Ep. 156: dooming ourselves with medicine

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Don't you fucking tell me that it was Flow Rider who did the one about the apple bottom jeans and the boots and the fur. That is bullshit. I'm sure it was Usher. [00:00:13] Speaker B: It was not Usher. Listen, I cannot for sure say it was Flow Rider. How does that even sound like Usher to you? [00:00:21] Speaker A: It's sure as shit doesn't sound like Mr. Worldwide. [00:00:24] Speaker B: That's not FlowRider. [00:00:29] Speaker C: Oh, fuck. [00:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Shit. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Well, I can confirm that it was. [00:00:39] Speaker A: In fact Flow Rider. All right, thank you. All right, let's move on. Look, I know I bang on about Mexico a lot, right? [00:00:49] Speaker B: For someone who hasn't been there. Yeah. [00:00:50] Speaker A: And let's face it, unlikely to ever be going there. I'm not going there anytime soon. And I also know, I'm also aware that last week I said that I was going to school you on some American fucking historical I'm surprised you remember that. I'm not going to do that. You see? [00:01:08] Speaker C: Okay, fair enough. [00:01:09] Speaker A: What I am going to do is talk a little bit more about Mexico. But I'm going to come at this from a different fucking angle, right? Because, holy shit, do I have a tail? I mean, yes, I've talked about the cartel situation a lot. It just mesmerizes, me to the cartel element. In Mexico, human life is worth less than fucking cocaine. That's wild. The influence, the power of the cartels has grown since the fucking eighty s. And the impact on the fucking social fabric of Mexico where they hold sway, the frequent brutality, the allegiances, the evolving fucking dynamics of the situation, these flamboyant acts of murder, right? It's inspiring to me and fucking just incredible that you occasionally pick up stories of people who ain't fucking taking it anymore. Right? [00:02:10] Speaker B: Okay. [00:02:10] Speaker A: Do you know what I'm saying, people? [00:02:11] Speaker C: I'm glad you turned that around. [00:02:13] Speaker B: Sorry. [00:02:15] Speaker A: Curveball. [00:02:16] Speaker B: Yeah. You had us in the first half. [00:02:19] Speaker C: For a moment there, I was like. [00:02:21] Speaker A: Mark no, in fact, when we were talking last time, we were talking about cartel murders like a week ago. Corey prefaced it. I go, Mark, you're going to have to sound less enthusiastic about this. [00:02:33] Speaker B: Don't sound like you like it. [00:02:35] Speaker A: But stories emerge of people who, when pushed to a certain limit, take an active role, who take direct action, who exhibit fucking decease agency and use grief almost as a fucking fulcrum to tip tragedy into momentum. Yeah. People who just don't fucking want to take it lying down. So I have to talk to you about Miriam Rodriguez. So context, right? We're in 2014, for whatever they're fucking worth, the official statistics from Mexico say that there were around 20,000 homicides in Mexico in 2014. Right? 20 fucking thousand. Approximately up or down, depending on who you ask. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Sure. [00:03:24] Speaker A: And a big old chunk of those are down to cartel activity. We are talking specifically about the Gulf Cartel, los Zetas, right. An Mo of theirs in 2014. People trafficking is huge. Of course, mass kidnappings slaughters. And in 2014, during one such kidnapping event, karen Rodriguez was kidnapped, the daughter of Miriam Rodriguez. Okay? And this kidnapping incident involved her being carjacked. She was surrounded by in a rural area of Mexico close to where she lived. Her car, her motor vehicle was surrounded by cars. She was bundled out, beaten, kidnapped. They always say, never let them take you to a third or second place away from the original incident. For reasons unbeknownst, the kidnappers took Karen Rodriguez to her own home, where she was bound, and from there, they kidnapped her elsewhere. Now, they followed a period of ransom negotiations, okay? It's incredible to me that Miriam Rodriguez and her husband at the time were able to get a ransom loan from the bank, which is a thing that's. [00:04:47] Speaker B: Kind of a wild thing. Is that a thing everywhere or specifically that's a Mexico thing. [00:04:52] Speaker A: It's the first I've ever heard of this, okay? [00:04:54] Speaker B: I'm curious if it's like, you can go to your bank and be like, hey, fucking ransom someone in my family. [00:05:00] Speaker A: The city had seen so many abductions, the bank was able to offer specific kind of repayment plans and borrowing fucking payment arrangements specifically for ransoms. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Is this not like just the ultimate in capitalism right there? The bank had a meeting and was like, we can because I'm sure there's interest on that shit. They were like, you know what? We've got a human trafficking problem, but I think I know how we can make a buck. [00:05:25] Speaker A: AA. Hello. See what I'm doing? I'm rubbing the old fingers together at the old yeah. So anyway, look, miriam entered into a period of discussions with the captors. She paid them like, some five grand here, a couple of grand there. Just them kind of eking out the process, trying to extract as much fucking money from her as they could. They never saw hide nor hair of her daughter. In fact, Karen's, not her body, but bones and items of her clothing were found later in a mass grave of some 200 OD people. Right? Jesus, I fucking kid you not. And Miriam decided, fuck this. Miriam decided that she was going to go fucking Liam Neeson. She was going to go taken on their fucking asses and take the law completely into her own hands. She came up know, officially, she was stonewalled. Mexican police plagued with fucking challenges, corrupt law enforcement agencies, high cartel influence at every fucking level of the police. [00:06:30] Speaker B: She was getting this is one of the things that is like, the most believable thing about the situation, because anywhere there's police, like, yeah, so they can be bought off. Let's be real. I can see how this would happen. [00:06:42] Speaker A: So she decides, fuck them. I'm going to get into this myself. And you look at I'm going to send you later on a picture of Miriam Rodriguez. And holy shit, she was late fifty s at the time. She looks like anyone's old mum, right? Dyed, kind of red bob hair. She's short. She's kind of stocky looking. You would never fucking think. But this event ignited a fucking thirst for justice, not revenge, by the way. Justice. During the kidnapping, the first lead that Miriam had was as they were holding Karen in her home, a family friend happened to come by to perform some work on their car or whatever, and this person was also kidnapped but released later through being, like, a low value target. The cartel had nothing wanted nothing to do with it. They released her, and Miriam was able to use to talk to this witness, to this friend who was also taken captive for a while and started to investigate, right? Trawling social media, spending hours on the fucking internet looking for descriptions, looking for people who matched the description. And she found a hit. She got a hit straight away. Not straight away. After a lot of kind of painstaking, kind of trawling of pictures, she found a match to somebody who ran an ice cream shop two fucking hours drive away. And she went there and started a stakeout process, right? [00:08:15] Speaker B: Wow. [00:08:15] Speaker C: Okay. [00:08:16] Speaker A: Standing outside that store, watching the comings and goings until she kind of traced the owner of the ice cream store to another member of their family, to another member of their family. And here's where it starts to get cool as shit, right? She started printing fake IDs for herself. She started using disguises. She had, like, a healthcare worker's uniform from an old job that she had some years back. She wore this uniform and started knocking on doors under the guise of performing, like, a census or a poll and started to piece together leads. She started to kind of follow threads. She started to ask questions. All the while, the more she was seen to be investigating this, the more that she was seen to be asking questions or wrapping on doors. In start to come the death threats. In start to come the threats that law enforcement warning her off, anonymous phone calls. But she completely refused to be deterred. Building a kind of a network of informants for hours and hours and hours drive around her home, tracking down leads, cooperating, talking to other victims families, really fucking taking the law into her own hands. [00:09:33] Speaker B: I'm sorry. The thing about this, taking the law into her own hands, building this network, all this kind of stuff. Can you imagine if the law took that kind of ingenuity and used the resources available to them? Because look at what one lady did. One middle aged woman stakes out places, goes and does a little subterfuge. All this kind of stuff creates a network of victims and informants and all this kind of stuff. One middle aged lady. But what are we doing here? This is not as hard as they want us to think it is. [00:10:13] Speaker A: Yeah, completely. One person, one fucking woman. With this fucking yearning, fucking hunger for justice. It was through her asking the right questions that the mass grave was discovered where some of Karen's clothing and her bones were found. Over the course of between 2014 to 2017, her dogged pursuit of these people responsible put ten people in prison. [00:10:43] Speaker B: Wow. [00:10:44] Speaker A: Yes. Directly because of her fucking absolute insane initiative, she got ten. [00:10:50] Speaker B: What do the cops in the courts and stuff do when she brings these people? Just like, oops, okay, I guess. [00:10:59] Speaker A: Yeah. One can only fucking imagine, you know what I mean? But I mean, she became an advocate for other victims of people trafficking, of kidnapping, of murder. She became a voice for other families. And desperately sad to say that it did indeed lead to her own death. On Mexican Mother's Day on the 10 May 2017, her home was broken into and she was shot twelve times and died on her way to the hospital. But through studying the fucking habits of her cartels, memorizing addresses, writing shit down and keeping it always with her in a diary that she would keep in a bag on her one incidence where she'd tracked a former cartel. Member who'd gone back to their old life as a street florist and she fucking chased them in broad daylight on foot with a revolver in her fucking purse. Incredible. Absolute fucking badass. And like I said at the top there, she wasn't going down to their level. She wasn't after revenge. She was after fucking accountability, justice, and ended up seeing ten cartel members behind bars before they finally caught up with her and fucking capped her. [00:12:14] Speaker B: And she had to have kind of known that was eventually going to happen, which I think makes it even more heroic to do this. She 100% knew that someday they were going to come to our door. [00:12:26] Speaker A: Yes, three years. The kidnapping and murder of her daughter set on a three year path, which she must have known was only going to end one way. [00:12:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:12:36] Speaker A: And I read that of the ten that ended up facing charges, some of them escaped, some of them walked. Right. But in terms of raising awareness, even outside of Mexico, there's a movie about her. [00:12:52] Speaker B: I was going to say. There has to be a movie, right? [00:12:56] Speaker A: It's a kind of a smaller scale, independent kind of movie that's been made about her. But I would not at all be surprised if in years to come, moore is made of this fucking incredible woman who even in the face of fucking legal stonewalling and the fucking crazy power dynamic there, didn't give a fuck. They came after her daughter, so she went after them. And I fucking love it. [00:13:22] Speaker B: That's incredible. It's incredible and it's frustrating in equal measure that people like her exist and are there to just seek out justice and take a wrong and figure out it's not going to bring her daughter back. And like you said, she could have gone on a revenge spree, right? She could have just gone and tried to murder however many people she could or whatever, but that wasn't what she could have gone ghost Rider, meanwhile yeah, right. But meanwhile, then she manages to get all these people put behind bars and then they're let go or escape or things like that, and it's like she did all of this work and the system cannot be depended upon to do the bare minimum in this heartily encouraged. [00:14:08] Speaker A: Because there's way more to this case than I'm going to cover in this cold open. Right? The lengths that she went to disguising her appearance, going under fake names, it's inspirational as shit. And yeah, maybe I'll stop talking about Mexico after this, because who knows? [00:14:27] Speaker B: But we're going out with a bang on a hero of a Mexican woman. [00:14:33] Speaker A: Big time. [00:14:33] Speaker B: I'm here for Tamiriam Joe. [00:14:37] Speaker A: Absolutesdi. Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:14:44] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, Misel, sen. [00:14:47] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said miselsen in such a horny way before. [00:14:51] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal received. [00:14:54] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:14:58] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm going to leg it. [00:15:04] Speaker C: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:15:06] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. All right. Yeah. [00:15:15] Speaker B: I keep hoping that you're going to do the Little John. And every time it's like Little John Blue Balls just leaving and waiting, which. [00:15:24] Speaker A: They call him in blue balls. Fuck out of here. Give me a fucking lunch money. Little John. [00:15:34] Speaker B: Can you imagine if you ever met a child who talked like the way Mark does? American children? Most horrifying thing I will say. So when I was in high school, there was a kid so I went to independent study school. There was a kid in my leadership class, believe his name was David, and he had this kind of just like that, and we just kind of mostly accepted this, but being from the East Coast, eventually I was like, oh, so, David, how long have you lived out here? And he's like, I was born here. It's just a speech impediment. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Ouch. Everybody in New York to me sounds a little bit like Rocky. [00:16:20] Speaker B: Sure, I can see that. [00:16:22] Speaker A: But that's not even New York, is it? [00:16:23] Speaker B: That's Philadelphia. [00:16:25] Speaker A: That's how they sound. [00:16:26] Speaker B: I think Stallone is from New York, though. There we go. And every Stallone character sounds like do, isn't it? [00:16:34] Speaker A: Isn't it amazing how Stallone was able to reach the level of fame and status that he did, looking and sounding like he did? [00:16:43] Speaker B: I know, right? He's actually, like a super interesting story. And to be fair, I think also kind of problematic. I think he has some iffy stuff in his past as well. [00:16:51] Speaker A: But let he without sin cast the. [00:16:56] Speaker B: First say, but, you know, he legit did porn to finance Rocky and stuff like that and was really dedicated to like I just want to get this movie made. And it's so much better than it has any right to be. [00:17:13] Speaker A: I will not hear a fucking bad word said against Rocky. The entire saga. They're all fucking in their own way. Bangers. [00:17:20] Speaker B: I don't know if I totally agree with that. But I mean, I think they're all. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Watchable times against us this week, folks, right? But I'm super quickly going to say Rocky. Classic rocky two. Fucking brilliant. Rocky Three. Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. Get fucked. That's amazing. Rocky Four just now we're in the stratosphere made Goodbye Reality. Goodbye. Any pretend that it being a sports movie now. It's cold war. No, not Cold War. Russia. The other one. Well, yeah. [00:17:47] Speaker B: It's Cold war, right? [00:17:48] Speaker A: Rocky Five. Tommy Gunn. Brilliant. And then we go into Creed and we go into Barbara. Fuck it. It's all good. [00:17:56] Speaker B: It kind of has that, like fast and Furious trajectory. It does movies where it's like, oh, this is just like it's like a car movie. And then the next thing you know, they're going to space. And you're like, what's happened here? But yeah. You're still going to have a good time. [00:18:11] Speaker A: Yes. [00:18:12] Speaker B: Eileen, hi. [00:18:13] Speaker A: Oh, yes, Eileen, it's wonderful to see you. [00:18:16] Speaker B: It is it is always glorious to see your face here. Dear friends. By super popular request, we have your favorite boffin and ours, Eileen Marks Nelson, here to scare us scare us shitless today, from what I see. [00:18:34] Speaker C: I will do my best. [00:18:36] Speaker A: Before we listen, I shit you not, I am delighted to have always, always love seeing you, Eileen. It's fucking lovely to have you on board this week, particularly this visit particularly. See, while you're all you and I'm talking to you, the listener, while you're I'm breaking the fourth wall, while you're out there worrying about the climate. Listen, the Great Filter comes in many forms, and climate is but one of the fucking potential population ending predicaments which we may soon, in fact, probably already are finding ourselves in. I'll say no more for a while. But listen, if you're feeling a little bit kind of comfortable and chilled and secure and safe in your own skin. [00:19:26] Speaker B: Which I'm sure everyone is this week, because we've had, like, a very chill week in the world and everyone's very relaxed right now, we're going to give you something else to think about besides world events this week. How about that? Something else to stress out over. If you're already it's like if you're. [00:19:42] Speaker A: Sick of getting kicked in the nuts, we'll punch you in the face. [00:19:45] Speaker B: That's it. [00:19:47] Speaker A: Jack of all graves, ladies and gentlemen. [00:19:51] Speaker B: So thank you for coming in swinging today, Eileen. We're very excited to have this happen. I don't think we have anything particularly interesting to update on this week other than of course, we've got next week book club. The week after that. On Sunday, we'll be doing our watch along. So of course all of this stuff will be posted on our socials and all that stuff. Hey, if you're on the Blue Sky and you haven't followed us yet, go and do that because we're trying to work on using that. [00:20:22] Speaker A: How are you finding Blue Sky? How are you finding it? [00:20:24] Speaker B: Oh, I love it. I have a great time on it. [00:20:26] Speaker A: It feels a bit dry. [00:20:28] Speaker B: It's really about like once you get into how you use it, you got to really utilize those feeds. You got to get your settings right. Settings are important because it's like you want to make sure you get some reposts, but not a lot of replies. You want to integrate your feeds into your main feed so that you see stuff from the other ones. Yeah, see, you got to get it right your ways. I will. We'll have a lesson. I should put that on our co fi or something, like Cory's Guide to Blue Sky or something so that people can learn to use it better. Because I do get asked a lot, like, how are you having fun on? Great. [00:21:05] Speaker C: It is a testament to my personality that I was able to spend as many hours as I have spent reading about the topic that we're going to talk about today. But it just sounds exhausting to me to figure out how to work the settings onto this guy, like, untold hours. And it was fine. And I'm like, the ten minutes it would take me to figure that out. [00:21:24] Speaker B: Is just too much big no go. I get that. And I think a lot of people feel that way, that they just want to jump in and have it all work out the box, which is understandable. But this is more like when you joined Twitter 15 years ago and you're like, the fuck am I doing here? And for a while, everyone was just kind of like, I don't know why we're using this. And eventually you get the hang. So I'll work on that. Maybe I'll do a little tutorial. Yes. So book club coming up. Watch along coming up. Everything's coming up. And that's about all we got going on. So I think we can just jump right into our watches, of which there are many. So we're going to, again, sort of try to condense them. As always, if you hate hearing about horror movies and you do not give a shit, there's always a timestamp for you to skip this part of the episode. [00:22:16] Speaker A: If you don't want to, there's always another fucking podcast. Frank, the fuck are you doing listening. [00:22:21] Speaker B: To we're not trying to alienate anyone here. Some people are here for Miriam and they're not here for the horror movies. [00:22:30] Speaker A: If you don't like horror films, you can skip to the bits where we. [00:22:34] Speaker C: Talk about I love your business model. I realize it's not really a business, but it's like, fuck you. [00:22:41] Speaker A: Also buy T shirt on your way out. Fuck it. [00:22:46] Speaker B: There are millions of other podcasts. Go listen to those. Yeah, one of us is working on some form of business model here and the other one simply trying to burn it for the ride. [00:23:00] Speaker C: Excellent. [00:23:01] Speaker B: It's fine. Yes, there is a timestamp should you want to skip the movie talk, but let's get into some of our watches. I'm actually really interested, Eileen, because despite your obvious busy mother and work and research for Jo AG's schedule, you have been trying know get in your regular Spooky Season watches here. And I've been enjoying seeing that journey on the letterbox, which kind of started before October even. You've been kind of making an effort because I am. [00:23:35] Speaker C: All of the things you just described, I was like, there is literally not any chance I could watch a movie every day in October. Like, this is not happening. But actually, from listening to you and Anna talk about your lists of things you were going to watch for Spooky Season or stuff you like to watch every year at Spooky Season, I was like, I can make a list. [00:23:57] Speaker B: There you go. [00:23:58] Speaker C: And so there are like a lot of horror films that I feel like I haven't seen, so that is kind of why I did it. I was like, this is the time of year to do it. So I made a list. I mean, it doesn't have everything on it that I probably should see, but it had a lot of ones that I've been wanting to that were obvious holes for me. And then maybe about 25% of them are just movies that I wanted to watch again that I've seen before. Sure. But yeah, I started it in like early mid September because otherwise it ain't happening. I'm not sure if I'm going to finish my list as it is. [00:24:28] Speaker B: We'll see. There's time. Listen. Yeah, we're not exclusive about that. [00:24:35] Speaker C: There's been a lot of watching like a half hour of a movie and then pausing it and then watching it again when I have time kind of thing. [00:24:41] Speaker A: So that's maybe not parenting. [00:24:43] Speaker C: Right, yes, parenting. Am I right? Exactly. But yeah, I've been watching a lot. [00:24:49] Speaker B: Of what have some of your highlights been of flicks that you have watched over the course of this month or so? So far? [00:24:58] Speaker C: Right, okay. So I made myself a list and I put it in numerical order by release date, of course, but I'm not watching them in order. It's just I needed them organized for myself. And then I go to it and I go, what do I feel like today? And find something. And I actually went to the trouble since I made a list of putting next to it, like, what streaming service it's on or if I have to rent it. This is what I'm like this is. [00:25:27] Speaker B: Mark'S Mind is blown here as the guy who's been running a deadpool on his Facebook for years and didn't think to put an Excel sheet until this. [00:25:36] Speaker A: Read just read the comments. Every time someone does level of organization. [00:25:39] Speaker B: That is unfathomable to dear friend. [00:25:44] Speaker C: I. Yeah, that makes sense. I remember listening to that in last week's episode and being like, what? Okay. [00:25:52] Speaker B: Just accept it. [00:25:53] Speaker C: All right? You do you, man. I won't tell you how to live your life. All I can do some of the stuff that I have on there is stuff I really like that I've seen before. So that's like, really obvious ones, like Beetlejuice, Nightmare Before Christmas. I did watch Silence of the Lambs this week, which I know you watched as well. [00:26:10] Speaker A: Everyone did, didn't yeah. [00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah. It was like weirdly in the water for whatever reason. I don't know if it was just put up on streaming or I don't know. I don't feel like every year at this time people watch Silence of the Lambs, but it really kind of like hit the zeitgeist all at once. [00:26:25] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:26:27] Speaker A: On Beetlejuice. It feels so strange to know that the fucking sequel has shot, has wrapped and is in bounds. That's incredible. [00:26:35] Speaker C: I saw that when I put it on my list. I mean, I'm like, kind of out of touch. So until I made this list, I didn't even realize they were making a sequel. And I was like, what? [00:26:43] Speaker B: And it was like a rumor for so long that it was like I never really trusted it until shitty fan. [00:26:49] Speaker A: Made posters, going around Facebook, all that. [00:26:51] Speaker B: Sort of I mean, some of them were convincing. Some of them were absolutely love that movie, though. [00:26:55] Speaker C: My husband had never seen it, so I made him watch it with me. It was like a life dream for me to throw a dinner party and make everyone recreate that scene with me. [00:27:03] Speaker B: That would be amazing. Can I come? I will fly out. I'm so there. [00:27:08] Speaker C: I just need to find literally to do it. I will host it. I want to do this. [00:27:13] Speaker B: I watched that every day for like, two months when I was a kid. My mom could not pull me away from Beetlejuice just every day. Popped that VHS right back in. It is an obsession. [00:27:23] Speaker A: Every time I see it, I love a particular line or a particular delivery more, right? [00:27:28] Speaker B: Yeah. They're all so memorable. That's the thing is it's like brilliant. If someone says something to me that I was thinking, I will go. You read my mind. Just like oso. There's so many the way they say stuff in that is iconic. Everybody is so great. [00:27:48] Speaker A: Current favorite is not to mention you're talking to a dead guy. Outstanding. [00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a brilliant movie. I love that. Did your husband like it? [00:27:58] Speaker C: He did. I don't think he likes it as much as me, but he's also in his mid thirty s and this is the first time he saw it. [00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair. [00:28:05] Speaker C: That makes sense. [00:28:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [00:28:08] Speaker C: I watched some things that you guys have talked about on the podcast before. Like I watched dead alive. And I wasn't expecting much from it. When you first start watching that movie, it's very clear it's low budget, and you're like, Right, okay. And so I kind of got into this false sense of security. Like, oh, I think I know what I can expect from this. [00:28:31] Speaker B: Oh, boy. No, you don't. [00:28:32] Speaker C: And then it just goes bananas. And I just kind of couldn't stop watching it. I was like, what is this? This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen in my life. Like the little intestines monster. Like, what on earth is that? [00:28:50] Speaker A: What the fuck? Yeah, I know I've said this on this cast in this exact same way before, but there is still a piece of my mind on the cinema seat still there from 20 OD years ago. When I saw that first, I never fully came back. It's like when you stories of people coming back from Nam and they're never the same. I left that fucking cinema a changed guy and I've never quite returned. [00:29:12] Speaker C: Yeah, it is changing. [00:29:14] Speaker B: I like that you said 20 OD years ago, too. Like, yeah, sweet boy. 20 years ago was 2003. [00:29:23] Speaker A: I'll stop that. [00:29:27] Speaker B: So there's that. But anyway, yeah, it's wild that that. [00:29:30] Speaker C: Is the same guy is incredible. That did The Lord of the Rings trilogy talk about range and everything that. [00:29:37] Speaker B: We'Ve talked obviously at length about that. But even he just did another doc and he did that World War I documentary that they shall not grow old and stuff. Like he makes like really boring old man stuff. [00:29:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:29:50] Speaker B: How did this insane person make all of the stuff that he's made in the past 20 years? [00:29:59] Speaker C: It kind of gave me some Evil Dead vibes. And I love Evil Dead, so I was a big fan of that. Like, just kind of campy. He's clearly not got a big budget, but they've really pushed the limits of what they can do with the budget they have. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Every fucking red scent is up there. [00:30:13] Speaker B: And the leading man, too, gives you that sort of just balls to the wall, ash kind of vibes. He put everything in that as well. [00:30:23] Speaker C: That's just a shout out because I'm sorry. [00:30:25] Speaker A: No, please go on. [00:30:26] Speaker C: I was just going to say, he seems like such a normal guy, but very quickly you realize that is not a normal reaction to this circumstance at all. What are you doing? [00:30:37] Speaker B: He's like Norman Bates, crank to eleven. [00:30:40] Speaker A: It was always in him just waiting to come out, wasn't it? It was always fucking there. Beautiful. [00:30:44] Speaker C: What were you saying, Mark? [00:30:47] Speaker A: I can't remember. Let me think. It was really soon. It was really recently as well. I've completely forgotten I'm having that kind of day. When things just come in and out of my head. I totally forgot what I was about to say. There it is. When people talk about dead alive, the character of Uncle Les doesn't get the fucking recognition it deserves because what a fucking brilliant, sleazy bastard. And if we talk about favorite lines before, there's that amazing sped up sequence of him just chopping piles of zombies. He shouts, Step right up your grave. Out, bastards. And just goes fucking apeshit. [00:31:25] Speaker C: That scene iconic. I loved it. [00:31:28] Speaker B: Beautiful. Yeah, I love that. I love that you loved it. That's a great time. [00:31:32] Speaker C: Yes. [00:31:33] Speaker B: I feel like that's got to be one of my watches this season as well. Yes. Other highlights. [00:31:39] Speaker C: Yeah, I watched a couple of Korean horror films that I hadn't seen before. So the host from 2006. Okay. [00:31:46] Speaker B: I know that's a very popular one, but you know me and Subtitles, I've never seen The Host or Ringu or any of the original Grudge like any of those kinds of things. [00:31:57] Speaker C: I think I have seen the original seen Ringu, but it's been a long time. But the host was actually really good. It's clearly allegorical and I think that it's a sign of growth that the first scene that you see is, like, people in a forensic setting, I think, like a morgue or something, or a research lab. I can't even remember because I watched. [00:32:17] Speaker B: Too many I totally know where you're going with that. [00:32:20] Speaker C: They throw a bunch of para from Aldehyde in the river, and then they try to say that that is what caused this insane it's like a creature feature, right? Like this insane creature to form. And I was just like, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. Six years? Come on. And then I kept watching the movie because everyone always talks about how great it is. And I was like, okay, you're making a commentary on how we shouldn't pollute our environment and it'll come back to bite us. Literally. Okay, I'm going to let this go, but it's still stupid, but I'm going to let it go. [00:32:55] Speaker B: That is gross. I can enjoy it even though this doesn't. [00:33:01] Speaker C: Yes. [00:33:02] Speaker B: Yes. I love that for you. [00:33:05] Speaker C: I also watched Train to Busan, which I love. [00:33:08] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, I watched that one last year. [00:33:10] Speaker C: I'm sort of obsessed with train movies, is something I've learned about myself. Like, I really like interesting my boats. I don't know, something about railcore moving, railcore going somewhere, but being trapped at the same time. [00:33:23] Speaker B: Yeah, this is what I'm saying. I had a professor in my ma who said that anything that's on a mode of transport is not scary. And I was like, what? Opposite day? Opposite of that. When you are trapped on something like a boat or a train or a submarine or whatever, that's inherently scary. What are you? [00:33:46] Speaker A: You have no control, do you? Are literally being driven. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Yeah. Any of those kinds of things you are at the mercy of whoever's flying it. The elements, the whatever. Very scary. [00:33:58] Speaker C: Yeah. What else? I watched a Girl Walks Home Alone at night. Have you heard of that film? Of course. [00:34:07] Speaker A: I am dying to see it. And I've had time and I've had so many opportunities, opportunity to see it, and I've just kind of scrolled past it. But this might be the push that. [00:34:14] Speaker C: I need to it's another one of those films that doesn't have a lot of dialogue. It gave me kind of like Ingmar Bergman vibes because it's black and white and it's very, like, I don't know, vibes. [00:34:25] Speaker B: Yeah, but you know how to sell the mark. [00:34:29] Speaker C: Yeah, but I really enjoy I don't want to bore you guys because there's way too many movies, but I did watch some things that I probably should have seen before. Like the original Carrie. [00:34:42] Speaker B: Nice. [00:34:43] Speaker C: I'd never seen Insidious before. [00:34:45] Speaker B: Oh, nice. [00:34:46] Speaker C: And actually legitimately scared me, so that's good. [00:34:50] Speaker A: I love it when a movie kind. [00:34:51] Speaker C: Of gets normally, it's like I always. [00:34:54] Speaker B: Say yeah, go ahead. [00:34:55] Speaker C: Sorry, there's a little thought bubble. Wow. I'm waiting for balloons. Anyway. [00:35:05] Speaker B: There they are. [00:35:06] Speaker C: There they are. Yeah. Those are some highlights. Some things that I'm looking forward to watching are the thing which I can't remember if I've seen or not. It's been so long. [00:35:15] Speaker B: Beautiful. Love. And it's like it's so in pop culture that, of course you recognize things from it, so it's hard to tell. I have so many movies like that that we've even talked about that I'll be like, oh, yeah, that movie, I love it. Or I hate it, and then I watch it later. I'm like, I don't think I've seen that. [00:35:30] Speaker C: Yeah, Carrie was kind of like that. I had seen scenes from it before, and obviously there's been a million adaptations of it and stuff, so I knew the general story. But it was kind of wild to go back and actually see it and make some connections I didn't realize existed. [00:35:43] Speaker A: Very timely as well. Piper lori died yesterday, I believe. [00:35:46] Speaker B: Really? [00:35:47] Speaker A: Yes. Carrie's mum, I think she was 91, died yesterday. [00:35:50] Speaker B: I did not know that. [00:35:51] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. The streets will not forget. [00:35:54] Speaker B: Ye yesterday. I spent the entire day playing a new video game that I got, and it honestly dawned on me that I was like, I haven't looked at any form of social media or anything. Who knows what's going on right now? But I was so invested in the video game and then House of Usher that I just never looked at anything all day long. So rest in peace. Piper lori. [00:36:14] Speaker C: Yes. [00:36:18] Speaker B: I love that. That's beautiful. I'm very excited. [00:36:21] Speaker A: I'm enjoying watches. [00:36:22] Speaker B: Really? And I've been watching, like yeah, your little ratings and all that kind of stuff as you've gone along and been enjoying just, like, watching the journey. [00:36:30] Speaker C: It's pretty fun. I haven't used Letterbox much in the past, and it's kind of funny because I've been finding that when I'm forced to rate a movie, I almost never give anything less than two or more than four stars. It's really hard for me to do. I find it personally difficult to be like, this was so terrible that it deserves this, or this was so good that it deserves that. I have a lot of trouble with the extreme. So even though I'm like, yeah, this movie was great, I probably gave it four stars. I don't think I've given a single five stars to a movie. [00:36:58] Speaker B: We could probably recommend you some that would be below your two star too. [00:37:03] Speaker A: Many, I'm going to say. [00:37:05] Speaker B: If you just want to get over that hump and rate something low, we could certainly suggest a few movies for you. That'll do it. [00:37:12] Speaker C: You know what? What is the worst movie you've ever seen? Maybe I should watch it. [00:37:16] Speaker A: Oh, Christ. [00:37:18] Speaker C: The worst horror movie. [00:37:19] Speaker B: Such a the Scream and Chat movies are often so intolerable. Sometimes it's so hard to even got me thinking. Yeah. If I think of like, let's say a mainstream sort of horror movie instead of like because a lot of the stuff is like B movies and stuff like that that we watch. I deeply hated Open Water, and it's one of only two movies I've ever walked out of in my life. That's probably yeah. Amongst the worst horror movies I've ever seen. [00:37:56] Speaker A: My mind automatically goes to Jack Frost. Right. And not the one you might be thinking of. Not the Michael Keaton one. [00:38:05] Speaker B: Okay. I was like, that's an inexplicable movie and I get it. [00:38:08] Speaker A: Not the Michael Keenan. [00:38:09] Speaker B: Yeah, the other Jack Frost. That's right. We watched that with Scream and Chat, too. [00:38:12] Speaker A: There you go. I will never forget the VHS cover. He's chilling dot, dot, dot and killing. [00:38:21] Speaker C: Amazing. [00:38:24] Speaker A: My problem is I hate an ineffectual movie more than I hate one that leaves me disgusted. Because it's bad. At least I felt something. [00:38:33] Speaker B: Right? [00:38:35] Speaker A: I tend to really downrate movies that just leave me kind of what the fuck even was that? I hate that. Whereas if there's something that's really bad, at least I can get on board. At least there's angle. [00:38:47] Speaker B: For some reason, I didn't rate this one, so I don't totally remember how I felt about it. I see that Anna and Satania both gave it two stars on Jack Frost. Jack Frost and Lori, she said about this, it's bad, but I also don't hate it. [00:39:03] Speaker A: There you. [00:39:06] Speaker B: A and I think that's kind of how I felt about it. Like, objectively, this is a bad movie, but I'm not having a bad time. [00:39:14] Speaker A: It's done conbrio, as they say. [00:39:16] Speaker B: What does that mean? [00:39:19] Speaker A: It's an Italian musical term, I think, which means just put your fucking heart into it. [00:39:24] Speaker B: Yeah. See, and that tends to I tend to give things a lot more leeway for that than Mark does of the listen, it sucked, but in a way that I kind of but then there's. [00:39:36] Speaker A: Another very fine line between that and making a movie which is shit on purpose. Like that fucking what was it? Heidi. Bad Heidi. [00:39:45] Speaker B: Oh yeah. Mad. Heidi, I think. [00:39:48] Speaker A: Awful. You're trying to make a bad movie on purpose and I see right through you. [00:39:51] Speaker B: Yeah. All the sharknadoes after the first sharknado. [00:39:55] Speaker A: Yes. [00:39:57] Speaker B: Tongue in cheek. [00:39:58] Speaker C: And I did not pursue the franchise. [00:40:03] Speaker B: Can't imagine why. But this is the one there's exceptions to that too. Like Veloci Pastor is great and it is like that's a movie that's trying to be bad, but it is so proficiently made that it works really well. So I don't know, we'll see. But yeah, watch Jack Frost and let us know if you break your I will. [00:40:29] Speaker C: Your interesting because I find that sometimes I take suggestions from you guys when you're talking about movies and sometimes when you guys are divided, I really side with one of you over the other. But it's like really a toss up which one. [00:40:45] Speaker B: It's true. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like even how a lot of times there was something just last week that we oh, it was the alien one. No one will save you. Where I was know in my mind I'm like, I think you'll like this, but Anna didn't like it. And you guys tend to be kind of in the same yeah, it's not we're not completely predictable that way. [00:41:08] Speaker C: And then sometimes you both really like something like tenebrae, which I tried to watch and found very difficult. I was just like so bored and you guys were like, this movie is so great for all these reasons. And I was like, something I'm missing, I don't know what. [00:41:21] Speaker B: Right. [00:41:22] Speaker A: Some movies are great, but they're work. You've got to fucking and I didn't. [00:41:25] Speaker C: Think it was bad, but it was. [00:41:27] Speaker B: Just like right, but it's just not forget that the way that it did you right. I would never expect that. Argento is for all people or any form of Jallo movie for all audiences. That's for sure. What about you, Mark? What hit you this week? I know we have a few in common. [00:41:51] Speaker A: Just blast through these do it. VHS 85. Right. [00:41:58] Speaker B: Which now you pitched as a movie that we could watch together. And I believe my response certainly not was your response certainly not. [00:42:07] Speaker A: I thought you'd like the anthology. [00:42:09] Speaker B: I do. I just hate VHS. I think VHS yeah, it's like the first one is just a rape fantasy disguised as critiquing rape fantasy that just keeps rehashing the same rape. [00:42:22] Speaker A: What you mean? [00:42:23] Speaker B: Over and over again. [00:42:24] Speaker A: Formulaic horror movie which passes except it's. [00:42:26] Speaker B: About sexually assaulting women. You're literally watching the same footage of women getting sexually assaulted over and over again. And you know how much I hate that. Well, and then everyone after that has just not been good to me. [00:42:44] Speaker A: There's one thing that I will keep going back to the VHS movies for. Right. Is that sense that at the start of each chapter, at the start of each bit of the anthology, you have no idea where it's going to end up? Right. And VHS, it delivers more of the same. You've got varying quality in each of the segments, ranging from pretty good to mediocre, but each of them takes a fucking hard left and you don't know where it's going to go. And I love that. I really enjoy ending in a place that's a million miles away from where you started and not really knowing how you got there, but you can't predict where it's going to go. [00:43:24] Speaker B: I think I often like that, but I think there's something to knowing that that's what's going to happen that makes it less interesting for me that I'm like, okay, so what's the plot twist? Like you're starting each segment like, all right, so when's this going to twist? [00:43:41] Speaker A: But it panders to me in that it also has loads of lo fi, practical gore. Three stars? [00:43:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:48] Speaker A: That's how you get three stars out of me. [00:43:49] Speaker B: Right. I think that's the thing I can appreciate about them is I like the vibe and all of that kind of stuff. It's just there's been very few segments ever in those that were anything more than me just being like, when will this end? And normally being very disappointed. [00:44:08] Speaker A: Wrap it up, boys. [00:44:09] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. Usually wherever it ends, I'm like, that was not that interesting. Like, you were just going for a twist and you did it. I guess. But VHS is not for me. [00:44:21] Speaker A: I drag my ass to the cinema to watch the creator. It's not really joag wheelhouse stuff. It's joag adjacent, I guess. But look, it's a great film marred by a few moments of complete dog shit. There are some moments, plot moments in the film, you're like, Fuck off. However, visually, it is the shit I love to see. It plays right to my sweet spot, visually, of gigantic, megastructures, intricate looking, kind of complicated looking, robots, cyborgy kind of shit. [00:45:04] Speaker B: You love a sci-fi world. [00:45:06] Speaker A: I really do. World building is fantastic in it. Plot wise, it's basically District Ten. [00:45:11] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough. [00:45:13] Speaker A: It is literally District Ten. [00:45:14] Speaker B: And I mean, that's what you were looking for, though, wasn't it? You want Gareth Edwards to be the good District Nine. [00:45:20] Speaker A: I've wanted District Ten, so I don't need to wait for fucking Neil fucking Bloom Fontaine to make it anymore because it's already been done. Thanks. Let me see. We both sat down on Friday the 13th, as is the law yes. And watched Friday. I don't know if it's the law in every state. I think some states have legalized not watching Friday the 13th on Friday, but it's generally socially you gotta I'll let you take that one away. What do you reckon? [00:45:51] Speaker B: Listen, I had fun. I think I liked it more than you did. We watched Friday the 13th Part Five, which is a new beginning. [00:46:01] Speaker A: It's a new beginning. [00:46:02] Speaker B: A new beginning, yes, in many ways, which is one of my favorite things about this. And we won't talk at length about this. Everybody's seen the Friday the 13th, but oh God, yeah. What I think is really hilarious about it is that part six is far and away my favorite Friday the 13th. Jason lives and they're both centered around Tommy Jarvis. The character of Tommy Jarvis is a completely different person in part five than part six. And that just goes unremarked upon at part six. He's like this traumatized, almost like juvenile delinquent with rage issues. In the fifth one, just really with a thousand yard stare because he's just so deeply entrenched in his trauma and. [00:46:50] Speaker A: Then in somehow ripped as fuck as well. [00:46:52] Speaker B: Totally ripped to shit. I don't know why. Just beating people up or whatever. [00:46:57] Speaker A: I don't know. [00:46:57] Speaker B: But then in part six, he's just a dumb little guy. He's just like such a goober when it comes to part six. And I just think that is absolutely hilarious. This is why Friday the 13th is so much more of a fun franchise than Halloween is, where Halloween always kind of takes itself a bit seriously and all this kind of stuff. And then Friday the 13th is just like, fuck it. [00:47:24] Speaker A: You know what you're getting and we're going to give it to you. [00:47:26] Speaker B: Yeah, I had a blast with it. [00:47:29] Speaker A: I've always enjoyed how Friday the 13th has a series within it that Tommy Jarvis trilogy, right? [00:47:36] Speaker B: Totally. [00:47:36] Speaker A: A couple of episodes following the same kid. I don't know why, but that really appeals to me. But if there's one thing that sets part five apart from the rest of the series, it's the batshit dialogue. [00:47:48] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. It's insane. Incredible, absolutely insane stuff. The things that people say to each other in it. The way the mother talks to her annoying son. What does she call him? Like a big dildo at one big dildo. [00:48:03] Speaker A: And this is like not just a dildo of average size. And then I leaned in, I was like, oh, interesting. There's a seabomb in there. [00:48:17] Speaker B: Yeah, there is. Even that whole scene, there's just something endearing about the batshit dialogue in it where that scene where the guy does use the seabomb, where he comes back to the car after taking a piss and he's like singing to the fix the car. That's what people do too. You come back and you're like, fix the car, you asshole. Why aren't we leaving? I don't know. There's something about it that despite how. [00:48:50] Speaker A: Insane it is, for example, a scene which fields hold together too long, of a guy having violent enchilada shits while his partner is stood outside the toilet fucking just insulting him, begging him. You don't get that. [00:49:10] Speaker B: And then they start singing to each other sweetly. And you're just like, who came up. [00:49:16] Speaker A: With this sort of like jasmine and Aladdin on the carpet and then Jason shows up. [00:49:23] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a good time. Or does he? I like maybe Jason in this one. [00:49:31] Speaker A: Too, I think yeah I have a soft spot for Friday the 13th which it doesn't frankly deserve. [00:49:39] Speaker B: Sure. You know but if you're giving me a good time yeah, what else? [00:49:47] Speaker A: We have to talk TV because there were two big hitters in the TV world this week corey and I both watched The Reckoning which is the dramatization with some creative license of the exploits of one Sir Jimmy Savile and you know what Mark? [00:50:08] Speaker B: I'm just going to come out and say it do not like that guy, do not care for him. [00:50:14] Speaker A: He did a lot for charity you. [00:50:17] Speaker B: Know if you take it on balance. [00:50:20] Speaker A: He did a lot of good work. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Do you know who this guy is, Eileen? [00:50:24] Speaker C: No, I don't. Okay. [00:50:26] Speaker B: It probably is. Know, saying who Jimmy Savile was so. [00:50:32] Speaker A: Much like Mexico and the cartel situation, the case and life of Jimmy Savile is a it holds the grimmest fascination for me because, well, for the uninitiated Jimmy. Saville born I want to say like in the had he was an air quotes entertainer and DJ and was all but ubiquitous on British TV and radio throughout the hosted a show called Top of the Pops was all over the airwaves of the BBC and whilst maintaining that public facing career was a committed and prolific abuser of children just to. [00:51:24] Speaker B: Extremes you can't even imagine. I think at the end of this program, when they went and just kind of did, like a reckoning of it, they think, like hundreds and hundreds. [00:51:33] Speaker A: Yes. [00:51:34] Speaker B: Over the years of people over the years. And not just children, adult women as well. [00:51:44] Speaker A: As has been heavily rumored and implicated was a necrophile. But the hook for me with this case is how it was institutionally, enabled at so many levels by so many people. We are talking the press, the police, the BBC themselves. It was largely by the time of his death. An open secret. [00:52:10] Speaker B: The thing that blew my mind was, like when they talked about one of the football clubs having a chant about Jimmy Savile being an like at the point where entire football clubs know shit. Like there's called the Reckoning. [00:52:27] Speaker A: Oh, sorry. Go on. [00:52:28] Speaker B: The reckoning on BBC. No, but this is it. [00:52:34] Speaker A: This is another yeah he died without answering for anything. [00:52:37] Speaker C: That's depressing. [00:52:41] Speaker B: And I don't know if the series does this for us to make us feel better or if it's any true, but it seemed in the series he clearly dies, like lonely and just kind of miserable. God, I hope that's true. [00:52:58] Speaker A: You see, the world changing around him from the onwards. [00:53:02] Speaker B: The world get away with things anymore. [00:53:04] Speaker A: Exactly. Moves on. And he's portrayed as this increasingly lost and frantic and bitter and angry old wanker, which he was. But he went to his grave without answering at all for his crimes. And it is a period in British media and British kind of pop culture that it fascinates me how that shit was allowed to happen on the scale that it did across the time that it did. [00:53:30] Speaker B: It is interesting that BBC put this out now. [00:53:34] Speaker A: Yes. [00:53:34] Speaker B: They don't look great. [00:53:38] Speaker A: I haven't really read much about kind of critical reception or public opinion in this piece, but I actually think it's possibly one of the shrewdest things the BBC could have done, because the voices of the victims are present throughout the entire thing. Each episode is bookended by the survivors, not actors, but the actual survivors themselves, giving their own testimony. The BBC. It's a mia culpa from the BBC, as far as I'm concerned. It is a high end production and say what you fucking want about it, but Steve Coogan is absolutely mesmerizing. [00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. [00:54:15] Speaker A: He throws himself into what is just a vile role. It is an uncomfortable watch. It isn't sensationalized in the least. Actually, I'm going to pause. There was one or two bits where it felt it was descending into pantomime as he kind of locks the door of his dressing room and Leahs over his shoulder. There was a little bit of fucking borderville about it. [00:54:36] Speaker B: I also think one of the things that it was really effective at, though, was kind of using those kinds of things instead of having us watch him assault people, which I think is often what would have been the case in something like this. [00:54:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And I have to much like my enthusiasm for cartel violence right. I have to say the piece about him being a necrophile right. Widely rumored but never publicly acknowledged. Netflix did a piece on him a year or two ago, which was just paper thin, which was shallow. The Netflix piece was in two parts and if you only watched the first part, it was like a biography. You could be forgiven for thinking that they were just celebrating this old weirdo. But it was widely regarded that he'd spent a long time alone with his mother's corpse because he had the run of the corridors of Stoke Mandeville Hospital, where he was a huge fundraiser. He was given carte blanche to walk into any room he wanted, and he was visibly seen spending time alone with corpses for a long time in the hospital. And I've never seen that acknowledged anywhere publicly. But BBC did it. They went necro. And that's just one I i think it was the right move. I think it was shrewd. [00:55:53] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. [00:55:55] Speaker A: And I think you're right. [00:55:57] Speaker B: Yeah. And maybe there's a degree to which know, we don't want to let them absolve themselves because they made something that acknowledges, like, it's certainly a strategic move absolutely. To do that. But at the same time, it is surprising how far that went to those. [00:56:13] Speaker A: That say it could never happen again. Fucking Russell Brand has been in the news constantly over the past couple of months on a totally different scale, but in the same kind of know. [00:56:23] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I mean, he certainly know if Russell Brand had focused all his energy on charity and stuff like this, who's to say it wouldn't have been to the exact same scale? It's just that he never made himself that likable to be able to get away with this stuff. But it's insane when you know publicly the shit that Russell Brand was saying and doing and then add all the private stuff on top of it. [00:56:45] Speaker A: So was Savile. He was wearing T shirts saying, I'm a fucking predator to that effect. He was open. He was right out in the fucking open doing this and that's what's so. [00:56:55] Speaker B: Wild about watching that whole mean. And that was one of the things as an American watching this, who hasn't had context. Obviously, I've learned things over the years about him, but watching it, I'm like I've always seen with Jimmy Savile been like, I mean, he looks like a pedophile. Like, if you imagined what a pedophile looked like, it's Jimmy Savile. And it's weird to me that no one caught that. And then it's like, oh, no, they. [00:57:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:57:20] Speaker B: It's not that no one saw it coming. Everyone did. It was just he was making a lot of money for everybody. And much like Russell Brand, it wasn't until he was gone and not making anybody any, you know, those things started to be punished. [00:57:37] Speaker A: Yeah. I'd love a range of viewpoints on that show, though. So if you have the stomach for it and if you can find it, I'd love to hear other people's opinions. [00:57:44] Speaker B: Yeah. For Americans. Get yourself a VPN now. They're like, free. If you have Google one or whatever and you can watch it with a VPN on. Or, you know, as always, take to the high seas. [00:57:58] Speaker A: Yes. Yarra. And super quick, because we're going to talk in depth about it on this month's Snack of All Graves, which is our little bonus stream of content for our co fight supporters. Thank you, Thrice. Blessed art thou doing the right thing. We're going to talk about Fall of the House of Usher fucking again. Talk about high end telly. Talk about a show which fucking grabs you by the nuts. It is incredibly good. [00:58:23] Speaker C: Yeah, I'm excited to watch. [00:58:24] Speaker B: I've watched all eight episodes since yesterday. [00:58:27] Speaker A: It's proper special stuff. The only thing I will say about it on main is let me think. Going back again to this must have been the early no, there was a version of Hamlet that got released with Ethan Hawke. Right. And it kept the Shakespearean dialogue intact, but it updated the setting. Right. And in the most clumsy fucking banal, I think rather than being the King of Denmark, his dad was like, CEO of the Denmark Corporation. Fuck you. A level kind of grade reimagining, almost as though it was embarrassed of the source material and tried to kind of ham fistedly update it. Pure Dick But Fall of the House of Usher just it is like a rich fucking beef Wellington, man. It loves the source material very much. [00:59:24] Speaker B: So it fucking loves so hard into it. [00:59:27] Speaker A: And it goes all yeah. [00:59:30] Speaker B: My thing on main, I guess I'll say before we talk in depth about it, is that that's exactly one of the things that I love about it, one of the things I'm always looking for ghost movies and TV shows and things like that, where it's like the actual thing is like a ghost. It's not a metaphor. I mean, of course it's going to be a metaphor, but also there is an actual ghost or things like that. And I think modern horror is afraid to just let something be supernatural and not explain it away. It's like no, it is literally supernatural. And I think that's obviously the kind of thing that Poe was dealing with. You're not explaining why a heart is beating under the floorboards or anything like that. There's an obvious metaphor to it, but. [01:00:17] Speaker A: Also very much real ghost. [01:00:20] Speaker B: And I think that is one of the things I really love about this, is that Mike Flanagan doesn't go, okay, I'm going to take Poe and then I'm going to explain. Like, instead he puts these stories together and you get these different yarns, different PO yarns put together in a supernatural story that has layers and layers of incredible meaning, but isn't afraid to be like but it's supernatural. And that's super fun for me. [01:00:52] Speaker A: Just to wrap up on this, I will express what is turning into disgust that you started it after me and finished it before me. I am fucking raging that you've done this. [01:01:04] Speaker B: I know. I told him beforehand, I was like, listen, I did it fully, knowing what I was doing. I was reveling in it almost. Yeah. I wasn't reveling. I was merely acknowledging that I as you hit play. [01:01:17] Speaker A: Fuck, Mark, I can't believe you've done this. And finally, Mike Flanagan, I know you're a listener. I know you're a fan. Fucking Freddy Krueger. [01:01:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:30] Speaker A: That's all I'm going to say. Mike. [01:01:32] Speaker B: There we go. Yeah. You know he's on Blue Sky and he answers fans on there. Yeah. He like, talks to people on Blue Sky. [01:01:41] Speaker A: When you teach me how to fucking it properly, maybe I'll badger him. You can ask him, irritate him a little bit. [01:01:47] Speaker B: He actually quite likes talking to people on Blue Sky. So there you go. Wow. [01:01:53] Speaker A: That was rapid fire, wasn't it? [01:01:54] Speaker B: That was rapid fire, and I will do the same. Listen watched vampire in brooklyn, which I'd never seen before. Eddie Murphy joint. Eddie Murphy, yeah, Eddie Murphy joint, which was promising in the beginning and then loses the plot very quickly because it becomes, like, serious, which I watched. A making of thing afterwards. And apparently it was supposed to be serious through and through, but there were various hands in the production of this. [01:02:21] Speaker A: Wes craven changed it. [01:02:22] Speaker B: It is Wes Craven. Yeah. And the funny parts are very funny. I've had a crush on Kadeem Hardison since I was a very small child, so I enjoyed Kadeem in it. But that movie, it sucks. Also, I learned afterwards from a friend that the stunt double for Angela Bassett died on that movie, which was like a huge thing as well. Just yeah. Jumping off of a building onto one of those big I want to say balloon inflatable things. [01:02:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:53] Speaker B: The big inflatable thing. And it was too small for the alleyway that it was in. And so she bounced off of it, smashed into the wall and died while her mom and her brother were on set watching. [01:03:08] Speaker A: Pretty horrific horrible. [01:03:10] Speaker B: So vampire in Brooklyn. You can probably skip for multiple reasons. [01:03:15] Speaker A: Or go frame by frame, try to see the moment. [01:03:19] Speaker B: I don't think they pulled a John Landis and kept it in the movie. I think they probably took it out. Rewatched ten Cloverfield Lane. Just as scary as I remembered it. That movie is fucking brilliant. And that's as a person who only made it through half of Cloverfield. So I was like, this is boring and making me nauseous John Goodman in it. Yeah. John Goodman is amazing. Mary Elizabeth winstead. Yeah. It's a great movie because it's scary and claustrophobic. The first three quarters of it, and then the last quarter of it is a totally different movie that is also insanely scary. Love ten cloverfield. [01:03:56] Speaker A: I'm actually gearing up to watch the OG Cloverfield with the boys. I think they'd enjoy it. [01:04:01] Speaker B: Okay, well, let me know. Not my I remember loving yeah. [01:04:05] Speaker A: Yes. [01:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Did not enjoy that movie. But we'll be interested to hear watch Silence of the Lambs just like everybody else on the Internet. And still a near perfect movie. Our dear friend Xander brought up a great point about how the representation in there of well, I mean, this is what's so frustrating. The movie says Buffalo Bill is not trans explicitly, and that trans people are not violent. But this movie had the effect, for idiots who are watching it, of being the representation of trans people for them and impacted the way that people interacted with trans people after that. [01:04:44] Speaker A: Had it not been so diligent in saying that Buffalo Bill was not trans, it would have been a very different. [01:04:49] Speaker B: Exactly like then, yeah, that's a transphobic know. But it was like it was so clear, it was trying so hard to make sure people didn't make that assumption, and yet that is what people took away from it, and that has impacted the way for 2030 years afterwards, people have reacted to trans people because of that movie. So when I say as a film, I think this is a perfect movie. But you have to also go, audiences are not perfect. And it had the Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, right? Like, still hurt people even though it wasn't attempting to do that. So that's certainly very real when it. [01:05:29] Speaker A: Comes to but is it horror? [01:05:30] Speaker B: It is absolutely horror. My God. Is that horror? The degree of gore in it, the degree of the reveals, the shocks, horrificness. [01:05:45] Speaker A: Some very subtle kind of ick in that film as well. [01:05:48] Speaker B: When they take the moth tears someone's. [01:05:50] Speaker A: Face off and the breath coming out of her dead lungs. [01:05:53] Speaker B: Right? He tears someone's face off and wears it. And the other guy is like building a whole lady suit out of it. It certainly, like we talked about last week, has the like it's a thriller, it's a procedural, all those kinds of things. But I think it is very much a horror movie at the same time. [01:06:12] Speaker A: Okay. [01:06:13] Speaker B: That's my take on it. I will say one of my favorite. [01:06:15] Speaker C: Things about making my list this year is that no one can tell me that something isn't horror. I get to decide, right? [01:06:22] Speaker B: I say it is. [01:06:23] Speaker C: I say it's fine for spooky season, so no one can tell me anything else. [01:06:26] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. [01:06:28] Speaker A: Perfectly put. [01:06:29] Speaker B: So, yeah, I had a blast rewatching that. Rewatched Deadstream, which I know you're not a big fan of, but didn't like it. [01:06:35] Speaker C: Didn't do anything for me third or. [01:06:36] Speaker B: Fourth time I've watched it. And I love it every time I watch it. [01:06:40] Speaker C: Of course. [01:06:41] Speaker B: Rewatch ernest scared, stupid, always important new watch, which we kind of watched together. And then you fell asleep right at the end. [01:06:48] Speaker A: I think I fell asleep close to the end, too. [01:06:50] Speaker B: Yeah. There was like 15 minutes left. [01:06:52] Speaker A: And you frustrating. [01:06:54] Speaker B: So we watched Totally Killer, which is the new Bloomhouse joint that everybody is watching. And I thought it was an absolute delight. [01:07:03] Speaker A: You didn't have high expectations, did you? You didn't go into it. [01:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I think I was just kind of like, okay, whatever about it. I didn't really think one way or another about the movie, but it's about a teenager who ends up sort of zapped. Her mother was friends with these people who were killed 30 years ago by a serial killer. And through various forms of happenstance, she ends up transported into the past where she has the opportunity to try to stop this killer and find out who that killer was. And it's very quippy and funny, the idea of, like, a gen zer going back and experiencing just, like, the open misogyny and terribleness of people in the 1980s. All the things that when you watch an 80s movie, you're like, Jesus Christ. [01:07:49] Speaker A: How did which we did a few nights later in Friday the 13th, right? Saw it all writ large. [01:07:54] Speaker B: Yeah. It was so funny to be like, let's watch, like, 24 hours laters, or whatever. Let's watch a movie from the be like, and this is the stuff that she was walking into. So it's very fun to watch that. And I think surprisingly good kills. Kiernan shipka is really good. And I thought, yeah, I liked the end of it that Mark missed. So totally killer. Watch it. [01:08:16] Speaker A: It was where I hack. I would call it Bill and Ted meets. [01:08:20] Speaker B: Right. Well, I mean, it's very self consciously back to the Future meets Scream. They reference Back to the Future many times throughout the movie. But, yeah, it was a lot of fun. And it's one of those ones that I can see myself just making my regular yearly watch that I put on in the background when I'm doing things and stuff like that. Really rewatchable. So, yeah, I think that's probably everything worth commenting on. [01:08:45] Speaker A: Sure. Just packing them in, packing them in. [01:08:49] Speaker B: And of course, that list will be on the blog and in the description of this episode. So if we did not repeat it enough times for you to know what we were talking about, you will find that list available to you. So you can check them out yourselves if you're like, Eileen, and putting them on your little to watch list, they're all available to you. [01:09:09] Speaker A: Cool. So, Mark yes, as I said at the top, while the world burns and freezes and gets hotter and is seemingly intent on blowing itself up while nation fights nation, you might all be forgiven for not noticing that there's more than one way to kill a civilization. There's more than one way to end a planet. And it's fascinating to me that in our endeavor to prolong human life, to cure what ails us, to end diseases, to heal the sick, have we fucked it completely in our attempts to extend the brief, fucking beautiful window of life? What I'm saying is, is medicine going to be our undoing? Are we going to fucking are we a propos of nothing? Right? My mind has been wandering today, and it's occurred to me that darkness is the natural state of things, isn't it? Everything existed for fucking billions of years before us. Everything will continue to exist for billions of years after us. We've got this fucking blink of an eye to kind of live and experience and regard ourselves and try and make sense of it. And I know I've gone into this before, maybe in the early days of Joag, but what's the goal? To cure death, really? What's the goal? At what point does medicine go, yeah, you got to die. You got to die. [01:11:01] Speaker B: Such a new issue, too. Just to interject for a second, because I've mentioned a few times lately the Wisecrack video that I think just came out this week, actually, that we did on insurance. But I was researching sort of like the history of medicine and all of that kind of stuff, and that it is incredible how it's only been a century, ish that we've been able to even cure shit. There's stuff that we slowly figured out how to prevent. There's stuff we could treat, but that we could actively prolong our lives and how much that has fucked with our psyche ever since that for the past century, essentially, we have had to deal with the fact that we live longer. And it has completely broke us out where people were very used to just being like, well, a couple more years and I'm out of here. [01:11:57] Speaker A: And just like we said earlier on, capitalism has got a hole on. So, you know, there's bucks being, you know, rackets being run, grifts happening all over the place when it comes to health care. But what we're going to discuss and what our wonderful friend Eileen is bringing to the table here is an angle on look, just like Jeff Goldblum says, right? Life finds a way. Diseases are know. And while we're busy chucking the know everything we can to cure and to reduce impact and to extend that tiny fucking window of consciousness that we have, it's fighting back. Death is fighting back. [01:12:45] Speaker B: Death is fighting back. And I have to say so we're talking antibiotic resistance today, which is a thing that has not been on my list of phobias. And I find it funny that. So this was requested. This was a text we got from Sam some weeks ago that was, you know, after your last time that you were here, Eileen. Sam had texted and was like, listen, like, I fucking love Eileen and love every time that she comes on this show. Will you ask her to talk about antibiotic resistance? And I was like, oh, sure, okay. It's not a thing that I have thought anything of. Mark was instantly like, oh, god, yeah. And I mentioned it to Kio earlier, and he was like, oh, yeah, that's the thing I think about. So I'm about to get my mind blown and get an entirely new fear handed to me because you texted earlier in the week, Eileen, and you had two other questions you were going to ask, as I mentioned. And you were like, I think it's just going to be antibiotic resistance, because this was a lot scarier than I expected it to be. [01:13:53] Speaker C: That and there was so much to get through. And I was just like, yeah, I don't want to do a disservice to this topic. [01:14:01] Speaker B: It's a big topic. [01:14:03] Speaker C: So. Thank you, Sam. [01:14:05] Speaker B: Like we said, if you're not looking for a new thing to be scared of and you just want to focus on your current ones, you may want to nope out now. But if you're ready to be distracted by something else to think about, Eileen, why don't you tell us about how we may be ending ourselves with medicine? [01:14:23] Speaker C: I would love to. So first of all, I'm going to kick it up a notch. I'm not just talking about antibiotic resistance. I'm talking about antimicrobial resistance, because it's just not just antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance would indicate that only bacteria can do this, and that is patently false. Okay, excellent. Let's go microscopic. I tried to structure this episode in a way that made sense, and I don't know if I did or not, but just bear with me. I'm going to tell you lots and lots and lots of facts. So just for anyone who has not taken microbiology, or it's been like a real long time since you thought about it, I'm going to be talking about bacteria, fungi, viruses and protozoa. I'm going to give you a background on what that is, because that's that. [01:15:12] Speaker B: Guy from Xenon, right? Did you ever watch Xenon Girl, the 21st century? [01:15:16] Speaker C: No. [01:15:18] Speaker B: There's a character named Protozoa, and he's like a rock star, and he sings the songs like, zoom, zoom, zoom, make my heart go boom, boom, my supernova girl. [01:15:27] Speaker A: Wow, I must check that out. [01:15:29] Speaker B: Put it on your list. [01:15:30] Speaker C: Amazing. [01:15:30] Speaker A: Great. [01:15:31] Speaker B: Sorry. Go on. [01:15:31] Speaker C: It's okay. Mark was just making a confused face, which means that I am right in thinking that I need to go over what these things are. [01:15:38] Speaker A: You do the only thing that's jumping out of my head. So just super briefly the difference between a bacterium and a microbe. [01:15:46] Speaker C: So bacteria are I have a feeling. [01:15:48] Speaker B: That Eileen's going to explain they're one of the microbes. [01:15:51] Speaker C: So microbe just encompasses more than bacteria, if that makes sense. So let me describe this to you and then tell me if you still have questions. [01:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [01:16:02] Speaker C: I'm going way back to roots. There's three domains of life that we have classified bacteria, archaea, and eukaryota. Okay. Archaea I'm not even going to talk about because they are single celled organisms, but they don't actually cause disease, as far as we know. So that's cool. We'll just check those out, not worry about them. [01:16:20] Speaker A: Nice. Great bunch of labs. [01:16:21] Speaker C: Yeah, great bunch of labs. So bacteria are prokaryotes. Everything else other than archaea are eukaryotes. And I'm not really good at these types of things, but I tried to make an example for you to understand the difference. So, Corey, you've got a mug of hot cocoa. There's some marshmallows on the top. [01:16:41] Speaker B: Right? [01:16:42] Speaker C: And those marshmallows are all kind of like clumped together and floating on the top, but they're still touching your cocoa. Right. Whereas Mark has another cup of hot cocoa, and he is a fancy pants McGee, and he has got one of those cocoa bombs. Right. And so the marshmallows are inside the hot chocolate bomb. [01:17:00] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. [01:17:02] Speaker C: Cory's mug is a prokaryote. It means all the genetic material, or in this case, the marshmallows, are able to touch everything else inside the cell, but they're kind of clumped together still. Whereas Mark's mug of cocoa is a eukaryote, it has a discrete membrane around the genetic material in the cell. So that's the biggest difference between bacteria and then fungi and protozoa. Are eukaryotes. And so they have that discrete membrane around their genetic material. And then viruses. Of course, there's a lot of debate over whether we should even consider whether they're alive, because they're basically a marshmallow with a candy coating. There's a small amount of genetic material, and then it's wrapped up in, like, a protein envelope. And that's all it is. It's very, very tiny. Does that help you understand the difference at all? [01:17:59] Speaker A: Yes. [01:17:59] Speaker C: Okay. [01:18:00] Speaker A: I can visualize that, certainly. [01:18:01] Speaker C: Okay, good. [01:18:03] Speaker B: I like it. [01:18:04] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:18:05] Speaker B: Considering how much cocoa I drink with fluff in it, this is a perfect way to actually talk about this. So I feel great about it. [01:18:12] Speaker C: Excellent. So we think these things, they're really tiny, they're simple. What should we have to worry about these? Whatever, but actually they're extremely adaptable. They're quite sophisticated, and they have been around for ages. So we think bacteria were the first form of life to evolve on our planet about three and a half billion years ago. And I mean, they're still here. [01:18:39] Speaker B: There's a Zillion strains of the cyanobacteria, right? Like, that's where we're supposed to have come from, right? [01:18:46] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe cyanobacteria I read about, but I didn't spend a lot of time on this side of the thought. [01:18:52] Speaker B: There are cyanobacteria. [01:18:53] Speaker C: They might be the anaerobic ones. So that would make sense. They would have been around before oxygen was on our planet then. Some people don't really know when viruses showed up. They think maybe around the same time as bacteria, maybe later. There's a lot of speculation, but obviously they've been around a lot longer than us. And these things are like, all over in our environment, right? Like soil, the ocean, the atmosphere. They're on your body. They're in your body. They're in your cells. And your DNA, like, the mitochondria in your cells, always pause. Did you say pause always? [01:19:35] Speaker A: No, always. [01:19:36] Speaker C: They're always yes. What? [01:19:43] Speaker B: Yes, they're always there. [01:19:44] Speaker C: Yeah, they're just all over the place. So, like, the mitochondria in your cells, it's thought that eukaryotic cells absorbed those from bacteria as like a way to help us make energy. And they kind of regulate the cell cycle of death and stuff like that. And the chloroplasts in plant cells are also thought to have been taken, absorbed from bacteria. And then a bunch of your DNA is viral DNA. At some point, it just got inserted into your genome and it's there. And that's kind of one of the ways that people look at how old is a virus, because you can look and say, okay, look at these different species with this common ancestor that we know existed however long ago, and all of them have this same viral DNA. So we know that virus is at least as old as the common ancestor kind of thing. [01:20:40] Speaker B: Can viruses be neutral, I guess, is my question. So when you say virus, I obviously am thinking of something that is inherently detrimental and is killing us. But if we all have viral DNA, is there like a degree to which this is just another just another thing in our body, another cell? Kind of like there's obviously bacteria that doesn't kill us or whatever. Is there, like, a neutral? [01:21:04] Speaker C: Most microorganisms are harmless or even helpful. [01:21:08] Speaker B: Right, okay. [01:21:10] Speaker C: So, yes, there are viruses that don't particularly harm humans. [01:21:15] Speaker B: That had never occurred to me. Okay. There you go. [01:21:20] Speaker C: Bring in the knowledge or something. [01:21:27] Speaker A: Would I be right in saying that what's the purpose of a virus? It's there to reproduce itself. [01:21:35] Speaker C: Well, yeah, but I mean, it doesn't necessarily like, not all viruses can get into human cells. Not all of them make us sick, if that makes sense. Yeah, but they do need a host to reproduce. And the ones that make us sick are the ones that we think about. Right. And the ones we're going to talk about today, because they're the ones that can harm us. Right, but I mean, there's just, like an overwhelming amount of bacteria and viruses on our planet. Like, one of the taglines when you talk about this topic is that when you think in terms of biomass, like the mass of the weight of that type of life, there is more biomass of bacteria on Earth than all the plants and animals combined. That's how much there is. And as for viruses, it's speculated that there's at least 10 million more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the universe. The universe. Not the Milky Way. The universe. [01:22:35] Speaker B: So this stuff is literally out of. [01:22:37] Speaker C: Here all over, like we are carpeted in this microscopic life. [01:22:41] Speaker B: Yeah. Wow. [01:22:43] Speaker A: And let me say that out loud because I'm losing my shit a little bit. There are more different individual types of virus on Earth than there are stars in the universe. Is that what you said? [01:22:59] Speaker B: Yes. [01:23:00] Speaker C: Substantially more? Yes. [01:23:03] Speaker A: I can't handle it. [01:23:05] Speaker C: You just can't see them because they're so tiny. So, yeah, I said most of them are harmless. Some of them are helpful. Honestly, like, life on Earth would not exist in the form that you know, it without just I don't even know how we would be living or alive without them. They do so many things. A really obvious example of them being helpful is what I think you were alluding to, Corey, is the gut microbiome, right? [01:23:30] Speaker B: Right. [01:23:31] Speaker C: Yeah. And I think for a long time we've thought that maybe that helps us with digesting our food. It helps us with making vitamin B twelve, which we need to live. [01:23:44] Speaker B: Right. [01:23:45] Speaker C: But there's more and more research coming out all the time that your microbiome impacts your immune system, it impacts your metabolism. There's a direct connection with your brain. There's the gut brain axis. And we think that your microbes in your intestines are probably impacting mood disorders. [01:24:10] Speaker B: Wow. [01:24:11] Speaker C: It's like the place in your body that makes the most serotonin, I believe, other than your brain. [01:24:16] Speaker A: It's like like cat disease. [01:24:18] Speaker C: What that's toxoplasmosis? [01:24:21] Speaker A: That's the one influencing behavior and choices. [01:24:25] Speaker C: I mean, it might be able to do it through your microbiome, I suppose. I don't actually know the details of toxoplasm how that gets infection. It's not one of the ones I'm talking about today. Right. Just generally, if your gut is not producing enough serotonin and that is part of what affects your mental health, then not great. [01:24:49] Speaker B: It's interesting because that's one of those things that kind of the obviously like the TikTok woo people have gotten a hold of and used to encourage cleanses and detoxes and things like that, right. Oh, that impacts your entire body. And it's interesting that to a degree that is true. [01:25:10] Speaker C: It is. Although we don't really understand it well enough to recommend something like that. And I don't think anyone in their right mind who knows anything about it would recommend a cleanse to anyone. [01:25:20] Speaker B: No, absolutely not. Yeah. Just to be clear, that's not me saying they're right. No dietitian on Earth will tell you to do a cleanse, so don't listen to the TikTok. But I think that's always fascinating. We also did a video on pseudoscience recently, and that one of the things that's so fascinating about it is oftentimes it comes out of a misunderstanding of research like this. Like scientists being like, we think that something going on in that microbiome is doing something to your brain and people taking that and being like, ho ho, well, then I can wash the sad out of my belly by drinking ginger for three weeks or whatever. [01:26:03] Speaker C: That would be nice if that was that. If only it were that simple. [01:26:06] Speaker B: Nothing is that simpler. [01:26:07] Speaker C: We would already know how to do it. [01:26:09] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Anyway, the indigenous people would have figured it out centuries ago if it were that easy. [01:26:14] Speaker C: Indeed. [01:26:15] Speaker A: I'm still struggling with the numbers. [01:26:17] Speaker C: You're probably going to struggle for a while. We've lost work. I hope I can bring you back eventually. Anyway, overall, those microbes in there are doing their most to keep their home, which is us, hospitable and healthy. Right? The short version is we need them, but obviously some microorganisms can cause disease or we wouldn't be talking about this topic at all. And actually, some people have speculated that this is actually an example of like, evolution gone wrong. Because in an ideal world, all those microbes are like archaea, right? They figured out how to coexist with us, which there are archaea in your intestines, by the way. [01:26:55] Speaker A: Okay. [01:26:55] Speaker C: But they don't harm us in any way. Like, that's the goal. That's the best case scenario. [01:27:00] Speaker B: It should be symbiosis, a mutualistic relationship. [01:27:04] Speaker C: Exactly. Good for both. But in these particular microbes, in their evolution, they have evolved so that they actually impact our health negatively, which is actually a bad thing overall for them. But I mean, once you go so far down a certain path, it's kind of hard to correct that even in a simple organism like this is my understanding. [01:27:28] Speaker B: Right. It's not like they're making a decision. [01:27:30] Speaker C: No. [01:27:32] Speaker B: And they are living and thriving, unfortunately. [01:27:35] Speaker C: For us, as we will discuss. I mean, they do lots of stuff in the environment too. Like, obviously everyone is aware that they break down like dead plants and animals and recycle nutrients. Right. [01:27:45] Speaker B: That was the first thing I thought of. Like decomposition. [01:27:47] Speaker C: Exactly. But let's chuck that out. Let's talk about that's. Another whole thing, antimicrobial resistance. So what does that even mean? It means that at one point we had a drug that worked for treating a microorganism that causes disease. And I will kind of regularly call them pathogens, okay? And they have found a way to escape the effects of that drug. The drugs are designed to kill them or keep them from multiplying or growing. And they've figured out how to circumvent that drug and now that treatment doesn't work anymore. [01:28:24] Speaker B: Right. [01:28:25] Speaker C: And this is something microbes are actually great at. Like the whole thing about them, the reason that they're still around, that they're so good at everything is that it's super easy for them to adapt to their environment. And part of that is because their life cycle is really fast. Like their cycle of reproduction is also really fast. Like some bacteria reproduce every twelve minutes, right? It's like twelve minutes to 24 hours. [01:28:48] Speaker B: Ish was I talking about I was just talking about this with someone. I can't remember if it was you or not, Mark, about the video that we used to watch in my 6th grade science class with the dividing bacteria. Maybe not. [01:29:01] Speaker A: We used to watch I've seen something similar. [01:29:04] Speaker B: This was a favorite in my middle school years that our science teacher we would like request that the science teacher put on. And it was like a video in which basically it was like a 3D, early 3D animation just after Toy Story was like, OOH, look what we can do. And it was like someone is walking up to a party and you're kind of watching their hands. It's kind of a first person view, right? And they sneeze into their hand and they touch a doorknob to open it up and all of a sudden it zooms in and you see these little bacteria dividing and going and doing a little dance as they divide as this goes on. And then it's like someone else grabs that doorknob and they go in and they touch a doughnut and then choose a different donut. And then you zoom in and you see the little dividing thing or whatever. Exactly. But that's exactly what I think of when it comes to this stuff. It's like how fast this stuff just divides and then dies or whatever, and then becomes new shit, right? It happens so quickly compared to us. It takes us forever to evolve and change and things like that. [01:30:19] Speaker C: And not necessarily always, but a lot of the changes that occur in these microbes, these pathogens, it's a mutation, and every time they reproduce, there's a chance for a mutation. [01:30:31] Speaker B: And then there's so many and then. [01:30:33] Speaker C: There'S so many of those. It's just like they don't live very long. They produce really quickly. I don't know if it's true. They all don't live very long. I'm not going to think about it. Let's not get caught up in details. [01:30:49] Speaker B: But not the point. [01:30:50] Speaker C: Not the point. [01:30:51] Speaker B: Regardless, they happen fast. [01:30:54] Speaker C: Yeah, they happen fast. Their timeline is very different from ours. So something that takes tens of thousands of years in us, something very simple can happen in a few months. [01:31:05] Speaker A: My God. [01:31:06] Speaker B: Right? [01:31:08] Speaker C: Nuts. Now, I've tried to structure this middle part of this, which is a lot of what I'm going to talk about around a timeline, but it was hard to do. So I'm sorry that I'm jumping around kind of a bit. I'm going to ease you into it a little bit, and then it's not going to be good. [01:31:31] Speaker B: Great. [01:31:32] Speaker C: You can come on this journey with me. Okay. Some fun facts to make you feel better before I talk about this. [01:31:41] Speaker B: Awesome. [01:31:41] Speaker C: There are plenty of examples, like pre modern examples of using microbes or antimicrobial substances. And it's just kind of fun. I'm telling you this just to tell you that it's fun that people discovered this. It is cool that we were able to use these things that we didn't really know were there and to our benefit. I mean, it's just a fun thing. So my example for microbial use is, of course, yeast in baking and fermenting. [01:32:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:32:14] Speaker C: So the first written record or whatever that we have of using yeast to bake comes from ancient Egypt in about 1400 BCE. And for brewing it's like 6000 BCE from Sumeria. [01:32:28] Speaker B: I love that we did that first. [01:32:30] Speaker C: Yeah, I don't actually know what they did exactly. To get yeast into their bread. Like, there are some speculation. [01:32:39] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:32:39] Speaker C: It could be that, like, sourdough, you leave the bread out for a while. It could be they were doing that and like, letting accidentally yes. Or it could be that they were making their bread with beer, which they would have already had the ability to do. And someone just was like, this is a good idea for me today. Wow, look what happened. I don't know. I don't know what happened because I wasn't there. That's what would happen for me. I'd be like, oh, look at this. This is so cool. I wonder if it'll happen again. But I'm a scientist. [01:33:07] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. The scientific minds of the day were like, holy shit, I just did a thing. Can I do that again? [01:33:14] Speaker C: Let's see. So it's just cool that that's been around for so long. And then there's a whole bunch of evidence. Some of it's, like, written down in text, some of it's somewhat anecdotal about. People using antimicrobials in pre modern medicine. And the one study I found that I like the best is they found a surprising amount of an antibiotic we still use today called tetracycline in the bones of Nubian skeletons. So Nubia would have been around modern day Sudan, and they basically dissolved the bones and chemically analyzed them to find this antibiotic. And then they were like, that's weird. Why did they have so much antibiotic deposited in their bones? And just before you ask, this doesn't happen with other types of antibiotics, so it's not like you can just look in other boats. I was wondering, oh, I wonder if they were using penicillin. It doesn't do the same thing. [01:34:09] Speaker A: Okay. Where would that have been naturally sourced? Would that have been in a plant? Is it an algae? [01:34:15] Speaker C: So the hypothesis that I read about is they were storing their grain in mud bins. And so the mud bins would have contained streptomyces, which is the soil bacteria that produces tetracycline. So they may not have understood, like, oh, there's a microbe in here, but they might have known, and they might have even just thought it was the grain. Like this grain, right? [01:34:39] Speaker B: Yeah. This grain makes us feel better. [01:34:41] Speaker C: Makes us feel better. So we're going to eat it all the time. They also actually thought that maybe they were brewing it into, like, an alcoholic beverage, like beer. [01:34:50] Speaker B: Sure. [01:34:50] Speaker C: Which would have upped probably the dose that they were getting. And they think it was very intentional because they even found this tetracycline in the bones of a skeleton they thought came from about a four year old child. Wow. They speculated they probably had an infection and they were trying to treat it with this beer or I don't know. [01:35:13] Speaker B: Yeah. Because obviously it wasn't like they were just getting the kid drunk. No, hopefully not an intentional intentionally giving a kid this dose of something. [01:35:22] Speaker C: Exactly. And I just thought that was super cool. This would have been about 1700 years ago, by the way. [01:35:28] Speaker B: Wow. [01:35:29] Speaker C: And then there's a lot more evidence about people using mold. So mold is where you get penicillin from. So there's evidence that was used in ancient Egypt from, like, papyrus and stuff that we found. Moldy jam was used in rural Quebec, moldy bread in Kansas, in the US. And in Devon, in the UK, and possibly a lot of other places. But I couldn't find a source, so I didn't put it in here. A moldy paste of chewed barley and apple was common in Central Asia. There's references to using moldy corn soaked in water or date wine. In the Talmud, which is a Jewish text, there was an apothecary named John Parkinson who wrote a book on pharmacology in the mid 16 hundreds, and he talks about mold being useful for treating infections. So even though we didn't know why all of these people in all of these different cultures around the world are aware that there is some anti infective. [01:36:23] Speaker A: Property to that is so fucking cool. [01:36:26] Speaker C: Super cool. [01:36:27] Speaker A: Just an idea arriving in just different cultures, different parts of the planet, completely disconnected from one another. But everybody just realizing. [01:36:37] Speaker B: I know that we have that kind of thing here, too, with the increased mather and the smallpox inoculations right. Which he had taken from indigenous people who had figured out that, hey, you can put a little bit of virus into somebody and they get better. I think that's so fascinating that yeah. Without knowing why without being able to describe this scientifically, people figured out that it worked. Shit worked. [01:37:04] Speaker A: Cause and effect. [01:37:05] Speaker C: I would love to know who the first person was in each of these cultures to just shove more than an open wound. [01:37:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm just like, well, let's see. [01:37:13] Speaker C: Yeah. Was it on purpose? [01:37:16] Speaker B: That's the thing. I always assume that everything must have initially been accidental. Right. Someone ingests something. There's the thing that we always, like we have a ton of I think it's the u that's in our backyard. We have, like, u trees and u bushes, which are hugely and, like, every part of it is poisonous. Except for the little fleshy bit on it, which my dear husband, before he knew that everything on the East Coast can kill you, ate. And he came in and told me this, and I was like, what are you doing? We don't eat here. That's not what you do. Luckily, ate the only part of the U that isn't poisonous, but he talks about how, like, the I think it's the u it's either the U or the poke, but the leaves you can boil three times into a tea, and they are no longer poisonous. And it's like, who was like, okay, I tried it, and that killed me. And then I boiled it, and that still killed people. I boiled it twice. That still killed people. Three times. Let's try three times and see what happens. How do people stumble upon this stuff? It's just incredible to me. [01:38:28] Speaker C: It's very fascinating. [01:38:29] Speaker B: Humans. [01:38:30] Speaker C: Yeah, humans, right? [01:38:32] Speaker B: Yeah. Anyways, go on. [01:38:34] Speaker C: Yes. I thought of something while you were talking, and now I forget what it is. [01:38:40] Speaker B: You trees poisonous stuff. [01:38:42] Speaker C: You shouldn't I was just going to. [01:38:43] Speaker A: Tell you that a stuffing mold in. [01:38:44] Speaker C: Prizing amount, including something I'm going to talk about today, of findings in science are accidental, so I wouldn't be surprised. Yeah, that was all I wanted to say. I can't hold things in my brain for very long. Sometimes just well, you're in good company. [01:38:57] Speaker A: Very much so. [01:38:58] Speaker C: That's why I have extensive notes. Okay. There's also antimicrobial properties to certain plants, so I'm thinking about, like, Indian and Chinese herbalists who have been using plants for medicinal purposes. The one paper I looked at on this had a lot of plants in it that I didn't recognize. The only one I did was a dandelion. So that's the only one I'm going to talk to you about, because I can pronounce the word. [01:39:21] Speaker B: Very familiar with dandelions. Yes. [01:39:23] Speaker C: Particularly the roots apparently have some antimicrobial properties. So just cool. We don't have any idea what we're doing, but we're struggling through the human condition. [01:39:33] Speaker B: Yes. Right. [01:39:35] Speaker C: Okay. So let's jump forward on my timeline here until my timeline falls apart and I stop telling you about it. So, 1674, we get. The first guy that we know of, looks through a microscope and is able to visualize microbial life. And I love this guy. He must have been such a weirdo. His name is Anthony Van Levenhook. He was a Dutch cloth merchant's apprentice. So from what I read, he was introduced to magnifying glasses, which were used to assess thread count. And then he just, over time, became some sort of microscope hobbyist. And he built all these little miniature microscopes. They were about two inches tall. The frame was like copper or silver. And then he crafted his own lenses, and his lenses were better than anyone else's at the time. [01:40:25] Speaker B: Time. [01:40:26] Speaker C: And he wouldn't tell anyone how he's an OG buffin. [01:40:28] Speaker B: Right, yeah. [01:40:30] Speaker C: And he had no formal training, by the way. He was not a scientist by training, but definitely a scientist by at heart. Like, this guy is great. So he makes these microscopes. They're apparently difficult to use. He won't tell anyone how to use them, which is fantastic. It's still a little bit of a mystery. Most of his microscopes are gone, lost to the ether. [01:40:52] Speaker B: Sure. [01:40:52] Speaker C: But they were able to magnify up to 275 times, which is wild. Just for scale. I've been working in a lab for pretty much my whole adult life, and I've never worked in a lab that had a microscope that did more than 100 times what's common even now, unless you're that's incredible. Studying the structure of bacteria, you don't need something that detailed. So even most of the work I do is at, like, 20 x or 40 x. So magnified 20 times or 40 times, 275 times. [01:41:28] Speaker B: That's wild. [01:41:28] Speaker C: In 1674. What a guy. Incredible. [01:41:31] Speaker A: Where was he from? [01:41:32] Speaker C: Where was this? [01:41:33] Speaker B: Denmark? Yeah, he was Dutch. [01:41:35] Speaker A: Okay. [01:41:35] Speaker B: Oh, Dutch. That was the Netherlands, right? Is that where Dutch people are from? Yes. [01:41:40] Speaker C: Okay. Yeah. [01:41:43] Speaker B: I thought you said Danish in the beginning, and then you said Dutch. [01:41:46] Speaker C: My bad. That's okay. I have said a lot of things already, and there's so much more to say. All right, so apparently this guy just went around grabbing samples from his environment. So, like, he was looking at pond water, he was looking at scrapings from his own teeth. He literally had, like, a diarrheal disease and went, I should look what's in this? [01:42:07] Speaker A: Hey, when life gives you lemons. [01:42:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a boy scientist right there. [01:42:13] Speaker C: And as such, I think he was the first person to see protozoa, bacteria and yeast. Although I don't know if he I didn't read enough to know if he actually, like, if we had even differentiated or, like, he just saw small lights, and he did make drawings of them. So the first visual representation that we have of bacteria was from 1683, and it's this guy's drawings nice. Of what he saw through his microscope. It's pretty cool. He also called them animal cules, which is friggin adorable. [01:42:42] Speaker B: It's really cute. [01:42:43] Speaker A: Doll. [01:42:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I love that. [01:42:46] Speaker C: So cute. Okay, now we're going to fast forward to the mid to late 18 hundreds. Obviously, this timeline is not exhaustive. I'm telling you things I think are relevant. So this is around the time that we get germ theory, so that's when we start to realize, oh, these microorganisms that we've been finding and studying, they're actually able to cause disease in humans. That's what's causing XYZ diseases. And I will no way cover all the people that contributed to germ theory, because it's way too many. But a name you might know is Louis Pester, the milk guy. He did a lot of other stuff, too, actually. He showed us that fermentation of alcohol is caused by microorganisms. He was involved in making the first rabies vaccine even though we didn't really know what viruses were yet. [01:43:39] Speaker B: Kind of like the small thing, honestly, like, one of the most important people in terms of human longevity, who exists because pasteurization changed the game. That basically took lifespans from being incredibly short, especially, like, people dying as children into people living into adulthood much more regularly than they did. [01:44:03] Speaker A: Was that where it all started to go wrong? [01:44:06] Speaker B: That's the question. [01:44:09] Speaker C: No, actually, I don't think so. No, I wouldn't say that that contributes to resistance, at least not that I read. [01:44:18] Speaker B: But perhaps philosophically, that's where maybe go wrong. Maybe where we start to think of ourselves as people who can live longer. [01:44:25] Speaker C: Yeah, maybe that's true. [01:44:27] Speaker B: She's not here to explain philosophy to us. [01:44:30] Speaker C: That's true. I don't think you want me to start going into my opinions. [01:44:34] Speaker B: Just facts. [01:44:36] Speaker C: Okay. All right. So notably, by the way, the first virus wasn't discovered until the 1890s. I've just peppered information into my timeline randomly. [01:44:46] Speaker B: Hey, love it. [01:44:47] Speaker A: Great. [01:44:47] Speaker C: And at that point, we still couldn't visualize them. So the way that they were discovered the first viruses that we discovered were in plants, and people were studying, like, their SAP, and they were, like, filtering the SAP because they thought that bacteria was causing the disease, and then the SAP could still cause disease after they filtered it, and it's because the filter was too big to catch the virus. Viruses are very small. Right. So there's that info. And then we weren't able to see the first virus until the electron microscope was invented in, like, the 1930s ish. So I'm not actually sure who visualized the first virus, but we weren't able to study them in that capacity until at least after the 1930s. [01:45:34] Speaker B: Right. [01:45:35] Speaker C: All right. 19 nine the first synthetic antibiotic is discovered. I almost didn't include this because some people who talk about antibiotic resistance don't, partially, I think, because it's not really used anymore and it didn't make as much of an impact as penicillin, which I'm going to talk about next. But I wanted to talk about it because the guy who discovered it, the drug is called savarsan. Savarsan? I don't know. His name is Paul Ehrlich, and the reason that he's interesting is he was one of the first people to try and target microorganisms. That's the whole thing in the field of antimicrobial drugs is you're trying to target the microbe and not human cells. And in some cases that can be easy because human cells don't have the same like, they have a cell membrane, but they don't have a cell wall. Bacteria have a proper they need to be rigid and so the properties are different. So it's pretty easy, or was at one time easy to find ways to target bacteria that didn't target human cells. [01:46:38] Speaker B: Right. [01:46:40] Speaker C: Things like fungi are a little harder because they're also eukaryotes and there's less differences in those cells to ours. Does that make sense? [01:46:49] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. Just as a side question, and you don't necessarily have to know the answer to this, but I'm just thinking, like, is that so viruses have a slightly different structure to these other microbes that were yes, microbes as well. And I know that one of the reasons why it matters that you have a high white blood cell count and stuff like that when you have cancer is because of the attacking of the cells and that the chemo or whatever attacks shit that might not just get your bad cells but also the stuff that's keeping you alive and that you need. [01:47:31] Speaker A: It's taking all. [01:47:33] Speaker B: Is that like a similar principle or is that a totally different thing altogether? Again, you don't have to know this. [01:47:39] Speaker C: Huge can of worms. Okay, so chemotherapy, they try to target it, right. It's not very easy to do. And that is why most of the things are not targeted. Viruses also kind of difficult to target, again, because they don't even have a cell wall. [01:48:04] Speaker B: Right. Candy coating. [01:48:06] Speaker C: Candy coating, that's right. This isn't directly answering your question, but there's actually evidence out there that some viruses may cause cancer and other microbes. I wondered, and so it's like a whole huge thing that I am probably not equipped to appropriately answer. [01:48:23] Speaker B: Fair enough. Yeah, that's fine. I was just wondering if that was like an off the top of your head thing. You knew whether those are connected concepts, but they are connected. [01:48:32] Speaker C: Fair enough. Can I articulate it for you as well? Probably not. [01:48:38] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough. [01:48:39] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:48:40] Speaker B: I will let you move on from that question. [01:48:42] Speaker C: No problem. Okay, so then the next stop on my timeline is 1928. That's when penicillin is discovered by Alexander. [01:48:51] Speaker B: Fleming Year, my grandmother was born. [01:48:53] Speaker C: Oh, yeah, that's exciting. [01:48:55] Speaker B: My grandma and penicillin. Great contributions to the world. [01:48:58] Speaker C: Absolutely. So the deal with penicillin is that it was a completely accidental discovery. Completely accidental. Basically, Alexander Fleming was a bacteriologist. And so what he was doing is he was growing up bacteria and petri dishes, and apparently he or someone in his lab, I don't know, forgot to put the lid on the culture plate and left it there. Came back and they found mold on their culture plate that had contaminated it. And I can tell you from working in a lab, this is 100% not the first time this happened. It's, like, so easy to contaminate your culture from everything. [01:49:38] Speaker B: I even remember doing that as, like a test when I was in middle school, just kind of leaving the petri dish out and seeing what happens, what you end up with on it. Yeah, I can see that. [01:49:47] Speaker C: Yeah, absolutely. [01:49:48] Speaker A: And kind of high speed decay videos are fascinating. Just watching stuff, just watching nature. Just rot stuff. Yeah. [01:49:58] Speaker C: Fun to see what shows up. But yeah, I don't know, I'm guessing this is just the first person to really look at it and be like instead of just being like, oh, crap, my experiment's ruined, he goes, Wait a second. And he notices that this mold, like, around the mold, there's no bacteria, and he goes, Suspicious. And so he decided to try and isolate that mold and grow that up in culture. And he called it mold juice, which I like. [01:50:30] Speaker B: I love the way these early scientists named things. [01:50:34] Speaker C: Me too. And penicillin is penicillin because the mold is called penicillum, by the way. Nothing fancy there. But anyway, sure, he isolates the mold, he grows it up, and he basically tries to use it to kill other types of bacteria and finds that it is working, like, on some of them, anyway. And this mold is the same mold that grows on moldy bread, by the way. Like, it's the same type. So all those people definitely onto something. The thing about Alexander Fleming is he was a bacteriologist. He wasn't really equipped in his lab to isolate penicillin to medical standards. So some scientists at Oxford University are the ones who did that, and they had the first injectable form of purified penicillin in 1941. If you were listening to Corey's Cold Open last week, you will know that penicillin was on the market for part of World War II and actually made a very nice, rather massive impact there. War injuries, infections and the like. [01:51:42] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:51:43] Speaker C: So Fleming and his colleagues, they received the Nobel Prize in 1945 for their research on penicillin. And in case you are wondering or thinking this is a new thing, it is not. Fleming cautioned against antibiotic resistance in his Nobel lecture in 1945. [01:51:58] Speaker B: Always how it happens, isn't it? Like immediately out the gate. There's always a scientist who's like, just FYI, there's probably this thing we should think about with this? Everyone's like? Yeah. Cool. Totally. [01:52:10] Speaker C: Yes. This is exactly what happened. He basically was like, yeah, I'm seeing this happen in my lab already. For your remembrance, 1928 to 1945. And he's already seeing resistance to penicillin in his lab, mainly from Staph, I think. So that's fun. We'll talk about that in a little bit. [01:52:26] Speaker B: Like Staph as an Staph. [01:52:28] Speaker C: Yes. Okay, we'll get there. [01:52:31] Speaker B: A thing that does terrify me. [01:52:36] Speaker C: Yeah. So in his speech, he said, it is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory, quote, unquote great. By exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them. The same thing has occasionally happened in the body, and the time may come when penicillin can be bought by anyone in the shops. Then there is danger that the ignorant man may easily underdose himself and by exposing his microbes to non lethal quantities of the drug, make them resistant. [01:53:06] Speaker A: Finish the course. [01:53:11] Speaker C: This was a Nobel lecture, so it's not like people didn't hear, yeah, this. [01:53:15] Speaker B: Isn'T underground information or anything like that. [01:53:20] Speaker A: Holy shit. [01:53:21] Speaker C: And in case you're wondering, the way that penicillin typically works is it causes bacteria to weaken its own cell wall and then prevents repair. So it works in two ways, and it does that by producing or causing the bacteria to produce enzymes that do that. And then weakened cell walls mean that eventually stuff that's not supposed to get into the cell, water, et cetera, gets in there, it swells up like a balloon. And that's all she wrote. That's how it's supposed to work anyway, right? [01:53:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:53:54] Speaker C: And that means that it is bacteriocital, which means it outright kills the bacteria. You also have and I mentioned this at the very beginning, you have, like, antimicrobial things that are microbestatic, which means it just stops it from growing or reproducing, and then your body kind of takes over the rest of the clearing of that. All right, so around the same time, in roughly 1950 ish the first antifungal drug was also discovered. And it was these two women, NYU, I think, maybe NYU and an Albany. Is there an Albany campus? [01:54:37] Speaker B: Probably? [01:54:38] Speaker C: We'll say there is, basically. [01:54:40] Speaker B: I would imagine they were mailing samples. [01:54:43] Speaker C: Back and forth, and it just cracks me up. Scientists are so great. So Elizabeth Hazen was collecting soil samples, testing them to see if they were anti fungal, and then she didn't have the skills to purify it. So if she thought there was, like, a good candidate, she would send it to her friend Rachel Brown in the mail through the post office. Amazing. And then Brown would purify it and send that purified sample back. And they discovered Nystatin, which was the first antifungal. And it's produced from Streptomyces as well, by the way. Good old streptomyces, old faithful. And it was a big deal because fungal infections were increasing. And guess why? Gosh, because people are using antibiotics. [01:55:32] Speaker B: Of course. [01:55:35] Speaker C: They demonstrated this in their research that antibiotic use was a direct contributor to the increase in fungal disease, particularly candida infections. Which makes sense. Like, this happens a lot in medicine now, where you treat a bacterial disease with an antibiotic and then you get overgrowth of yeast. [01:55:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, people take antibiotics and they get yeast infections all the time. I had no idea that was why. [01:56:04] Speaker C: So by the late 1940s, around the same time this fungal drug, antifungal drug, is being discovered, we're already seeing epidemics of antibiotic resistant bacterial in hospitals. [01:56:15] Speaker B: Wow. [01:56:16] Speaker C: Specifically penicillin resistant staphylococcus aureus. Basically, the Staph Staph bacteria PH started producing an enzyme that blocked the activity of penicillin, and in some cases no longer even had receptors for penicillin, which means it's really hard for the penicillin to get inside the cell and have an effect. So scientists are like, okay, what can we do about this? And they make a generation of semisynthetic penicillinase resistant penicillins. I cannot read or talk, I apologize. Basically, second generation. [01:56:52] Speaker B: I mean, it's not the easiest thing to say. [01:56:54] Speaker A: No. [01:56:54] Speaker C: Second generation penicillins. And they're kind of like penicillin, but they've been modified so that the Staph enzyme doesn't block their activity. Does that make sense? [01:57:06] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. [01:57:07] Speaker C: So they're not quite as effective as natural penicillins, and they have some unpleasant side effects, like liver toxicity, but they get the job done. In 1959 when they're introduced methicillin, as. [01:57:23] Speaker A: We'Ve said, our kind of rate of adapting to viral mutations is ridiculously slower than viruses can adapt and mutate themselves. [01:57:32] Speaker C: You have no idea. So in 1959, this methicillin is introduced. By 1961, you have methicillin resistant Staphylococcusarius, which is MRSA or M RSA in the UK, within two years across Europe, Japan, Australia and the US. And today, MRSA is resistant to almost all antibiotics, becoming more resistant to vancomycin, which is considered the antibiotic of last resort in this case, which is why. [01:58:05] Speaker B: My father in law lost his leg, because there's nothing they could do about the MRSA. [01:58:09] Speaker C: Very common. I actually read that 85% of Immersa infections are acquired in healthcare associated settings related to that, I think. I don't remember exactly what happened with your father in law, but this happens to people who, when they go in for surgery, when you have any sort of invasive device. So like a urinary catheter, a port for blood drops. [01:58:35] Speaker A: It was big news over here for some reason a few years back. MRSA in hospitals. It seems to have dropped off the radar now, but it was talked about a lot here recently. [01:58:47] Speaker B: Interesting. Eileen's like yep. [01:58:51] Speaker C: Yeah, it's not good anyway. I mean, I'm not even going to talk tons about MRSA today. It's just a really big bad one. Anyway. Okay, so it's generally was accepted that the introduction of methicillin caused MRSA. Which makes sense, right? [01:59:04] Speaker B: I mean, yes, but that's horrifying, but. [01:59:06] Speaker C: It'S not what caused it. Probably. I read a different paper. [01:59:10] Speaker B: Okay. [01:59:10] Speaker C: That's frankly more disturbing. Okay, great. [01:59:14] Speaker B: I thought you were going to give me something better than that, but yeah, go on. [01:59:16] Speaker C: No, but it's bad. It's always worse. Okay, so the gene in Staphylococcus aureus that encodes penicillin resistance is called Blasey, and the gene that encodes for methicillin resistance is called mechae. I don't know why. That's just what they call them. [01:59:32] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough. [01:59:33] Speaker C: By studying frozen Mrs samples, these researchers found that mecha was actually present in some of the staph samples before the introduction of methicillin. They pointed out that mecha can actually encode for penicillin resistance with a different mechanism than what Blase does, which means that staph that had both of those genes would actually have two mechanisms of resistance to, like, regular penicillin. [01:59:59] Speaker B: Right. [02:00:00] Speaker C: So the hypothesis here then, is purely incidentally. This bacteria developed resistance to one antibiotic that happened to also confer resistance to an antibiotic we hadn't even made yet. So that when we put it on the market, that resistance gene was already in the population. Anyone who had that mecha gene in the bacteria in their infection, it would have not been killed off by methicillin. It would have overgrown. And then that's why within two years, methicillin is basically caput, doesn't do much of anything. [02:00:40] Speaker B: Wow. [02:00:41] Speaker C: It's horrifying. Yeah. [02:00:43] Speaker B: Jesus Christ. Oh, man. I think yeah, within two years. This is what's so wild is obviously you started this talking about is that these cells and all this stuff reproduces really quickly. Right. All these microbes reproduce really quickly. But you don't think we created a new problem. It's like that good place, Meme, where it's like, oh, when I do this one thing, it ends up creating a whole new problem. Like, oh, we were, like, trying to fight one thing, and that was all good and well, except that it made it so that this was worse. [02:01:21] Speaker C: Absolutely. [02:01:21] Speaker B: And it happened super fast. Not over the course of decades or things like that. [02:01:27] Speaker A: And future proofed itself. [02:01:29] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [02:01:30] Speaker C: And of course not even intentionally. Just like Corey mentioned. [02:01:32] Speaker B: Right. They're not thinking about it. It just happens. Crazy. [02:01:39] Speaker C: Okay, I'm going to talk about this more a little bit later, but it's worth mentioning while I'm roughly in this part of the timeline, that the late 1940s is also when antibiotic use starts happening in livestock production, I'm sure that's a great idea and it won't come back to bite us anyway, right? [02:01:55] Speaker B: That's absolutely the last put it in the food chain. [02:01:57] Speaker C: Yeah. What could go wrong? All right. And this is possibly why people were not taking Alexander Fleming the most seriously from, like, the 1940s, late 1940s through about 1970 ish you get what is termed the golden age of antibiotics. And what that means is we were just finding a lot of new ones. And so I think people were just, like, not concerned. They were like, oh, but there's so many out there. Every time we turn around, there's a new class found and everything is going to be fine. Everything is magical. Penicillin is magical. [02:02:30] Speaker B: That was such the attitude towards medicine at that time, too, which is why you end up with things like thalidomide and whatnot. Anyway, it was just like, oh, look what a miracle we have right here. Yeah, I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong. [02:02:42] Speaker C: Exactly. Also during that period, we got the first antiviral drug, if you're interested, 1962, used for viral eye infections. Fun times. All right, we have to talk about it. Let's talk about the use of antibiotics in livestock, because it's just a huge reason why we have this problem. All right, I'm going to read you a few sentences from an abstract from a paper called changes in Intestinal Flora of Farm Personnel after Introduction to Tetracycline Supplemented Feed on a Farm, published in 1976 by a guy named Stuart Levy and his colleagues. So tetracycline showing up again. All right. Chickens were fed tetracycline supplemented feed. They called it tet feed. And as expected, within one week, their intestinal flora contained almost entirely tetracycline resistant organisms. Within a week, one week, increased numbers of resistant intestinal bacteria also appeared, but more slowly in farm members, but not their neighbors. Within five to six months, 31.3% of weekly fecal samples from farm dwellers contained greater than 80% tetracycline resistant bacteria, as compared to 6.8% of the samples from the neighbors. [02:04:10] Speaker B: Dude. [02:04:11] Speaker C: So a third of those fecal samples had more than 80% tetracycline resistant bacteria. From the people who lived on this farm. It was just a family, two parents, nine kids, and then the neighbor. [02:04:22] Speaker A: Were they eating the chickens? [02:04:24] Speaker C: What? [02:04:25] Speaker A: Were they eating the chickens? [02:04:27] Speaker C: I don't know if they were eating the chickens, they were eating the eggs. They did say that that did not have any impact, though, on people ate the eggs who were not the sparm family and did not have any change. [02:04:40] Speaker A: Do the same thing, which is even more terrifying. [02:04:43] Speaker C: It is a bit. [02:04:44] Speaker B: So it was just by being in proximity or like what most so they. [02:04:48] Speaker C: Think that it was possibly because the people working on the farm were actually in contact with the feed. [02:04:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:04:58] Speaker C: And then just like the environment, like chickens poop all over, hand to mouth. [02:05:04] Speaker B: There'S any number of ways that you could entry vaccine. Yeah. [02:05:10] Speaker C: I don't think they tried to state for sure or anything that they said that the transfer of resistant organisms from the chickens to people may have happened, but they couldn't definitively say that from the study that they did. Right, but they did specifically say eating eggs from the pet feed chickens did not impact intestinal flora. So that's good, I guess. Maybe. Or worse. I'm not sure. [02:05:37] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. I feel like that you don't have to ingest something specifically. [02:05:43] Speaker A: That's the bit that's concerning me disturbing, just being around it. [02:05:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:05:49] Speaker C: And then for the neighbors, they were. About within 5 miles of the farm. And they didn't have any direct contact with the chickens, any of the feed, and that's why they were the control group. So some of them did have tetracycline resistant bacteria. And the researchers was like, well, I don't know what their health care has been like. It's possible they had tetracycline for a medical indication or who knows where they got it from, but much more in this family. Bonkers it gets worse. After two months on Pet feed, 20% of the bacteria from these chickens is showing resistance to antibiotics they are not taking, like amphicillin and Streptomycin. [02:06:33] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [02:06:34] Speaker C: They're only exposed to tetracycline, but they're developing multi drug resistance within two months. [02:06:44] Speaker A: Future proofing. [02:06:45] Speaker B: Yeah, they're future proofing themselves. This is like you said, Mark, it's life finds a way. Right? Like, you're giving them one thing and the bacteria or whatever, the microbes are protecting themselves. [02:07:01] Speaker C: I have that in my note a couple of places. Life finds a way. What you'd call the episode, anyway. [02:07:07] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you're right. [02:07:08] Speaker A: I prefer it gets worse. [02:07:12] Speaker B: Right? It's a toss up. [02:07:14] Speaker C: Yeah. [02:07:15] Speaker B: Okay. Go on, tell us more. [02:07:16] Speaker C: Okay. Not only that, within the period examined, so within six months, 36% of the bacteria from the farm family also showed multidrug resistance. [02:07:28] Speaker B: My God. [02:07:29] Speaker C: Only 6% in the neighbors. [02:07:32] Speaker B: Wow. [02:07:34] Speaker C: Amazing. [02:07:37] Speaker A: If you don't have an answer to this, that's absolutely cool. Does the resistance decrease over time or is it once you're resistant? Fucking forget it. The antibiotics have no use. [02:07:48] Speaker C: It can, because if you don't have exposure to something, it might not necessarily benefit the bacteria, but it isn't like a given. Does that make sense? Yeah, it is, but it can, right? [02:08:06] Speaker B: Because basically the point is for it to be able to reproduce and have a host or whatever, things like that. So if you're not being potentially there could be reasons why it would not be beneficial to stick around in a host that is not consistently exposed. [02:08:20] Speaker C: And to be fair, the bacteria that they're looking at in these intestines are not necessarily harmful bacteria, they're just normal microbiome bacteria. But the point is, it can happen. And it can happen in the ones that cause us problems. If it can happen in the ones that don't. Great. So, despite this study and several others to follow, the FDA didn't issue any real statement or guidance on antibiotic use in livestock until 2013. [02:08:48] Speaker B: Joyous and this was 1976 that this. [02:08:52] Speaker C: Yes, they were intending to do something about it, basically. They were intending it was unlabeled antibiotics. [02:09:01] Speaker A: Oh, mate, I intend to do a bunch of stuff. [02:09:03] Speaker C: Yeah, no, it's great. You're going to love it. It's really full circle right here. They were going to label antibiotics as unacceptable for use in livestock in 1977. And this is a quote from an article from Grist with an amazing name. And I really am just doing this so I can say the name EiE. Decades of antibiotics in farm animals lead to deadly superb. [02:09:26] Speaker A: Take a fucking bow. [02:09:31] Speaker C: They said. [02:09:31] Speaker B: It's good to have a sense of humor around. [02:09:36] Speaker C: The proposal drew howls of outrage from two of the most powerful lobbying groups in Washington, agribusiness and drug Course. [02:09:45] Speaker B: Of course, it's the lobbyists. [02:09:47] Speaker C: Both the House and Senate ordered the FDA to, quote, unquote, hold in abeyance any and all implementation of the proposal until further studies had been conducted. [02:09:59] Speaker A: Burn it down, man. Just burn it all. [02:10:01] Speaker C: Capitalism is the big bad yet again. [02:10:03] Speaker A: Start again. Burn it down. [02:10:05] Speaker B: It's so predictable every time. Whether it's climate change, whether it's drugs, whatever the case may be, it is always a lobby that's like, I don't know, all the facts aren't in. We paid two scientists to say that actually this might not be the case, and then the rest of us suffer forever. [02:10:26] Speaker A: I haven't met that character before. I quite like that guy. [02:10:30] Speaker B: There should be more pushing up the glasses of the nose. But it's so frustrating that every time it comes down to these things, we always knew 50 years ago that this shit would come to bite us. And there is always some lobby that goes to the government and is like, I don't know if we have the facts. And they're like, okay, well, if you say so. And then we're fucked. [02:10:53] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, you got it. The overall takeaway is antibiotic use in livestock. And also pets, by the way, is kind of bad news bears for them as well as us. Any chance in pets? Well, yeah, pets is just before my. [02:11:11] Speaker B: Dog had to have surgery or whatever, and it turned out to be a different thing. He would get, like, urinary tract infections. They would give him, like, penicillin or whatever, or whatever. Antibiotic. [02:11:21] Speaker A: If they know it's not giving you. [02:11:23] Speaker C: That he has a bacterial infection, then they should, like they should give it to him because the benefits outweigh the risks. But if you're not sure and you're just prescribing it, that's another thing. Does that make sense? [02:11:36] Speaker B: Which is probably what they did, because it turned out he had a bladder stone. [02:11:40] Speaker C: Yeah. Okay. So, yeah, that's not great. [02:11:42] Speaker B: Not great. Okay. Interesting. [02:11:45] Speaker C: Any use of an antimicrobial drug when you don't actually have a microbe, like a pathogen causing you a disease, is just a chance for anything. You do have to develop resistance. I mean, it's a chance for them to develop resistance if you're sick, too, but at least it's healing. Do you know what I'm saying? [02:12:02] Speaker B: Right, yeah, exactly. [02:12:03] Speaker A: That would be like, responsible use short termism, isn't it? It's extending that little fucking blink between the darkness. That's what it is. [02:12:14] Speaker B: Fucking A. Okay, go on, go on, go on. [02:12:16] Speaker C: All right. [02:12:16] Speaker B: Just processing I hesitate. [02:12:18] Speaker A: We're doing a lot I'm processing the philosophical implications here. [02:12:22] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:12:23] Speaker C: I'm not even going to try to go into it, but antibiotics on fish farms. Also a problem continuing on. I don't even know if I should. [02:12:31] Speaker A: Tell you, fuck you giving fish antibiotics. [02:12:34] Speaker B: We're not going to go there, Mark. We're not going to go there. [02:12:37] Speaker C: They'll put it in their water or they'll inject it directly as a way to prevent disease because the conditions are not ideal. [02:12:44] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that comes down to how our factory farming works here in general, too. [02:12:47] Speaker C: Right. [02:12:48] Speaker B: Everything is just injected with antibiotics. Clean. [02:12:52] Speaker C: Exactly. That's why all this preventative use of antibiotics and livestock is happening. It's not great. It's not just us. There's a lot of people around the world doing it. That makes it worse. [02:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:13:03] Speaker C: And for what it's worth, the livestock number like, three times more than the more than the population of humans worldwide. So a lot of the antibiotics being used in the world are being used in animals. And I'm not going to give you a statistic because I feel like the statistics are difficult to understand and don't mean a lot because you don't dose a chicken with the same amount of antibiotic as you do a human or a cow. [02:13:28] Speaker B: Right. [02:13:28] Speaker C: So even if you're injecting a bunch of antibiotic into chickens and there's 9 billion of them, I don't know how many chickens there are in the world. There's a lot of chickens that much, like, they're getting a relatively low dose. So how do you compare that to humans? I don't know. There are statistics out there, but I'm not sure I know how to interpret them. Just there's a lot of antibiotic use in livestock. Not good. And there's precedent for antimicrobial resistance to spread between animals and humans, and I'm not going to go into that a lot as well. But they found, like, strains of MRSA in pigs that they previously only found in humans and vice versa. Whatever. Another can of worms. It's kind of hard to know how bad that situation is, too, because we really don't monitor it. [02:14:13] Speaker B: Well, of course, right. If you don't look at it, it's not a real thing. [02:14:18] Speaker C: Okay, so the last new class of antibiotic was released on the market in 1987. We have not found a single new class since that time. Not one. Nada. Nothing. Niente. We are in what is called the Discovery Void. We have been in the Discovery Void for 36 years. [02:14:37] Speaker B: I think that's the name of the episode, the Discovery Void. [02:14:40] Speaker C: Fuck. [02:14:41] Speaker A: So many potential zingers. [02:14:44] Speaker B: Okay, so for 36 years, bupgus. [02:14:49] Speaker C: Not one new thing. It's not like people aren't looking for them. It's just like all that they found that we've been able to put on the market is maybe a slightly altered version of something we are already exists. [02:15:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:15:02] Speaker C: So there's only limited use for those types of things. Entirely new antibiotics, like when they were being discovered in the Golden Age were like, just a huge deal. Super awesome. Like, oh, wow, we don't care about penicillin resistance. Because, look, we found XYZ. [02:15:20] Speaker B: Here's another thing. [02:15:20] Speaker C: Here's another thing. [02:15:21] Speaker B: Here's another thing. [02:15:22] Speaker C: You get an antibiotic. You get an antibiotic. Antibiotics for everyone. And that's how we ended up where we are today anyway, right? So, yeah, if you count penicillin as when we started using modern antibiotics, we've only been using them for 82 years, and for 36 of those, we have made effectively no progress. Marvelous. I love that for us. [02:15:41] Speaker B: Wow. Jesus Christ. [02:15:45] Speaker C: If you're interested in the timeline of antiviral, think well, I don't know if I should even speak to this because I didn't look up enough of it, but I don't think we have as many because as I told you, it's kind of hard to make an antiviral drug because of their structure. It's just really difficult to do. But we do have some and it hasn't been quite the same, but the little timeline I'm looking at, and I don't know how exhaustive they were, they have like a new class being discovered in 1999 and then nothing until the anti COVID drugs basically in 2020. So that's cool. [02:16:19] Speaker B: Wow. [02:16:20] Speaker C: Is there anything else out there? I didn't do my due diligence, but they didn't think it was important enough to put it on this. [02:16:27] Speaker B: Right, yeah, exactly. [02:16:28] Speaker C: So cool. And then again, 1970s and 1990s, there was like new antifungals and stuff, and then maybe another one developed in the early two thousand s. And then. [02:16:44] Speaker B: Wow. [02:16:45] Speaker C: There's a paper I read from 2020 saying there are some new drugs in the pipeline, but nothing is on the market. The only way you would get any of those therapies is if it was like, in a trial, like a clinical trial. And that means that safety is not 100% established and whatever. All right. And I have not really talked about protozoa, but we discovered several drugs roughly 50 years ago. Most of them have either high cost, they already have developed drug resistance. They didn't work very well to begin with. They have awful side effects, something like that. So it's kind of similar ish to these other things where you see a lot of drugs being found in like 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and then it starts to drop off. Got a few in the 1970s, a few in the 1990s. And the table I found, 2002 is the last one I see discovery void. Discovery void, which usually is just talking about antibacterial drugs, but seems to kind of go across the board from what I'm seeing. And this table, they tell you the limitations of each of these drugs. And just like, sometimes they say cost, or it's difficult to manufacture, there's only an injectable. But what I keep seeing is resistance. Safety, safety, resistance, safety, resistance, safety, safety, safety, resistance, safety, resistance, safety, safety. Resistance, resistance. Resistance. [02:18:28] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [02:18:30] Speaker C: Ouch. [02:18:32] Speaker B: Obviously it's midnight for Mark, so I don't want to drag out questions and things like that, but I guess maybe and sort of wrap up. What are the repercussions of this then? For one, does penicillin even work at this point? What are we doing to ourselves if. [02:18:48] Speaker A: You extrapolate this 20, 30, 40 years into the future? [02:18:52] Speaker C: Let's skip some things here. [02:18:55] Speaker B: Not to rush you or whatever, but. [02:18:57] Speaker C: I just there's a lot left, so let's skip some. [02:19:01] Speaker B: Let's skip these. I'm sure that there's so much of this. There's one of those places where life. [02:19:05] Speaker C: Finds a way that's fun. [02:19:09] Speaker A: Your turn of phrase is enchanting, BTW. [02:19:12] Speaker B: Yes, agreed. [02:19:13] Speaker C: There's so many horrible things. Okay, I'm going to try. Please do tell us some of these horrible things more quickly than I had intended. Okay. [02:19:21] Speaker B: I know that Mark is always down to hear more terrible things. I'm only looking out for his tomorrow. But please more, tell us more. [02:19:29] Speaker C: I apologize, Mark. I'll do my best. Okay? [02:19:32] Speaker B: Not your fault. [02:19:33] Speaker C: I just want you to know some of the absolutely horrible things that have happened with resistance. So let's talk about malaria real quick. That is like, oh, great. Caused by protozoa, which I didn't know, by the way. I'm apparently not very smart for a scientist. [02:19:49] Speaker B: I don't know if that's common knowledge, to be honest with you, but I. [02:19:53] Speaker C: Can never gauge because if I talked my husband is he's an immunology, like PhD, and so if I talk to him, he's always like, yeah, of course. [02:20:01] Speaker B: And I'm like, oh, yeah, of course, yeah, naturally. [02:20:03] Speaker C: I don't know, until like, last week, I thought it was caused by a virus. Just not thinking about it, and I was like, what? It's a protozoal parasite. What the hell? Anyway, oh, yeah, did not know. [02:20:12] Speaker B: Go on. [02:20:13] Speaker C: So basically, these scientists were looking in Ethiopia at this at resistant strains, and they found resistant strains that I've moved around in my stuff, and now I'm trying to find where I was that are like, resistant to treatment. And then they also found strains that don't show up on diagnostic tests, and then they found a strain that does both in Ethiopia. So what it means is not only can it circumvent treatment if you could be treated, but you might not be treated because they might not realize it's malaria, because it doesn't show up on the diagnostic. [02:20:56] Speaker A: Malaria. [02:20:57] Speaker C: It sounds like the diagnostic test they usually use is kind of like probably not exactly, but kind of like the at home COVID tests. Basically. [02:21:04] Speaker B: I was just going to say that's basically the same thing with COVID right? That at this point, a lot of people are like, I have all the symptoms, but my test is not telling me that I have it. [02:21:12] Speaker A: It's a great point. [02:21:14] Speaker C: Yes. And basically what has happened is that parasite just stopped producing the protein they test for. [02:21:23] Speaker B: Wow. [02:21:24] Speaker C: So you put it on the test and you go, oh, they don't have malaria. Sorry about your luck. We don't know what to do for you. And actually they do have malaria, and that's real bad. If you don't get treated, you don't. [02:21:34] Speaker B: Want to just have malaria. [02:21:36] Speaker C: Yeah, it doesn't go well for you. So they decided to send samples from several hospitals in Ethiopia back to the US for RNA sequencing. And they wanted to know because that's something where you can tell if it's malaria. And they wanted to know, okay, what percentage of the protozoa rather sorry, what percentage of these samples from this hospital have resistant protozoa that also can't be detected? And it was 8.2% already. [02:22:07] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [02:22:09] Speaker C: And that doesn't include the ones that just have one or the other. [02:22:12] Speaker B: Right, right. The ones that have both, that's the double whammy. And then plenty of them have one. [02:22:19] Speaker C: People are trying to eliminate malaria and it's not looking great. That's what I'm saying. [02:22:23] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. I mean, that's honestly a thing that I've wondered. Why have we not gotten rid of malaria? It feels like we've been working on that a really long time. [02:22:32] Speaker C: Indeed. [02:22:33] Speaker B: That's bananas. [02:22:34] Speaker C: Everything is crazy. So the World Health Organization says antimicrobial resistance is in the top ten threats for global health alongside things like climate change, alongside things like prevention of non communicable diseases like heart disease and stuff. And they put out a key report in I don't remember, I think it was 2022. I didn't write it in my notes because I'm smart like, that fine. And they basically said some of the key points from their report are Klebsiella pneumonia. It is a bacteria that causes a lot of hospital acquired infections, causes pneumonia, causes bloodstream infections. It's a really bad one for, like, newborns or people in the ICU. And they said the treatment of last resort is not working in some cases anymore. The treatment of last resort is not working. Resistant bacteria has spread to all regions of the world based on their report. [02:23:30] Speaker B: Oh, my. Oh, no. [02:23:32] Speaker C: More than half the people in some places, if they were to get this infection, the last line treatment would not work. [02:23:39] Speaker B: Nothing they could do. Holy fuck. [02:23:41] Speaker A: They said that last bit sounds like the radio report you'd hear in the background. [02:23:46] Speaker B: Exactly right. [02:23:48] Speaker A: Of an apocalypse movie. [02:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. This is the virus that kills off all of humanity or whatever. [02:23:56] Speaker C: Not done. No. [02:23:57] Speaker B: This is Station eleven. There's more. [02:24:01] Speaker C: We're like, in the middle. Okay. Resistance to one of the antibacterial medicines that's widely used for UTIs. When it was first introduced in the 1980s, resistance was virtually zero. And now there are countries and parts of the world where ineffective in about half of patients. The last resortment treatment failure for the last resort treatment for gonorrhea has been confirmed in Austria, Australia, Canada, France, Japan, Norway, Slovenia, South Africa, Sweden, and the like. [02:24:30] Speaker B: Weirdly, we were talking about that earlier today because Kio was saying that his dad served in Vietnam. [02:24:37] Speaker A: Cannot shift that gonorrhea. [02:24:39] Speaker B: He can't shift. So, yeah, his dad served in Vietnam and at the time, you could literally just go get a shot, and that cleared up your gonorrhea. And so, men being men, there was a competition in his unit to see who could get gonorrhea. The most times, they were like and then you'll just get a shot, and it'll clear up. And it eventually became so resistant. These guys got sent home because it didn't do anything for them anymore. They'd gotten it so many times that it was completely resistant, and their junk was just fucked by it. [02:25:13] Speaker C: It wouldn't be dramatic to say that at this point, with the state of things, gonorrhea could become totally untreatable insane. And that's one of the diseases that can be easily passed from mothers to babies. So sweet. Yeah, lovely, too. And they also mentioned the antibiotic resistance. It just causes people to be sick for longer. It increases the risk of death. Like, if you get MRSA, you're like, 64% more likely to die than people who get the non resistant version. The MSSA. The methicillin sensitive staph infection. And in the Americas, in some settings, as many as 90% of Staph infections are MRSA. They're methicillin resistant, and standard antibiotics don't work cool. [02:26:02] Speaker B: And they do terrible things to you. Like, just if you're at home, Google Staph infection, and it is amongst the most horrific things that can happen to you. And like my father in law, they might just have to cut you apart. They might deal with it, and yikes. [02:26:20] Speaker C: Okay, more terrible facts. Trying to be fast. In 2019, the estimate is that 1.3 million people died directly due to antibiotic resistance. A worldwide estimate. And the COVID-19 pandemic has stretched hospitals in such a way that some of the systems in place to prevent infection have broken down. We've seen an increase in resistant infections, 15% increase in the US. In 2020, and also 80% of patients that were hospitalized with COVID between March and October in the US. Received an antibiotic, which is stupid because we knew it was a virus. So I'm like, why? [02:26:54] Speaker B: Right. [02:26:55] Speaker C: Why would you give them that? That won't help them. [02:26:57] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [02:26:59] Speaker C: That's not how it works. They're not even okay, anyway, don't yell, Eileen. Just get through the facts. All right? They estimate the CDC estimates that 47 million antibiotic courses are prescribed every year in the US. That should not be prescribed. They are prescribed to people that do not have a disease it can treat. [02:27:20] Speaker B: Oh, my God. [02:27:21] Speaker C: Every year. That's 28% of all antibiotics prescribed in the US. Every year are, like, no reason. [02:27:28] Speaker B: Over a quarter. [02:27:29] Speaker C: Over a quarter. [02:27:30] Speaker B: The prescriptions are completely unnecessary and just potentially building up our resistance to antibiotics. [02:27:36] Speaker C: Right. And actually okay, so the whole point of I was talking about targeted therapy, but a lot of those antibiotics do have side effects. And other antimicrobials for microbes that are more similar to our cells do have side effects. So you can take something and then actually mess something up for yourself, that was fine, right? Because it's not going to help you with whatever you're taking it for, but it may damage you. Great. [02:28:02] Speaker B: Oh, fuck me. Yeah. [02:28:03] Speaker C: All right. There's also something called antibiotic tolerance or persistence. So that means that even though the bacteria does not have a resistance mechanism to the drug and it should be fully susceptible, it just doesn't work. The drugs don't work. And that's something we've also known about since, like, the 1940s. Cheers to us. [02:28:24] Speaker B: Great. [02:28:24] Speaker C: It hasn't been studied as much as it should, but they're called persistors persistor cells. Cells that should die or stop replicating when you give an antibiotic, but they don't. They say that they think these persistor cells have a different stress response than the rest of bacteria and that in that way they are able to stay alive. And so the only way to kill them is to have enough of the drug, basically so much for long enough that they can't hang on, is my understanding. And then I can't talk about this without talking about biofilms. I'm so sorry. Do you know what a biofilm is? [02:29:08] Speaker B: No. [02:29:09] Speaker C: Okay. They're horrifying. They're basically a group of microbes. They get stuck to each other and usually also to some surface. So it's like a clump of microbes. They can be stuck inside your organs, your tissues, wherever you've got your infection, and then they produce like a sticky goo. It's kind of mucus like, and that helps them stick in place. And it also has things that are good for them that help them kind of thrive there. And it also means that it's not necessarily accessible to drugs you might take because you've got this clump covered in goo, and maybe the drug can't penetrate your gooey. Clump of biofilm. I mean, that can happen anywhere, like slimy rocks on a river. Is biofilm okay? Biofilm, yeah. [02:29:58] Speaker A: Adaptation, then. [02:30:01] Speaker B: Yes. [02:30:02] Speaker C: It provides a benefit to the microbe because they get to survive and have extra survival mechanisms if they do this. And it happens also on indwelling medical devices a lot. So a lot of the hospital infections where you get a really persistent infection, it's because there's a biofilm because of your port or your IV or your stent or your heart valve. [02:30:29] Speaker B: Oh, that's gross. [02:30:30] Speaker A: I'm so glad my wife doesn't listen to Joak. [02:30:34] Speaker C: Okay, look, this is the best and worst thing I think I found. This is the thing that creeps me out the most. Even though it's not probably the worst thing. I just love it. Okay. There's an article I came across, and it was about dental biofilms from UPenn the University of Pennsylvania. And the title of this article tells you everything you need to know. Almost. Microbes that cause cavities can form superorganisms able to crawl and spread on teeth. Able to crawl. How wonderful. These superorganisms were found in the saliva of toddlers with severe tooth decay. They are sticky they're basically, like, moving biofilms. They are antimicrobial resistant. The article described them as sprouting limbs that propel them to, quote, unquote, walk or leap. The individual microbes that make up the superorganism are not able to move, but the superorganism can. And this is an instance. So if you are reading the book for book club, you will have heard words like hyphae and mycelium. This is basically a conglomeration of Candida and a bacteria, yeast and a bacteria. So it's like the bacteria is backpacking along this yeast, which grows these hyphae, these filaments. And the filaments is how it's moving. But that Candida doesn't normally move. And so they're like, what is this? Is this something about teeth or they don't have much give. Like, normally those hyphae that Candida might produce would just get into your stuff, but because it's like a harder surface, it's able to move around. Disgusting. Anyways. Wow. They look like bugs. They look like insects. I wish I could show you this picture. I'm going to send it. [02:32:25] Speaker A: You said limbs. [02:32:26] Speaker B: Limbs. [02:32:27] Speaker C: They look like limbs. It almost looks like a fly, but it's got all these wonky legs all over the place, even, like, on its back. But it's very like, it looks like it has a back. It's just a bunch of microbes. Incredible. But it's disgusting. I'll have to send you the picture. But anyways, gee, thanks. Yeah, it's bad, but they're basically just glued together and slimy and gooey and moving around in this mouth. And they said that the walking ones were similar in speed to the cells in your body that would normally be involved in wound healing. So pretty fast for like, a cell. And that the leaping, they were able to jump more than 200 times their body length. [02:33:08] Speaker B: Like my scale. [02:33:11] Speaker C: Tree frogs can jump about 50 times their body length than grasshoppers, 20 times. And this freaking thing can do 200. [02:33:18] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. [02:33:21] Speaker C: Now, obviously, tooth decay, not great, doesn't kill many people, but the fact that that can happen in that circumstance is not good news for me. [02:33:31] Speaker B: Right. Like, it's probably not the only situation in which that can happen. It's one in which we've observed the. [02:33:36] Speaker C: One that we know and obviously culminates too, kind of accidental that we found it. Oh, man. We I say we. I had nothing to do with it, but it's we the we the human race. Yes. Okay, so what's happening because of this? What does the future look like? We're getting common infections, like pneumonia that are becoming less treatable. Infections in neonatal and intensive care units are sometimes untreatable. Like, just more people dying. [02:34:03] Speaker B: It's full circle. Right? Like, when we invented these things, it kept kids from dying. And now the result of our having invented this is kids dying. [02:34:13] Speaker C: Yes. It's not really the result of it's. The result of the use sure. [02:34:20] Speaker B: Of the use of it. Yeah. Right. [02:34:22] Speaker C: That is exactly accelerating it at least anyway, right? All right. It means if you're immunocompromised, you're going to become more vulnerable. You're already more vulnerable to infections, but the more infections you get, the more likely you are to get a resistant infection. Right. It spells bad news for cancer patients, people who need organ transplants or joint replacements. Like, surgeries like that could become, like, fatal in cases or impossible to do. [02:34:52] Speaker B: It's really cool as a person with a joint disorder here. [02:34:55] Speaker C: If we can't control infections, it's a big deal, right? Anyway, so future predictions. It is estimated that 10 million people will die every year by 2050 because of antimicrobial resistance. 10 million. For scale, 7 million people died from COVID over the first three years of the pandemic. 10 million a year. [02:35:17] Speaker B: Wow. [02:35:20] Speaker A: Holy moly. Yeah. A pandemic plus level death annually. [02:35:24] Speaker C: Yes. [02:35:25] Speaker B: And it will go like, I mean, much like COVID, but even more so, like kind of unrecognized as a thing. Right? Because you won't attribute it to that. You'll say someone died of pneumonia, someone died of Mrs, someone died of whatever. And you also have to categorize as. [02:35:39] Speaker A: You'Ve got to factor in that doctors are probably going to just try throwing antibiotics at it anyway, right? [02:35:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, man, that's wild. [02:35:47] Speaker C: The UN environmental program calls antimicrobial resistant an urgent threat to life as we know it. And Inger Anderson, the executive director, said antimicrobial resistant challenges cannot be understood or addressed separately from the triple planetary crisis, crisis of climate change, crisis of nature and biodiversity loss, and crisis of pollution and waste, all of which are driven by unsustainable consumption and production patterns. So talking about Mark's introduction about climate change and stuff, it is related, so I didn't talk at all about this yet, but just briefly, wastewater is a big driver of antimicrobial resistance. It's not just resistant microbes getting in the water from hospitals and stuff, but also just chucking out antibiotics. Antivirals, antifungals that aren't getting used, even disinfectants can contribute to the issue. By the way, fun fact, okay, even there's studies on it, especially those that contain quadinary ammonium compounds, which is one of the most common disinfectants. It drives resistance in antibiotic, resistance in bacteria, or resistance in other microbes as well. And we've known that since the 1940s. Like, that's a thing that we have known is probably happening. So basically what we need to do is we need to stop using antibiotics when we don't need them in health care. We need to stop using antibiotics, especially to the degree that we do in food production. We need wastewater containment, better waste management. Like some wastewater is treated with the quaternary ammonium compounds. Like, probably not the best choice given what I've read. I don't know anything really about wastewater treatment. Just doesn't seem smart. And I mean, even public institutions like the one I work for probably contributes to this because antibiotics are used in research a lot. And where do you think. It goes goes down the sink when you're done with it. [02:37:45] Speaker B: Sure, yeah, of course. [02:37:46] Speaker C: 100%. Cool. [02:37:53] Speaker B: Climate change. [02:37:54] Speaker C: Sorry. Go ahead. [02:37:56] Speaker A: If I'm hearing this right, then this is one more potentially catastrophic, population limiting event, which we've a caused, b know how to stop. [02:38:12] Speaker B: Right. [02:38:13] Speaker A: And C, aren't going to. [02:38:16] Speaker B: Right? [02:38:17] Speaker C: Okay. I don't know if I would say we know how to make it stop, but we definitely know how to slow it. And we are not doing what we need to do. I mean, there are people out there who are trying to get people to do what they need to do, but the problem is, it's a global problem and not everybody is on board. So that's what I was going to say with I was going to talk about a couple of things. First, climate change, it's making things different. So there were a lot of I read a paper about neglected tropical diseases, basically diseases that usually happen in tropical climates that haven't been studied that much because the people who live there don't have the resources to do so, and the people who aren't being infected don't care. And now with climate change, they're moving. Like the area that can be affected is bigger than it was. And that's a lot of those protozoal infections, a lot of the fungal infections that are going to be affecting more people here. Real short. [02:39:09] Speaker A: When we went to Grenada last year, I was terrified of getting a dengue fever mosquito by that banquet. And I was super scared of getting dengue. [02:39:21] Speaker C: I didn't luckily that's probably for the best, but yeah, dengue is not good anyway. Also, changes in rainfall. They specifically make it easier for fungi to grow in areas they couldn't exist before. It's expected that if global warming keeps going as it is, we're going to see fungal diseases that normally would have affected tropical areas up by the US. Canadian border. [02:39:45] Speaker A: Go to that. [02:39:46] Speaker B: Wow. [02:39:47] Speaker C: Within the next 80 years. [02:39:49] Speaker B: Holy moly. Incredible. [02:39:51] Speaker C: Flooding, like what we've been seeing in New York, can spread wastewater that promotes antimicrobial resistance. And this is an equity issue, which I've already kind of alluded to, but people with less infrastructure are affected more. It shouldn't come as a huge surprise that some of the highest rates of resistance are found in places like sub Saharan Africa, where the hospitals don't have access to the drugs they need in the first place. There's an issue with fake antibiotics being sold, and also the infrastructure might not be there. Kind of like what I was describing with they have these little rapid tests in the lab, but they don't have the ability to do this fancier way to tell if it's malaria. Right. They just don't have it right. [02:40:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:40:32] Speaker C: I read an article where Doctor I'm mispronouncing this, I'm sure. Nubwa Madugu said that about 85% of bacteria isolated from blood and urinary tract infections across six hospitals in Nigeria were resistant to most commonly used antibiotics, and 65% were resistant to the antibiotics of last resort. That's already happening. And while we're on the mean, I don't have any citations for this, but think about what's happening in Gaza. Think about the infrastructure that's probably already present in their hospitals not being great. Think about what's happening with, like, bombings, people getting injured, having infections, the conditions they're in when they're kind of being corralled. And then, I mean, the people who are bombing them are effectively doing this to themselves. They're just promoting resistance. [02:41:27] Speaker A: Wow. Yeah. [02:41:28] Speaker C: In that area, which is not what they're thinking about. Right. But not probably great for them. [02:41:34] Speaker A: It's so many of our behaviors. Intensive farming, the battery kind of farming, which is only like we talked about, the kind of jumping, the resistance, jumping between chickens and men. It seems like all of the intensive money making behaviors which we've adopted are conducive to this medicalizing so many conditions and just en masse globally, spreading this low level resistance, creeping up and up and up and up. [02:42:06] Speaker C: Yeah, it's not good. It's related to everything. So, like, the nature and biodiversity loss. I was talking in the very beginning of this about people using mold and people using plants. The fact that we're losing biodiversity means there's less opportunities for us to find new natural antimicrobial sources for drugs, which is also not wonderful. All right, I'm going to read you a frankly bleak quote, and then I'm going to tell you some things you can do and some maybe slightly hopeful things so that you don't just leave here feeling absolutely horrible. [02:42:39] Speaker A: Okay. [02:42:40] Speaker C: This is a quote I found from. [02:42:42] Speaker A: A woman I kind of do. I'm not going to lie. [02:42:44] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [02:42:44] Speaker C: I'm a little stressed out. I'm about to stress you out more. First, this is a quote from Mallory Smith. She was a patient who battled an antibiotic resistant bacterial infection for 13 years before it killed her. Full disclosure, she's got a memory in it, a memoir and a documentary. And neither of them are things that I have seen or read or have any idea about, but they're both called salt in my soul. I just got this quote that was put up by her mother on the CDC blogs of, like, here's examples of what can happen because of this terrible thing she says or said. Resistant bacteria do a lot of taking, of dreams, of time, of travel, of friendships, of freedom, of potential, of plans, of lives. It does not discriminate. It's a complex, unpredictable, irreversible, progressive, painful, suffocating, choking weed. When my bacteria leaked into my bloodstream, I developed sepsis. My body convulsed violently and erratically. Four nurses held me down as my septic fever rocketed to 106 degrees. And then even more nurses arrived to cover my face and limbs with ice packs. There were so many unfamiliar sets of eyes looming over me, touching me, pressing me down into the bed as I shook all I could focus on was their eyes. I struggled against them because I just wanted my parents, but they were standing in the corner helpless. It was such a raw and vivid experience that I'll never forget it. I felt as if I was being burned from the inside out as the infection was raging inside me. Simultaneously, I had the out of body sensation of sitting off to the side, seeing everyone in the room as they were scrambling to bring my fever down. Seeing myself thrashing and writhing with no ability to stop it. [02:44:26] Speaker B: Wow. Golly. [02:44:30] Speaker C: So this I don't want that. This can happen to you, anyone, anywhere. It is happening all over the world right now. This is case of sepsis, which is obviously really bad. It's like in stages of a disease, but like woo. So what can you do? What can you do to not have this happen? [02:44:45] Speaker B: Please. Yeah. [02:44:47] Speaker C: The CDC tagline for this is Prevention puts a pause on Antimicrobial Resistance. If you want to know the super fun propaganda. All right, fun thing. Okay. First, stay up to date on your vaccinations, always. Two, wash your hands and do it properly. If you can't wash your hands, use hand sanitizer with at least at least 60% alcohol. In general, wash your hands before and after preparing or eating food when you care for anyone who's sick. Touching anything that's frequently touched by a lot of people. So like restaurant doors, store carts, shopping carts, gas pumps, obviously, when using the toilet, changing diapers, anytime you deal with animal waste or food, anytime you handle trash, and anytime your hands look dirty. Using antibiotics only when they're prescribed. Taking them exactly as your doctor tells you to take them, and not pressuring your doctor into prescribing you antibiotics because they will not work unless you have a bacterial disease. When you do take antibiotics, you finish the prescription, even if you feel better before the end. You don't share your medication with anyone else. You don't take medication prescribed for someone else, and you don't save antimicrobials prescribed for you for later use. If you need to dispose of them, take them back to the pharmacy where hopefully they will be responsible. But maybe they won't. I don't know. I don't know what they do. [02:46:09] Speaker B: Okay, fair enough. [02:46:13] Speaker C: I don't trust anyone anymore. If you have any questions about how to take them, you ask your doctor or your pharmacist. That is what they are there for. They work for you, so make them work. When cooking, assuming you eat meat, keep it separate. Separate cutting board from produce. Don't leave your food out on the counter forever after you make it. Put it in the fridge as soon as you don't eat it. Stay home when you're sick. Just because you don't need antimicrobials doesn't mean your grandparent, niece, nephew, friend, coworker or random stranger at the grocery store will be so lucky. Pathogens affect different people differently and that is really all you can do as a person. [02:46:55] Speaker B: But that's practically that's a lot of things that people don't do that are very easy to do. [02:47:01] Speaker C: Yes. [02:47:02] Speaker B: When it comes down to it, I think there's some comfort in that, at least on a personal level. We can limit this just by doing really basic things. [02:47:12] Speaker C: You absolutely can. And in all of my research that I found, I never saw anything that said that soap was increasing antimicrobial resistance. So wash your hands with soap. You can clean things in your house with soap. You don't always have to use a disinfectant if you're not a hospital. [02:47:28] Speaker B: Right. As well. [02:47:29] Speaker C: So I guess that's something you could also do. All right. So is there any hope on the horizon? There are a lot of drugs in these various pipelines. I do not know if any of them are ever going to come to fruition, but the fact that scientists are working on them is at least something. So, for one, protozoal diseases are at least getting more attention now. We are starting to understand those diseases a bit better in the last few decades than we have in the past. And again, they probably weren't focused on because they only affected certain areas. Bunch of jerks humans. [02:48:04] Speaker B: Right. [02:48:06] Speaker C: Some researchers are looking into something called bacteriophages, which is or sometimes just phages. [02:48:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:48:11] Speaker C: So those are viruses that target bacteria. They're not widely used and they're definitely in the learning phases. But there have been some promising results. [02:48:26] Speaker A: One in particular that feels like Escalation. [02:48:30] Speaker C: Yeah. Like, right now they don't affect us, but they could. That's true. I don't know. [02:48:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:48:34] Speaker C: But it also is inconsistent. Like, I've read cases where it saved someone to go through phage therapy, and then I read a study where they were like, yeah, we had 20 people who volunteered. Five responded great. Six had a partial response. A few of them had a response, but then it went away right away, and then five of them had no improvement at all. [02:48:58] Speaker B: It really seems like it's not consistent. [02:49:00] Speaker C: Yes, it seems like it's very personal. Like it's a type of therapy that's going to have to be tailored, which by its very nature does mean that it's not going to be accessible to right. [02:49:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:49:12] Speaker C: Which so there is some hope there, but not for everybody. [02:49:16] Speaker B: I was going to say good news, Eileen. Good news. That's our hope. [02:49:20] Speaker C: Some researchers are circling back to medicinal plants and trying to find something there. Some people are starting to take antibiotic tolerance more seriously and studying how that works. Nano antibiotics is actually a potential avenue forward. That is pretty decent, I think. I mean, I'm not a microbiologist, so maybe I just think it sounds good from the papers I read. But these antibiotics are packaged in engineered nanoparticles, or they're just synthetic antibiotics that are super, super small. And from the brief amount I read about them, it looks like they're able to bypass a lot of the resistance mechanisms that bacteria have formed against regular antibiotics. And this is super important. This part, because they are so small, they have a unique shape, and because of their particular composition, it seems that resistance develops very, very slowly with these treatments. [02:50:17] Speaker B: Okay, that's great. Love the sound of that. [02:50:21] Speaker C: Yeah. So it's easier for them to get into the bacteria because of their size. They don't need a lot of the mechanisms that regular antibiotics need. They're kind of like little Trojan horses. They bypass the normal barriers, and then they get inside where they can do their work, and they do it of particular excitement. MRSA has been successfully killed off in a lab setting with amazing nano antibiotics. [02:50:50] Speaker A: Good to hear. [02:50:51] Speaker C: So it'll be really interesting to see how that research moves forward. That one is, I think, the best one, so I'm ending on that one. [02:51:00] Speaker B: I love it. [02:51:01] Speaker C: Yes. [02:51:01] Speaker B: I feel great about that. Makes me feel somewhat hopeful. [02:51:11] Speaker A: Why isn't this everywhere in the public discourse and in the public knowledge? And I think we can all take a few guesses, right? [02:51:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:51:21] Speaker C: I told you about some lobbyists, those lobbyists. [02:51:24] Speaker B: Let's take a journey back to 1977. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Wild. The fact that as a person who spends every week worrying about things on this show and that it's never really been a thing I thought about that saying something. It's wild. [02:51:41] Speaker A: It isn't the general discourse this episode will play directly. Believe it or not, into my marriage, I often berate Laura for being, in my own words, a clean freak. Maybe it's me. [02:51:54] Speaker B: Well, I don't know. [02:51:56] Speaker C: I mean, there's a lot of like I said, a lot of the stuff that's out there is not harmful, but in the circumstances where you are, like, preparing food or using the toilet, it kind of is okay to be a bit of a clean freak. You know what I mean? [02:52:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm not saying I'm walking around with shit. [02:52:16] Speaker C: I don't know. I heard the episode about the poop knife, and. [02:52:23] Speaker A: The poop knife has come back. [02:52:28] Speaker B: Incredible. [02:52:29] Speaker C: Opened my eyes. [02:52:30] Speaker B: Eileen, you're the best. [02:52:32] Speaker C: Oh, thank you. [02:52:34] Speaker B: Thank you so much for this new fear. But honestly, I mean, as much as all of this was horrific, I think just those little wake up calls about the little things that we can do are important because we are not the big corporations that can lobby people, and we are not farmers. We're not all of these people who can make these big earth shattering changes. But the degree to which we can help ourselves and keep ourselves out of the hospital and from getting sick and things like this in positions that make us more vulnerable. I think it's really important to know that stuff, especially as this resistance increases and we see this incredible estimation for how many deaths we're going to be looking at as a result of it. Like, anything we can do to prevent that from being us and our families and all that is helpful knowledge, I think. [02:53:24] Speaker C: Yeah. It is bleak, but you are not powerless entirely to stop it, which is. [02:53:30] Speaker A: That'S a good word, not a message that we hear on the show often. [02:53:34] Speaker B: Yeah, really, that's true. So thank you so much again from. [02:53:40] Speaker A: Me, from all of us. Sincerely, Aleen. Thank you for giving us of your time and your considerable intellect. Yeah. [02:53:46] Speaker B: And you always over deliver on, I think, what is asked of you to. [02:53:50] Speaker C: Stopping the podcast and being like, oh, I said really stupid things again. [02:53:55] Speaker B: You guys are wrong. [02:53:57] Speaker C: And then every time I'm like, oh. [02:53:59] Speaker B: I said the stupidest thing, it's going. [02:54:01] Speaker C: To haunt me when I'm dying. [02:54:03] Speaker B: Follow our Facebook to look for whatever Eileen inevitably critiques herself for this week in the group. [02:54:09] Speaker A: She'll end up becoming numb to it, like, ironically, the microbes that we've been discussing. [02:54:16] Speaker B: Yes, maybe we'll have you back again soon with another couple of questions you've already got in the pipeline from listeners and from us. And it'll be wonderful because everyone loves when you're here. [02:54:27] Speaker C: Happy to be here. Yeah. [02:54:28] Speaker B: So I think you hear your kids demanding your attention as it is. So, dear friends, thank you so much for being here. And if you ever have questions for Eileen, do tell them and we'll put them on the list of things for her to tackle in future episodes because the door is always open for more Eileen, sods and we're deeply grateful that you take your time for that. And as always, if you want to follow up, join us on all the Socials, the Facebook, the Blue sky, the instagram jack of all graves on all the things. [02:54:58] Speaker A: Subscribe to us on on Threads. [02:55:01] Speaker B: We're not on threads. We're not on Threads or Twitter. We have standards. Yeah. Anything else that they should do over the course of this week, Mr. Mark? [02:55:14] Speaker A: Stay clean and spooky. Spookily clean. [02:55:17] Speaker B: Spooky clean. [02:55:19] Speaker A: Night, guys.