Ep. 173: chiropractic quackery & tiktok pranksters

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Have you ever been to a chiropractor, Mark? [00:00:07] Speaker B: Right. No, I haven't. However, Laura has and does regularly. [00:00:11] Speaker A: Interesting. What for? What's the ailment? [00:00:14] Speaker B: So ever since having Owen, she has had kind of back issues from carrying him around. End a lot. Now, I don't necessarily believe in them. I don't think chiromancy is. I think it's horseshit. [00:00:37] Speaker A: Chiromancy. [00:00:39] Speaker B: Yeah. And her chiropractor, from what I hear from Laura, needs to stay in her fucking lane. She's making her, like, dietary recommendations and fuck off, love. [00:00:50] Speaker A: You are absolutely, basically giving a preview of everything I'm about to talk about right here. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Even worse, right. A good friend of mine, a very good friend of mine has trained in something called spinology. I know, right. [00:01:08] Speaker A: Okay. [00:01:08] Speaker B: And I don't believe in that either. You know, I don't judge. I don't judge people who do absolutely not go to it. I don't judge anyone for anything they believe or pour their heart into or wish to make a part of their lives or their process or their journey. But I've known people into all sorts of fucking dumb shit. [00:01:31] Speaker A: Sure. [00:01:32] Speaker B: During my life. I think I might have mentioned the reflexology devotee that I knew previously on this cast. And how aghast I was at hearing her say that where she'd get a cancer diagnosis, her first port of call would be a fucking reflexologist to weave some fucking foot magic before going to an actual doctor. Foot magic, you fucking idiot. Grow up. [00:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not great. Nobody's going to massage the cancer out of you. [00:02:06] Speaker B: Absolutely not. Extremities, I lump all that in the same bin as Reiki. You know what I mean? Oral fucking cleansing, all of that. I put that in one big old bucket, and I've written on the bucket. Shit for cunts. [00:02:29] Speaker A: That's fair. Listen, the thing about with reflexology, with Reiki, with all of that kind of stuff, a lot of times we understand that that is alternative medicine. Right, or shit for cunts. [00:02:50] Speaker B: They are the same thing. [00:02:52] Speaker A: And again, I don't judge people, but it's shit for cunts. Right. But I think there's certain stuff that, whether you believe in it or not, you do understand that is homeopathy. You understand that is alternative medicine, and. [00:03:08] Speaker B: That is alternative to medicine. [00:03:11] Speaker A: Right. And that's not the same thing as traditional medicine. Right. Chiropractors are different because most people do not know that that's not traditional medicine. If you were to ask around, probably, I mean, I don't know how much you've harassed your wife about her chiropractic fixation or things like that? [00:03:34] Speaker B: She knows my feelings. [00:03:36] Speaker A: Right. But if you hadn't expressed those feelings, she probably would not have heard that either. Right. It's one of those things that most of us learn about it as a thing. It comes into our lives as a thing that is sort of in tandem with regular medicine. [00:03:55] Speaker B: Yes. You think chiropractor. You think sports, massage and therapy and postural correction and things like that. And that seems legit, but it isn't. [00:04:07] Speaker A: Right. So when I was getting my master's, I started going to a chiropractor because my school health plan covered it, and I was like, cool. I'm in pain all the time. Yeah, this was a cool thing. When. I don't know if it was. Yeah, I think it was for everyone. We paid into fees. So, like, California public schools don't have tuition. They have fees that you pay, and amongst them is a health fee. And I think it's only, like, $350 a semester or something like that compared to the thousands you pay for a private insurance plan. And then there's basically, like, a hospital on campus, and you can go there for your doctor's appointments, for your vaccinations, for all your stuff on campus because of your campus health plan. I see. And so this covered going to a chiropractor. So I went to a chiropractor at the time, which I always want female doctors. I'm just not super into men touching my body. I've gotten a little better about it as a person nearing 40, but it's my whole life, I've never been really into that. So I requested, like, a female chiropractor. And I go in, and not only is the chiropractor male, but his name is guy. As if just to rub it in. Oh, you want a female chiropractor? We found you a man named man to work on you. [00:05:40] Speaker B: That has to be intentional. Somebody read your form, and they were, yeah, yeah, okay. You don't want a fucking bloke. We'll double down. [00:05:47] Speaker A: Exactly. And guy was a perfectly nice guy. Young, hot, chiropractor type situation, which, of course, then makes you even more nervous, like, oh, dear God, sure. My first two sessions, after Guy adjusted my neck, I immediately got horrendous 24 hours long migraines, complete with all the throwing up and wanting to die that that entails. [00:06:12] Speaker B: Fuck's sake, guy, what did you do? [00:06:14] Speaker A: Come on, guy, get it together. So from there, I was like, okay, you can adjust the rest of me, but just don't touch my neck. We're going to leave that out of the equation. And he was like, okay, that's fine, no worries. And the adjustments felt good. I mean, have you ever had someone pop your back? Nope. Really? [00:06:33] Speaker B: Nope. [00:06:34] Speaker A: Never? [00:06:36] Speaker B: Nope. [00:06:37] Speaker A: Oh, mark, you gotta have. [00:06:38] Speaker B: I've seen plenty of videos of it. Obviously. I've seen plenty of TikToks of some quite violent chiropractic. [00:06:44] Speaker A: Well, I don't even mean like in a chiropractic setting. I mean like having your wife put her arms around you and bend your back or anything like that to get a good pop out of it. [00:06:56] Speaker B: No, that has never happened to me. Never had that done. [00:07:00] Speaker A: Okay, well, you should try it, because for, like, 20 minutes after having that done, you feel like you can conquer the world. It feels so good to have someone just pop all that tension out of there. But of course the pain then comes back, so you got to go get another adjustment. It's not really solving anything. While at the chiropractor, I showed him my bendy fingers and all of that kind of stuff, and he told me I have loose joints and recommended I do acupuncture as a way of helping with this. So I went on to get acupuncture, which was also available for cuts. And it turned out to be one of, like, the most painful things I've ever experienced in my life. Because I have restless leg, they put the needles in my ankle like, oh, we're going to deal with this shit and all that kind of stuff. And then they left the room. And because I have restless leg, I couldn't stop moving my foot, which caused intense nerve pain to shoot through my entire body every time I so much as twitched because of where the needles were. So I spent like 20 minutes in there with these needles in just, like, crying, because every time I moved my restless leg, intense, burning, fiery pain through my entire body, and it turns out I don't have loose joints. I have Ehlers Danlow's syndrome. [00:08:43] Speaker B: Sorry, but loose joints is not a diagnosis, apparently. [00:08:47] Speaker A: So there's something called ligamous laxity, which for people who don't have a hypermobility disorder, like eds, can be a thing. It's not necessarily like a chronic pathology like having eds, but it's sort of in the similar vein. But that's not what I have. Of course, yeah, I have eds, and while it'd be nice if acupuncture fixed eds, it unfortunately does fuck all for it. [00:09:22] Speaker B: And I am right in saying that acupuncture does nothing for anything, does it? [00:09:28] Speaker A: Well, that's not the thing I researched today. So I don't want to make any claims about what acupuncture does or does not do, because I don't know the science of it. Off the top of my head, there may be something that that does. It's probably not a lot of the things that it claims to do, but a lot of times, things you do to your body may have an effect on it in some way or another. It's not going to cure cancer or something, but maybe it relieves a pain or something of that sort. Certainly enough people do it, that at worst, there's a placebo effect that seems to be effective for people. [00:10:08] Speaker B: It's a complementary therapy, isn't it? Which to me tells you everything you need to know. It isn't anything. [00:10:15] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't think I'm necessarily as sort of dogmatically opposed to these things as you are, because, like I said, I think that there can be a degree to which things do stuff because you do things to the body and things happen. I just think that there's usually a limited sort of application for things, and usually these things claim to do something far outside of what even physiologically makes sense for them. [00:10:46] Speaker B: But I will absolutely accept that the placebo effect is a thing and is very powerful. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Right, yeah, exactly. And we'll see that in here, too. And there's something to that that it's like, okay, if doing something physically can trick your mind into feeling healed, then has it not in some way worked? [00:11:10] Speaker B: Yeah, that's the big question, isn't it? It's an act of chicanery upon your body. [00:11:18] Speaker A: Right. And if you can do that, then cool, great. That's cool. But in this case, I basically came to the conclusion that chiropractic wasn't for me. I assumed my weird body was the problem and why it didn't work, and it didn't occur to me that actually it's the practice that's the problem. I thought they were doctors. They call themselves doctors, but it turns out that's basically like me saying, I'm a doctor, and therefore I can assess your physical ailments. Not that kind of doctor. Most people don't know that. So I'm going to go ahead and explain it. So, chiropractic was founded as a religious practice by a king hell, really? Yes. By a quirky dude named D. D. Palmer in the early 20th century. And you may have heard people say in snarky tweets and whatnot that chiropractic was created by a guy who said a ghost taught it to him. That's completely true. I thought that that was going to turn out to be, like, an exaggeration, but no, Palmer said, quote, the knowledge and philosophy given me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being, appealed to my reason. [00:12:34] Speaker B: Laura's going to love this. [00:12:37] Speaker A: Dr. Jim Atkinson had been dead for 50 years when Palmer pioneered this process. And before Palmer received this otherworldly revelation, he'd been practicing what he called magnetic healing, which involved manipulating a magnetic field surrounding the patient's body in order to diagnose and cure whatever was wrong with them. I know we haven't talked about Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church on here, and we really should, but this shit straight up reminds me of him. Like, Smith, too. Just kind of jumped from weird horseshit to weird horseshit until something finally stuck and he created that church. And that's pretty much what happened with Palmer. So chiropractic's sort of founding myth is that of a guy called Harvey Lillard, who Palmer claimed to have cured of deafness. Here's Palmer's description of what happened. You're going to have that incredulous look on your face this entire time. Here's what he said. Quote, harvey Lillard, a janitor in the Ryan block where I had my office, had been so deaf for 17 years that he could not hear the racket of a wagon on the street or the ticking of a watch. I made inquiry as to the cause of his deafness and was formed that when he was exerting himself in a cramped, stooping position, he felt something give way in his back and immediately became deaf. An examination showed a vertebra racked from its normal position. I reasoned that if that vertebra was replaced, the man's hearing should be restored. Makes sense, obviously. You know what I mean? And honestly, as a scientific, like, the scientific method, okay, that makes sense, right? Like, we see this. There's a physical problem here. [00:14:18] Speaker B: Yeah, let's try it famously. The back is famously the seat of hearing, isn't it? [00:14:24] Speaker A: But what if you found that out, right? This is like 1920. We haven't figured out medicine yet. It is burgeoning as a thing. So if you're like, okay, this guy heard a pop, and then he stopped being able to hear, and then you're like, you got a vertebra out of place. It makes sense, per the scientific method, to be like, well, let's see if we pop that back in. [00:14:45] Speaker B: Cause and effect. Let's reverse the process here. [00:14:49] Speaker A: See if that fixes. [00:14:50] Speaker B: Wind it back. [00:14:51] Speaker A: Right. Well, he says I racked it into position by using the spinous process as a lever. And soon the man could hear as before. [00:15:01] Speaker B: Fucking wild. [00:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah. There was nothing accidental about this as it was accomplished with an object in view and the result expected was obtained. There was nothing crude about this adjustment. It was specific so much that no chiropractor has equaled it. So basically he's like, yeah, I use the scientific method. I had a hypothesis and I tested it and it worked. Right. Lillard, the man he did this on, for his part, reported, quote, I was deaf 17 years and I expected to always remain so, for I had doctored a great deal without any benefit. I had long ago made up my mind to not take any more ear treatments for it. Did me no good. Last January, Dr. Palmer told me that my deafness came from an injury in my spine. This was new to me, but it is a fact that my back was injured at the time I went deaf. Dr. Palmer treated me on the spine in two treatments. I could hear quite well. That was eight months ago. My hearing remains good. [00:15:57] Speaker B: Okay. [00:15:58] Speaker A: Now, I did my damnedest to find anything verifying this that didn't come from a chiropractic site or journal. It simply doesn't show up anywhere. I did find a chiropractic site that claimed to be determining whether it was a myth or a fact, which cited several studies in which people's hearing had improved due to upper cervical spinal manipulation. But all of those studies came from chiropractic journals, of course, and some of them were published in German, so I couldn't even read them, of course. I did, however, find a blog post from Edsard Ernst, medical doctor and professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula medical School at Exeter, who explained that. [00:16:40] Speaker B: Basic human over here, Exeter, UK. Okay. [00:16:43] Speaker A: That very one, yes. And this guy is like the. He comes up a lot. He's like basically like the leading medical debunker of chiropractics. [00:16:51] Speaker B: Right. Just super briefly, I've never, ever been able to wrap my head around that schism of medical practitioners who also study complementary therapy. I just can't get my head around it. [00:17:04] Speaker A: Yeah. And it happens a lot. And you see it especially a lot with nurses. [00:17:07] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:09] Speaker A: I'm not entirely sure why that is. That feels like another rabbit hole we could go down another day of like, why is it that nurses especially, but there are some other medical practitioners who fall into this stuff. But I mean, what was it? I talked about something last month or the month before in January, in which, oh, it was the bigfoot one, where it was like, this is like a real scientist. He has made real discoveries, and yet he suspends that entire part of his brain when it comes to. So I don't know. There's, like, Dr. Ben Carson, who is one of the dumbest human beings I've ever witnessed in my life, but he's a brain. You know, there can be some sort of schism in that sort of practical application of knowledge and your dumb brain and what you want to believe. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I guess it's your academic learning versus your heart telling you what it believes. [00:18:14] Speaker A: I don't. And it is very easy to find things that validate what you want to believe about stuff. And that was one of the things in even trying. I came at this with a bias. So I genuinely was, like, reading the other side of this, too. I'm like, what do chiropractors say about this? [00:18:32] Speaker B: Do you have any kind of fringe beliefs, any kind of wacky beliefs? Do you have anything that you think. Do you have any kind of head versus heart beliefs? [00:18:42] Speaker A: That's a good question. I mean, I think I've talked about how I can suspend disbelief when I want to believe in ghosts or something like that. If I'm in a haunted house or something in my head, I know it's not real. But for a time, because I enjoy the feeling of being spooked. [00:19:01] Speaker B: Yes. [00:19:01] Speaker A: I can kind of convince myself of it. I'm not sure if I have any consistent fringe beliefs, though. I'm sure. Here's what I'll say. I bet there are things that I have not learned the challenge to yet. Like chiropractics. Right? Like, if you asked me ten years ago if I had a fringe belief, I would say no. But I did not know this was not a real thing. Right. [00:19:26] Speaker B: I see. Yeah. [00:19:26] Speaker A: Okay. Do you have, like, a heart thing that you. [00:19:32] Speaker B: I honestly don't believe I do. I honestly don't think I do. If anything, I'm probably the opposite, and I'm too ready to disbelieve things. I don't believe anything. [00:19:46] Speaker A: Really? Yeah. You start at that's not real, whether or not it is, my foundational principle. [00:19:54] Speaker B: Is, fucking prove it or fuck off. [00:19:57] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, I think that makes sense. Yeah. I think I tend to. There's a degree to which I'm both ends of that thing where it's like, I think if I hear something that sounds suss, yes, I'm going to assume fuck off or whatever. But also I'm like, if it's like, that could be a thing like acupuncture, right? I'm not going to outright be like, no, it's bullshit. I'm like, I need to read about whether it's bullshit or not before I make that decision. But that's an interesting question. I'll think on that more. I wonder if there are. [00:20:32] Speaker B: Do, please. [00:20:33] Speaker A: Maybe like. And again, it's like in my head, I don't believe it. So of course I don't believe it. But I have sports superstitions for sure. [00:20:43] Speaker B: Okay, rituals. Good luck. [00:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah. The kinds of thing where it's like if I turn on a game and they're winning and they start losing, I have to turn it off because clearly I have cursed it. Things like that. Of course that's not true, but it's very sort of ingrained in me as someone who was an athlete my whole life, to have various superstitions around that stuff. So maybe like that. [00:21:08] Speaker B: It's something I'll definitely throw out to listeners. I'd love you to chime in. I mean, obviously because you're listening to Jack, of all graves. You're a rational, level headed, very, very sexually attractive and witty kind of people of science. But that said, do you have just these fucking little certainties, these little beliefs that your head and your heart can't quite reconcile? [00:21:30] Speaker A: Love that. [00:21:31] Speaker B: I'll just leave that with you. [00:21:32] Speaker A: Yeah, please do tell us. I would absolutely love that. A lot of people that's like, I think astrology is probably the biggest one. A lot of people who otherwise are very rational and reasonable for whatever reason. Astrology is their spot that they simply can't. They can't get past for whatever reason. But yeah, very curious. It's to people out there, what's your thing if you have one, or one you used to have? Super interested in that. So like I said, was trying to find these things. Couldn't find anyone who was not a chiropractor who said that this event ever happened. And then I find Edzard Ernst from Exeter, who, like I said, is the leading debunker. He's run all of the really major studies surrounding debunking chiropractics, essentially. So he's apparently got a little bee in his bonnet about that. Good for him. So basically he explained that human anatomy basically foils this story outright. He explains, quote, the nerve supply of the inner ear, the bit that enables us to hear, does not, like most other nerves of our body, run through the spine. It comes directly from the brain. The acoustic nerve is one of the twelve cranial nerves. So of like all things that you could pretend you cured with someone from manipulating their spine, literally, it's not connected. It is one of twelve nerves that is not connected at all to your spine. So obviously a spinal adjustment would do Jack's shit. And apparently even Dee Dee, Palmer's daughter, disputed that this story literally happened as told in her telling of the incident. Quote, her father told her that he was telling jokes to a friend in the hall outside Palmer's office and Palmer, who had been reading, joined them. When Lillard reached the punchline, Palmer laughed heartily, slapped Lillard on the back with the hand holding the heavy book he had been reading, and a few days later, Lillard told Palmer that his hearing seemed better. Palmer then decided to explore manipulation and as an expansion of his magnetic healing practice. Simon said the compact was that if they can make something of it, then they both would share. But it didn't happen. So this is like literally the foundation of chiropractic. It's cited on legitimate chiropractic websites, all over the Internet and there's pretty much no way it happened. It's obvious it didn't happen. You don't have to be an expert to be able to tell this is 20th century snake oil hogwash. [00:24:02] Speaker B: Sure. [00:24:03] Speaker A: But it's cited as real evidence that spinal adjustments are miracle cures. I mean, all over the place. When you look at these major chiropractic websites, they trace it back to this, which is bonkers to me. [00:24:17] Speaker B: And this feels to me as though something that even the therapies that we've mentioned just here, reflexology, acupuncture, chiropractic, it's this fucking fallacy that any one part of your body can act as like task manager for the rest of your body. It's just balls. It's just complete balls. [00:24:39] Speaker A: It would be great if that were how it worked. Like, oh, just like hit this button on your hand and all of a sudden your head starts working better or whatever doesn't work. [00:24:48] Speaker B: I saw a product, in fact, advertised this week that was a reflexology shoe insert, right? That you can mold depending on where your area of concern is. Is it your circulation, is it your blood pressure? And it'll just fix it because you'll have that particular part of your foot stimulated and fuck off. [00:25:12] Speaker A: And again, I can see how there is a degree of something that would work in that, right? If you have back pain or something, for example, sometimes that's about how you walk, right? So you put some reflexology thing in your shoe and all of a sudden you're like, see, now I don't have the issues with my back that I had before and stuff like that. And it's not going to lower your blood pressure or whatever unless there is some unrelated thing that it's doing. Systems are connected. We have one body. Nothing is like operating on its own. But again, it's about the broadness of the claims that are being made. It's not to say that things can't do something. It's to say they can't do everything, which is what these things tend to sort of assert. So there's been a battle between chiropractic and traditional medicine pretty much since its founding, which you can probably imagine, considering its dubious origins. Chiropractors argue that the American Medical association fought hard to suppress alternative medicine like chiropractic because it posed a competitive threat to their business. And you still hear that today when it comes to homeopathy. And the know, the doctors don't want you to know this one weird trick, it would cut into all their big pharma money, right? It's the exact same principle on that. [00:26:43] Speaker B: Variations of that phrase just keep getting used in clickbait ads. [00:26:47] Speaker A: Yes. [00:26:48] Speaker B: One of my recent favorites is use this one simple trick to completely empty your bowels. Great. Next to, like, a picture of an old banana. [00:26:58] Speaker A: I feel like that's a thing. Naturally. You just do. But. Okay. Yeah. [00:27:03] Speaker B: I'm not going to lie. [00:27:04] Speaker A: My one weird trick is going to the bathroom. [00:27:06] Speaker B: Just going for a big dump. [00:27:11] Speaker A: It's incredible. If you need one weird trick to help you empty your bowels, it's time for a colonoscopy. That's a simple signal of a whole different problem. But a big part of a lot of this stuff, too, is convincing you that you have problems, you don't, that you're full of toxins that need to be cleansed from you in various ways. Right? So buy this supplement, wear this insert, whatever the case may be, to cleanse you of all know bad juju inside of you that is causing all of this stuff. [00:27:44] Speaker B: It's a wonderful book just there to my left by a Dr. Ben Goldeger called bad science, which the second you mention that word toxins, every alarm bell should be ringing because they don't exist. [00:28:01] Speaker A: Yeah, toxins, chemicals, all these kinds of things are like, just. [00:28:05] Speaker B: They're impurities. [00:28:06] Speaker A: Impurities. [00:28:07] Speaker B: Is it made. [00:28:09] Speaker A: They're all words that people use that either are meaningless or are meaningless within that context. Everything's a chemical. So, yeah, you're going to be filled with chemicals. Otherwise you're, like, dead. I don't know. But, yeah. So it all kind of comes from the same sort of thought process. And there could be some truth in this claim that traditional medicine didn't want competition. It's not beyond the pale to think that doctors wouldn't like people fucking them off. For some dude who claims he can cure them by manipulating their magnetic field, that could be a problem. That I can. Right. That's understandable. But there's also no denying that a huge part of the problem was chiropractic practitioners masquerading as medical doctors when they absolutely were not. In fact, until 1920, chiropractors could actually be jailed for misrepresenting themselves as doctors. Good. But that changed when a law was passed making it so they could indeed call themselves doctors, as long as they didn't say they were doctors of medicine. [00:29:18] Speaker B: I see. [00:29:19] Speaker A: Yes, again, it's not that kind of doctor. [00:29:22] Speaker B: Yeah, situation. I think the word doctor is devalued. [00:29:28] Speaker A: Maybe its uses are a little broader than are useful, at least in some areas. I mean, you know when you go to a university, what kind of doctor you're dealing with, and you know when you go to a hospital, what kind of doctor you're dealing with. But there's a lot of other kinds that are out there, probably more than most people realize. There are. [00:29:52] Speaker B: A popular pro wrestler spent the best part of his career calling himself the doctor of thugonomics, for God's sake. Thugonomics is not. [00:29:59] Speaker A: You got to go to a lot of school for that. [00:30:01] Speaker B: You do. Yeah. [00:30:02] Speaker A: Do you know how much training is. [00:30:03] Speaker B: Involved from the streets? [00:30:06] Speaker A: Exactly. School. Hard knocks, bro. Now, according to the National Board of Chiropractic Education, training includes four years of undergrad, followed by three to five years of chiropractic college, followed by a clinical internship. And just for the record, that's three years less school than I had to go to for my degrees. It takes longer to be qualified to teach an undergrad, a pop culture course than to become a chiropractic doctor. Yeah, but anyway, I won't read off all the courses, but the NBCE lists off the typical coursework one can expect in their studies. First year includes things like general anatomy, palpation. Don't know what that is. [00:30:47] Speaker B: No, I think palpation is the art. [00:30:51] Speaker A: Of when you, like, press on. [00:30:52] Speaker B: Just having a dig around, having a bit of a feel around. [00:30:56] Speaker A: Palpate my fireworks. Yeah. [00:30:59] Speaker B: That's rummageology, isn't it? [00:31:01] Speaker A: Rummageology, yes, exactly that. So palpation is amongst their classes, human biochemistry, fundamentals of nutrition, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, and chiropractic principles and procedures. Second year includes courses like pharma toxology. Not pharmacology, pharma toxology, pathology. [00:31:26] Speaker B: Which is what then? [00:31:28] Speaker A: I'm not a chiropractor. [00:31:30] Speaker B: Chemical poisons, what would that be? [00:31:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's probably supposed to be like pharmacology. [00:31:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:39] Speaker A: How those things affect you, I guess. I did not see this come up in. I looked at other medical practices and their things that they learn and pharma toxology did not come up on any other one aside from chiropractors. It could be in other things. I just simply did not see it. So I assume this is special. Let's see. Pathology, clinical microbiology, imaging interpretation and nutritional assessment. And the third year wraps up with courses like pediatrics, dermatology, obstetrics and gynecology and diagnostic imaging interpretation, which is a lot of really varied stuff to take in one year. Stuff other medical professionals spend years on individually. You're not going to have a semester where you have pediatrics, dermatology and OBGYN. Those are pretty specialized. [00:32:35] Speaker B: You're kind of breezing through all of those topics there, aren't you? [00:32:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Yes, exactly. And just for comparison, training to become a pediatrician requires at least eleven years of schooling, including undergrad, four years of med school, and at least three years of pediatric residency, followed by several additional years of training in a pediatric specialty like neonatology or pediatric cardiology. Their training will be at least 12,000 to 14,000 patient care hours, where chiropractors are required to have about 800 contact hours over their two terms of internship in preparation. So in part because of the contentious nature of the relationship between chiropractic and traditional medicine, and in part just because of the nature of what chiropractice is and where it came from, the field has a tendency to see rejection of traditional medicine. Antivaxx beliefs are common amongst chiropractors. A push towards homeopathic remedies is common, like my chiropractor and the acupuncture. The belief that you can fix things like diabetes and immune system disorders with chiropractic is a huge current trend. Diabetes is a big one at the moment. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Absolutely wild to me. In fact, Naomi Klein is currently talking about how yoga moms and fucking new age health buffs are very susceptible to. [00:34:01] Speaker A: Fringe right wing ideology. Like all kinds of stuff God read doppelganger. It is so fucking good. [00:34:08] Speaker B: It is great. [00:34:10] Speaker A: All of your concerns about the world, Naomi is going to address them. [00:34:15] Speaker B: Excellent. [00:34:16] Speaker A: It's really. Yeah. The belief that you can fix things like this is huge with this. And it's clearly dangerous, because, like I said, for the average person, there's no reason for them to not trust their chiropractor. They think they're a doctor who's gone to med school. So if they say the COVID vaccine is doing dangerous things to your body, or that big pharma is just trying to sell you insulin you don't need, why wouldn't you believe them? They present themselves as the only trustworthy medical professionals in the field, when they are not, in fact, medical professionals. And this goes all the way back to Palmer himself, who considered distrust of vaccines a core tenet of chiropractics and referred to them as poison. So it's a feature, not a bug. Further, in the Guardian, Dr. Ernst noted that the dangers of chiropractic are underreported, making it so that chiropractors can create a falsely positive picture about the safety of their treatments. Anyone who's ever seen an american pharmaceutical ad knows that if any adverse effects occur during medical trials, they need to be reported. [00:35:23] Speaker B: I love. You know, I love american. [00:35:24] Speaker A: I know they're your favorite thing. Yeah. And the thing about them is like, yeah, you get that long list of all the ways in which you can be harmed by this medication, but that doesn't mean that this medication causes that, right? It just means that someone during this trial, had this happen to them. So if someone dies of old age while they're taking this pill, they have to list that as a potential side effect, whether or not it was actually caused by this, because it's like this happened while this was going on. But according to Ernst and his team, they collected data from 60 randomized controlled trials of chiropractic carried out from January 2000 to July 2011. They found that 29 of the studies failed to mention any adverse effects of the treatment. And of the 31 trials where adverse effects were reported, 16 actually reported that none had occurred during the study when they published it. So the adverse effects that did occur in the studies for sure were never published, which is unethical, per medical publishing guidelines, and allows for chiropractors to proclaim their procedures 100% safe. And you see this even on the big health sites like Healthline and WebMD and Mayo Clinic, because adverse effects aren't reported. In their publishing of the studies, they all say that there's little risk, and that's simply not true. Ernst looked at hundreds of case studies and found that about 50% of patients seeing chiropractors have adverse effects. Half. Wow. If two people go to the chiropractor practice, statistically one of them is going to have a bad result. Right? Ernst found that in addition to these fairly mild adverse effects, which basically are pain at the site of manipulation and referred pain sometimes, which only last one or two days, we have about five to 700 cases of severe complications being reported. And this next paragraph is absolutely staggering to me. So I'm just going to read this straight. How the article put it. With extreme chiropractic movement of the neck, an artery can disintegrate and lead to a stroke, an outcome that is well documented in medical literature. We only see what is being published and that can only be the tip of the iceberg, said Ernst. Some neurologist sees a stroke and he finds out that this is associated with chiropractic in 99.9% of the cases, he won't publish that. What they see people having strokes from chiropractic procedures and they just don't mention it, which is insane. So we have no way of knowing how many people this has happened to. Weirdly, the Guardian asked the British Chiropractic association for comment. And they were just like, nah, no thanks. I imagine the strategy here is to try to not streisand affect things. Like if they just ignore it rather than responding, they figure it'll go away. Which it kind of did. Like I said, even the normally vigilant medical websites don't mention any of this. Another study by american neurosurgeons found over 500 documented cases of a patient suffering a stroke after receiving neck manipulation by a chiropractor, many of whom died afterwards. They died just from this? [00:38:51] Speaker B: That is chilling to me. [00:38:54] Speaker A: Right, horrifying. [00:38:57] Speaker B: You book in with somebody who you think is a medical practitioner, who you think is your fucking trustworthy, your spine in their hands, you get fucking palpated and manipulated and you have a fucking stroke there and then, right? [00:39:11] Speaker A: It's horrifying. And a lot of them, the thing is that it takes a little while, so it's like they go home and it happens. And so basically, chiropractors argue this is just a coincidence. People have strokes all the time, so there's no way to prove that it's really their fault in their eyes. In 2001, the Guardian asked uk neurologists to report cases referred to them of neurological complications occurring within 24 hours of cervical spine manipulation over a twelve month period. 74% of the neurologists they asked responded, reporting 35 patients suffering, quote, severe adverse events that they suspected were caused by such an adjustment. As the article put it, the number may look small, but the really important finding of our survey was that none of these complications had ever been reported anywhere. Which means that the extent of the underreporting was exactly 100%. [00:40:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:40:11] Speaker A: No one is ever reporting when a chiropractic adjustment causes death to people. [00:40:20] Speaker B: Good God. [00:40:21] Speaker A: Insane? [00:40:22] Speaker B: Good God. [00:40:24] Speaker A: So what chiropractic is good for is exactly what you'd expect it to be good for, essentially, pain relief. Healthline lists back pain, neck pain, whiplash, sciatica, osteoarthritis, scoliosis, and headaches and migraine, although they acknowledge there actually isn't enough research to show that they can help with this. And research has shown primarily that it's likely a placebo effect. It cannot help you with headaches and migraine, but it can make you think that it is. [00:40:52] Speaker B: Which I can bite. [00:40:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And from a scientific perspective, chiropractors are equipped to help with those forms of pain. And this can be really important because other forms of treatment can be expensive as fuck. Whereas a lot of insurance covers regular chiropractic adjustments, it can also help reduce the need for opioids, for pain relief. And I think we know why that's a good thing. Yes, of course. Much better to have people going to a chiropractor than taking opioids and ending up addicted to drugs. So some things chiropractors claim to be able to heal, though, include stuff like asthma, tinnitus, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, bone tumors, and weak immune systems. And in British Columbia, chiropractors had to be legally barred from claiming they could fix pregnancy problems like breach babies by actively just turning them around in the womb. But here in the US, chiropractors make plenty of unfounded claims about what they can do to heal children of issues like ADHD, nocturnal and uresis, infant colic, and asthma, along with claiming the ability to boost a child's immune system. [00:42:02] Speaker B: Fuck that. [00:42:04] Speaker A: Which is another one of those catchphrases that is absolutely meaningless. You cannot boost your immune system if your immune system doesn't work. You need to go to an immunologist and find out if you have an underlying disorder that makes. [00:42:18] Speaker B: What are you going to do? You're going to fucking palpate my white blood cells. [00:42:22] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But they do this on literal babies. A high school friend of mine, legit, has a chiropractic practice just for babies. And every time she posts a video of her doing an adjustment on their tiny bodies. I want to puke. It's horrifying. The American Chiropractic association claims, quote, poor posture and physical injury, including birth trauma, may be common primary causes of illness in children and can have a direct and significant impact not only on spinal mechanics, but on other bodily functions. And naturally, chiropractic can fix all that. There is simply no evidence that this is the case, though. And with the underreporting of dangerous chiropractic effects, the last thing I would want to do if I had a kid was to hand them over to someone with 800 hours of training and let them fuck with their spine. [00:43:11] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:43:12] Speaker A: Fuck out of here. Absolutely not. So when it comes down to it, if going to the chiropractor and having your shit cracked once a week makes your pain go away and you can afford to get it done, fucking do it. As someone with chronic pain, I would love if someone could make me feel better for a little while. But for the love of God, don't believe them when they tell you they can heal you of anything other than aches and pains. They absolutely cannot do it. There's no scientific evidence they can do that. Further, there is a medical practice that is often covered by your insurance that can do what chiropractic can and help you with long term pain management, physiotherapy. The unsung heroes of the medical field, doctors of physical therapy, are trained specifically to be able to help people with injuries, disabilities and other conditions that would normally require surgery and prescription drugs. According to the American Physical Therapy association, their goal is not just to treat pain, but to prevent it long term, often giving patients treatment plans that they carry out at home, not just in the office. Thus, you don't just leave with your back cracked, but with a method for strengthening your body on your own so that you eventually don't need to keep coming back to them. The goal in physical therapy is not to need physical therapy, whereas chiropractics is expected to be ongoing. Like, how old is Owen? [00:44:30] Speaker B: Oh, he's ten. [00:44:31] Speaker A: He's doing chiropractics for ten years. [00:44:34] Speaker B: She hasn't been going to the chiropractor for ten years. But this is always my response when she comes back and suggests it says that the chiropractor has been recommending her particular foods to eat. Well, of course she fucking does. You know what I mean? She needs the income stream. She needs you coming back, right? [00:44:50] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Let me tell you the other things that I can help you with so that you keep coming to me. [00:44:56] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:44:57] Speaker A: Even when your pain subsides. Why are you going to come here? Oh, well. [00:45:02] Speaker B: I am on the brink of. And I'm almost wary of saying this, right. Because, you know I've got ongoing sleep issues. Right. That still hasn't gone away. Right. I'm managing it, like I said, through over the counter means. But a good friend of mine has recommended hypnotherapy. Right. And just saying the word is triggering every fucking bullshit alarm in my body. Hypnotherapy is bullshit. But the guy who recommended it to me is a rational man. [00:45:40] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. [00:45:42] Speaker B: So I feel as though I might give that a crack. [00:45:45] Speaker A: Do it. Why not? Let's see if it fixes you. [00:45:50] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:45:53] Speaker A: They're not going to touch you during hypnotherapy. They're not going to break your body. That's true. That's a no harm, no foul kind of situation. Unless you think it's going to cure cancer or something. [00:46:05] Speaker B: Exactly. Right. [00:46:06] Speaker A: Like, if someone tells you hypnosis is going to cure your diabetes. Of course, don't fucking do it. Someone tells you. Maybe it'll help you with your sleep issues. Probably not, but maybe. [00:46:17] Speaker B: Exactly. There's very little risk there. [00:46:20] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Like, oh, give me another tool in my arsenal. Sure. Worst case scenario, it doesn't work and you have a good story to tell about the time some guy tried to hypnotize you. Yeah, stuff like that. It's like, it's quackery. Probably. But again, I haven't researched hypnotherapy. I don't know the bounds of what it does. So I'm not going to outright say it can't help you. And in this case, having done chiropractics and done physio, I found physio to be a lot more helpful and caused me 100% fewer migraines. But I'm not here to tell you how to treat your pain, just to say, hey, this practice came from absolute quackery and often claims to be able to deliver far more than is physiologically possible and is potentially more dangerous than a cursory is chiropractic. Safe search is going to turn up, and you should probably be aware of that before your vertebral artery dissolves. [00:47:24] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:47:26] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:47:28] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, miselsen. [00:47:31] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said miselsen in such a horny way before. [00:47:35] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal received. [00:47:38] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:47:41] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm going to leg it. [00:47:48] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark. [00:47:50] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. You want to? Yes, I will. In fact, I will. Bring us in. Welcome for a ren. Pull up a chair, won't you please sit down for your weekly meal of lead and microplastics as we lift up the rock and see what the fuck is wriggling around under it. But the rock is earth, and we are humanity beneath it. So let's take a little look at what the fuck has gone wrong in the world this week. Listen, I tell you what the great thing is about Joak, right? [00:48:30] Speaker A: Okay? [00:48:31] Speaker B: Not just about the cast, but about the experience of being a jo ag listener, right? [00:48:38] Speaker A: Oh, okay. A thing you know a lot about. [00:48:41] Speaker B: Yeah. What I assume is a great thing about being a Joe Ag, what you get as a jogg listener, is the certainty that any week now, we're going to blow the fuck up, right? [00:48:56] Speaker A: Any fucking anytime now. [00:48:59] Speaker B: I mean it. [00:49:01] Speaker A: Any fucking given day, we're going to become serial. [00:49:03] Speaker B: That we blow the fuck on up, right? So what you get, as well as the insight, as well as the cultural exchange, as well as the shared fucking experience of being on the Joak journey with us, what you also get is knowing that when it happens, you will have been there from fucking. You know what I mean? You were in on the ground floor. [00:49:26] Speaker A: Early adopters. [00:49:28] Speaker B: Yes, well, I say early adopters. I mean, we're fucking four or five. Four years. [00:49:33] Speaker A: Four years into this. Yeah. Right. [00:49:35] Speaker B: But if you're on the Joak journey now, right, you get a sense of just real superiority over the millions who will join us later, right? So put that in your little pocket. Yeah? Bank that. [00:49:51] Speaker A: Just chuck that in your bag for a rainy day. [00:49:56] Speaker B: Don't know what that is. Joined in. Anyway. Liked it? [00:49:59] Speaker A: That's good. That's convincing. [00:50:01] Speaker B: Thank you. Yes. Because maybe this will be the week. Maybe this will be the week that we go fucking supernova. And you were here. You are the ogs, right? You are the fucking diehards, the true believers, the actual. You're the listeners that we really want. [00:50:18] Speaker A: It's true. [00:50:18] Speaker B: Right? And when we get massive, maybe this week, when the millions follow, fuck them, right? Fuck our future fanbase. You're the ones that we like. [00:50:32] Speaker A: That's right. [00:50:33] Speaker B: Yeah. So welcome to Jack of all graves friends. [00:50:35] Speaker A: And we hope as well, have you ever seen Princess Diaries? [00:50:39] Speaker B: No. [00:50:40] Speaker A: Princess Diaries has come up a lot this week, for whatever reason. And the song that I was singing, catch a falling star, features in that movie. In a brief scene, there's like a choir that we're going to do catch a falling, and then they all catch a falling star and put it in your pocket. For some reason, all week Princess Diaries has been coming up, and now it's like I've had all these things that I need to do, but all I want to do is watch Princess Diaries. [00:51:09] Speaker B: Well, then you should. [00:51:10] Speaker A: I should. I should just neglect my responsibilities and sit down and enjoy the antics of Princess via Thrombopolis. Of. [00:51:23] Speaker B: Know, I've long been convinced that the only way to rid yourself of an earworm is to listen to the song that you can't get rid of. [00:51:31] Speaker A: That's science right there. [00:51:33] Speaker B: Yes, indeed. I see no reason to think that it would be any different from a movie that you can't get out of your head. Just watch it. [00:51:40] Speaker A: I mean, I did that with frequency last week, and that was such an amazing choice. I'm still high off of it. I might watch it again. Why not? [00:51:47] Speaker B: Wow. [00:51:48] Speaker A: I just fucking love it so much. But anyway, it just feels like the. [00:51:51] Speaker B: Most disposable bit of film. Lies you get hung up on. [00:51:57] Speaker A: No. [00:51:57] Speaker B: What frequency has zero cultural impact? Like, none. [00:52:02] Speaker A: Lies. That is a lie. I think the thing about frequency, I'm going to kind of give you that. [00:52:11] Speaker B: Okay, good. Please do continue talking about. [00:52:13] Speaker A: Listen, you can't say something like that and expect me not to defend the classic that is the 2000 film frequency. The thing about frequency is everyone thinks they're the only person who's ever seen it and loves it. And then you start talking to people and they're like, no, I fucking love frequency. So it has this weird thing where it's like nobody saw it in the theater. Everyone saw it on dvd, like three years later, and we're like, holy shit, I love this movie. And then everyone thinks it's like their own thing. Like, hell, yeah, I just love this movie, frequency. And then as soon as you talk to a group of people, everyone's like, yeah, goddamn, that was a great movie. So it's like that low key cultural impact. It's like everyone's little movie. [00:52:54] Speaker B: It's in the cultural kind of threads in the fabric as opposed to in the headlines, right? [00:53:02] Speaker A: Precisely. Frequency has more impact than avatar. Fight me. [00:53:08] Speaker B: Time will tell. Time will fucking tell on that. [00:53:10] Speaker A: But Princess Diaries has a lot of cultural impact, and one of my favorite experiences of this was when I was teaching, I gave an exam. And the thing about my exams is, know, I always wanted people to actually learn stuff. So I was pretty, like, I gave them a study guide with the actual questions on it. And then I was like, anything you can fit on a note card, bring that in. So people will be writing in tiny writing, like, all the answers, their whole essays and stuff like that on note cards, fine. But there were, like, a couple of things that would always trip people up, one of which was that I would ask them about the president who was assassinated, this particular president. I don't remember how I phrased the question, but the answer, of course, was James A. Garfield. And without fail, there was always, like, a dozen people who would answer Andrew Garfield, to which I would write that Spider man on all of their papers. But one semester, the same exam, someone was talking about royalty somewhere or talking about another country, but they wrote Genovia, to which I had the pleasure of going, that's the made up country from princess diaries. That's not real. And I still treasure that moment to this day. It's, like, just a really gratifying teaching moment for me. [00:54:33] Speaker B: The same person who I mentioned earlier, who was into reflexology, is the same person who confused the american state of Atlanta with the lost city of Atlantis and refused to answer somebody's query about kind know, call charges or fucking whatever, because she thought they were taking the. [00:54:55] Speaker A: Piss, because she thought they were. [00:54:57] Speaker B: Because she thought they were trying to get her to amazing calling Atlantis. [00:55:04] Speaker A: This is me and the swans all over again, which is another one of my favorite moments in our journey as friends was that we were talking in a direct message, and I said something about how. Something about not thinking swans are real or whatever. And I was like, you thought I was kidding? And then I told you this story about when I said to my friends, like, oh, those animatronic swans are really cool at Disneyland. And they were like, those are real. And I was like, swans aren't real. And they were like, what the fuck? Your response was like, I was not ready to find this out. I didn't know swans were real until I was 21. It is what it is. [00:55:45] Speaker B: I'm going to send you a hedgehog in the mail. [00:55:49] Speaker A: I am not going to lie. I was googling today. Are hedgehogs good pets? [00:55:56] Speaker B: Are they? [00:55:57] Speaker A: Somewhat. [00:55:58] Speaker B: Are they? [00:55:58] Speaker A: Somewhat? They're apparently fairly low maintenance, but they are spiky, and they are prone to things like lice and salmonella, which is not great. [00:56:09] Speaker B: Absolute fucking hives of ticks. Absolutely. [00:56:13] Speaker A: But it's not like you're letting them run around. So I feel like if they're in your house, it'd be really weird if they got ticks. But also they can be very cuddly, but only if you get them within the first six to eight weeks. Then they start to become very solitary. And the other thing is, they're nocturnal, so you don't want to keep them anywhere near where you're sleeping or they will keep you up all night. I already have a dog that does that, so I don't need a pet that does that. I think guinea pigs is going to be the next thing I want. Guinea pigs. [00:56:39] Speaker B: Guinea pigs are excellent guinea pigs. No, they're great. Particularly the noise they make. Do you know what noises guinea pigs make? [00:56:49] Speaker A: How are the mice, by the way? [00:56:51] Speaker B: Oh, doing great. One pissed on my hand earlier, so that's classic mice. Classic mice behavior. But they are hail and hearty. They're healthy, they're socialized, they're good pets. Much to your. [00:57:03] Speaker A: I'm glad. This is not my experience, but I'm very glad that it's going better for you. [00:57:10] Speaker B: Back to guinea pigs, super briefly, please. No way of verifying this, but I have been told that if you have several guinea pigs, you can train them to walk behind you in a line. [00:57:19] Speaker A: I follow an Instagram account that they train their guinea pigs to do this, and it's the cutest thing, and then they'll come across an obstacle and they'll all leap in their little lines over the obstacle. It's just so cute. I fucking love guinea pigs. I think that's going to be the next pet in the Edmondson household, but. [00:57:39] Speaker B: Delicious by all accounts, too. [00:57:41] Speaker A: I have heard that, but I'm not interested in eating a guinea pig. [00:57:45] Speaker B: Where do they eat guinea pigs? Is it Peru? [00:57:47] Speaker A: I want to say I feel like it's somewhere in. There's just. I have learned this about myself. I think I mentioned this before, but that when I ate meat, I realized that I've seen things slaughtered in front of me and been fine and all that kind of stuff, but there are certain animals that just, like, I can't override the, like that's a pet or things like that when eating, like rabbit and such, or when I tried to eat a frog. I love frogs too much, and I just could not. It was horrifying. [00:58:21] Speaker B: Guinea pig consumption is actually on the rise. [00:58:24] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:58:25] Speaker B: Yes. [00:58:26] Speaker A: I guess they're probably really easy to farm. [00:58:28] Speaker B: Raise, yeah. [00:58:29] Speaker A: In fact, my friend Hugh worked on a guinea pig farm when we were in high school, and ever since then, he refuses to acknowledge the existence of guinea pigs. He hates guinea pigs. There's too many guinea pigs. [00:58:42] Speaker B: But no, I'd endorse that. If you wanted to keep some guinea pigs, I'd be all up for that. [00:58:46] Speaker A: Thank you. I appreciate that. Anyways, Jack, of all graves is the podcast you're listening to. The podcast that will not eat a guinea pig, but will keep them in their home. [00:58:56] Speaker B: Actually, fuck off. I would happily eat a guinea pig. [00:58:59] Speaker A: Okay, well, fine. The podcast were half. [00:59:03] Speaker B: 50% of us would eat a guinea pig. [00:59:05] Speaker A: Yeah, would eat a guinea pig. [00:59:06] Speaker B: Would you eat a guinea pig? [00:59:08] Speaker A: The other half would just love a guinea pig. [00:59:10] Speaker B: Have you eaten? Surely to fuck. One of our listeners has at some point eaten a guinea pig. We cultivate a cultured fan base, people traveled, worldly, erudite, adventurous. [00:59:24] Speaker A: Have you ever been to South America? [00:59:27] Speaker B: No, I've not. [00:59:29] Speaker A: Me neither. I've got two continents left, South America and Antarctica. [00:59:34] Speaker B: You're not going to go to Antarctica, surely. [00:59:36] Speaker A: Oh, I am going to Antarctica. This has been a like, I have somehow inceptioned this idea into Keo's head now, and now he is convinced we're going to go to Antarctica. But the other night on Wheel of Fortune, one of the prizes was like, a National Geographic cruise to Antarctica. And I was like, let's just see how much this cost. And when they said the value, add a value of $20,000. And I just started laughing hysterically. I'm like, we're going to need some time to save up to go to Antarctica. [01:00:09] Speaker B: I worry about how the cold would affect your. [01:00:13] Speaker A: Don't. Cold isn't too bad. Heat is usually what fucks me up. But I would like to see an emperor penguin before. There are no emperor penguins. Yeah, before we climate change them to death. I would like to see a penguin that's as tall as I am. That's what I want. [01:00:35] Speaker B: I had to remind myself then, but you aren't tall, are you? That's like a pretty big penguin, I think. [01:00:42] Speaker A: Maybe they don't get quite my height, but I think they get like 4ft or something like that. A penguin and I could do the chin test if I hugged a penguin, it would, like, get right. Oh, it'd be so cute. I would like to do that in my lifetime. [01:00:58] Speaker B: I don't doubt that you will, because that's the kind of gal you are. [01:01:02] Speaker A: That is the kind of gal I am. This is as I wrote in everyone's yearbooks in high school. Find what you're following and chase it down. [01:01:11] Speaker B: Nice. [01:01:11] Speaker A: Goddamn it. I didn't write the goddamn it part. I didn't used to swear when I was a teenager. Anyways, hey, just a reminder, we have a watch along at the end of this month, 24 March. We're just getting it out there now because we are such good planners and have been using our calendar. The 23 march. [01:01:36] Speaker B: Whoops. 23 March. Saturday the 23 march. [01:01:39] Speaker A: We'll be watching the fly. [01:01:41] Speaker B: Yes. Spoke about this very movie to Sam, my good friend Sam, who I met up with in London yesterday. And just all of the reasons why it's perfect, all of the reasons why it's brilliant and a perfect, perfect watch along movie. So that's going to be a banger, friends. So if you've not done one before, if you've not joined us for one before, this is the one. [01:02:01] Speaker A: This is your time. I was hoping you somehow catch the. I was going for the Michael W. Smith song, christian contemporary artist Michael W. Smith song about Cassie Bernal, the girl that became famous for being a Christian during Columbine. But then it turned out the whole thing was a myth. [01:02:27] Speaker B: Okay. I went instead with perfect moment, which was sang by Martin McCutcheon from EastEnders. [01:02:37] Speaker A: Nice. [01:02:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:02:38] Speaker A: Hey, what's a. Does that have murders? [01:02:42] Speaker B: No. Does it? Fuck. Well, it's a soap opera. Yeah, sure, there have been murders in Emmerdale, but it's a soap opera about rural folk in rural Yorkshire. I want to say it is Yorkshire. [01:02:59] Speaker A: I know that much because it came up on House of games. But the clue about it sounded as if it were something more like mystery oriented. [01:03:08] Speaker B: Well, all you need to know about Emmerdale, really, is it's now called Emmerdale. It was originally called Emmerdale Farm. [01:03:17] Speaker A: I could see why they changed that. [01:03:19] Speaker B: Yes, it changed to it's. It's. It's the rural soap opera. That's all it is. [01:03:29] Speaker A: Okay, listen. This past week, for some reason, after all these years, I constantly ask you weird questions. But you do now you've started equating me to those videos of Jonathan Frakes. [01:03:45] Speaker B: I can't believe I've never done it before. It's just perfect. [01:03:47] Speaker A: And now every time I ask you a weird question, I'm like, I'm doing it again. But I'm going to continue doing it. I'm aware of it now. So, yes, we have that coming up. And book club, of course, will be in two weeks. And this book, someone has already started reading it. It's called shutter. Shutter. You can see that on jackvallgraves.com. Book club. But one of the members of the book club who started reading it, read one chapter and was like, holy shit, this is already amazing. So I am very excited. It's by an indigenous author, one of three indigenous authors. We're reading this this year, so I'm really excited about that. So, jackovallgraves.com book club, if you want to know more about the book, how to become a part of the club, all that stuff. And we meet on discord, and we have an amazing time every single time. So do that. And if you are one of our. What's our top tier on Kofi? [01:04:47] Speaker B: Great bunch of lads. [01:04:49] Speaker A: Great bunch of lads. If you're a great bunch of lads. Kofi supporter, I will be mailing out things within the next week or two for your quarterly mail. So if you want to get mail from me, sign up at that tier, and if you already are a member of that, you'll be getting some nice. Yeah, some nice. [01:05:14] Speaker B: Love that. [01:05:15] Speaker A: About tasty. It's difficult to know what I can send because sometimes things get lost in the mail. Like, I sent everybody these cool ass pendants that I got at this weird church in Montreal, and half of them came empty. So it's like you got to be careful with what you try to send in the mail. So I try to stick with things that are, like, flat ish, so that they don't end up falling out or being taken because they look like something cool or whatever. [01:05:45] Speaker B: I wonder what percentage of posties are thieves. [01:05:51] Speaker A: I like to think not a lot, but it certainly does happen a fair amount, which is a bummer. It's a very vulnerable thing to send stuff in the mail. [01:06:04] Speaker B: Yeah. It's also like a big act of trust, isn't it? [01:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, same with, like, TSA. Like, when you put your luggage through, people rifle through it and, you know, because they put a little thing in there, like, hey, we went through your shit. But also they could go through that stuff. And, you know, they do. There are absolutely people who arrive at their destinations and are like, why isn't this thing that was in my bag in there vulnerable? Vulnerable. [01:06:32] Speaker B: Have you ever had luggage lost? You've traveled a lot. Have you ever had luggage go awry? [01:06:36] Speaker A: I've had it lost, but it has always eventually turned up. Like, when my friends and I went to Ireland in 2017, all of our luggage got lost, which was a pain in the ass. And it took them, like, 48 hours to get it to us, which was a bit of a struggle. And you're, like, in cold weather and stuff like that. And we were from Southern California. We're like airplane clothes aren't going to cut it. And when I was in college, I remember my luggage getting lost once and it took days for them to get it back. And then they finally delivered at like 04:00 a.m. I had to wander out there in my jammies and go get it. So. Yeah. Not my favorite. [01:07:18] Speaker B: No. I can imagine. What have you watched this week, Corey? [01:07:23] Speaker A: I've watched a few things. [01:07:25] Speaker B: You're picking the slack up this week because I've watched nothing except. [01:07:29] Speaker A: Yeah. You have not been in the movie viewing. [01:07:32] Speaker B: No, I've been super busy. Super busy. [01:07:34] Speaker A: No matter how many times I tried to bait you into watching something this week, you could not be baited. Let's see. I went and saw poor things to finish out my Oscar nominated best picture movies because as I've said, I think on here, I am not going to watch the biopics because I don't hate myself. So no Oppenheimer and no maestro for me. [01:07:59] Speaker B: Oppenheimer, all the other ones. It is exactly what you think it is. [01:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I've read books. I think I'm okay. Yeah, I'm good on that one. So I went and saw poor things, which is a real mixed bag for me. I think the first. So it's like a little over 2 hours long, I think. And the first hour and 15 minutes of it is brilliant. Absolutely loved it. I think this movie might have my favorite Mark Ruffalo performance of all time. And then it's obviously a satire about men's and women's roles and society and all that kind of stuff. And the second half of the movie insists on telling you that instead of showing it to you. So the first hour was very clever and just showing you these reversals and things like that. And then the second hour was like, now let us explain to you what we've been saying. I see for this, the last 20 minutes of it are just like nonsensical. It's very absurd. But basically the story of four things is people have compared it to like Franken Hooker, essentially. Emma Stone is a woman who has been sort of in some way put together by this surgeon, played by Willem Dafoe, who know a severe deformity. And he lives in a household full of other things that he's cobbled together. [01:09:27] Speaker B: I strongly intend to watch it. So don't. [01:09:29] Speaker A: I'm not going to give anything away, of course, but just various things he's cobbled together, little Franken monsters, all over his house, a half goat, half dog animal or things like that. And it's very whimsical and weird. Definitely takes place in not our world, that kind of thing. And as she starts to mature and things like that, she decides she wants to go on adventures of her own. And so then we're like following this cobbled together woman as she discovers the world. So I won't say any more than that. [01:10:04] Speaker B: You've just described Edward scissorhands. [01:10:07] Speaker A: It's like Tim Burton all the way through as well. The influences are very clear. It's Franken Hooker meets Tim Burton, for sure. Yeah. I think it's worth watching. It's just for me, it's like 1 hour of it is brilliant. And I would have been like five stars. Absolutely. And then it's like, okay, I wish you hadn't gotten messagey about it because now I feel I'm being pounded over the head with it. I also watched Lisa Frankenstein. Yeah, it was not great. The aesthetic is, I don't know, it takes place in the 80s, but it doesn't really feel like it at all, except for the music and how they're dressed. But it very much has, like a modern sensibility to it. Lisa Frankenstein is the story, another cobbled together human story of a girl whose mother was murdered by a serial killer. And she has basically not spoken much since then. And her father has remarried and she basically goes to the graveyard and she says over this grave that she wants to die or whatever. Or she says she wants to be with you, with this person in the grave, meaning she wants to die, but he interprets it as with him and comes and suddenly appears this zombie guy in her home and brings her to life as she sort of develops a relationship with this guy and they begin to cobble him together from various parts to try to fix him from his dead. [01:11:51] Speaker B: A physical relationship, because that's creepy. [01:11:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it is creepy, corey necrophilia, as they call it. It has ideas. I think. It just doesn't execute them super well. I don't really like Diablo Cody, so I feel like maybe I'm predisposed towards not liking it for that reason too. I'm just not really into her writing. And then with a first time director, Zelda Williams. It's uneven. [01:12:20] Speaker B: Yeah. It's one that I have no intention of seeing. I know exactly what I don't feel. It's anything I'm going to enjoy. I, too share that antipathy towards Diablo Cody. I don't like the kind of, I hate ironic detachment in dialogue and in characters. [01:12:38] Speaker A: That's very much what this is. [01:12:41] Speaker B: Not for me. [01:12:42] Speaker A: Yeah. So I don't know. People like it. It's just not my bag. Lisa Frankenstein. We watched Dead and breakfast with the scream and chat the other day, which has to be, like, one of my favorite movies we've ever watched for Scream and chat before. It seems like a 90s movie, but it's not. It was made in 2004. It stars like Jeremy Sisto and Eric Palladino, Deedrich Bader, what's his face, daddy Winchester from Supernatural, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, all these people. And basically it's about a group of, I think they're supposed to be in college, like, college age people who are going for a wedding or something. And it's like a cabin in the woods sort of situation, and a murder takes place. And pretty soon it's clear that there is something going on that is taking over people and causing chaos in this little country town. Oz Perkins is in it. Anthony Perkins'son. And it was so much fun. It's very ridiculous, but it's got great practical effects in it. Lots of blood and decapitations and a decapitated head that one of the characters carries around and makes it talk like a puppet throughout the movie. [01:14:00] Speaker B: Oh, nice. [01:14:01] Speaker A: Yeah, it was so much fun. If you're looking for, like, a really stupid watch, dead and breakfast is delightful. [01:14:08] Speaker B: Okay, cool. I will actually watch that. That sounds. [01:14:11] Speaker A: It's, you know, potato quality. It's just a fun little ride. Nice. And then the other thing I watched was the man who killed Hitler. And then the. [01:14:22] Speaker B: What's the title? [01:14:23] Speaker A: That's the title. And you would think that that's going to be like a goofy sharknado type thing or cocaine bear. It's not. It is deadly serious, takes itself extremely seriously, stars Sam Elliott and has, like, a bajillion other very credible actors in it. Aiden Turner plays him when he's younger. Ron Livingston is in it. And it's like, basically about a guy who does those things. He goes to World War II and is basically assigned to kill Hitler and does that. And then it shows him older, sort of lonely old man who has made choices that have left know alone. And he is charged then with killing Bigfoot and goes and does that because Bigfoot has some sort of contagion that potentially could be world ending. And so they need someone to kill him, and so they send him to do that. It's so bizarre because that's such an insane premise. But it's taken completely seriously and very movingly, there's times where I was like, why am I tearing up while Sam Elliott is fighting Bigfoot? What's going on? [01:15:41] Speaker B: Fantastic. [01:15:42] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a very weird. It's not fantastic, but it's interesting. Like it's worth watching just because it's such a bizarre movie. So, yeah, the man who killed Hitler and then the Bigfoot. [01:15:58] Speaker B: Nice bunch of watches there, Corey. [01:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:16:02] Speaker B: Yes. I felt as though I had to give June another watch in readiness for going back, which I'm going to do this week. And I won't hear any shit talking about Dune from. It's awesome. It's monumental. [01:16:23] Speaker A: I feel like I'm neutral on Dune, basically. I don't hate it. It's just also I did sleep through a good chunk of it and I felt like miss anything. But at the same time, I'm not super attached to the story or whatever. I saw Dune when I was a kid. I think we watched it quite a bit in my household, actually. But I'm not super attached to it. So it's like one of those things where I'm like, it's got pretty sounds. I think that was the thing that I was really blown away by. [01:16:52] Speaker B: Beautiful sound. [01:16:53] Speaker A: Yeah, the sound design is incredible. And I remember seeing it and more than anything, just being like, I have not experienced sound design like this before and being like, yeah, really blown away by it. And people seem to be really liking the second part. So I'm obviously going to see it and I think I'll probably like it fine. [01:17:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Because it's a long, old commitment, I'm finding that I'm going to have to pick my moment to see it properly. Catch it too late and I'll fall asleep. [01:17:25] Speaker A: Right. Yes. [01:17:26] Speaker B: Catch it too early and I'll have to miss work. Right. So, yes, it's a tactical one. It's one of delicate get. Right. [01:17:38] Speaker A: But I am, because it's a movie event. Everybody's seeing it. And I do love that kind of thing where it's like we're all seeing the same thing, we're all talking about it and everything. That's amongst my favorite sort of shared experiences. So I'm looking forward to seeing it this week. [01:17:55] Speaker B: Yes. So, yes, we shall report back. [01:17:57] Speaker A: Of course we will. Yes. Naturally. Hopefully by next week we'll be able to report back about that film. In the meantime. [01:18:06] Speaker B: In the meantime. [01:18:07] Speaker A: In the meantime, you came up with a topic this week that out the gate excited me. I was into it, so. [01:18:17] Speaker B: This might turn into a rant. Right. And I think I only really suggested this topic because I really wanted to rant because. Oh, God, I've got to share how much I fucking hate what we're about to talk about. Right. I'll preface it by just telling you, right, that in January this year in Melbourne, right, a 14 year old kid was charged. Was arrested and charged after his friend filmed him for social media, of course. Pushing a fucking 79 year old man off a pier into the fucking ocean. [01:19:01] Speaker A: Come on. Was the guy. Okay? [01:19:04] Speaker B: He was saved by passers, by Jesus. [01:19:10] Speaker A: Christ. [01:19:13] Speaker B: Without any attempt to conceal his identity. This kid shared that, right? [01:19:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's for the Internet. He shared it, yes. Even because I. Oh, man. [01:19:23] Speaker B: From his own. [01:19:24] Speaker A: How they caught him. [01:19:25] Speaker B: Yes. He didn't obscure his face, he just openly shared him. Just fucking shoving this old guy into the fucking sea from a pier. Incredible. [01:19:40] Speaker A: Lol. [01:19:41] Speaker B: Yeah, well, quite. And just a couple of weeks back, so very recently, there's a belgian youtuber who goes by the name Yanike, or Jannike, however pronounced it, I don't know. Also arrested this week for videos in which he firstly films himself mixing, like, a bucket full of horrific shit, right? Just like a bucket full of water, paint, food, beer, dog shit, actual dog excrement. Actual dog shit, right? [01:20:17] Speaker A: Okay. [01:20:18] Speaker B: And he then fucking pauses this over members of the public and runs away. Come on, you fucking scumbag. [01:20:29] Speaker A: Seriously. This is a thing that I struggle with a lot in society generally, is the. Like, how would you feel if that happened to you? Well, yeah, like the golden rule type situation. [01:20:48] Speaker B: Furthermore, right, recently, a british youtuber, a guy who goes by the name of Mizzy, his real name is Bakari Bronze Agaro. And this kid, he recently got 18 weeks in prison, rightly so, for repeatedly. Just videos that he's sharing on social media of him just brazenly just walking into people's homes and sitting down in their living rooms. [01:21:16] Speaker A: That's right. Yeah, I remember that happening. [01:21:19] Speaker B: Running away with a dog. Just stealing a dog from a pensioner. Riding his bike into stores in the back room of shops and restaurants. [01:21:30] Speaker A: Just absolutely antisocial, baby. [01:21:34] Speaker B: Horrific antisocial. Just pulverizing of the social contract on video. Simply for, in this kid's case, just for a craven play for sponsorship and fucking brand endorsements and YouTube, or just. [01:21:51] Speaker A: Views, for that matter. [01:21:52] Speaker B: Exactly. [01:21:53] Speaker A: We talked about that. When we're talking about dangerous things people do to themselves on TikTok, when Anna was here, I did like a cold, open talking about that. And it's like people. It's not even for sponsorships and stuff like that. It's like they get the 40,000 views or whatever and some likes and it's like, that's worth it. It is totally worth that. Like what? [01:22:19] Speaker B: It's given me a lot to think about in terms of how the fuck have we, have we got here where this kind of thing is becoming more and more prevalent and how is it seen as a reasonable avenue of exposure for people, right? I mean, take. Take the fucking dog shit, water pouring guy, right? With all of these views and with all of this notoriety, what outcome? What outcome, possibly. What is the fucking goal here? Surely he can't be telling himself that that's going to lead to any kind of legitimate career. [01:23:05] Speaker A: Nobody is going to sponsor someone that's doing dangerous shit to people or that's not going to bring you to the next level. Like, oh, all of a sudden people saw me pour some dog shit on people and they wanted to see what I could do next. Yeah, exactly. I was such a genius. [01:23:23] Speaker B: That's where my head is at this week. Right? That's what I kind of want to discuss in a little bit more depth. Fucking hell. Is it that there's. Now, take Mizzi, for example, right? When being sentenced, the judge condemned the fact that it felt like for him, it's an open play for fame, right? And whereas in traditional kind of legacy media types like tv and film and whatever, there are so many more steps that somebody would need to go through and an idea would have to go through to make it anywhere near in front of the eyes of the public. [01:24:14] Speaker A: Yeah. It's kind of this weird reversal because now you see this with, when people want to become actors and musicians and stuff like that, too, especially musicians, that it's like, it used to be that it was like, oh, yeah, you have to do all this training, you have to have an agent, you have to blah, blah, blah, blah, get all this. And now when you try to become one of these things, like, well, how many followers do you have? Are we going to be able to monetize you because you've already got a following, or are we going to have to start from scratch, which we don't. [01:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. That. I think that kind of instant validation, that instant fame that social media and TikTok in particular affords, does it drive people? I mean, has it become a pissing contest? Are people looking for more and more ridiculous, extreme, fucking offensive ways of standing out? I guess. Is that what it is? [01:25:18] Speaker A: Yeah. And I kind of wanted to, in thinking about that, sort of explore pranks in and of themselves. Right? Because ostensibly that's what these are, right? Like, they're bad ones, but they're pranks that they're pulling on people. And I found a couple of articles that have interesting takes on the psychology of pranking, one that kind of explains why, in general, we find pranking fun, and one that explores the more insidious side of pranking. And so I thought maybe we could go through that a little bit because I found these pretty fascinating. So one of these articles called the psychology of pranking talks about it from sort of the positive values of this humor and laughter release endorphins and oxytocin, all that kind of stuff. Yeah, great things that we'd love. And clinical psychology says that practical jokes are a form of play fighting. Jokes imply a sense of closeness or insider group feelings in the relationship. That is, you tend to prank those you believe you're close with or who can handle the joke. And you do see this kind of stuff like you had mentioned, like people who prank their partners on TikTok and stuff like that. And some of it sucks, but some of it is just like silly, right? Things that a lot of people do in their homes, like, oh, my husband is easily startled, so I hide behind things, stuff like that. And just to hear him scream or whatever. And it's like, it's closeness, it's a bond, you know, that this isn't like he's not going to have an emotional breakdown because you scared him or things like that. It's fun. And you can do that kind of stuff with people that you know well and know how they're going to take it and that maybe they're just going to prank you back tomorrow and stuff like that. So it's a way of actually building closeness and community with people. [01:27:23] Speaker B: Is inherently, though, a prank, not just by definition, something mean spirited, is it? [01:27:35] Speaker A: Not? Just a way of not mean? Okay, so one of the things it says, know a good prank satirizes human fears. Or, you know, it talks about how this is used worldwide. Like, for example, there is in New Guinea, a tribe that as sort of a coming of age ritual, they'll have children make a box and buried in the ground, and they'll tell them that after a while, treasure will appear inside it, but they can't peek. And they know that kids, of course, are going to peek. So when the kid looks inside of the box, it's just a box of animal shit. And it's poking fun at kids who would go and look at their Christmas presents early or whatever. It's not mean you're not trying to hurt the kid. It's just kind of like, you peaked, you little goofball, and all you get is shit as a result. And it's like, about motivations. It says, what are you trying to accomplish? And this argues that a prank releases inhibition, liberating us from a moment, from having to act properly. And that's a thing that throughout society we like to do. Give us a moment of just being like, you're not acting right. And that is part of the fun of it, as opposed to, like, you're not trying to hurt someone. If someone hates pranks and you do this to them all the time, that's mean spirited. If they laugh every time you do it and think it's funny, then this is like, yeah, it's part of building relationship with someone. So that's kind of the psychology of why we do find pranks funny and why we do them to each other. Right. In your friend groups most of the time, if you have a prankster in the group, they're not doing stuff that deeply harms you. They're just doing stuff that's like, oh, we all have a laugh about it. Let's tell that story later on. [01:29:32] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. I fucking hate being pranked. Right? [01:29:38] Speaker A: I'm not a huge fan of it either. But you pranked me the other day, right? Was that mean? [01:29:43] Speaker B: No, it wasn't. [01:29:44] Speaker A: Were you trying to hurt me? [01:29:46] Speaker B: No. [01:29:46] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. It was an affectionate thing you did because we know each other really well and you knew that I would buy it because I am very literal. And it was funny that you pranked me into thinking we had to be silent during this video game or the zombies were going to find us. [01:30:05] Speaker B: I'm still quite proud of it. [01:30:06] Speaker A: Right. So you know what a prank looks like that isn't mean spirited. [01:30:11] Speaker B: Yes, I do. And I think that's kind of what has happened here somehow, is that the mean spirited element of pranking is the one which seems to. Is the one which is getting the most eyes on it, is one which gets the most media, is one that gets them in whatever, the fucking echo chamber. That's the fucking voice which ends up being loudest. [01:30:39] Speaker A: This is approached in this other article that I was talking about. So another angle on pranks that is less sweet and affectionate. And my dear friend, I know you're going to take me very literally, and trust me on this, is an argument by a criminologist named Tony Blockley in a vice article who basically says the aspects of this are like a your ego. Right. Like, shocking people. Being able to shock people is something that provides status and credibility. It's something that you're like, oh, just me being able to do this is an achievement. And on top of that, he equates it to a lot of toxic masculine behavior. Yeah. He puts this, he says, in frightening someone, you're asserting your power and control over them. [01:31:32] Speaker B: Yes. [01:31:32] Speaker A: The intense psychological drive to be dominant is predicated by an environment that aggrandizes these values. Why do they do it? Because they can. They can scare somebody. They can control someone. These men would never see the people they frighten as victims. They don't consider that person. They see the person as an object for their achievement, not as a person. And that describes what you're talking about with, like, pushing an old man off a pier. You do it because you can. That's not a person. That is like an avenue for me to get views and have control. [01:32:05] Speaker B: Absolutely. People are using people as props. It's also a complete disregard. Just a fucking callous, horrible disregard for people's expectations to kind of privacy. And I hate the assumption that, I think is just basically carried around now that everyone is fair game to be filmed and shared. I hate knowing that at any given point, somebody can wave a fucking camera in my face and share it, and I have no recourse. Privacy law cannot keep up with the speed at which everybody is now on display on show 100% of the time. [01:32:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I've thought about that before. Are there times when I've been doing something in my own little bubble and someone was filming me and I didn't know it and it's on TikTok and I have no idea. I don't use that. What if that happened? That occurs to me all the time that it's like, you know you're being filmed sometimes, right? Like, just in benign ways. Like, say you're walking around Disneyland or something and someone is filming their vacation, you know, that you're in the background of people's footage and stuff like that. But what if you're doing something weird and you don't know it, and you end up on a people of Disneyland TikTok or something, and you don't. [01:33:35] Speaker B: Yes. [01:33:36] Speaker A: Like, yeah, that idea that at any time you can be content for someone else is not. [01:33:43] Speaker B: That's it. You've just put your fucking finger right on it. I absolutely despise this idea that people can be just used as props, as content, and have no recourse. Because when that fucking video of a guy getting shit water dumped all over him on a train has been shared thousands, hundreds of thousands of times, which. [01:34:06] Speaker A: Is a humiliating thing to have happened to you. Humiliating? [01:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:34:10] Speaker A: Probably your coworkers have seen it violating. [01:34:12] Speaker B: Yeah. This act of violation, and the individual has absolutely no agency, no recourse, can't do anything about it when it's happened. [01:34:21] Speaker A: And I think his thing about sort of power and the dehumanization here speaks to that as well as another thing that people talk about is everyday sadism. Not the kind of stuff where you actively are tracking down and trying to hurt people, but in which, in a sort of day to day way, there's a pleasure derived from the suffering of others. And I'm a fan of schottenfreude. I love an american's funniest home videos or whatever. When people send in videos of themselves or something like that with something happening to them, I find that funny. Sure, there's an element of consent to it, but there was one study that was done where 78 undergraduates were asked whether they'd rather kill insects, assist in the killing of insects, clean toilets, or submerge their hands in ice cold water. And over 53% of the volunteers elected to grind the insects to death and did that. They didn't really, but they thought they were grinding insects to death, right? And many of the people who did so expressed joy in doing it. They were having fun crushing the insects. And sure, a lot of us have antipathy towards bugs, but the sort of thing they were trying to say is that sometimes sadistic actions are pleasurable experiences for people. And as long as that's the case, when you're watching stuff like this, you are deriving pleasure from it, which drives up the view counts or shock or whatever the case may be. But you have this dehumanization met with a bunch of us sitting at home enjoying that dehumanization of someone else, watching someone else suffer for our pleasure. [01:36:10] Speaker B: See, that is one thing I just can't get my head around. And it's been kind of condoned on legacy media before now as well. I mean, I remember, I think it's early naughties. There was a prank tv show over here called Balls of steel, right? Which was the most. The lowest common denominator, fucking gutter kind of horseshit prank show with a jackass esque team of fucking pranksters just doing horrible fucking childish shit to the public, which was then filmed for the gratification of the audience. Things like pretending to smear dog shit on their car door, just insulting people and running away. Just really purile, childish horseshit. [01:36:57] Speaker A: Right? [01:36:58] Speaker B: But it was huge. It was a really popular fucking show. I don't know. [01:37:05] Speaker A: Yeah, there's an interesting history to that too, because I think of prank shows like that. Right. Often they were, and some are pretty benign. For example, like an article about candid camera, which is like, the OG of prank shows obviously noted that the pranks they did were things like having someone use a spoon, but it melted when they tried to stir their coffee. Like, oh, darn it. Or having someone try to drive a car, but it doesn't have a motor. It's silly. [01:37:37] Speaker B: Exactly. That trades on befuddlement. [01:37:40] Speaker A: Right? [01:37:40] Speaker B: Befuddlement, as opposed to absolutely fucking something. [01:37:44] Speaker A: Or the show. Who do you think you are? Has actors in scenarios where bystanders have the choice to intervene or not and sees what they do. In this case, the prank isn't harming the people, but causing introspection. Are we bystanders or do we step in? You have shows like scare tactics, which scared the living shit out of its victims, but was set up by friends and family so that ultimately there was, like, a catharsis when the person escaped the horror show and was greeted by someone they loved. But then you've got meaner stuff that I think is more the lineage of your TikTok assholes. Like that one you were just talking about. Or like, boiling points, which put people into rage inducing situations to see if they would freak out or keep their cool. Or punked, which sometimes could be very silly, but also famously brought Justin Timberlake to tears when he thought that the IRS had confiscated his dogs. A quibby reboot of punk saw the social media personality and actress Liza Koshi getting pranked into thinking she hit a 13 year old girl in the face and broke her nose on the day of her butt mitzvah, causing Koshi to have to fight back tears as she tried to deal with the situation. That's mean. That is mean. Like causing so much distress to this person in this situation. Why is that funny about that? [01:39:03] Speaker B: That is what I'm really fucking struggling with. Right. That guy was 79, right? [01:39:08] Speaker A: And the kid was 14. So there's a degree of just immaturity. Well, yeah, there's just not thinking through the consequences of doing something stupid when you're that age. But it's still like, why did the reason that that 14 year old kid thought pushing a 79 year old man into the water is funny is because he watched other people do this? Is it things like that? And get tons of views for doing it. He knows that you can be rewarded by doing terrible things to strangers. [01:39:46] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, you can't spend views. But value isn't about money, and value is placed by. [01:39:52] Speaker A: It's all social capital. [01:39:55] Speaker B: You said it. Yes, exactly. That. If the kind of the trade off, if the price that you pay to get, that is fucking long lasting harm. If I was sat on a train and somebody dumped shit all over me, that would leave you with fucking PTSD, man. That would leave a fucking real mark on your life. You know what I mean? And for what? For fuck all. I hate it. I absolutely hate it. [01:40:20] Speaker A: Yeah. My dad used to always say when it came to pranks or what games you were playing or things like that, if it's not fun for everyone, it's not fun. And I think that feels like the proper approach to all of this. There's plenty of things. And even to go back to that sort of gendered dynamic about this, I think you see that clearly too, is that most of these are boys and men, where most of the Pranks that you see from women are kind of tender in what they're doing. I saw one the other day, it went wrong, but it was like this girl tried to hit her roommate in the face with a pancake while she was flipping a pancake, but the handle came off of the pan and the whole pan hit her in the face. But the two of them then had a laugh or whatever. It was silly. She was like, oh, I'm just going to do this silly little thing where I throw a pancake at my roommate. That's not going to injure her in any way or anything like that. It'll just surprise her. And you see a lot of those kinds of tender sort of pranks amongst women, but this idea of the control and the power and the ego and being able to just treat people as expendable in this way does seem largely, obviously not all, but to be a kind of male conceit, and it's easy. [01:41:38] Speaker B: To kind of assume that, but it really does feel borne out. It really does feel as though that's how it's working. And I sincerely wonder if, obviously, I'd like to think were that to happen to me, I would fucking kill a man. [01:41:57] Speaker A: Sure. [01:41:58] Speaker B: I genuinely feel as though a murder charge could be avoided. Worse, somebody to get killed in a situation like that. [01:42:06] Speaker A: Oh, in America for sure. I'm sure that's happened. I would not be surprised if someone has killed someone when they did that and they've got away with it. [01:42:15] Speaker B: A guy got shot in the stomach last year. There you go, doing a prank. Air quotes. A fucking prank. He picked the wrong fucking Texan and got shot. Fucking shot point blank in the stomach. Was it texan? Hang on a second. [01:42:32] Speaker A: Did they die or they just. [01:42:33] Speaker B: Oh, no, they didn't. They survived, but the guy with the gun avoided it at all charges, you know what I mean? He was completely exonerated. And any fucking time, any day now, someone is going to get killed. Somebody's going to get fucking flat out killed for doing this. [01:42:55] Speaker A: And it feels like an error in socialization, right? Like people who are getting validation from. Because none of them would do this, you would know it's not funny to dump shit on someone if nobody saw it, right. That would not be a funny prank to do. [01:43:12] Speaker B: Yes. [01:43:13] Speaker A: It's all about the performance and what clout you get from that and the idea that a view is somehow the same thing as a community applauding you of people liking you. And the vice article goes into that. This basically false sense of a, like, on a social media site, like equating that to friends, right? And that is like, I don't know how you overcome that. We all want validation, right? Like, why would we post on social media if we didn't want some form of validation from that social media? We'd just keep our lives to ourselves. But that extreme element of that, of the do anything to feel like you're being liked is a huge societal problem. That's antisocial behavior. And what are we doing that causes this to happen? [01:44:17] Speaker B: The youtuber who got shot was in Washington, DC, by the way, not Texas. My bad. [01:44:21] Speaker A: Okay. [01:44:21] Speaker B: But yeah, it's what I mean when I say if value is placed on it, it doesn't need to be monetary, it doesn't need to be financial. But I mean, when creators doing the stupidest shit go blow up and get huge and end up with sponsorship and end up with a media career. [01:44:48] Speaker A: Right. [01:44:49] Speaker B: It feels as though it's a pathway. [01:44:56] Speaker A: Yeah. People like Logan Paul and stuff like that paved this road. Yeah. Did he apologize for going and filming dead bodies in a forest? Yes, but not until he'd gotten bajillions of views of dead bodies in a forest. People see that and it paves the way for exactly this kind of behavior. Can I leverage my antisocial behavior into career friends or into whatever people are seeking out? [01:45:30] Speaker B: And it's led to just actual fucking. Just bystanders, man. People going about their fucking day, going about their life in a world which is tough enough. Thanks. [01:45:40] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Exactly. Do we really need to add all of this to a world that is hard to navigate as it is? I also remember, like you remember five or six years ago, it felt like they were in tandem with each other. There was the thing where people were going around cutting off people's man buns and the thing where people were punching people in the back of the head for social media. And I feel like I remember there being at least one incident of that. I don't know if killing but seriously injuring someone. [01:46:16] Speaker B: The one exception. Right, I'll give you one exception. Some years back, there was a guy who had a YouTube channel where he would like really big circular ear tunnels. [01:46:32] Speaker A: You mean like gauged ears? [01:46:33] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. On alternative fashion, just big, long. A guy would sneak up on people with big ear tunnels and put a padlock in the ear run off. I thought that was okay. [01:46:47] Speaker A: That is kind of funny. [01:46:49] Speaker B: There was also a trend for anyone listening from the UK of a certain age. I'm going to use the term happy slapping, right? You don't have to drink tango, do you? Like a fizzy fucking orange drink? There was an ad campaign which featured just a bloke in orange paint running up to somebody and slapping them across the chops with both their hands like that. And that was fucking huge in schools. I can imagine based simply on that one advert, kids were running up to each other just. [01:47:25] Speaker A: Yes, kids are impressionable like that. I'm sure they did not think that was going to happen when they made that commercial. [01:47:30] Speaker B: But the difference being detention, a fucking. [01:47:34] Speaker A: Dressing down from your teacher punishment, your. [01:47:36] Speaker B: Mum and dad calling you a silly twat and telling you not to do it again. You weren't getting fucking hundreds of thousands of people going, nice one, keep doing. [01:47:43] Speaker A: Do it again, do it again. Find a stranger to do it to this time. I think what these two articles sort of spelled out for me and what our discussion spelled out is like, this is a case where intention matters and relationship matters. It can be cute and fun to prank someone as a means of building community where everyone's in on the joke, where we all consent to the joke as opposed to this idea of using people as props because you don't see them as people with inner lives or just lives. Don't want to drown in the water. [01:48:24] Speaker B: You know what I mean? You hear the term NPC used often when referring to actual fucking people, man. [01:48:31] Speaker A: Right, exactly. It's NPC culture. And that's not a thing that I am into. [01:48:39] Speaker B: No, not in the least. [01:48:40] Speaker A: And it's frightening to watch that, yeah. [01:48:42] Speaker B: I hope it comes across. I despise it, man, so much. [01:48:47] Speaker A: And it feels like it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know, are we out of touch? Are we getting old? Do we just not find it funny anymore, what the kids are doing? But I do think that that distinction makes a difference. I love those prank videos where someone does something to their family member or whatever. That's cute and funny. But I think we do have to think about the antisocial elements of this stuff and how social media rewards that, even when it's rage. Like, rage bait is a thing too. People know sometimes that it's going to make people mad. But if that anger manifests in views and people reposting it and going, look what this person did, isn't it bad? It has the exact same effect for a lot of people. [01:49:37] Speaker B: Yeah. And TikTok do fuck all right. [01:49:43] Speaker A: Yeah. They don't deal with something until it becomes major enough that they go, oh, that's a violation of our terms of service, and ban it. [01:49:50] Speaker B: Exactly. Look, for me, it's just one more thing. It's just one more fucking thing that is now a thing that we have to deal with in a context of such. Just decline. It's another part of what feels like a slide going on socially. [01:50:21] Speaker A: In a time where I think that's so spot on. Because what we need more than anything in this day and age is solidarity. People coming together for solutions to world problems on every level and to have things in a time when we need solidarity so badly that only serve to drive us apart and to encourage behavior that is against community. And that says hurting people is good. Actually, if it's funny that it's antithetical to what we really need in the times that we live in right now. [01:51:02] Speaker B: Here, here. Friends, do you share my rage, or is it just great? [01:51:09] Speaker A: Are we being. Get off my lonnie. What's happening here? What do you think? [01:51:13] Speaker B: I don't know. But were I to be the victim of a surprise fucking shit dowsing while sat on a train, it would almost like, to paraphrase pulp fiction, it would almost be worth the guy doing it just so I could catch him doing it, because I would kill a motherfucker. [01:51:38] Speaker A: The rage even just, like, thinking about this drives you to just. Yeah. Deep, deep rage. [01:51:48] Speaker B: It really does. Something about this has touched a nerve. I don't know. [01:51:53] Speaker A: I hate it. Yeah. Conversely, though, if you and your family or significant other or friends have pranks that you pull on each other, that are very fun and funny. Please tell us about them, because like I said, I am not immune to the enjoyment of shot and Freuda. I like a person falling down. I like when something silly. You know, if you've got a good prank, know isn't antisocial. We'd also like to hear about that. [01:52:21] Speaker B: Yes, we would. Know what's the other side of the coin? [01:52:25] Speaker A: Yeah. The moral of the story is here, though. Don't prank mark. [01:52:29] Speaker B: If you do, be prepared to throw. [01:52:32] Speaker A: Be prepared for the wrath of Marco. [01:52:38] Speaker B: Listen. Thanks for listening this week, friends, as always, we love each and every one of you individually, as though you were our cousins, nephews or godchildren. And if you do nothing else, please do stay spooky. Won't.