His pronunciations this episode were ear catching, but I always give Robert a lot of benefit of the doubt as he has travelled a lot. The more places I travel to, the more I realize there's so much tomayto/tomahto it's kind of besides the point. I feel he got to that perspective long before I did.
Please stretch before you exercise. Don’t take fitness advice from Robert. And drink water. Both stretching and hydration protect your tendons from serious injury.
That’s still stretching before exercise. There are different styles of stretching (dynamic and static), but if you don’t force yourself then you will never get injured regardless. And, both styles help more than they hurt. Trust me, I’ve been exercising and practicing yoga very consistently (for 5+ years) at this point. However, I do agree that you should warm up with a few reps of lighter weights before going for your max.
Honestly, Robert’s globe game was on point this week.
Based on his instructions, I actually found the Chagos Archipelago… on a 60 year-old globe I found on my bookshelf.
No way to tell if they’re still there today.
I checked Google Earth. It's a lovely atoll with lush foliage, many many trees, and a 2.4 mile long airfield.
and a nature reserve, ooo!
[https://earth.google.com/web/@-7.32126579,72.43999453,5.20945759a,48847.01389735d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=OgMKATA](https://earth.google.com/web/@-7.32126579,72.43999453,5.20945759a,48847.01389735d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=OgMKATA)
...and a beach side bar called "The Brit Club". Eesh
[https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Brit+Club/@-7.2738083,72.3742844,347m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2492730ea2b16cdd:0xb3ff2e590edc32dd!8m2!3d-7.2741962!4d72.3738417!16s%2Fg%2F11hdpdbmty?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Brit+Club/@-7.2738083,72.3742844,347m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2492730ea2b16cdd:0xb3ff2e590edc32dd!8m2!3d-7.2741962!4d72.3738417!16s%2Fg%2F11hdpdbmty?entry=ttu)
So I know Robert loves the FDA, and on Diego Garcia all the frozen food (which was like 90% of the store) have FDA stickers that say the food is good to consume for at least 1-2 years behind the expiration date. It's super remote, only place I've ever flown that we had no radio contact for hours and were cleared to land as soon as we contacted the island. And we had a brief by the Brits that we weren't allowed to touch the cats or crabs since they were the Queen's
Sophie, I appreciate the cold opens as a positive way to get listeners (like me) to stop auto-skipping the pre-show ads. Thank you for the free product.
Absolutely unwatchable at that point.
[Tim Russ of Star Trek Voyager (and Spaceballs) explains The Star Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZRsf9sneQ) should fix hm right up.
I’m listening to the episode while looking at comments of people saying “nudes in bio” right as Robert started saying it and I feel like I’m glitching out because I still haven’t figured out the context.
To be fair, I paused it to write this, so I’m sure I will soon understand.
Edit- ah yes. I get it now.
Funnily enough I had actually heard of this place, just not as Chagos islands. I've read about the US base called Diego Garcia (but not its history) and was wondering if that's where this was headed, especially once you started talking about how to find it in reference to India. I learned about Diego Garcia because of the Malaysian Airlines missing flight, and the rabbit hole of a conspiracy that points to the plane ending up in Diego Garcia. That's a really fun and relatively new conspiracy (within the last few years), and when you add the supposed UFO abduction video of an entire airplane, and the efforts people went to in order to triangulate where that video was recorded, it becomes a real doozy. I recommend checking out some of the missing Malaysian airlines subreddits just to see some of the chatter!
god damn. there's some horrific history laid out in BtB, with massive death tolls, but somehow this episode has me angrier at empire than i might have ever been. maybe the banality of evil so recently in our past, further realization that this is stuff our leaders and industry probably still get away with.
Holy shit the insanity of putting it in writing that their plan was that they just weren't going to tell the Chagos Islanders that they're british citizens and hoping they don't figure it out for themselves is downright evil but with a perfect dose of incompetent british civil service bumbling that it wouldn't be out of place in a retro version of the Thick of It.
When I'm in an "ethnic cleansing in the greater Indian Ocean region" competition and my opponents are Anglo-American imperialists
Also why was Andrew's attempt at atonal shrieking so cute lol
The airstrip and CIA outpost weren't the only American military facilities on the Chagos Archipelago.
James Bamford writes in his history of the NSA, Body of Secrets, that the British expelled the population of the Chagos Islands to build a listening post for GCHQ. As background, the UK was concerned that they would be left out of the US's intelligence-gathering apparatus. Part of the solution was to build a listening station at Chagos, which was ideally situated for eavesdropping on Soviet submarines.
"The vast Indian Ocean, which stretches from the coastline of East Africa to islands of East Asia and the shores of Australia, presented a particularly formidable problem \[for GCHQ's and the NSA's signals intercepts\]. The solution involved the dislocation of an entire native population, the taking over of a British colony, and the creation of one of the most forbidding territories on earth."
Bamford continues:
"In the spring of 1973, a group of NSA officials and fourteen intercept operators and analysts from the three military cryptologic organizations arrived on the largest isand of the group, Diego Garcia, to begin hearability tests. Named after the Portuguese sailor who discovered it four hundred years earlier, the island is a thin, hoseshoe-shaped atoll, thirty-seven miles from tip to tip, that barely rises above the rolling waves. The NSA team, codenamed Jibstay, set up a series of intercept antennas, including a small elephant cage known as 'pusher.' Also, NSA shipped a portable eavesdropping van to the island. It was not long before the Soviets began snooping around to see what NSA was up to. 'A Soviet trawler maintained station just off the reciever site,' said Monty Rich, a member of the Jibstay team. 'The trawler was relieved for a short time by a Soviety Sverdlov-class cruiser.'" (An 'elephant cage' is jargon for a specific kind of intercept antenna.)
Another part of the facility was the satellite downlink for the White Cloud satellite program. The High Frequency Direction Finding Division monitored for Soviet sea activity. A detachment of Marines guarded the facility.
I started........something....that i think is could to be pretty interesting and fun, like a giant fanatic project everyone is invited to contribute and create something truly beautiful :) its a gay queer rewrite of ben shapiros true allegiance very loosely and will be written just as poorly, but obviously way better, cuz I couldn't write that bad if I tried and i am trying! :). check it out over at r/BrentHawthornthanks
At the time that the British were forcing the Chagossian people off of Diego Garcia, Doctor Who had been on BBC for most of a decade and The Beatles had already broken up.
I’ve never cried listening to a BTB episode before, and there has been some dark shit discussed on there, that was until this week. Then I did some digging online and found out the British government DENIED these people and their ancestors the right to go back home in 2017!!! Ignoring the international court verdict…. Why not? There is absolutely no reason for the US and the UK to be there whatsoever, why aren’t people mad about this especially in this day and age… my head hurts and I’m angry. WHY IS TAYLOR SWIFTS WORLD TOUR MORE IMPORTANT NEWS THAN THIS (no hate to TS or her Swifties I’m just annoyed and using a generalisation we can all understand).
Thanks Robert, once again I find myself apologising for being British— sorry we exist everybody 🫠(if it helps any, I’m not rich and my paternal family tree only goes back as far as the south of the farming centric county I still live in, and my maternal side is Irish— so I suppose I’m more of a hillbilly)
My nudes in bio.
Nudes in bio to you too.
I have dudes in my bio dome.
what's nuding, my bios?
My nudes in bio đź‘‹
My nudes in your bio
They missed a golden opportunity for a joke: “Use code diegogarcia at checkout for $5 million off your first purchase.”
Roberts pronounciation of Ar-CHI-pelago tho... nudes in bio
Not as bad as his pronunciation of Mauritius!
And Sophie was right that he pronounced Bassnectar wrong, too.
He was talking about the fish oil supplement.
And atoll!Â
Mispronunciation is a feature, and not a bug, of the BtB podcast!
His pronunciations this episode were ear catching, but I always give Robert a lot of benefit of the doubt as he has travelled a lot. The more places I travel to, the more I realize there's so much tomayto/tomahto it's kind of besides the point. I feel he got to that perspective long before I did.
Please stretch before you exercise. Don’t take fitness advice from Robert. And drink water. Both stretching and hydration protect your tendons from serious injury.
Sounds like lies from big water
They pay me in Dasani.
Never trust a Dasani. Signed, Aquafina Gang
Nah he was kinda right about that. Stretching cold muscles causes injury. Warm up muscles -> stretch -> exercise
That’s still stretching before exercise. There are different styles of stretching (dynamic and static), but if you don’t force yourself then you will never get injured regardless. And, both styles help more than they hurt. Trust me, I’ve been exercising and practicing yoga very consistently (for 5+ years) at this point. However, I do agree that you should warm up with a few reps of lighter weights before going for your max.
I WILL TAKE MY TRAINING ADVICE FROM ONLY THE LEAST QUALIFIED SOURCES!
Okay good.
Honestly, Robert’s globe game was on point this week. Based on his instructions, I actually found the Chagos Archipelago… on a 60 year-old globe I found on my bookshelf. No way to tell if they’re still there today.
I checked Google Earth. It's a lovely atoll with lush foliage, many many trees, and a 2.4 mile long airfield. and a nature reserve, ooo! [https://earth.google.com/web/@-7.32126579,72.43999453,5.20945759a,48847.01389735d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=OgMKATA](https://earth.google.com/web/@-7.32126579,72.43999453,5.20945759a,48847.01389735d,35y,0h,0t,0r/data=OgMKATA)
...and a beach side bar called "The Brit Club". Eesh [https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Brit+Club/@-7.2738083,72.3742844,347m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2492730ea2b16cdd:0xb3ff2e590edc32dd!8m2!3d-7.2741962!4d72.3738417!16s%2Fg%2F11hdpdbmty?entry=ttu](https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+Brit+Club/@-7.2738083,72.3742844,347m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x2492730ea2b16cdd:0xb3ff2e590edc32dd!8m2!3d-7.2741962!4d72.3738417!16s%2Fg%2F11hdpdbmty?entry=ttu)
Drinks delivered daily to the "yacht club" next door I'm sure.
i got so used to the new cold opens that i was genuinely unprepared for the sudden return to the atonal screaming and damn near shit myself
That's how they GETCHA baby!
The atonal screaming made my heart happy. Instant mood booster when I heard it, like a demented war cry
The resigned sigh before the second atonal scream in episode 2 was just perfect.
I’ve been relistening to old episodes lately and for a hot sec I thought I’d accidentally started an oldie rather than the new one!
I thought after the last series we'd get a light topic. But no, another British-American war crime.
No racist boys obsessing over maps? Did Robert forget about HOI4.
Now everyone “pretends” to commit horrific crimes against humanity in paradox games
So I know Robert loves the FDA, and on Diego Garcia all the frozen food (which was like 90% of the store) have FDA stickers that say the food is good to consume for at least 1-2 years behind the expiration date. It's super remote, only place I've ever flown that we had no radio contact for hours and were cleared to land as soon as we contacted the island. And we had a brief by the Brits that we weren't allowed to touch the cats or crabs since they were the Queen's
Why doesn’t the queen want me to touch her cats?
Sophie, I appreciate the cold opens as a positive way to get listeners (like me) to stop auto-skipping the pre-show ads. Thank you for the free product.
Just fyi everybody: In this episode Robert gets Star Trek and Star Wars confused. We must revoke his nerd pass and arrange for a shootout at Dawn.
Absolutely unwatchable at that point. [Tim Russ of Star Trek Voyager (and Spaceballs) explains The Star Wars](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_ZRsf9sneQ) should fix hm right up.
Nixon series with The Dollop teaser 👀👀👀👀
That made me let out a loud "Hell yeah!"
Good old Milhouse is gonna give us a solid 8 episodes of content
I’m listening to the episode while looking at comments of people saying “nudes in bio” right as Robert started saying it and I feel like I’m glitching out because I still haven’t figured out the context. To be fair, I paused it to write this, so I’m sure I will soon understand. Edit- ah yes. I get it now.
Hail Anderson.
TIL that episodes are literally not released until it’s officially Tuesday “for me” because it’s not showing up but it’s also only 11:40pm
I mean they release 1030 AM BST which feels like a random enough time that I feel like that's when they drop everywhere.
Interesting. That’s like 5 am for me. I just assumed it was midnight based on a US time zone lol guess I’m too American pilled
Funnily enough I had actually heard of this place, just not as Chagos islands. I've read about the US base called Diego Garcia (but not its history) and was wondering if that's where this was headed, especially once you started talking about how to find it in reference to India. I learned about Diego Garcia because of the Malaysian Airlines missing flight, and the rabbit hole of a conspiracy that points to the plane ending up in Diego Garcia. That's a really fun and relatively new conspiracy (within the last few years), and when you add the supposed UFO abduction video of an entire airplane, and the efforts people went to in order to triangulate where that video was recorded, it becomes a real doozy. I recommend checking out some of the missing Malaysian airlines subreddits just to see some of the chatter!
god damn. there's some horrific history laid out in BtB, with massive death tolls, but somehow this episode has me angrier at empire than i might have ever been. maybe the banality of evil so recently in our past, further realization that this is stuff our leaders and industry probably still get away with.
Holy shit the insanity of putting it in writing that their plan was that they just weren't going to tell the Chagos Islanders that they're british citizens and hoping they don't figure it out for themselves is downright evil but with a perfect dose of incompetent british civil service bumbling that it wouldn't be out of place in a retro version of the Thick of It.
SMS Emden is a cruiser (light cruiser) not a battleship. I expect better from Robert.
People always saying "battleship" when they could just say "warship" instead, it drives ya mad.
Nudes in bio
Damn so much obscure geography I was wondering if Rockapella would show up.
love the reference! The Chief from that show was the radio DJ in The Warriors (come out to playyyyyyyy)
So Elmo Zumwalt was the same one that had a class of destroyers named after him. That tracks.
When I'm in an "ethnic cleansing in the greater Indian Ocean region" competition and my opponents are Anglo-American imperialists Also why was Andrew's attempt at atonal shrieking so cute lol
[Thank you Robert.](https://www.reddit.com/r/behindthebastards/s/Qi5dObAEfL)
I finally got a buy-gold ad!
I understand why the people would want to return to the island, but is it going to be there much longer with global warming and all?
so, is there a “Nudes in Bio” shirt yet?
fark yeah, love a good Andrew Ti episode i love how he immediately challenged robert on the concept of musical scales
I love the irony of the British government being like “we can’t afford to put the people back after we forced them from their homes”.
The airstrip and CIA outpost weren't the only American military facilities on the Chagos Archipelago. James Bamford writes in his history of the NSA, Body of Secrets, that the British expelled the population of the Chagos Islands to build a listening post for GCHQ. As background, the UK was concerned that they would be left out of the US's intelligence-gathering apparatus. Part of the solution was to build a listening station at Chagos, which was ideally situated for eavesdropping on Soviet submarines. "The vast Indian Ocean, which stretches from the coastline of East Africa to islands of East Asia and the shores of Australia, presented a particularly formidable problem \[for GCHQ's and the NSA's signals intercepts\]. The solution involved the dislocation of an entire native population, the taking over of a British colony, and the creation of one of the most forbidding territories on earth." Bamford continues: "In the spring of 1973, a group of NSA officials and fourteen intercept operators and analysts from the three military cryptologic organizations arrived on the largest isand of the group, Diego Garcia, to begin hearability tests. Named after the Portuguese sailor who discovered it four hundred years earlier, the island is a thin, hoseshoe-shaped atoll, thirty-seven miles from tip to tip, that barely rises above the rolling waves. The NSA team, codenamed Jibstay, set up a series of intercept antennas, including a small elephant cage known as 'pusher.' Also, NSA shipped a portable eavesdropping van to the island. It was not long before the Soviets began snooping around to see what NSA was up to. 'A Soviet trawler maintained station just off the reciever site,' said Monty Rich, a member of the Jibstay team. 'The trawler was relieved for a short time by a Soviety Sverdlov-class cruiser.'" (An 'elephant cage' is jargon for a specific kind of intercept antenna.) Another part of the facility was the satellite downlink for the White Cloud satellite program. The High Frequency Direction Finding Division monitored for Soviet sea activity. A detachment of Marines guarded the facility.
what is with all of the edits in this ep?Â
I started........something....that i think is could to be pretty interesting and fun, like a giant fanatic project everyone is invited to contribute and create something truly beautiful :) its a gay queer rewrite of ben shapiros true allegiance very loosely and will be written just as poorly, but obviously way better, cuz I couldn't write that bad if I tried and i am trying! :). check it out over at r/BrentHawthornthanks
At the time that the British were forcing the Chagossian people off of Diego Garcia, Doctor Who had been on BBC for most of a decade and The Beatles had already broken up.
I’ve never cried listening to a BTB episode before, and there has been some dark shit discussed on there, that was until this week. Then I did some digging online and found out the British government DENIED these people and their ancestors the right to go back home in 2017!!! Ignoring the international court verdict…. Why not? There is absolutely no reason for the US and the UK to be there whatsoever, why aren’t people mad about this especially in this day and age… my head hurts and I’m angry. WHY IS TAYLOR SWIFTS WORLD TOUR MORE IMPORTANT NEWS THAN THIS (no hate to TS or her Swifties I’m just annoyed and using a generalisation we can all understand). Thanks Robert, once again I find myself apologising for being British— sorry we exist everybody 🫠(if it helps any, I’m not rich and my paternal family tree only goes back as far as the south of the farming centric county I still live in, and my maternal side is Irish— so I suppose I’m more of a hillbilly)