Short Stuff: Did a vampire legend help win the Cold War?

Stuff You Should Know

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.5 • 82.7K Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2026

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

During the Cold War, the CIA used the legend of a vampire named Aswang to scare locals into not helping the communists.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:02.6	Guaranteed Human.
0:08.3	Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff.
0:10.1	I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here for Dave.
0:12.6	So this is Short Stuff.
0:14.3	Gidia.
0:15.3	That's right.
0:16.0	And this week we are talking about more nefarious business by the American CIA.
0:21.7	Yeah.
0:22.8	During the Cold War in this case.
0:24.9	But first, we should probably tell you just a short bit about the Philippines, right?
0:28.7	Yeah.
0:29.3	There's 7,000 islands in the Philippines, more than.
0:32.4	I did not know that, but that's a lot of islands.
0:34.4	That's a lot.
0:35.2	Yeah.
0:36.5	There's 175 different languages.
0:39.3	Tagalog is one of the larger language families or groups or just languages.
0:46.5	And because there's 7,000 islands, there's a bunch of different languages.
0:49.7	There's a lot of different cultural beliefs.
0:53.3	But some of the ones are spread pretty far and
0:56.6	wide across the Philippines, which would suggest they're very, very old, like, folk beliefs.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from iHeartPodcasts, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of iHeartPodcasts and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.