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I'm Danny Shapiro, host of family secrets. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. With over 25 million downloads, the importance of both telling and hearing secrets is apparent, and I am so excited to share 10 astonishing news stories with you. This is our best season yet. Listen and subscribe to family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So, four, oh, months the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar wide ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts hey, I'm dua lipa and I'm thrilled to be back for the second season of my podcast Dua Lipa at your service alongside me and my guests lists and recommendations. The show features conversations with some of my biggest inspirations working across entertainment, politics, activism and much, much more. So please tune in and join me on this very special adventure. Listen to Dua Lipa at your service starting Friday 23rd of September on the iHeartRadio. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello friends, I am Robert Evans and this is behind the ******** the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. And today is part two of our Epic 2 parter on Momar Kadafi, the Colonel, the dictator of Libya, and one of if not the craziest people to ever run a country. In part one we went through how Muammar conquered all of Libya, overthrew the existing. Government with the help of a bunch of friends he made in high school, we talked about his Amazonian bodyguards. We talked about his crazy theories on how the world ought to run and how the start of his brutal, repressive state kind of went against everything that he claimed in his rhetoric to want for the world. So now we are getting into more about Moammar Gadhafi. This episode is going to include how he spent his fabulous oil wealth, how he became maybe the richest man on Earth, and how he delivered probably the craziest speech. Ever delivered at the United Nations? And all of this is going to feature a little cameo from a guy you may have heard of Donald Trump. So let's get into it. Now, the entire oil and gas industry of Libya was under Colonel Gaddafi's personal control. He managed that part of the country's very hands on. By the time of his death in 2011, he was thought to have amassed a fortune squirreled around the world of over $200 billion, which put him way ahead of Jeff Bezos at the time. Yeah, he was probably the richest man in the world when he died. It's hard to say because he hit a bunch of money and all sorts of places. Libya was making something at its height like a billion dollars a day in oil revenue and a lot of that. Went to fund projects, but it seems like the he was treating his people a little better than than Jeff Bezos. And you could argue that. I mean, they all had healthcare. The Libyans did have a better health care plan than Amazon employees. Yeah, yeah. So Gaddafi spent a huge amount of Libya's wealth supporting terrorist and revolutionary groups around the world. There was no real through line between them other than that they were all rebelling. He supported the IRA, the Basque separatists in Spain, Iraqi Kurds. He was actually the only Arab leader to support the Iraqi Kurds. He backed the Sandinistas, the Red Brigades in Italy and Japan. Carlos the Jackal, numerous groups across Africa, almost every bomb used by the IRA during the height of their terror in like the 80s and the 90s. Believed to have been made using Semtex explosives shipped out of Libyan ports. He was the man for international terrorists. So if terrorists were indie films, he's like Harvey Weinstein. He is. He is the Harvey Weinstein of terrorism, right? You nailed it. Yeah. Yeah. He's the Harvey Weinstein of terror. Yeah. And Weinstein is kind of the. The IRA is has been Affleck. Yeah. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. OK, there we go. I apologize, ira. You guys deserve better than the be compared to Ben Affleck. That's not fair. The IRA has better tattoos. Sure. And they're better at music. I don't know. Ben Affleck has a band, right? He has to. He has to have a terrible bet. He plays the guitar every now and then at a party. OK, so Gaddafi also supported a bunch of legitimate governments across Africa, sending the money and even troops to help them in their wars. In return, he convinced almost 30 African nations to cut off contact and diplomatic ties with Israel. Colonel Gaddafi's greatest African coup was convincing Jean Benell Bokassa, the Emperor of Central Africa, to convert to Islam. Gaddafi personally handled his conversion ceremony and gave him $1,000,000 as a gift. This money, and Gaddafi's money in general, was sorely needed by Bokassa because he had almost bankrupted the Central African Republic with an outrageously expensive $80 million coronation ceremony. We're gonna talk about the causes someday. There's like Roman Eagles made out of gold and just throw just that detail is just brilliant. Bakasa converted back to Christianity, the religion of 80% of his people, three months later. Wasn't a lasting victory. Wow. Yeah. Libya occupies an awkward geographical and cultural position. It's part of Africa, but its population is Arab. Gadhafi initially hoped he might be the leader of a vast Arab resurgence across the Middle East and North Africa, but he quickly alienated everyone else in the Arab world. So once that door was closed, he decided to try his hand at uniting Africa instead. So we had two options, he figured. Yeah. It was either gonna unite Africa or the Arab world, huh? Yeah, that was his goal. What? Why? Because he, he never, he never. Libya was too small for him. He didn't just want to be, he wanted to be, he wanted to expand leader. And he looked at the Middle East and you're like, he's like, no, they're not going to go for it. It was more like as a kid he was. He was really into Gamal Nasser, who was like the President of Egypt, who was like an Pan Arab nationalist. All right. Basically reuniting the Ottoman Empire kind of deal, right. And that was Gaddafi's dream for a while. But all of the other Arab leaders came to hate him. OK yeah. He was like, OK. Those guys hate me. Yeah, I mean, to go somewhere where I haven't burnt bridges. Yeah, as much so, like, his best buddy was Edie Amine, and he he was friends with, right? Yeah, exactly. You mean he must be a fun guy to hang out with? Yeah, he gave soldiers to Idi Amin, which didn't end well for him because his army was not good at being an army at any point in this, which is Gaddafi's. Yeah, they were terrible. Yeah. So it's like a ****** gift. It's a ****** gift. It was better than idiom means army. OK, yeah. Did he give armies often? And people would have to, like, pretend to like it and then, like, give the army to someone else? Like Regift the army. He kind of gave armies to a couple of people and then they got badly beaten, and then he didn't have much of an army left, and they were international sanctions against him, so he couldn't give away his army anymore because he was running low on tanks. Not great. So yeah, if you go searching through the wild woolies of the Internet for documentaries about Moammar Gadhafi, you will find a number of very positive. Takes many of which are homemade by guys in their rooms. Ohh no. There is a reason behind this, though, because a lot of his legacy in Africa was positive. He established a $5 billion fund that invested in legitimate businesses across the continent. The Guardian claims he did more than any other leader to establish the African Union. So it it's not all negative. Again, with Gaddafi it's always a mix of right. Again, it's him. He's the problem. He is the problem. Like if he like, wrote everything, he wanted to have Dan down and then they just, like put him somewhere where he couldn't hurt anybody. Yeah, in the desert, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's why he went to the desert that one time. There was a lot of times he just never stayed there, which is the problem, right? He should have stayed there. If he just said, hey, there should be an African Union. And then once everyone was like, yeah, that is a good idea. He ****** off to the desert. He never would have been murdered in the street. And I'm out like George Costanza. And in the Seinfeld episode where he tells the one joke, yeah, yeah, that would have been a better way to Gaddafi. But instead, he didn't all of this ****. So he was. He was popular though, in a lot of parts of Africa outside of Libya, even when he wasn't popular inside of his own country. But to the West in the 1980s, Muammar Gaddafi was the *** **** boogeyman. In 1986, a bomb went off in a Berlin discotheque. Several people died. Ronald Reagan called Gaddafi a Mad Dog and he was portrayed. A sinister and a deadly figure pulling strings around the world, which is like half true. He may have been involved in the discotheque bombing. Probably was to some extent. You know, he maybe he didn't know about it. And again, the way Harvey Weinstein sort of has his hand in every indie film or production. Yeah. Did like, yeah, Gaddafi probably somewhere there's some money in there. He probably Weinstein. A bunch of different reactions. Yeah. Sanctions were in place on Libya during the Reagan administration, which cut the nation's revenue by 1/3 overnight. This was the start of the dark times for Moammar Gadhafi. On April 15th, 1986, eighteen US bombers took off from the UK and dropped 60 tons of bombs on a Libyan airfield, a Naval Academy and Muammar Gaddafi's Bab al Aziziya compound. Several civilians were killed in the bombing. Gaddafi claimed his four year old daughter Hannah was also killed. This is the first time the world heard about his daughter and it's hard to say what's true. Reporters from multiple major outlets have attempted to track down the truth of Hana. We don't know. Basically, the possibilities are she's either dead, a practicing Dr, not real, or two different people. That's a hell of a thing to be of one of those things. Yeah, like after his regime fell, they found her room and her passport, but never her. And there was like some evidence in the room that she may have been working as a doctor in Libya, but nobody knows what happened. Wait. So they found her passport that must be in the bedroom listed. Well, but he gets to issue passports. OK, so is this again going back to like Seinfeld? Is this like a Seinfeld esque thing where he does a lie and then has to, like continually back it up? Make the point that he's making passports for this fake dead person? It is obviously totally possible that when NATO bombed his home, his daughter died in the bombing because they bombed US home. It's also totally possible. That the guy in charge of the government faked having a daughter, or faked his daughter dying and then hit her from the world under a different name. Was she in the passport? She was like 2 years older than he claimed she was. OK, So what other he's like, yeah, it's very hard to tell what happened with Hanna. Whatever happened to her? The bombings actually were kind of a PR coup for Gaddafi. He built a massive statue at the bomb site to commemorate the attack, and he would for years afterwards hold press conferences and meet with dignitaries in front of it. The statue is called Golden Fist clinching an American airplane, and this is a statue of a golden fist crushing an American airplane. God, I want this statue. It's an amazing statue. Oh my God. It could also be like a tribute to King Kong. It could be. Yeah. There's a lot of things that statue could stand in for. Oh, it's so good. It's amazing. Now, Gaddafi's actual military response to the US bombing was to fire 2 missiles at an American Coast Guard base on an Italian island. And miss. Both missiles landed in the ocean. Yeah, which maybe he just wanted to **** with the ocean. Oh yeah, because he hates the ocean. If you remember from Part 1, Moammar Gadhafi is terrified of the ocean. Rightfully so. Rightfully so. So the wonderful book Libya, the rise and fall of Gaddafi, argues that Reagan's obsession with Gaddafi actually helped the Colonel. He'd been widely unliked before this point. After the bombing, he could credibly claim to be a leader of Arab and African resistance to the western imperialist powers. That said, the sanctions increasingly ****** ** life for Moammar Gadhafi and mainly for the people of Libya. Their anger made Gaddafi worry that at some point they may take their rage out on him. So he announced a bold reform package. First off, he abolished the People's Councils and the revolutionary committees, and he claimed that all of Libya's problems had been the fault of those ********. Because, you know, he's not in charge. All right? So he threw them all under the bus. Under the bus. Good. Step one. To drive this point home. On March 3rd, 1988, nineteen days before I was born, Moammar Gaddafi gathered a bunch of supporters and foreign diplomats at the Farnoosh prison in Tripoli. He got into an enormous bulldozer and then drove it into the jail's massive gate to break it down. Unfortunately, the bulldozer. Could not break the gate of the jail, so Gadhafi backed up and rammed to the prison wall until it collapsed outwards onto the crowd of diplomats and supporters. Then a sewage pipe ruptured and **** spilled into the street. That's like something that would be on The Simpsons. That's like something Homer Simpson would do. It's amazing. Oh my God, that's great. Eventually. So yakety Sax has still been playing. It never stopped. It never was the Libyan national anthem for 40 years. 100 prisoners eventually rushed out through the hole in the wall, Moammar Gadhafi announced. Peoples don't triumph through building prisons and raising their walls even higher. Done the silence of this country, half of whom were buried in rubble. Ohh no. Kadhafi opened up his country to a small amount of privatization. People were allowed to run personal businesses. Hotels started to open up in Tripoli. Things actually seemed like they were moving forward in a positive direction. But then on December 21st, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 went down over Lockerbie, Scotland. After a terrorist bomb detonated on board, 270 people died, including eleven on the ground. In 1990, the Lockerbie bombing was credibly linked to Moammar Gadhafi's Libya. A computer chip in the bomb detonator matched detonators found previously on Libyans who'd been arrested in Senegal. Kadafi denied any wrongdoing and anything to do with the bombing. He refused to hand over the accused bombers. He said the evidence against Libya is less than a laughable piece of a fingernail, which is weird. To compare that to a fingernail, I mean, it's like the same size the the chip. The chip. Yeah. I guess, yeah. Yeah. Maybe that's what he was going after. I don't know. Yeah, it's a yeah, it's a weird. It's a weird thing to say. It's one of those things I have to assume. It's like something you say when you're guilty, like when you you don't know how to defend yourself. Yeah. So the 1990s were a bad decade for Moammar Gadhafi's regime. Libya spent most of that time under a strangling set of international sanctions. Qadhafi also had to fight off an Islamist. Uprising that threatened to topple his regime. He spent years doing that. There was like a brutal little, almost civil war between the Islamists and the Gaddafi regime. The economy collapsed due in part to sanctions and in part to the war and also in part to expensive projects like the great Man made River scheme. So Gaddafi believed that all great peoples need a great river. Livia does not have many great rivers or any great rivers, naturally, but it does have the largest underground reserves of fossil freshwater. So Kadhafi's plan was to pipe water from underneath the deserts to the coastal cities. This was an enormous engineering task. The largest irrigation plan ever carried out 1600 miles of pipe. It's an enormous ******* thing. It took up 15% of the government's budget during the years that it was under construction, and it was under construction for a very long time. This is again something that actually turned out to be a good idea, because now that it is complete, it currently provides something like 70% of Libya's freshwater and supports a huge amount of their agriculture. Water that hasn't been corrupted by the ocean. Yeah, becoming the ocean. He just keeps trying to get his people away from that ******* ocean. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But it took a long time to finish this man right river. And during the 90s it was just incredibly expensive when they didn't have a lot of money to spare his big dig. They had the Big dig in Boston where they had construction for like a decade and it was awful and everybody hated it. It sounds like Gaddafi's big dig. Oh, I was going to say it sounds like Gaddafi's Boston. Yeah. I'm not an East Coast guy. Have you been to the East Coast? Yeah, yeah, I've been to the East Coast. Terrible. Where? Like the east parts. I feel like you need to give me another. No, I actually I liked Boston the one time I was there. Looks like a lovely city. It's alright. I wasn't there during the Big dig unless I was, but I wasn't driving. So yeah, no, I I I enjoy the East Coast. Unless it's the summer, in which case I don't. The all summers are the worst. Yeah. The winters are also kind of the worst. I'm fine with winter, but I I come from Texas, so if it's hot outside, I expect there to be air conditioning. And no one on that coast has figured out AC. At least that's the way it seems when you travel, right? There's also mosquitoes, and that's kind of a deal breaker. Yeah, you got to deal with those in the South, too. So I guess I don't notice that so much. But I'm not a summer guy. Anyway, let's talk about Omar Gaddafi some more. So, yeah, Libya's government during this sort of giant slump in the 1990s. Tried a number of different tactics to fix the economy. In 1994, he established a tourism secretariat and dedicated the nation's gorgeous coastline to tourism. This, again, is not a crazy idea. Libya is a beautiful country, especially around the coast. The problem is that of course, Libya was still subject to massive international sanctions and alcohol was illegal. Both of which kind of put a damper on a vacation destination. You need the booze. If you can't offer anything else, you need the booze there. Yeah, it's OK if there's not a lot of variety in the food, but I need to be able to drink on the beach. Yeah, like if I were going, if I went into the convenience store and it was just Italian suits and and milk powder, I'd be like, well, OK, there's vodka so I I can make this work. You know, I can have a good time, but if there's no alcohol, then it's like, what am I gonna do? Yeah, what are we even? Why am I even here? Yeah. At one point, a journalist asked the head of Libya's National Tourism Agency. Who would want to go there for vacation? The head of the tourism agency answered. Perhaps reformed Alcoholics. Come dry out in Libya. Been drinking too often? Hit rock bottom come to Libya. He also said. And then there are those who like adventure so. Which I'm gonna guess 90% of people who like adventure also drink. Yeah. And I think people, when they say I like adventure, they mean like zip lining and then drinking margaritas afterwards. Yeah. So, like Saddam Hussein, by the mid 1990s Gadhafi seemed to have soured on being a dictator. He turned to the warm embrace of writing and in 1993 published a collection of short stories titled Escape to Hell. The eponymous story appears to be written from the perspective of a dictator fleeing his own unhappy people. It's like he knew. Like he knew. I'm going to start reading from Omar Kadafi Short stories, which I should have plugged at the end of the last episode, because this is really the best thing we got here. This sounds wonderful. So when we get back, we're going to just dig right into momar's ufra. But first buy things products. Yeah, everything. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey y'all, this is Caroline Hobby, the host of get real with Caroline Hobby, honest women, honest talk. I love podcasting. 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And we're back, and we're about to get into the part of the story I'm most excited about, where we talk about Moammar Gadhafi's career as a short story, right? Sounds delightful. So the collection was, of course, called Escape to Hell, which was the title of a story in it about a dictator fleeing his own people. I'm just going to read one selection from escape to hell. Sorry. I was about to say that sounds like a John Carpenter movie. It does, it does. And the hell in this is the desert. He's talking about how he hates being in charge. So much that he wants to escape to hell, the desert, because it's nicer than being around his people. He loves. He loves the desert. I mean, he's a better one like that's these people are desert people so that it makes sense. It's the ocean. Hates the ocean, loves the desert. Who can stand against the crushing current and the blind engulfing power? How I love the liberated masses on the March they are unfettered, with no master singing and Mary after their terrible ordeals. On the other hand, how I fear and apprehend them. I love the masses as much as I love my father. Similarly, I fear them no less than I fear him. In a Bedouin society where no government system exists, who can deter a father from persecuting any of his children? Yes, how much they love him and how much they fear. Them at the same time. That is how I love and fear the masses, exactly as I love and fear my father. He knew what was coming, and there's a great there's a line in there where he talks about, like, how all he knew how to do was tear down the old government. And he didn't know how to do stuff, like be a plumber. So, like, why should people expect things to work? But he's like, dude, you're the one who stayed in power. So yeah, at this point he's like Tony Soprano. Like, it's all he can do. And he sort of knows. Eventually it's, you know there's gonna come back to bite him on the end to this road. Yeah, exactly. And he forgot how to use the brakes. He calls these all short stories, but they are really just collections of rants with no cohesive plot structure or characters, save for almost one story suicide of the astronaut, which I am convinced might be the greatest thing ever written in a language that sounds like a great band. It is a great name for a band, and it's a great short story. And Dave and listeners, I don't have any option but to read the story in its entirety, every single word of it. I have no choice in the matter. I could no more cut out my own tongue than I could keep Colonel Gadhafi's brilliance hidden from the world. Are you ready, David Bell for suicide of the astronaut, if I'll ever be ready? Yeah, do it. Having travelled far and wide in giddy outer space, and since budgets can no more support the great expense of outer space programs. And now that man has landed on the moon, but found nothing much except that the two astronauts have exposed the wild guesses, in vain hypothesis of scientists that there were seas and oceans on the moon, which led to the competition to own them and designate names for them by the insolent great powers who nearly went to war on Earth for the sake of dividing the moon natural resources, especially the marine. Months and having roamed around the planetary system taking pictures of all the planets, and after giving up hope of finding intelligent life or any suitable place for living there, man returned to the earth frustrated and suffering from giddiness, vomiting and fear of perdition. That's the first sentence. Holy ****. OK, hold on. I need to unpack that. So this is this story takes place after that. This is a side note. This is like, so, you know how we went to the moon and we found all this ******* all the ocean? We almost went to war over the moon? Yeah, well, you could forget about all of that. We're done with space. We're done with that. OK, next sentence. He has now realized the fact that the Earth is unique and incomparable as a source of life, which in simple words means food and water, and that which is indispensable to life is secured by the atmosphere of the earth, etcetera. Thus man had to return to the earth from his outer space escapade. Right, all right, paragraph 2. Back on the Earth, the astronaut took off his space suit and put on his familiar one which is suitable for walking and living on the Earth. Now that his mission with the Space Corporation had come to an end, he began to look for an earthly job. He applied for one at a carpentry workshop, but he failed the test because he lacked the essential know how of what he thought was a simple trade. Also, he had a go at the lathe workshop, at a blacksmith's, forge building, and plumbing. He even tried painting and whitewashing he had not studied. Fine art or music or weaving, as they had nothing to do with his scientific specialization, the Space Corporation. This is a Neil Breen film. Some people, most people won't know what that means, but for the few people would do this is a, this is a bad B movie plot. Yeah, it is. It's amazing that he thinks an astronaut would have trouble getting a job anywhere because, like, I've had to hire people on a number of occasions in my life, and I know that if anyone had walked in and said I was an astronaut and wasn't space, that would be the end of the interview. If the word astronaut is on a resume, yeah, you've got it. You got it. Yeah. Even if they can't do anything, I just have them there all day to be like, so what's space like? Well, and I just, I assume anyone who can be an astronaut can pick up any other skill, right? Yeah. We decided when we were in elementary school collectively, that the best job as astronaut, which means any job less good than an astronaut, an astronaut can do. Like, Oh yeah, for sure. Yeah. Even if you're a surgeon, they'll pick it up. Being an astronaut is basically being really smart. But in space, yeah. So like, yeah, any anything they can do, like if they can do it in space, yeah, they can handle it here. Yeah, I assume an astronaut can do anything. Yeah, but momar Gaddafi assumes he can't get a job at a woodworking right? Well, this is the future where we were, like, all already on the moon and stuff. And this is like, this is like the Ridley Scott astronauts. These are like the space truckers. I'm pretty sure he's imagining. Did he just watch aliens? And then right there, it's extremely possible this might be in that cinematic universe. Is this. Are you saying that that that Moammar Gadhafi suicide of the astronaut is is in the aliens Canon? It might be. So far, I see no reason not to say that. All right, let's see where it goes. Let's start with paragraph three. OK, so he had to leave the city, a frustrated failure, and set off for the countryside, where he looked for work as a farmhand in order to support himself and his family. One of the farmers asked if he was attracted to the earth, by which he simply wanted to know if the astronaut liked farming. But the astronaut answered, the attraction of the earth decreases as we go up, and our weight also decreases gradually until we get to the point of weightlessness. Then in there we get free of the Earth's attraction, or gravity as we call it. But soon afterwards we get attracted by another planet and our weight begins to increase gradually and so on. I hope I have answered your question. Hold on. So the astronaut was asked. How, how how do you like the earth? How he he thought that he the guy was asking him how weighed down by gravity to the earth would you say you are right now? Which would be an insane interview question. That's amazing. That's that's yeah. The farmer showed signs of someone who did not comprehend and looked as if he wanted more explanation. And the astronaut, hoping to impress the simple farmer in order that he would take him on as a farmhand, went on parading his space knowledge. The volume of the Earth is about 1320 times less than that of Jupiters. And that 12 years on the earth equal to 1 year on Jupiter. And that Jupiter spot is big enough to hold the earth in its center. You may also be interested to know that. Saturn is 744 times bigger than the Earth. It is only about 95 times heavier than the Earth. So we know now why this astronaut can't get a job. We figured that, yeah, he's literally talking about the as far from farming as you can get, just keeps giving space facts. OK, so I think I understand the point of I don't know if we want to talk about this at the end. I think I understand what Mobar is trying to say. Well, let me continue with the astronauts rant. Sure, the diameter of the earth is about 50 times bigger. And that of the moons and it's volume is about 80 times bigger than that of the moons. The pull of the Earth's gravity is 6 times greater than that of the moons. The earth is about 150 million kilometers away from the sun, whose light takes 8 minutes to reach the Earth. At the speed of 300,000 kilometers per second. The volume of the Earth is about 1,300,800 times smaller than that of the Suns and the mass of the Earth is also. 332,958 times smaller than the mass of the Sun, whose density is 30 times bigger than that of the Earth. The Earth comes third in distance from the sun. Mercury is the nearest planet to the Sun, Venus comes next, and then the Earth, etcetera. Venus is about 42 million kilometers away from the Earth, which is about 400,000 kilometers away from the moon. Is space Rain Man? Yeah. If you had a car that ran, this is still the ******* astronaut. Explaining to the farmer if you had a car that ran at 100 kilometers per hour, it would take you 146 days to get to the moon. But if you had no car and decided to walk to the moon, it would take you eight years and 100 days to get there. I think I have answered the question fully now. As you see, I am well informed in matters concerning the Earth. As soon as he had heard this last repetition of the word earth, the farmer became aware of himself and closed his mouth. Which had been wide open during the whole story of the astronauts journey from one planet to another. From the time he left Earth until he returned home. The farmer did not comprehend much, but he too felt dizzy because he fell under the spell and felt that he was also coming home from a space journey with no tangible gains concerning his farm would matter. To him was the distance between one tree and the other and not the distance between the Earth and Jupiter. He was also interested in the volume of the yield of his farm and not in the volume of mercury. He felt very sorry for the begging, pathetic astronaut and had the desire to give him some. Holmes. But he was unable to take him on as a farmhand and so, having lost all hope of finding any breadwinning job on Earth, the astronaut decided to commit suicide. Wow. That's the story. That's the end. That's the end. No, you don't even learn, like, how he carried that out. So he's writing this like a fable, basically. Yeah. I think that was the goal. Yeah. God. He should have written movies. He should have written movies. He probably could have gotten something made. No, I would watch a 90 minute adaptation of suehs. Yeah. Astronaut. Yeah. If there are producers listening to this show, I will make sure that script gets written. Roland Emmerich, probably could we could we can do this. So he's trying to say, I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty clear what he's trying to say, right? I think so I I think the point this feels, it felt obvious, but maybe it's not. It's that he's basically like, I think about people like Elon Musk, who is like, we're going to space and we're sitting here like, hey, we need like clean water and affordable housing doesn't have water they can drink. Yeah, I think that's what he's saying is the idea, like we go to space. And we we want to acquire this sort of knowledge, but. It's useless to the practicalities of actually living in like farming and like the idea that an astronaut's job is essentially useless once we learn that there's nothing out there for us that the earth is. The thing is, is the thing we should be taking care of and working on, and and the most useful skills are it's down to just growing food. I think that's what he's trying to say. Really dumb story in a really dumb story. And, like, I'm not gonna get on a rant about space programs here. I'm one of those people who thinks that we're going to get killed by a rock if we don't get better at space. I think it's good to explore space. Absolutely. I just think that our expenditures on the space program are not why America does not have good social programs. Like, if someone with the charisma of Kennedy could start a program that's just like, everybody gets water. Yeah, like we want to be Star Trek. But like, Star Trek started with Earth. They were like. Let's figure this **** out. Let's make sure no one's starving. Yeah. And then maybe we can start going into space and figuring that out. Which, yeah, that's a reasonable message. Gaddafi is is insane. Yeah. I mean, sorry, technically Star Trek started because there was a third World War and then Cochrane invented the warp. Dr and Vulcan saw it. But we'll be doing a whole episode on OK for sure. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the suicide of the astronaut. Good God. Yeah. Life changing, right? Yes, that's wonderful. So by the late 1990s, it was clear to Moammar Gadhafi that Libya's only option was to make nice with the West and convince them to lift sanctions. This started in 1998 when Gadhafi finally handed the Lockerbie bombing. That was the the plane that got blown up and killed 270 people. He handed the suspects in that bombing over to be tried under Scottish law in a neutral international court. This was a start, but it took three years for things to really ramp up, and it wasn't until the 9/11 terror attacks that Colonel Gadhafi got his big break. So September 11th, 2001 was the best day ever for three groups. Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, all of the whales in the world, and Moammar Gadhafi. Despite being an observant Muslim himself, Gaddafi had been fighting Islamist terrorists and trying to warn the world about them for years. So when 911 happened, he publicly condemned it and he told the world, like, this is what I've been warning you about for a long time. I'm against those guys too. He arranged a blood drive to help the victims of 911. He declared the US invasion of Afghanistan. The act of self-defense. And at this point the Bush administration was eager for a foreign policy win. So, you know, they decided to start talking with Gaddafi about opening Libya back up to the world and dropping the sanctions. This wound up leading to in 2003, Libya are announcing its plans to build nuclear weapons. Western corporations, particularly oil and gas companies, were hugely excited for the possibilities that Libya represented because there's a **** load of oil inside Libya and in general it seemed to be a major coup. Of the Bush administration. It later came back to bite them in the ***. Seemed like it seemed like it vindicated their policy, like because we ****** with Saddam Hussein and, you know, murdered him, then that's why Gaddafi gave up his nukes. So clearly ******* with one dictator might make the others better. But of course then America and the other Western countries intervene to get Gaddafi killed in 2011, which provided a very good reason for North Korea and Iran to not give up their nuclear weapons programs. So that said, I'm not going to condemn anybody who tries to stop a country from getting nukes because we got enough of those. And that that did work in the short term. Did you say all the whales? Whales love 911? Yeah. It's a well documented fact. It's another ocean thing. This is another reason to stay away from the ocean. Well, the actual reason that you can read up on this. I'm not. I'm not just making a joke. Scientists who listen to whales, you can tell the stress levels and the whales based on the kind of songs that they sing. And they notice that in the weeks after 911, their stress levels plummeted to the fact where they weren't stressed at all, they were super happy. They're all like we did it. Up 911, yeah. No. And it turned out that what it is is that the the the like sonar and whatever equipment on planes that that that it uses to communicate with air traffic like that stuff. Whales can hear it. And it's like whales always have a headache because there's always planes everywhere. We are the noisy upstairs. And for like a week or so after 911, there was no more noise. So 911 was the best thing ever for whales, right? Yeah. And qadhafi. Yeah. This is really an anti ocean podcast, which I had not intended when I started writing it. Yeah. Well, I'm sure over time it'll gradually shift to being mostly that. Yeah. Yeah. The ocean as a *******. Yeah. Umm, so we're going to talk about the rest of Moammar Gadhafi's western rehabilitation, of his image tour and his trip to speak to the United Nations in New York City, Gaddafi in New York City. It's like a ******* crocodile Dundee, but with your market off straight to DVD sequel. So we're going to get to that, but first product. 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Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. Hey y'all, this is Caroline Hobby, the host of get real with Caroline Hobby, honest women, honest talk. I love podcasting. It is so much fun because I have the most in depth, spiritual, soulful, real, honest conversations with women who are mothers, who are entrepreneurs, who have started their own businesses, who are married to celebrities, who are celebrities themselves. These women are juggling motherhood, being a career woman, starting their own businesses. Taking leaps, knowing when to jump. These women are incredible and the conversations are so real it will hit every nerve in your body. As a woman, a little bit about myself, I was a country music artist and a trio. I traveled the country open for every celebrity you can imagine in country music. I also been on The Amazing Race twice and I'm married to Michael Hobby, who is the lead singer of 1000 horses. And we have our precious daughter Sonny, who's two listen to new episodes of get Real with Caroline Hobby every Monday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcast. And we're back from products. Let's continue talking about Moammar Gaddafi. So we left off. He just sort of agreed to give up his nuclear weapons. 911 had brought him closer to the United States and this whole Western rehab tour culminated in 2009 with a trip to New York City to speak in front of the United Nations. Now, this was not as simple as it might sound. True to his Bedouin roots, Kadhafi brought an enormous tent with him wherever he traveled. His initial plan was to erect it in New Jersey on a piece of land. Owned by the Libyan embassy. But the statement department said, no, you can't put up a giant tent. There's a ton of people with guns in America. They might just shoot you like it was one of those. Like, there's way too many. I can see that request coming and then being like, he wants to what, a tent? Oh, God, no. Does he not know everyone has a rifle and there's angry people about it? So he tried next to find a large enough plot of open land in New York City for the tent, but everyone he asked turned him down because he's a violent dictator. Finally, Moammar Gadhafi was able to find one friend. In America, who would rent him some land? Donald J Trump. ****. Mr Trump rented him a large plot of land in Westchester County. Here is how a 2009 Guardian article described the erection of the tent. Workers were seen yesterday erecting a tent and satellites in the glamorous neighborhood of Bedford on an estate owned by Trump. Local officials tried to stop them, saying it was illegal to build a temporary residence without a permit, and ABC News helicopter filmed a large tent on the 113 acre 7 springs estate with rugs and patterned wall hangings. Green and yellow fabric lined the walls in a pattern dotted with images of small, brown camels, according to a local newspaper website image. Last night, a State Department official told AFP the tent might be used for. Entertaining by Gaddafi, but he would not be sleeping there. And here is a picture of Moammar Gadhafi's tent. OK why? Oh my God, why didn't this come up during the election? Oh, it did. It did. Oh, it sure. Like, it seems like if someone's running for president and someone's running against him and that person running against him says he let Moammar Gadhafi camp in his backyard. I feel like that's enough, right? How did we get here? That that is too big a question for this. I know, it's just. Oh my God, yeah, what a tent, right? Yeah, it's a pretty good. It's a pretty good time. We'll have the picture BBQ website like. There's nothing in it, though. I I don't think they'd finish setting it up yet. OK. It looks like it would be a good place for like a wedding or something. Yeah, and I'm legitimately jealous of the tent. Nobody's going to claim that Muammar Gaddafi did not have good taste in tents. So the town was furious about this and banned Gaddafi from putting up his tent. The whole incident caused an outcry that forced the Trump Organization to respond. They said that the land was, quote, leased on a short term basis. The Middle Eastern partners who may or may not have a relationship to Mr Gaddafi. We are looking into the matter. Mr Gaddafi never got to stay in the tent. In 2016, then candidate Trump bragged about the whole affair. Don't forget, I'm the only one. I made a lot of money with Gaddafi, if you remember which a lot of people made money. How did how did he make that a break? I think he was a big fan of death of the astronaut. Yeah, he's probably just kind of psyched to have his favorite author in town. That's true. Yeah. But the Colonel did get to give his speech at the United Nations, and my God, what a speech it was. He was scheduled to speak for 15 minutes. He spoke for more than 90. Ohh, and now we're gonna hear the whole speech, right? But we're going to get into the cliffs notes he had himself announced as quote leader of the Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, president of the African Union and King of African Kings. Wow. Yeah, that's a hell of a title. Yeah, that's a bold title. It wasn't until 17 minutes into the 15 minute speech that he hit on his main point, urging that Africa be given a seat on the Security Council, which is not an unreasonable demand. He also complained that permanent seats on the Security Council were unfair and undemocratic, which is also reasonable. Then he demanded the UN be relocated to Libya, which is a little bit less reasonable. He's the problem. He's always the problem. After that, Gadhafi went sort of off the rails with a list of rapid fire demands that were half reasonable, half bug **** ****. He demanded thorough investigations into the deaths of Martin Luther King Junior and JFK. So that's just been bugging him for a while. It's been bugging him forever. He just wanted to know he proposed Israel and Palestine be merged into a single state called Israel Stein. OK, so what's happening here? What's happening? But you ever see the in the scene in the movie Armageddon when they have the demands? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that. It's the first time he's gotten like this much of an audience. So he's like 15 minutes now. I'm going to go for 90 and I'm going to say yeah. He's like it's like being yeah, it's like a film student in a like stuck in an elevator with Spielberg. Yeah, like he's just gonna throw every pitch he's got out, and I love it. It starts with like Yeah, Israel and Palestine should be one country, which a lot of people would be like Oh yeah wouldn't that be nice. If that were Ezra Stein. That's not what anyone would call it. My God, he supported the Taliban 's call to establish an Islamic state. He demanded war crimes trials for the invasion of Iraq. He demanded 7.7 trillion dollars in reparations for Africa, which honestly seems kind of lowball on it, yeah, and he insinuated that swine flu was a biological weapon. Insinuate just threw that in as a seasoning just dropped that in there. Yeah, it was a whirlwind and I'm going to say right now. Probably the greatest speech to the UN has ever seen the whole event earned Colonel Gaddafi, a spread in Vanity Fair titled Colonel Gaddafi, a life and fashion. I'm just going to read you their ******* introductory paragraph. Since completing his transition from international pariah to statesman, Colonel Moammar Gadhafi, the longest serving leader in both Africa and the Arab world, has brought color in his own eccentric panache to the drab circuit of international summits and conferences. Drawing upon the influences of Lacroix, Liberace, Phil Spector for hair, Snoopy and Idi Amin, Libya's leader, now in his 60s, is simply the most unabashed dresser on the world stage. We pay homage to a sartorial genius of our time. I'm going to show you a picture of him standing next to President Barack Obama, and Barack Obama is not ******* having it, and it's amazing this will be up on the website. Oh my God, you owe it to yourself to see it. How would you describe his outfit, David? It's like a Star Trek alien or something. He's like a TNG. Star Trek, yeah, TNG where they had 30 minutes to pick it out. Yeah, they're just like sequins and color. You never want your fashion to be described as Snoopy and idiom mean. And Barack Obama's body language in this is amazing. He's just like, I got to get away from this guy as soon as possible. Yeah, it's weird to see a picture of a president rethinking their career. Yeah, yeah, you don't find what that is. But this is the moment. Of course. Not long after Qadhafi's visit to New York City in 2011 came the Arab Spring. This brought about a revolt against Gaddafi. The revolt started in the eastern city of Benghazi because of the arrest of of an activist who was organizing a protest March. Basically, the revolt spread quickly throughout the country as Gaddafi's. Versus arrested and murdered dissidents. The whole time Kadhafi seemed baffled at what was happening. After all, Libya was quote the state of the masses. It was the people state and the people couldn't rise up against themselves. He wasn't in charge, of course. What were they doing? Unfortunately for Gaddafi, NATO sided with the rebels and created a no fly zone that grounded the Libyan Air Force. You know, Gaddafi was kind of winning up until that point. His hard courted Western friends abandoned him, so his Western Charm tour came to nothing. The African nations he'd supported. Also all abandoned him, as did his fellow Arab leaders. NATO moved on from a no fly zone to launching air attacks against the Libyan army and sending in advisers to train the rebels. After a very bloody year of fighting, the capital of Tripoli was taken. Colonel Gaddafi went on the run, but his convoy was blown apart by NATO jets on a highway outside of his old hometown. Gaddafi was found by the rebels, wounded and hiding in a sewage pipe. He was shot dead on October 20th, 2011. His corpse was displayed inside a freezer for several days. Ooh yeah, this is like Gaddafi style. Yeah, you you live by hiding your dead enemies in the fridge and you die by having your enemies put you in a fridge. Thing in particular sparked this. I know the Arab Spring originated in Tunisia with the overthrow of the guy who was in charge of Tunisia at the time, who I think was a friend of Gaddafi's. And that sort of started the domino effect that, you know, convinced people in Libya it was time to start agitating for change. And it was possible when it started he could have launched real reforms because there's a long history that we got into some of in this if Gaddafi saying there's going to be reforms and then nothing happened, right. It seemed like it was time though. Yeah. He's like a drunk guy at a party where it's like, at certain point everybody's like, OK, you got to go. Yeah. If he had said, like, hey, you know what? I built that giant underwater river and now I'm going to step down and try to forget all the people I had killed and just remember the river. That might have worked. Yeah. I mean, he did enough good. He could have hid behind it. Yeah. But he did so much bad stuff, too. Yeah. And that his repression of the rebellion was very brutal. A lot of people locked up, a lot of people executed. Huge numbers of people killed and bombed, right? And so, yeah, by the time the rebels got to his compound, there was no chance they weren't just going to shoot that guy straight off. This podcast is not the place to get into whether or not NATO intervention in Libya was a good idea. It hasn't been a clean thing, obviously, but I do want to point out some numbers, one of which is that the 2011 civil war against that dethroned Gaddafi, there was an estimated 20,000 people dead from that. There was another. Civil war that started in 2014, and the estimate for that is about 10,000 deaths. We're looking at 30, maybe 40,000 people dead as a result of the conflicts and those deaths probably. I mean it's it's one of those things. If NATO hadn't stepped in, it's possible Gaddafi would have just stopped the rebellion cold in its tracks and there wouldn't have been that many deaths. But it's also possible that it would have wound up like Syria where more than half of 1,000,000 people have died because there was no no fly zone established. So it's it's hard to say whether or not. Libya is better or worse off as a result of the intervention, but they do now have a sort of functioning democracy and Gaddafi is out of power. It has not been a smooth transition to democracy because again, when Gaddafi left power there were no political parties, there was no no one who knew how to run anything in the country. Because the people who were in charge when Gaddafi died were people who had been his friends when he was a teenager that had been running things the whole time. None of the younger people really knew how to do anything. So, like it has been a messy Rd. They're doing their best. Yeah, he didn't set them up for success, which is part of his point. Yeah, because it does seem like he had to go, but that's yeah, it's a tough thing to to to figure out then yeah. It's not as when people say it was a mistake to intervene. It's not. Something that you can say that easily. Yeah. I'm not going to say it was the right thing to do either, but it's a complicated morally. It's that. Yeah. Because, again, anybody has rape rooms. Yeah, exactly. It's like, should get involved. We should. Something should be done. Yeah. And he was, you know, a very repressive leader. He executed a lot of people, which we talked about in this sometimes, and made a lot of people watching televised, a lot of executions, and they were pretty brutal. He would have a lot of people hung on television. So he was, he was a bad dude. And probably would have killed a substantial number of people if he'd succeeded in stomping down the revolution, right? Because he did. When there was that Islamist rebellion against him, he killed like 1300 people in one massacre. So, like, you know, if he had had his way with the revolutionaries, there could have been more than 30,000 dead. It's hard to say. It's hard to weigh that, like, how many deaths versus how many in this alternate reality didn't get involved. Like it's a bleak. Question. And he's a hard guy away because presumably in 100 years we don't know what Libya is going to be like, but hopefully they'll still have that giant ******* underground river he built. So who knows? Maybe. Do they still have that? Yeah, the statue of the Fist, they do. It's in a War Museum in the city of, I think, Misrata. They took it as like a trophy for like, remember that time we overthrew the dictator? Here's a statue, right? I mean, the the river's cool, but that fist, that fist statue, it's like a like a Banksy sculpture. And that's wonderful. It is great. Well, that is all the time we have for Moammar Gadhafi today. Dave, thank you for joining me in this epic tale of whatever the hell we call Moammar Gadhafi. Thank you for having me. This was a blast. All right. Well, Colonel Bell, you want to plug the things that you have to plug? Yeah, I'll plug things. You can find me on the Twitter at movie hooligan. I tweet stuff. I'm also Co run a podcasting and a Twitch network called Game fully unemployed G AM EFULY. It's a I guess a pun. We have a patreonpatreon.com/gainfully unemployed. Check us out. Yeah, and you can find me on Twitter at I write OK, which is just two letters. You can find our podcasts, Twitter and other social media stuff at at ******** pod. You can find us on the Internet at behind the ********. Dot com, which is where the pictures and sources for this particular episode will be. You can also find my book on Amazon, A brief history of vice. David himself appears in it. True, I don't want to go into too much detail, but there's a hospital visit, so, and a milkshake. And a milkshake. So if you want to see how those things are connected by my book, a brief history of vice. Other than that, I got nothing. Next week we'll be back with another ******* or potentially several ******** to talk about, so please join us next Tuesday. And every Tuesday from now until the end of time, I love like 60% of you, statistically. I'm Danny Shapiro, host of family secrets. I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of family secrets. With over 25 million downloads, the importance of both telling and hearing secrets is apparent, and I am so excited to share 10 astonishing news stories with you. This is our best season yet. Listen and subscribe to family secrets on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. 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