't come back, and it
turned out that he had been regularly attacked by oven
other ravens and seagulls, and he figured out how to
send them off. But this last time, apparently two wild
ravens attacked him and killed him when they were really sad.
In the c I c I released, there's a really
nice legy to it. You can see they're really attached
(19:06):
to it and kind of realized that that could be
the end of the program. Paul Handley, national security correspondent
at the AFP News Agency, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thanks that's it for today. Join us on
social media at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily
(19:29):
Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us
a rating, and tell us the stories that you're interested in.
Follow us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you
get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive was
produced by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sorrentino. I'm
Oscar Ramirez, and this was your Daily Dive.
It's Tuesday, September. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles and
this is the daily dive. Going to see your favorite
musical act is getting price here. Concerts are more expensive
than ever, but fans keep paying up. The average price
of a ticket to the one hundred most popular tours
(00:20):
in North America have quadrupled over the past two decades.
Lucas Shaw, entertainment reporter at Bloomberg News joins US for
white ticket prices are going up. Next. Politicians have been
caught swearing since the beginning of politics, but according to
a new analysis, the number of swear words used by
lawmakers on Twitter took a noticeable jump after Beto O'Rourke's
(00:44):
latest campaign t shirt even has the F word on it.
J Clara Chan, media and politics reporter at The Rap
joins us for when profanity hits the campaign trail. Finally,
the CIA has declassified dozens of files from its attempts
to create secret adam Most Spies. By nine seven, the
CIA had three programs aimed at using dolphins, cats and
(01:06):
dogs or birds, and Secret Spy Mission Well not the
most successful programs. It is an interesting look at how
animals are being trained to perform a variety of tasks
to help gather intel on the enemy. Paul Hanley, national
security correspondent at the a f E News Agency, joins
us for more. It's news without the noise. Let's dive
(01:27):
in right now. There's never been a greater collection of
people that were really more focused, very specifically on the
problems that the industry has had around fan identity and
how do we advantage fans, how do we give fans
a real shot to get access to the best tickets
in the best time. Joining us now is Lucas Shaw,
(01:48):
entertainment reporter at Bloomberg News. Thanks for joining us, Lucas,
Thanks having me. We're gonna be talking about concert tickets
and how they're just getting more and more expensive, and
the other side of it, fans are still paying up
all that money despite how much the prices are going up.
Right now, an average ticket price to the hundred most
(02:08):
popular tours in North America, it's just about a hundred dollars,
which is up from about twenty five dollars over the
past two decades. Tell us a little bit more about
how these ticket prices keep going up. Well, it's most
basic level supply and demand where you have a lot
of people who want to go and see their favorite acts,
and those acts only come to town one sort or
(02:31):
twice a year if that. And so you've seen a
concerted effort over the past couple of decades to raise
those prices. A lot of factors going in that. Part
of it is that the music industry saw what happened
in the sports sports and have moved on this first,
and they started raising prices to go and see basketball games,
baseball games, football games. I mean you try to get
a Laker ticket in l A. Those tickets started like
hundred fifty two dollars, and they said, why not us.
(02:52):
There was then the decline of the CD business and
in general record sales, which meant that artists were more
and more dependent on or touring business, and so they
felt a little less precious about raising prices because if
their fans were going to pay to buy their album, well,
then they were going to charge the stands more to
see them live. And then you had the development of
a couple of kind of more modern things, one being
(03:13):
really premium tickets and charging for v I P packages,
and the other being the resale market with on sites
like stub Hub and SeatGeek, and because scalpers were making
so much money from reselling the tickets at a higher price,
it told ticket sellers, and it told artists they could
charge more. There was clearly demand, and why shouldn't they
be getting the money that was instead going to scalpers,
(03:34):
some of whom were pretty unscrupulous. A lot of times
scalpers and other people will set up bots to kind
of lead the site to buy the tickets before you can,
and even if you log in right when tickets go
on sale, everything is sold out within seconds a lot
of times, and it's so frustrating because you can't get
the ticket. Then then you've got to go to the
resale sites and the ticket prices are ballooned even more there.
(03:55):
This has been a really vexing problem for the music
industry for at least a few years, maybe a decade now.
There have been some efforts to combat it. There has
been some legislation path limiting the use of both ticket
Master in particular, has this product called verified Fan pre sale,
where they know, based on a user's history kind of
buying tickets and listening, how likely they are to go
(04:16):
to see somebody, and they will invite them to be
part of the first batch of people to buy tickets
to show. This is something that Taylor Swift used a
lot on her most recent tour. But it's a problem
you can't solve perfectly because how diffuse it is. Let's
also talk about some of these premium experiences, these v
I P experiences where sometimes they cost thousands of dollars
(04:36):
and could be you know, ticket to the concert plus
a meet and greet. A lot of times these tickets
are available to and club members, like you've got to
be part of so and so's army or something like
that to get some advanced ticket sales and things like that.
These are the other element of this that's driving a
lot of ticket sales up. I think that, in particular
is what's driving that average price up, because if you
(04:56):
think about how the math on it works, if you
have a bunch of it gets at the top, it'll
skew the overall average, even if the vast majority of
the tickets are slightly cheaper. And I think what you've
seen is to what you said. Some of it is
definitely span clubs and engaging super fans, and some of
it is also just taking advantage of the fact that
there's some really rich people out there who will spend
(05:16):
out of any sum of money if it means that
they or their child gets the best seat in the house,
or get something signed, or maybe gets to go to
a meet and gate. You profiled in your article a
Pink super fan. And they started saving money well in
advance of any concert, just in the preparation for when
it did go on sale they would be able to
(05:37):
go and meet the prices that we're going to be
out there. So Bex Paul is a thirty two year
old woman who lives in London. She fell in love
with Pink when she was a teenager. When and saw
it her first Pink show in two two, she paid
eleven pounds and has in the years since then seen
Pink close to a hundred fifty times. At the end
of the most recent tour, which which wrapped in early
two fourteen jun a girlfriend set up a separate bank
(05:58):
account called Pink and and they just started saving money
wherever they could. By the time that Pink tickets actually
went on sale, they had saved more than six thousand pounds,
so about seven thousand dollars, and they used that to
buy tickets and travel and all that for seventeen shows.
They end up going to eleven, but they bought for seventeen.
She said it paid for all but the last one
or two. They had to get some money for friends.
But she was honestly just happy that she did not
(06:20):
have to go into debt. Gone are the days of
when you hear, hey, somebody's playing at the local club nearby,
and you can buy a ticket and just go. Now
you have to plan this stuff months in advance, get
the advanced notice, wait in that digital line to get
all your tickets, and it's just a crazy world, and
it's getting more and more expensive and increasingly harder to
see the people that you really love. Yes, although the
(06:42):
experiments in recent years with really jacking up the prices
to try to kill the resale market does make it
easier in some cases to get tickets to these shows,
because some shows aren't selling out quite as far in advance,
Like this is not going to apply for like the
hottest act on tour right now, Billie Eilish, who's shot
in the stratosphere this year. I don't think it would
apply to go and see her. But somebody like Taylor
(07:03):
Swift even last year with her tour, because they were
pricing so aggressively and because she's not quite as all
powerful as she used to be and she's playing these
massive venues. Per shows would not sell out way in advance,
and you could usually get tickets pretty close to that date.
So I think there is a little bit of a
silver lining in that sense that, yes, for a lot
of acts you need to sign up on day one,
(07:24):
and even then, to your point about bots, you might
not be able to get tickets, but with certain groups
you can still get tickets at the last minute. It
just depends on who it is and sort of what
stage of their career they're in. Lucas Shaw, Entertainment reporter
at Bloomberg News, thank you very much for joining us. Yeah. Thanks, family.
(07:47):
It's not sure how many gunmen. Not sure how many
people have been shot. I don't know how many people
have been killed, the condition of those who have survived.
I don't know what the motivation is, not yet know
the firearms that were used or how they acquire them.
Joining us now is j Clara Chen, media and politics
reporter for the Rap. Thanks for joining us, Clara, Hi,
(08:10):
thanks for having me. We're gonna be talking about an
interesting topic when profanity hits the campaign trail. We're noticing
this a little bit more in recent times, how some
of the candidates and just politicos in general are a
little bit looser with their language, and you're getting some
f bombs here and there, especially from Beto O'Rourke in
(08:33):
recent times. He actually has a shirt that he released
through his campaign says this is left up and it's
all about gun violence. But tell us a little bit
about this, Clara, just in general, how we've been noticing
more profanity. Sure, I mean there's actually some data to
back us up as well. There was this government research
company called predict and they've basically been looking at the
(08:56):
use of profanity by lawmakers on Twitter and so accounting
for words sort of like excuse my language here, sort
of things like that. They noticed that in specifically, there's
sort of been almost nineteen hundred times politicians have sworn
on Twitter. So there's actually numbers to back up this
sort of sense that what we're seeing from lawmakers is
(09:19):
an uptick in profanity that was just this year in
that number was a hundred and ninety three, And it
doesn't seem like a lot. You know nineteen hundred times
that lawmakers have sworn compared to all the other swear
words you constantly see on these platforms. But these are politicians,
These are lawmakers. These are people who are held to
a different standard. For the most part, people look up
(09:40):
to them things like that, So it is kind of
jarring when you hear or see them use this type
of language. I do think, though, that language norms over
time naturally evolved. And I had a great conversation with
this cognitive science professor at you See San Diego, and
he sort of specializes in cursing scholarship, and he's sort
(10:00):
of pointed to three sort of different factors as to
why we might be seeing sort of this uptick in
political profanity, if you might call it that. So, obviously
the first one is as time goes on, people view
language differently, and obviously it's subjective to each person in
their own sort of personal beliefs. But recent studies have
found that at least for our younger Americans run of
(10:23):
the mill quote unquote, profanity is sort of deemed as
less offensive to say, like millennial and Gen Z generations
than perhaps it was to boomers or Gen xers and
things like that, and so for politicians who might want to,
you know, appeal to younger demographic not censoring themselves might
make them seem more appealing to younger voters. And so
(10:44):
just to clarify, though, what run of the mills where
words mean, it's sort of related to three different areas.
So there's profanity related to sex, which could be a
word like bodily functions, so things like and then religion
and by that we mean they as I. You can
see that happen over time, these run of the mill
square words as you're mentioning, and you notice it in TV,
(11:07):
the word big is like easily toss around in most
shows that are appropriate kind of across the board, at
least with these parental ratings, that's one of the main
words that you've noticed kind of just ease its way
into the normal lexicon. So you definitely see that all
over the place. And then on social media you were
talking about how some of these politicians might use it
to make themselves a little more approachable to the younger crowd.
(11:30):
On social media, though, it's kind of this weird combination
of informal language because you're talking directly to your constituents,
your people. But it's written out there, so it's always
going to remain there, so you can always go back
to see it, especially when it comes to tools like Twitter,
for example. As you were saying, it is sort of
the strange both informal yet formal in the sense that
(11:52):
it's written so anyone can go back to it. I
think it's different from what happened in the past that
the politicians could Before what you would read from a
politician would probably be informal format like a book or
in a letter or newspaper or something like that. So
certainly there is more informal modes of communication that politicians
have been using in recent years. Lends this informality to
(12:15):
the way that they want to speak with the constituents,
and with that perhaps more inclinations to use profanity. What
are some of the other reasons we're saying that this
is creeping up a little bit more. This ties in
a little bit with sort of the twitterization of political discourse,
and I think we can't ignore sort of the role
that the current president has had in using Twitter obviously
(12:37):
as the main platform to release policy statements, to talk
to his constituents, to also throw insults at people, and
so I think Trump's language is sort of setting a
new norm for what was acceptable or allowable in political
discourse for politicians. So I think that's certainly another factor
that we've been seeing as contributing to why politicians might
(12:59):
be more informal and using profanity and publicatements and things
like that. J Clara Chan, media and politics reporter for
The RAP, Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you.
What the CIA documents show is how meticulous they were
(13:21):
in planning and thinking out all the kinds of problems
they had, but you still couldn't solve everything, like what
happens if the animals just went away and the pigeons
sometimes would fly off in tests and never come back
with the extensive camera. Joining us now is Paul Handley,
national security correspondent at a FP News Agency. Thanks for
joining us, Paul, Hi, how are you doing doing well?
(13:43):
Thank you. We're gonna be talking about some fun stuff.
The CIA has declassified details of its secret Cold War
spy pigeon missions and declassified other documents dealing with how
they were using animals, potentially training them to conduct other
kland Stein missions for the government. Think there was things
that involved dolphins and dogs, ravens, all sorts of stuff.
(14:07):
Paul start us Off tell us a little bit about
what the CIA d classified. Well, it's been known for
a long time that they experimented on animals in the
nineteen sixties. In nineteent but they let out some details
of the kinds of animals they were using, what they
were using them for, some of the targets, and it
was really interesting. We've known that pigeons have been used
in war and in spying and messaging for a couple
(14:29):
of thousand years. Even the Germans started to try to
use them for taking pictures in World War One. But
the CIA wanted to take that a lot farther, and
they wanted to mess around with a lot of other
animals and see what they could do. A lot of
these programs weren't necessarily the most successful. I know some
they tried right away, like they tried to do mind
control with dogs. That one didn't really go anywhere. Well,
(14:52):
what do we know about some of those The mind
control thing, I guess it was a little controversial. The
CIA didn't let out all the documents from the program,
but it was clear there were some dog lovers who
raised questions about animal rights during it. But then they
wanted to see if they could plant some kind of
electronics in their brains and then control them to go
on missions, and they tested them to go along a path.
(15:13):
But it really didn't tell you what happened with that.
I think maybe it was sensitive and maybe it really
didn't work. Another thing they tried to do those with cats.
It appears they wanted to see if they could put
some listening devices on cats or even the mind control things,
and see if they could just let them loose, wander
through maybe an office or someone's home, and transmit signals
(15:33):
about the discussion. They also didn't describe what happened was that,
but I imagine they found out what a lot of
people knows, you really can't train cats. A lot of
this does center on the birds. Obviously, the pigeons was
one of their main focuses. I guess they had a
lot of success with that, but even still some of
those programs died off after a bit. With the pigeons, specifically,
(15:54):
they would outfit them with little cameras and a lot
of times maybe half of the pictures that they were
set up to take, you know, surveillance type pictures. About
half of those came out okay and the other half
did not. The ce I was investing a lot of
money in small cameras and high speed film, the best
stuff you could get, and outfit them on pigeons and
of courses, the cameras got better, you could get better pictures,
(16:16):
and that was ideal and they had a whole range
of possibilities for that. But what they shifted up and
tried other birds. They spent a lot of time collecting
some birds of prey and ravens and crows. They wanted
to see how they could train them to carry cameras,
also to drop off things, or to do simple missions.
(16:37):
With the ravens, they wanted to see if they could
have one deposits a listening device on a window sill
outside of room where presumably there were Russians or someone talking,
they could get some information, and they experimented on that.
In one case, they sent the raven off and he
dropped the listening device where it was the wrong window sill,
even though they were using lasers to point off. In
(16:58):
another one they said that in Germany, they send it
off and the raven did the mission, and then the
listening device didn't work. What the c i A documents
show is how meticulous they were in planning and thinking
out all the kinds of problems they had, but you
still couldn't solve everything, like what happens if the animals
just went away. And the pigeons sometimes would fly off
(17:19):
in tests and never come back. With the expensive cameras,
they even named the most promising raven that they were
working with, Dooda, but that one unfortunately fell to the
attack of other ravens. So they had this camp on
an island offshore California, and they had a whole slew
of birds. They had some hawks, some falcons, and they
(17:41):
had this raven they named Duda, and they were seeing
how far they could go and perform a mission. So
they take them out on a boat and see if
it would fly back to the island. And they go
out on the boat and see if the bird would
fly to the boat. And increasingly they were expanding the
distances from a quarter mile to a half mile, to
beyond a few miles to where the boat couldn't be seen,
(18:02):
and they were getting pretty good results. They had problems.
A couple of falcons just often up and died on them.
One hawk got something on his feet to some kind
of infections, and he was out, and then he molted
and they couldn't use him because his feathers weren't there.
All sorts of troubles that he might not think of,
but they ran into and then they had this raven
doda and they mapped out. You could see in these
(18:24):
documents they really liked it, and they would really right
the bird, and they were really making progress, and you
could see in the schedule how many more miles he
flew every week and the week, and they were really
confident that they could get him up to the thirteen
mile goal that was needed for some kind of Michigan
Eastern Europe or Russia. And he went off and they
were following, and he disappeared over the rise and they
(18:46):
weren't worried, and then he didn't come back, and it
turned out that he had been regularly attacked by oven
other ravens and seagulls, and he figured out how to
send them off. But this last time, apparently two wild
ravens attacked him and killed him when they were really sad.
In the c I c I released, there's a really
nice legy to it. You can see they're really attached
(19:06):
to it and kind of realized that that could be
the end of the program. Paul Handley, national security correspondent
at the AFP News Agency, Thank you very much for
joining us. Thanks that's it for today. Join us on
social media at Daily Dive Pod on Twitter and Daily
(19:29):
Dive Podcast on Facebook. Leave us a comment, give us
a rating, and tell us the stories that you're interested in.
Follow us on I Heart Radio, or subscribe wherever you
get your podcast. This episode of The Daily Dive was
produced by Victor Wright and engineered by Tony Sorrentino. I'm
Oscar Ramirez, and this was your Daily Dive.
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