Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Now let's record a podcast.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. Go. All right, start now.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:00:11] Speaker B: Well, three, two, one. Go.
[00:00:14] Speaker A: As you know, Mark.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Go now.
[00:00:16] Speaker A: I am going.
Geez Louise.
As you know.
As you know, Mark.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:00:26] Speaker A: America loves a murder by the state.
We just go bananas for cops shooting folks in the subways, people dying mysteriously in prison cells, or making that long walk down death row to get injected or electrocuted or firing squatted or what have you.
[00:00:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you are kind of known for it. And.
[00:00:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:00:51] Speaker B: Thing for us as a. As a non american, I know this. So, you know, it has to be. It has to be a thing you do.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: If it's even, you know, if it's one of our. Yeah, one of the things that, like, if you were to make a list of stuff about America, like, might show up on there. Yeah, yeah. Just can't get enough of this kind of thing in. In the old us of a.
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Stop me if I'm wrong here, by all means, rein me in.
Uh, would I be right or fair to say that while you love people kind of, oh, dying accidentally whilst under the care of the state, maybe you don't so much love accountability for it. So, yeah.
[00:01:33] Speaker A: No, not as big a fan as it turns out.
[00:01:37] Speaker B: We're not really seen to be done for said deaths.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: No. Yeah, because the fun is the deaths.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:01:47] Speaker A: Right.
[00:01:47] Speaker B: Yeah. That's the fuck around bit, isn't it?
[00:01:49] Speaker A: Exactly. So the finding out we're not. We're not super into.
But listen, over the past at least, decade or so, many attempts at making it harder to do the whole death row thing have meant that there has been, like, a solid decrease in capital sentences actually being carried out. There's far fewer now than there once were.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: Right. So if I commit a heinous act in the states and I get sentenced to death, how likely is it that I will see that death?
[00:02:21] Speaker A: I mean, it would depend on what you did, for one thing. But the.
[00:02:26] Speaker B: And what happens to me if I don't. If I get sentenced life to death, but it becomes obvious that I'm not actually going to get executed, what do I just.
[00:02:36] Speaker A: You just sit there, basically. That's the case for a lot of people in the United States, based on whether there's, like, moratoriums in certain places like California on death penalty, or as we'll talk about here, you know, places where they have run out of the drug to do it, or, you know, for various reasons, you will just stay sort of in whatever section of the jail they have walled off for you as solitary confinement. Or not. Solitary confinement as death row lifetime.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Solitary confinement for many is the case, but whatever area of the prison that is, that's where you will sort of stay in perpetuity until whatever you die in the jail, likely.
And, yeah, the sort of process has a lot to do with, like, making appeals, you know, and getting as many appeals as you possibly can. Right, exactly. And for a lot of people on death row, that can go on for a long time, depending on what you're in, all kinds of stuff about how many appeals you're allowed.
So there are places where you could easily just be there until you die. It's a life sentence, essentially.
[00:03:51] Speaker B: What if I cry?
[00:03:54] Speaker A: When they don't take that into consideration?
[00:03:58] Speaker B: What if I just cry?
[00:03:59] Speaker A: This man is far too sad. Yeah.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Yeah. If I really don't want to die, you know?
[00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Maybe they'll. Maybe they'll reconsider.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: I'm not sure if I apologize to everyone. And I mean it. I really mean it.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Yeah. Will that get me out of it? No, that absolutely won't. As we'll talk about, we don't like letting people off death row, even if they are categorically innocent. So crying and saying I'm sorry is probably.
[00:04:25] Speaker B: What if I said for my last meal, I wanted to eat the electric chair?
[00:04:32] Speaker A: That's good. I think you might have found your caveat right there.
[00:04:35] Speaker B: Loophole there.
[00:04:36] Speaker A: Loophole.
Too smart for the criminal justice system.
[00:04:40] Speaker B: Hate him.
This one tricked execution with this one simple trick.
[00:04:51] Speaker A: Anyway, Mark, like I said, we don't do as many executions now. Just checking to see what this dog is getting into.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: Your background is blurred, and it looks to me as though he's shitting.
[00:05:06] Speaker A: He's not shitting. He's very particular about where he shits. And it is not in my office.
[00:05:12] Speaker B: Thankfully, as he should be. He's got standards.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: He does have standards.
As do we. I keep on this is such a silly aside, but I always think of him as, like, those people who go on vacation and, like, come back home, like, super constipated and stuff because they cannot go anywhere but their bathroom. That's him. Like, he won't go on walks or anything like that. It's like it has to be in our backyard or one spot in our dining room.
[00:05:37] Speaker B: But as you will find, that is not an issue.
[00:05:41] Speaker A: The first time I met you. Not an issue.
[00:05:46] Speaker B: Is that a story we've told?
[00:05:48] Speaker A: I don't. I. I don't know if we have or not.
Maybe we save Mark shitting for the intro, but for now, let me get back to talking about the death penalty. I've not made it through a paragraph of this yet.
[00:06:03] Speaker B: Yeah, okay, fine, fine, fine.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: This is what we do here. Everybody here knows what they signed on for, but. Okay, so. Haven't executed a ton of people in the past decade or so.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: So it's gone down.
[00:06:16] Speaker A: The various. Yeah, it's definitely gone down by a lot. From peak times at which we've. We've done this.
But just last night, South Carolina lethally injected their first inmate in 13 years.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Last night?
[00:06:28] Speaker A: Last night, yes. Freddie Owens was executed. And it's hard not to feel like they were absolutely itching to do a state murder because, a, the only reason they couldn't do it till now was that there was a shortage of the drugs to do it with, which we have talked about on here before. It's hard to get them, and b, once they got them, they rushed to take this guy out, despite the fact that the witness whose testimony sent him to prison recanted and said that he actually wasn't present for the robbery at which the murder he was convicted for occurred, and claimed he'd only blamed him because he was high on cocaine and made a deal with the cops.
[00:07:05] Speaker B: Oh, shit.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Yeah, that's not great. And listen, that guy obviously is an unreliable witness one way or another. He either lied then or lied now. But whether or not that's true, that's the kind of thing that should cause some pause when it comes to executing a man.
Obviously, we shouldn't be doing it at all, but if we're going to, we should be really damn sure that there is zero doubt on any level that he did the thing that he's accused of.
[00:07:32] Speaker B: I can't help but agree. And that's the main kind of, for me, the biggest and most irrefutable argument against the death penalty.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Because if even one person is dying, well, innocent cut the whole thing off.
[00:07:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you referred to it just there as prison murder or.
No, that betrays a certain bias that.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Yes, I am not pretending to be unbiased in any of this. Mark, this is showing your hand a little bit. Yeah, I'm not putting my journalism hat on here.
We know what side I'm on in this whole thing.
And to that end, we're not shy about executing people of dubious guilt or even provable innocence, like Cameron Todd Willingham, for example. And I can't remember if we've talked about him before. We totally should if we haven't, because this case is egregious, but he was convicted of killing his three sons based on total junk science, was more or less entirely cleared when the evidence was reevaluated and the state of Ohio went ahead and killed him anyway. In 2004.
The innocence project sheds lights on cases like these all the time. But I bring this one up specifically because in Willingham's case, like I said, it was discredited, debunked junk science that doomed him.
And today I'm going to talk to you about one specific type of discredited, debunked, if still controversial and disputed junk science that has ruined many lives and is now at the center of an impending execution in Texas next month, that of one Robert Roberson, accused of murdering his daughter Nikki via shaken baby syndrome.
[00:09:15] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:09:17] Speaker A: Now, I know I've mentioned this before, and I know that you know that this is considered to be junk science. Yeah, sure, yeah. Is contentious. But let me. Let me tell you more about it.
I'm gonna tell you about Robert, as well as some other folks who've been accused of this horrendous crime and why people are still being jailed for it, even though it's a very controversial crime.
[00:09:38] Speaker B: Sorry for the continued decides, but I blew my kids minds recently.
[00:09:43] Speaker A: Terrible thing to say when talking about shaken baby syndrome, but all right.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: The phrasing wasn't great, but I asked them to kind of guess when was the last execution by guillotine in France?
[00:09:55] Speaker A: Ooh.
[00:09:57] Speaker B: Do you know this?
[00:09:59] Speaker A: Um, I feel like it may have come up recently.
[00:10:03] Speaker B: 18 hundreds?
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Like 18 something. Yeah.
I don't know, but I know it's come up recently and that it is extremely recent.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Would you like to take a punt?
[00:10:13] Speaker A: 1967.
[00:10:16] Speaker B: Close. 1976.
[00:10:18] Speaker A: Oh, I just had the numbers back on.
[00:10:19] Speaker B: You did? Yeah, you did. You did. It was either 70. Yeah. It was either 76 or 77. It was the same year that Star wars was released and they were still chopping off heads in France.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: So crazy.
Especially because, like, you know, like, I'm pretty sure.
Yeah. Like, the UK got rid of death penalty in a lot earlier than that. I know. I can't remember what the date was, but I think it's earlier than that. Right?
[00:10:45] Speaker B: I must know.
[00:10:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Now you must know. I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain it was earlier than that.
And we talked about Portugal having ended death penalty in the 1864 in the UK. 1964. Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought it was longer ago than that. I feel like, functionally, though, I think it had ended in the UK earlier than that. Right?
[00:11:11] Speaker B: Were they? Yeah. These were the last guys.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. The kind of like here, where it's like, we may. We may be just a couple of scrolling.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: Maybe those who sneaked in.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: Yeah, right. There's people who are still getting executed, but we may be, like, rolling towards abolition of it.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: Is that a fact? Is the. It's not per se, but there is incremental progress.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's the thing is, like, so many places have a lot of disputes over it, and that's why people don't get executed a whole lot at this point that there are. Yeah. There is some sense that if it's not fully abolished, certainly in some states, and there already are states that it's. There are states that are death penalty states, states that aren't, but that it is, like, functionally over because there's too many things holding up people from being executed.
[00:12:08] Speaker B: That's another kind of facet of american law, which fascinates me is states rights. Yeah. Is the extent to which powers are devolved at the state level.
[00:12:20] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly.
[00:12:21] Speaker B: You know, you can get a. Get an abortion in one statement or another. You can get executed in one statement or another. What, is there a kind of a category of law that is devolved to state level or.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Federal or state laws. So there are things which is interesting in and of itself because, like, say, weed, for example, is federally illegal.
[00:12:41] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: But. So technically, we shouldn't legally be able to have it anywhere, but still in states, it. We're able to choose that for ourselves. So it is not.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: Will I be committing a crime if I buy some gummies in a shop in New York?
[00:13:00] Speaker A: No, that's why it's complicated. Because federally, technically, yes, you're not allowed to do that, but in the state, it is legal to do so. It is very complicated. The difference between federal and state law. That's.
[00:13:13] Speaker B: That's your politics and your law, in a nutshell. It's fucked. I don't understand a word of it. It seems so convoluted.
[00:13:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. It very much is. And that's why we're constantly fighting about it. Right. Like, with all the abortion laws and things like that is because, you know, nothing is fully settled as to, you know, who is in control of things or whatever, unless, like, the Supreme Court rules one way or another. But, yeah, there's so much wiggle room between what is state and federally allowed. It's very complicated. But no, you are. You functionally cannot be in trouble for smoking weed in New Jersey or New York.
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Okay.
Anyways, I want that clipped out and recorded and sent to my wife.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: I'm sure that's what she's worried about, is you getting arrested. Well, maybe, but I don't know if.
[00:14:07] Speaker B: It'S for that anyway. Sorry. Robert Robison.
[00:14:10] Speaker A: Yes. And for those who don't know what shaken baby syndrome is, obviously it's pretty much what it sounds like. The National center on shaken Baby syndrome defines it thusly. Shaken baby syndrome, abusive head trauma, SBS.
AHT.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: For what? The National center for Shaken Baby Syndrome.
[00:14:29] Speaker A: On shaken baby syndrome. That's a research center.
[00:14:33] Speaker B: Fun place to work.
[00:14:34] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Every day is just a giant downer.
Hard pass on that.
But abusive head trauma is kind of the more commonly used word now instead of shaken baby syndrome. But SBS. AHT are the two acronyms, and it's a term to describe the constellation of signs and symptoms resulting from violent shaking or shaking and impacting of the head of an infant or small child. The American Academy of Pediatrics describes SBS as a subset of AHT with injuries having the potential to result in death or permanent neurologic disability.
This theory came about in 1971, proposed by one Norman Guthkelch, and essentially amounts to. Yeah, it's not a great name. Essentially amounts to baby whiplash.
And chief among the theory's tenets is that there are internal injuries, like retinal bleeds or intracranial bleeds, with little to no external evidence of head trauma. That can only happen in cases in which a baby has been shaken. There is no other possible cause.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: So I.
I never shook either of my kids. Right.
[00:15:51] Speaker A: Glad to hear it.
[00:15:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Um, there was one occasion, Owen was a. Owen cried a lot, right? A great deal. And, uh, I remember vividly one night, uh, when I was carrying him and trying to soothe him and trying to tune it out and just trying to deal with it, and I just couldn't. And it was relentless. It seems like he'd been going for, like, twelve fucking hours, right. And I didn't shake him as such, but I did kind of forcibly throw him is also the wrong word, but there was a bit of space between me and the bed, and I kind.
[00:16:32] Speaker A: Of yeeted him, didn't gently put him down.
[00:16:35] Speaker B: Yeah. I just fucking cast him down.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:16:38] Speaker B: Which, by the way, second I had done that, I was like, holy fuck, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:16:43] Speaker A: And the SBS or the organization. Not the SBS. The SBS organization that we were just talking about does say on their website that crying is the leading cause of this happening. Just babies crying and parents being like, shut up. So you're not alone in that. In that thing. But they do clarify that while they don't recommend these activities, it isn't caused by stuff like tossing a baby in the air, biking with your baby, a baby falling off a couch, or sudden stops in a car. People worry that stuff like what you did, just kind of like not being gentle and tossing a child is going to do that.
[00:17:21] Speaker B: And I've seen, like, episodes of 24 hours in police custody since then because that's lodged in my memory.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's clearly, like, you know, made a huge impression on you.
[00:17:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it was horrible. And, uh, you know, I've seen fucking scumbags getting taken down for shaking the fuck out of their kids and killing them.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Right. Yeah.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: And I thought, I wonder if I'll accidentally kill him.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: Could I have done that? No. Yeah, you could not have killed him.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Plus, he was a sturdy kid as well. So I did the internal kind of calculations, even if it was subconsciously, and.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: I thought, he's going to be fine. Yeah, I think, yeah, a lot of. A lot of parents do kind of things like. Like that. And of course then are immediately like, dear God, I'm the worst human on earth for doing it.
[00:18:09] Speaker B: Oh, man.
[00:18:10] Speaker A: So they say, you know, these kinds of things, like. Like I said, they don't recommend you do it, but tossing your baby is not going to give them shaking baby syndrome.
[00:18:20] Speaker B: I would hope that the center for fucking baby shaking Studies would not recommend.
[00:18:25] Speaker A: That I do shaking babies. Yeah.
[00:18:29] Speaker B: If that was the outcome.
[00:18:31] Speaker A: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah, it's all good.
They explain that it results from violent shaking, even just for a few seconds, and happens because babies have big heads in proportion to their bodies, weak neck muscles and underdeveloped brains, and because obviously they're a lot smaller and weaker than an adult.
And perhaps because of the controversy that has arisen over this in previous years. The website is also quick to point out that over 700 publications in more than 100 peer reviewed journals confirm the existence of SBS.
And let me be clear. You can absolutely do great harm to a baby from shaking them violently. The concept of SBS, on the whole, is not necessarily junk science. Abusive head trauma occurs and is horrible and can lead to lifelong disabilities or death. And the website claims there are about 1300 cases per year, but that im going to take with a grain of salt for reasons that we get into.
But I want to say at the jump that I am not saying that shaking a baby won't maim or kill them. Don't shake your baby and think, hey, Corey said it's fine. In the cold open of the jack of all grace podcast.
[00:19:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I kind of getting a little.
[00:19:47] Speaker A: Throw your baby. It's fine. Don't worry about it.
[00:19:52] Speaker B: Dude. No, go on, I'll pour.
[00:19:54] Speaker A: I'm gonna. Yeah, don't worry. I'm gonna build on this.
What people are arguing sounds like that.
[00:20:00] Speaker B: Might be what you're saying.
[00:20:02] Speaker A: It's not what I'm saying. What people are arguing is junk science, is that you can look at a specific set of injuries and say with absolute certainty that they are a result of a baby having been abusively shaken and not from a host of other things, or that the injuries specifically used to make such a diagnosis are even attributable to shaking at all. And we'll get to that.
But this is often the case when it comes to disputed science used in the courtroom. It's not that the thing can't occur. It's that we are ascribing a set of ambiguous clues to a certain condition and saying with absolute certainty this caused that.
And if you look at the list of signs and symptoms on the website, you can see right out the gate that these things certainly can be attributed to a lot of stuff. Symptoms like lethargy, decreased muscle tone, decreased appetite, or poor feeding, vomiting, grab bruises on arms or chest, not smiling or vocalizing, trouble swallowing or breathing, seizures, inability to lift head, inability to focus eyes or unequal sized pupils.
They are not saying that these things are definitive and only attributable to SBS, but that's just to give you an idea of how broad the signs are of this happening.
So Robert Roberson's daughter Nikki died in January of 2002 after having spent the previous week sick with coughing, vomiting, and a fever.
And by the way, you're gonna see so much overlap with, like, Lucy Letbe in these cases.
[00:21:34] Speaker B: It had a code to me, like.
[00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, there's so much of it in here that I was, like, reading this. I was like, goddamn.
But she had been to the doctor twice in that time where she received prescriptions for drugs that, according to the intercept, would not be prescribed for children of her age. Now, 22 years later, I don't know exactly what those drugs are, but another article referenced that amongst them were opioids. So sick two year old being given opioids.
On January 30, she fell out of bed, but she seemed like she was okay afterwards.
The next day, however, Roberson found her unresponsive and rushed her to the hospital, where she unfortunately died within a day of arriving.
Despite the very obvious other conditions affecting Nikki that could explain her death, medical professionals pronounced that the only possible explanation for her demise could be that she was shaken to death by her father.
The jury in the case was not told that Nikki had suffered chronic illness since birth, that she was prescribed an opioid, or that she'd been suffering from breathing apnea, from undiagnosed pneumoniae, which is fucking insane. A child dies in these circumstances, and they are given none of the facts.
[00:22:53] Speaker B: No medical history at all?
[00:22:54] Speaker A: No. Yeah, no history or even the current state of that child. Child had pneumonia at time of death.
That seems important, you would think.
And on top of that, jurors were instructed to pay attention to his demeanor and the fact that while being questioned, he didn't seem defensive, angry, or sad.
My brother in Christ, Robert Roberson, has autism.
He doesn't present things the way other people do. Right. Like having flat affect is often a part of being autistic.
So Robertson became the first person to be sentenced to death for the crime of shaken baby syndrome.
Now, the state of Texas has something called the junk science writ, which is meant to prevent exactly this sort of thing.
This gives people convicted due to disputed or discredited science the chance to be retried, which is great, except, as the intercept points out, the law is only as good as the criminal legal system tasked with applying it.
And it's probably not going to shock you that Texas is not great at applying a law that puts fewer people in jail.
Since its inception in 2013, people who have appealed it, appealed using it, have rarely received relief. Only 15 of the 74 applications that have been ruled upon.
[00:24:26] Speaker B: And this was in how long? When did this law come into pass?
[00:24:29] Speaker A: 2013.
So, in the past decade, 74 of those applications have been ruled upon in a court. Only 15 of them have seen any form of relief as a result of those cases.
[00:24:43] Speaker B: I'm interested. Do you know what kinds of junk science the successful 15 appealed to?
[00:24:51] Speaker A: I'm not sure.
Obviously, this is one of them. I'm sure a lot of it has to do with things like blood splatter, um, things like, um. Like in fires, arson cases, like in the case of the other guy that I was talking about before, like, um, gas patterns and stuff like that, that supposedly say where a fire started, you know, things like that. That, like, people ruled definitively on at the time. And we realize, like, that's not a thing. You can't tell that.
[00:25:21] Speaker B: Not conclusively, anyway, right?
[00:25:23] Speaker A: What we do know, uh, is that 34% of those applications had been. Had come from people facing the death sentence. And not a single one of those, uh, had any of them receive any form of relief. Based on junk science.
And it's worth noting that in 2012, Norman Guthkelch, the guy who came up with the shaken baby theory, disavowed using it in criminal prosecutions, going so far as to say, quote, I'm going to bethe that we are going to find in every, or at least the large majority of cases that the child had another severe illness of some sort, which was missed until too late in 2015. He added, I was against defining this thing as a crime or as a syndrome in the first instance to go on and say, every time you see it, it's a crime. It just became an easy way to get into jail.
Three quarters of those cases were procedurally barred, meaning they were dismissed without consideration because of various legal barriers to the process. So straight, like, bureaucracy stops a lot of cases from even being heard in the first place. People are sitting there on death row simply because some weird shit in the legal process happened and they couldn't get reviewed.
[00:26:35] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:26:36] Speaker A: So the writ sounds really cool and progressive on the surface, but a huge chunk of the people who attempt to use it don't even make it back into court, and the ones that do largely end up with their convictions and sentences upheld.
[00:26:48] Speaker B: Is that, do you think, one of the reasons it exists as a nod to progressiveness?
[00:26:52] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, like, and I'm sure the people who came up with it had good intentions. You know, I'm sure it came from progressive people. It probably came from activists who worked to get this, you know, into law. But, yeah, I think certainly the way that it's deployed is sort of as a nod to, like, look, people think Texas is really bloodthirsty, but actually, look at this law that we have.
Like, we're totally fair about this. You can totally get shit reviewed, but it doesn't. You know, it doesn't really work.
So obviously this was the case with Robertson in court. His lawyers laid out the flaws of the SBS diagnosis and pointed out that Nikki had been very sick in the week before her death. Further, she had been given medicine that absolutely would have worsened her condition.
And the detective who questioned him at the time, having since found out about his autism, was basically like, my investigation was influenced by my interpretations of the way he was acting, and we should definitely take that into account now.
[00:28:00] Speaker B: I would be informed of his autism.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: This time, not the first time.
And, yeah, so he was like, you should take that into account.
I would not say the same things about him now knowing about him being autistic.
And the court was like, meh, go die about it.
And this has been their response to every single death penalty case brought before them. Under this writ in slate, formerly imprisoned writer John J. Lennon, who now works with Yale Law School's prison letters project, wrote about a 31 year old landscaper named Tom Imschweiler, who was serving a five year sentence for the shaking death of his five month old son, Franklin.
And that sentence may seem short, but it was part of a plea deal. He entered an Alford plea. Have you heard of an Alford plea?
[00:28:50] Speaker B: I have not.
[00:28:51] Speaker A: This is basically where you plead guilty, but you maintain your innocence. You're essentially saying, I didn't do it, but I also don't want to rot in jail. That's what an Alfred plea is.
And he did this because he also has a young daughter, and he wanted to make sure that he was out by the time she starts making, like, core memories about childhood, which is bleak as fuck. Having to plead guilty to the death of your kid you didn't kill so that you can get out before your daughter doesn't remember you anymore.
[00:29:21] Speaker B: See, I'm trying to work that through in my mind, and it just doesn't fucking compute. How can that be a law that I can say I did something even though I'm saying do it just to get out earlier?
[00:29:33] Speaker A: Exactly. Somebody's got to be punished for this thing. So, yeah, I. There you go.
[00:29:38] Speaker B: That's a joke law. That is a comedy law.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, it's a good thing it exists.
[00:29:42] Speaker B: Do I have to do this when I plead? I plead guilty. Do I have to wink?
[00:29:47] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, this has kept many people from, you know, getting horrifyingly long sentences and stuff like that, including death penalty, so yay for that. But it's, like, horribly unfair, obviously, for people to have to do that in order to.
[00:30:05] Speaker B: But just as a law, it makes no logical sense. It's fallacious.
[00:30:10] Speaker A: I mean, that's the thing, is. Yeah, it's basically.
Basically you're saying. I mean, it's kind of like a plea deal generally, right? You're basically saying, I know that if I were to sit in front of a jury and the prosecution gave their side of the story, they would convict me and I would have no control over the sentence.
If I plead guilty. But say, you know, I'm acknowledging I didn't do it, then they get their pound of flesh, but they don't put me in. I'm not at the mercy of what the jury says and the sentence that I receive as a result of that, that's fucked up.
[00:30:48] Speaker B: Yeah, awfully.
I don't think there's a british equivalent of that.
[00:30:55] Speaker A: Interesting. Yeah.
Much like the state laws and federal laws and everything. Everything's very complicated.
[00:31:02] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
Is that a symptom of America being so fucking huge, do you think?
[00:31:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, and it goes back to sort of why we had a civil war here, things like that. Right. Like, we were expanding westward and basically deciding to, do states have control over themselves, or are we centrally run? And the central issue of that, obviously, was that people wanted to expand slavery into the new territories that we were expanding into. And so this was the state's rights issue of the time, was the government was saying, no more.
The federal government was like, we're not expanding slavery. It can stay in the states where it already is, but anything new is not going to have enslaved people in it. And the south was like, fuck you, then we will leave.
But when you get towards that, you realize that was kind of one of our central.
[00:32:02] Speaker B: Was that really the core issue?
[00:32:04] Speaker A: Yes, it very much was. Yeah.
It's a pretty bananas thing to have at the center of some of the most important moments in your country's history.
Yeah, it's wild.
[00:32:21] Speaker B: Like, we can own people or I'm out.
[00:32:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Right. That was 100% what it was about.
And now that gets, like, sort of whitewashed into. It was about states rights. But if you dig to states rights to do what, though?
Were they worried about weed? Or was it owning people?
And so, yeah, like, this has been fraught from the early days of our country and how we were trying to sort of separate ourselves from monarchy and being, like, we don't want anyone, like, a single entity to rule over us the way, you know, England did before.
[00:33:00] Speaker B: Maybe not to the same scale, because we did four episodes on Palestine. I'd quite like an episode about slavery, please.
[00:33:06] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I've thought about that. Thought, like, it would be interesting to talk about, like, racism in each of our countries because, like, our. They're such different landscapes of it. Like, there's plenty of racism in both countries, but how it developed.
[00:33:23] Speaker B: Yeah, sure.
[00:33:23] Speaker A: Completely different.
Right. So, yeah, we like that as our Christmas episode.
That's a great idea. Nice little Christmas episode on shadow slavery. That would be really fun. But, yes, we will talk about that because, yeah, it's a huge part of our country. All that to say, though, is that states rights have always been, like, a huge issue in America and something that we're constantly fighting over and that still to this day, there are areas that perpetually, like, threaten to secede because they're, like, you won't let us do this thing. The US is tyrannical. We're going to, you know, take Texas off and make it a country called, like, lone Star or whatever. Or we're gonna take the Pacific Northwest and call it Cascadia. Whatever.
[00:34:12] Speaker B: I seem to remember asking this question, like, way back in the early days, you know, what would happen if a state decided they didn't want to be a state?
[00:34:21] Speaker A: And I believe I just said the government would crush them. Yeah, the military would absolutely crush any attempt at resistance like that. But even that's fucked up.
I don't know what would happen in Britain if, like. Well, I guess, you know, they just keep voting on it, don't they? Like, exactly.
[00:34:40] Speaker B: I mean, we left the EU and nobody. We didn't get crushed. I mean.
[00:34:44] Speaker A: Well, no, but that's different because you weren't like.
Like, the EU isn't a country. It's a, you know, alliance of reasoned arguments.
[00:34:52] Speaker B: Keep happening for welsh independence.
[00:34:54] Speaker A: I was gonna say it's more equivalent to Scotland or Northern Ireland or Wales in terms of, you know, seceding.
And I think probably Northern Ireland is your closest analog. And what happened? What did the Brits do when Northern Ireland tried to secede?
Yeah, they militarily crushed them, put up walls all over the cities, and horrifyingly oppressed the people who wanted to join the Republic and the north. Yeah, the same thing would happen there.
[00:35:32] Speaker B: Hmm.
Anyway, much to consider here.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Much to consider. Yes. Lots of. Lots of cultural exchange and whatnot happening here. But that is not to say that anything over here makes sense. I just think in that case, we have very recent evidence that Britain does the exact same thing if people try to forcibly take themselves out of the union.
But anyway, like Robertson's daughter, Nikki, Franklin had been sick and running a 104 degree fever in the week prior to his death. But his pediatrician had given the go ahead for his family to take him on a family vacation to the outer banks in north Carolina.
They are from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which is about 10 hours away.
They rented a beach house along with his partner's mother, sister, and brother in law. And Tom woke up to the sound of Franklin whimpering in the middle of the night. And as probably every dad in modern history has done, at some point, brought the kid down to the living room so he wouldnt wake everybody up.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:36:35] Speaker A: He then propped him up between two pillows and went to the kitchen to warm up some formula.
When he returned moments later, Franklin was face down in one of the pillows.
He immediately yelled for help, and his brother in law, who was a medic, performed CPR while his wife called the ambulance. He died a few days later in the hospital, where doctors found subdural and retinal hemorrhage and brain swelling, which are the things that they say are the signs of shaken baby syndrome. So they reasoned that the only way that that could have happened with no obvious external trauma was that Franklin had been shaken to death, much like our old friend Lucy Letbye. Tom was also incriminated by his personal writings. He wrote a letter to his wife in which he said, maybe the devil took my hand, maybe I did hurt my son. And the DA was like, aha. Well, there you have it, a confession.
And much like, let be, his explanation was that he'd written that letter in a state of absolute despair, believing that I somehow was responsible. Because that is all I was told from the moment I went into custody, which is wild. Like, that is almost exactly the same thing that Lucy Letbe said. And you see this when it comes to people who, like, write confessions under duress and things like that. And it's a thing that it's hard for me to relate to. Like, I think, you know, I have kind of a defiant personality and stuff like that. So I, like, can't imagine being coerced into this.
[00:38:05] Speaker B: I don't know where it.
[00:38:06] Speaker A: All the time it does.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: I don't know where I saw it or where possibly the Guardian, but I'm sure recently I've read that Letbe claimed that a therapist had told her to kind of vent on paper. A therapist had told her to totally make sense, right?
[00:38:24] Speaker A: Get it all out.
Yeah. And that's. I mean, what she said was, she was like, everyone was telling me I'd done this and I started to, like, think maybe I had. And I was right. Yeah. And I was dealing with that. And that's what he says here. And you see that with forced confessions all the time, that people get so worn down by the police interrogators telling them they did it. We know you did this. Stop lying to us. We know we have evidence you did this, that they start sort of thinking like, oh, my God, did I? Did I actually do this? And then they use that as absolute evidence that you did the thing that you wrote down, like, oh, maybe I did this, actually.
So in both Tom's and Robert's cases, neither of them had any form of history of child abuse or abuse of anyone else, for that matter.
But who cares? The signs were there, but doctors, forensic pathologists and other experts have been protesting this for at least a decade. Even ones who had once fervently championed the SBS theory, like Jonathan Arden, for example, who now provides expert testimony that helps to prevent such conviction.
In one case in Minnesota, for example, he testified that a, quote, thin layer of old blood on the surface of the baby's brain was proof that the injury had occurred before the child had. Had been left alone with his father.
So the thing that the courts had used to say that SBS were there were completely disproven by this bit of evidence. It simply was impossible for it to have been the case.
And that's the kind of testimony that isn't usually heard in these kinds of cases.
Other things that these people have said can present as SBS include diseases, genetic conditions, and accidents, which seems obvious. Like, think about the head trauma that killed Sonny Bona or Natasha Richardson. Right. Like, they seemed fine.
[00:40:28] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:40:28] Speaker A: And then Liam Neeson's wife. Yeah. Natasha Richardson.
Yeah. Seemed fine. And then later, like 24 hours later, just dropped dead.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: Bonk.
[00:40:38] Speaker A: Yep. And we know this happens to adults, so why wouldn't that be the case with babies? Just, like, from a logical standpoint, they're small adults, so the same kinds of things should probably be able to happen to them.
Further, not only do experts now point out that there are many exceptions to what they've considered a rule with SBS, they assert that shaking babies doesn't actually produce the conditions it's been said to produce. Bleeding on the surface of the brain, bleeding in the back of the eye, and brain swelling.
That's a huge revelation because that's the trifecta right there. Those are the three things that have always been like, if those are present, for sure, it's SBS. And now these experts are like, you cannot do that by shaking a baby.
They did shaking studies on pigs, which, if you watch mythbusters, you know, are basically our closest analogs to humans when it comes to trying to test something. And they were unable to cause severe brain and eye injuries by shaking.
[00:41:41] Speaker B: They did that with Mythbusters.
[00:41:43] Speaker A: Not that. No. But on mythbusters, whenever they needed, like, a human analog for a test, that they clearly.
[00:41:48] Speaker B: The guy with a hat and a beard shaking the fuck out of a little pig.
[00:41:51] Speaker A: Shaking a pig. No, but they always used pigs whenever they needed something that was similar to a human to do tests.
But, yeah. So they researched how much force an adult can generate by shaking and found it highly unlikely that someone could generate enough force to cause lethal bleeding and swelling.
Like I said, there are plenty of horrible things that can happen when you shake a baby, but those aren't among them.
Big yikes.
Neuropathologist John or it might be. Jan Lestma, one of the theory's most ardent propagators, later said that he was wrong. And that, quote, the original papers that espoused shaken baby were basically opinion papers with essentially no science applied to them.
And doctor George Nichols, who was state medical examiner of Kentucky, said in 1997, shaken baby syndrome is a belief system rather than an exercise in modern day science.
[00:42:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:42:48] Speaker A: Which is. Whew, what a takedown.
Even faced with this, medical experts and practitioners of the law are loath to give up. On SBS, Tufts School of Medicine professor and American Academy of Pediatric Pediatrics committee on Child Abuse neglect member Robert Sage acknowledged that, yeah, sure, there are wrongful convictions, but he said he wasn't sure how that quote has any relevance to the issue of abusive head trauma.
[00:43:15] Speaker B: Tuft School of Medicine, tufts t u.
[00:43:18] Speaker A: F t s okay, all right, all right.
It's the school of medicine. Hard knocks.
[00:43:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Anesthesia. We don't do that.
[00:43:28] Speaker A: He went on to say, as a doctor and experienced child abuse, pediatrician, I know that abusive head trauma exists. I have cared for injured children, some of whom died. I have met with parents who were deep in misery as the realization of what they had done seeped in.
And, yeah, that is horrible and traumatic. But also, that's a real, you can't make a tomlet without breaking a few Gregs sort of mentality. Like, it's fine to send some innocent folks to jail because the thing they're being accused of does exist.
[00:43:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:00] Speaker A: It's like saying it's fine to give someone the death penalty for being a serial killer, even if they didn't do it. Because, hey, Ed Kemper, serial killers exist.
[00:44:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:44:10] Speaker A: So what can you do?
That's not how the law works, but that's basically how it's applied in SBS cases.
And this, of course, goes back to a couple things, including one we've talked about time and time again when it comes to people being wrongfully convicted or accused. Accused of stuff, whether it's, you know, maybe Lucy Letbe or the dingo lady or even the McDonald's hot coffee lady, it is way easier to think, well, these people were particularly dangerous or abusive or incompetent, and that's why these awful things happen to them than it is to accept that the universe is cold and uncaring and this shit could happen to you, too. We need to believe these are extraordinary circumstances that only happen to the worst people in society. Society and, well, straight up murder innocent folks to preserve that false sense of security.
We also put a lot of trust in the criminal justice system that they're going to get things right and that they wouldn't, whether accidentally or maliciously, present something as science that isn't.
We have sort of a tv view of what goes on in the courtroom. Forensic science is almost magic on procedurals. And with enough fancy equipment, you're always going to be able to drill down on a cause. Or if you can't, well, that's where profiling comes in. You can tell by the type of person, which, of course, was one of the things that was problematic in Roberson's case. They expected him to act a certain way, but he was autistic and his affect wasn't the same as that of a neurotypical person.
Imagine how many times this has happened to people who are neurodivergent or who have various, not to mention the obvious, which is, according to the medical news website stat quote, when it comes to identifying child abuse, racial and socio economic biases are rampant.
Black children are more likely to be identified as victims of abuse and are more likely to receive a skeletal survey compared to white children. And children with public health insurance are more likely to be reported to CPSD compared to children with private insurance.
So if you're poor or black or both, you are far more likely to end up charged with child abuse than if you're white.
[00:46:26] Speaker B: It was chilling as fuck and sticks out in my mind that one episode where you profiled me based on stuff I'd said on the cast as somebody who could probably have killed his wife.
[00:46:37] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Exactly.
[00:46:40] Speaker B: I'm a great bunch of lads, everybody knows this, but in a few, you.
[00:46:44] Speaker A: Would never do such a thing.
[00:46:45] Speaker B: But if you would, you to present some of my peccadilloes.
[00:46:51] Speaker A: Right.
It's easy to make you look guilty as fuck. And that's you, a middle class white man.
[00:46:58] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: The. The threshold is so much lower if you don't fall into any of those categories, which obviously is a huge portion of this. A lot of the cases that get the most attention are of white men accused of this. When there are plenty of black and latino and indigenous men and women who have cases like this that nobody's talking about.
[00:47:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:47:23] Speaker A: So we're now starting to see SBS convictions overturned, but not nearly at the rate we should be. Only about 3% have been overturned at this point, so we can be absolutely certain that there are hundreds, if not thousands of people languishing in jails, their children being raised without them because an unthinkable tragedy befell them and they got blamed for it.
[00:47:47] Speaker B: Did Robinson go to the chair? Did he get.
[00:47:50] Speaker A: It's October that he's supposed to be executed and there's really. Yeah, there's no indication that that will not happen. It is very likely he will be executed.
Love, love America.
[00:48:06] Speaker B: Yeah, bummed out a little. Bummed out a little by that.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: Actually. You know what? To that end, one of the things that I did want to say here is that, like I said, it's October, that this guy is supposed to be put to death. So we have time. Dear Jack, of all graves friends, I think October 17, so like about a month, right? We have time. Write some letters, make some calls, and like, get your friends to have a party where you write letters and make calls. Whatever the case may be, say something.
Go and do something. If you've been sitting here listening to this podcast as for years we've talked about stuff that you have no ability to change, like climate change and whatever else right here. Go, go, do. Go say something. We can do this. Sign a petition, whatever else, at least, you know, we don't have to sit and just let this one go. Say something. Let's work on trying to get Robert Roberson out of this jam.
[00:49:10] Speaker B: I'm just checking if there is a petition.
[00:49:13] Speaker A: I'm sure there probably is. I would imagine maybe innocence project, something of that nature.
[00:49:17] Speaker B: There is indeed. Yes.
[00:49:18] Speaker A: There you go. Base level. Look at that. Mark took 2 seconds and found a petition. Go sign that. Whatever the case may be, if there's one positive thing we have here, here's one way that we can actually be involved in this case.
[00:49:34] Speaker B: Doing it right now.
[00:49:36] Speaker A: Hey, attaboy. Make yourself heard. I love that.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: Done.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Amazing. Thank you. Mark, you take us in.
[00:49:47] Speaker B: Yes, by all means.
[00:49:48] Speaker A: Hi.
[00:49:49] Speaker B: Hello.
Difficult to send up beat after that, unfortunately.
[00:49:53] Speaker A: At least there's a theme tune in between the cold open and this.
[00:49:59] Speaker B: Do we still have the same theme tune?
[00:50:01] Speaker A: We do have the same theme tune. There was a brief point where it was slight, like when we started the cast and we didn't have quotes from a bunch of episodes. There was a different theme tune because it only had quotes from our first ep and maybe some of our conversations we had outside of the podcast.
And then when we had enough, I changed it, and it has been that for three years.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: I wonder, is it still appropriate, that theme tune?
[00:50:29] Speaker A: What do you mean?
[00:50:31] Speaker B: Well, it feels a little frivolous and a little jarring to maybe after that conversation to have like I don't know. I don't know.
[00:50:49] Speaker A: I mean, that's the. It's a valid point. And sometimes I don't use it for things if I'm like this, you know, there have been times I've used discernment to be like this. Feels like maybe. Maybe we don't. Sorry, Robbie, but it does there. It does serve as sort of, like. We talk about a lot of dark things in the beginning, so it does serve as, like a little moment to collect yourself before all of a sudden we're, like, talking about something goofy, you know? Yep, fair enough.
Should I have, like, a sad theme to. Well, I'm gonna put, like, the Twin Peaks theme in the. In that gap or something.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Eastenders. Yeah. The greatest show on british television, an institution. Whenever there's a super consequential moment, typically a beloved character, death, they'll play like, a special version of the. Of the theme. It's called Julia's theme, I believe, named for the woman who wrote it.
And it always, always hits like a ton of bricks, man.
[00:51:49] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:51:50] Speaker B: Whenever a character gets Julia's themed, often, you know, somebody will be driving off out of Albert square in the back of a taxi with a rain street window or, you know, a funeral procession.
But, yeah, they use Julia's theme very sparingly. You don't get Julia's theme very often. Yeah, but when they do, you're always left in stunned silence. It's fucking great.
[00:52:13] Speaker A: I love the concept. I don't think you know what I was gonna say. I don't think you could pull that off here because people would immediately laugh if there was suddenly serious music. But then again, maybe that helps. Maybe again, it's part of what would be used. Breaking of the tension.
[00:52:26] Speaker B: I wonder if I could knock us up like another version of candle in the wind.
[00:52:30] Speaker A: Ooh, I like that. That feels appropriate.
[00:52:34] Speaker B: Yeah. I won't do it, obviously.
[00:52:36] Speaker A: Right. Clearly.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: If we were to have a Julia's theme, it would be.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: It would be candle in the wind.
[00:52:42] Speaker B: It would be me writing a bespoke version of candle in the wind.
[00:52:47] Speaker A: I want to hear it. I would very much like to hear that.
[00:52:50] Speaker B: Maybe I'll pen it on the plane.
[00:52:53] Speaker A: When we go to karaoke. You can put on candle in the wind, but sing your Joag version.
[00:52:59] Speaker B: It's a brilliant idea.
[00:53:00] Speaker A: There it is. You know, we've had a lot of conversations, me and my friends, about, like, what will we do at karaoke? You know, I have not. I used to karaoke all the time. Right. But I have not in basically like five years now, which makes me a little nervous. I'm like, out of practice. Like, do I do an old standby just because I know my old songs? Do I bring in something new? Pard B thinks points to anyone who does something horror themed, like a, from a horror movie, or B. By a horary band, or C. With spooky lyrics.
[00:53:38] Speaker B: Well, these places have everything, don't they?
[00:53:40] Speaker A: They do, yeah, everything. The place has their whole catalog searchable on their website that we're going to. So you can look ahead of time and see do they have my song? But, yeah, living in the future now everything is on there but that, you know. Of course, that is to say, we are. What'd you figure out? Like 72 hours out from being on.
[00:54:04] Speaker B: Your way here, I'd be wondering if it's even worth going to sleep. I'll either be asleep or wondering if I should even fucking bother.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: Right, yeah.
It's Christmas Eve in the Lewis.
[00:54:17] Speaker B: I don't want to arrive all fucked up.
[00:54:19] Speaker A: Right, yeah, exactly. Delicate balance. Especially because coming this way sucks. Fine. Going to the UK, coming this way.
[00:54:28] Speaker B: So I've got to be strategic somehow.
[00:54:31] Speaker A: Do you have a plan?
[00:54:33] Speaker B: Oh, medication is the plan.
[00:54:39] Speaker A: I've said this before, and this probably works better for you than me, but, like, the first time that I went on an overseas flight was to belt fast, and I knew that I would be very anxious because you know me, I do not like flying. I do it all the time, but I hate it.
[00:54:55] Speaker B: Luckily, I love it, as you know.
[00:54:57] Speaker A: Yeah, you enjoy flying. And so my thought process was like, so my flight, we had to leave at like 04:00 a.m. from the school to get to LAX. And so I was like, I'm not going to go to bed. So I'll be like, super, super tired and that'll be very helpful. And then I'm going to also take sleeping meds. So when I get on that plane, I'm going to have been awake for, like, you know, 24 hours and be on sleeping pills and I will pass the fuck out and wake up in Northern Ireland.
[00:55:28] Speaker B: That's kind of my plan. That's kind of where my head is at.
[00:55:31] Speaker A: Seems like a totally reasonable plan except the way my anxiety is set up.
I powered through that shit. And so I was awake the entire flight and then got to Northern Ireland and it was like 730 in the morning. So I had to be awake an entire day having not slept for two days. And on sleeping pills, I. Oh, my God. I just remember, like, it felt like I was, like, having an out of body experience. Like, I was walking next to me all day. Like I could not function.
[00:56:05] Speaker B: Well, I'm certain I'll be able to sleep on the plane. Cause I'm not.
[00:56:08] Speaker A: You don't have this problem?
[00:56:10] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
I'm anxious in a lot of other areas, but a plane is not one of them. So I'm.
[00:56:17] Speaker A: I just always tell this to people who, like, whenever I see people who are like, oh, I'm going on a plane for the first time, or the first time in forever, and I'm terrified of flying, I'm like, let me tell you a thing you're gonna think is a good idea.
It's actually not. Don't do that.
But for someone like you, that's fine.
[00:56:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's the plan.
I'll maybe have a little nappy nap, like, early evening, and then power through, smash a downer before I get on the plane.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:56:50] Speaker B: And hopefully be bright as a button.
[00:56:54] Speaker A: Yeah. Because you'll be getting here, like, 1130 in the morning. Um, so, yeah, hopefully you'll be fresh as a daisy when you arrive here, ready for me to immediately whisk you away on adventures. I keep thinking that I'm like, am I planning too many things? Am I planning too many things? But, like, compared to. I know what your vacations are normally like, and I know that your wife plans much harder and with much less downtime than I do, so I'm like, you're going to be fine.
[00:57:20] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know this isn't, I know that they won't be, you know, smelling the roses.
[00:57:28] Speaker A: It's going to be a blast. What do you think? Do you have concerns? Do you have questions as you make your way? This is a great question, America. For the first time in literally 30 years.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: I am kind of, if anything, I'm very curious to see just how much mileage my social battery has in it.
[00:57:51] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, for sure.
[00:57:55] Speaker B: Because we know I like to leave.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: You are. Yeah, you're a lever. We have to do this.
[00:58:00] Speaker B: Yeah. And I simply will not be able to do this.
[00:58:04] Speaker A: Right. Well, I don't know. I have a different, like, perspective, and I think it's because I am friends with a lot of, if not lever, sort of rechargers.
[00:58:14] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:58:14] Speaker A: And I think that you have, like.
[00:58:16] Speaker B: A quiet spot for me.
[00:58:17] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing. It's like, we have spots. Like, if everybody is hanging out outside, you can go inside and, like, you know, go sit in your, your bedroom for the week and chill out and recharge or whatever, and nobody's gonna be like that asshole. Good. Okay.
So that. Yeah, but I do get that, like, the social battery is a question for sure, and that's.
[00:58:45] Speaker B: That's honestly my only concern. Other than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bring it all on and I'll be fine. I'll be. I'll be better than fine. I'm gonna. You know, it's gonna be amazing.
[00:58:53] Speaker A: Is there anything you're. You're looking forward to in particular, obviously, with meeting our listeners and things like that? You're very excited about that, but, like, you know, us, things that you've got, like, an eye towards?
[00:59:06] Speaker B: Well, so I've got a. I've got a.
I want to go to CV's. You know this.
[00:59:16] Speaker A: I do know this. And it's. Here's my thing.
I will take you to CV's. We will buy your melatonin at Glenridge Pharmacy, my place of choice, because I was looking up the reviews of the local cvss around here just to, you know, see what. Maybe what's the best one to take you to. And everyone hates the CVS's area. They all have, like, two stars. But I want you to get your meds somewhere nice. But we will go into a CV's and maybe you can buy some, like, candy or something amidst the Halloween decorations and that weird, sweet plastic smell that you get inside of a CV's, you know?
[00:59:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I want that. I want to experience that.
[00:59:55] Speaker A: To experience, like, the terribleness of it is probably part of the experience.
[00:59:59] Speaker B: Exactly. I want waltz and all. I want it all. I want it all.
Now. Something I need to ask you. How.
How far will we be from the 78th precinct in Brooklyn?
[01:00:19] Speaker A: The 78th precinct in Brooklyn?
[01:00:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:00:23] Speaker A: What is at the 78th precinct?
[01:00:26] Speaker B: It's where they film Brooklyn nine nine.
[01:00:29] Speaker A: I was wondering if that was going to be the case.
That's fascinating. I did not know that.
[01:00:35] Speaker B: Obviously, I couldn't give her stuff, but Owen would dearly love a photo.
[01:00:38] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. I freaking love Brooklyn nine nine. But I don't think we will reach prospect heights, unfortunately.
[01:00:45] Speaker B: What else? What else? What else? We won't get the chance to go to Rikers island, will we?
[01:00:49] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:50] Speaker B: No. Can you go to that? Is it like Alcatraz?
[01:00:53] Speaker A: No, see, Alcatraz is shut down, and Rikers, I think, is still in operation.
Yeah. I think you can see it, though. I think you can see it from. I want to. I think it's on the Hudson.
[01:01:06] Speaker B: That would be good if we could get a look at it.
[01:01:09] Speaker A: You can wave at Rikers.
[01:01:13] Speaker B: Excellent.
Let me see.
I hope. I would imagine we'll get, like, a boat and see the statue.
[01:01:22] Speaker A: We will. We will do that. I was kind of keeping that. Oh, Riker's actually on the east river, but so, in fact, we might actually see it from the boat. I was kind of keeping that on the DL, and maybe people won't listen to this beforehand and know, but our tour is going to start with the Staten island ferry, so get to see the statue.
[01:01:43] Speaker B: Do they?
[01:01:44] Speaker A: All that stuff.
[01:01:45] Speaker B: Can you go in it? Can you go up her, as it were?
[01:01:48] Speaker A: She didn't say it that way. Yes, it is at various times forbidden to go up her, but I don't know if it's closed or open right now. We won't. Like.
[01:02:01] Speaker B: I'm not saying I want her, I'm just curious.
[01:02:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I went in when I was a kid, but, yeah, you can go inside of there. You take a ferry to the island, the Liberty island in New Jersey, because was it called Liberty Island, New Jersey?
[01:02:19] Speaker B: The statue was erected. No, I thought not.
[01:02:21] Speaker A: No, it was not. It was not called that.
But this is one thing that, you know, New Jerseyans will get. Will get on you about. The Statue of Liberty and Ellis island are both in New Jersey, not New York.
[01:02:33] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Thank you.
I imagine. Well, I mean, like is probably the wrong word, but I'd like to at least breeze past the site of the atrocity.
[01:02:45] Speaker A: Oh, that's like the atrocity. What's the atrocity?
You know the one we will indeed go and see the memorial pools and all of that kind of stuff where that happened. You get to see the weird 911 gift shop that is over there. It is the most bizarre thing on the planet, that you can go and buy 911 souvenirs.
[01:03:08] Speaker B: Oh, I didn't know that. That is. Now I'm.
[01:03:11] Speaker A: Yeah, you're gonna love it.
[01:03:12] Speaker B: Like a t shirt.
[01:03:13] Speaker A: But you can get t shirts, bags. Like, I fairly certainly have, like, weird shit, like shot glasses. Like, it's a little kiosk or whatever. And you can buy your 911 souvenirs. And it's super weird. Like, they don't say nine. Well, I mean, I think they do have, like, 911. Never forget, you know, or whatever. They're surely not like, 911 championship.
[01:03:33] Speaker B: Like an eagle.
[01:03:34] Speaker A: Like. Yeah, but they are. They very much have t shirts, sweatshirts, postcards, like, all of that kind of stuff from the memorial.
[01:03:45] Speaker B: You will help me make good choices, won't you?
[01:03:49] Speaker A: Listen, I can only do so much.
[01:03:51] Speaker B: Someone given to my, you know, with my impulsive nature.
This could be dangerous.
[01:03:57] Speaker A: Well, it's. Yeah. It's a weird thing when you're visiting a place like that because it is. It's New York City, so people are like largely just going about their day or whatever. Like it is a working area. There is a new world trade center, all this stuff. So it's this weird, bizarre mix of people who are just at work or passing through to get from point a to point b.
People who are there to like deeply feel this moment, the memorials and then like hitch, like the souvenir stand where they have to monetize this tragedy. Which I guess if you think about it, this is the case, I'm sure at Pearl harbor you can get postcards and shit like that.
On my shelf behind me I have a mug from the 6th floor museum which is where JFK was shot from.
You have this kind of stuff. I think because this is such a fresh. At least for someone like our age, this feels like a fresh thing and it's weird to have tourist stuff around it.
But yeah, there are full grown adults who were not alive when this happened.
[01:05:17] Speaker B: Am I right in saying that we'd be walking on unrecovered human remains?
[01:05:24] Speaker A: I don't think so. I think they found everybody.
Yeah. I mean I'm sure there's. There's bits of things that weren't recovered, you know, no. More so. Less so than being in a graveyard.
[01:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
There's not going to be that many bits of people underneath there. And like. So a good chunk of that space like they like it's this big deep memorial pool thing. It's very hard to get a grasp of like the size of it until you actually see this. Um. But yeah, it's, you know, they've. Where the buildings are. Has been made into something else.
[01:06:05] Speaker B: Superb.
[01:06:06] Speaker A: So.
[01:06:07] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:06:07] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a weird spot.
[01:06:09] Speaker B: And listen, I. I don't say this lightly. Right. But the, the fact that you've studied and got yourself accredited as a tour guide.
A star rated tour guide no less.
[01:06:24] Speaker A: Star rated tour guide. I know. I haven't even said that the on here yet. I don't think that.
[01:06:28] Speaker B: Oh well please don't let me steal your thunder. Go for it. Just make announce your news.
[01:06:33] Speaker A: I went on Wednesday somewhere in there. Went into the city, went to a testing center, sat down, took the New York sightseeing guide exam and received 91% on it. So I get a little star next to my name as one of the cream of the crop of people you could take a tour from.
[01:07:00] Speaker B: Do you plan on doing it afterwards? Do you plan on doing it again?
[01:07:03] Speaker A: It's a good question. Because, yeah, I mean, I, like. It's been my dream since I was little to be a tour guide. Yeah. I have always wanted to be a tour guide. When I lived in Anaheim, I was a museum docent, a volunteer museum docent, and fucking loved it.
And so having tracks. Yeah, right. It, like, completely makes sense with my personality and, like, having been a professor and all this kind of stuff like these are there. I'm just always doing tour guide things in non tour guide ways. And so now that I have a license to do it, like, my friend who's a tour guide in Philadelphia, he messaged me and he was like, my company actually has a New York branch, if you want to, like, see if they have any openings or whatever. And I was like, okay, well, that is interesting. So who knows? Maybe this is the start of a career change.
[01:07:58] Speaker B: And I know that you're not kidding either.
[01:08:03] Speaker A: No, 100% not kidding would absolutely do it. Presented with the right opportunity. Fuck, yeah. That is my dream. It is. Genuinely. If you were to ask what is like, if you could only do one job for the rest of your life, and that's it, you will never get to change careers. That's your thing. Tour guide, easily.
[01:08:25] Speaker B: I can't wait.
[01:08:27] Speaker A: I'm excited about it. I'm, you know, obviously a little bit of nerves about it, but it's obviously friends, so I don't have to be nervous. I, you know, I might have to, like, look at my little script a little bit. I won't be completely off book of our travels and everything, but I got myself a cool little iPad case so I can carry it around and show pictures of things and whatnot and keep my notes on there, it's gonna be.
[01:08:55] Speaker B: Why don't you, at the start, just tell everyone that one of the things you're gonna tell us will be bullshit, and then at the end, we have to guess which one.
[01:09:05] Speaker A: Which thing is bullshit. Yeah, I kind of love that. I'm gonna work on that.
[01:09:10] Speaker B: You don't have to do it. I'm just gonna give that to you if you want it.
[01:09:13] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we'll see what happens. Like the idea.
But, you know, these are the things that we're thinking about as this week approaches, which is just huge. It's such an exciting.
[01:09:24] Speaker B: Oh, tabat seismic.
[01:09:26] Speaker A: Seismic. Yeah, absolutely.
[01:09:28] Speaker B: And as I said to Cory before we started recording, we can then stop talking about it. So for those who aren't invested at all and couldn't give a shit.
Don't worry. It'll be over. It'll be over soon.
[01:09:37] Speaker A: I mean, there will probably be at least one episode where we reflected upon it because we're gonna be all hyped up and there will be videos, and there will be videos. I'm excited about that, too. You got a new camera?
[01:09:48] Speaker B: Bought myself a new little camera. See, one. One thing about me. Right.
[01:09:53] Speaker A: Little.
[01:09:54] Speaker B: Want to share something? A little thing about me. I like. I like to have new things.
[01:09:59] Speaker A: You do. That is a thing you are. Yeah.
[01:10:01] Speaker B: Into frequently, like a. Like a semi frequently influx of new things. That's something that I enjoy. I think it's neat. Yeah.
[01:10:14] Speaker A: I feel like I get the flack for being impulsive, because if you show me food on the tv, I need to eat it immediately. But I came there with my little osmo pocket, and you were like, I want that.
Your impulses are bigger than mine.
[01:10:33] Speaker B: That camera that you showed me, I got the next version of that. It was hands down, clearly ever bought. It's fucking brilliant.
[01:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it's worked out nicely.
[01:10:42] Speaker B: Yep. So I got myself a new little action camera for it, and I'm looking forward to playing with that.
And I'm gonna practice, you know, I'm gonna get some nice editing practice from it. And I cannot wait to record with Anna and Steve. I just can't wait.
[01:10:57] Speaker A: It's gonna be so much fun. Really stoked on that. Mark will be providing us with the joag cold open portion, and then we will band together, talk about the Jaws series, and very excited to share that 200th episode with all of you when it occurs. So it's all happening this week in just a few short days. And as a result, I almost have a bathroom, too. So things are really, really coming along awesome.
[01:11:30] Speaker B: Five years ago, four years ago. Four years ago that this is where we'd be.
[01:11:34] Speaker A: That this is where we'd be. Paul Rudd. Jiff here.
[01:11:40] Speaker B: I don't know what that means, but yes.
[01:11:42] Speaker A: You know, the hot ones, they have.
[01:11:45] Speaker B: Oh, never seen it. It's fucking mad that you insist on saying gif. I hate it.
[01:11:51] Speaker A: It's what it's called, and I'm not going to change it out of peer pressure.
[01:11:54] Speaker B: What does the g stand for?
[01:11:56] Speaker A: It doesn't matter what it stands for, because the person who created the inter. The whole thing said it's gif. And therefore, I don't change it simply because Zoomers decided that it's with a soft j g. When.
[01:12:13] Speaker B: When a piece of art leaves its creator, it belongs to the world. I don't give a fuck what he says. Graphics is the first word of that acronym.
[01:12:23] Speaker A: Like I've said, I started using this before. This was a thing everyone talked about.
[01:12:29] Speaker B: I change, though.
[01:12:31] Speaker A: Why? There's nothing wrong with saying it correctly.
[01:12:35] Speaker B: Oh, God.
[01:12:37] Speaker A: Everyone else says it wrong. I've been saying it my whole life. Why would I change it, mind.
[01:12:43] Speaker B: Listen, I feel the same way about the word oximeron.
[01:12:47] Speaker A: Except that's categorically wrong. But.
[01:12:49] Speaker B: Bullshit.
I won't move a fucking inch on how that word is pronounced.
[01:12:56] Speaker A: Well, there you go.
[01:12:59] Speaker B: My cold, dead hands.
[01:13:00] Speaker A: Yeah, but I come from. I come from programmer world and so, you know, then these things got into everybody else's hands and I'm expected to change because the. The kids read it wrong?
Nah, not gonna happen.
[01:13:16] Speaker B: Do you come from the giraffic design world?
[01:13:19] Speaker A: Okay, you're asking. You're acting like there are no soft G's in the world. This is what he decided. He spelled it out. I'm not specifically to make the name sound like Jif. He could have called it something else, but he wanted it to be Jiff.
[01:13:36] Speaker B: How does the g at the start of the word graphic sound?
[01:13:38] Speaker A: That's not the point.
[01:13:39] Speaker B: The point is it very much is.
[01:13:41] Speaker A: It was, but it isn't, because it was. The acronym was made to make the sound Gif.
You're not going to sway me on this.
[01:13:56] Speaker B: No. It's strong beliefs, strongly held. That's what me and you're all about.
[01:14:01] Speaker A: It's true.
[01:14:01] Speaker B: Yeah. We find a way. We find a way to, you know, to remain friends in the face of this.
[01:14:06] Speaker A: Indeed. Let's start our what we watch section here with some strong beliefs we've been fighting about for the past two years.
[01:14:15] Speaker B: Hey, yo.
[01:14:17] Speaker A: Finally, you know, bringing my blood pressure down a little bit.
[01:14:22] Speaker B: All right, now let's let me just kind of try and navigate my way through this.
Which was the. One of the latter two screams that had the shrine. Was that six or five?
[01:14:34] Speaker A: Six.
[01:14:35] Speaker B: I maintained that that was fucking obnoxious.
[01:14:39] Speaker A: Right, that's fair. That's fair. My whole thing was not that I didn't like that you don't like this movie, it was that you decided the whole franchise was shit because you didn't like one movie.
[01:14:49] Speaker B: But the opening sequence of Scream four, when there are like three different fucking stab movies, one after another, was fucking brilliant.
[01:15:02] Speaker A: It was. Right, right. I remember seeing it, like, in the theater and, you know, when it got to the second one being like, are you serious? Okay, surely you're not going to do it to me again.
[01:15:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
Oh, man, Wes was fucking great, wasn't he?
[01:15:21] Speaker A: Word.
[01:15:22] Speaker B: Wasn't he great? What a fucking. That guy could fucking direct the fuck out of a movie. And as I said to Pete, oh, man, there were some beautiful moments during Scream four when I would explain to Pete, I would put this into. I would try and put the movie into context, horror genre to him only, like for seconds later, one of the characters on screen to literally repeat exactly what I said, like in a condescending way. Making me look like a fucking nerd.
[01:15:46] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:15:47] Speaker B: Like people are going to overanalyze this, aren't they? Well, I'm overanalyzing it. To Peter to my left. You know what I mean?
Fantastic.
[01:15:54] Speaker A: Incredible.
[01:15:54] Speaker B: That film within a film within a film within a film within a film really put me right in to Elm street four.
[01:16:04] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:16:05] Speaker B: Where there are loads of bits, where, you know, there's dream within a dream within a dream within a dream bits. So it's.
I was not prepared for how good scream four is.
[01:16:16] Speaker A: And I thought you'd feel that way. I'm curious, like, when you and Pete get to six, if at all, you reevaluate that. Because I feel like four is important in that step to six where it's like six. When you watch it without four, I can see what you're getting about the, like, this is just it, you know, sucking its own dick or whatever.
But I feel like when you're sort of getting that framework of what they're doing within it, it becomes at least marginally less obnoxious.
But now what we have is like. Because at the time, basically, you had. You'd watched one, five and six, essentially. Um, at least in enough recent history that you had any concept of them.
[01:17:01] Speaker B: Yes, yes.
[01:17:01] Speaker A: And six irritated you so much that you'd kind of thrown all of it out, which now at this point, and you liked five, which we've talked about, you enjoyed five. So what we have here is that you have. You like a lot, for sure. Like one.
[01:17:16] Speaker B: And right now the averages are balancing out in its favor.
[01:17:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Three you thought was fine.
[01:17:22] Speaker B: It mirrors elm street in that.
The way I put it to you. Talk about a fucking mid franchise revitalization of what scream is as a property amstreeted. Exactly. Obviously, Wes wasn't heavily involved in three and four, but they really fucking came out punching, you know, they really came out swinging, those two entries.
[01:17:43] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
[01:17:45] Speaker B: Ah, I was delighted and I wasn't, you know, there was, there was no element of, ah, fuck. It's good. I was wrong. There wasn't any.
[01:17:52] Speaker A: That's the thing. Yeah. You're like, oh my God. No, this is. Yeah, you didn't like text me like with a, like, ah, crap. It was like, you're like, oh my God, that was insanely good.
[01:18:02] Speaker B: I mean, it kind of, you can, you can, you can sense the passage of time in that movie with how freely it was able to dial up the volume of the kills. There's a lot more gore in four than there ever than probably in the first three put together. Entrails and fucking neck wounds and shit. Yeah, yeah, it's smart as fuck. I simply loved it. I had no clue who the ghost faces would be. No clue.
[01:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is. Yeah. One of the great things about that movie. And as I said, it was so funny that Anna was like, oh, it's one of my favorite reveals, which we won't say because maybe someone hasn't seen it, but this came up in my facebook memories the other day actually, that I had watched it with my mother a few years ago and not the most attentive human being in the world. We get to the reveal of the killers and as in every movie you've been watching these people through the whole movie, you've gotten to know them quite well. And the person takes off the mask and my mom goes, who the fuck is that?
[01:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah, that killer was in like most scenes of the film. She's not even like a peripheral character.
[01:19:18] Speaker A: Right, exactly. This is not. Yeah. Someone that like showed up in one scene and you should have been watching closely or anything like that. It's like, why do I watch movies with you? Good Lord.
But yes, I'm just very happy that on the whole now watching through this franchise is now tipped in its favor.
[01:19:39] Speaker B: Unlike you with Gif.
It's nice to have my mind changed on this.
[01:19:46] Speaker A: I was open to that, by the way. I just, you know, googled to make sure that I wasn't lying about.
[01:19:52] Speaker B: You can google all you fucking want.
[01:19:53] Speaker A: Yeah, but the reason because I wanted to, I was like. It was because he wanted the Gif sound. In fact, it was the choice of the creator of the GIF image format, Steve Wilhite. And he wanted to echo the american peanut butter brand Jifden. So compiserve employees would often say choosey developers choose GiF, which is the slogan of Jif Peanut butter.
[01:20:13] Speaker B: If anything, thats an even better reason to retcon it.
You wanted, you wanted a ubiquitous brand.
[01:20:22] Speaker A: You wanted it to sound like.
[01:20:24] Speaker B: Sound like a peanut butter brand.
[01:20:25] Speaker A: Yes. Well, also, keep in mind, at the time, it wasnt ubiquitous. Everyone wasnt using this all the time.
Only nerds like me who were early adopters of this kind of thing were using it. So they didnt know when they created it that every person on the planet would use gifs.
It just got out of their hands.
[01:20:48] Speaker B: All right, best we move on.
[01:20:52] Speaker A: Anyways, what else did you watch this week?
[01:20:55] Speaker B: A couple of movies on a theme. Have you heard of Omni Loop?
[01:20:58] Speaker A: I never heard of it until you mentioned it the other day.
[01:21:01] Speaker B: I only downloaded it on a whim. Right. It's a 2024 time loop movie. It's got ao Adibiri in it, and it's. Oh, it's lovely. It's peaceful. It's a very calm, loafing.
[01:21:14] Speaker A: Not usually something you associate with time loop movies.
[01:21:17] Speaker B: No, no, no.
There's nothing madcap to it at all. It is a, like I said, a very calm, very reflective kind of view of the lives you could have led, the people you could have been, the decisions you didn't make, the paths you could have taken.
[01:21:37] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:21:38] Speaker B: Told very much from the female perspective, motherhood versus career, family versus, you know, achievement is, you know, it's got quirk to it. It just casually drops huge kind of Sci-Fi ideas and just treats them as though they're part of the, you know, part of the language of the film, vocabulary. The film just expects you to come along with some pretty big conceits.
And it is lovely. Just.
Just leaves you. Leaves you with a yemenite man. Leaves you. Leaves you. It leaves you with feelings, you know.
[01:22:21] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:22:22] Speaker B: Leaves you.
[01:22:23] Speaker A: I'm into that.
[01:22:24] Speaker B: Yeah. I hope you like it. I hope you watch it. I hope you enjoy it.
[01:22:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll definitely check it out.
[01:22:28] Speaker B: That was fucking rubbish.
[01:22:32] Speaker A: That does happen sometimes, but it's usually not with things that are like, as sincere as something like that.
[01:22:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it looks cheap. This is not a big budget movie, okay? It's not, you know, it looks like it was a home.
[01:22:44] Speaker A: It's not everything everywhere all at once.
[01:22:46] Speaker B: No, it isn't.
Which, because I was into the theme, I watched right afterwards the next day, watched everything. I rolled at once. Again, a fucking triumph for me as a parent here in that I watched it with Peter and Owen. Right.
1013. This is an r rated film.
[01:23:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I guess so, huh?
[01:23:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pete fell asleep within five minutes and didn't wake until the end. Right. He was gone.
[01:23:15] Speaker A: He is certainly your child.
[01:23:19] Speaker B: Owen turns to me after five minutes, goes, dad, I'm not feeling this.
And I'm like, whoa, just chill.
And by the end, he was, dad, this is amazing.
[01:23:29] Speaker A: Oh, love that.
[01:23:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:23:34] Speaker A: I mean, I think that's how I was when I watched it too. The beginning of it, I was like, I don't know about this.
[01:23:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:23:40] Speaker A: It's like you don't remember when you watch it again because you know where it's going. But the first time I saw it, I remember not being, like, totally sold and then being like, yep.
[01:23:48] Speaker B: But no, like, a few times throughout. You turn to, dad, this is brilliant.
And it is. It hit just as hard for me the second time as it did. I think it might be the third time.
[01:23:59] Speaker A: I was gonna say, is it really only the second time?
[01:24:01] Speaker B: The thing with everything ever all at once? Right? And if this sounds. If this. If I sound like a dick saying this, fuck it. Maybe I am. I don't care. But it is.
The feeling is almost indescribable, right? It's a kind of like a killing me softly sort of vibe, right?
[01:24:22] Speaker A: Killing, like the soft.
[01:24:24] Speaker B: Yeah. That film, in the space of, like, 100, 2140 minutes, articulates stuff that I've struggled with 20 years.
[01:24:36] Speaker A: Sure.
[01:24:37] Speaker B: It's. It's. It's as though it reached fucking into me and pulled out my fucking fears and worries about life being pointless.
[01:24:45] Speaker A: Right?
[01:24:46] Speaker B: Just laid it all out in the most brilliantly inventive and funny and engaging way. I have the deepest, deepest connection with that film. It is perfect. It is just brilliant.
[01:24:59] Speaker A: Yeah. Agreed.
Yeah. I have nothing more than I could add to that. You're spot on, by the way, though. She seated my dog. The shadow of my dog looks like he's shitting. He's not. There's, like, a whole bunch of kids playing outside and he is having the time of his life watching the children play.
[01:25:19] Speaker B: Do you know?
He must be so happy that you came and gone.
[01:25:24] Speaker A: I like to think so, you know, like, he's. He does so many, like, he's a cuddler. He's always sleeping on his back with his tummy up, which the Internet always says means that they're, like, completely comfortable because in the wild, you wouldn't do that because you might get attacked. So when a dog bares their belly, it means they're, like, completely safe. He, like, he seems to just, you know, in whatever way a dog can love. He seems to love us. And I'm like, I hope. I hope you're really glad that we rescued you. There's also that thing, like, you know, whenever you get a dog, you're separating them from their litter, of course. And there's, like, always this little part of me that's like, oh, no, that's very sad. But dogs are fine with it. This is like a human thing to be worried about that. But I'm like, I hope it was worth it. I hope it was worth being separated from kiwi and apple and BlackBerry to come and be our dog.
[01:26:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure he has. I'll ask him.
[01:26:19] Speaker A: Yeah. When you get here, you can have a heart to heart with the dog about how he feels about being our dog. I will let.
Last week we watched the dark half, and as I've said a million times on here, I've been in just jonesing for nineties horror, and I love a nineties horror miniseries. And so the other day, I revisited Stephen King's Storm of the Century, which was a 1999 miniseries. Have you not seen this one?
[01:26:54] Speaker B: I have not.
[01:26:55] Speaker A: Well, well, storm of the century is about a town that is about to be hit by an incredible world ending kind of storm, essentially, that threatens to wipe them out and emits this happening. This figure shows up who is like, he starts by the first you meet him, he murders an old woman, and he has this little rhyme about sin or whatever. And over the course of this movie, people start killing themselves with a message written red on walls and things like that that say, give me what I want to this ends, or whatever. And it seems to revolve around this figure who has come to town. And it's three episodes, and the first two are kind of them out about trying to figure out what's going on, figuring out that this guy is evil and not just some weirdo that came and murdered a lady and all that stuff. In the last episode is this very tense, almost courtroom drama esque thing that's like a huge, highly escalating town meeting. And it is just, I mean, it's well acted, it's tense, it's bleak as fuck.
And yeah, it was a good time. Storm of the century is on Hulu over here. I don't know if it's no 99.
[01:28:28] Speaker B: Oh, okay.
[01:28:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I remember watching it when it came out, you know, when I was in middle school or whatever, like 14 years old when this came out and enjoying it at the time. Tim Daley is the lead in it. And it's got a lot of people that you would recognize, a lot of that guys and all that stuff. But, yeah, it was a fun little thing to watch while I was getting the house ready, prepping things, vacuuming, all kinds of stuff like that.
Fun little watch.
[01:28:56] Speaker B: Nice.
There's a lot of tv at the minute, so I probably won't get to it until after Penguin and Agatha are done, both of which have started strong.
[01:29:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I haven't watched Penguin, but I did last night. We broke out the projector and inflatable screen to test it out, and I was like, let's watch Agatha. So we watched the first two episodes of that.
[01:29:15] Speaker B: That second episode. That first episode is great. The true detective.
[01:29:19] Speaker A: Yeah, it was funny because, like, my brain wasn't with it at all. And Keo caught it right out the gate, like, with the opening. I was like, oh, I didn't know that this was going to be, like, a procedural or whatever. He's like, I was, oh, it's not.
[01:29:31] Speaker B: Going to be exactly the same. It took me a while. I think it was only like, the credits.
[01:29:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Whereas based on the danish show, you know, Wandavision spelled Bunny. But, yeah, it was like, immediately I was like, oh, I didn't know this was gonna be a procedural. He's like, it's not going to be. It's gonna be like, wanda. I was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see.
[01:29:52] Speaker B: And that musical number in the second.
[01:29:53] Speaker A: Episode is fucking great, isn't it, kitty from that seventies show being hilarious in that whole scene is just delightful. Am I supposed to know this song? Yeah.
[01:30:07] Speaker B: Penguin starts equally as strong. It's, you know, as you'd expect. Way more violent and profane.
[01:30:14] Speaker A: Is that a. Is that a max show? What does that come from? Do you know?
[01:30:17] Speaker B: Obviously.
[01:30:18] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, that's like, I'm sure you stole it. But.
[01:30:22] Speaker B: So, yes, killings and swearing aboundhe. Um, but Jesus, man, Colin Farrell is so good.
[01:30:27] Speaker A: Of course he is.
[01:30:28] Speaker B: He just disappears, man. You know what I mean?
[01:30:31] Speaker A: In more ways than one, because, well, yeah, still. How. How is that Colin Farrell?
[01:30:37] Speaker B: Insane. Amazing.
[01:30:39] Speaker A: I'm usually so good at spotting. Yeah. I'm usually so good at spotting people under that. But there is no Colin Farrell there.
[01:30:45] Speaker B: None at all.
Oh, it's wonderful. I can't. I hate. I hate and love that it's weekly because I would have watched it all by now.
[01:30:55] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. I have such a love hate thing with weekly because I do enjoy watching something week by week, but that is a higher chance that I forget I'm watching it. So, you know, that's the.
[01:31:07] Speaker B: That's the rubbish, which is the right way.
[01:31:11] Speaker A: Either binge or watch weekly. I prefer weekly.
I'm not a huge binger. I don't like to watch a ton of things at once.
[01:31:21] Speaker B: No, same on that. We agree. Yeah. I can only one book, one show. I can't do more than one thing at a time.
[01:31:28] Speaker A: So I tend to, like. I have a few shows, usually, like sitcoms, like ghosts and stuff like that, that I watch weekly, and I enjoy that. It's very hard for me to, like, have stuff that I'm going to watch all ten episodes at one time or something like that. Like, that's usually I get overwhelmed and I stop watching it.
[01:31:48] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:31:48] Speaker A: Unless it's something like, you know, the appointment television. That is everything Mike Flanagan puts out. But, I mean, those come out weekly, so there is that. But I have binged those as well.
[01:32:00] Speaker B: I think he's got a segment in the new VHS.
[01:32:04] Speaker A: Really?
[01:32:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:32:06] Speaker A: That's interesting.
[01:32:07] Speaker B: I saw a little review of this on social media earlier, and by all accounts, I mean, obviously you're predisposed to hate it.
[01:32:15] Speaker A: Yes, this is true. I mean, but they've never had someone as huge as Mike Flanagan in one of these.
[01:32:23] Speaker B: No, he's not directing. Justin Long has a section that he's directing. Yep. Kate Siegel has a section.
[01:32:30] Speaker A: Oh, that's probably why you were thinking Mike Flannel, because it's Kate Siegel.
[01:32:34] Speaker B: I'm sure he has something to do with it, though. If he's not in it or is he co written? I don't know. I'll have to. To take a look, but.
[01:32:41] Speaker A: Well, yeah, he and Kate Siegel do often co write things I would watch.
It's hard for me to even say that I hate those movies so much.
[01:32:52] Speaker B: I know you do. I know. It's hilarious to me.
[01:32:55] Speaker A: I mean, I think the thing is, my loathing is really only for the first one because I hate that fucking rapey nonsense that is that entire movie. The other ones I just think are bad.
[01:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:33:09] Speaker A: It's like, that's more. The balance of good segment to bad segment leans way too far. Bad and all the other ones. So it's really only the first one that I'm like, this is irredeemable shit. The rest of them is more just like. Just on balance, I don't have a good time with them.
[01:33:25] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:33:26] Speaker A: So I don't know. I'll give it a whirl. I like Justin long. I like Kate Siegel.
[01:33:32] Speaker B: Oh, speaking of rapey nonsense, I did watch Blink twice.
[01:33:34] Speaker A: Ah, fuck me.
What the fuck was that?
I.
A movie that they had to later add a trigger warning to because it has such graphic rape in it that you don't expect from the rest of the content. Of this movie that people went and were horrified when they went and saw it. FYI, if you're thinking of watching Blink twice, all of a sudden tons of.
[01:34:02] Speaker B: Rape just come out of nowhere.
[01:34:04] Speaker A: Out of nowhere, like, and it's not that, like, you could see, like, obviously there's going to be a twist coming in this or whatever. And the idea that it might be something like that is not outside the realm of something you'd predict. But the way that it's shown is honestly reprehensible. Like, I could not believe the way that she chose to direct the rape in this. It's truly horrifying and triggering. And a lot of people have said it better than me in letterboxd reviews and things like that. But just sort of the ways in which a privileged rich person depicts this kind of stuff, having been insulated from it and the choice of resolution for.
[01:34:50] Speaker B: It, that was exactly what I was about to say. The ending of the film is.
[01:34:54] Speaker A: Is. Yeah, it's like, I don't want to give it away.
[01:35:00] Speaker B: I can't articulate it.
[01:35:01] Speaker A: But it's. So you'll get to the end of this, and I don't recommend you watch blink twice, honestly. But if you watch it and you get to the resolution of this movie and you aren't sitting there going, are you fucking serious? Then you need to reevaluate, because. Truly atrocious way to end a film.
[01:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's.
Are you trying to tank your career, Channing.
[01:35:28] Speaker A: Right.
[01:35:29] Speaker B: This isn't the sort of film you take on if you don't want to do your livelihood harm.
[01:35:35] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting, though, because I thought this was like one of the most fascinating sort of gender divides of things. It's fairly high rated if you look on Letterboxd, but if you look at the high ratings, it is almost entirely men. And if you look at, like, the half star, one star ones, it's almost entirely women. And this is one of the things that I thought about this movie is, I'm like, this is one of those movies that men watch and think that they have just like, oh, this. I'm.
This is the female experience. Look at what I. And by watching this, I'm such a good man. And women are like, what?
Okay, that's very cool. Trauma pornhood that you have just thrown at me for a movie that plays out for most of it in a way that feels like it's very much aping the menu. Get out.
[01:36:26] Speaker B: Oh, completely.
[01:36:28] Speaker A: I've seen movies kind of thing, and the tone is way too light for what it eventually ends up being, which is trauma porn.
No way around that. Oh, I just hated blink twice with.
[01:36:44] Speaker B: Every fire I would.
It's an instant red flag if somebody claims to have enjoyed that film.
[01:36:51] Speaker A: Right. Exactly. Like, you know, big yikes. Super yikes. I was. When I saw that you'd watched it and your rating on it, I was like, oh, thank God.
[01:37:00] Speaker B: Oh, that would have been a fucking a podcast ender right there.
[01:37:06] Speaker A: Like, God. Oh, no. It's like, this is not gonna.
Not going to be a good conversation.
I can imagine that.
Anyways, but another thing that we both watched this week that I think we had very good feelings about.
Beetlejuice.
[01:37:24] Speaker B: Beetlejuice, yes. And I was delighted to see you rating it highly. It's great.
[01:37:30] Speaker A: Oh, my God, I had such a good time. I was telling Al that during the. There's a scene in this movie that sort of references back to the original, but features the song MacArthur park.
And during it, I was having so much fun that we've talked about this before. When you're watching a movie and you're like, this is such a good movie, and you start crying, not because you're sad, but because you're just like.
[01:37:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Connected to it so fucking deeply. Yep.
[01:37:59] Speaker A: That scene, like, made me feel like I felt when I was five watching Beetlejuice and I was just, like, crying. I was like, this is very silly, but I'm just, like, tearing up because I'm having so much fun watching this movie.
[01:38:16] Speaker B: So good to hear somebody else having that experience, because whenever that happens to me, I kind of feel like a freak.
[01:38:21] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Why am I crying? I'm not sad.
[01:38:25] Speaker B: Right? I just like movies, like, about four times during everything, everywhere, all at once.
[01:38:30] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[01:38:31] Speaker B: And it happened earlier on today at fucking Avengers Infinity War.
[01:38:35] Speaker A: Right? Like, it's just like it.
[01:38:37] Speaker B: That moment where the sad bits just. I was enjoying one of the battles so much, I started tearing up.
[01:38:43] Speaker A: What stuff? It's just like, what a. What a joy to be human and get to experience exactly this kind of thing, you know?
Such a. Yeah, I totally understand that feeling. And I had that watching Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Like, like other people have said, like, obviously the ex wife plotline is totally unnecessary to the movie. It does not add. Oh, it is anything to it.
[01:39:06] Speaker B: But I'll tell you something. Tell you something.
I left Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice after seeing Monica Belucci. And now I like guilt.
[01:39:16] Speaker A: What? No, I was like, what did you do after seeing Monica Belushi? And should you be saying it.
[01:39:25] Speaker B: I've graduated from MILFS now. I like gilfs.
[01:39:28] Speaker A: What's a gilf?
[01:39:30] Speaker B: Oh, that's a grandma.
[01:39:31] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Is Monica Belushi, like, grandma aged mid.
[01:39:37] Speaker B: To late fifties, I think.
[01:39:38] Speaker A: I don't know. I mean, you're 45. I don't know if someone is a gilf when they're, like, ten years older than you.
[01:39:46] Speaker B: She's 59.
[01:39:48] Speaker A: Okay. All right. You're edging that way, I suppose.
Yeah. I mean, she's fun. And that character, let me tell you. I've told several parent folks, maybe don't take your kids to this because this is more violent and disturbing than the original beetlejuice is. So it's not like the one that we saw when we were kids. And we're like, this is great, and fine. It's disturbing. And what she does to people in this, like, I think every single time caused me to gasp out loud.
[01:40:20] Speaker B: Right? Isn't it?
[01:40:20] Speaker A: Yeah, this is. Oh, this is horrifying and very gross.
Every single time it got there.
[01:40:29] Speaker B: Did you agree with what I said about the pacing and about how it would have been the same film had it been released, like, the year after the original?
[01:40:35] Speaker A: Totally. Absolutely. And I think one of the things that I love about this, too, is that it is obviously fan service y, but it doesn't feel so in a. It doesn't feel like fan service. I think it feels more like it's a continuation.
[01:40:48] Speaker B: It's expansion. Completely.
[01:40:50] Speaker A: It's expansion. Right. So, of course, it's gonna have certain things that were in it because it's part of the same universe, but it really didn't feel so, like, winky naughty as, like most later sequels do. And like you said, where it was like, this picks up and it. You have to have seen Beetlejuice. It is not. Yeah. It's not gonna go back and remind you of things and the way that other stuff does where it, like, just recreates everything over again. It's like, nope, here you go.
Let's just jump right in.
[01:41:21] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Like, unfortunately, like, alien Romulus, which I.
[01:41:25] Speaker A: Love, obviously, but that absolutely fucking brilliant. Falls into the wink nod track. Like, there's no denying that it does that.
And I think largely beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. Even when it is doing things like the MacArthur park scene that is reminiscent of the old one, it's so different from what was done. It's just we know that this is a thing that Beetlejuice is capable of doing because we saw him do it in the last one, so he's going to do that.
[01:41:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it's part of his mo, is what he does. His bag of tricks.
[01:41:56] Speaker A: Exactly. There's, like, a difference between, like, just being like, didn't you love this? And this is the world that we've built. So here you are in it.
[01:42:05] Speaker B: I seem to remember thinking that the soul train was a little on the nose. That was my only.
[01:42:10] Speaker A: It was. But I am such a sucker for, like, a disco dance scene that I was like, I'm in. I don't care that that makes zero sense. Like, there's no reason that they should always have a disco party going on when this is carrying souls from place to place. But you will never find me complaining about a disco dance break in a movie, period. Also, it's the only place that Tim Burton will ever put a black person in a movie, so.
[01:42:35] Speaker B: Also true. Yep. Sadly. Sad, but true.
[01:42:38] Speaker A: Still not gonna be forced to put any black characters in his movie. But we do have Latinos this time, so there is that progress. Walter, he's growling at the record player.
I feel like I could have, like, a whole instagram of just, what's Walter growling at? Because it's always something super weird.
[01:43:01] Speaker B: He's an mp3 pup.
[01:43:04] Speaker A: Like, yeah, this old technology. The other day, I put two paint cans on the stairs because I was going to take them up to paint the bathroom walls. And he was not okay with the intrusion of these cans and just started barking at them vigorously. And then he kind of got up enough guts to go and sniff them, and then all of a sudden freaked himself out and ran away. It's like they're literally inanimate objects.
[01:43:29] Speaker B: How the fuck is he going to deal with what is about to be visited upon him?
[01:43:34] Speaker A: Yeah, if paint cans are a problem, we'll see how he does with people.
But, Walter, he's being ridiculous. Anyways.
What else?
[01:43:46] Speaker B: No, that's pretty much it for me. Apart from the aforementioned Avengers infinity war, the boys are continuing with their watch along and much like Carlito's way.
And let me see, what else? Carlito's way. Any of the rocky films.
[01:44:03] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:44:03] Speaker B: Or 24 hours in police custody. If I walk in and it's playing, my ass is sitting the fuck down.
[01:44:08] Speaker A: I was like, what is the common thread between.
[01:44:13] Speaker B: They have my attention instantly, and I walked in when it had been on for, like, 15 minutes, and I simply just forgot about the next two and a half hours and sat down and.
[01:44:22] Speaker A: Said, this is Infinity War.
[01:44:24] Speaker B: This was infinity war. Yes, because I don't think it ever got better than that. Endgame was great. But it wasn't as good.
[01:44:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I just. I remember, and I'm sure I've told this before, but. But that was one of the.
Just such an interesting theater going experience. Because I went to huge theater, completely full. I think it's the biggest theater in Orange county. It's the Newport big five or big six, something like that. Huge theater. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people in there. And everybody stoked out of their minds to go see this movie and everything. And it's like chaos. And everybody's excited and there's clapping and cheering and things during parts of the movie. And then ends. And this just sad, wild silence lingering over this auditorium as everyone was just, like, processing what they had just experienced.
I've never had a movie experience like that where the energy is so high, but there's an energy to the sadness at the end too. Energy to.
[01:45:27] Speaker B: Yeah, you're waiting for it to be put right. Hang on, there's a couple of minutes left. How the fuck are they going to do?
[01:45:31] Speaker A: Surely this is not how this ends, right?
[01:45:36] Speaker B: Yeah, just in. I won't. I won't go over all ground, old, old ground, with my feelings towards the MCU up to that point. But as a fucking blow off, as every story converging in one ridiculously fucking opulent bit of cinema. Yeah, it's never. I can't see how you could ever better that as a. Just a treat. It is fucking. Oh, it's incredible.
[01:46:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a great one.
[01:46:06] Speaker B: And 2 hours, 20 is too long for any film.
[01:46:11] Speaker A: True.
[01:46:12] Speaker B: But I wouldn't cut a thing. I wouldn't cut a single fucking second from that film.
[01:46:16] Speaker A: It's probably. Yeah, totally.
I think that is it.
[01:46:22] Speaker B: I got nothing else to say on any of the matters.
[01:46:27] Speaker A: Nothing to say until we've met.
[01:46:31] Speaker B: Nothing to say until I'm going to say to your face.
[01:46:33] Speaker A: Exactly that.
So, dear listeners, as always, thank you for coming along on this ride. And many of you we will see in just a few short days. And those of you that we won't, we wish we really were seeing you.
[01:46:46] Speaker B: I think next week's episode will be our infinity war of Joag. It'll be the four year fucking journey culminating in.
[01:46:54] Speaker A: Yep, this is phase one or whatever. I guess. That's like phase three, I guess, or something like that of MCU. But either way, we're just super stoked to hang out with so many wonderful people that we've been hanging out with online to get Mark here to these United States, to it. Never going to not be funny to me, suddenly shoveling shoveling pills into your mouth at the end of the podcast.
But yeah, we're super excited to see people. We wish you all could be here and hang out with us. But we will of course be on here next week with our 200th episode with the Hellrankers talking jaws and whatever Mark decides to take us through for our half of the pod. And until then, of course, you have one mandate.
[01:47:47] Speaker B: Stay spooky.
[01:47:49] Speaker A: Mh.
