Ep. 175: irish america & feral children

[00:00:03] Speaker A: I don't know if you know this, Mark. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Go on. [00:00:06] Speaker A: But there are a lot of people of irish extraction here in these United States of America. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Okay. Are there? [00:00:15] Speaker A: Yes. Myself and my gigantic family being amongst them. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Right. Help me out with this. Of irish extraction. How far back irish are we talking, and how far back do you have to be to stop being able to claim that you are, in fact, Irish? [00:00:31] Speaker A: Well, you've kind of stumbled upon something that is very specific to the United States when it comes to ethnicity in general. We don't wear it out. You take it with you, basically. I mean, there's some people who are so many mixes of white that eventually they just kind of like, well, I'm a mut or whatever. They stop keeping track because everyone intermarried. But groups like the Irish didn't intermarry a whole lot. They stayed amongst themselves. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Kept Irish. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Yeah. Until my generation in my family, my. [00:01:11] Speaker B: Dear departed grandma, just super quickly, I don't really believe her, but she told me once when I was a kid that if you go back, like, five or six grandparents, great great grandparents, whatever, we're of russian descent. [00:01:28] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay. [00:01:29] Speaker B: I do not think of myself as Russian, not even a little bit. [00:01:33] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And I think the thing is, it has a lot to do with kind of how we separated, an enclaved out when people immigrated here. Right. So there's, like, the people who came on the Mayflower and things like that, and they were, like, british and whatever, and over time, they had no reason to stick to marrying other british people or other dutch people or whatever the case may be. [00:02:03] Speaker B: There was options. There were choices. [00:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah. It was just kind of know, are we all the same kind of Christian? Cool. We all marry each other. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Get it? [00:02:11] Speaker A: Where other groups, especially catholic groups, but other groups in America tended to end up sort of pushed into areas where they lived with each other, and they stayed with that group for various reasons. So until my generation in my family, no one had ever married someone that wasn't irish. And then my dad's generation, there's, like, us, obviously, he married a black woman. And there's like, my cousins are half japanese. I have a half italian set of cousins. That generation suddenly intermarried. [00:02:48] Speaker B: So when you say you're plausibly irish, you're like one generation. [00:02:53] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [00:02:54] Speaker B: Fine. [00:02:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And I would say, yeah, for a lot of us, that is pretty much the case. Up until recent history, you would have kind of stayed within that. But America is different than Europe when it comes to this kind of stuff, because we're not from here. Right. Unless you're indigenous, you didn't come from this landmass. And so we tend to sort of hang on to those identities in ways that people in Europe don't do it. You're just like, where do you live? You're that thing. Or at least for. Until. Unless you are. [00:03:32] Speaker B: Do you know, that makes a lot of sense. That makes perfect sense. Yes. My great great grandparents didn't settle here from anywhere. [00:03:42] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. So there's not really any cultural grounding in. If there is some russian back in your family, it's not a part of who you are. Whereas here we tend to sort of retain those identities. [00:03:58] Speaker B: I bet you if I fucking spat on the stick and sent it off to 23 andme or whatever, there's zero fucking Russian. I don't know why she would say that. [00:04:05] Speaker A: I know. That's a funny thing to say. [00:04:09] Speaker B: She even. Fucking hell, now we're dredging memories. She even mentioned a name. She said Tulitsky was the old russian family name. [00:04:16] Speaker A: That's very specific. [00:04:17] Speaker B: I mean, isn't it? What a fucking strange thing to lie about. I don't believe a word of it. [00:04:22] Speaker A: Well, I'm sure she wasn't lying. There must be some reason she thinks that. But every family has mythology too, right? There's always things that your family hands down about themselves that. It's like no one can verify this, but we've been saying it for so long that at this point it becomes true in my family. And to be fair, there's a chance this is still true. But we've always thought that we were part Native American. And when I did the 23 andme thing, that didn't come up. Now, part of this also, like Welsh didn't come up, and I'm clearly Welsh. My last name is Vaughn, so there's certain areas that they don't have enough DNA for or they homogenize. Right? So if you, 23 andme specifically will not tell you you're Welsh, it will tell you you're irish or English. [00:05:18] Speaker B: It won't tell you you're Welsh, it. [00:05:19] Speaker A: Won'T tell you're Welsh. You could do 23 and me. [00:05:22] Speaker B: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. [00:05:23] Speaker A: It will not tell you you're Welsh. It will say you are from the British Isles. Isn't that crazy? [00:05:34] Speaker B: Slighted. [00:05:35] Speaker A: Yeah, it's bananas. Ancestry will tell you this. Ancestry will give you Welsh like most of the other ones will, but for whatever reason, 23 in me does not do that. [00:05:46] Speaker B: Fascinating. How do you know this? [00:05:47] Speaker A: Because I googled it after. Yeah. I was like, everything points to the fact that I should have Welsh in me, and that's weird. And so I just kind of looked and was like, oh, you know how. [00:06:00] Speaker B: Hard I'm biting my tongue right now? [00:06:02] Speaker A: Shut up. You know what I mean? But anyways, I googled and it was like, yeah, 23 andme does not test for Welsh and will not tell you you're from there. So just FYI, if you ever decide to give your DNA to the data mining companies, don't do 23 andme because they won't tell you where you're from, except you might find out you're russian. Okay. But anyways, all that to say, yeah, Irish Americans, there are a lot of us here. And the thing about Irish Americans is, while we basically invented St. Patrick's Day, and we love our specific culture that we've created here, the vast majority have no fucking clue about the actual history of Ireland. [00:06:51] Speaker B: So St. Patrick's Day is an american irish creation. [00:06:56] Speaker A: It is the feast. I know you're four minutes in, right? Look at how much you're learning. The feast of St. Patrick is a catholic holiday. [00:07:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:06] Speaker A: St. Patrick's Day, as it has become, was actually created by Irish Americans in the 17 hundreds, specifically as a protest against Britain. [00:07:18] Speaker B: And the big foam green top hats. [00:07:21] Speaker A: With the clover on that is ours. We did this. [00:07:24] Speaker B: So cool. [00:07:25] Speaker A: I know, right? Good job, Irish Americans. But yes, despite all of that, Irish Americans don't know a whole lot about irish history. We're, like, very into being irish, but no interest in knowing what that means from a historical perspective. And as such, the Irish are amongst the worst subsets of white Americans. They're often anti immigrant, pro cop, racist, and they justify it with things like, oh, there used to be no irish need apply signs on shops back in the day or with, like, myths about how the Irish were slaves, which is not true. But you ask a white irish person and they will tell you that that was totally a thing. And they just. [00:08:11] Speaker B: Yeah, indestructible mike from the other fucking week, he was an irish settler, wasn't he? Was an irish immigrant. [00:08:17] Speaker A: Indestructible mike. [00:08:19] Speaker B: Dave the fuck mike the fucking durable. You remember the fucking could not be killed, right? [00:08:25] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. [00:08:27] Speaker B: Indestructible mike. [00:08:31] Speaker A: I remember this now. Yeah. And so they sort of completely remove the history of irish oppression so that they can't see how the same things that were visited upon them are visited upon others. And the story I'm going to tell you is about the sort of accidental way that the Irish became white. And, Lord, we have had to suffer as a result. Now, since, as I said, Irish Americans know next to nothing about Ireland other than potatoes, drinking, fighting, I'm going to provide a backdrop of why people didn't stay there, because any of us who have been to Ireland love it. I don't think there's an irish American alive who hasn't fantasized about dual citizenship and making a home there. It's a gorgeous place. So why did our ancestors piece the fuck out of the Emerald Isle to live in crowded tenements in places like grimy 19th century New York City, where everyone looked down on them and treated them like shit? The short answer, the British, the Brits and the Irish didn't like the known, right. It's like how everything in this country comes back to Reagan. If you go other places, it just comes back to the Brits. The Brits and the Irish didn't always live in hostility with one another. In fact, for many centuries, they coexisted quite well, intermarrying with each other and living peacefully, even in the more clannish days. Before and after the Viking and Norman invasions of Ireland between the 7th and 11th centuries, Brits were happy to just meld right into irish society. But that all changed at the beginning of the 17th century, when the English and the Scottish started creating protestant settlements in Ulster, which is now, of course, part of Northern Ireland and still part of the United Kingdom. These protestant settlers didn't just set up a little spot for their clan to live, but instead straight up confiscated the Gaelic Catholic's land. And this was a new kind of invasion compared to the ones of the past. The british Protestants not only saw Irish Catholics as a separate race, they saw them as an inferior race and initiated a full scale genocide on the orders of one Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector of the Commonwealth. Real rat bastard, and perhaps the greatest villain in a long line of them in Ireland's struggle. In 1690, the Irish were defeated at the Battle of the Boyne, and Britain went on to subjugate them in every way possible, including barring them from public office in the legal profession, preventing them from getting education, keeping them from owning land, and, perhaps most egregious to the people at the time, limiting their right to practice their religion. This, of course, is why the troubles in Northern Ireland in the 20th century tend to get minimized and boiled down to a religious conflict. It's not a religious conflict, it's a colonial entity occupying an indigenous population and severely limiting their rights. But one of those rights happens to be their right to practice religion, and a defining difference between the ruling group and the oppressed group is the religion. And it doesn't help that centuries later, Protestants in Northern Ireland still parade through catholic neighborhoods in what are known as Orange marches to really rub their faces in. The fact that they conquered them back in the day and now they're Brits, and that there are still protestant and catholic sections of town tells you a whole lot about how effective the segregation was. They have a power sharing government now, but it's very new, and it hasn't solved the divide between those who still think the crown is cool and those that want to see a united Ireland. But the point is, what Britain did in Ireland is the same exact thing they did to indigenous people in North America and in their other colonies around the world. In fact, Ireland is considered to be the first british colony. Go ahead. [00:12:39] Speaker B: Well, we've got something like eight months left before the great irish reunification of 2024, according to commander data, of course. [00:12:46] Speaker A: And how wild is it that they ended up with, like, a shin Fein member leading stormt now? Like, what the. Is it happening? [00:12:54] Speaker B: Was not shown over here for fucking. I'm absolutely full on serious. That episode of Star Trek the Next Generation was not shown on the BBC when they played next Gen for the first time because of the political implications of that one fucking line that was known wild. Oh, for real? That was like a lost episode. And it's only very recently has that episode seen the light of day over here. [00:13:16] Speaker A: Mark, I had no idea. [00:13:18] Speaker B: True story. I will hook you up. I'll link you up. [00:13:20] Speaker A: Yeah, that's bananas. I love that. I mean, I don't love that, but I love that as, like, a fact. I didn't know that that was a thing. And I mean, boy, doesn't that get to the heart of this, right? Like, we're talking about 30 years ago, that it was like, we can't even air this on the television because this might rile people so badly. Bananas. So the Irish were displaced from their homes by the British often then, just, like, given a little plot of land that they then had to pay the landlord for who was now living in their house. As Livia Gershon put it in the JSTOR Daily quote, in both parts of the world, as in North America and here, I mean, North America and Ireland, Britain used techniques including religious suppression, apartheid style division, and well organized violence to gain access to land and its products. In the process, it expelled local people from their land during the irish potato famine, which I'll get to a crisis caused largely by british policies that forced irish farmers to grow crops for export. [00:14:24] Speaker B: The empire wasn't a famine at all, right? [00:14:26] Speaker A: Yeah. The empire sent families on dangerous coffin ships to North America. In Canada, it pushed indigenous people onto small reserves or into urban areas. So, like I said, I'll get into the potato famine in a minute. But this sort of point being that the same colonization techniques were used in Ireland that have later been visited upon other colonies, ones that we know recognize, like, oh, that was a shitty thing that we did to them. Again, I'd say most irish Americans don't know that the exact same thing was visited upon Ireland first, and they don't see those parallels. [00:15:04] Speaker B: The canadian colonialism that you speak of. [00:15:06] Speaker A: Is what I've just finished reading about in doppelganger. [00:15:10] Speaker B: Yes, yes. [00:15:11] Speaker A: Which we will also talk about when we get the pod started, but horrible stuff. And the testing ground for that was Ireland. Aziz Rahman, Mary Ann Clark and Sean Byrne point to Ireland as Britain's first colonial expansion and explain that its techniques were honed in its expanded colonization around the world. The point, they note, was to gain strategic military power, economic profit, and political power. And they got that by creating a brutal and violent system of apartheid that stripped the indigenous peoples of their rights down to the ability to speak their own native language. This is obviously true of Wales as well, and why so many places now are fighting to bring back their indigenous languages. When you drive through Ireland or Wales, you notice that everything is in Gaelic or in Welsh and then translated into English. This isn't because most people in either of those countries speak the indigenous language, but a conscious effort to reclaim what the Brits tried to kill, which is working pretty well. They have done a very good job of revitalizing both irish and Welsh in those places and abroad with people like me. And the Irish have always been super in tune with their connection to other colonized people around the world. In fact, according to Gershon, during the 1916 Easter Rising, they made a point of calling attention to the similarities of their struggle to those of the people of Congo, Brazil and Peru. [00:16:50] Speaker B: Wow. [00:16:51] Speaker A: Yeah, right. And we obviously see that now in Ireland's steadfast support for Palestine as the UK continues to fund the genocide there. Ireland has stood up and been like, absolutely not. And the Easter rising itself is important because this was the moment the irish rebels organized and attempted to put up resistance against the british troops who far outnumbered them, easily trounced them, and executed over a dozen of them, along with the nearly 500 people who were killed in the fighting, most of whom were civilians and many of which were kids. In one case, the British took a wounded rebel from the hospital, tied him to a chair, and executed him by firing squad. Real grim imagery, and not dissimilar to the incident in Palestine a few months ago in which israeli soldiers burst into a hospital and executed a paralyzed teenager they said was a Hamas operative. The parallels just keep playing out over. [00:17:48] Speaker B: I think you described it a few weeks back as a playbook, a colonization kind of playbook. [00:17:55] Speaker A: Yeah. And you absolutely see this stuff happening here. Victory wasn't the point of the Easter Rising, though. The violent and horrific response from the british enraged people in Ireland and abroad and galvanized movement for irish independence that led to the eventual creation of the Republic of Ireland, albeit with the partition of the six counties that make up Northern Ireland. But until then, life as an Irish Catholic was really, really hard and continued to be. If you lived in Northern Ireland, and to add to the oppression in the middle of the 19th century, they were hit with the affirmationed great famine. And this is a thing I think is not well understood by Americans. And I don't know if I can say the same for Brits. Do you think Brits really know what happened there? Do you know what happened there because you later looked into it, or is this common? [00:18:46] Speaker B: The only reason I know broadly the shape of it was because of Sinead O'Connor. Yes, right. [00:18:54] Speaker A: Absolutely. [00:18:56] Speaker B: But no, broadly, I think it gets reduced to a stereotype, to an irish stereotype. [00:19:04] Speaker A: What do you think? Like, if you went up to someone and we're like, explain the potato famine or whatever, what would they say? Do you think? [00:19:10] Speaker B: Oh, next to fuck all. [00:19:14] Speaker A: Fair enough. Okay, so this is not just Americans who would struggle with this. And that's by design, of course. [00:19:21] Speaker B: Well, yeah. I mean, often we've lamented that, man, what gets taught. [00:19:33] Speaker A: Is maybe God, what. [00:19:35] Speaker B: People need to fucking know. Yeah, exactly. I'm a product of that. [00:19:41] Speaker A: Right. And the plus is that, of course, you're a curious enough person to want to know more than that. But part of the problem is that a lot of people build their worldview around what they know, and it isn't enough. So basically, the Irish were living and working on plots of land now owned largely by Brits, and they'd rent out a small area on that land that they could use to grow food for themselves or to sell at markets, and that would sort of supplement their meager incomes. Potatoes were very easy to grow, so they tended to dedicate most of the space to them, and everything else would be for stuff they could sell and listen, potatoes are a beautiful food of the gods, and we are lucky to have them. Delicious, versatile, can love a potato, but. Yeah, go ahead. [00:20:36] Speaker B: Oh, no, don't worry. I'm just trying to think, is there a form of potato that I do not like? I don't think there is, no. [00:20:41] Speaker A: I think there's things you can mix it with that would turn me off. But like, the form of potato, I think, is. [00:20:47] Speaker B: But in its purest form, I mean, I think probably the most refined and godlike and kind of ultimately engineered form of potato is the potato fondant. [00:20:59] Speaker A: Have you seen that? Yeah. Oh, no, totally. That was what I was thinking. Like, when you started to say the most refined, like, that was what I was imagining. [00:21:06] Speaker B: High end. All the way down to just fucking whacking a potato in the oven. [00:21:10] Speaker A: Yes. Or in the microwave, for that matter. [00:21:13] Speaker B: Air fryer. Air fried baked potatoes another bit. [00:21:17] Speaker A: Telling you near perfect food become to. [00:21:20] Speaker B: Life then when you. [00:21:24] Speaker A: But there's sort of a misconception that the Irish are into potatoes as like a cultural. I guarantee you, Catholics in Ireland in the 18 hundreds were probably sick to death of potatoes, which made up a huge part of their diet, simply because it was all they could afford to grow and eat. And it's similar to, like, I don't know if you know this. Do you know what Americans eat on St. Patrick's Day? [00:21:48] Speaker B: I don't, but there's a fucking voice in my head saying, like corned beef? [00:21:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:21:54] Speaker B: Is that right? [00:21:55] Speaker A: You're correct. Yes. [00:21:56] Speaker B: Well, son of a bitch. [00:21:57] Speaker A: Corned beef and cabbage is the traditional St. Patrick's Day meal in America. And it is not irish. It was what Irish Americans could afford to eat when they were living paycheck to paycheck in New York City in the 18 hundreds. And they bought it from Jews. This is a jewish meal, and it has just become. This poverty food has become associated with Irish Americans, much like potatoes becoming associated with the Irish. [00:22:29] Speaker B: FYI, corned beef sandwiches. Big taste of my youth. [00:22:33] Speaker A: Really big. [00:22:35] Speaker B: Well, ha. Let's just touch base here. What do you mean by corned beef? [00:22:40] Speaker A: What do I mean? Well, I did read what it is. It's some form of brine that they use that used salt or. Yeah, it was like salt that was in a shape called corns. So they brine a beef and that is called corned beef. And it's like pink. Just like a pink slab of beef. [00:23:02] Speaker B: Yes. So what I mean by corned beef is it will come in a tin. [00:23:07] Speaker A: Yeah, a lot of times it's definitely tin. [00:23:09] Speaker B: Open it with a key, peel off the bottom, and you'll get this cube of meat, and it's got, like, lovely kind of fat on the outside. And you cut off a wedge of that shit, whack it between two slices of bread, loads of butter, glass of diet Coke. Welcome to Tridiga. [00:23:26] Speaker A: It's horrific. Beautiful. [00:23:30] Speaker B: I can eat that right now. [00:23:33] Speaker A: Kiyo had corned beef for dinner when we went to the pub. I've said before that I was, like, a huge meat eater. My entire life, loved meat. And even when I was eating tons and tons of meat, corned beef was. [00:23:46] Speaker B: You've been to the pub today, haven't you? [00:23:47] Speaker A: I have, yeah. You've been drinking St. Patrick's? No, I haven't been drinking. Sober 2024. [00:23:52] Speaker B: Oh, of course. [00:23:53] Speaker A: I had a Shirley Temple. [00:23:55] Speaker B: Okay. [00:23:56] Speaker A: Which was interesting. My first St. Patrick's Day since I was probably, like, 22, that I had no drinks at all. [00:24:02] Speaker B: I love that. [00:24:04] Speaker A: Keo had a couple of Guinnesses. I had a Shirley temple. Life was good. But, yeah. So that is to say, potatoes are not like a cultural irish thing, except that they were making do with what they could get, and the rest of their produce would be sold at markets while other crops like grain, would be exported out of Ireland. But in 1845, Ireland was hit by a devastating fungal potato blight called phytophora infestins, or pea infestins, that took out a third to half of the year's crop, and by the next year, three quarters of the crop failed. This would last six years and kill about a million people through a combination of starvation, disease, and poverty. And the british government pretty much just let it happen for six months. They had a cheap and efficient soup kitchen scheme that fed millions of irish people every single day. But then, inexplicably, they just stopped doing that, and they continued exporting the food that could have been used to feed the people there, because, duh, money. They should have obviously said, you can't export this stuff anymore. You need to feed the people here. Much more important than those gross Catholics was the money. On top of these direct famine problems, the government did nothing to stop the landlords from evicting their suffering tenants. And according to the BBC, half a million people were evicted from their homes between 1846 and 1854. And as a result, between one to 2 million irish people fled Ireland, many of whom ended up at the feet of Lady Liberty right here in the US of A. Not literally, because she wasn't built until the 1880s, but figuratively at the feet of Lady Liberty. Now, just to give some bonkers context here. The population of the Republic of Ireland now is about five and a half million. So, yeah, we're looking at, like, a fifth of today's population having fled in the 18 hundreds, not to mention equally as many having died. And half of that then on top of that, also having been evicted. So that's a lot of people in a small country either dying or leaving as a result of this famine. And, of course, then after that, even more irish people left in the early 20th century to get away from all the persecution and poverty once Ellis island opened up here and we had a nice little gateway for european immigrants to come through. So, according to the US census, in 2020, there are now nearly 39 million irish Americans in the US. There are 34 million more irish Americans than there are irish people on the island of Ireland. We outnumber our folks back home by a landslide. This, of course, is helped along by families like my dad's. He was one of eleven kids, and this wasn't abnormal for his neighborhood. By the time my dad was growing up in orange, New Jersey, in the 1950s, Irish Americans were part of the respectable white middle class. His dad had served in World War II and came back with that GI Bill money to set his family up in the suburbs outside New York City. After initially having my dad and his older siblings in Brooklyn, they were living the american dream. But this wasn't always what it was like to be irish in America. You see, Marco, whiteness is not actually a skin color. It's a political construction. It's a class construction. And when the Roman Catholics of Europe first immigrated to the United States, they were not politically white, despite what their skin might have told you. The race of irish people was irish. Italians were italian. Poles were polish, at least on the east coast. On the west coast, those lines were a little fuzzier because these Europeans were working alongside Mexicans and chinese people as opposed to just other Europeans. So there was a hierarchy. Europeans of any background got better jobs and pay, while mexican and chinese labor got the worst and most dangerous jobs and were paid the least to do them. So whether or not the Irish were classed as white per se, they enjoyed at least some status above the more obviously ethnically different folks. For east coast Christians, though, the main divide was protestant or Catholic, and the dominant Protestants didn't think too highly of those weird papists. [00:28:56] Speaker B: Super quickly obvious kind of vocal tells aside, how else would an irish settler be marked out as irish? [00:29:07] Speaker A: That's a good question. I mean, like I said, america was very ethnically segregated so, I mean, it would be very difficult for you to hide something like an accent because it would have been from where you grew up, probably what you ate gave you away, your family gave you away. And your name, I mean, if you didn't change your name, everyone's going to be like, yeah, Seamus Murphy. Like, he's from London. You can tell where the guy's from. So, yeah, I'm sure there were plenty of people who passed one way or another. [00:29:43] Speaker B: People learned what I was kind of wondering. [00:29:45] Speaker A: Yeah, but if you're, like, a working class person, what opportunity do you really have to try to pass as a different kind of European? That takes some degree of privilege to be able to do vocal coach. Vocal coach? Yeah, it'd be tricky. Like I said, Protestants were skeptical of papists, and there's a reason Joe Biden is only our second catholic president. Americans have historically been wary of people taking orders from some guy in Rome. They think that that's going to be your priority as opposed to doing what's best for the nation. And in 19th century New York, Protestants would legit snag Irish Catholic kids off the street and essentially kidnap them into protestant care homes, a thing they were allowed to do due to a law about kids being found not in school during the day. It was like, basically like a form of vagrancy. [00:30:42] Speaker B: Free kids. [00:30:43] Speaker A: Free kids, yeah. And it's pretty crazy, considering a lot of kids had to work in factories and stuff, so, of course they weren't in school, but obviously. Yeah. [00:30:58] Speaker B: A law that states a kid who isn't in school and is roaming around, possibly at work or whatever, is no one's kid. He's like a kind of a. [00:31:08] Speaker A: Well, no kid. It's more like they can be basically thrown into juveniles or whatever. Yeah, it's not that it's like, this is my kid now. It's like they can be put into a home, they can be put into. [00:31:21] Speaker B: Care as a result. [00:31:23] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And so Protestants took advantage of that to just straight up, like, kidnap Catholic kids at the time. And the law was obviously a putative law. The point wasn't that they cared about kids education and wanted what was best for them. It was about punishing and controlling classes of people they felt were undesirable. For Catholics, it was important that their children, even their orphans, be raised catholic and not snatched up by Protestants. Thus, in 19. Oh, 440 irish Catholic orphans from the foundling hospital in New York were loaded on a train headed west for Arizona, where the nuns that had been caring for them had arranged with the French born priest, Father Constant Monde, for the kids to be taken in by parishioners at his church. The Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Clifton was, however, a mexican church having no context for America's weird racial fuckery. Mondin was like, I'vetted a bunch of families from this church. Who are very moral and upstanding and stable. And can totally take these kids and raise them as good Catholics. Done and done. And indeed, that wasn't unusual on its face. Between 1854 and 1929, some 200,000 abandoned and orphaned kids. Were sent from the eastern US. To various homes and institutions here and in Canada via train. And it's worth noting this was not an altogether altruistic endeavor. The point was not to raise them in middle class comfort. But to provide labor to the folks toiling through westward expansion. Charles Lauren Brace, the Methodist minister who pioneered the orphan trains, said, quote, the demand in the Midwest and west for children's labor is practically unlimited. A child's place at the table of the farmer is always open. His food and costs to the family are of little account. So essentially he was like, there are all these useless and expensive irish kids taking up space in New York City. We could just send them elsewhere where they'll be cheaper to take care of. And can do some good, hard farm labor for people. And it genuinely played out like some sort of state and religion sanctioned child trafficking, as Tucson Weekly put it. [00:33:36] Speaker B: That is how it sounds. [00:33:37] Speaker A: It is, yeah. Tucson Weekly said at their destination, crowds attracted by newspaper ads. Inspected the children like cattle, which is cool. And Catholics were not stoked on their kids essentially being auctioned off under the guise of being adopted. So they created their own system. That would make sure the kids could be sent off to other Catholics. Who actually wanted them as part of the family and not as beasts of burden. So, at a glance, Father Mondown was just doing his christian duty. By aiding in this mass movement of orphans. And in October of 19, four, a train full of adorable little irish kids. All cleaned up and dressed in their nicest clothes. With little ribbons attached to them with their new family names, arrived in Clifton and were welcomed into the arms of these glowing mexican parishioners. And the white people were pissed. It was unfair. They thought that they were being passed over for the opportunity to raise these kids. And it was downright wrong for them to be brought up in disgusting and degenerate mexican households. They stood on this all night. And when the next morning, the last of the orphans were being distributed at the Holy Cross church in Morenci. A whole ass mob turned up demanding that Mondan get the kids back. To quell the surging rage, he gave three of the kids who were left, two white families. But that wasn't enough. The threat of violence became such that Mondan and his staff had to hide out in the back of a saloon and then flee the town to avoid being lynched. Angry white people accusing them of being child sellers and slave traders. [00:35:20] Speaker B: The hypocrisy. [00:35:21] Speaker A: Yeah, right, like, come the fuck on. Do you hear yourselves? Or. Seven of the nuns stayed behind at first to try to face down the crowd, but eventually they too had to hit the road. One of the nuns told the Tucson Citizen. In the street, a sheriff sat on horseback with a revolver. Like the other men, women called us vile names, and some of them put pistols to our heads. They said there was no law in that town, that they made their own laws. And as you can imagine, this was super traumatic for the kids, too, who were being snatched in the dead of night, in a monsoon, at gunpoint, and then brought back to a hotel in Clifton, where they were put to bed in blankets on the floor. One child, a little girl named Josephine, died a few months later from pneumonia she'd contracted after that wet, cold night. They managed to get back to New York with 21 of the children, and the foundling hospital tried to reclaim the orphans that had been kidnapped via illegal proceedings. But the Supreme Court in Arizona ruled that the white families could keep them, saying that it simply wasn't appropriate to see a white caucasian child abandoned to the keeping of a Mexican Indian who was, by reason of his race, mode of living habits and education, unfit to have the custody, care and education of the child. Racist as fuck. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Dehumanizing. [00:36:45] Speaker A: That's exactly what it is. Dehumanizing. And eastern newspapers were appalled at what had unfolded, calling Clifton and Morenci debased localities and condemning the horrid treatment of the nuns. Meanwhile, western papers celebrated the brave whites who had saved the sweet, innocent white american babies from the squalid, half civilized Mexicans of the lowest class. This was in the papers then. Eventually, even the nuns caved to press. [00:37:13] Speaker B: Where are we historically? Here. [00:37:15] Speaker A: This is the 18 or 19? Four. I mean, 1904. Not that long ago, no. Yeah. The nuns came to pressure and said that the homes that the kids had been placed in were chosen poorly and blamed Father Monda for his lack of understanding of the racial landscape of America. And as Linda Gordon, author of the great Arizona Orphan abduction, put it, quote, the train ride had transformed them from Irish to white. [00:37:46] Speaker B: Oh, get fucked. [00:37:48] Speaker A: Yep. So I don't know, maybe it's fitting that the Irish being classed as white for extremely racist reasons led to irish Americans being super racist. But race in America is weird and complicated. I'm proud of my irish roots because of actual irish people, but I don't claim us here. We fucked that up. [00:38:11] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:38:14] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:38:15] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, miselsen. [00:38:19] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said Miselsen in such a horny way before. [00:38:23] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal received. [00:38:26] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:38:29] 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. [00:38:36] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark. [00:38:38] Speaker B: I think you feel great about. Welcome, everyone. Welcome, welcome. We record this on a Sunday, which is fucking novel, isn't it, these days? Very novel thing, right? Very interesting scenario to be recording this on a Sunday. Listen, Corey, let me run something by you. Do you feel as I feel that there's been something of a scope change to joag in the last kind of year. [00:39:10] Speaker A: Oh, right. [00:39:14] Speaker B: Come with me a little bit on here. Right. It feels very much to me that in the first year or so of this journey, right, the vibe was, are we as a fucking species, as a culture, are we fucked? Have we gone too far? Have we fucked this up? Whereas lately it feels as though the vibe is we are fucked, not, are we fucked? [00:39:44] Speaker A: Right. That's a good point. [00:39:45] Speaker B: We are fucked. [00:39:47] Speaker A: You're not wrong. I do think that that certainly is a trajectory shift. [00:39:51] Speaker B: I'm glad it isn't just me. [00:39:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:39:56] Speaker B: I'm glad that isn't just vibes that I'm inventing, because I really do feel that. [00:40:01] Speaker A: Yeah, no, we started this, obviously, amidst when this pandemic was semi new, months into this cool situation, and we're sort of questioning, what does this mean? And looking at that, looking at our political landscape and all kinds of things and being like, woof, this is going to be tough to come back from. And in the time since then, there has not been much comeback. In fact, things have gotten considerably worse. [00:40:37] Speaker B: On pretty much every front I quite enjoy. I have a little kind of rye chuckle from time to time at the kind of four or five minutes, mid lockdown, mid, like 2020, 2021, when there were some voices that were like, maybe we'll learn from this. [00:40:57] Speaker A: Nature is healing nature. [00:41:02] Speaker B: Maybe we'll learn from this. And maybe we'll all come out of this more inclined to think of our other fucking, our fellow man and our fellow, our families and our friends and not so much focus at all on me and why aren't things right for me? [00:41:19] Speaker A: And you know what? Here's the thing, Mark, is that I don't think that was entirely misguided. I think to a degree that did happen. I think there are a lot of people who were, for lack of a better word, radicalized by the pandemic and radicalized by the things that happened throughout it. George Floyd and seeing what happens when you don't give people what they need to survive, right? We saw what could be and what happens when you don't do those things. And I think there are a lot of people who did come out of that with that mindset of like, we could change this. This doesn't need to be what society is like. Our politicians didn't come out of it that way. [00:42:09] Speaker B: No, sir. [00:42:10] Speaker A: And that, I think, is what makes us feel so fucked. And that's not to say all people also were like that. Because plenty of people were radicalized in the other direction by this whole. [00:42:22] Speaker B: Yes. And again, not to want to speak on a fucking population level, but column B, I think, is quite further ahead than column A. I think there were way more fucking cranks. [00:42:37] Speaker A: I don't think that's the case, though. I think governmentally there are definitely more cranks. I don't think in the general population. And maybe I'm speaking for the US as well. I'm not speaking for your population. I'm not there. [00:42:50] Speaker B: Let me ask you this before, dear, dear listener, and I apologize. Me and Corey are just talking to one another here. You are invited. [00:42:58] Speaker A: We are what a podcast is, Mark. [00:43:00] Speaker B: Yes, of course. I've finally grasped that after fucking four years. Corrigan. Right now I'm going to paint a picture. Corrigan is wearing a t shirt. A t shirt. It's a lovely little t shirt. It's got that famous picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon and you've got the landscape of the moon. And behind him on the horizon is old glory, the fucking stars. [00:43:23] Speaker A: And weaponize a story I told you against all. [00:43:28] Speaker B: Not at all. Right? But Corey then went on earlier on, before we hit record, because we catch up, before we hit record, Corey talked to me about, was there a baseball game? [00:43:37] Speaker A: You were at baseball game. [00:43:39] Speaker B: And she was wearing a similar t shirt with like the NASA logo on it. And the guy fucking slinging drinks and hot dogs took a look at her shirt and encouraged her to, hey, do your own research. Did we really? Is NASA really? Did we go to the moon? Did we go to the moon? [00:43:56] Speaker A: Not just that, but, yeah, that the earth is flat, and I needed to do my own research to find that out. [00:44:03] Speaker B: That's just a guy. That's just a guy. Do you think that guy would have been as emboldened in his views to tell a fucking stranger that the world is flat? Had lockdown, had the pandemic before the pandemic. Oh, fine. Then fucking bin that train of thought. Bin it. [00:44:28] Speaker A: No, this was pre pandemic. This happened. [00:44:31] Speaker B: Okay, fine. [00:44:31] Speaker A: It must have been 2018, 2019, somewhere in that general vicinity that this occurred. So, yes, those guys were there doing their thing. But I am with you on the train that plenty of people went down that spiral farther. And certainly there were plenty of people who lockdown broke something in their brains, and they dealt with that through conspiracy theory and all kinds of right wing nonsense and all of that kind of stuff. My only thing is that I don't think that that is the majority of people. I think that the unfortunate thing about that is that the people in power are. That helps them. It helps them to have people like that and that they ultimately want bad things for us. They ultimately don't want solidarity, and they. [00:45:29] Speaker B: Don'T want collective action, of course, because it serves them. It serves the fucking big C, capitalism. It serves that fucking mindset. [00:45:38] Speaker A: Yeah. So that's my take, is not necessarily that the problems. Yes, a lot of problems have gotten worse amongst the weird shit people believe and the way that that's sliding us into fascism. But I also don't think it's the majority. I think it's just unfortunately, our governments are fascists. [00:46:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, fine. Thank you anyway. Welcome. Welcome. Good morning. Good afternoon, good day. [00:46:05] Speaker A: You're going to take it. Was this going to lead into your discussion of doppelganger, or is this a separate thought? [00:46:09] Speaker B: Oh, no, this is a completely. This is a segue. Different. Yeah. No, the idea of scope creep for Joanne has been on my mind the last couple of weeks. [00:46:19] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's an interesting thought. [00:46:25] Speaker B: I'm sure I'm not speaking for you. I hope I'm not, but I'm so much more resigned now. I feel the fucking. The fight is lost. [00:46:40] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. [00:46:44] Speaker B: And whereas maybe a couple of years back, I also knew the fight was lost, but I was a little bit more chipper about it. [00:46:51] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, you had kind of more of a, like, it's kind of funny to have a seat on the ride. [00:46:56] Speaker B: Hilarious how fucked we are. This is so fucked. Ha. Now I'm more like, oh, God, this is so fucked. Sad face sad emoji, right? [00:47:04] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:47:04] Speaker B: As opposed to kind of, you know, the emoji. Big smile and tears coming out, cry laughing emoji. I'm not that emoji anymore. Now I'm just cry emoji. [00:47:10] Speaker A: You're just downward tears emoji. [00:47:14] Speaker B: That's the guy. Yeah, I'm him now. [00:47:19] Speaker A: Yeah. No. I don't know if I would define myself as resigned, per se, because you know how I am. I will give this to my dad. The thing that he always said to me as a kid that my mother hated was, don't get mad, get even. I think I tend to have this little voice from my dad in the back of my head that's just like, you fight these fuckers. But at the same time, I do think that there is a degree to which part of me is like, I'm going to keep acting like we can fix this, but I don't know if we can. I don't know if there's anything that can be done when it's literally like, we have no political power. [00:48:10] Speaker B: We are, I feel, at a point, as a species where it has never been more important for us to collectively mobilize. [00:48:22] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. [00:48:23] Speaker B: It has never been more fucking vital that we start to think in the interests of us. [00:48:30] Speaker A: Yes. [00:48:31] Speaker B: And at the same time, there's never been a time, I don't think, where we aren't doing that as much. [00:48:38] Speaker A: Right. Where there's not even the most basic attempt to do that. Yeah. [00:48:46] Speaker B: And it stop being funny, maybe. [00:48:50] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And if you want another book to throw you into a little bit of turmoil about that, the 6th extinction by, I think, Elizabeth Colbert, I want to say the name is, the book is definitely called the 6th extinction, but it is know the story of climate change and how we are fucking ourselves about that whole thing. [00:49:18] Speaker B: It's the last time I act on any recommendations from you. Son of a bitch. I'm not doing that again because I am fucked, man. This book has. I've been climb pilled. [00:49:26] Speaker A: You've been climb pilled. The journey has, like, this started so positively. It was like, oh, so glad you recommended this book for me. And then by the end of it. [00:49:36] Speaker B: But specifically, how. Fuck me. So many of our systems and institutions that we cleave to so fucking closely are holdovers from fucking fascism, slavery, colonialism, fucking eugenics. [00:49:58] Speaker A: Yeah, eugenics. [00:49:59] Speaker B: This is all stuff that is still built from those perspectives right? And fucking hell, it's all fucking set up to fail. It's all set up to fail because it's all set up in the interests of the few, right? And everything that's been built, everything that we live and walk amongst, funnels upwards, right? And that's how it's going to stay. And it's killing us, right? [00:50:37] Speaker A: It's at this point actively destroying and killing us. [00:50:42] Speaker B: Even to the point where fuck me, man, conspiracy theories. Conspiracy. The cranks, right? Who I used to short lack the cranks. It's in the best interests of capitalism for the cranks to be as amplified as possible. [00:51:00] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:51:02] Speaker B: Because while you're lolling at a crank, you're distracted from the real fucking issues. And the real issues are as bad, if not worse than anything the cranks are banging on about. [00:51:13] Speaker A: Exactly. This was a conversation that I had with an ex friend who is a bartender that I used to hang out with, but he was giving me a ride home one day and I got in his car and he was listening to Alex Jones. And I immediately just reached and turned. It just not happening. And he was like, oh, why don't you listening to that stuff? And that was legitimately what I said was, I was like, he's sitting here telling you all this stuff that riles you up and distracts you from the very clear conspiracies that happen around us every day, that they're out in the open. Nobody has to hide anything from you. You're sitting here delving into all of this bullshit and trying to decode what some dumb ass teenagers put on four chan when it's like just read a single thing, if it's happening, fucking want, they're all there openly for you and you're cooking up weird ideas about harvesting adrenochrome from babies when that's not what's happening. What's happening is you're watching that and not paying attention to the collective action that we all need in order to protect ourselves from capital. It drives me insane. [00:52:34] Speaker B: It's analogous, I believe, to what I still hold to be my chief problem with God. Believing in God. Why would you want to invent a God when the actual fucking world is or could be beautiful enough, right? [00:52:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:52:52] Speaker B: Why do you want to invent fucking bullshit problems, right? And fucking allow the horrific state of affairs that is contribute to it when there's all the real problems you could ever possibly want? [00:53:09] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. We don't need to make up anymore. Let's deal with the ones we've got. That would be great. [00:53:18] Speaker B: And I play into it myself. [00:53:20] Speaker A: Sure. [00:53:22] Speaker B: Every fucking, you know, every time I buy from Amazon. [00:53:26] Speaker A: Right. [00:53:29] Speaker B: And I'm a part of it and I'm not laughing anymore. [00:53:35] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. It's, you know, realizing how completely, inextricably linked we are to this system is another one of those things that just makes it all feel so futile. Like everything I do, no matter how hard I try, is a part of. [00:53:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:53:53] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:54] Speaker B: So, hey, listen, welcome. If you haven't turned off by now, this is Jackal Graves with your fun happy time fucking chultle funny bunny co host Corey Mark. And we'll try and keep it light. We really will. [00:54:09] Speaker A: But this is my fault for telling Mark to read doppelganger since he's suddenly started listening to me about things. This is what, yeah. [00:54:24] Speaker B: Do you have this effect on all your friends? Do you do this to everyone? [00:54:27] Speaker A: All my friends are like this. We're already like this. We don't have to cline pill each other or anything like that. This is our text messages. Yeah, that's my secret. I've surrounded myself with equally enraged human beings at all times. This is like just as, like one. [00:54:48] Speaker B: Last, just, sorry to dive to cut across, but I'm not enraged, though. I'm just fucking glum. [00:54:58] Speaker A: Well, yeah, I was talking about, like, my friends who are not, you are equally enraged but also glum. I mean, we just share it in our group chats and stuff like that. We certainly have our share of messages that are like, is this just pointless? Is this just like the end of the world? And that's it. [00:55:19] Speaker B: Have you seen the video for just that Radiohead track? Rap fucking banging Radiohead song with a guy lying down in the street. I'll send it to you. It's a great, great video for a great song. And a few people listening will know exactly the guy I'm on about. There's just a guy lying in the street staring forward as though he's learned some awful truth from that guy right now. [00:55:39] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, no, I feel that. But one of the things that I just think is interesting is when I think about how people conceive of leftists and things like that, there's this idea that, oh, it's just these, the blue haired they thems and all that kind of stuff. Right. With all that. And I'm like, honestly, at this point, it's like a bunch of normies like you and me, just a bunch of cis hat people like me and my friends who, I had a Hamilton birthday party. I am not some scary other out there. Not that blue haired they thems are, but to a conservative, they are. I'm just like, the most boring ass. The biggest adventure I had this week was going and having a taco at the pub on St. Patrick's Day. I'm not in a polycule. I'm not antifa or any of that kind of stuff. But this is where we are now is that plenty of us normies are like, bro, do we have to burn it down? Or like, what? [00:56:55] Speaker B: I had to give voice to that. [00:56:57] Speaker A: Yeah, we got to do that from time to time. That's what we do. [00:57:00] Speaker B: Because we aren't burning it down. [00:57:02] Speaker A: Right. Since we're not burning it down currently, we just need to. [00:57:07] Speaker B: And it feels like it needs burning down. It feels really important. [00:57:10] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:57:11] Speaker B: That we send some emails and organize a burning. [00:57:14] Speaker A: Yes. That's the thing is, I'm like, who's organizing the group chat on this? Where's the global group chat for us to burn? [00:57:24] Speaker B: And you can't burn it down individually. [00:57:25] Speaker A: No, that's the thing is each of us can't do it. Who's putting it together? How do we make it happen? [00:57:32] Speaker B: Well, there was that one guy outside the fucking embassy. [00:57:34] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. That's the best we can do. [00:57:39] Speaker B: Listen. Yeah, I did watch the video, right? Of course. Fuck, I'm broken. I'm so broken. It was so darkly comedic when the cop pulled a gun on the gun, right? [00:57:51] Speaker A: And you could hear him from, like, you know, feet away before he even did that. Just like, get on the ground. Get on the ground. Like, sir. [00:57:59] Speaker B: Thank you, officer. [00:58:01] Speaker A: Are you kidding me right now? And then he's just pointing a gun at him. [00:58:04] Speaker B: Famous firefighting piece of equipment. The revolver, right? [00:58:09] Speaker A: Like, oh, man, if there. There is no better picture than that. Like, man self immolating himself or his principles and an american cop just pointing a gun at him while he does it. Yeah. [00:58:24] Speaker B: Mad shit. Do you do any impersonations? Do you know any impressions? [00:58:30] Speaker A: Do I have any impressions? Yes. Oh, golly. I don't know if I have, like, a go to impression to you. [00:58:40] Speaker B: Well, it might shock you to learn that I do a pretty good shakira. [00:58:43] Speaker A: Oh, let's hear it. [00:58:49] Speaker B: Because my hips don't lie, and I'm starting to feel it's right. [00:58:54] Speaker A: I used to always, like, I loved her spanish stuff, but I got to get, like, the back of the. It becomes Jordan Peterson after a little bit. Yours. You woke moralists. It's now Jordan Peterson in my head. [00:59:22] Speaker B: Isn't she in prison or did she go to prison? [00:59:24] Speaker A: I don't think she went to prison, but she was, like, in tax trouble or whatever. [00:59:27] Speaker B: Trouble? [00:59:28] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know if I feel like rich people don't really get, but, like, nobody wants Shakira in jail. Make Bezos pay his taxes. [00:59:43] Speaker B: Shakira in jail? Let me tell you. [00:59:44] Speaker A: Well, okay. It's inappropriate. [00:59:48] Speaker B: I fucking love Shakira. [00:59:51] Speaker A: When I was in high school, in spanish class, the spanish teachers would always play music for us and stuff like that. And I remember when swearte or whenever, wherever came out, it was like the guys in the class would just be like, swear. They swear. They swear. They. And they have to roll in the video thing and pop in the video first. Swear they. Good times. Hey, friends, we've got a new podcast on our ko fi, and that is the joag fan cave with me and Kristen. [01:00:29] Speaker B: Am I a bit jealous? Yes. [01:00:30] Speaker A: Well, you should be. [01:00:35] Speaker B: No, like I said to you on text. Right. [01:00:36] Speaker A: Just. [01:00:36] Speaker B: Can you just confirm for me that you're not going to end up annexing Joe hag johag? So in like, six months, it'll be. [01:00:45] Speaker A: Fancake presents Johag, and then just go find specials with you. We're down to monthly with Mark and weekly with Kristen. [01:00:56] Speaker B: I think I'm only like one or two Monday episodes away from you better. [01:01:01] Speaker A: Act right is what I'm saying here, because Kristen's got a growing fan base. They're all, why have we not investigated our impression game sooner? [01:01:17] Speaker B: That's good, isn't it? That's the kind of content you listen. [01:01:21] Speaker A: That's what you're here for. So on the Kofi, it's also in our main feed this week, so you may have already seen and listened to it. A little preview of what's to come. We watched the others this time. We determined next month we will be watching frailty. Very stoked on. [01:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:01:41] Speaker A: And Kristen obviously has never heard of it. I sent her the picture of the poster and she was like, is that Bill Paxton? Say less? So. Very excited to watch frailty with her. So if you're interested in listening to us delve into that and some interesting thematic history around that, that's probably going to have to do with Pentecostals being crazy. It's going to be a good time. [01:02:05] Speaker B: I don't know why. That really entertained me when you said Pentecostal. Right. Can I just ask super quickly, where do you think Bill Paxton's career would be today had he not died? What do you think he'd be doing? [01:02:16] Speaker A: Do you think it'd be any different than it was. [01:02:20] Speaker B: Well, do you think he would have, take Nick Cage, for example. If he died like a decade ago, nobody would have predicted what Nick Cage would be doing now. [01:02:29] Speaker A: Well, that's a valid point. I think the thing with Bill Paxton is he's a workhorse, right? He was the kind of guy who, he will go hard in whatever he was a leading man from time to time, and you're like Twister and stuff like that. But more than anything, he was like, what do you need me to do? I'm going to do that. And so I feel like that's just like, that's what he was going to do. He was always going to be like just this beloved guy who shows up in everything and we love him in that thing, and he just keeps on going. I don't see a slump. I don't see a Nick cage. All of a sudden, he's the center of our universe. Just a guy who is going to keep working and everyone was going to love him. [01:03:15] Speaker B: Yep. I cannot disagree, man. [01:03:18] Speaker A: What a loss. Bill Frickin Bangston. I've been meaning to rewatch big love for a while. That was a fun one. Also, we have a watch along coming up this Saturday, and the timing will be a little bit different for very fun reasons. [01:03:37] Speaker B: Well, I'll tell you now, watch along is absolutely one fucking zillion percent happening this Saturday, the 23 March. [01:03:44] Speaker A: Yes. [01:03:45] Speaker B: And it's still absolutely. Depending on what day, you ask me, it is possibly my favorite Cronenberg film. It's certainly the one which I think is best representative of all the stuff he does brilliantly well. [01:04:00] Speaker A: What would be like on another day? What would you say would be your favorite Cronenberg? This is a tangent, but I'm just curious because. [01:04:11] Speaker B: Dead ringers, okay. Possibly crash. [01:04:16] Speaker A: Okay. [01:04:18] Speaker B: It depends. It depends. Any fucking scanners? [01:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. [01:04:22] Speaker B: Right. On a lot of days, the fly would be my favorite one of his. It's got it all. It's got it all. Everything he does is right there. But of course, it's elevated by the writing and by the, by the performances of one Mr. Jeffrey Goldblum. [01:04:39] Speaker A: Yes. [01:04:41] Speaker B: Now then, just. We're starting a little bit later on, that's all. 10:00 p.m. UK time. 98 76 05:00 Eastern. That's cool with everyone. Reason being me and the boys are going to. By the boys, I mean my children. [01:04:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Like the actual boys. [01:04:58] Speaker B: The boys, yeah. [01:04:59] Speaker A: As opposed to the boys. [01:05:01] Speaker B: We're going to see the wrestling. There's some leisure center wrestling going on. In Bista. [01:05:07] Speaker A: Love it. [01:05:07] Speaker B: And look, wrestling is great on a grand stage, right, with the glitz and with the fucking. The showmanship and the fucking performance and the la, la, la. But wrestling is also great in a really small environment. When you've got that little bit of banter with the heels, when you're in danger of getting a fleck of sweat. [01:05:28] Speaker A: Totally. [01:05:30] Speaker B: We're going to get some foam fingers, we're going to boo the Eagles, we're going to cheer the faces. [01:05:36] Speaker A: Love it. [01:05:36] Speaker B: And that finishes at half nine. So I'm going to get my ass straight home from that and we're going to watch along. So that's 10:00 UK time. Hope that's cool. Crew. [01:05:44] Speaker A: Amazing. Very much looking forward to this. It's going to be a great watch along. Who doesn't want to watch the fly? [01:05:50] Speaker B: I also forgot just super quick, I'm enjoying the fact that me and the boys would have seen pro wrestling at its highest possible level, packing at Wembley Stadium. And then right there, grassroots. [01:06:04] Speaker A: I love that. It's a beautiful thing. It's education right there. Culture. [01:06:08] Speaker B: Yes. That's what it is. [01:06:09] Speaker A: That's what it is. I forgot dad going, sit there and enjoy. You'll like it. And isn't that education, really? [01:06:18] Speaker B: Yes. [01:06:19] Speaker A: It's St. Patrick's Day and I was like, finding something to wear. And all of my St. Patrick's Day garb all has something about drinking on it, which I did settle on a shirt that has, like, the guidance harp or whatever it says, like, irish or not. Buy me a shot. I was like, that's the best I got. But I have my green Mercedes Monet limited edition shirt from the garden this week that I totally forgot about. That says CEO of Boston with two S's. [01:06:51] Speaker B: Like Boston dollar signs. [01:06:52] Speaker A: Dollar signs. Yeah, it's pretty cool. That was a super fun event to go to. [01:06:59] Speaker B: A hell of a show. It came across fantastically well on TV. [01:07:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I want to watch it on TV as well and hear the commentary and all that kind of stuff, but went with my friend Wes, who has no frame of reference for any of it, but had a great time. Yeah, absolutely. [01:07:17] Speaker B: I always look for you. I mean, this is your third dynamite, isn't it? I'm always squinting. [01:07:20] Speaker A: I think it's my fourth dynamite. [01:07:22] Speaker B: Wow. So cool. No, I've never caught you on screen yet. [01:07:26] Speaker A: No, I've never sat in a place that's particularly filmed. But there was bless, like, this time I got, like, nosebleeds because I was like, I'm going with someone who doesn't watch wrestling or whatever. And the screens are so big, it really doesn't matter where you sit. So I got like nosebleed seats and bless this sweet boy with a sign that says, rijo cured my depression. Comes with his sign all the way up in the nosebleeds and held it up the whole match. It's riho and Willow. Beautiful. It's so sweet. I was like, I hope he has a really nice night. There's no way he's getting on TV. There's no way anyone saw him. But I freaking love that sign. And the whole time he was just like, Riho. Freaking cute. I loved it. [01:08:14] Speaker B: Also, how hilarious is it that Darby Allen broke his foot and isn't going up Everest. Go to Everest. Very funny. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Looks like he won't be dying on Everest this year also. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Did you see how fucking mingin is? [01:08:28] Speaker A: Yeah. It was like not connected to each other anymore. Those bones. That was rough. Just. What are the Ods? This is a man who throws himself around every single week and has for years. And he breaks his foot the week before going to Everest. Incredible stuff. Yes. So yeah, we have fan cave on there. We've got watch along. Coming March 23. This coming Saturday, book club. Yesterday was amazing. Had a wonderful time with the gang as always. Jackovallgrades.com book club for the next book that we'll be doing third Saturday of the month as always. And it's going to be. [01:09:05] Speaker B: What is the next book? [01:09:06] Speaker A: The next book is. Oh, it has a really good name. Fuck. I can't think of what it's called, but it's about a field hockey team that makes a deal with a demon to win. [01:09:21] Speaker B: Nice. [01:09:21] Speaker A: And the repercussions of that, I think it's called they fly on broomsticks or something like that. [01:09:28] Speaker B: Okay. [01:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah. It should be a really fun time where they fly on sticks. [01:09:33] Speaker B: What do you say? [01:09:33] Speaker A: I don't know. [01:09:34] Speaker B: Field hockey? [01:09:36] Speaker A: Like as opposed to ICE hockey? Field hockey is the one you play on grass. [01:09:40] Speaker B: Fine. Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. [01:09:43] Speaker A: Yeah. You played in a field. Field hockey. [01:09:45] Speaker B: All the answers were right there. [01:09:47] Speaker A: Context clues. So yeah, check that out. It should be a really good time. Shall we talk about what we watched this week? [01:09:57] Speaker B: Yeah, quite a bit, actually, to plow through. I've been a busy bee. [01:10:00] Speaker A: I don't know why. I've apparently not watched anything this week. I don't feel like it was a busy week. I know I've been watching the show resident alien, but I don't feel like I was watching, like, a ton of it. I'm just like, what did I do with my week? I have a lost week behind me. [01:10:18] Speaker B: What have you been doing? [01:10:19] Speaker A: I don't know. What have I been doing, Mark? I don't know what's going on. I did. The only thing that I watched this week without you, aside from the thing we watched together, was Madame Webb. [01:10:34] Speaker B: Why did you. [01:10:35] Speaker A: You're not going to watch Madame Webb? [01:10:37] Speaker B: Nah. Fuck no. Life's too short. [01:10:39] Speaker A: Did you not watch Morbius? [01:10:40] Speaker B: I did. [01:10:42] Speaker A: Exactly. It's like, you got to see the train wreck, right? And it is a truly baffling failure. Madam Webb. Like, on every conceivable level of filmmaking, it is so deeply bad. One of the things I know other people have talked about is the ADR in this. They clearly changed the plot of the movie. And as a result, every single line the villain says is ADR. And so his mouth never matches what he's saying in this entire. It's incredible. Yeah. It is unreal to watch just an entire movie in which you're like, they spent so much money, they could not reshoot any of. He's not in it so much that it would cost a bajillion dollars to reshoot his scene. [01:11:48] Speaker B: Plus, who the fuck is the guy anyway? He's not like, you know, yeah, he's super busy. Just get him back. [01:11:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm sure he could easily have come back and reshot those scenes. And it is bonkers that instead they chose to just dub him with himself. So that is crazy in and of itself. The sound design in general is abysmal and inexplicable. The cinematography is bad, the editing is insane, the directing is awful, and it's hard with this AI generated ass script. I get it. But just the weird choices that are made by the director in how these characters play themselves. Like, there's one of the girls, the black one of the three Spider girls or whatever, the entire movie, she just has, like, a frown, like, a surly face and says bitchy things to people. And it's like, this isn't funny. This isn't quippy. This is just like, why is she mad all the like. [01:12:53] Speaker B: It feels like a movie that would make a really nice oral history of. Yes, I'd like to know what really was going down behind the. [01:13:02] Speaker A: You know, I think I have a little bit of a thing against Sidney Sweeney because she comes from, like, a rich Trump family. And so I will fully say that I have a bias against Sidney Sweeney, even though she's bringing the big titty girl back, which is not in fashion right now. As that right wing columnist pointed out, she is wrong about the reasons this is bad or whatever, but it is true. Tits aren't really in fashion anymore. So good on Sidney Sweeney for that. But she has the thickest California accent on the planet. And it's like just throughout the whole movie, it's just like mouthful of Marbles California Valley girl accent that she cannot hide despite the fact that this character should not sound like, oof. Just everything about it is poor. It is poor. Mark. [01:13:53] Speaker B: I hate because I didn't know, but I hate that somebody decided that titties weren't fashionable on this podcast. It's always titty o'clock. [01:14:03] Speaker A: Well, it's an interesting thing that I don't know if you saw this column, but some conservative writer was saying how many a Gen Z has never seen the bubbling blonde with bouncy breasts in pop culture before and was like acting like it was like this giant loss that the wokes had taken it away from them or whatever. And I was like, okay, shut the fuck up. But I will say as a busty person for the past five years or so, it's like I cover everything up because it's like, it's not the look right now. The look is like covered. Like, people wear big baggy clothes now and you don't go out with your cleavage all up in there. [01:14:49] Speaker B: Burn it down, Corey. [01:14:50] Speaker A: Burn it down. Just got to take it back. It's weird because it's like I used to always have cleavage out, but I'm very self conscious about this. I told Richard when Richard and Jen were visiting, we would take selfies at the beach and stuff like that. And I was like, but you can't post it because I'm a little self conscious about how much cleave is that, which I never used to be. But yeah, it isn't the fashion right now. People look at Billie Eilish. The girl has like boobs like mine, and it's just she wears like giant. [01:15:28] Speaker B: That makes sense. [01:15:29] Speaker A: And things like that. And that's how the youngsters dress now. Yeah, but it's titty o'clock in here. [01:15:35] Speaker B: Once again, my finger and the pulse are quite distant. My finger is always on the titty. [01:15:45] Speaker A: That could be problematic. But anyways, what else did. What did you watch? [01:15:50] Speaker B: Loads. Right, so let's go over the ones that we've already mentioned. First, I sat down in front of zone of interest and I'm delighted that I did. [01:15:57] Speaker A: I think you watched that last week? [01:15:59] Speaker B: I don't think I did. That was on Tuesday. [01:16:02] Speaker A: Was it? I could have sworn we talked about it. [01:16:04] Speaker B: You did? [01:16:06] Speaker A: Yeah. I just could have sworn that we talked about it when you watched it. But go on, go on. [01:16:10] Speaker B: I just loved it, really. I mean, as much as anything else. What you don't see is the main focus, but more importantly, what you hear, right? You talked about the fucking horrific sound design of Madame Webb. He did get an Oscar, I believe, the sound design of his own. Yes, I think that's the one that they did win. And like you said, the banality of evil, this fucking. This casually awful family. But even in the background there are just gunshots and dogs barking and the machinery of fucking industrial murder churning, churning. [01:16:53] Speaker A: Churning, screaming and crying. [01:16:55] Speaker B: Exactly. I found it deeply affecting. I also enjoyed where on the couple of occasions where it broke away from naturalism, just long, lingering shots of flowers that are fed by human ashes. [01:17:15] Speaker A: Right. [01:17:17] Speaker B: I adored the ending. Where do I. Can I talk about it? I adored the ending where it kind of jumped forward in time to Auschwitz as a memorial. And our general almost freezes for no reason in a corridor that he's walking down and suddenly is seized by a sickness. And then it jumps forward to Auschwitz as a memorial. And it's almost as though he feels the fucking weight of future history. That's the fucking vibe I got from that. It's almost as though for a fucking second, for some reason, he becomes aware that fucking history is going to absolutely wail on him. And I loved it. And the horrific emptiness it leaves one with. [01:18:07] Speaker A: Sure, yeah. [01:18:08] Speaker B: Good shit, good shit. All right, now, Frogman, is this one you've heard of? [01:18:13] Speaker A: No, I have not encountered this yet. [01:18:16] Speaker B: All right, I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. Do you like found footage? [01:18:19] Speaker A: I do, yeah. I like found footage. [01:18:21] Speaker B: Do you like cryptids? [01:18:23] Speaker A: I do like cryptids. [01:18:25] Speaker B: Do you like folk horror? [01:18:27] Speaker A: Yeah, usually. Yeah. [01:18:30] Speaker B: Get thee to a frogman. Because what we have here is the Blair witch project, but with likable characters. [01:18:39] Speaker A: Nice. [01:18:40] Speaker B: Yes, I like that. Hunting a cryptid. The majority of the film is filmed on super eight. The fucking characters are nice and likable. It's all about a cryptid. They go in the hunt for the fucking mysterious frog man. [01:18:52] Speaker A: Love it. [01:18:53] Speaker B: And it's a good laugh. It's a feature length, or it feels like a feature length VHS segment. [01:19:01] Speaker A: I mean, that's not the best way. [01:19:03] Speaker B: To sell it to me. I know, but one that you like. [01:19:07] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. I'll take that. [01:19:09] Speaker B: Frogman is super likable. It zigs and zags. Yeah, it's a good laugh. It's not going to blow your mind. It's a footnote, sure, but it's a good laugh. [01:19:22] Speaker A: I'm often looking for something like that, though. Everything doesn't need to blow my mind. Sometimes I'm just looking for something that's a good time. [01:19:29] Speaker B: And that is what Frogman is. It's a nice, easy three stars. I'm going to leave you to talk about ten to midnight. [01:19:36] Speaker A: You're going to leave me to talk about it? [01:19:39] Speaker B: You've got to stop this. You've got to fucking stop this. [01:19:43] Speaker A: Where was the point at which. Okay, so ten to midnight, you were at a. I don't hate it for a good chunk of this movie. And then at the end, all of a sudden was like, now you're having angry thoughts towards me. Ten to midnight is a flick from what, like 1980? [01:20:03] Speaker B: I think it was 82 or 83, thereabouts somewhere. [01:20:07] Speaker A: Early 80s, general vicinity. [01:20:09] Speaker B: 83, 80, yeah. [01:20:11] Speaker A: About a serial killer who murders all of his victims while naked except for a pair of gloves, latex gloves, and is basically a reactionary to the perception of having been rejected by anyone. And this really kind of. You see throughout this movie, he sort of reverts to this very childish demeanor when he feels like he is being disrespected or rejected in any way. That he suddenly gets whiny. Yeah. Yells and whines and things like that. Yeah, exactly. Totally the incel type. And so if he feels affronted, which. [01:20:52] Speaker B: Is unusual, because conventionally a very attractive. [01:20:59] Speaker A: Keeps it tight, super good body. He's kind of a Patrick Bateman sort of figure. And yet because of his sort of entitled personality and things like that, it still kind of puts people off in spite of himself. And I think that's part of it, he works so hard to maintain this physique and this look and all that kind of stuff, and yet still he can't get what he's entitled to. And you see that with the sort of first pair of people you see is like these teenage girls, young, like, maybe young, twenty s. One of which is totally into flirting with him and all that kind of stuff. But the other one is like, nah, fuck off, dude. And that. He can't handle that. It's like, well, one of them is into it. It's like the rejection from the one drives him through this whole thing. [01:21:58] Speaker B: And this guy is being hunted in a 1983 kind of way by Charles Bronson. [01:22:04] Speaker A: Yes. Who every single line is basically like, they just sort of cut and pasted out of, like, a detective novel or something like that. Nobody in this movie talks like a human being. Everything is just like, what's the trophiest thing this person would say in this particular moment? So it has a very written by AI feel to it. I think you put it as like, it was as if someone told chat GPT to write seven in 1982. [01:22:34] Speaker B: 100%. [01:22:35] Speaker A: That's exactly what it is. So I thought it was fun. It's not good. Most of the reviews refer to it as sleazy, which it is. [01:22:45] Speaker B: And it's got obligatory 80s titty. [01:22:50] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, lots of that. [01:22:51] Speaker B: Absolutely lots of that. Look, if you're into that 80s vibe, you will not find a more pure, distilled version of that vibe than in Tender midnight. Also, we got to the end of the movie. There's no reference to midnight. [01:23:08] Speaker A: No, not at all. [01:23:10] Speaker B: How close we are to midnight. It's simply a title. [01:23:14] Speaker A: I don't think we're ever shown a clock at any point at this. I don't know what time it is. Fuck it. [01:23:19] Speaker B: It's called tender midnight. [01:23:20] Speaker A: No, but, yeah, I don't know where it went from being like, I don't hate this. To like, why are we watching this movie for you? Because it's stupid. But I thought it was entertaining. [01:23:33] Speaker B: It was, but at the same time, it's not. The vibe. I don't want to watch that movie or anything like it again, please. [01:23:40] Speaker A: Okay, fair enough. [01:23:43] Speaker B: All right, listen. [01:23:44] Speaker A: I always ask you for a vibe and you're like, no, whatever you want, Corrigan, this is what you get. [01:23:51] Speaker B: My fault, right? Glass house. All right, sir, how to describe Glass House? So it feels like a pandemic movie, even though I think it was a list. No, it was 2021. So, yes, a pandemic movie. You have a family unit in a large kind of arboretum, hermetically sealed off from the outside world where there's a virus. [01:24:16] Speaker A: Shit. [01:24:17] Speaker B: There's a virus in the outside world which they refer to as the shred and the thread. This virus. The shred. Okay, yeah, really cool name. This virus induces memory loss and kind of dementia symptoms. And there are, like, three girls, a brother with learning difficulties and a matriarch of the family. And the story goes, some time ago, their brother Luca went out into the wild, into the world, and was lost. And they're forever waiting for Luca to come back until a handsome stranger appears claiming to be Luca. And fucking relationships unfurl and lines are crossed. It's not bad. It's not bad. I think it's a south african movie. And you could do a lot worse. There's some pleasing gore parts. You will guess. You in particular will guess where it's going before the. Before the fucking credits. Right? You've probably guessed already through that vague description. But, yeah, glass house ain't half bad. Worth a look if it's better than tender midnight by half a star. Okay, let me see right now. Seven. I'm going to just gush a little bit about seven. It's something entirely different. Or having. Having your socks rocked by a movie as a teenager. Right? And then coming back to it as an adult. And realizing that even though you loved it, you didn't really love it. [01:26:01] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Now I actually get it. [01:26:05] Speaker B: Holy shit. There is more going on in this movie than if you haven't seen seven in a few years, right? Just give yourself a fucking treat. Give yourself. You deserve a little bit of time with seven. Because it is nourishing. It's so good, man. It's so good. And let's lift out what we know about some of the performers in seven. Right? Let's not bother. [01:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Right? [01:26:35] Speaker B: We didn't know. [01:26:36] Speaker A: Clearly, it's a problematic cast, but. [01:26:38] Speaker B: Yeah, we didn't know at the time. Right? I often criticize kind of capital B, bleak movies for having. No, but seven. Seven. It's got this fucking. It's known for being a bleak piece of work, right? Relentlessly dark and rainy and fucking whatever. But, oh, my God, both Mills and Somerset are so know I'm in danger of becoming Somerset, right? I'm in danger of becoming Morgan Freeman in seven. Right? [01:27:14] Speaker A: Now. [01:27:15] Speaker B: But when you learn more about him, you know why he's the way it is. And you realize that it's just a fucking. It's an act. It's a facade he hides behind. As a protective mechanism against a world you no longer understand. And then you got Brad Pitt a career best. He's never been better than he is. Idiosyncratic, hot headed, self consciously fucking dumb. But the little moments of humor, right? You know, when he buys the cliffs notes for Canterbury tales and whatever, right? In the next scene, it's just like a fucking half second little thing. Where he just slips them in the desk. And hides the fact that he's done this from Somerset. Because he obviously craves this guy's approval. [01:28:00] Speaker A: Right? [01:28:01] Speaker B: You know? It's astounding. The soundtrack is incredible. Every performance is incredible. It's perfect. It is fucking perfect. Just stuff that I've never noticed before. Right? There's a bit when Somerset goes to the library, right? And they play an aria on the speakers. And it's just this wonderful, wonderful scene. Somerset is flicking through the Canterbury tales, or. No, he's flicking through Dante's inferno, right? And Fincher kind of zooms in on, like, this deformed beast in hell, right? With limbs protruding where they shouldn't. The next scene is a shot of mills from above. He's going over the case photos and he's pouring over the case. And he just reaches his neck back to crick out some tension in his neck. And in that frame he fucking looks like one of these beasts. God, it's so good. That's the fucking stuff, man. Seven is the bomb, yo. [01:29:02] Speaker A: It's a great flick. [01:29:05] Speaker B: It's unreal. [01:29:06] Speaker A: Also, you need to get through your next couple of movies fairly quickly. We're burning. [01:29:11] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Sorry. Well, I'll waste no time on dodgeball. Time has not been fun to dodgeball. [01:29:20] Speaker A: Disagree. Disagree. [01:29:22] Speaker B: Oh, come on. It's got it all. It's got fat jokes, it's got gay jokes. You know what I mean? [01:29:27] Speaker A: Yeah, no, absolutely. I just think it's still very funny. It's like I always would say to my students and stuff like that. It's like, just don't you have to acknowledge a movie as problematic? That doesn't mean it can't be funny to you or whatever. Still. But don't let those ideas sink in uncriticized. And so, yeah, when I watch it, it's got so many classic lines and things like that that I just find are hilarious. Despite the fact that there's plenty of stuff that you're completely right is not. [01:30:01] Speaker B: Why I two starred it. For every classic line, there's a fucking stinker as well. It didn't do much for me. Right. Coherence. Coherence. Very intimate, very small scale, obviously low budget movie. A load of kind of 30 something Silicon Valley types are having a dinner party, one of whom is played by none other than fucking Nicholas Brendan Xander. [01:30:26] Speaker A: Yikes. Is it recent? [01:30:29] Speaker B: 2023, I believe. No, it's a bit older. 2013. [01:30:34] Speaker A: Oh, okay. I was like, people are still casting him and stuff. Okay, got it. Okay. [01:30:39] Speaker B: But anyway, I know you haven't seen it, but I often refer to Primer as being a really good kind of mind bendy fucking. You don't need huge effect budgets to tell a really good fucking science fiction tale. And that's what coherence is. Nice, really fun plot is there's a comet is going overhead and it plays fuckery with realities. Fold in on themselves. The power goes off in their house while they're mid dinner party. But hang on, there's only one other house at the end of the block that's got power, but it's also them. Uhoh. And people cross between houses and you're not sure who's from which reality. Very fun. Very fun indeed. [01:31:20] Speaker A: Big recommend if I were tonight to watch either Frogman, glass house or coherence, which should I watch? [01:31:28] Speaker B: Which one are you not going to hate? Watch frog man. Fuck it. [01:31:33] Speaker A: Okay. I watch Frogman. [01:31:35] Speaker B: Finally, 20 days in. Mario, Paul. Listen, just before I start that topic, big congratulations to the plucky young underdog, Vladimir Putin, on securing his election victory today. I love an underdog story. [01:31:49] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just really nice to see. [01:31:51] Speaker B: He really came out of nowhere. [01:31:52] Speaker A: No one saw it coming. [01:31:53] Speaker B: People with his moxie, you know what I mean? He's got another term. Who fucking knew? [01:31:58] Speaker A: It's incredible. No one could have predicted. [01:32:00] Speaker B: Now, I know our level of investment in Ukraine is somewhat different. I'm very invested in Ukraine because of my proximity to it. But we've talked at length about the wars and other sides of the planet here on Joag. And 20 days in Mariupol actually shows it to you. And it does not blink, it does not flinch. Corpses being rolled into mass graves, children dying. The siege, day by day closes in on this fucking port town. The tanks start off on the outskirts. And as the days draw on, as the days draw on, the guy, the documentarian, just desperately, desperately trying to find bits of connectivity to get his footage out to the world. And as the fucking misery mounts and mounts and mounts, we see the indignity of russian state media calling it a film set. These are all paid actors when we've just seen them die, right? Literally, we've seen these people die. [01:33:11] Speaker A: Yeah. The insane gaslighting from these fascist ass countries. Seriously? [01:33:18] Speaker B: Yeah. For my money, if you want to see a load of people die in a fucking war, in an invasion, then you should probably watch this film because it shows a lot of it. [01:33:31] Speaker A: I mean, if you're not sick of already seeing that on Instagram and TikTok 24/7 you can also watch that. But it's a frontline doc, which I always recommend from PBS. Frontline puts out great stuff. I haven't watched this one yet, but one of the things I seek out. [01:33:50] Speaker B: This time next week, I'll be talking to you about late night with the devil, for I have tickets to see it on Tuesday night in a lovely little boutique cinema in Oxford. So I'm going to jump in the car and go see our boy dasmalcian do his thing. [01:34:05] Speaker A: I might drive all the way out on Thursday to go see it in Elizabeth because it's not playing anywhere near here. [01:34:15] Speaker B: Same. [01:34:15] Speaker A: Which is insane. And it's not even like, it's not at a cool boutique theater or anything. It's just far away. But I really want to see it. So hopefully I will be able to join in that conversation because I'm stoked on that movie. It's got like 100% on Rotten Tomatoes so far. [01:34:31] Speaker B: Nice. We've also got Ghostbusters next week as well, which I'm equally psyched. [01:34:34] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. I'm not equally psyched about Ghostbusters, but I am psyched about ghostbusters. That'll be fun. [01:34:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:34:40] Speaker A: I will easily be able to see that. [01:34:42] Speaker B: There we go. Yeah. It always bodes well when the review embargo is like 48 hours before release date. That's always a good sign, isn't it? [01:34:50] Speaker A: Is it? [01:34:51] Speaker B: No. [01:34:52] Speaker A: Okay, great. I was like, it feels like the opposite of that, but it's not. [01:34:57] Speaker B: But hope springs eternal. [01:34:58] Speaker A: Yeah, we'll see. We'll see how it goes. But I liked the last one, so hopefully I'll like this one, too. [01:35:06] Speaker B: Yes. [01:35:08] Speaker A: So last week I was like, hey, Mark, let's hit a total classic of a topic. Let's talk about feral children. And you were like, yeah, cool. What does that mean? So apparently not as classic as I thought, but I remember, like 20 years ago, it was kind of a running Internet joke that if you clicked on enough Wikipedia related pages, you'd eventually find yourself on the page for feral children. So perhaps the Internet is just too big for that kind of serendipity now. And thus today we're going to fill everyone in who missed that cultural moment on what feral children actually are. And some examples of that. [01:35:52] Speaker B: You hear it a lot. Every parent at some point will say, my kids, they're a couple of wankers. They're feral. Yeah, every parent says that. [01:36:01] Speaker A: Were you raised by wolves? [01:36:03] Speaker B: Exactly. Well, it turns out, yeah, maybe. [01:36:10] Speaker A: Yeah. There's sort of different ways that we define what feral children are. And the central distinction is that these are kids who, for one reason or another, are raised for a period of time without contact with human civilization. So, like I said, a lot of folks will think of that phrase like raised by wolves. And that's because one form of feral child is kids who end up in the wilderness, either taken in by some sort of pack of animals or simply observing animals to learn how to keep themselves alive. These are obviously huge in know your Tarzan, your romulus and Remus, your mowgli. We all love an interspecies friendship, and there's something that really appeals to us about the concept of a lost or abandoned child taken in by animals that should be predators, or at least should want nothing to do with us. But feral children are also the result of really horrendous abuse. Kids whose parents have deliberately isolated them from human contact. In fact, the proper term for feral children is isolates. And we'll talk nice. Yeah, we'll talk a bit about both of these types of feral child. But one of the key things about them is that they are, in real life, nothing like Mowgli. In fact, one of the interesting things about feral children is that they show us things about how we develop as humans, which mark will get into, but about how we learn language, about how we learn culture when it's instilled in us, and whether it's possible to teach us to be human once we've lived without that enculturation. And fortunately, the answer to that latter question is kind of no. [01:37:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you remember when the both of us talked about big tare, the French. Yes, fucking the french unit. I think one of the things that we both drew out about that tale was. Hang on, really, right? It was that long ago that retellings get embellished and embellished and agendas come into play and stereotypes and everything takes a fucking role in each retelling of these tales. And because so many tales of feral isolates, I love that, by the way, are from like, the fucking 13th century, right? Folk, almost folk tales. [01:38:34] Speaker A: They're practically cryptids. [01:38:36] Speaker B: Yes. My understanding of what would happen if you left a baby with like, a pack of sheep isn't that it would become sheep like, and would be raised by the sheep. It would probably get eaten. [01:38:54] Speaker A: Well, this isn't without precedent, like you said, obviously the majority of stories when it comes to feral children are probably not true or have been embellished over time in some way or another. And that's why when it shows up in fiction, it's completely different than what it would really be like. I thought it was really funny. In one article I read, it lamented that because stories of isolates are so unbelievable and often embellished, the literature about them is often boring as fuck because they want to be really serious and academic in their retelling. So, like, if you actually talked about this stuff with the enthusiasm it probably deserves, everyone would just think you're making shit up. To be clear, there are actual cases of this happening in various ways, but not in the ways that a lot of those stories would do. [01:39:58] Speaker B: Like you said. Yeah. I hadn't even thought of Jungle Book. [01:40:02] Speaker A: Never. Like, right. It's definitely nothing like Jungle Book. We do know that animals do this in the wild with other animals. For example, wildlife documentarians Derek and Beverly Jubert observed a female leopard who, after killing a baboon, realized that there was left attached to her corpse, a baby baboon. Rather than being like, oh, sweet, a second meal, the leopard picked it up, brought it into a tree and groomed it before curling up and falling asleep with it. It was only when the baboon baby died in the night that the leopard finally went back and ate the mother baboon. It would appear in this case, that baby activated something in the leopard that overrode. The idea of baboon equals prey. Like, she left the prey behind to go take care of the baby and didn't come back to the prey until the baby died itself. I also was thinking of this series they have on PBS where they craft these little robot animals with built in cameras to go and hang out amongst various animals and try to blend in and get footage they normally wouldn't get. You've seen those things. They are, like, disturbing looking as fuck. And I simply have to believe these animals know these aren't really them, but they're like, okay, we'll take in this weird, confused animal who wants to hang out with us. It's fine. We see it all over our Instagram feeds too. Like, animals can be very chill with each other and will raise things from other species if they don't sense a threat. If you have two pets of different types, you've probably seen them cuddle and take care of each other. My dog used to cuddle the heck out of Brienne's cats back in the day. So, like, all this to say, it's not an insane idea that an animal would try to take care of a different animal, and we are animals. So we actually do have a few examples of this that are documented in scientific journals, in news articles, contemporaneously when they happened, and things like that. So in Argentina in 2008, a one year old boy who had this feels like exactly the kind of thing, to your point, of, like, this is really what happens when someone wanders away. In Argentina in 2008, a one year old boy who had become separated from his unhoused father was taken care of by eight cats until the police found him. The cats had become so protective. They were initially aggressive. When the cops tried to take him away, they would bring the kid scraps of food, clean him with their tongues, and sleep on top of him. So he stayed warm through the winter. So through the winter, they just kind of, like, brought this kid's stuff to eat and laid on top of him. He didn't become catlike or anything like that. It was just until they found him, he just was fed and warmed by cats. [01:42:52] Speaker B: See, a lot of what I've read about this indicates that isolated infants, after long periods of isolation, will exhibit kind of aggression, right? [01:43:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:07] Speaker B: Will kind of act out, will become more. Rather than adopting the traits of whichever fucking animal by osmosis, they instead exhibit kind of primal anger. [01:43:23] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. Which completely makes sense. It's like the best protective thing that they have for themselves, right? [01:43:32] Speaker B: Yes. [01:43:33] Speaker A: Is this aggression that they can display in one way or another? And I think people read that as animal, like, oh, they're acting like an animal because they're being aggressive and they're growling or things like that when it's like. That's just like an instinctive thing you do, because we are animals again, we're going to act like animals and left are our own devices. In 2001, a ten year old chilean boy was found living in a cave with a pack of stray dogs after he was thrown out of his parents home at the age of five and then escaped a care home at the age of eight with the dogs. He would roam around the streets of Santiago eating out garbage cans. And it's assumed that for a time he was actually being suckled by one of the female dogs. And one of the articles that I read about this phrased it as, he was suckled by a bitch. [01:44:24] Speaker B: Weren't we all? Weren't we all? [01:44:26] Speaker A: I feel like female dog gets the point across. It's just really jarring. [01:44:30] Speaker B: Will that be the title of the episode? [01:44:32] Speaker A: Suckled by a bitch? [01:44:33] Speaker B: Suckled by a. [01:44:35] Speaker A: But anyway, when police finally found him, he initially tried to evade them, again, to your point, by leaping into the ocean and was pulled out. He was found showing signs of depression, was very aggressive, and while he did know how to speak, he didn't speak much, by the way, because people continued to be completely incapable of unique thought. He was nicknamed Dog Boy by the chilean press. Come on, come on. We've got ostrich boy, we've got dog boy, we've got the wolf children. [01:45:08] Speaker B: Right now I'm looking at Gazelle boy, leopard boy. [01:45:11] Speaker A: There you go. [01:45:11] Speaker B: Irish sheep boy from the 16 hundreds. Nice bear girl. Let me just talk to you about the legend here of bear girl from the 17 hundreds. Again, none of this remotely stands up to scrutiny, but two hunters were attacked by a bunch of bears who they shot and then captured a girl who was living with these bears, who was described as a tall, muscular 18 year old girl. [01:45:40] Speaker A: Okay. [01:45:41] Speaker B: Who'd lived with the bears since infancy, who ended up a prison. She was locked up in an asylum in the town of Karpfen because, quote, she refused to wear clothes or eat anything but raw meat and tree bark. Bull. [01:45:57] Speaker A: Yeah, not so much, but I like the story nonetheless. [01:46:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it is nice. I like the detail. I like that she was sinewy and mustard. [01:46:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. I feel good about that. But another of our most famous cases, one that there's actually even a BBC documentary about, was that of a Ugandan boy named John Sebunya, who had seen his father murder his mother as a child and fled into the jungle to avoid the same fate. There, he was cared for by Vervit monkeys for the next eight months to a year. According to the Guardian quote, he vaguely remembers the first monkeys coming up to him after a few days and offering him roots and nuts, sweet potatoes and cassava. They were wary at first, but after he posed no threat, they befriended him within about two weeks and taught him, he says, to travel with them to search for food and to climb trees. He was eventually found by a woman. What's that? [01:46:54] Speaker B: Just imagine that. Imagine that first moment, right when a monkey just reaches out. [01:47:00] Speaker A: You want this buddy, okay? He was like, they don't know exactly how old he was, but he was somewhere between two and three years old, so he probably wouldn't have thought a whole lot of it. [01:47:15] Speaker B: Good show. [01:47:16] Speaker A: Yeah. It'd just kind of be like, okay, well, this is happening. [01:47:20] Speaker B: Well, what have you got by two or three years old? That's when your vocabulary is expanding. You start being able to kind of verbalize more complex ideas, prepositions, kind of chains of ideas. Your social development. By about two or three, ideas like cooperation and sharing start to crystallize. [01:47:42] Speaker A: Which being amongst the monkeys would probably have helped. [01:47:46] Speaker B: Exactly. Maybe they got to him at just the right time. [01:47:48] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, of all the animals, when it talks about raised by wolves and acting like wolves and things like that, the Ods of that are not great. But a monkey acts similar to a human. So you can see how. You can see how some of that would probably have been a lot more helpful than if just cats slept on him. Or something like that. So he was found by a woman named Millie, who, while out collecting firewood, thought she'd stumbled upon an injured monkey with no tail. Turned out, nope, it was a whole ass toddler. So she brought him back to her village, where naturally, he became the subject of much curiosity. He was chock full of tapeworms, one of which was 4ft long. And he at first react. Yeah, four foot tapeworm. He at first reacted badly to hot food, instantly becoming ill for several days because he was so young and only spent a year or so in the wild. He grew up to be quite well adjusted. He was great at football, deeply thoughtful and capable of grasping nuance and conversation, able to speak and interested in working with animals, although he clarified that he was not interested in spending any more time with monkeys. [01:48:58] Speaker B: Would you put that on like your tinder profile? [01:49:02] Speaker A: Raised by monkeys. Literally raised by monkeys, genuinely. But of course, as I mentioned, there's a darker side to the whole feral children thing, and that's those that become that way because of horrific abuse by horrendous shithole parents. The most famous of these cases is that of girl known as Jeannie. But before we sort of get into Jeannie, maybe you can just talk a little bit more about kind of what you found about the sort of developmental stages of these feral children and whatnot, because that's really what we get into with her. [01:49:41] Speaker B: Yeah, certainly. I mean, when you are completely cut off from interaction, both with families and with just other people in general, not only does your psychological and mental development get hindered, but it also has a massive kind of physical impact as well. Infants require kind of movement, physical touch, this way of contextualizing the world through touch, and it skyrockets with interaction with other people. It's where you learn to connect people with your environment, with people, those you are similar to physically. And without that stimulation, without that physical kind of impetus, that physical input, you just have no way of contextualizing the world. It's often said that kids imprint, that the young of a particular species will imprint on a parent, like immediately after birth. And emotional bonds with caregivers. Obviously, we're talking kind of in the civilized world, but it's your emotional bond with your caregivers that gives you that kind of kickstarts to your healthy kind of air quotes. Healthy psychological development and starved of that, removed of that isolation is going to fuck up your emotional regulation, it's going to fuck up your sense of trust, it's going to fuck up all kind of healthy development of language. Language acquisition, associating words with objects, object permanence, isolated kids, they're not going to develop any kind of communication skills, any kind of speech skills. Cognitive impairment, I guess is what I'm talking about here. Complete lack of social and sensory input. And all of the sources refer to kind of brain growth, being dependent on external stimulation, right? Brain growth in terms of being socialized and in terms of learning to live in a kind of fucking social world needs input. You need something to learn, you know what I mean? Otherwise you aren't going to fucking. You're going to stay feral. We thrive and we pass on this need for human connection. And that's where this anger comes from. Isolation can cause just intense anxiety, intense loneliness, depression, fucking. Even in infants you will see symptoms of depression and anxiety when robbed of interaction. It fucks up any and all air quotes. Normal pathway to development. [01:52:35] Speaker A: And it's fascinating that the result of that is essentially almost like manufacturing developmental disability. Yes, that may or may not have been there in the first place. You can simply by depriving a child of touch, a child of language, of community, end up with a kid who is essentially developmentally disabled. [01:52:59] Speaker B: Yeah, 100%. [01:53:01] Speaker A: Yeah. It's a fascinating concept. And really, I think one of the things that particularly fascinates me about this is it's something that going through, especially like in the film studies PhD, we talk a lot about language and about how it shapes your world, right? As such, the way that we talk about things shapes our worldview. And we know that between cultures, right? The way that our languages develop, shape the way that we think about things. So, like someone who grew up speaking Chinese is not just different because they grew up in another place, but because language shaping their world shapes it differently than it does someone grew up speaking English. And to completely take that out of the equation, to have language not play a role in a child's development at all, essentially, you're taking this huge part of the shape of their world away from them so that functionally, they don't know how to human, they don't know what the human experience is like because they don't have words to describe it, they don't have words to understand it. Everything is a mystery to them simply by being deprived of language. And that was obviously the case with this last story of Jeannie. [01:54:21] Speaker B: Jeannie. [01:54:22] Speaker A: The description from the Guardian of her discovery is actually quite striking. So I'm going to read an excerpt from that. It said, quote, she hobbled into a Los Angeles county welfare office in October 1970. A stooped, withered waif with a curious way of holding up her hands like a rabbit. She looked about six or seven. Her mother, stricken with cataracts, was seeking an office with services for the blind and had entered the wrong room. But the girl transfixed welfare officers. At first they assumed autism. Then they discovered she could not talk. She was incontinent and salivated and spat. She had two nearly complete sets of teeth. Extra teeth in such cases are known as supernumeraries, a rare dental condition. [01:55:06] Speaker B: That's one of the bits about this case that absolutely blows me away. [01:55:09] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [01:55:10] Speaker B: The second your milk teeth serve a purpose and fall away. Yes, that's entirely what they're there for. They're there to serve a purpose for your own life and then fall out and die. Right. Is her supernumerary kind of dental action, is that because of her not ever getting the opportunity to use those milk teeth? [01:55:31] Speaker A: Situ, like they didn't get the cue that would tell them it's time. [01:55:35] Speaker B: Exactly. The biological kind of trigger to tell them it's gone now because she was so starved of interaction, starved of what her genes tell her are telling her body how to react. So did her adult teeth grow in just behind her milk teeth, leaving her with two full sets of teeth? That is fucking wild. [01:55:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really hard to imagine. And I think because of this, she could barely chew or swallow and she couldn't fully focus her eyes or extend her limbs. She weighed just 59 pounds and she was, it turned out, 13 years old. That's 26 kg. I cannot make that stone for you. But very, very small. As it turned out. Jeannie's father had been keeping her in a homemade straitjacket tied to a chair in their family home ever since she was a toddler. She was 13. At this point, not only was she deprived of interaction with other humans, she was forbidden to cry, speak or make noise. And she had been beaten and growled at like a dog by her father, Clark Wiley. Wiley didn't want children, but apparently his pullout game was weak and he kept having them. The first baby was left in a cold garage till she died. The second died from complications at birth, and the third was a boy named John who survived. And the fourth was Jeannie. The death of Wiley's mother sent him into a rage and paranoia spiral, which led him to beating the shit out of John and locking Jeannie in the bedroom where she was confined to a potty seat. His wife, a victim of his abuse, finally escaped him in the. Jeannie's abuse was uncovered in that incident where she walked in there looking for the office to do something about her blindness, at which point, being a giant coward on top of an abusive bastard, Clark shot himself rather than facing the music, leaving behind a note that claimed, the world will never understand. Yeah, no shit, dumbass. Of course we don't understand that kind of monstrous behavior. But Jeannie knew very few words and was usually silent and undemonstrative. The Guardian describes her walk as a shuffling bunny hop, and when she was stressed out, she would urinate or defecate. The doctors called her the most profoundly damaged child they had ever seen. One of the members of the research team that worked with Jeannie explained, language and thought are distinct from each other. For many of us, our thoughts are verbally encoded. For Jeannie, her thoughts were virtually never verbally encoded. But there are many ways to think. She was smart. She could hold a set of pictures, so they told a story. She could create all sorts of complex structures from sticks. She had other signs of intelligence. The lights were on. But that's such, like, a bonkers idea, right? Like, your thoughts are verbally encoded, and to just not have that in there, you're thinking, but not in the way that most of us think. [01:58:39] Speaker B: At what point is it not thinking? And it's just kind of putting together concepts. [01:58:46] Speaker A: Right. Which is thinking, but it's just not what we do. [01:58:51] Speaker B: Exactly. It's like imagining, how do blind people dream? It's that kind of thing. [01:58:55] Speaker A: Right. [01:58:56] Speaker B: It's an internal process. It's an internal narrative. But it's something that you've had to construct completely on your own. [01:59:02] Speaker A: Right. [01:59:03] Speaker B: Because you've missed all conditioning. [01:59:06] Speaker A: Yeah. It's hard to fathom. That's the thing with this whole thing is like trying to wrap your head around what that would be. [01:59:13] Speaker B: Trying to describe a color, isn't it? [01:59:15] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. 100%. So she was able to learn words, which demonstrated to researchers that lexicon seems to be without age limit. Grammar, on the other hand, was another story. The researchers came to the conclusion that the window for learning grammar seems to close if you haven't developed it between the ages of five and ten, which is obviously not to say that you can't learn new grammar after those ages. We could obviously learn other languages with different grammar and syntax. But if we don't understand the concept of what grammar is in the first place, our brains seem unable to grasp it. After that window closes, you can't start teaching us how grammar works. Still, Jeannie seemed to be making a lot of progress, and everyone was hopeful for a sort of Helen Keller success story scenario. Until, of course, a combination of exploitation, institutional and familial dysfunction and loss of research funding relegated Jeannie to the foster system and various state institutions, where she was barred from seeing the researchers who had become like family to her. She quickly regressed and from all accounts, never seems to have recovered. As one of the researchers put it, she was this isolated person incarcerated for all those years, and she emerged and lived in a more reasonable world for a while and responded to this world. And then the door was shut and she withdrew again and her soul was sick, which is a downer to come around to after we've talked about kids being raised by cats and dogs. [02:00:43] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a terrible downer because she's more than likely still alive somewhere. [02:00:51] Speaker A: No, she died. She died in, I think, the early 2000s when she was like 67, I think, somewhere in that vicinity. [02:00:58] Speaker B: Okay. But everything you read about Jeannie just talks about how, oh, she was interesting to the fucking system for a little bit. [02:01:04] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly. [02:01:05] Speaker B: And then not just file her away. [02:01:08] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, we've gotten all the use that we can out of that. But regardless of how terrible all of that is, it is fascinating to just think of how much language shapes us as humans. And to your point earlier, while it's possible she might have already been developmentally disabled, we don't have evidence that that was the case. And as such, her entire difficulty with being able to adjust to human society simply came from not being able to interact and learn language and touch and all of that kinds of stuff. So it's kind of this thing where it's like language shapes our world. And if you miss out on that, your context for understanding anything about the world or the human experience is sort of stripped from you, and you have to learn all of that or to the degree you can, from scratch, which is absolutely fascinating. I hope they figured out ways to learn that without having to kids having to suffer in order for us to find that out. [02:02:11] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, not to want to end on a downer, just like I started this episode as a downer, but it's still incredible to me that so much of our knowledge of nontraditional psychology psychotherapy is based on research done under abhorrent circumstances. [02:02:38] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. [02:02:42] Speaker B: That stuff, data mined in the most fucking horrific, egregiously and unethical kind of ways is passed on, and we still draw from it today. [02:02:54] Speaker A: Yeah, it's kind of exactly where you started with things like the structures. The structures are bad. The structures are so terrible. And unfortunately, that's the foundation of a lot of our knowledge. But if you know better, you can do better. So that's what we hope for. [02:03:13] Speaker B: That's what we hope for. [02:03:18] Speaker A: Okay, one last thing to close this out on a positive note. I guess you had a challenge for our listeners regarding a few musical refrains from various films. [02:03:38] Speaker B: Oh, shit, I've forgotten about this. What is this? [02:03:40] Speaker A: From Star wars and. [02:03:42] Speaker B: Right, okay, so, right. I'm going to try this right now. And Corey, I want you to try it, too. I have been told lately, and not by some TikTok nonsense, this is an actual human being. That said to me, apparently it's well known that it is almost impossible to in order the theme tunes to Superman, then Star wars, then Indiana Jones. No, Indiana Jones was fourth. There were four. [02:04:14] Speaker A: Oh, there were four. Whoa, plot twist. [02:04:17] Speaker B: Superman. No, it's three. Superman, then Star wars, then Indie. One after another. One after another. [02:04:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [02:04:23] Speaker B: Can you do it? I'm going to try it. Right, do it. I'm going to start with Superman because I can visualize the credits. That's Superman. [02:04:40] Speaker A: Sounds a little Star Treky, but go on. The problem is I don't really know the Superman and Star wars ones, but go on. [02:04:53] Speaker B: And Indy is. There you go. I can do it. [02:04:59] Speaker A: I feel like the pausing in between is maybe cheating a little bit, but pausing and thinking and stopping to think about which one is which. I would like to try it, but I don't know the Superman theme and I don't know the Star wars theme very well. [02:05:13] Speaker B: I was only able to do that by visualizing the fucking opening credits of each film. [02:05:19] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, that's good. [02:05:21] Speaker B: Thus translating visual memory into an association and a kind of a sonic response, because I am not a feral adult. [02:05:33] Speaker A: Well, there you go. So can you do it? Dear friends, please either give us a yes or no or record yourself attempting it. [02:05:43] Speaker B: Yeah, that might be fun. [02:05:46] Speaker A: And until next week, dear friends, you have just like the best time. Know, just like chill, hang out, live your life, you know. [02:05:55] Speaker B: Yep, yep. [02:05:57] Speaker A: Anything else we should do? [02:05:59] Speaker B: Yes. Barrel child for stay spooky.