In the 1990s, Samuel T. Cohen, the father of the neutron bomb, became extremely vocal about the fact that the Soviets had discovered a new raw material that could potentially spell the end of organised society. Red mercury had hit the market.
Apparently, when detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, it could create city-flattening blasts like a nuclear bomb. And, it would help make nuclear fusion weapons more efficient and considerably smaller. It was an arms dealer’s dream!
In theory, red mercury could produce enormous pressures and temperatures, sufficient to initiate a mini pure fusion explosion. Traditionally, fusion weapons need a fission component to trigger the deuterium fusion. However, with red mercury, this fission step is supposedly unnecessary. Cohen described it as a remarkably non-exploding high explosive. Sounds like something from a Marvel movie right?
According to Cohen, when Boris Yeltsin took over the new Russia after the collapse of the soviet union, he issued secret directives to authorise the sale of red mercury on the international market. It was unimaginably dangerous. It was expensive. And it went rife on the black market, along with the plethora of fake versions available for gullible buyers.
Red mercury became known as the arms trafficker’s marvellous elixir. A substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need. It was offered for sale throughout Europe and the Middle East and Russian businessmen found many buyers who would pay almost anything for it, even though they didn't know what it was. For all they knew, it could have been mercury in a bottle painted with red nail polish. Not even joking.
According to an issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1997, the asking price for red mercury ranged from $100,000 to $300,000 per kilogram.
The BBC even made documentaries about it, revealing startling evidence that Russian scientists had designed a miniature neutron bomb using the mysterious compound called red mercury.
But many respected scientists and investigators have poured cold water on these claims. Peter Zimmerman, a nuclear physicist, expressed his doubts about red mercury’s existence. He pointed out Cohen’s approach to conspiracies, often mixing pseudoscience with whispers of governmental cover-ups. Other sceptics, like the International Atomic Energy Agency, have firmly stated that red mercury is no more than a clever scam.
As stated in the US Department of Energy newsletter, Critical Technologies, “Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue and voila!”
Some say that Washington and Moscow got together to circulate rumours about red mercury to flush out nuclear smugglers and waste terrorists' time.
Real or not, red mercury certainly spent some time in the spotlight. It was suggested that red mercury could avoid being detected by radar, guide missiles, and even operate as an aphrodisiac in its green form. Make love, not war right?
Then there’s the most expensive type, called the blood of the slaves which magicians use to summon genies. Not to be confused with spiritual mercury, found in Roman graveyards and used to keep away the devil's eye.
The crazy thing is that rumours of red mercury are still circulating. As recently as 2011, WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables with references to red mercury. In 2006, Sri Lanka notified the American embassy in Colombo of concerns that the Tamil Tigers had tried to procure some. And apparently, after the soviet union fell, Russians hid tiny bits of red mercury in sewing machines, radios, and televisions before exporting them. Your grandma could have some in her living room!
So whether you’re planning to flatten cities, get cosy with the ladies or cast away evil, if you’re going to buy some mercury, make sure you bring gold and garlic to test the product first. It's attracted to gold and repelled by garlic - duh. That's how you can be sure you're not getting ripped off.
But if you do get the red stuff, be careful how you open the box. If you do it wrong, a radius of eight kilometres around you will be destroyed.
SOURCES:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/sep/30/thisweekssciencequestions1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_T._Cohen#Red_Mercury_claims
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00963402.1997.11456737
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/magazine/the-doomsday-scam.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13418241-900-only-fools-still-hunt-for-elusive-red-mercury/
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[00:00:00] Rod: Samuel T. Cohen, and you'd know it was the father of the neutron bomb. He he died in 2010.
[00:00:07] Will: Okay.
[00:00:08] Rod: Short story. I thought you'd enjoy it anyway. Tune in next week where it's Will's turn. In the last sort of 15, 20 years of his life, he became extremely concerned and very vocal about a new raw material.
[00:00:19] This material would make nuclear fusion weapons far more efficient and very bloody small. So he was really, you know, Into this and worried about it. He wrote a piece, he wrote many things, but he wrote a piece, an opinion piece in financial sense. com.
[00:00:32] Will: They might just say we're financial sense. We just own the. com. Yeah. I think you're downgrading their credibility by adding. com. I'm sure it's like the financial times, which is a big newspaper. com.
[00:00:42] Rod: Look at me accidentally making them sound dodgy. It's what I do. I'm a cynical man. You know that.
[00:00:47] Will: Okay.
[00:00:47] Rod: No, this piece is great. That is a great great publication. The only way you could find it is on the internet archives. It wasn't easy to find normally. Anyway, so Sam was writing about this with a colleague and he said, look, in the early 1990s, there was information coming out of Russia. There were statements by high ranking military and civilian officials, including the chairman of the Russian atomic energy commission.
[00:01:07] Will: I like where this is going. I don't know where it's going, but I like Russian atomic stuff.
[00:01:11] Rod: Yeah. This one's for you, man. This one's for you. So yeah. Head of the Russian atomic Energy Commission, and they're suggesting that there's a pure fusion device as small as a baseball and weighing around 10 pounds could be developed.
[00:01:22] All it needed was about a gram of deuterium tritium fuel, a gram. The fuel itself, I mean, not easy to come by, but it exists. A gram is not huge. Previously, this sort of device was impossible, but now it's suggesting in the nineties, it could happen using, and I quote, an exotic new material capable of producing enormous pressures and temperatures, great enough to produce a mini pure fusion explosive. In other words, no longer was a fission component needed to trigger the deuterium fusion. And for, I'm sure you already know this, but other people may not.
[00:01:52] So fusion versus fission is when a neutron slams into a large atom. It excites it and splits it into two smaller ones. So that's fission. That's what we more commonly do. It's easy. It involves big booms. Fusion is when two atoms slam together and form a heavier one. So they actually fuse so that's like two hydrogen atoms turn into a helium atom. And this is the same process as the sun.
[00:02:12] So fusions, the, you know, the gold standard, it releases way more energy than fission does. So, this device they're talking about is being able to build a fusion bomb. The size of a baseball. The new material Sam was saying dramatically different in nature and concept of use from conventional high explosive fission weapons.
[00:02:28] Will: This does sound a little bit like a, the plot of mission impossible movie or something like that.
[00:02:32] Rod: Oh, no, it's not antimatter. It's not like a Dan Brown. No, this is a hundred percent fact. This is why we do it. We don't do, we don't do false on wholesome. When the material was ignited, it didn't actually explode but it stayed intact long enough to produce the enormous temperatures and pressures that allowed a deuterium tritium fusion.
[00:02:48] Will: Just a quibble. Just a quibble here. Enormous temperatures and pressures really, to me, sounds like explosions. I don't have other definitions of explosions except for
[00:02:55] Rod: but you need to contain the explosions so that there's fusion, you see? So you contain the outburst of energy to allow fusion where the atoms bang together and form a baby atom. Yeah, and so the new material was known as a bolo technique. It was developed in Russia and popularly known as red mercury. So poetically, the new scientists described it in the 90s.
[00:03:16] They said red mercury is precious and rare, exceptionally dangerous and exorbitantly expensive. Its properties are unmatched by any compound known to science. And it was a stuff of doomsday dreams. Apparently when it's detonated in combination with conventional high explosives, red mercury could create city flattening blasts like a nuclear bomb.
[00:03:36] In other applications, a famous nuclear scientist once suggested it could be used as a component in a neutron bomb, small enough to fit in a sandwich size paper bag. That scientist indeed, Sam Cohen. So according to Cohen, when Boris Yeltsin took over, you know, the new Russia, he issued secret directives to authorize the sale of red mercury on the international market. I think a post Soviet union needed a couple of bucks.
[00:03:59] Will: Look, I get, you might need the cash, but some stuff maybe should not be sold.
[00:04:05] Rod: Oh, look, I agree. This stuff sounds dangerous and the prices were very high, but also there were fake versions offered to gullible buyers.
[00:04:27] Will: Welcome to The Wholesome Show, for people who sit up the back of the classroom.
[00:04:32] Rod: In which we ask the ridiculous, pointless, and sometimes even intriguing, if not slightly risqué questions that you're afraid to ask.
[00:04:38] Will: The Wholesome Show is me, Will Grant.
[00:04:41] Rod: And me, Dr. Roderick Griffin Lamberts. I'm going to tell you the tale of red mercury. So rumors that Soviet nuclear experts had produced this material which had unimaginative destructive power, they were circulating in the seventies originally. And there are many official investigations and denials, but the story just wouldn't die. So yeah, it does.
[00:04:59] No, it doesn't. Yes, it is. And in the late cold war, these legends were circulating very strongly. So this is a good time for scary stories about terrible things. After the collapse of the Soviet union, the, there was declining security as we all know, and things started to appear on black markets.
[00:05:15] Will: There was all of the stuff about the suitcase nukes being for sale and just regular nukes possibly for sale. Tanks. You can buy anything you want from Boris Yeltsin.
[00:05:23] Rod: People were concerned that this crazy stuff would get out there and red mercury apparently was the sphere of that was aided by credulous news reports that, and that basically became an arm traffickers marvelous elixir, it was called a substance that could do almost anything a shady client might need. So it could, depending on who you listen to guide missiles, shield objects from radar.
[00:05:41] Will: Wait, guide missiles.
[00:05:42] Rod: Yep.
[00:05:42] Will: It's explosives. How is it going to guide a missile?
[00:05:45] Rod: I'm not a red Mercurist .
[00:05:47] Will: Guiding missiles is a little bit of computer and maybe some fins at the back and stuff like that. Not an explosive device.
[00:05:53] Rod: Maybe though the unique properties make it easy to focus on, you know, like you paint the target. I've seen movies, you know, paint the target for the boom booms. And they're worried of course, you know, you could equip a rogue state or terrorist group with weapons that would mean they could rival the superpower because they'd have this, you know, stick it under your armpit bomb that could nuke a city.
[00:06:12] Will: They could get a baseball to fly to New York rather than a missile.
[00:06:15] Rod: You want to play ball? Do I ever. 1980s, we move on. So references to red mercury appeared in major Soviet and Western media sources. Heading towards the late eighties, but they were never really specific about what it was. So that didn't stop people, however, claiming it was revolutionary, terrible, but horrifying.
[00:06:32] So in Pravda sneaking forward to 93, this was a supposedly based on elite top secret memos. They described a red mercury as a superconductive material used for producing high precision, conventional and nuclear bombs. Also stealth surfaces and self guided warheads.
[00:06:50] Will: Wow. Stealth services as well. So it can do everything. It is a little bit of a wonder material. It does sound a bit you know, unobtainiumy or something from a Marvel movie, but sure.
[00:06:59] Rod: You know, that, that word did come up in one of the sources I was browsing with the notion of it being the real world unobtainium. So there was concerns and there were nations as far afield United States, France, South Africa, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Libya. All very interested in it for different reasons.
[00:07:13] Will: Were we interested in it here in Australia?
[00:07:15] Rod: No, our hands are clean and we are beautiful.
[00:07:18] Will: Bob Hawke didn't have a quest for red mercury during his 1980s, Australia?
[00:07:22] Rod: Oh, look, he may have, but I couldn't find anything on Australia. We're not that important.
[00:07:26] Will: Look, I mean, the shady arms traffickers don't spend a lot of time here in Australia. And I'm glad for that.
[00:07:31] Rod: Or do they?
[00:07:32] Will: I'm glad for that. Well, maybe now with our government at the moment, but I'm glad for that, but I kind of feel left out occasionally in these cold war stories.
[00:07:41] Rod: Why are we always at the kids table? I want to smuggle explosives in my bung. There we go, we've got a date joke in. I mean, I think that'd be fun. I don't think it'd be fun. So in 95, it was described as a powerful chemical explosive, which has been dismissed by many experts as a myth, but it could be real and it could pose a serious threat to the world's attempts to control the spread of nuclear weapons. So this is one of the biggest concerns. If it's small light
[00:08:04] Will: I'm loving this. I'm loving this idea of whether it's a myth or not, because I see a lot of these people, these are serious people and if it is real, we've got to worry about it. And so let's start worrying about it anyway whether it's real or not.
[00:08:15] Rod: These are damn serious people. A lot of very serious people.
[00:08:17] Will: Of course they are. They button their pajamas in, you know, the middle of the night, they gotta be tucked in all the time because they're so serious.
[00:08:24] Rod: And you wear your flannel bed tie. I know I do for special occasions. So obviously people wanted to buy it. No surprises. So it was offered for sale throughout Europe, through the Middle East as well by Russian businessmen and they found many buyers who would pay almost anything for it, even though they didn't know what it was.
[00:08:41] Oh yeah. We want this. We totally want this. Oh, you want it? We got it.
[00:08:44] Will: I'm just loving these arms dealers as well. Like they must love this concept. People are that jazzed up about it and they've got to be secret about it. So they, you know, and also probably you don't actually want to use it. You just want to keep it in your safe and never use it. I got a little bit red mercury. Don't worry.
[00:08:59] Rod: So according to An issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 97, the asking price for red mercury ranged from 100, 000 to 300, 000 per kilogram.
[00:09:09] Will: Oh, okay. I thought it'd be more expensive. I don't know. I have no concept of the price of explosives. but I just guessed more.
[00:09:16] Rod: Look, it's, yeah, this is, well, this is only one. This is, you know, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. So, you know, they're very stiff. They wouldn't really have black market connections, would they?
[00:09:24] Will: I don't know, but it's like the, it's like the police estimates on the street value
[00:09:27] Rod: we found a gram of pot with street value of 4 million. You're like, oh, for fuck's sake.
[00:09:32] Will: It's worth all the golden Fort Knox.
[00:09:34] Rod: That's it. Did your Republican grandfather tell you this? You idiot. So they were saying it's 100 -300k per kilo. They said sometimes material would be irradiated or shipped in containers with radioactive symbols, perhaps to convince potential buyers of its strategic value.
[00:09:47] Will: Oh, of course. No, but you're not putting this in a little shoe box or just a little jar. You got to have a whole unboxing procedure here. This is like you get the new Apple product or something like this. It's got to be all glossy and stuff to make you slowly look and little throbbing lights.
[00:10:00] Rod: And pause at every moment and just wallow in the moment of deliciousness as you unpack your black market red mercury.
[00:10:06] Many of the samples at this time, anyway, according to the, this bulletin, the police would seize them and they'd find normal old mercury, mercury oxides, normal mercury mixed with red dye.
[00:10:16] Will: I do love the idea of these little backyard chemists that are told by their boss, make some red mercury. What do we do? What do we do? You just red dye.
[00:10:24] Rod: It's mercury with red. What can it do? Oh, anything. Anything.
[00:10:30] Will: Back in grade 10 or grade 11, when high school chemistry class they gave us a jar of mercury to play with. It's a little shoe box size thing full of mercury to play with. This is back in the nineties when occupational health and safety standards were not as high as they could have been. And so, so the teacher's like, okay, we want to find out how heavy this is, how dense it is.
[00:10:48] So have a little bit of play, put your hand in it and push your hand into it. And there's the kid that let's call him the back of the class. He puts his face into the mercury.
[00:10:59] Rod: Oh yes, he did. Did it all come straight off or does it dribble? I've never seen it on a human.
[00:11:05] Will: Yeah, there's sort of a little bit of drip, but not much, like it came off very quickly. So cool times in far north Queensland.
[00:11:14] Rod: Oh, we had dudes in, in fancy private schools in the eighties who would light up the Bunsen burner taps at the tap in a science class. They'd get a bit bored and just ignite that. And there'd be rockets of flame across the room. Like, what are you going to do? My parents can pay for it.
[00:11:25] Will: I'm a little bit cold right now. I need to be a bit warmer, aye sir.
[00:11:28] Rod: Yeah, so fucking bored. I'm just fucking bored. So Russian news organizations in the nineties, they would talk about the claims of the destructive properties of red mercury and they take them pretty much at face value, but it wasn't only the Russkies.
[00:11:40] So channel four in Britain did two documentaries back then one called the trail of red mercury and one called Pocket Neutron. And according to these docos, they revealed startling evidence that Russian scientists have designed a miniature neutron bomb using a mysterious compound called red mercury. That's the BBC.
[00:11:58] Will: Well, it's serious now. It exists.
[00:11:59] Rod: Gotta be true. Yeah. It's not just Russians. It's the mother country. In the 2000s, I love this one, News of the World claimed they'd foiled a terrorist plot to buy red mercury to use as material for a dirty bomb. 2004. And they used a journalist as a holster in this guy alone, but we won't get into it now.
[00:12:14] They used a journalist who was often referred to as the fake sheik, Mazar Mahmoud who would pose as a sheik to try and do undercover stings.
[00:12:21] Will: This is what he did, he would undercover sting as a fake sheik. Is that woke anymore? I don't know. Are you allowed to?
[00:12:27] Rod: News of the world. Never claimed anything like it. Definitely not then. A hundred million percent not now. In fact, quite the reverse.
[00:12:33] Will: I do like, you know, has he got this whole costume of disguises? He's got all of the cultural appropriation stuff. And he's got, and today I'm an Indian chief.
[00:12:41] Rod: Predominantly, this was his gig. The gig was to play a fake Sheikh. Cause his real name is Mazza Mahmood. So it's of the area. So he's just like, he was black facing it or anything.
[00:12:53] Will: So he's class appropriation, not which is fine. You can dress up
[00:12:56] Rod: class, not cultural. So he'd do this regularly apparently. And in one case in 204 his efforts led to the arrest of a bunch of guys who are trying to buy a kilo of red mercury for 900, 000 pounds.
[00:13:09] Now your price is getting better. I think it turned out when they arrested, they didn't actually have any in that made things complicated. The nature of the sting wasn't cool either. So those guys didn't get in trouble. As recently as 2010 and 2011 WikiLeaks published American diplomatic cables with references to red mercury. 2006 Sri Lanka notified the American embassy in Colombo of concerns the Tamil Tigers had tried to procure some.
[00:13:31] This is stuff going on into the 2000s. What the fuck's going on? Is it real? Is it not? I'm going to say we're definitely taking it seriously.
[00:13:37] Will: I'm going to say yes, it is real. I'm going to go out on a limb here. I'm going to join team potentially gullible, but team wants it to be real.
[00:13:45] Rod: You're joining team Cohen. Let's, you know, father the neutron bomb. That's a good team to be on. I'd rather be on the side of the neutron bomb than against it. Oh, you know, and I love the difference between a neutron bomb, you know, it only kills meat. It leaves everything standing.
[00:13:58] Will: Beautiful buildings. Like if you have a beautiful building, it doesn't destroy the building, just your meat is gone.
[00:14:03] Rod: The best architecture.
[00:14:05] Will: Yeah. It's so backwards, such a backwards concept. You know, when you think about war and you're like, okay, we destroyed the the enemy's ability to fight by destroying their tanks and their ports and stuff like that.
[00:14:14] No, we want to do the other thing. We kill all the sailors and then their boat is beautiful and preserved. And people think, Oh that's nice. No, it's not. It's really not.
[00:14:23] Rod: Oh, I'll get a story about that in a moment. Just an aside. Anyway. So back to Cohen. Cohen is definitely a believer. He said not only it's real, but he knew what its nature was. In an edition of his autobiography, he claimed it was manufactured by, this is the quote, Mixing special nuclear materials in very small amounts into the ordinary compound of mercury, inserting the mixture into a nuclear reactor or bombarding it with a particle accelerator beam.
[00:14:45] Will: But that's chemistry 101, isn't it? Sure. I mean, this is the, you're working with all that stuff already.
[00:14:50] Rod: We did that in year 10 of my high school, privileged school.
[00:14:53] Will: That's a great product. Like as a recipe, you know, and then insert into the nuclear reactor.
[00:14:59] Rod: Just bombarded with a particle accelerator beam. You know the drill. He said it's remarkably non exploding high explosive.
[00:15:06] Will: Well, no, that sounds good. That sounds good. You don't want it to explode in the wrong place.
[00:15:09] Rod: But he said when it's detonated, it becomes extremely hot, which allows pressures and temperatures to be built up that are capable of igniting the heavy hydrogen and producing a pure fusion mini neutron bomb.
[00:15:20] He goes on. I don't want to sound melodramatic, but red mercury is real and it's terrifying. I think it's part of a terrorist weapon that potentially spells the end of organized society.
[00:15:30] Will: I don't want to sound melodramatic. Twiddles moustache, but here's some melodrama for you like Once you say I don't want to sound melodramatic, it's saying I'm going to though
[00:15:41] Rod: It's just going to potentially spell the end of organized society. Not melodramatically though, just in a calm way. So as an aside, we're talking about neutron bombs. He claims in his biography that in 79, Pope John Paul II gave him a peace medal for his invention of the neutron bomb.
[00:15:55] I tried to verify that. I couldn't find out either way. So because it was such a peaceful way of eradicating humans or something.
[00:16:01] Will: But the Pope is not a super private figure. I know that there are hidden Vatican archives and stuff like that. But if you're giving an award from the Pope, typically you do it in front of people and it makes the news.
[00:16:12] Rod: I would have thought. Huh. Huh. I couldn't find anything that said it definitely didn't happen. It's like, you know, proving something doesn't exist, but it was definitely referred to in more than one source. Probably all originating from.
[00:16:22] Will: So much better. Peace. It means preserving the buildings, just destroying the meat inside them.
[00:16:26] Rod: Yeah. The beautiful architecture and delicious tanks. In this editorial that I referred to earlier in the piece, which was called the nuclear threat that doesn't exist or does it? Dramatic. He and a co author called Joe Douglas, they were saying as stories of black market red mercury trafficking began spreading, Western nations began a broad misinformation campaign to debunk the stories, ridiculing them and their authors.
[00:16:50] Will: So Western nations are actually getting in there and saying, no, it doesn't exist. Like, yeah. Like, you don't have evidence, like, to say that it doesn't.
[00:16:58] Rod: According to sam and Joe.
[00:17:00] Will: Oh, okay, so he's, they're claiming that this is disinformation, saying it's not.
[00:17:03] Rod: Yep. And he said the United States were leading this via the Los Alamos Nuclear Lab, and they put the word out that red mercury was, quote a half baked scam.
[00:17:12] Will: It could be both.
[00:17:13] Rod: It could be both. I know. I mean, you can call it whatever you want, it could be 20 million things, and some of them could be really bad. Or good, depending on what your motives are. He also, they also claimed that it wasn't a scam. So they went on to say, this is, you know, these people were claiming it's a scam, but it's not.
[00:17:28] They said it was confirmed by British investigators that it exists. And one guy they quote or refer to as a guy called Frank Barnaby, who apparently had secretly interviewed knowledgeable Russian scientists. And these scientists confirmed to him the existence of red mercury and its great significance.
[00:17:43] Will: Okay. All right. I mean, still, yeah.
[00:17:48] Rod: So Frank Barnaby going from him. So he was a respected nuclear weapons analyst. He used to direct the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and other such things. He investigated red mercury for at least six years. At least at the point of this source, he accepted there have been many cases where it was offered for sale at enormous prices, but turned out to be a hoax, but he believes, quote, on the balance of probabilities that a mercury based high explosive, which could revolutionize the design of nuclear weapons was developed within the former Soviet Union.
[00:18:16] Will: He sounds pretty credible. So, so basically that there could still be a whole bunch of hoaxes out there. You know, people, arms traffickers that are selling something red mercury on the black market. They've got ice cream, they got the pink ice cream and they're selling that as red mercury. But that there still may be something actually in these labs there's really something
[00:18:34] Rod: pivotedly he says, you know, mercury based, but not red mercury, not the thing they're claiming.
[00:18:39] Will: Don't want to use the brand name, but you know, competitors product made of mercury and maybe red hue.
[00:18:45] Rod: It's not a Hoover, but there could be other vacuum cleaners. But he said, look, there's evidence Soviets were churning out huge quantities of mercury antimony oxides. And apparently that's a, it's quite a difficult compound. And allegedly that's one of the things upon which red mercury is based. So he said he's pretty, he was convinced they made a large amount of that kind of stuff.
[00:19:04] And he talked to chemists who've analyzed it in East Germany, but what they did with it was a mystery. So he's basically saying, look, there were precursors to that, what could be it. And he's happy to say that, but not necessarily that red mercury exists. And he went on to say, look Nobody would dream of getting that stuff for a dirty bomb.
[00:19:21] Cause for a terrorist who would have no significant advantages over normal high explosives, or if they want a dirty bomb, just get standard, you know, depleted uranium and stuff to go to the trouble of spending vast amounts of money on it makes no sense. So, yeah, cause it'd be easy to get other stuff that could be equally horrible.
[00:19:36] Will: So, so in terms of, you know, destroying the enemy, it doesn't actually help. Causing damage, being terroristic, it doesn't actually help.
[00:19:44] Rod: There are other things you could do that would, you know, like a dirty bomb, you know, exploded in the middle of Manhattan. Doesn't need red mercury to freak the shit out of people and kill a lot of folk.
[00:19:53] So he's saying basically, why would they spend 80 bajillion dollars on something when they could spend half a bajillion and do equally effective stuff. So is it just not real? Is it not real at all? So as soon as this stories appeared and people started trying to buy it. It turns out it started to morph into basically whatever the buyer was looking for is what it looks like. You know, someone says you want that, ah, you want red mercury mate?
[00:20:16] This is the reds of red. It is like blood red mercury. It's delicious. It's delightful. It's heavy. Runs through the fingers. There was a new scientist report in 92 which was quoting some stuff that was done by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which we all know very well. So they were saying, look, when red mercury first appeared in the black markets back in the eighties, the supposedly top secret nuclear material was red just because it came from Russia.
[00:20:39] So they're claiming red was because, you know, it was dirty filthy stuff. I get it. Then it reappeared later in Eastern Europe and suddenly it had become literally red. It went from being, you know, communist.
[00:20:50] Will: If I'm buying some red mercury and I turn up with my special suitcase to put the red mercury in and they show it to me and it's looking blue or white, I'll be like, no, I want the red mercury. And they're like no. So red mercury is just a myth, mate. Like that's just the naming. It's actually looks white. Didn't, you know, mate
[00:21:06] Rod: I wasn't born yesterday. This shit is silver. I got some of that in a thermometer that I used to check my pet's health.
[00:21:12] Will: I'm going to need it to be red.
[00:21:13] Rod: Yep, I'm going to need to be read. So the report goes on and says that in the hands of hoaxes and con men, red mercury can do almost anything the aspiring third world demagogue wants it to. You want a shortcut to make an atomic bomb? No worries. You want the key to the Soviet Union's ballistic missile guidance system?
[00:21:29] Sweet, you can do that. Perhaps you want the Russian alternative to anti radar paint that goes on a stealth bomber? You need red mercury, buddy. This is the gist. So another guy, Peter Zimmerman, who's a nuclear physicist, he was a chief scientific advisor for the U. S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency at the time.
[00:21:45] Okay. He said, look, if Cohen did ever reveal evidence, I never saw it. By that time, I would have seen something. I have no idea. And he reckons that basically Cohen followed standard sort of whack job attitudes for conspiracy theories. So you mix Whole bunch of garbage, pseudoscience, governments withholding the truth.
[00:22:00] Will: And here's the thing, you know, he may be the inventor of the neutron bomb being a super smart person or even being a successful super smart person doesn't stop you at all from coming up to dumb ideas in other parts of your career, even in your own career. I mean, like, you know, Linus Pauling famed for having two Nobel prizes, yet then went on to a giant conspiracy theory about vitamin C. Conspiracy theory or a or a weird delusional health.
[00:22:25] Rod: That it cures death?
[00:22:26] Will: Oh, it wasn't quite that, but but it was definitely, you know, right down the end of shall we say it might share a little bit of the same sort of orientation to the world with your Pete Evans's and yeah those sorts of people. It doesn't stop you. You're not protected from having dumb ideas because you've had some smart ideas.
[00:22:44] Rod: And often, you know, the most crazy people in all them asylums, or is it asylar, all have professorships, everyone. Every single one. Zimmerman goes on, this is basically, I could never figure out where Sam Cohen, the physicist, ended and Sam Cohen, the polemicist, began.
[00:22:59] So. Polemicist is, I would have said, you know, nut job or crazy guy, but he's really got a political angle there, it seems, or a strong social angle to this, and many reports, they say things along the lines of the substance was everything except scientifically verifiable.
[00:23:13] Will: but of course it's not. I mean, you know, absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. But just because, you know, we haven't found, you know, we haven't found it doesn't mean it's not sitting there somewhere in a Russian lab. And that some of the stuff that might've been sold might've been real.
[00:23:26] Rod: Basically also whenever it was, as they put it, devilishly elusive. So you'd get people or mafias smuggling it and then law enforcement agency would bust them and then they go, we got it. And you've got like ordinary mercury mixed with dye or whatever else it might be. Or some very elaborate container with chlorine gas in it so it stinks and burns your eyes.
[00:23:43] Will: There were actually people doing the very elaborate container with chlorine gas? Oh, yes.
[00:23:49] Rod: Oh, hell yeah. Oh, hell yeah.
[00:23:50] Will: I do like that they're going the whole hog with the hoaxing there. That's great.
[00:23:54] Rod: There would have been, and maybe there still is, so much money to make in this if you didn't give a shit and you're in weird parts of the world.
[00:23:59] Will: Yeah, but you know the didn't give a shit. Okay. I think the risk of pissing off other armed traffickers and mafia gangs is a big one. You know, I don't want to be on the bad side of those guys. They're probably, I've heard of violence around them. But ethically, you know, selling fake goods to bad people, you know that I see no downside there.
[00:24:19] Rod: Just hide afterwards, take off the false mustache. I don't know what you're talking about. So, early 2000 international atomic energy agency, their statement was basically they had through a spokesman. This is my favorite, red mercury doesn't exist.
[00:24:31] The whole thing is a bunch of malarkey. I know he didn't need to swear. So maybe it's real, but maybe it's not what people say. So you got another guy who is a leading bomb designer at Los Alamos in the 50s. He said, look, I bet it doesn't exist. However, the implications are so significant that you kind of got to keep looking in case.
[00:24:51] Will: Yeah. Okay. Well, okay. Flip it back. The implications of something like this. Could you imagine the Soviet weapons program or any other big superpower weapons program, the Americans, Chinese, or something like that, working on things like this? Totally.
[00:25:04] Totally. You know, you know, the idea that you could have Super explosive that are very small and they're stable before they're triggered, of course, they're working on that. I mean, that stuff's important to them.
[00:25:14] Rod: The U S are probably snarky just cause they didn't have it. We couldn't do it. That's not fair.
[00:25:18] Will: Whether they're successful or not in developing, it doesn't mean that they didn't try.
[00:25:22] Rod: So the real fun comes in as you, you know, we basically hinting at is the scammers and the baiters and so forth, they're playing off this and these are my favorite stories.
[00:25:31] So, I mean, there are many, there, there are so many that obviously I couldn't cover them all because it'd be a nine part series, but so 92 new scientists report. They go on to say that there are reports of mercury stained red. There's a report of one lazy con artist trying to sell mercury in a bottle painted with red nail polish.
[00:25:47] Oh, big risk, especially if you're like a dilettante or a novice, rather you'd be like, yeah, no, it'd be fine. It'd be fine. Just take it. Are you sure? Yeah, it'd be fine, it'd be fine. Okay, but if not, we'll come back and kill you.
[00:25:58] Will: We don't like to be swindled. Really don't like it.
[00:26:01] Rod: Yeah. First time, shame on me. The second time, shame on you. So Czech officials arrested a dealer, but they had to return the reg mercury because the substance had just no, it was nothing. So they didn't have the powers to confiscate it.
[00:26:15] Will: You can keep the garbage. That's my nail polish.
[00:26:19] Rod: And they reckon after Iraq got taken out in the first Gulf war, they said the Iraqis had four filing cabinets of offers for red mercury. Wow.
[00:26:28] Will: Yeah. Yeah. But see, this is the thing, you know, poor Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong un, Kim Jong il, his father, you know, that they would be a lot of people trying to target them saying I got some Red Mercury here.
[00:26:40] And they're like, they know that Saddam's got some money is willing to spend money on dodgy weapons programs.
[00:26:45] Rod: I don't know if I'm going to go all the way with you on poor Saddam Hussein. I think maybe, you know, you're right. You're being too nice.
[00:26:51] Will: Look, maybe I'm being too nice there, but I just think, you know, being a terrible person might make you vulnerable to a certain bunch of scammers. And I'm just recognizing the difficulties of his situation here.
[00:27:01] Rod: Oh, you mean ignorant, dumb shit. I see what you're saying. Ignorant, greedy, dumb shit with megalomaniacal tendencies.
[00:27:06] Will: Yes. And whilst there are, you know, there are scammers that prey on the little old ladies, there are scammers that prey on the evil dictators. While I'm here I'll do your roof. I'll do your roof as well. Throw that in, red mercury and your roof. I'll put some solar panels on your roof.
[00:27:22] Rod: And we run a thin bit of red mercury through it. My God, it takes the sunlight and amplifies its signal by 900%. You can sell it to your whole city. The whole ploy thing I think is great. So you've got a lot of stories that talk about how it was probably the origin theory of it was an intelligence service disinformation campaign.
[00:27:38] So the Russians planted it, you know, the old KGB and its successors planted it to get people to, you know, just waste their time and stuff around.
[00:27:43] Will: And could that be? Could that well be the, just fake it and just say, Oh, this will throw the Americans off the scent.
[00:27:49] Rod: Seriously, if you worked in counterintelligence and black ops, wouldn't you be like, how can we fuck with them this time? Oh, I got a story for you. It'd be like working in a comedy writers room, you know, this crap and this,
[00:27:58] Will: but you know what? This is, it's still smacks to me of, it doesn't need to be made up. Like this seems to be the kind of thing that enough rumours would swirl around this, that something would coalesce in the middle of this.
[00:28:09] They go, you know, it's small, you can move it in a suitcase. It's got some little identifying characteristics, but other than that, it's all sciencey and weird. You don't need to make that shit up. That comes through.
[00:28:18] Rod: You sit in the Moroccan cafe with your disguise on, you know, you're a CIA agent and you've got your fez and your fake moustache and you're smoking hash, drinking coffee and you go, look, I'm not saying it's true, but I heard right. I'm not saying substance. Yeah. I can't say for sure, but this is what I've been hearing. And then you just walk away. So they're basically saying it may be even Washington and Moscow got together to circulate rumors about it, to flush out nuclear smugglers and to waste terrorist time.
[00:28:44] Will: Oh, that's great. Oh, that's great. I'm loving the idea of, I don't know, is it Gorbachev and Reagan getting together and like, let's go.
[00:28:52] Rod: Great idea. Great idea. Okay. You know how you beat terrorism? You waste their time. It's so simple. It must work. I don't know if I agree Michiel, but I'll give it a go.
[00:29:03] Will: That's not bad. That's a good Reagan.
[00:29:06] Rod: It's early in the morning. So special investigators from the US department of energy, basically they said quite unequivocally, red mercury is a lure. It's a central prop of a confidence game. It's designed to fleece ignorant buyers. And in their newsletter called critical technologies they say, Take a bogus material, give it an enigmatic name, exaggerate its physical properties and intended uses, mix in some human greed and intrigue and voila!
[00:29:31] Will: Also, it's still perfect for smuggling as well. Like you wouldn't invent a bogus material. That's like, okay, the problem with it is really big. Like, like you're going to need a few trucks to, to move this stuff around. You know, the idea of a plane, not easy. Yeah. You could theoretically shove this up your bung and still smuggle it. So I think that's perfect for the conspiracy theories.
[00:29:52] Rod: I have to agree. I mean, yeah, you've got to make it vaguely, not even plausible, just possible. Yeah. Even, you know, Jane's Intelligence Review, Jane's Military multiple publications of all sorts of things. 99, they said the scams victims may have included even people like Osama bin Laden, because Al Qaeda were basically nuclear novices. So there are agents to be running around going, yeah, that sounds great.
[00:30:15] Will: I was just loving this idea of Osama bin Laden reading some early blogs and you know, on the weird bits of the internet. So he's got his one bunch of tabs is for all of his intolerance and deep down stuff there.
[00:30:26] How do you keep a hundred wives happy? Yeah, indeed. But then another bunch of tabs is all about red mercury conspiracy theories. And he's like, Oh, this blog here,
[00:30:35] Rod: Basically sounded like horseshit, the DOE were very happy to say so. But, the thing that they really were interested in finding them intelligence agencies, etc. is, offers of red mercury often come with offers of things that are definitely real. So people would say, yeah, I'll take some plutonium, a conventional warhead missile, and a little red mercury.
[00:30:52] Will: And a fake DVD of the Black Widow
[00:30:54] Rod: exactly. This is a pre release of Avengers 17. It's not due out until 2029. But you can have it with the red mercury and a little bit of plutonium. So you can see why they would go, okay, well, anyone who's hunting that is also probably hunting other evil shit. And so they might at least catch them for other stuff.
[00:31:10] But my favorites are. The mystical magical and whatever the hell it is properties. And so there's a, I read a great story from New York times magazine, a guy who went hunting around Turkey and Syria and stuff and talking to people. So a lot of this stuff comes from that. He talks about an unaffiliated rebel at the Turkish Syrian border,
[00:31:28] Will: just general rebellion. I don't like stuff. I don't like anything and I don't like you and I don't like, you know, nothing.
[00:31:34] Rod: What do you think of blah? Bring it down. I don't join that trash. I'm not a joiner. I'm an unaffiliated. I'm definitely a rebel. I'm a unique individual. And so is my buddies over here. So according to this guy red mercury has a red color and there is mercury that has a color of dark blood. Then there is green mercury, which is used for sexual enhancement.
[00:31:55] Will: No, it's not. Like where do you put it to sexually enhance? I just want to say to those of you listening we recognize that many people do experience sexual dysfunction. It's not a crime.
[00:32:11] Rod: And Will is sympathetic.
[00:32:12] Will: It's not a moral failing. But go and consult your doctor before you get some green mercury and put it somewhere. Like, wow, just the idea of I'm having so much trouble with the sexy things.
[00:32:22] Rod: Yeah. They're going to put mercury in your pants, but that's green. So it's cool. Silver mercury apparently is used for medical purposes. Well, sure. But wait, the most expensive type is called the blood of the slaves. It's the darkest type. Magicians use it to summon genie. You can take that to the bank.
[00:32:45] Will: Blood of the slaves. If you're gonna, if you're gonna invent some sort of contraband sort of name.
[00:32:51] Rod: Perfect. Blood of the slaves, you summon the genie.
[00:32:55] Will: I do like the idea. Okay, here, and again, maybe this is overlapping in Saddam Hussein, looking for both weapons and vaguely credulous that this might actually summon the genie.
[00:33:06] Rod: Can you imagine that? I'm not worried about the explosives. I want my three wishes. God damn it. Bring me the blood of the slaves.
[00:33:11] Will: I want the golden Kalashnikov.
[00:33:13] Rod: So the dishonest, the fake people, this unaffiliated rebel goes on in my village, at least 15 people trade in it. 15 in a village.
[00:33:22] Will: It's a very special village. Built on top of red mercury lab.
[00:33:26] Rod: Mercury mines. They buy normal mercury and they color it. They use red lipstick and they put a little spoon on the heat till it turns to powder and then you mix it in. But! He goes on. Let's be clear. Identifying these cheats were easy because real red mercury is attracted to gold, but repelled by garlic.
[00:33:43] Will: We're blending out our mythologies here. Repelled by garlic.
[00:33:47] Rod: So if you're going to go and buy some, the smart person brings gold and garlic to test the product first, and here's how it runs. You'll love this. You put a drop on a plate and you approach it with garlic.
[00:33:56] The drop moves away, put red Mercury on a plate. The red Mercury will move with the gold. So it's attracted to gold and repelled by garlic. That's how you can be sure you're not getting ripped off. Cause you're not an idiot.
[00:34:05] Will: Crucifixes. Where does red Mercury stand on crucifixes? Silver bullets. What do we got?
[00:34:09] Rod: It's pretty much all that. Isn't it?
[00:34:10] Will: See it was also invented in a Russian lab, but it was also a vampire. They squished some vampires down into
[00:34:16] Rod: it's it's mercury that a vampire has drunk. And then you bleed it out of the vampire, taking on vampiric properties. Vampire urine, vampire mercury urine.
[00:34:24] Will: There is a group of people that are happy to believe this stuff. Oh, that's so good.
[00:34:29] Rod: I wish it was true. There's also cold and hot. So according to a different smuggler the cold form, which the smugglers sometimes call spiritual mercury, can be found in Roman graveyards.
[00:34:40] And it would get buried with kings and princes and sultans. When they died, not just generally buried, they'd die and they'd bury it with them.
[00:34:47] Will: Yeah, okay, that sounds fun. I mean, dig up dig up an emperor.
[00:34:49] Rod: A little bit of grave robbing, give it a crack.
[00:34:52] Will: Marcus Aurelius and his spiritual mercury.
[00:34:54] Rod: This type of mercury, they said, had been recovered by Middle Eastern grave robbers for several decades. And in previous generations, old women would wear it as a necklace to keep away the devil's eye.
[00:35:03] And more recently, rich men would look for cold red mercury, either as an aphrodisiac or to improve their sexual function. If the green doesn't work, get some cold red. That's pretty much how it works. And then they're getting these great stories of how if you've got the cold red mercury is no good for nuclear weapons
[00:35:18] Will: like what are you doing, what are you doing, mate?
[00:35:21] Rod: Mate, you need the hot stuff.
[00:35:22] Will: That's to keep the devil's eye away. So I'm now imagining this arms deal now is it the arms dealer that's opening his jacket and he's got, wanna bite? He's watches on one side and he's got a whole vials, he's got red, he's got spiritual, he's got green. He's got
[00:35:35] Rod: the small cooler behind him for the cold stuff 'cause he don't want it to warm up. loses Its potency. You only get half a genie. But I reckon the hot stuff only comes from sophisticated laboratories. And mostly comes from the Soviet Union. It's in, it has to be put in specially maintained boxes with particular equipment, a manual on how to handle it and special gloves. So, it's not just about getting the red mercury. You need the special.
[00:35:56] Will: No, I'm feeling I'm with there. You know, if you're taking this seriously, you need a manual, like you need a little pamphlet. You don't want to just be abandoned with your red mercury.
[00:36:04] Rod: But also if you get that wrong, apparently it's not just to say the very special box needs special equipment to open it and special reactors to work with it.
[00:36:11] Will: Mate, have you got your tongs mate? You need your tongs. What are you doing? Did you bring your tongs?
[00:36:15] Rod: If you open this box, a radius of eight kilometers around be destroyed.
[00:36:21] Will: way to not look in the box.
[00:36:23] Rod: It gets wacky. But so the, this is where it gets really kind of dangerous. So it got particularly weird because it was alleged that you could get it from junkyards and seamstress or tailoring shops.
[00:36:34] Will: Seamstress and tailoring shops?
[00:36:35] Rod: Yeah. Because.
[00:36:37] Will: Was hoping you were going to explain.
[00:36:39] Rod: Apparently to prevent this kind of stuff falling into the wrong hands after the Soviet union fell, Russians would hide it's tiny little caches of this stuff in sewing machines, radios, and or televisions, then they'd export it. So it could be scattered around the Arab world in particular.
[00:36:53] Okay. And so the rumors have been circulating for ages and that would drive the price of some old sewing machines up to 50 grand a pop
[00:36:59] Will: deep down. Okay. I'm thinking about my shelves behind me, but now I desperately want a Soviet union era sewing machine. I want that so much.
[00:37:09] Rod: One source was actually saying that the really coveted ones were Singer sewing machines, which had an image of like a butterfly on them. So American sewing machines as well, but apparently stealthed in there.
[00:37:18] Will: No, I want the Buff Knuckleclost.
[00:37:21] Rod: Yes, the one that's driven by coal and takes nine people, nine loyal citizens, comrades to make one sock. So look, basically there's a lot of folk legend around the substance, but there are ramifications that are going on still as a result of this.
[00:37:35] So in 2013, six people were killed in the Harare in Zimbabwe by a blast in the home of a faith healer. There was an explosion. One of the victims was a kid. And one of the folks spoke with the police and they said they were pretty convinced that there was that what they were doing was trying to get red mercury out of an old tank mine.
[00:37:52] So the belief that this stuff existed in mines and things made it worth their while to try and get it out and sell it. Or use its properties, in this case, the faith.
[00:38:00] Will: Can I just double check what is a tank mine?
[00:38:02] Rod: a mine for tanks, like buried in the ground and blow up tanks. Like tanks, like, you know, like a driving tank over a mine.
[00:38:09] Will: I was confused. It's weird when words have multiple meanings. I was trying to visualize it like either, either you're digging tanks out of the ground or
[00:38:16] Rod: so people were going and getting unexploded mines and trying to extract red mercury from them because the rumors were such that
[00:38:24] Will: they clearly do have explosives in them. So lesson one, be careful and don't do it. But lesson two, they're going to, they're going to have something explosive in it. So whether it's red mercury or silver mercury or the green mercury.
[00:38:35] Rod: Whether it will heal you, man, not so convinced. I mean, it got so bad in South Africa or sorry, in the, in, in Southern Africa that a guy who guy called Michael Moore, different Michael Moore managed the landmines Africa campaign and website.
[00:38:47] He started a second site called campaign against red mercury to try and urge people not to believe the hoaxes because it got to the point where people actually dying, trying to harvest it. That's 2013. So I thought, how do I end this story? Like, where do I go? And I thought, okay, I'm just going to Google red mercury news.
[00:39:05] And get the first hit. So you've got two days ago, two days ago. All right. Google news. The title is what is red mercury and why are people ready to pay Lux for it? Lux is means hundreds of thousands basically in India. This article is very short. It comes from Gizbot. A social media has become a hub for fake news these days.
[00:39:22] No kidding. speculations are transmitted via apps like WhatsApp. The latest rumor that's taking a tour on the internet is red mercury, which is mostly found on old electronics such as CRT TVs and FM radios.
[00:39:35] Will: So, which is mostly found. That's a nice confirmation straight away there.
[00:39:39] Rod: 2020 news article from Gizbot on the internet. As the name suggests, it's a red colored liquid and it's rumored to be an expensive compound. Though it has mercury in its name, there is no proper documentation to reaffirm the same. Is it worth it? They ask.
[00:39:54] Will: You could use your money in other sorts of exploits.
[00:39:55] Rod: You could. But they quote videos circulating on the internet. Most monochrome TVs will contain this liquid in a tiny glass bottle. A gram is allegedly worth more than 10, 000 rupees. And a lot of conversation is happening regarding the substance. According to some, the liquid is being used for making bombs. Remember, we're talking 2020 some online comments even suggest that red mercury can be used to cure COVID 19 and there is no absolute documentational proof to validate the statement.
[00:40:24] Will: You've finally done a COVID 19 episode.
[00:40:26] Rod: I know. I didn't want to, but this one now and then I like to be current. So should you sell your old TV or FM radio? As of now, there's no scientific study or backing that could actually speak about this red liquid that is being called red mercury.
[00:40:39] Will: Here comes, comes a giant, however,
[00:40:42] Rod: we do not advise you sell old television or FM radio as this could be used for illegal activity,
[00:40:48] Will: hoard them just in case.
[00:40:50] Rod: We are further investigating on this mystery liquid that is said to be more expensive than gold. Do note that mercury, which is a liquid metal, only costs a couple of thousand rupee per kilogram and is poisonous.
[00:41:02] So even if the red mercury is a compound with mercury in it, it should not cost this much. The logic there seems fairly creative. As of now, it seems like a scam, but stay tuned to GizBot to get more updates. Today. As I said, that was two days ago.
[00:41:16] Will: That's awesome.
[00:41:16] Rod: I think it's balls, obviously, because, but I think it's great fun. The problem is the real ramifications. When you read the historical stories, I'm like, this is hilarious. This is hilarious. 2013 people, you know, people are dying, fiddling with minds. And then the news, I thought news I'd hit nothing or I'd hit something, you know, the most recent would be 20 years old, but no
[00:41:34] Will: this is why would it go away? Why would it go away? This is perfect for this kind of rumor, something that could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, something that's tiny. It could be in all sorts of electronics, either, you know, actually smuggled in there, or maybe they were using it and
[00:41:49] Rod: old cheap electronics too. You can find any old crappy thing at a junk shop.
[00:41:52] Will: This is just perfect rumor fodder. Straight away, people will spread this kind of rumour just because people want to. What a beautiful scam, like the way that it must go through arms dealers. And there must be some arms dealers that just shut up about red mercury. It's a sign that you're an infant in the arms dealing world.
[00:42:08] Rod: It's a red flag for ripping someone off really, isn't it?
[00:42:11] Will: That's awesome. I love that. I mean, look, I'm not saying I'm going to go out there and and push red mercury to arms dealers, but arms dealers are bad people anyway. So if they fall victim to it, you know, make a hundred.
[00:42:23] Rod: Tell me you've got a supply. We could use it. It's better than getting a crowdfunded thing.
[00:42:26] Will: Make a couple of hundred grand easy. You know, there's no downsides to this except for obvious big downsides. The wholesome show. It's me, Will Grant, and him, Rod Lamberts, brought to you by the way that red mercury does not cure cOVID.
[00:42:43] Rod: Or anything, really. Or anything. It can cure you of life, I think.
[00:42:47] Will: See you next week, listener.
