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Greetings friends, it is Monday, August 28th and Felix and I are joined today by my favorite time of the year. It's Blowback Season 4. We are joined today by the co-hosts and creators of Blowback, Brendan James and Noble Colwyn.

Gentlemen, welcome back.

Hey homies.

Hey guys.

Brendan, Noah, Blowback Season 4 just came out. You know, when you got to get you on, this is probably...

Listen to the first three episodes. This is probably like your season that is most ambitious in scope.

And the story you have chosen to tell, the history that you're digging into this season is sort of like the genesis of the term Blowback, at least in its most popular conception of like 9-11.

So let me ask you like, why Afghanistan? What drew you to this topic this time and like what did you begin to discover as you started researching this season?

Yeah, it's definitely the most on the nose understanding of Blowback probably is at least for our generation.

The term itself was coined by a CIA guy, Chalmers Johnson years ago.

But as we've found every season, you know, sometimes it's a punchy title for the show.

Sometimes we're talking about Blowback, sometimes we're not. Sometimes we're talking about something that is said to be Blowback but is a little bit more complicated.

And then this is, yeah, I think that really kind of Uber example and we wanted to dive into it because really of the withdrawal in 2021.

And it wouldn't just be about Afghanistan, this endless war, but it would be about a somewhat sort of beginning middle of an end now, at least for the time being of American involvement.

And there's other reasons. I mean, we like to jump around. I like to jump around. We got to go to the 1980s.

We've never really gotten to cover that decade before in the show.

And we got to kind of follow all these colorful characters through a real 40 year saga, which as you say is like a longer period of time that we've ever tried to ever try to cover before.

I can share with our listeners that if you are fans of the works of Hideo Kojima, you will you will not be disappointed by this season.

And you know, little little audio samples and drops you guys are in there is incredible. But I guess like in the first episode, you sort of, you lay out some, some themes that are developed over the course of this season.

And I guess the first one I want to talk about is the connection between political Islam and like jihad and Western intelligence services.

Because like, I know this, we don't need to get into it. You know, it sounds conspiratorial to say, but like, would fundamentalist Islam as a political movement in Afghanistan or really anywhere else in the middle, in the Middle East, I know Afghanistan isn't the Middle East.

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