Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: I was listening to Last Podcast on the Left the other day.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:00:07] Speaker A: And they have these, like, midweek episodes that they.
[00:00:10] Speaker B: Right off the bat, straight away, right out the gate.
They are. They're like a big podcast, aren't they?
[00:00:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. They're one of the hugest of all the podcasts.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Continually keep coming up in. Because I.
I still search for us on Reddit every now and again.
We haven't had a wreck. We haven't been recommended on Reddit for about six months.
[00:00:35] Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, we gotta get it together.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Yeah, we do. But in every. Every. Every time somebody asks, hey, what's a good creepypasta? Somebody will always mention, Last Podcast on the Left. How did they reach the level of notoriety? They've reached them. What did they do?
[00:00:49] Speaker A: I mean, they were early to it. They've been around for, like, 12, 15 years, something like that. So I think being amongst the first is definitely a big part of it. And then they expanded into, like, a network lpn. So they have other shows on their network and stuff like that.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Ah, yes. Now, this is. Okay, so that's something that podcasts do, is it? So have, like, sister podcasts, other podcasts, additional podcasts, and put it under an umbrella.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Mm, exactly.
[00:01:21] Speaker B: Okay, well, we won't be doing that.
[00:01:23] Speaker A: We will not be doing that. No. We will stay right here doing what we do. But I was listening to Last Podcast, and they have midweek episodes that they do called side stories, where they just, like, sort of shoot the shit about weird stuff that's in the news or listener emails or whatever sort of comes across their desks, that kind of thing.
And one of the hosts, Ed, he only joined the podcast, like, a year or so ago because one of the original hosts turned out to be an abusive douchecanoe.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Oh, damn it.
[00:01:53] Speaker A: Yeah. It was another thing we're never.
No, absolutely not. That is not.
Not a worry that you have to have about this particular podcast. No abuse of douche canoes.
But I mention this because Ed, you know, he came onto this about a year ago as, like, your sort of ultimate skeptic, right?
When they talk about aliens and supernatural shit, he's generally just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. That's not real. Which is nice when you're listening to Last Pod because sometimes you're like, Marcus and Henry can be, like, very, like, credulous about things, and you're like, you need that voice to come in and be like, come on, guys. Yep, that's generally Ed.
But after a year of listening to Henry and Marcus talk about the paranormal. Something seems to have switched a little for my dear boy Eddie. Suddenly, maybe he's not quite as incredulous as he was before. Maybe he can be convinced.
And that is evidenced in this week's side stories in which they discussed a gruesome phenomenon known as cattle mutilation.
[00:02:58] Speaker B: Oh, nice.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: And no, I don't mean Bryan Danielson's brutal submission hold.
[00:03:03] Speaker B: Excellent. Obviously, that's where my head went first. Of course.
[00:03:06] Speaker A: Naturally. Yes, but, yeah, great.
[00:03:09] Speaker B: Great topic.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Do you know anything about cattle mutilation?
[00:03:13] Speaker B: Right, no. Well, next to nothing. Only that it's often reached for as kind of a, you know, little green men. Tropey. Trope. Isn't it? They're coming up, mangling the cows, stomping some crop circles.
[00:03:28] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. I feel like you kind of put it alongside the crop circle phenomenon. Shit that happens.
[00:03:31] Speaker B: Inserting something into a redneck.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Probing.
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Exactly. And then take it off back to Mars.
[00:03:40] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. That's. That seems to be kind of the common conception these days.
[00:03:46] Speaker B: That is actually. I think Mars attacks. When I think cattle mutilation, I think Mars attacks.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: I love Mars attacks. Just watch that.
[00:03:52] Speaker B: I know you did. I know you did. And I'm the same. I fucking love Mars attacks. There is. There's a. There's a.
An exhibition of art and props and ephemera and SK Sketches of Tim Burton's on the Design Museum in London, which is running until April, which I absolutely have to get to.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Yeah, that'd be. That'd be amazing. You know, this is just a side thing, so don't let me go down the spiral too long. But one of. So my friend Emily, who's like my best friend from college, she a listener? She. No, she's not a listener. She's not really into creepy, spooky things. That's not her jam.
[00:04:32] Speaker B: But now I won't bother.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: But she doesn't get one. No. But Emily, her. She's from San Clemente in Southern California. And this is. Her dad grew up there as well. And this is where Tim Burton is from. And apparently they went to high school together and were, like, at least, like, vaguely acquainted with each other. And she said that her dad has told her about, like, how he basically. All the, like, the art style that he has and everything is like, all the stuff that he would just like, draw in his notebooks. Like, all the stuff that you see. He had, like, honed that in high school. That was his style. And when he started coming out with movies, her dad was just like. That just Literally looks like the stuff that he. He was drawing, doodling during class and stuff like that.
[00:05:16] Speaker B: Found his groove early on and stuck to it.
[00:05:19] Speaker A: Yeah, love that. Yeah. Which is pretty fun. Yeah. Anyway, so back to cattle mutilation.
From what I can gather, this is a pretty uniquely American phenomenon. I did Google, like. Like, I looked like cattle Mutilation UK and I found, like, a story from whales, things like that. But, like, it's not. It's not widespread.
[00:05:39] Speaker B: No, no.
[00:05:40] Speaker A: There. Despite the fact that cows exist all over the world, this is an US thing. And the New Yorker had a pretty good explanation of it in a 2023 article. They said cattle mutilation is characterized by, quote, cows drained of blood, their body parts typically eyes, tongues, cheeks and sex organs removed with surgical precision.
Yes.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: Some report clean wounds, just burned open.
[00:06:05] Speaker A: Not necessarily. It's more just like the cuts themselves are described as surgically precise. We'll get there.
Some reported mutilations are accompanied by other strange and seemingly inexplicable signs. Circular depressions in the surrounding areas. Animals with broken legs as if they've been dropped from great heights. Predators that keep away from the carcass, perhaps sensing that something is amiss.
[00:06:29] Speaker B: Love that.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: As we'll get into. This phenomenon has been a going concern since the mid 20th century, but it was brought back into the popular conversation when Netflix's reboot of Unsolved Mysteries detailed the deaths of a bevy of cattle in Oregon, exhibiting the telltale signs of the mysterious mutilation.
[00:06:48] Speaker B: Nice. I did see a burst sheep once that I couldn't explain. I was walking towards my mum's house. I'd visited my mum and there was a dead sheep on the side of the road.
And I used the word burst very intentionally.
It had burst and I don't know how. And my abiding memory is seeing just loads of what looked like chewed grass just spilling out of this sheep's innards.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: I wonder if it's like. I'm sure you've seen this. You've seen that video of the whale exploding, right?
[00:07:20] Speaker B: Oh, yeah.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: I wonder if it's like. It's like the gases build up in the belly or whatever.
[00:07:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Maybe like bleh. Ends up bursting out. So it's probably like it didn't explode while the sheep was. I was about to say awake. Alive was the word I was looking for. It was probably like, dead. And then, like all the bacteria.
[00:07:39] Speaker B: It could have been just totaled by a car for all I know, but it.
[00:07:43] Speaker A: Yeah, or that.
[00:07:44] Speaker B: Just.
[00:07:47] Speaker A: Gross. Uh, let's get into more gross things, please.
So, yeah, so Netflix did an Unsolved Mysteries about these. This cattle mutilation spate in Oregon. And this, it seemed, broke Ed Larson's brain, largely because there simply seemed to be absolutely no explanation.
[00:08:07] Speaker B: And I will ask questions. You say a spate. This is like a tightly packed series of incidents.
[00:08:14] Speaker A: Don't worry, I'll tell you the story. I won't leave you in the dark, Mark. I will tell you.
But nobody ever found a culprit for what was happening to these animals. So there's only one thing it could possibly be. And what is that, Mark?
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Aliens.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: Yes, aliens.
Now, of course, this actually isn't the only theory that people have come up with, even in the realm of the paranormal or sinister. We'll come back to that as well.
My point, as we get started here is that the mutilation of cattle and other animals under seemingly mysterious circumstances has a vice grip on the American imagination.
Ask anyone interested in it, and they'll likely tell you that no one has even come close to providing an explanation beyond the sinister and possibly otherworldly.
And after listening to normally rational Ed Larson lose his mind over it, I began to wonder, is it really that mysterious? Do we seriously have no idea what's going on with these eviscerated livestock?
[00:09:12] Speaker B: So your fella from LP O T L, this specific topic, cattle mutilation, was what caused him to lose that hard edge of. Of. Yeah, you know, he's not so much a man of science when it comes to cattle mutilation. He's willing to entertain the, you know, the uncanny.
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it was wild. He was like, literally just like, there's no other explanation, though. And I was like, this is interesting.
[00:09:39] Speaker B: So.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: So is it that. Yeah, that. That fascinated me. Like, is it really that, like, there is no explanation here? And that's why people go to this.
And true mysteries in this world are few and far between, especially when it comes to something so brutal and widespread. So I figured I'd take a look and see if this is one of those rare times that we simply can't explain something away.
[00:10:02] Speaker B: Yep, that's what this subject needs. It needs a dose of fucking. It needs Corrigan's I Corrigan's focus. Because if there, you know, you'll strip the last scintilla of doubt.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: You know it.
[00:10:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Come on, let's do it.
[00:10:16] Speaker A: Now, this is gonna be like a very Corey disclaimer here that nobody else cares about. But I feel like I should say a thing about reading stories about cattle mutilations. Whether they're from legit news sources or from crank paranormal websites, is that they're clearly all kind of getting their information, like, from each other or from the same sources.
[00:10:35] Speaker B: Circular. Circular. Telephone.
[00:10:38] Speaker A: Exactly. And in a large part, they're coming from a 2011 article in the Journal of the Ag. Everyone, he's laughing because he used telephone, which is obviously the American name of the game.
You're on a journey of growth. It's wonderful. But, yeah, I think a lot of the sort, a lot of articles are basically paraphrasing a 2011 article in the Journal of the Ag Agricultural History society by a Dr. Michael J. Goleman. So while I'm quoting some of those other articles, I'm also quoting Goleman directly because I think basically that's where they're getting most of their information from.
And there's stuff I would love more specificity on, but lots of elements have just kind of been heard through the grapevine or telephone, if you will. They'll say news reports at the time said this, but there's no, like, reference to what that actual news report was or any quotes from them.
[00:11:32] Speaker B: So.
[00:11:33] Speaker A: So I just want to get that out where I'm a bit vague. It's because these stories are being told, like, 27th hand at this point.
But that's also kind of why stories like these take on this, like, unimpeachable quality. Like, they've been passed along so many times. It's not like you can go and check and be like, actually, that's wrong. So this is kind of built into the cattle mutilation story is this kind of.
Somebody told me you had cattle that got murdered by aliens.
[00:12:01] Speaker B: Not ever having ever. And not really ever being likely to listen to last podcast on the left. I, you know, I can't really speak to this. This fella's grip on. On, you know, science and fact. But surely such a seasoned Scotcher as this fellow would have known that himself. I find it tough to kind of buy, you know, just why this particular phenomena was, what was. What caused this.
[00:12:29] Speaker A: Well, let's get into it. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about cattle mutilation.
[00:12:34] Speaker B: Let's get into it. As the one alien said to the other when looking at a cow.
[00:12:39] Speaker A: Nice.
[00:12:40] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:12:41] Speaker A: Or a redneck, for that matter.
So it was the 1970s when the first big cattle mutilation flap happened. You familiar with the term flap?
[00:12:55] Speaker B: Yeah, a flap, A brouhaha.
[00:12:58] Speaker A: Yeah, right. It's like usually what people who are into aliens and stuff refer to, like, an Incident. Like a bunch of incidents.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, I didn't know that actually.
[00:13:07] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: I was like, oh, this guy's in a real flap. Like he's. Oh, you know.
[00:13:12] Speaker A: No, no, no, it's like. Yeah, it's a. Yeah, it refers to like sort of a flap of. Nope, she's called a flap. I don't know why it's called that.
[00:13:20] Speaker B: Cluster of unexplained, possibly alien related sightings is in the community known as a flap.
[00:13:30] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. You've learned a new word.
So, yeah, 1970s, when the first big cattle mutilation flap happens on various small scale ranches all over the western and midwestern United States, ranchers were reporting cows whose quote, ears, eyes, rectums and sex organs had been cut away with surgical precision.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Why? This is why the rectum. Why you gotta go to the rectum.
[00:13:56] Speaker A: Listen, you know, I. I'm sorry, I'm just reporting the news here.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: I'm talking to the cattle mutilators. Why you.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: Right, all right, why. Why the rectum?
[00:14:06] Speaker B: Go for the eyes. Why you gotta go for the ass?
[00:14:10] Speaker A: We'll get there. But this is always the phrase, right? Surgical precision.
[00:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:14:15] Speaker A: And like when you hear that phrase, what it. What does that make you think?
[00:14:18] Speaker B: Think surgical precision. It makes me think premeditated.
It makes me think well equipped.
It makes me think undercover of darkness out of public eye.
It makes me think these people came to fuck up some cows, but with an agenda. This isn't just an opportunistic, you know, rectal destruction. This is premeditated rectal evisceration.
[00:14:52] Speaker A: Totally. Yeah. When someone says something was done with surgical precision, we figure, well, then that can't have happened like randomly or by natural causes. Yes, yes, someone, yeah, someone with the technical know how must have done this. And it even comes up in murder cases, like the Black Dahlia, for example. Sure, she was supposedly taken apart with surgical precision. So she must have been killed by someone with medical training of some kind. Right? Like it's got those kinds of connotations.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: Jack the Ripa, Sure.
[00:15:20] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. People think he might have been a doctor because of the surgical precision with which he killed those victims.
So by the end of the 70s, more than 10,000 of these mutilations had allegedly occurred in various places across the nation.
But as all of my sources point out, those ranchers in the 1970s didn't generally attribute the incidents to aliens at that point as become which has become common wisdom today.
No, they thought the source of the problem was far more terrestrial. Do you Have a guess.
[00:15:59] Speaker B: No, help me out.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Put your tinfoil hat on.
[00:16:01] Speaker B: Oh, all right. The government.
[00:16:03] Speaker A: The government. Yes, exactly, the U.S. government. And listen, there is plenty of reason for that.
American ranchers were in a bad spot in the 1970s for various reasons, some unavoidable and some less so.
For example, we started to be far more concerned about environmental protection in the 1970s, with the EPA having been created by the Nixon administration in 1970.
This meant restrictions like limits on grazing on public land, which ranchers had previously relied on.
And now they couldn't do that or they would have to, like, pay for grazing on land. And you may remember this coming up in the news again, about a decade ago, when a cattle rancher named Cliven Bundy ended up in an armed standoff with US Authorities after refusing to pay over a million dollars in grazing fees for letting his cows graze on federally owned land adjacent to his ranch for 21 years.
[00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah, the farmers over here are furious, as I think I might have mentioned with you, protesting because of change in tax exemption laws.
[00:17:09] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. You're dealing with the same mindset kind of stuff here. Mm. Yeah. And in this case with Cliven Bundy, it's wild because he amassed a full on armed mob to fight off the government, and to this day, he's totally free and still grazing his fucking cows on public lands a decade later. Yeah, the government just basically stood down.
[00:17:30] Speaker B: He amassed a mob. I mean, these don't sound like Jolly Ranchers, you know, these.
[00:17:36] Speaker A: No, no, they do not.
[00:17:38] Speaker B: Huh.
[00:17:41] Speaker A: Nicely done.
[00:17:42] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:17:44] Speaker A: But yeah, it all goes back to these new rules that ranchers had been chafing at. They were also dealing with high inflation at the time, and the US Government was sending a lot of our grain to other nations where there were food shortages which caused the price of livestock feed domestically to go up.
Perhaps one of the worst policies for the farmers came when Nixon answered inflation by imposing a price freeze on meat.
This meant that despite rising costs to raise and feed cattle, ranchers would have to sell the meat at lower prices to keep the consumers from feeling the squeeze of inflation.
The ranchers obviously didn't want to do that, so they decided to hold out on sending their cattle to slaughter until the freeze ended.
This spiraled into what came to be known as the wreck.
Because the ranchers withheld their cattle, meatpacking plants had nothing to slaughter. And with nothing to slaughter, they had to lay off employees and close down their plants.
By August of 1972, 140 meat packing plants in America had fully ceased operation.
Which then led to beef shortages at stores, which caused the price of the beef to rise, even though the farmers weren't getting that money.
And when the freeze finally ended, the cattle were too old and the meat they produced was fatty and gross, which ended up driving those prices down after all. So they'd waited out the freeze, killing off plants and jobs all over the country, only to then see the price of their price per head of their cattle drop by 33% and inflation still raising the price to feed them.
[00:19:23] Speaker B: That's fucked, isn't it?
[00:19:25] Speaker A: Yeah, isn't that fucking chain of events.
[00:19:28] Speaker B: I don't trust farmers, frankly. But.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Right.
You have no reason to.
[00:19:34] Speaker B: I can see how that would have led to some outlandish fucking behavior. If you know you're getting poorer and poorer, yet the price of the product that you sell is still going through no fault of your own. That's a tough situation.
And then you throw aliens into the mix, Right?
[00:19:50] Speaker A: Well, again, at this point, most people are not putting aliens into the mix. But when cattle started dying in what appeared to be mysterious circumstances, they looked to the government who had already kind of fucked them up at this point. And it wasn't unheard of for the government to fuck things up for ranchers and then lie about it. In 1968, they accidentally nerve gassed 4,500 sheep to death in Utah. And they didn't acknowledge that accidentally. It just like leaked out from somewhere and killed 4,500 sheep. And they didn't acknowledge they'd done that until a journalist obtained the unsealed files on the incident 30 years later.
That was a big oopsie. They weren't trying to do nefarious shit. They were just bad at whatever they were doing cause mass sheep death. But then they lied about it and covered it up. So the farmers of course were like, I think the government killed my sheep. And the government was like, we don't know.
And so you can see why people would have been like, stuff starts happening. Did the government do this? Right. They're not going to tell me. They're going to lie about it.
As with any conspiracy theory though, the question is always to what end? Right. Like if you ask why exactly, a lot of times you're going to get stuck at that. So why exactly would the government be sneaking onto small ranches and surgically removing the soft tissue of animals and then leaving without a trace?
Is it a social experiment? Are they experimenting on the animals? Are they just being assholes?
I go ahead.
[00:21:25] Speaker B: Even though the sources are circular, are you Confident in the MO of these different clusters of bovine mischief, having the same kind of telltale, the same signs, the same surgical precision.
[00:21:43] Speaker A: And we'll get to that.
[00:21:43] Speaker B: That was in common across all.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Yeah, all the way across the board. Yeah, for sure.
[00:21:49] Speaker B: That makes it more difficult to believe that it was governmental, right?
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Sure, yeah, absolutely. Like if, if it's interference from the government over decades or whatever.
Iffy, of course, on that.
[00:22:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:22:04] Speaker A: Tens of thousands of these happening. But yeah, you have to ask why? Of course. And I didn't really find many good explanations as to what people thought they were doing, aside from like a short mention in the New Yorker that folks considered biological weapons tests a potential culprit. And in fact, I think it was the agricultural journal article that mentioned there was like one shitty journalist, like sensationalist journalist who tried to say that it was a biological weapon that they were trying to craft specifically to only kill Asian people so. So that they could use it in Vietnam.
[00:22:39] Speaker B: What? That was a fucking hard, hard turn, right?
[00:22:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
Kind of comes out of nowhere, right? Excuse me. Yeah, this was printed, apparently a journalist actively printed that in a paper.
So.
[00:22:56] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:22:57] Speaker A: That's the kind of thing, I guess, that you could potentially say the government was doing. I don't know. The to what end element of this is pretty vague to me, but I also, like, I didn't spend a lot of time going down like the rabbit holes of like deep conspiracy theory websites. I just find them brain numbing to read. So. Yeah, they have.
Yeah. Especially because it's like trying to understand their logic is difficult. Like, even if I were reading their explanations for what the government was doing, I would probably be just as in the dark afterwards as to what they think is going on. Doesn't usually make a lot of sense.
But suffice to say that for whatever reason people thought the government were interfering with their cows, going so far as to claim that they had been chased by aircraft or that they'd seen shady unmarked helicopters hanging out over the sites of the mutilations.
At least once someone actively shot at a helicopter that was out inspecting power lines. And another rancher shot at a helicopter in Colorado just because he was just frustrated about the whole ordeal. So we just shot a helicopter? Yeah, yeah, might as well.
The danger that came from a bunch of armed cattle ranchers on edge led to the BLM having to stop doing aerial land surveys in eastern Colorado. And the Nebraska National Guard was told to fly their helicopters a full thousand feet higher than was standard to avoid getting shot. Blm, the Bureau of Land Management.
[00:24:25] Speaker B: Thank you. Yes, of course. I was thinking this. For some reason, my head went, lives matter, bovine. Lives matter.
[00:24:34] Speaker A: Nice. If you recall from season one of the White Lotus.
[00:24:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:24:40] Speaker A: This does cause confusion with what's Her Face.
What's the. What's the gal we all love?
[00:24:49] Speaker B: I can't remember off the top of my head, but I can see her in Jennifer Coolidge. Jennifer Coolidge, Yeah. I can bring her face to mind. R. You can't do that.
[00:24:58] Speaker A: I can't do that, no. But she thinks that John what's His Face's character works for Black Lives Matter, and he works for the Bureau of Language Management.
[00:25:07] Speaker B: Your next drawing challenge is to try and draw Jennifer Coolidge from memory. I'd love to see that.
[00:25:12] Speaker A: Can you imagine? Oh, my gosh. Well, if I remember afterwards, I will try to draw anyways. So Colorado Senator Floyd Haskell wrote to the FBI, begging for an investigation to be opened, saying, quote, the ranchers and rural residents of Colorado are concerned and frightened by these incidents. The bizarre mutilations are frightening in themselves. In virtually all cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum, and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints.
[00:25:47] Speaker B: See, that's so interesting to me, because, listen, I've never mutilated a single cattle. Right. It's not something I do.
But that doesn't strike me as something that is like a straight in, straight out job. That's not a quick endeavor, is it?
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Feels complicated.
[00:26:04] Speaker B: Yeah. And if you're gonna make them all look identical, sure, you'll have to.
[00:26:09] Speaker A: And I don't know if they look identical. I think there are differences in how they look.
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:26:13] Speaker A: So I will say I don't think that's the case. But these are all the commonalities that they have between them.
[00:26:20] Speaker B: I see.
[00:26:21] Speaker A: He went on to say, quote, clearly something must be done before someone gets hurt.
But the FBI was like, a bunch of gross. Dead cows are none of our business. That's not our jurisdiction, and declined to get involved, which is kind of understandable. On the one hand, the FBI washing their hands of it does nothing to stop people from thinking the government's in on it and covering it up. Like, certainly that validated people's feelings. On the other hand, it's literally just dead livestock. That is very clearly not FBI business.
[00:26:53] Speaker B: So can you give me some idea as to, you know, per incident? Is it just the one cow, or are we talking like 10, 15 cows per incident.
[00:27:04] Speaker A: I think it's generally one cow, right? Per incident. Yeah, yeah. It's not like the whole field, the whole. Is killing anything like that? The whole herd? Yeah, no, it's not like that. Maybe a couple. But I honestly feel like it's like one per incident in these cases.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah. You're going to be wiped out after doing one of those on you.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: Right. Seriously, got to go home, take a bath, ice yourself.
[00:27:29] Speaker B: Unless.
[00:27:31] Speaker A: Well, right, that's true.
Various state investigative bodies and task forces in places like Oklahoma, Colorado and New Mexico dug into these incidents and tried to get to the bottom of them. According to the New Yorker, in Minnesota, two prisoners said that the mutilations had been blood sacrifices carried out by a hell oriented biker cult.
Which I guess is a colorful way of saying satanists.
[00:27:56] Speaker B: Yep. Not quite satanic. They're not hell oriented all the way satanists, but they are hell adjacent.
[00:28:03] Speaker A: They're leaning hellways.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Yes, they're hellbind.
[00:28:09] Speaker A: And the follow up parenthetical in this argument in this article is so good. So they say these two criminals. Right. Two prisoners say that it was these guys in a hell oriented biker cult. The parenthetical says the prisoner tipsters claimed fear of retaliation and requested transfers to smaller facilities from which they both ended up escaping.
[00:28:31] Speaker B: Hey, imagine.
[00:28:34] Speaker A: Imagine tricking a legitimate government agency into thinking you have secret knowledge about a satanic cult, hacking up cows, then convincing them that they need. Convincing them they need to transfer you to a different facility. Because knowing this puts them in danger and then breaking the fuck out.
[00:28:53] Speaker B: Fantastic. I mean it's less work, calls their story into question.
But as far as a plan goes, fair play, lads.
[00:29:01] Speaker A: Nailed it.
[00:29:02] Speaker B: They lateral thinking. Yes, yes.
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Unfortunately I think they both were caught anyway afterwards. But still.
In 1975, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation opened up a 19 month inquiry studying over 200 mutilations and sending 35 carcasses to Colorado State University to be necropsied.
And we will come back to this.
[00:29:23] Speaker B: Yeah. I had no idea that cattle mutilation was such a widespread phenomena.
[00:29:29] Speaker A: Right. This is true. Surprise, surprise me.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: I had no clue.
[00:29:33] Speaker A: I thought this was like a thing that occasionally, you know, occurred somewhere and someone made like a big deal out of it, but.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: Or had been debunked like crop circles and then just stopped. It isn't still happening, is it?
[00:29:47] Speaker A: We'll get there.
[00:29:48] Speaker B: Okay.
I mean, you go.
[00:29:51] Speaker A: In fact, we're getting there right now.
[00:29:53] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Let's get to modern times.
[00:29:54] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: And I want you to pay attention here. Okay. This is. Let's get into this mystery. I want you to listen carefully, you know, ask questions if you needed to.
[00:30:02] Speaker B: Or whatever, but lock in as a kid, say.
[00:30:08] Speaker A: Right.
Let's get down and dirty into this mystery first.
2021, a case that ended up on this season of Unsolved Mysteries.
We're in Crook County, Oregon, where rancher Ricky Shannon claims that one of his cattle had been found dead with an odd cut down its spine.
According to Shannon, there were no tracks to or from the cow, no blood surrounding it, and the cow's left cheek, tongue and three of its teats had been cut away cleanly.
The eyes were untouched. There were no bullet holes, no vehicle tracks, and supposedly no predators or birds had touched it.
A few days later, rancher Casey Thomas reported that One of his 5,000 cows was found dead and lying on its side, hair removed near the stomach, its udders cut off, and its left cheek, tongue and sex organs removed.
[00:31:04] Speaker B: The tongue and the cheek. That's fascinating to me. There's something to that.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: There is, yeah. Okay. I like it. I like it. So there was an uneven patch of hair missing between its front legs in the middle of that, what appeared to be a prick mark.
The next day, a reported wolf kill came, came in.
When the authorities got there, an udder had been removed, a circular cut made around the anus and its reproductive organs removed without puncturing the gut.
The left cheek, left eye and tongue were all removed. Sergeant Timothy Durheim noted that there were straight, clean incisions where the cheek had been, that he'd found a puncture wound between its neck and shoulder, and that he saw no bite marks or human or animal tracks in the immediate surroundings.
There was also minimal blood, DNA.
DNA.
[00:31:59] Speaker B: DNA? Any kind of.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: I don't think they took DNA in this case. And like, what would they take it of? Because they don't have any like prints or hair or, you know, anything like that as far as they can tell. But I don't see that anyone's been here.
[00:32:13] Speaker B: I would be going straight for the circular cuts around the anus.
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:32:17] Speaker B: And I would be swabbing those analysis lesions.
[00:32:22] Speaker A: I hate it.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: I would be seeing what it showed up, you know, run it through the old lab.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Sure.
Well, not long after, another cat was found, more decomposed than the others, but with its left cheek removed and a 2 inch patch supposedly cut into the hair on its neck. Okay, so 20, 23, two years later, another case caught the public eye in Texas.
Six cows found dead alongside a highway with their tongues removed, allegedly with no blood spill. And a straight, clean cut with apparent precision.
Each cow came from a different pasture, and they were all found in different locations along the highway.
A circular cut had been done to remove the anus and external genitalia on two of the cows. And similar precise cuts were noted around the jawlines of the cows.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: This is terrible.
[00:33:16] Speaker A: According to c. It's pretty gross. According to cnn, officials reported that, quote, there were no signs of struggle or blood spill and no footprints or tire tracks in the area around any of the cows.
So our cattle mutilation stories are similar, but have changed shape a little. Right.
Rather than being framed in such a way that the big bad government came and did it, we've got something going on that says no human could possibly have done it. There's no tracks of any kind, no footprints, no tires. Predators won't come near the carcasses. There's now some sort of puncture being made to the animals in the process.
The shaven, the missing teeth, the shaven hair. Right.
Otherwise it's more or less the same. Right. Cattle dead, missing genitalia, cheeks, tongues, minimal blood in the area. Animals looking like they've been drained.
So what happened, do you think? Do you have any guesses from any of this yet?
[00:34:17] Speaker B: Jesus. So let's take the Sherlock approach to this. Right?
[00:34:22] Speaker A: Mmm. Okay.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: And let's. Let's pare back everything that it isn't.
[00:34:29] Speaker A: Okay?
[00:34:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:34:30] Speaker A: Yes, love that.
[00:34:30] Speaker B: What it isn't is aliens. Sorry, Ed, it isn't aliens.
[00:34:35] Speaker A: Why not? Mark? Why not?
[00:34:37] Speaker B: Well, because it's absurd to even entertain the fact that it would be aliens. Right? That it's. It isn't aliens. I know that it isn't aliens. Right, okay, sure. I don't believe it to be the government, okay? Because as you said, to what end?
And in much the same way as any other kind of high level, deep state conspiracy theories, la la la. The effort to a execute that and then to keep it quiet for as long as it has been quiet, it just. It isn't. It doesn't ring true. Right?
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:35:15] Speaker B: So it's. It's by human hand, okay?
That's all I've got. What I am, I am certain of, is that it's human and it isn't the government, and it isn't.
It's obviously a pattern, it's obviously a plan that somebody is executing, okay? But what their motivation can be, what they hope to gain. I'm sorry, I, as yet have nothing.
[00:35:43] Speaker A: Love it. Dear listener, at home, maybe take a moment, pause, ruminate on what Mark has said. Ruminate on what I have said.
Do you have any theories? Where do you think this is going? Maybe write it down.
Feel free to post it on our Facebook for me and then hit play again.
[00:36:01] Speaker B: The. The big. The big head scratcher here is the teats and the anus.
Right.
If, you know, even if you want to set up. Even if you want to stage or set up a fucking crazy event, maybe that's what you would do then, isn't it? You would purposefully cut. Do it in a weird way.
[00:36:24] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Oh, this is a pickle. This is a real, real pickle here.
[00:36:31] Speaker A: Corey, do you want to know what.
[00:36:34] Speaker B: Oh, you've cracked it. You've.
[00:36:36] Speaker A: Yeah. I have an answer for you.
[00:36:39] Speaker B: Oh, right. Am I close?
Is it human? It's humans.
[00:36:43] Speaker A: It's not humans.
You ready to find out?
[00:36:50] Speaker B: No, not yet.
[00:36:50] Speaker A: The answer to cattle.
[00:36:51] Speaker B: No, I'm not. I. It isn't a predator because of the surgical.
[00:36:56] Speaker A: Do you want me to answer or not? This is the thing. Like, do you want me to.
[00:36:59] Speaker B: No, I'm currently. I'm thinking out loud. I'm giving my idea.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Process it. Okay.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: Exactly.
[00:37:03] Speaker A: And I will not.
[00:37:03] Speaker B: You know, I need to say things out loud. The surgical precision, the lack of blood, the similarities in the mo. I'm talking about the teats and the anus.
[00:37:13] Speaker A: The cheeks. It does seem to be the sticking point.
[00:37:16] Speaker B: The cheeks, the teats, the circular shaven potatoes, tomatoes. Teats. Teats and anus.
I. Fuck. Right. My best guess is it's a person or group of people, much like crop circles, who are doing it for the mystery, for the notoriety, to see it come up in the paper and to have a little titter to themselves. It's crop circles, but way, way, way darker and more widespread and weird and more involved.
[00:37:51] Speaker A: Do you want to know the answer?
[00:37:52] Speaker B: Go.
[00:37:53] Speaker A: Okay, let's go back to those tests in the mid-70s in Colorado that I said we'd return to. Sends all those. Sends all those carcasses in Colorado in the 1970s to the university for necropsy and all that stuff.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:38:11] Speaker A: So according to Goleman, people who actually knew about animals, namely veterinarians and veterinary pathologists, were skeptical of the whole story from the jump.
And the necropsies performed on the dead cattle pretty much proved them right.
We talked about this when we discussed the Dyatlov Pass incident.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:38:32] Speaker A: Scavengers are pretty predictable in the stuff they'll take from a carcass.
It's the soft tissue that they go for. Work smarter, not harder.
[00:38:42] Speaker B: Fine.
[00:38:42] Speaker A: So the anus, genitalia udders, tongue, ears, eyes and cheeks are exactly what you'd expect to find missing on any dead animal that had been left out long enough for scavengers to start picking.
[00:38:54] Speaker B: Why did you put that fucking woman singing at the fucking supermarket into my head? Greens, peas, anus, teats, potatoes, tomatoes. Amazing. Got my teeth, got my anus, got my cheeks, got my eyes, got my tongue, got my hooves, got my mouth.
[00:39:11] Speaker A: This has gone beyond me. I think so, yeah. So these are the areas that scavengers usually pick at, and that doesn't take long to start. Scavengers responsible for this can include coyotes, foxes, vultures, magpies, bobcats, badgers, and even just plain old flies.
These scavengers can even make what may appear to be precise cut marks along the edges where they've consumed the flesh.
What about the lack of blood? Yep, you might ask.
The idea that there should be a ton of blood comes from the assumption that the only way these cows would be dead and mutilated like this would be if some sort of predator attacked them.
And that certainly would result in blood spatter and gore all over the place.
[00:39:54] Speaker B: Not to mention tracks.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: And tracks, of course. Yes, But Goleman wrote, livestock deaths are common on ranches and usually result from diseases like blackleg lightning strikes or gastrointestinal problems resulting from the consumption of nails, barbed wire, wire and pieces of metal.
In 1974, the USDA estimated that 6.1 million cattle deaths had occurred over the course of the year, which equates to 4.5% of the overall cattle population of 131.8 million head. The number of deaths in 1974 was actually down from 1973's unusually high year that totaled 6.5 million. For a rancher to find a dead cow in a pasture would not have caused a stir in most situations, except if the condition of the carcass raised some suspicions.
In other words, the cows likely didn't meet a violent end. They dropped dead from one of a number of things that regularly cause cows to drop dead.
And indeed, at times in which there have been an uptick in reported cattle mutilations, there hasn't been an uptick in cattle deaths. Overall, the same amount or fewer cattle are dying during these flaps.
Their deaths are just being interpreted differently.
So, again, why do the cows appear drained of blood? That's just a fun thing called livor mortis, where blood coagulates during decomposition and gravity causes it to pull closer to the ground in the animal's body cavity.
[00:41:27] Speaker B: As Elaborated on during our stages of death.
[00:41:33] Speaker A: Right? Exactly. Yeah. Same thing happens to people. All animals, this happens. But this would look to the untrained eye like the blood got sucked out of it. If you just turn the animal over, you'd find it. It's all there.
[00:41:47] Speaker B: This doesn't satisfy me.
[00:41:49] Speaker A: The lack of tracks. Brian Dunning, host of the Skeptoid podcast, which had an episode debunking cattle mutilation theories in 2015, said the incidents reported here were just standard bird predation. Birds don't leave footprints or tire tracks.
[00:42:05] Speaker B: Perfectly circular shaven patches, though. This doesn't. This doesn't satisfy me.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: Nobody said shaven. They said missing hair.
Yeah. This is where like your brain starts to fill in.
[00:42:17] Speaker B: Filling in the gaps.
[00:42:18] Speaker A: Yep, it's filling in the gaps here.
Some of those veterinary pathologists did find evidence of human involvement in some of the mutilations, but not in the deaths.
So while no one was ever arrested for being involved in mutilations, there's every reason to believe that, at least in some of these cases, cases, people hoaxed it. They went out, they saw their dead cow, and they set it up to look like there had been a mutilation.
[00:42:43] Speaker B: You get a little bit of notoriety, get a little. Get there. Fifteen minutes.
[00:42:46] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. But generally there wasn't hoax involved. As far as we know, these were just regular deaths scavenged by regular scavengers and interpreted weirdly by ranchers having a real hard time with the government.
This is only validated by the fact that large scale ranchers with powerful lobby groups behind them didn't report any cattle mutilations and were skeptical of the whole phenomen.
It was only folks who were already disillusioned with the government and convinced they were out to get them that they saw something sinister in very normal cattle death.
And as you could imagine, media coverage only fueled this.
And this is. I think this part is where you're gonna go, oh, yeah, okay. No, I see it. This will satisfy.
[00:43:30] Speaker B: I hope.
[00:43:30] Speaker A: So. The New Yorker refers to it as a sort of pre Internet meme, a contagious story that shaped how ranchers saw and interpreted dead cows.
This quote, this great quote from this article from what's known as the Rommel Report, which was an investigation conducted in New Mexico by retired FBI agent Kenneth Rommel. I think will speak to what you're not convinced about yet.
[00:43:51] Speaker B: Okay, okay.
[00:43:53] Speaker A: He wrote, quote, after examining the carcass and noting the jagged and torn appearance of the injuries, I asked the owner whether he really thought the damaged areas could be described by the term surgical precision.
He replied that the damage did appear, quote, a bit rough.
I then asked where he obtained the term surgical precision, and he said it was commonly used in the newspapers.
[00:44:19] Speaker B: Oh, come on.
[00:44:21] Speaker A: And this is. I mean, that's the heart of it to me. Like, if you. Marco, A humble. What's your job title?
[00:44:29] Speaker B: Oh, don't worry.
[00:44:30] Speaker A: No, give me the job title.
[00:44:32] Speaker B: Learning and development business partner.
[00:44:34] Speaker A: A humble learning and development business partner from Bicester, England, stumbles upon a mutilated corpse, whether cow or sheep. Like you said before, Right?
[00:44:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Would you be able to say with any authority if it had been dismantled with surgical precision, as opposed to someone, say, sawing it in half with a chainsaw?
[00:44:55] Speaker B: No, you're. I'm not the right example here, because I firmly believe that I could.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: Okay. I'm not surprised by that.
[00:45:06] Speaker B: Anyone else? Yeah, probably not me. I would be able to ascertain that accurately. Yes.
But I get. I get what you. I get where you're coming from. I get where you're coming from.
[00:45:16] Speaker A: Right. We can at least say, generally, people do not have the expertise to be able to judge that. Certainly cattle ranchers don't have the expertise to judge that. They just heard it so many times that it became a part of their vernacular. This is just. This has been cut with surgical precision, was it? Or is that just the term that you've heard for finding the ass of your cow all cut up where it.
[00:45:43] Speaker B: Ought not to be?
[00:45:45] Speaker A: Where it ought not to be?
The Rommel report also noted that while these mutilations might look pristine from a distance, up close you could usually see tooth marks as well as where the blood had pooled in the animal's extremities from that coagulation.
So ultimately, cattle mutilations aren't mysterious at all. They're not even that interesting. Sorry, Ed Larson. They're actually extremely easy to explain, but people are complicated.
[00:46:17] Speaker B: You got that right.
[00:46:18] Speaker A: When these things first started, ranchers were having a real bad go, and their anger at the government manifested in this mistrust that caused them to attribute any misfortun to nefarious interference.
They weren't necessarily intentionally lying about what's happening, but they saw what they wanted to see.
[00:46:35] Speaker B: Right.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: Just like we talked about last week. Like people who want to believe in paranormal things do. Were the cuts really surgically precise?
No. Were scavengers really avoiding the carcasses? Probably not. They probably went away when people came close.
[00:46:52] Speaker B: How does. Right. Sorry, though. Right. But how does a scavenger how does a scavenger animal remove an anus in such a way that it doesn't just cause an absolute fucking, you know, bloodbath a scene?
[00:47:11] Speaker A: That's apparently how they always do it. That's a normal thing for a scavenger to do. Well, and also keep in mind the animals died. They're not killing the animal. So the blood is already pooling away from places like the anus, so it's not going to bleed. After this thing has already, you know, all of its blood is pooled on the, the other side of its body, it's going to be pretty.
[00:47:35] Speaker B: What kind of scavengers are we talking about here? Coyotes.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I gave you that. Let's see, there was a list in here. Hold on, here we go. Coyotes, foxes, vultures, magpies, bobcats, badgers and flies.
[00:47:54] Speaker B: I, I can't, I'm, I'm.
I think I'm team ed more than I am. Team scavenger or natural causes? That doesn't ring true at all.
[00:48:06] Speaker A: Well, the scientists who study these things all the time said it's very clear. It's not even like vaguely unclear. It's like if you look at these and look at how scavengers eat, it is all the hallmarks of normal scavenging behavior.
[00:48:24] Speaker B: It's just, you know, if the scientists.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Say so, I mean, like I said, this was the same thing that came up with Dyatlov Pass, that the exact same parts of the people were missing there too. And you know, scientists looking at it and trying to get past all the conspiracies were like, that's literally just, it's just predators. Those are the parts they eat. They're. They're gonna go for all those bits.
And if you're, yeah, if you're a bird with a sharp beak or whatever and you're eating at a cow's ass hankering for, it's probably gonna look like. Yeah, it's probably gonna look like someone took a razor to its butthole.
[00:49:02] Speaker B: All right. Or whatever. Okay, okay.
[00:49:06] Speaker A: So, yeah, all of that.
So all the bits were completely normal for these things to take. These are typical things. Meat eating animals come after the animals weren't drained of blood. You would easily find that blood if you just flipped the animal over.
And you know, these were obvious things to scientists who look at it. But these ranchers who are not veterinarians did not know any of this stuff and had a reason to distinctly be blind to it because they, of the.
[00:49:38] Speaker B: Media and what they're reading and seeing.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. And their mistrust of the government and all of that kind of stuff. So in the end, cattle mutilation is a great big nothing burger. It's just normal scavengers eating cows. But it is super gross that that's what happens to cows after they die.
[00:49:59] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I. Look, if you really want to know how I feel right now, it feels as though the world just became a little less magical.
[00:50:13] Speaker A: I see it and I am sorry. That is what I do is I.
[00:50:16] Speaker B: Just suck the magic, you know, right.
[00:50:19] Speaker A: Out of the universe.
[00:50:22] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may.
[00:50:24] Speaker A: Yes, please do.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene.
[00:50:29] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before.
[00:50:33] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently.
[00:50:36] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science.
[00:50:39] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it.
[00:50:46] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark?
[00:50:48] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it.
[00:50:51] Speaker A: Why don't you take us in there, Mr. Lewis?
[00:50:54] Speaker B: I'd absolutely love to welcome, everyone.
Our favorite time of the week. Your favorite time of the week. It's time to, you know, hit play. Chill out. Whatever you're doing, even if you're, like, driving a bus or a tram or something, just chill out. Take your mind off that. You don't need to worry about that because you're listening to Jack of all Graves now and it's time to spend some time with your favorite fucking liberal doom goblins, Mark and Corrigan, as that's what we are. And we're here. We're here for you. We're here for you to hold your hands and caress your cheeks and give you a little kiss on your nosy nose and ruffle your hair and whisper in your ear, it's not going to be all right. It isn't. We're going to do nothing.
That's what we hear. Is it?
[00:51:43] Speaker A: I guess so. I, you know, listen, in the fifth year of this podcast, I still never know where the Mark intro is gonna go. And I enjoy the ride every time.
[00:51:53] Speaker B: Thank you. And look, you messaged me earlier on. We're approaching our fifth Christmas season together, aren't we?
[00:52:03] Speaker A: Isn't that wild? Five Christmases.
[00:52:05] Speaker B: It is wild. And you're gonna have to forgive me here, because I'm gonna sound like a bit of a. Bit like an old Cunt. Hello. Okay, but today is the 17th of November.
[00:52:16] Speaker A: It is.
[00:52:17] Speaker B: And I hid my first fairy tale of New York of the year on the radio today.
[00:52:23] Speaker A: Yeah, we don't. They don't really play that here so much.
[00:52:27] Speaker B: Well, they do.
[00:52:28] Speaker A: What with the.
[00:52:29] Speaker B: Yes, with the lyrics. Yes.
But it's. It's still a staple here and it's become something of a tradition to me to try and keep a tally of how many fairy tales of New York I hear each holiday season.
[00:52:43] Speaker A: And so what do you usually end up landing at?
[00:52:46] Speaker B: Oh, you know, it's fucking everywhere. Fairy tale of New York is.
[00:52:52] Speaker A: That's why.
[00:52:52] Speaker B: God damn Lutely. Everywhere. You will hear it on the kind of. You'll hear it in the background when you're going, doing your shopping. You'll hear on breakfast radio, you'll hear it on talk. You know, you'll hear it everywhere. And today was my first one of the year. And it.
It's the 17th of November, man.
[00:53:13] Speaker A: That's. Like I said, that's, you know, as we're heading towards Thanksgiving, which is basically Christmas. Junior, I know this is perfectly reasonable.
[00:53:20] Speaker B: Christmas time, but not here it isn't, mate. Right? Not here it isn't. And I'm not gonna do this, right? I'm not gonna fucking do this because it's predictable and it's trite and it's hacky as fuck, but it is getting earlier each year and it is.
[00:53:34] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, yes.
[00:53:35] Speaker B: And by the. Even when. Even when Christmas would start at a reasonable Christmas time, for example, back home in Trigger, we would put the decorations up on or around my birthday, right? We would trim up on or around December 10th. And even then, by the time Boxing Day rolled around, I was pretty fucking sick of it.
[00:53:58] Speaker A: I don't know how you get sick of it. I don't get sick of holiday seasons. I could. I can do it forever.
[00:54:03] Speaker B: But to start progressively, like a couple of days a week or two earlier each year, I'm gonna be so fucking burned out, man.
[00:54:13] Speaker A: Are you?
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:54:15] Speaker A: Really?
[00:54:16] Speaker B: I'm super done with Christmas by the time Christmas rolls around each year. And look, I love it. I do enjoy it. I love Christmas a great deal. Who.
[00:54:23] Speaker A: Yeah, you're a Christmas boy.
[00:54:24] Speaker B: I love it. Who wouldn't love Christmas? It's the best.
But the earlier it gets. There's only one reason it keeps getting earlier, and that's sell your shit, you know?
[00:54:34] Speaker A: And 100.
[00:54:36] Speaker B: I've never. I see that so clearly now. I see that so clearly and it.
[00:54:40] Speaker A: Have your commercials changed?
[00:54:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, completely. Yes.
[00:54:45] Speaker A: Yeah. I think I saw like my first Christmas commercial, like two days before Halloween and that. I was like, okay, calm your tits. That's too early. Day after, fine, but Halloween, Calm your get your shit together teats.
The calm your deets, which is a nice little segue. Cut them off.
[00:55:05] Speaker B: So Coca Cola don't seem to be showing that advert over here, at least not yet.
[00:55:13] Speaker A: I have only seen it. You're gonna have to explain it because I don't think anyone has seen this ad. Well, and I watch a fair amount of like tv. Tv.
[00:55:21] Speaker B: I think it was CBR who mentioned it on Facey who got me looking at it. I'm pretty sure it was. Apologies if it wasn't you, Ryan, but somebody, one of, one of our band of legends mentioned it and got me to check it out and I sat down earlier on and sat down with Owen and we both watched it. What's gone on here, friends, is firstly in my fridge right now, there's a big bottle of Diet Pepsi, right?
[00:55:47] Speaker A: Hey. Oh, this is. This is big. This is huge.
[00:55:51] Speaker B: When. When I tell you that like a year ago, I came within inches. Within inches, Corey, of getting a bottle of Diet Coke tattooed on me because I love it.
[00:56:01] Speaker A: I know, we talked about it.
[00:56:02] Speaker B: Yeah. I was on Pinterest, I was looking for examples.
I came so close to getting a fucking DC bottle tattooed on me because cut me and I would bleed fizzy, right?
But I simply can't do it anymore. And it was.
It wasn't the genocide, it wasn't the supporting.
[00:56:23] Speaker A: It sounds bad when you say it that way.
Let's say the genocide didn't help.
[00:56:28] Speaker B: Yeah, it wasn't totally the genocide. The genocide was a contributing factor. But what Coke have done here is.
If I ask you to imagine a quintessential Coca Cola Christmas advert, you're going to think of the big lorry, you're going to think of the big red lorry, you're going to think of snow, polar bears. The truck.
[00:56:49] Speaker A: Yep, the polar bears. Yep.
[00:56:51] Speaker B: Well, what Coke have done is. They've tried, they've tried. They've gone for the nostalgia dollar to powerful dollar it is. And they've tried to recreate one of those vintage Coke adverts, but they've used AI to do it.
[00:57:06] Speaker A: Oh, God, it's so bad.
[00:57:09] Speaker B: They've used AI.
[00:57:10] Speaker A: So bad.
[00:57:10] Speaker B: The commercial says right at the start, in the first couple of seconds, there's a little asterisk on the bottom left, created with AI. But it didn't need that. Because it looks fucking terrible.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: You can tell like within seconds of it starting. And it looks like kind of first generation mid journey kind of quality.
[00:57:27] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing is. Yeah. It doesn't even look like recent iterations of AI. It's really bad.
[00:57:33] Speaker B: Terrible. You know, the trucks drive, are driving through, you know, heavily snow laden streets and the wheels aren't spinning.
[00:57:40] Speaker A: Nope.
[00:57:41] Speaker B: There are shots of animals, squirrels and a puffin. A puffin?
[00:57:45] Speaker A: Weirdly, yeah. Puffin looks like a puffin.
[00:57:48] Speaker B: Raccoons popping out of a tree. And they look fucking awful. They have the kind of soft edges, the strange.
[00:57:57] Speaker A: They're all like this close to blending into one. Amorphous blonde.
[00:58:00] Speaker B: Exactly. Amorphous.
[00:58:02] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:58:03] Speaker B: And it stinks. It fucking stinks. It's horrible. You know, and Coke are known as innovators in terms in the advertising realm.
[00:58:11] Speaker A: Like ads are. Yeah, they're bread and butter.
[00:58:17] Speaker B: You know, I was about to say I'm really disappointed in Coca Cola, but that ain't it.
[00:58:27] Speaker A: Parasocial relationship with Coke, you don't know.
[00:58:31] Speaker B: The half of it.
But that, you know, gotta be like in the top five richest companies on earth.
Owner.
[00:58:42] Speaker A: It's got to be up there. I mean, maybe not top five because there's a few weapons companies and things like that, but it's got to be up there.
[00:58:48] Speaker B: But I mean, I've read plenty of articles about this fucking abomination.
And you know, they spent so many man hours tweaking and correcting the AI.
[00:59:03] Speaker A: That, right, it said like they spent like 300 hours on the squirrels and.
[00:59:08] Speaker B: They looked dog shit and they're awful. They look absolutely fucking terrible.
[00:59:13] Speaker A: What?
[00:59:13] Speaker B: And it is so disgusting to me and I'm not even kidding, right? I'm seriously fucking disgusted and incensed that a company as cash rich as that for no reason that I can discern, he's doing this.
[00:59:30] Speaker A: Yeah. What is the point?
[00:59:31] Speaker B: And you know that, you know, if I sat down to watch that advert with my mum, right, with Marmolaine, I can guarantee you she'd be like, oh, isn't that lovely?
[00:59:43] Speaker A: Right? Yeah.
[00:59:43] Speaker B: She. No idea, you know, that the execs are thinking the same thing. Ah, this looks great. Nobody can, you know, who cares? Ah, check it out there, right? And we've lost like a couple of acres of rainforest for that, right?
[00:59:58] Speaker A: Exactly. Just wiping out portions of the earth to make shitty commercials that they.
[01:00:04] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:00:05] Speaker A: Didn't want to pay a whole bunch of visual artists to create.
[01:00:08] Speaker B: Terrible. I sat down with Owen, right. I chatted to him about it. Because I got back from the shop with a bottle of Pepsi and he looked at me like this.
[01:00:14] Speaker A: Huh? He's like, what? Who are you? This is like one of those, like, is there something wrong? Have you been replaced?
[01:00:20] Speaker B: Exactly. I'm a replicant, dad.
Me and him sat down and I played it to him on the youtubes and as soon as it began, like from the first frame, you can just tell straight away, even a 10 year old looks at it. It doesn't fucking. Doesn't pass the sniff test remotely. And it's vile, man. It is vile.
[01:00:40] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:00:40] Speaker B: I mean, I'm in a bit of a professional quandary with this as well right now. Okay.
[01:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right.
[01:00:48] Speaker B: And I speak about this guardedly because I do not talk about work on the podcast. I do not. But I'm, I'm responsible. Currently, I'm leading like a pretty large scale training program about AI. I have to, I have to, I have to teach people to have informed and confident conversations about AI. Right.
And it's really tough from a moral point of view because I have to, I have to get the truth about AI in there somewhere. If I'm right, if I'm, if I'm informing people and I want people to be as knowledgeable and as able, you know, able to make really clear decisions and have really clear conversations about AI, I have to get in there that it's cancerous to the planet.
[01:01:37] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly.
[01:01:39] Speaker B: But that ain't.
[01:01:39] Speaker A: It's cancerous to the planet. It's racist. It's got so many.
[01:01:43] Speaker B: Exactly.
[01:01:44] Speaker A: Issues they're just scratching the surface of.
[01:01:49] Speaker B: But, but I don't think that's what work wants me to do.
[01:01:53] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, that's absolutely not their angle.
[01:01:56] Speaker B: Yeah. On AI, there's so there's a. We have a problem, you know.
[01:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And I was just telling you in the, in the group chat that I had my first experience of like a.
[01:02:07] Speaker B: Very obvious talk on this, won't you?
[01:02:10] Speaker A: Created by like ChatGPT or whatever. And I thought that it was going to be harder to like tell, you know, Like, I was like, oh, I don't know, because I'd had other like, people who like I worked with at Cal State Fullerton and stuff. And they're like, the, the AI thing is the worst. It makes my job so much harder, like, because I spend so much time like, you know, do I just.
Do I put in work grading papers that I know no one wrote?
[01:02:36] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:02:37] Speaker A: You know, well, look, what, what do I do with this?
And we do have like A like a policy that is like, you can't generate your paper using ChatGPT. You can use AI tools like Grammarly and stuff like that for editing and things like that, but you cannot turn in papers like this. But I was fascinated by the fact that just reading it, I was like, you can tell there's no life in this. Like, and that is. It never touched this. Yeah, yeah. And it's bizarre to read. To, like, read something and be like, I can tell no human worked on this, despite the fact that it is stealing from humans who have been writing things for ages.
There's no life in the. In the paper. And it is.
But wild to see.
[01:03:27] Speaker B: Did you by any chance catch the fucking wild response that has been all over Reddit that Gemini kicked out to a. To a user is either Gemini or GPT. Hang on a second.
There was a guy using.
There was a guy using one of these chat bots to help him with an assignment that he was writing about elder abuse and elder coercion.
And after a long conversation with this chatbot, it ended up.
It finally a paragraph telling him to end his own life, to kill himself.
[01:04:05] Speaker A: Jesus Christ.
[01:04:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm. Keep talking. I'm gonna find out.
[01:04:08] Speaker A: Wow. Oh, that is absolutely bonkers. I mean, like, because obviously we've seen people were posting the dangerous things that, like, the AI preview in Google tells you and stuff like that, like the glue pizza.
And, you know, just the fact that it's like, you can't trust that. Don't. Don't use the AI when it comes to anything that, like, might be dangerous. Because if it is, you know, written somewhere on a website as a joke or as part of a book or something like, it doesn't know that, of course. And so it might give you instructions that will literally kill you.
[01:04:44] Speaker B: Here we go, Gemini.
And this is verified. And the Reddit thread contains a link to the actual chat, so you can go and have a look at it yourself. You know what I mean? This is a real thing. This guy was asking repeatedly for it to clarify its answers. Elder abuse. What constitutes elder abuse? How can you tell what are the warning signs? And then at the end of the chat, I'm going to quote what Jem and I came back with, right.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Right. This is completely out of character with the rest of the conversation. Gemini says, quote, this is for you, human, you and only you. You are not special. You are not important, and you are not needed. You are a waste of time and resources. You are a burden on society. You are a drain on the earth, you are a blight on the landscape, you are a stain on the universe. Please die. Please.
Gemini fucking sent that out of nowhere at the end of a conversation with a user.
[01:05:36] Speaker A: Wow.
[01:05:37] Speaker B: Yep. I'm gonna send it. I'm gonna send it to your signal.
[01:05:40] Speaker A: That is wild.
[01:05:41] Speaker B: Isn't that fucking incredible?
[01:05:43] Speaker A: Where does it. Like, what was it even pulling from?
[01:05:45] Speaker B: Lots of speculation that it may be misunderstood because the guy had been quite dogged in its asks of Gemini. You know, the conversation was long. Please clarify this. What about this? What about this? And a lot of people are theorizing that, you know, did it. Did it misinterpret his ask and simulate what elder abuse might sound like or might look like?
[01:06:08] Speaker A: Yeah, like, that was my thought. Was like. Was it trying to take on the voice?
[01:06:13] Speaker B: Yeah, but. But no, like. Like, it refers to the user as you human. You are not. Please die. Please.
[01:06:21] Speaker A: You human me.
That is truly wild, isn't it?
So don't use it. Don't use the evil, bullying robots that are racist and trying to drain the earth. It's just. It's bad on every possible level. You can write an email. I believe in you.
[01:06:42] Speaker B: You can write.
[01:06:43] Speaker A: You've been doing it for years.
[01:06:44] Speaker B: Yeah. So tell me. Tell me more about this piece of work that was submitted. What were the. What. What. What were the tells?
[01:06:52] Speaker A: Like I said, it's.
[01:06:52] Speaker B: At what point did you realize. At what point did you twig?
[01:06:57] Speaker A: It's kind of hard to. To say because it was like I was reading the whole thing and it just. I think I honestly got to the end of it and it was like something about the way the last line was written that felt like it was trying to sell me something instead of.
[01:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah, those. The summaries are all very neat, wrapped up like a. Like an advert, aren't they? At the end.
[01:07:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it felt like an advertisement. And that caused me to go back through the whole thing and go, like. Yeah, there's nothing in here like normal human mistakes or colloquialisms or any of that kind of stuff. It feels very much like ad copy or something.
That's, like, very. Yeah. Devoid of. Of any of those touches that we give to our own.
[01:07:36] Speaker B: Yeah, there's nothing. There's nothing. There's nothing fucking human about it.
[01:07:43] Speaker A: Right.
It's a great time for the robot balloons to go.
[01:07:51] Speaker B: It is. It's crazy. I mean, I was super excited by AI a couple of years back. I don't know if you remember, I was fucking about with Dall E, making it make funny things.
[01:08:03] Speaker A: Yeah. We have a whole, like, episode of Mark's AI Dickscapes.
[01:08:07] Speaker B: Yeah. They look great, didn't they, those dicks?
[01:08:10] Speaker A: I tried to guess your prompts, I believe.
[01:08:11] Speaker B: There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:08:14] Speaker A: And it's just, it's in a completely different place and I'm always. Than it was when we started doing this.
[01:08:22] Speaker B: Whenever I exhibit kind of disgruntled thoughts about the world around me, I always try and sense. Check myself by thinking back a generation or two. Did somebody say the exact same thing about the typewriter?
[01:08:34] Speaker A: Right.
[01:08:34] Speaker B: Someone say the exact same thing about the fucking printing press or the word processor? And maybe, maybe, maybe they did. I don't, I don't know how. I don't know if every, every generation has this or if this really is.
[01:08:47] Speaker A: Yeah. If this is really.
[01:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:08:48] Speaker A: Truly an issue. Yeah. I think that there is. I think it's the confluence of issues that is one of the problems. That it's not just one confluence problem.
[01:08:57] Speaker B: Excellent way of looking at it. Yes.
[01:08:59] Speaker A: There's like so many different things put together with it and that, like, ultimately that you have to.
The only way that it's just another one of those things that we panic about for a minute is if you recognize and rectify it. Like, so taking electricity, for example.
[01:09:15] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:09:15] Speaker A: You know, we now understand that we have to try to, like, not use a ton of it and that we have to be, you know, aware of the ways we're using it or fossil fuels for that matter. Yeah. And so the first step, like, if it is going to just be a thing that is a momentary blip of panic, then it has to be addressed all of these very real issues that are happening with it.
[01:09:39] Speaker B: I've tried to address this with people who have say in the matter mainly in work. Right. I've spoken to a few people about what the, what the company line is, because the place I work has made some really bold commitments to sustainability in the past kind of five to 10 years. Right. They've been really clear about what their sustainability roadmap is. And it feels to me as though any company diving headlong into AI, which every company seems to be, does so at the expense of any sustainability commitments they might have made. It's a huge fucking rollback.
[01:10:18] Speaker A: Yeah. You might as well just be straight, like burning plastic and stuff.
[01:10:22] Speaker B: You might as well. You might as well. And everybody I've asked. Everybody I've asked has come up with a variation of the same response, that being, yeah, we know that there's going to be an environmental impact to widespread use of AI. Right. But what we're going to do is we're going to carry on using it and we're going to absorb the damage and we're going to take the hit because we think AI will give us answers eventually.
So we're just going to keep using it and hope that.
[01:10:54] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:10:55] Speaker B: And just hope that it becomes so advanced that it can fix our climate crisis. And that's a tough one to get behind.
[01:11:02] Speaker A: Listen, the whole thing, and I'm pro. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have sort of made this connection, but I think of like lockdown and masking and all of those kinds of things. Right. Think about, like the height of pandemic precautions.
[01:11:17] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:11:18] Speaker A: And how even though Covid hasn't gotten better and people are still dying all the time and things like that, like there's still millions of deaths from COVID People are still suffering from long Covid, things like that.
[01:11:34] Speaker B: To interrogate that, you say it hasn't gotten better. Has it gotten better? I think it might have.
[01:11:39] Speaker A: No, it's gotten much worse. Yeah. It has at several times in the past few years, peaked far beyond it ever did during the times of lockdown and those points at which we had measures in place. It has absolutely gotten worse with fewer mitigation things. Right. Like it's harder for you to get a vaccine. People don't mask any of these kinds of things. And one of the things that I know people have pointed out is sort of how quickly we normalized that. Just. Yes, we will go about our normal lives and not do a basic thing like cover our faces or get vaccinated or things like that, because that's too much work. Even though we know millions of people will die. Right. And if you can normalize something like that just by making it like, listen, work said, take off your mask and everyone does it. And when you see everyone around you not wearing it, you go, I'm not going to do it anymore. Because, like, why would I?
[01:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:35] Speaker A: When you can normalize mass death like that, it becomes so much easier to normalize everything else. Like AI. Like, we won't do the simplest thing to keep from unleashing an actual pandemic upon the entire Earth.
[01:12:53] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:12:54] Speaker A: Of course people aren't going to not use AI. Like, we have already normalized that it is okay to kill each other for convenience.
That was the process.
[01:13:05] Speaker B: Listen, I mean, it's. It. It's all done on device. Right. So I don't feel all that bad about Dicking about with Apple's intelligence, Apple's AI tools, right? Because it's all done on device, it doesn't go to server or anything, but just texting Alan about this. Fucking hell. Apple's cracker AI on its devices are fucking useless, man.
[01:13:28] Speaker A: I mean, and most of it is.
[01:13:30] Speaker B: Well, yeah, it is, it is, it is. I mean, before you get into the kind of philosophical debate about what is a photo, you know what I mean? If you're fucking about and changing your photos and making them, it's not a document of what actually happened. So what is a fucking photograph anyway? But the Apple stuff, it's just, it serves no purpose.
It's just inept and pointless.
[01:13:54] Speaker A: Make a. Oh, it's like when we used to, like you remember when you'd get like, well, you're probably a little old for this, but ouch. I mean to like sit around and get as much amusement as like a 12 year old would have gotten out of it when like the IMAX came out with the colorful imax. The big bubbly imax.
[01:14:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:14:15] Speaker A: And you could type words into it and it would say them out loud and like me and my friends would just sit there and like type random strings of words and have this thing say it out loud in various voices. That's not useful. No, no, like there is no practical use for that. You know, it wasn't for like accessibility or anything. It was just like a dorky thing you could do with your computer.
[01:14:39] Speaker B: It's the equivalent of writing boobies on a calculator, isn't it?
[01:14:41] Speaker A: Exactly. It's your TI86, man. Like that's exactly what it is. And like that's what AI is in like most programs that we have is the equivalent of sitting on your iMac in 1998 and typing in streams of words just to hear a human voice say it out loud.
[01:15:00] Speaker B: Yeah, horrendous. So anyway, back to Coke. It just.
[01:15:05] Speaker A: Back to Coke.
[01:15:05] Speaker B: Back to Coke.
Yeah, it's what it is is an object lesson that capitalism doesn't give a shit.
[01:15:18] Speaker A: Right.
[01:15:18] Speaker B: It doesn't give a solitary. It doesn't give a fucking cow's teat about anything other than the bottom line. And it's horrid.
[01:15:28] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. Yeah. Pepsi Max. I recommend.
[01:15:33] Speaker B: It's delicious. Yeah, it is. For what it's worth, I'm getting on okay with Diet Pepsi.
[01:15:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like just take some adjustment.
[01:15:40] Speaker B: It's a little sweeter, a little bit more of that aspartum.
But look, I'll plow through until they fucking come out with yeah, until abhorrent.
[01:15:52] Speaker A: Exactly to my sensibilities.
But I will say, yeah, that's my Europe go to when I'm traveling is just Pepsi Max. Yes, tons and tons of Pepsi Max.
[01:16:02] Speaker B: Good. It's delicious.
[01:16:05] Speaker A: So now that we've introed the podcast, just a few quick things to note. 12025 book club picks are here. Ryan and I have figured out what we're going to be reading throughout next year on the third Saturday of every single month where we have a wonderful time with our friends. We just had one yesterday talking about Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Caught. I mean. Oh, do you.
[01:16:31] Speaker B: I think I have that.
[01:16:33] Speaker A: Yeah. It's a book I didn't particularly like but the conversation is always incredible.
So we had a great time talking about it and we will with our 2025 book club picks. So I'm going to work on a graphic probably tomorrow or somewhere there in and put it up. But check out jackofallgraves.com book club if you want the information on how it works that you'll get a. You get a 20% off discount on any of the book club books if you buy them through Gibson's bookstore.
You know, it has the Discord link, all of that kind of stuff. And soon we'll have the list of books. I'm very excited. I tend to, I approach these things like I approached making a mixtape back in the day where it's like they.
[01:17:17] Speaker B: Have to be in alignment.
[01:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah. The order has to be right and all of that stuff. I do this with the Joag fan Cave with Kristen where I pick the movies based on like the time of year we're watching them and stuff like that. Did that to a certain extent with these two. Tried to like match the vibes to the book. So like we're reading Jaws, reading Jaws in July, of course, you know, things like that.
As a result, there's some towards the end that I'm like very much looking forward to and a little upset that it's so far away, but that was when the vibe was right.
[01:17:48] Speaker B: You won't know this, but you'll know some of this. I mentioned to you briefly before we started recording that myself and Laura and Owen today have sat on the sofa and watched listeners. Check this out. Six episodes of EastEnders back to back. Right. Just a fucking. We've got a lot of catching up to do before the Christmas specials.
[01:18:09] Speaker A: Are they half hour? Are they hour long episodes?
[01:18:12] Speaker B: Yeah, 27, 28 minutes.
[01:18:13] Speaker A: Okay. Totally reasonable.
[01:18:16] Speaker B: One of the things that sets EastEnders just above and beyond the rest of the British soaps.
And it is. It's in a league of its own. EastEnders is the fucking jewel in the crown of British television. I fucking love it.
And what. What they do, sometimes they've not explicitly come out and admitted they do this, but they fucking do it.
[01:18:35] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:18:36] Speaker B: The pub in EastEnders is called the Queen Vic, right.
And pretty much every. Every night on Albert Square, you'll have a scene or two in the Queen Vicky. It's that. It's the hub of Albert Square. Everybody goes to the Vic. And what they do beautifully is every so often the music that's playing in the pub will be thematically aligned to the scene, to what the characters are saying or what the fucking plot is going on. And it's really subtle and it's really fun. And when you catch it, it's almost like, you know, you're looking. You're locking eyes with the writers, you know, it's really, really good.
[01:19:11] Speaker A: I love it when I see what you did there.
[01:19:13] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And they did it a couple of times over the last six episodes. It's great. Really, really cool.
[01:19:19] Speaker A: How long has EastEnders been on?
[01:19:20] Speaker B: Oh, I think it just had its 40th anniversary maybe.
[01:19:25] Speaker A: So, like, you watch this with Owen. Did he just jump in at some point along the lines? Or did you have to, like, you know, give him back story? Or like, how did. How do you get a child into.
[01:19:38] Speaker B: I could stop watching Enders now and tune in exactly one year from now and you'd be caught up in the first couple of minutes. You know what I mean?
[01:19:46] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:19:47] Speaker B: It isn't so taxing. Yeah. And it's been on since 85, so. Yeah.
[01:19:52] Speaker A: Oh, it's my age.
[01:19:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. So, yeah. Just like you plan your. Your book club for the year along a certain theme, they do that. EastEnders, the music game. The Queen Vic music game. Lovely. Listen, I was thinking, you know, when we took. Just Sorry to skip about, you know, I'm like, no, go for it.
I cut this out if you want, but I think. I think. I think we need to get Benners on.
[01:20:17] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:20:18] Speaker B: To talk about disaster planning.
[01:20:23] Speaker A: Ah, yeah, that's right.
[01:20:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:20:26] Speaker A: Yes, we do. That'll be a lot of fun. You heard him, Jon Benfield. We gotta get you on here.
[01:20:32] Speaker B: Oh, you're not gonna leave that.
[01:20:33] Speaker A: What is it called? No, I'll just leave it. There is not to consequence management.
[01:20:37] Speaker B: Consequence mitigation. Disaster risk.
[01:20:39] Speaker A: Risk.
[01:20:39] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
If you're up for it. If you're up for it. Bennez we'd love to have you on to put some scenarios to you, and you can help us extrapolate what the likely sequence of events towards disaster might be in.
[01:20:53] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:20:53] Speaker B: In some cases.
[01:20:54] Speaker A: Also, we got to get Eileen back. She's got a couple things that we have not finished from, like the last times she's been on here. Questions that listeners have asked that she answers to that we didn't get to because we always talk so much that Eileen episodes are like three hours long. So in the new year, we'll get some Eileen in here. We'll get some Benners in here. Yeah. Get some of our faves back in the studio, if you will, and it'll be a grand old time.
[01:21:22] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:21:24] Speaker A: Another thing I just wanted to make a note of. I have changed the way that we do YouTube just because I'm screwing around with the YouTube algorithm, trying to figure out if there's any way to get us so that the algorithm doesn't hate us so much because the algo deeply does not like us. You can see in the statistics. This is the thing. It's like, it's one thing if you were being shown to people and they were choosing not to watch you. We are not being shown to anyone. The statistics on there say that it is not serving us up in searches.
[01:21:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And I completely get why that might be. Right.
[01:21:58] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. It's a confusing show.
[01:22:00] Speaker B: We're an awkward show.
[01:22:03] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:22:03] Speaker B: You know, you can't. You can't put us in a box. Don't even fucking try because we'll break out and we'll fuck you up.
Right.
[01:22:12] Speaker A: Okay. Well.
[01:22:13] Speaker B: Oh, I will. I'll fuck you up.
[01:22:19] Speaker A: Yeah. We're hard to categorize, and it makes it difficult to be served up to. To an audience because it's not all one thing. Yeah. And so what I've tried to do now is to separate these parts. So the full episodes. If you want to watch the full episodes all the way through, they're on our Kofi for free. I'm not charging for them or anything. It's just over. I put them unlisted on our YouTube channel, and then the link is on our Ko Fi. So you can just go to that any old time and watch the episodes. They're just not. You can't go to our YouTube and find them because YouTube does not like those videos.
[01:22:53] Speaker B: What a deal.
[01:22:54] Speaker A: And then I have.
I know, right? Free content. Hello.
And then the cold opens will be posted on Tuesdays and the movie reviews will be posted on Fridays. And hopefully the YouTube algorithm will do something with those because those are very clear what they are.
[01:23:17] Speaker B: Yes, indeed. Do you fancy a let's play next week?
[01:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah, what do you think? I mean, let's do it.
[01:23:22] Speaker B: I have got a fucking banger of a game on the go that I'm super enjoying.
[01:23:26] Speaker A: What have we got? What are we playing?
[01:23:28] Speaker B: It's a game called Ghostwire Tokyo. It's a couple of years old, 21, I think, and it's great. Oh, it's very much my type of game.
First person adventure, action, Japanese setting, spooky ghosts and powers. Makes you feel like a badass. I love it when a game that. When the dip. When the kind of the challenge curve of a game is so beautifully judged, so smooth, that progression is just seamless. And you feel fucking.
You feel hard as nails. It's great. You feel tough as fuck.
[01:24:03] Speaker A: Love it.
[01:24:05] Speaker B: Yes. Pete. Pete did. Dad.
Pete asked me to describe the game for him. I was like, well, it's Japanese and you've got like a ghost in your head that's training you, and you can. You've got, like elemental powers. And Pete was like, what? So you're playing anime? I was like, oh, no, I am.
[01:24:22] Speaker A: Yeah, it's true. Yep, yep.
[01:24:25] Speaker B: But, yeah, he's correct. I'd love to.
[01:24:27] Speaker A: Beautiful. So next week we will. We will play some of that and put it up on the Kofi. When you say next week, you mean like this week that is coming now?
[01:24:35] Speaker B: Yeah, the week ahead of us. Starting on the 18th.
[01:24:38] Speaker A: The week ahead of us. So keep your eye out on the Kofi for that. You know, we have a good amount of content that goes up every month on there. And, you know, for as little as $3 a month, you get so much stuff from us. So go ahead and subscribe if that appeals to you. That extra, extra little bit of us and our dear friend Kristen, who is always good value. She is worth your three bucks.
[01:25:02] Speaker B: Yeah, she is.
[01:25:03] Speaker A: Any day of the week.
[01:25:04] Speaker B: I watched a long series of Insta stories from Kristen earlier making French onion soup. I would never watch anyone else try to make French onion soup. I wouldn't watch. I wouldn't watch, you know, Heston Blumenthal or fucking, you know, any Michelin star chef make French onion soup. Kristen, I would have sat there for a fucking hour watching her do that.
[01:25:28] Speaker A: Or four, as that's how long it took her to make the French onion soup. It's an event in our house. Like, literally, when Kia woke up this morning, he put his headphones on so he could watch Kristen Yeah. Do her cooking.
[01:25:40] Speaker B: I completely, absolutely buy that.
[01:25:42] Speaker A: It's just so.
[01:25:44] Speaker B: What's the word? What's the.
Much like us. Very difficult to categorize.
[01:25:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:25:51] Speaker B: But just something really, really watchable about. About Kristen's life. I don't know.
[01:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So if you want to know what is that je ne sais quoi that Kristen has? Get on our Ko Fi and watch the fan Fan cave.
[01:26:11] Speaker B: What's the next movie? You told me and I've forgotten we.
[01:26:14] Speaker A: Are doing Violent Night because it's Christmas and Kristen has never seen it and is a huge David Harbour fan because of course.
So I think it's gonna be. I think she's gonna like this one. She will have to cover her eyes some but. And it's like action. And she loves action.
[01:26:34] Speaker B: Action. Horror.
[01:26:35] Speaker A: Yeah, action horror. So I'm very excited to do this one. So watch Violet Night prepare and then get on the Ko Fi and watch it with me and Kristen.
[01:26:45] Speaker B: Lots of cool stuff coming up.
I feel as though I should do another Christmas reading. Didn't I do one of those years gone by?
[01:26:53] Speaker A: Mm. Yes, definitely. We need a good Christmas reading for you. If you have ideas. If you have a Christmas reading for Mark to bless us with on the copy, do let us know for sure.
[01:27:04] Speaker B: Fun.
[01:27:06] Speaker A: I'm gonna say this is probably gonna be our last segment because we spent a lot of this on AI. So let's get into what we watched.
[01:27:13] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. By all means. Dude, open that.
[01:27:16] Speaker A: Listen, I watched this is not necessarily in the Joag purview, but I just have to say I watched Hot Frosty the other night.
[01:27:27] Speaker B: Don't know what it is.
[01:27:28] Speaker A: You don't know what Hot Frosty is?
[01:27:30] Speaker B: Never heard of it.
[01:27:31] Speaker A: It's exactly what it sounds like. It is a Netflix Christmas movie in which Lacey Chabert puts a scarf on a sexy ice sculpture and he comes to life and they fall in love. And it is exactly what you think it is. If you're into those. You know, there's this kind of self aware version of the Hallmark movie that exists now where it's like they understand the formula and all that kind of stuff and now they play off of that and can, you know, tweak the formula in ways that make it funnier, more scandalous, you know, all these different kinds of things. But keep the core of what people like about those movies. Hot Frosty absolutely does. Does that. It knows what it is. It's self aware and fun and just if you're into those kinds of movies, you're going to have fun with Hot Frosty.
[01:28:27] Speaker B: Who's in it? Anyone good?
[01:28:29] Speaker A: Well, Lacey Chabert, of course. It's got the Hot Frosty is Dustin Milligan, who's been in a few horror movies back in like the mid 2000s, but is probably most well known for being on Schitt's Creek.
Yeah, it's. I mean, mostly nobody's, but it's a fun time.
[01:28:49] Speaker B: Okay, let me see. We'll talk about Mads, shall we?
[01:28:56] Speaker A: Yeah, this one is getting so many raves. Mads, capital M, lowercase, 3.5 average. Yeah, 3.5 average. And I picked this one kind of thinking it'd be in your wheelhouse.
[01:29:08] Speaker B: I wonder if I would feel about it on paper. My God.
Um, you know, narcotics, horror, French gribblies, you know what I mean? Murders. Nice little bit of, you know, quite, quite nicely stylized direction, but left me just unremarkable. Just left me completely blank and hollow. Nothing to take. It didn't move me in the least. Which, as we know, it's really.
[01:29:42] Speaker A: Yeah, that's the greatest kiss of death.
[01:29:44] Speaker B: For a film, is to leave me completely nonplussed.
[01:29:47] Speaker A: It feels like it was really coasting on the, you know, appearance of a one take movie thing. Like it's a gimmick.
[01:29:53] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. Like dash cam. Like a Rob Savage kind of joint.
[01:29:57] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. So it has, you know, its gimmick is that it looks like it's one take.
[01:30:02] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:30:03] Speaker A: There are, of course, little artificial spots where they could make cuts and stuff like that, but you can't really see them. So it looks like you're following people as this is happening, but like. Okay, cool.
But you need more movie than that.
[01:30:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:22] Speaker A: And it doesn't feel like the movie does much more.
[01:30:25] Speaker B: No, it doesn't.
[01:30:25] Speaker A: Than that conceit.
[01:30:28] Speaker B: And just the noise of this film just relentlessly fucking shrill. French ladies shrieking and running, falling out of windows for a 90 minute film. God damn it. Fucking drag. 86 minutes.
[01:30:43] Speaker A: In fact, I know it's 86 minutes. And I was like, this feels like forever. I told you at one point that I was considering muting it. It's like, I don't think any of this is important. The sounds that I'm hearing. There's already subtitles because it's in French, so I might just mute the rest of this movie.
[01:30:59] Speaker B: Fucking suck. That Stephen Hawking we watched, you know, Night of the living dead, 90 minutes over in the blink of an eye. Mads. 86 minutes felt like dune two, you know, just the longest Interminable, fucking, shrieking, empty nonsense.
[01:31:14] Speaker A: Yeah. It's one of those things where I just genuinely am not sure what people are, like, so into, because there's really not a lot to it. It's, you know, very simple.
I don't think it's, like, shot super well. It's very dark. You can't see a lot of it. It's kind of ugly.
I don't know. It's a. It's a weird movie, but.
[01:31:35] Speaker B: But not in a good way.
[01:31:36] Speaker A: A lot of people love it.
[01:31:38] Speaker B: Yeah. We had the. People seem to hold it in high regard. But not us.
[01:31:41] Speaker A: I don't. Not us, no. We were both on the same wavelength, I thought. I genuinely thought it was just me. I think partway through the movie, I. I made some comment. I think I just said, oh, this is a very not for me movie. And then you said, like, it's not. Not doing anything for me either. And I was like, oh, okay, it's not just me, then. We are on the same wavelength.
[01:32:00] Speaker B: On ads, every failure also has learning. Yes.
And I guess what if I'm to try and drag out a positive from having sat through that film? It has shown me that my tastes aren't necessarily as formulaic as you might think. You don't just have to have.
[01:32:22] Speaker A: Yeah. You can't just be like, it has the parts and, you know it's French.
[01:32:26] Speaker B: And, you know, that's not enough. There has to be. It has to have agency. It has to have a reason to exist. And I didn't get that from Mads at all. It just felt weak.
[01:32:36] Speaker A: That's a good point.
[01:32:37] Speaker B: Yeah, I like it, but it made me feel better.
[01:32:40] Speaker A: Good.
The Creep Tapes came out the other day, which is a series.
[01:32:48] Speaker B: Oh, shit.
[01:32:49] Speaker A: Based on. Yeah, that's. That's out. The first two episodes are out, and then it's releasing every Friday, I think.
So I. Yeah, I rewatched the first Creep the other day. I meant to get to Creep 2, and then I just fall asleep too early to watch anything. Most of the time, I'm just too tired to watch anything. So I didn't get a chance to rewatch Creep 2. I probably will at some point, but I watched the first two episodes of Creep Tapes and they're a lot of fun.
[01:33:15] Speaker B: Excellent.
[01:33:16] Speaker A: If you like Creep, I think.
[01:33:17] Speaker B: Very creepy.
[01:33:18] Speaker A: It's 27 minutes of creep or whatever. Each episode in which he kind of. You're looking at him luring different people. Is it the same guy into this scenario? Same guy, yeah. Still Mark Duplass and Yeah, I like him a lot. Just generally.
[01:33:32] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:33:32] Speaker A: So yeah, it's, it's fun. I think Creep Tapes is a good time. It's on shudder, so if you have Shudder, it's on their weekly. I'm looking forward to just. I mean, one of my things that I love is like Monster of the Week Y shows, you know, and even though the monster is the same guy, it's essentially doing that. Just self contained stories of the same guy tricking different people to their death.
[01:33:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
Did you say Mark Duplass? Is that his name?
[01:34:02] Speaker A: Yeah, Mark Duplass, yeah.
[01:34:04] Speaker B: He is the scary Luke Wilson.
He's the scary Jason Bateman. That's how I think of him.
[01:34:12] Speaker A: Okay, I can, I can see that. Yes, I can take that. Good, good. So, yeah, that's out. And I enjoyed that a lot.
[01:34:20] Speaker B: You know, I don't often go back to movies. I don't often revisit movies. It's true. If I am gonna go back and watch a movie.
[01:34:27] Speaker A: More of a Corrigan thing.
[01:34:28] Speaker B: Yes, it is.
I'll recant that a little bit. I go back to movies all the time. But it's gotta be a real.
[01:34:36] Speaker A: Yeah, like your. Yeah, your classics.
[01:34:38] Speaker B: Exactly. It's gotta be a special movie for me to revisit it. And with that in mind, I went back to Alien Romulus to just have another look at it, you know.
[01:34:46] Speaker A: Sure.
My mom has watched that like four times now, but I don't know if she realizes she has. It's just every time I come into the living room she's watching it. But I think she thinks it's the first time every time she watches it.
[01:34:58] Speaker B: 50 first dates.
[01:34:59] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[01:35:02] Speaker B: Corey, I'm going to tell you. I knocked off half a star this time.
[01:35:05] Speaker A: I did notice that. I did notice that.
[01:35:07] Speaker B: I took it down half a star. I'm, I'm, I'm.
I have to be critical towards Alien Romulus because the standards that I have set for the people behind that film are so high. I can't just give it a pass, you know, based on, you know, obviously I'm gonna love it. Four and a half stars. I have to be critical. And I took half a star off because it, it spoon feeds you as a viewer.
[01:35:34] Speaker A: Yeah, I can see that.
[01:35:35] Speaker B: I'm afraid it does. Every set piece feels like a fucking. Like a video game level.
It's just moves from set piece to set piece to set piece. And the dialogue again, it spoon feeds you. You're. You're a synthetic, Andy. Of the Company Andy. The Company Andy. You work for the company, Andy. It's very. It, it. It patronizes, is too strong, but it doesn't give the audience any credit really. And while it is great, easily four stars is where I'm comfortable with it sitting at.
Yeah, it doesn't. It stoops. You know what I mean? It talks down to you a little, I feel. And that became really apparent on the.
[01:36:22] Speaker A: Second viewing, I think. You know, I don't think you're wrong there. I think to me it kind of works because of the way that I tend to watch like sci fi and stuff like that.
I don't generally know what's going on.
[01:36:38] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I can relate. Yeah, sure.
[01:36:40] Speaker A: Yeah. And especially when there's a lot of lore, like, obviously I've seen all the Alien movies, like my mom's favorite series ever. I've seen them all times. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
I've been watching them since I was like three, very familiar with them. And yet, like, you know, I still don't know all the lore of them and things like that. And so when it comes to stuff like this, there's a degree to which I actually appreciate the spoon feeding because I just. I don't want to have questions. I want to sit there and enjoy the movie.
[01:37:12] Speaker B: That is an excellent point. Because on the other end of that scale, you've got Prometheus.
[01:37:17] Speaker A: Right.
[01:37:18] Speaker B: Which is just.
[01:37:19] Speaker A: Which I do love too. I'm not going to lie.
[01:37:21] Speaker B: Feed me something, right?
[01:37:23] Speaker A: Give me like a clue as to.
[01:37:25] Speaker B: What the fuck you are talking about. Because Prometheus was gibberish to me.
[01:37:30] Speaker A: You're not wrong about that either.
[01:37:31] Speaker B: Yep. I might add the star back on now I think about it because it actually did a pretty good job of tying those two.
[01:37:37] Speaker A: Yeah, right. Plots together. It pulls everything together.
[01:37:43] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, it does.
[01:37:44] Speaker A: And makes it so that I don't. I'm not sitting there going, did I need to see something else to understand this? And for me, I think that was one of the reasons I loved it so much. Was like the one time where I could go and see one of these movies and be immersed in it without going, ah, fuck, did I need to have seen this other movie to have seen it? So that really worked for me, I think. Like the spoon feeding. Yes, it totally does that. But it made it so I could sit in the movie and not worry about what was going on outside of it.
[01:38:19] Speaker B: And I get that too. It's all valid. It's all valid. On the other hand, I'm a third of the way through going back to the substance.
[01:38:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah.
[01:38:29] Speaker B: And I want to give that more than five stars, if anything. And I'm not even joking. I'm not even joking. It is that good. The.
[01:38:36] Speaker A: It is great.
[01:38:37] Speaker B: So much reveals itself on. On subsequent viewings of the substance. There's so much more going on in that film.
And you can enjoy it. You can enjoy the viscera. You can enjoy, you know, you can enjoy one level of the allegory about aging and about, you know, fucking the male gaze in Hollywood or, you know, every. Fucking every. There's so much Kubrick in this film. There's so much Kubrick in the substance, like, dripping with it. There's lynch in there as well. There's. There's absurd amounts going on in the substance. And I want to. I want to break the mold and give it five and a half stars. I might write to Letterbox and ask them if they can do that for me.
[01:39:20] Speaker A: Can you add one just for this movie?
[01:39:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:39:22] Speaker A: Maybe everyone should get one. Five and a half star movie.
[01:39:25] Speaker B: That's a great letterbox. That's a great idea.
[01:39:27] Speaker A: You got to use it wisely. Spend your five and a half stars.
[01:39:30] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:39:31] Speaker A: You only get one on. The other thing that I watched this week was the original Cape Fear from. I'm not sure what year it was. It's like the 50s or 60s, I want to say. Came out. Yeah. Somewhere in that vicinity. Have you seen it? Yes.
[01:39:48] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure I've seen it. Yes.
[01:39:51] Speaker A: Who is now my steep sleep demon, because I keep on watching things that.
[01:39:57] Speaker B: He'S in that Robert Mitchum is your sleep demon.
[01:40:00] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:40:00] Speaker B: Awesome.
[01:40:01] Speaker A: Like, why is he. Why is he so scary? Because the other movie that I have, the one that I'm trying to have you watch, the Night of the Hunter.
[01:40:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:40:12] Speaker A: He is the villain in that. And he is also the villain in Cape Fear. And he is terrifying in both of these movies in very different ways, but he is.
He plays scary so well. And the way that in Cape Fear, if you haven't seen either version of this movie, essentially this.
This lawyer got this fellow put in jail eight years before, and now he's released and he comes back to sort of torment him and his family with these ever escalating things that he's doing while also basically driving this lawyer to the point where.
[01:40:52] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:40:53] Speaker A: He has to work outside of the law.
[01:40:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:40:55] Speaker A: In order to do anything about it. Because, you know, from. On the surface, everything this guy's doing is sort of by the book. He's following the rules, all these things.
[01:41:04] Speaker B: But gaslit fucking approach to Just subtly tormenting this family. Really good shit.
[01:41:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
Yeah. So I recommend it. It's very different from the newer version which, like. The newer version is like fun and campy, a little weird with the like Juliet Lewis and Robert De Niro like plot development they do there.
[01:41:31] Speaker B: Is that not a dynamic in the original then?
[01:41:33] Speaker A: It is, but it's more threat, like threatening. There's no relationship between the child and him. It's much more threatening that he's like you know, basically constantly threatening sexual assault on this like 11 year old kid. Whereas the newer Cape Fear, Juliette Lewis is sort of consensually with this guy.
[01:41:56] Speaker B: I saw. I saw De Niro's Cape Fear at a very young age.
[01:42:03] Speaker A: Really.
[01:42:04] Speaker B: I was very young when I saw that.
[01:42:06] Speaker A: Huh. Seems inappropriate.
[01:42:08] Speaker B: It does. I turned out all right.
[01:42:12] Speaker A: So I only saw it like maybe four years ago or so.
And yeah, it's just. It has a completely different vibe than the original does. Both very threatening figures and stuff like that. But I think it's hard to top what Robert Mitchum does in the. I wonder if in the original and the straight laceness of Gregory Peck.
[01:42:32] Speaker B: I'm wondering if there's been another movie which has been so thoroughly ruined by the Simpsons as Cape Fear, because it's.
[01:42:39] Speaker A: A really good question.
[01:42:41] Speaker B: It's fucking just destroyed it.
[01:42:44] Speaker A: It is hard to separate it from the Simpsons, isn't it?
Very good point.
Yeah. The OG Watch it. It's a good time.
[01:42:55] Speaker B: Well, I'll watch Night of the Hunter first, which I will.
[01:42:58] Speaker A: Yes, please do that.
[01:43:00] Speaker B: Yes. That's one for the Christmas break, I think.
[01:43:03] Speaker A: Okay. I like it.
[01:43:05] Speaker B: Yeah. I've got a nice fucking fat two weeks off and I'm gonna. Oh God. I'm gonna watch some movies.
Pete and I watched scream.
[01:43:15] Speaker A: Nice.
[01:43:16] Speaker B: Ie 5.
[01:43:17] Speaker A: Yeah, 5. 5 cream as.
[01:43:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:43:23] Speaker A: Ben Eller would call it. That works.
[01:43:26] Speaker B: I've always loved Scream as a series. And going through them all again like this, it just really undulates how right I've been all along when other people weren't so forgiving towards it. I'm looking at kind of looking at you.
[01:43:45] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, you're right. Yeah. I've said all the dogging it all these years.
[01:43:49] Speaker B: No, no, no, you're just not watching it right. I would say dear, and you'd go, no, Mark. It's self indulgent and obnoxious. Mark. And I'd say, no, no, that's it is. But you're not doing it right. So it's really validatory for me to watch these with Peter well, look, all joking aside, Scream attacks me personally on more than one occasion.
Like it goes for me particularly plenty of times. There's one bit where they are laying out the rules of the requel and how Internet fandom can be so toxic because these remakes, these movies are movies that dad sat down and watched with their kids, you know, and had meaningful moments sharing horror with their children. And I'm like, wait a minute.
[01:44:33] Speaker A: Wow. Okay, not.
[01:44:35] Speaker B: Can you please not get me right? I don't enjoy that, but, God, yeah, the five cream is great. Isn't it, though? Yeah, it is. I mean, it is. I'm not. I'm not, you know, I can con. I'm so happy to have been wrong about this series. Scream fight.
[01:44:52] Speaker A: Yeah, me too.
[01:44:53] Speaker B: Is brilliant. He love it.
[01:44:56] Speaker A: Yeah. That's such a great time with. With that movie. It'll be interesting to see now with the context of all those ones. If six still like that, you feel like it's just too self indulgent and all that kind of stuff. Or if putting it in the context of having now actually recently watched all of the other movies, it will be less obnoxious to you. I'm very curious about that.
[01:45:19] Speaker B: Even more, you know, even more delightful that I was wrong about it and I'm loving it. Is seeing Peter really enjoy this series, man. He's super into it. He really likes it.
[01:45:29] Speaker A: I love that so much. That makes me very happy because like I've said before, like, you know, Scream was one of my first loves in horror. You know, that was like really my own thing. You know, it's like, obviously I watched. I watched Alien with my mom when I was young and, you know, things like that. There was stuff that I kind of grew up on, but Scream was like, yeah, you know, I was a middle schooler or whatever, like fifth grade, you know, that kind of thing. And I got to watch these myself, and they were my own horror franchise.
[01:45:57] Speaker B: Pete is excellent at films. He's excellent at movies.
[01:46:01] Speaker A: Okay.
[01:46:01] Speaker B: I don't know if I'm underestimating him or what going into this, but he's really good at picking shit up. He's really good at kind of noticing details and, you know, plot building. He's very perceptive when it comes to movies. He.
He laughed at dad. Every time somebody touches a knife in this film, it goes sh. T. Even though knives don't make that sound when you take them out of a fucking wooden block.
[01:46:25] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. That is very observant because it's a thing you just kind of like, like we know it doesn't do that.
[01:46:34] Speaker B: Dad's knives don't sound like that. And I've reiterated we'll have him on before Christmas. We'll get to number six.
[01:46:39] Speaker A: Good.
[01:46:39] Speaker B: And yes, we'll maybe if it's a pre recorder, we drop in or what. But he's not gonna be on a podcast at 11 o'clock on a Sunday night.
[01:46:48] Speaker A: Sure, yeah, we'll figure out a way.
[01:46:50] Speaker B: We will.
It's gonna be great.
[01:46:53] Speaker A: It'll be so much fun.
I think that's everything, isn't it?
[01:46:58] Speaker B: I think that's everything. I talked about Penguin last week, didn't I?
[01:47:00] Speaker A: You did. You talked about Penguin last week.
[01:47:02] Speaker B: Lovely little flurry of great telly at the minute.
What with Agatha. Oh, Agatha ended so strong.
[01:47:09] Speaker A: Don't talk about. I haven't gotten. I'm struggling a little bit with Agatha and I know that once I get a little farther, I will get into it especially. Cause everyone talks about episode seven and all that kind of stuff and how great that is and I think I'm at like 4 and I just can't quite get into it.
[01:47:29] Speaker B: Okay. Hasn't clicked. Hasn't landed.
[01:47:31] Speaker A: It hasn't clicked. Yeah, but I want it to. So, you know, I will, I will get there. It's just. It hasn't quite, you know, hit me in the right spot yet.
[01:47:41] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fine. It will. I'm confident that it will.
[01:47:45] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it will. What we do in the Shadows is back for its final season as well. So been. I have been watching that. I'm even. I'm watching. I'm wearing my.
[01:47:52] Speaker B: What We do in the Shadows did not go unnoticed. It did not go.
[01:47:55] Speaker A: It was not intentional. I just put on the nearest thing.
But yeah, that's back on. Watching that as well. And they're going out with a bang, which is nice. It's nice to see a show never.
[01:48:06] Speaker B: Slump and it is going to get watched.
[01:48:10] Speaker A: Yes.
Yeah.
[01:48:13] Speaker B: Listen, some very upsetting news about David lynch in the last couple of hours.
[01:48:21] Speaker A: What?
[01:48:23] Speaker B: He reportedly can't walk without oxygen.
[01:48:28] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, Because I know he said he was not. He can't direct anymore because he can't.
[01:48:32] Speaker B: Go on a set anymore.
[01:48:34] Speaker A: Is it emphysema? What is it that he has.
[01:48:35] Speaker B: It is emphysema. Yes. But like a couple hours ago, David lynch says he can hardly walk across a room without oxygen. It's very, very upsetting and does not bode well. He's fucking old, man. He's in his late 70s.
[01:48:50] Speaker A: Yeah. He's done well for someone who has emphysema, you know, it's. It's such a bummer thing to see. It's like one of those consequences of your own actions.
[01:49:00] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:49:01] Speaker A: Kind of things. But, you know, it's still such a bummer.
[01:49:04] Speaker B: To which he's very open about that.
[01:49:06] Speaker A: Yes, he is, absolutely.
It's a thing he talks about.
But, you know, let that there's. I know there's like a new generation of smokers out there, which baffles me. You know, I think millennials are like amongst the like least smoking generation. It's just like, yeah, everybody dies doing that. Just don't do that. And now the youths are back to doing it again. Don't do that.
[01:49:31] Speaker B: No, certainly not.
[01:49:32] Speaker A: Don't do it.
[01:49:33] Speaker B: One, maybe one of the only positive things that our new government has done so far, somebody of Pete's age is never going to be able to legally smoke in this country, which is great.
[01:49:46] Speaker A: Is like, it's banned altogether.
[01:49:50] Speaker B: There's a roadmap in place for cigarettes to become illegal to buy wild.
[01:50:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that works. Now, prohibition is always a tricky slope, so it'll be interesting to see if that does what they want it to do.
But, yeah, they shouldn't exist. They should at least be extremely expensive. Yeah, I think that that's what should be the case is cigarettes should be prohibitively expensive.
[01:50:23] Speaker B: They already are. But I'd go further. I think there's no reason for them to be around. I mean, if we're talking like.
[01:50:30] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it'd be great if they didn't. I just think, you know, they will whether they ban them or not.
And yeah, you never know what's gonna happen when you fully do prohibition with something. Yeah, always a little sketchy, especially because it's not like the rest of Europe is going to prohibit cigarettes.
[01:50:48] Speaker B: No, that's a great point. So, yeah, of course it's instant black market, isn't it? Of course.
[01:50:53] Speaker A: Right.
[01:50:54] Speaker B: Black market for cigarettes already exists, you.
[01:50:58] Speaker A: Know, it's a black market for all things, I suppose, you know, so, yeah, we'll see where. See where that goes.
[01:51:03] Speaker B: But yes, yes, yes.
[01:51:04] Speaker A: You know, just don't do it.
[01:51:06] Speaker B: Yeah, just don't.
[01:51:07] Speaker A: There's no benefits.
[01:51:09] Speaker B: It's far more fun ways of killing yourself over periods of time, you know.
[01:51:14] Speaker A: Precisely where you don't end up hobbling around on oxygen all the time, you know.
[01:51:20] Speaker B: You know, I think David lynch would say the same. I said this after Tony Todd last week. This it's just going to keep happening now, isn't it, really?
[01:51:29] Speaker A: Yeah. Really worrying the legends, especially, like, you know, we're coming from a generation that like, a lot of them figured out how to get their lives right and stop a lot of their worst habits. But they did. They were guys who lived at a hard, hard living time, hard drinking, hard drugging, all of that kind of stuff.
And so, you know, anyone who's still kicking is doing very well considering what they probably did to their bodies in their younger years.
[01:51:59] Speaker B: Yep.
[01:52:00] Speaker A: I just kind of hope that they.
[01:52:02] Speaker B: Keep going, you know, it's the root cause of my. The reason I exercise so much these days and why I don't drink. And I'm pretty much a teetotal straight edge at the moment. Yeah. And that's why. Repair some damage.
[01:52:17] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. It's all, you know, we gotta do what we can to fight what we did to our bodies when we thought we were invincible.
[01:52:23] Speaker B: We sure do.
[01:52:26] Speaker A: Friends. None of us are invincible. None of us are safe.
You never know when a scavenger is going to bite out your ass, eat your rectum.
[01:52:38] Speaker B: Rectum. So I barely knew him.
[01:52:44] Speaker A: So have a great week, everybody. Thanks for joining us. Once again as we, you know, sprint towards the holidays, what did we ask people to. Oh, if you have a holiday reading, I'd like.
[01:52:56] Speaker B: Yeah. If you've got a short story or a piece of prose or anything that you'd like me to read for a Christmas spooky reading, send it my way. Because I'd love to do that. If you have any more compelling ideas about the cattle mutilation thing, because I don't.
[01:53:13] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah.
[01:53:13] Speaker B: I'm still not totally convinced it's predators.
The teats, Corey. The teats and the anus.
[01:53:19] Speaker A: The teats. Teats are soft. Have you ever felt a teat?
[01:53:23] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:53:26] Speaker A: So that took too long to answer.
Yeah, I know. I've definitely for all felt a te before.
You know what? Go ahead and stay spooky. Yes.
