Ep. 208: the skyjacker & the claims adjuster

[00:00:04] Speaker A: What you got for us, Corrigan? [00:00:05] Speaker B: Well, today, Mark, I'm going to hit you with a bit of a classic that came to mind this week for, you know, no reason. Just. Just came to me. [00:00:20] Speaker A: Apropos of nothing. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Apropos of absolutely nothing. Just a thought. And this story takes us back to 1971, but we're gonna start just a little later than that and we'll go back. Okay. We're gonna start in 1980. [00:00:40] Speaker A: Good year. [00:00:42] Speaker B: Good year. Probably. I don't know, I wasn't there. [00:00:45] Speaker A: I was. [00:00:46] Speaker B: You were there. You were a wee little toddling. [00:00:50] Speaker A: Toddle, that's right. Yep. [00:00:52] Speaker B: You're an end of the year baby. So, like you're barely even toddler at that point. [00:00:55] Speaker A: That's right. Toddling, actually. [00:00:58] Speaker B: Ooh. [00:01:00] Speaker A: End of 1980. [00:01:02] Speaker B: Beginning of 1980. [00:01:03] Speaker A: Sorry. Beginning of 1980. So end of 1978, I was born. That would have been just before my accident. [00:01:13] Speaker B: Oh, when all your skin was in the place. [00:01:16] Speaker A: It was all my skin growing in the right places. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Oh, fascinating. When was, when was your accident? [00:01:23] Speaker A: I seem. I believe I was 18 months or thereabouts. [00:01:27] Speaker B: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. We are like in the zone. [00:01:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. Any day now. [00:01:32] Speaker B: Any day now, Mark is going to have an accident, so not. So that will lead to him eventually growing hair in weird Brundlefly. [00:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Mundane. Brundlefly, mundle, fly. Thank you. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Continue. [00:01:50] Speaker B: So February 10, 1988, year old Brian Ingram and his family decided to do what surely thousands and thousands of Pacific Northwest families have done before them and go on a little camping trip on the Washington side of the Columbia River. [00:02:07] Speaker A: Nice little fishing, you know. [00:02:09] Speaker B: Yeah, probably just the little marshmallows, some s'mores, all that jazz. [00:02:15] Speaker A: Chewing on a wheat of barley. [00:02:19] Speaker B: A wheat of barley, A sheaf of barley, A whole sheep mouthful of barley. [00:02:27] Speaker A: What's an individual? A blade of barley? [00:02:31] Speaker B: I don't know. I think, I think maybe country life is outside of both of our experience. [00:02:40] Speaker A: Clearly starting to feel that way. [00:02:42] Speaker B: It's starting to feel like maybe we don't have a handle on that, but either way, this is the Columbia River. We're not talking about like the middle of Idaho here whittling a corn cob. This is coastal, I guess, not coastal kind of coastal. We're talking about Washington. Washington state. [00:03:01] Speaker A: Okay. [00:03:02] Speaker B: West coast of the United States. [00:03:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:04] Speaker B: And little Brian was given the task of smoothing out some sand in preparation for a campfire. Again, surely, like many children before him, but Brian's campfire prep would not unfold in the usual way. He came across three packs of rubber band bound $20 bills, all in a state of deterioration, having clearly been there for a while. In total, it came out to $5,800. [00:03:34] Speaker A: Holy shit. [00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a lot of. A lot of money for a kid rather than. Yeah, especially for a kid sitting there with his rake in 1980. Yeah. And rather than try to go on a shopping spree with this buried cash, he and his family figured out there might be something a little iffy here. So they took it to the FBI, who, upon inspection, realized that this young boy had turned up the only money ever to be recovered from the notorious skyjacking carried out nearly a decade earlier by a man known as D.B. cooper. [00:04:09] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That name rings bells. Have you ever. Have you ever come across, like, a windfall like that? Have you ever found cash? [00:04:19] Speaker B: Sort of. One time. I mean, it was our own money, technically, but one time, there's, like, these state claims, things where, like, you know, if you had, like, money somewhere that you didn't know about, like, you were owed money from something. [00:04:36] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:04:37] Speaker B: Like, you can look it up for your state and see what's there. And so, like, everyone was doing this. Like, this was 2012. [00:04:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:04:45] Speaker B: And everybody was looking up, like, oh, there was, like, you know, $50 from a class action suit in there. There was, you know, 75 bucks that I was owed by a landlord or whatever. And we looked, and there was $8,000 in it from, like, some random, like, pension type thing that Keough had received when he worked at the department of ed. Beautiful. [00:05:06] Speaker A: Beautiful. [00:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah. We took it and we spent the summer in Northern Ireland. [00:05:11] Speaker A: Oh, excellent. That's good. [00:05:12] Speaker B: That's really good. [00:05:13] Speaker A: That's a lovely story. [00:05:15] Speaker B: What about you? Have you ever come across something like that? [00:05:17] Speaker A: I will never forget finding two tenners on the floor once when I was a kid. [00:05:24] Speaker B: I should have let you go first. [00:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah. Two tenners. I was a kid and I just pocketed it. And I will never forget just looking and squinting and it's. Two tenners had it away. I'm not going to admit the second time I came across money because it's really horrible and I regret what I did. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:05:53] Speaker A: Okay. I got some cash out of a. An insurance miss selling kind of thing Again, you'd call it a lawsuit. But there was a court case that was brought against several credit card companies back in the 2000s, early 2000s, and I was wronged, apparently without even realizing it. And I got a love when that happens. Got a couple of G's out of that. That was good. [00:06:16] Speaker B: Hey, that's pretty good. I feel like usually when it comes to those, like, class action suits, it's like, oh, yay, I got, you know, $1.73. But I do have a friend who, like, as a hobby for a while, he would just fill out. He would look up what are the current class action suits, and he would just fill out the forms. Just because most things like you do qualify for in some way. You know, they're, like, so vague that it's like, if you used this website, you know, anytime in this 17 years, you know, anything like that, and, you know, a lot of times it would be like these really small checks. But I think over the course of, you know, the five years he was doing this, he got, like, several grand from filling out these things. [00:07:00] Speaker A: That one in particular, I mean, in the. In the 2000s, I lived my life bouncing between credit cards, just boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. So, yeah, that's why that one paid off for me so well, because fucking hell, I gave them enough for my money. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:07:20] Speaker B: That's the thing. I'm very glad that, like, I didn't even get a credit card till I got a credit card when I was 21, because you can't rent a rental car until you're 25 here. Unless, like, some credit cards will, like, cover insurance for it or whatever, and you can get around it. So I was going on a road trip with a friend, and I got a credit card for that, and then I never used it again. So thankfully, I escaped the, like, you know, 20s credit card chaos that a lot of people go through. I just have student loans instead. [00:07:52] Speaker A: Yes. [00:07:53] Speaker B: But anyways. [00:07:54] Speaker A: Anyway, I apologize. What was the kid's name again? [00:07:57] Speaker B: His name's Brian Ingram. [00:07:58] Speaker A: Eight years old, and he found a couple of bands. [00:08:01] Speaker B: Found, yes. These. This money that it was found belonged to DB Cooper. Now, I'm not gonna ask you what you know about DB Cooper. I'm obviously gonna go into this. But you're familiar with DB Cooper in. [00:08:16] Speaker A: The broadest tombs, Giza fucking jumped off a plane and vanished. [00:08:22] Speaker B: Perfect. [00:08:22] Speaker A: Yes. [00:08:23] Speaker B: Great. [00:08:23] Speaker A: There you go. [00:08:24] Speaker B: And I think. I think generally people know that much about DB Cooper, but I'm gonna delve a little further into it, if you'll permit me, please. Yeah. So, first of all, DB Cooper is a misnomer of a pseudonym, of course. Two layers of. Not this guy's real name. [00:08:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:08:47] Speaker B: DB Cooper is the name accidentally given by mistaken Media reports about a man who, for a brief moment in time, called himself Dan Cooper. And I will get into how that happened a little bit later. But Dan Cooper was responsible for the only unsolved hijacking in American history, which is kind of a bananas fact. Like, the only unsolved hijacking ever. That's crazy. [00:09:15] Speaker A: I don't know. That doesn't ring particularly crazy to me. Because hijacking can't be common, right? [00:09:22] Speaker B: Exactly. And it would be hard to get away with hijacking. [00:09:24] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. Yes. [00:09:26] Speaker B: They didn't have our modern TSA back then, but you would have to be able to get on a plane in a disguise that made you unrecognizable, but not to the point where they were like, hey, bub, why are you in disguise? [00:09:36] Speaker A: Exactly. What's with those glasses? With the nose? [00:09:40] Speaker B: Yeah, that mustache looks glued on. Sir, can we talk about it? [00:09:43] Speaker A: Yeah, just step out of line, please, sir. [00:09:48] Speaker B: You'd have to manage to get away with it without anyone seeing you and going, I saw a dude fly out of a plane, land over here and drive off that away. You'd have to manage to have no one on the plane try to fight you or shove you out the door. So if you got Mark Wahlberg on that plane, it's all over, bud. [00:10:02] Speaker A: You're cooked, Wesley Snipes cooked. [00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah. No, not happening. Yeah. So, yeah, like you said, it's not necessarily like. Like, obviously it's hard to hijack a plane and get away with it, but. [00:10:13] Speaker A: Post 9 11, I think everyone felt as though. I know I did. That had they been on that plane, things would have gone different. [00:10:23] Speaker B: I had never had that thought. I don't think everyone had that thought. I think. I think that is a very. I think, male thought. [00:10:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think every man listening to this has at one point weighed up how they would have reacted were they on one of those planes. And many of us would, in my case, rightfully have come to the conclusion that it would have shaken out quite differently had we just. Had we been up there. [00:10:52] Speaker B: Mmm. Yeah. Well, unfortunately, would that this desk were a time desk, but we cannot go back and see how you would have handled that. What a world it would be. What a world. But it is hard to hijack planes. I just think it's interesting to have, like, a crime that no one else has managed to get away with. [00:11:15] Speaker A: I love that. Personally, I think that's beautiful. It's, you know, just enigmatic. Loads of unanswered questions. What ifs? I love that. [00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll come back around to that because, you know, I don't. But it's the day before Thanksgiving in 1971 when Cooper makes his way into Portland International Airport and buys a ticket to Seattle Tacoma Airport. Or as my brain and anyone else here who lives in the Pacific Northwest would process it, he bought a ticket from PDX to SeaTac. It's a short flight these days, about 40 minutes, I'm sure. Not much longer at the time. And as such, we're talking about, you know, a fairly small plane, not like a huge. There's 36 passengers on Cooper's flight that day. [00:12:03] Speaker A: Your mic is kind of noisy. Is something rubbing against your mic? [00:12:06] Speaker B: Ooh, is it? [00:12:10] Speaker A: I think it might have been the cable for your earphones. [00:12:13] Speaker B: Oh, do you think? Yeah, let's see. Let's. Let's move some stuff around here. How we. How we doing? Does that sound any better? Hello. Hello. Hello. [00:12:22] Speaker A: That does sound better. Thank you. [00:12:23] Speaker B: Okay, good. Thank you for that. [00:12:25] Speaker A: Are you not impressed? [00:12:26] Speaker B: I'm very impressed. Thank you very much, Mr. Lewis. Okay, so 36 passengers on Cooper's flight that day, plus the pilot, Captain. Captain William Scott. First Officer Bob Ratichak. [00:12:43] Speaker A: 36 passengers. So quite a small aircraft, right? [00:12:47] Speaker B: Exactly. Like I said, 40 minute flights. [00:12:49] Speaker A: That makes a difference. [00:12:50] Speaker B: That makes a difference. Yeah. Not a huge fight. Yeah. Flight engineer H.E. anderson and two flight attendants, Tina Mucklow and Florence Schaffner. The takeoff time was 4:35pm and the ticket cost Cooper a cool $20. [00:13:04] Speaker A: Good God. And that's, you know, within our lifetimes. Within my lifetime at least. That's fucking mad. [00:13:12] Speaker B: This is before you. This is 1971. [00:13:14] Speaker A: Okay. Okay. Yeah, that was. That was probably a detail that you pass along. [00:13:18] Speaker B: I did sit. It does seem low though. I know that like when like flying started, flights were exorbitant and actually the like, what we pay for them is comparatively low because it used to be that there was. Huh. [00:13:36] Speaker A: They kind of went like that so super high. Dipped and then back up. [00:13:40] Speaker B: Well, it used to be that there was like a federal. At least for the United States. I don't know about, you know, the UK or anything like that, but there was a federal minimum price that flights had to be and it was extremely high. And so once they took that regulation off, flight prices plummeted. So if we were still at like the same level that they were at that point, we would be paying like thousands of dollars every time we got on a plane. So I'm assuming this is after that. [00:14:08] Speaker A: Regulation is a wonderful piece of knowledge for me. Thank you. Even that, because I don't. I have no idea if there was a similar setup in the uk. I don't believe there was. Yeah. [00:14:21] Speaker B: I don't even know why I know that. It's just one of those random things I've come across in my travels, I guess. [00:14:28] Speaker A: Is that. Is it a fuel thing? Is it an engineering thing? Is it what? [00:14:34] Speaker B: I don't think so. That I would have to look into more. I don't remember what the, like, reason that they had behind that was. It's a very strange rule. Normally when it comes to the government regulating prices, they're trying to put a cap exactly on them rather than a minimum. So, yeah, I'd have to look into. I don't remember what the reasoning for that was. I just remember that that is a thing. [00:14:54] Speaker A: When would that have been lifted, Corgan? [00:14:56] Speaker B: Well, obviously before 1971. Yeah. Clearly, if he was getting on a plane for 20 bucks, it was, you know, fairly cost efficient. I'm sure that's probably the equivalent of like, what, like 150 or something like that now. Um, but. So he gets on, he boards the plane wearing a suit and tie, which was the style at the time. And no one's hackles were up. Just a normal guy on a normal flight. That is, until shortly after takeoff when Cooper handed flight attendant Schaffner a note. Now, according to the crime Museum, it was apparently pretty common for dudes to slip flight attendants their digits or hotel room numbers. [00:15:37] Speaker A: Oh, I bet. [00:15:38] Speaker B: So, yeah. What a horrible time to be a flight attendant. Hard pass. And as such, Shaffner was like, yeah, great, thanks, sir. And tucked it into her pocket without looking at it, which is very funny. Can you imagine? You're, like, trying to commit a crime, and she just doesn't look at the note. Like, this is a big hitch in the plan. Yeah, just like, off, dude. So Cooper was like, the. And called her back over, beckoning her to, you know, come in close. And he said that she'd better read the note and gave a nod towards his suitcase, telling her that there was a bomb in there. So realizing that there was actually something worse than another rando trying to get his rocks off going on here, she made her way to the plane's galley, where she read the note and then showed it to another flight attendant. They then went together to the cockpit to show the pilot, who immediately called air traffic control. The exact wording of the note is not known, as Cooper insisted that the flight attendant return it to him. But what we do know Is. It was handwritten. It demanded $200,000 and two parachutes delivered upon arrival at SeaTac. And it included the phrase, no funny business. [00:16:53] Speaker A: Oh, perfect. [00:16:55] Speaker B: Right? Everyone remembers that last part for sure. And I love that. It's. It's like he was. You know, it's written like he was a crooked cop in a film noir. [00:17:04] Speaker A: Like a Dick Tracy villain. [00:17:05] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, it's so perfect. [00:17:07] Speaker A: Yeah. Was he expecting the money? Like in. In the plane? Was he expecting. [00:17:13] Speaker B: I'll get to that. [00:17:14] Speaker A: Okay. [00:17:17] Speaker B: Just gonna throw it, see how it gets there. He was very specific about how he wanted that $200,000 divvied up. He wanted it in increments of $20, which would weigh approximately 21 pounds. If they used anything smaller, the added weight could be a hazard when he jumped out of the plane. And larger denominations would weigh less, but would also be harder to spend because in 1971, everyone wasn't walking around dropping hundos all over the place. Would have been a lot of money. And as we all know from countless movies, he asked for the serial numbers of the bills to be non sequential to make them harder to trace. [00:18:00] Speaker A: Of course, any fool knows that. [00:18:02] Speaker B: Everyone knows this. This is robbing shit. 101. [00:18:06] Speaker A: Yep. [00:18:07] Speaker B: So they did that. But the FBI did make sure that all of the serial numbers began with the letter L. Okay? So air traffic control calls the cops, and the cops call the FBI, who then call the president of the airline who's like, you know what? Give this guy what he wants. I'm not in the mood to deal with whatever bad publicity is gonna come if he offs somebody because we didn't give him the dough. Just reasonable, you know, an airline can afford $200,000 not to have someone die on their plane. [00:18:37] Speaker A: Yep. [00:18:39] Speaker B: So Schaffner goes back to Cooper to tell him what's going on. And for good measure, Cooper opens up his briefcase and he's like, hey, look at all these wires. And, ooh, is this dynamite? Maybe. If you don't want to find out, go tell the pilot that he needs to keep the plane in the air until the money and the parachutes are ready to go. So she tells the pilot, and he announces over the intercom to the passengers, who have zero idea any of this is happening, that they're going to have to circle for a bit due to mechanical problems, which, honestly, for me, like, I would rather you tell me this plane is hijacked. I do not want to hear about mechanical problems. Tell me there's, like, a stubborn flock of pigeons on the tarmac or something. But if you're trying to keep me from panicking, mechanical problems is not the move. I just wouldn't have done it. But that's what they did. And who am I to criticize the methods of a pilot who thinks there's a whole ass bomb on the plane? You know, he's. He's thinking as quick as he can. So the FBI was able to get the money, no sweat. But the parachutes were a little more work. You see, Cooper was insistent that these be civilian parachutes, not military ones. And initially rejected ones offered by McChord Air Force Base. Civilian parachutes open with user operated ripcords, whereas military ones are automatic. You jump from the plane, whoosh, there's your parachute. They did consider giving him dummy parachutes, but since he'd asked for two, they figured he might plan to take a hostage with him. And they couldn't risk letting a civilian plummet to their death if that was the case. So they had to find working civilian parachutes. So finally, the cops managed to get the owner of a skydiving school to provide them with four parachutes. And we will very much come back to this, so please keep that in mind. They get four parachutes that they buy from a skydiving school. Important detail. [00:20:44] Speaker A: The logistics are baffling me a little. [00:20:46] Speaker B: Okay, go ahead. [00:20:49] Speaker A: How would they deliver those parachutes to the plane in the air? [00:20:52] Speaker B: We'll get there. [00:20:53] Speaker A: Okay, good. [00:20:54] Speaker B: They're not gonna get there. [00:20:54] Speaker A: See? And I know that we will. I know that we'll get there. We always get there. [00:20:58] Speaker B: I can see how that would be confusing, but we will. Yeah. They're not gonna deliver it. [00:21:02] Speaker A: We always get there. [00:21:04] Speaker B: We do always get there. If we don't get there, something has gone horribly awry in my telling of this story. You have to start questioning if I've been body snatched. [00:21:13] Speaker A: Yes, Corrigan. [00:21:15] Speaker B: Shit. Like the time of you. Like the time you the. I said a few weeks ago, like for some reason as like a throwaway line and something you were like. Now hold on, whoa. You don't say for some reason because I'm coming back to it. Okay, so 5:24pm everything is assembled on the ground. They've got the cash and the chutes and those folks on the ground radio the captain like, let's fucking go bring that bad boy in. So they land the plane, but Cooper has them taxi the plane away from the. What you just did with your eyes was horrifying. [00:21:56] Speaker A: Sorry. [00:21:56] Speaker B: I wish you hadn't done it. Marcus just rubbed his Eyes vigorously to the point where it's, like, a little bit bloodshot. And then rolled it just the one eye like you were rolling it. And, like, how you put your contact lens into, like, the solution and roll it around. That's what it looked like you did with your eyeball. And it was horrifying. Good. But anyways, Cooper has them taxi the plane away from the terminal to a spot that was remote but also well lit. [00:22:33] Speaker A: Right. So his plan was to land and have them take back off. Land, grab the shit, and take back off and go. [00:22:40] Speaker B: Right. So he had them dim the cabin lights and said that no vehicle was to approach the plane and that the person bringing his treasure was to arrive by themself. Now, this is a little confusing. I don't know how this worked, but despite the fact that he said, no one can drive anything up here, the money in the parachute arrived via an unaccompanied Northwest Airlines employee who drove up in some sort of company vehicle. The flight attendant Mucklow, lowered the stairs, and the employee carried in the parachutes in a large bank bag full of cash. While it's not totally clear when they were informed, it's safe to say the passengers realized at this point that something unusual was happening and that they were being held hostage. But Cooper released them and flight attendant Schaffner once all that booty was loaded onto the plane. But he kept flight attendant Mucklow and the rest of the flight crew on board. And I love this little detail here. The FAA radioed and was like, hey, can you ask Cooper if we can come on board? We want to tell him about the dangers and consequences of air piracy. [00:23:47] Speaker A: We just want to talk. [00:23:49] Speaker B: We just want to talk. This man clearly planned this ahead of time, but they wanted to come give him a little PSA beforehand in case he hadn't considered that, like, you might get in trouble for this. [00:23:58] Speaker A: No, that's, you know, kind of them. [00:24:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it was really nice. Like, hey, bud, you don't. You don't gotta do this. Yeah. Needless to say, he declined their offer. So Cooper starts giving instructions. He has the flight attendant get comfortable with operating the aft stairs while in flight, which she thought you could not do. He tells the crew to keep the plane below 10,000ft and to keep airspeed below 150 knots. An easy dive for a skydiver who knows what he's doing. According to sources, it was clear that Cooper was very familiar with skydiving and with the Boeing 727 100, and thus he knew that this Plane could fly low and slow perfectly safely. He said that he wanted to go to Mexico City, but the pilot told him that they couldn't make that far. Make it that far on a tank of gas. So they agreed that they'd stop in Reno, Nevada to refuel. He also insisted that they refuel before they leave. But again, knowing a shit ton about the plane, he noticed that it was actually taking too damn long. He literally knew, like, this plane can do X amount of gallons in X amount of minutes. And now it's been 15 minutes. We should be done by now. So suspecting a stalling technique was being used here, he was like, time's up, bitches. Let's go. So he and the, and the captain worked out a route that would work. And finally, Cooper insisted that the cabin be depressurized so that when the aft stairs were lowered, there would be a. There would not be a sudden gust of wind that would crash the plane or suck him out the door unprepared. [00:25:30] Speaker A: Okay, okay. Okay. [00:25:32] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. He really knew what he was doing here. What? [00:25:36] Speaker A: Where my head went there. Have you read the Stephen King short the Langoliers, which was made into that fucking awful movie? [00:25:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen the movie. I've never read it. [00:25:49] Speaker A: The. Unusually for Stephen King, it's got a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant ending whereby they. They figure out that when you go through this fucking portal, only the people who are asleep wake up on the other side. You have to be unconscious or you get langolier fied. So they depressurize the cabin to knock everyone out so that they're asleep when they go through the portal and to the side. And I was wondering if Cooper had the same idea. [00:26:23] Speaker B: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. [00:26:24] Speaker A: That would have been better. [00:26:25] Speaker B: That would not have benefited him in this case. There was no portal or langoliers here. That would have just knocked them out. [00:26:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:26:35] Speaker B: The idea was simply at 10,000ft, you can deal with the pressure. It's not going to do anything to you. Okay. And so, you know, getting to that height, he could keep the cabin depressurized and thus not deal with the effects of opening a pressurized cabin into a non pressurized outside. [00:26:56] Speaker A: He would have been violently sucked off. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Precisely that. So everything set? He told the crew to hang out in the cockpit. At this point, there were obviously no cameras and there wasn't even a peephole from the cockpit into the rest of the plane. So between 7.46pm when the plane took off and 8pm, none of them had a clue what Cooper was up to back there. At 8pm a light went off indicating that a door was open. And the pilot asked over the intercom if Cooper needed anything. He responded with an angry no, which is also, I just like the idea of him being grumpy about it. [00:27:36] Speaker A: Well, he's, he's, he's seen that there is indeed funny business. [00:27:40] Speaker B: Yeah, there's been funny business happening. And he specifically requested a lack of funny business. So, you know, can you fault him? Nope. They heard nothing else from him. And at 8:24, quote, the jet genuflected as the nose dipped first, followed by a correcting dip in the tail end. Scott made sure to note the spot where the dip took place, 25 miles north of Portland, near the Lewis River. At that point, they figured that that had happened because the aft stairs had been lowered and Cooper had jumped. Though of course they didn't check because they weren't supposed to go back there. So when the plane landed In Reno at 10:15, they gave it a little cursory shout to make sure that he wasn't back there. And then they opened the cockpit to find Cooper and the money gone. The only trace left being the second parachute, which he'd left behind. And for what it's worth, authorities had tried to follow him on this. Like we've all seen hijacking movies and there's always, like, planes flanking both sides of the aircraft. [00:28:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, sure, sure, sure. [00:28:43] Speaker B: Shoot it down or whatever, you know. But as I mentioned, Cooper had specifically picked that plane for these specific reasons, including that low and slow flight ability. Not all planes can do that. And the F1, F106 fighter jets the cops attempted are just such planes. They're built for high speeds of up to 1500 miles per hour. They couldn't hang with this crawling Boeing. [00:29:10] Speaker A: And he knew that, and he knew that. That's fucking great. [00:29:14] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah, right. It's bananas. So they went and they got a Lockheed T33 from the Air National Guard. But ironically enough, it wasn't fast enough to catch up with the Boeing before. Cooper had already made his leap. [00:29:31] Speaker A: So they went back to check on him, and he'd already gone. He'd already jumped. [00:29:33] Speaker B: He was gone. Yep. Indeed. So for weeks, police searched for any sign of Cooper in the vicinity of where the captain thought that he had jumped. They turned up nothing at all. They even ran a search for Dan Cooper in the criminal records in case, for some reason, he'd decided to do the crime under his real name. They turned up a Man From Oregon named D.B. cooper, but cleared him pretty much immediately. Not before, of course, someone from the press got hold of the name of this person of interest and published it, which was then repeated by another reporter and another, until the fugitive's name became, for all perpetuity, DB Cooper. [00:30:19] Speaker A: So not only is it, like you said, not only is it not his name, it's not even the name that wasn't his. [00:30:24] Speaker B: Fake. That's even his fake name. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cool. [00:30:27] Speaker B: It's straight up not the guy. [00:30:29] Speaker A: And yet is now folklore. [00:30:31] Speaker B: Yes. Even the police began referring to him as DB Eventually. Awesome just caught on. [00:30:38] Speaker A: Whole story is awesome. [00:30:39] Speaker B: I know, right? So charges were filed in 1976, and until little Brian Ingram turned up that money on the beach in 1980, there was literally nothing to go on. They had never found one single clue until that day. But even with the money, there's only more questions. If the money wasn't with him, did that mean he'd perished after jumping? Had he buried it there and not come back for it? [00:31:07] Speaker A: Yeah, Little Brian didn't find the whole stash, did he? [00:31:10] Speaker B: No, just $5,800, man. [00:31:14] Speaker A: That does raise more questions. [00:31:16] Speaker B: It does raise more questions, right? It's not all of it, you know, how did it get there? Like, did he bear it? Did it land? Did it land there? Did it land somewhere else and wash up there because of the currents? Like, there's. It just. It just opens up. [00:31:31] Speaker A: See, not. Not knowing this story, really, I'd. I kind of always. What was. Was the story. I never even knew that this was a real event. I mean, for me, DB Cooper might as well have been like the Mothman. [00:31:46] Speaker B: Of the whole folkloric. [00:31:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:31:48] Speaker B: Exactly 100%. But this did. This did happen. Real guy really did happen. A YouTuber dedicated to the case actually reenacted his jump, and he found that there was basically no way Cooper could have held on to that money. It would have been ripped from his arms pretty much immediately. So, decades later, it's safe to say that finding the money tells us little about Cooper himself's fate. He probably just lost hold of it immediately. So whether he survived or not is not really indicated by finding the money. Right? So, like any notorious criminal, people have come out of the woodwork with their theories. All sorts of people have claimed, oh, it was my dad or it was my uncle or my co worker. And in 2016, the FBI announced they weren't going to invest any more resource resources into actively trying to solve this case. [00:32:43] Speaker A: In 2016, in fact. [00:32:45] Speaker B: 2016. Yes. And they were pretty sure he didn't survive the jump. And all these years, they'd been just chasing a ghost. But now you know that cold cases are your bag, not mine. [00:33:00] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:33:01] Speaker B: I don't like a mystery. I want to know what happened. It drives me up the wall that we can put bajillions of dollars into solving something and somehow no one can find anything to provide a solution. [00:33:12] Speaker A: Yeah. I love being tantalized by something like that. I love the possibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:33:19] Speaker B: I am not into it. There's so many of us. There's only so many of us on the planet, especially in any given region of it. How can people slip from under our noses? [00:33:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:28] Speaker B: But given that aversion to mysteries, you might wonder, Corrigan, why on earth would you talk about the only unsolved hijacking ever to occur in all of American history? And the answer to that is that we might. Might actually have finally cracked it once and for all. Maybe. So you remember what I told you about the parachute, Mark? [00:33:54] Speaker A: Came from a diving school. Came from a skydiving school. [00:33:58] Speaker B: Came from a skydiving school. Right. Parachutes had been purchased from a skydiving instructor because Cooper specifically wanted civilian chutes, and that's the only place that they could find them in a pinch. The man who provided those shoots was named Earl Cossey. And one of the parachutes that he'd given them was very distinct. And he's talked about it many times over the years. He's dead now, but for years, giving interviews, he explained what this shoot was like. It had been. Was that your belly? [00:34:31] Speaker A: It was. Did that come across? [00:34:33] Speaker B: It did come across. That was a good growl, yo. Anyways, there was a brief moment where I was like, was that my belly? And then I was like, that wasn't me. [00:34:46] Speaker A: It's amazing you hear that from across the world. [00:34:49] Speaker B: Zoom didn't even cut it out, which it normally does. So the man who provided those shoots was named Earl Cossey. It had been a military standard rig, altered to be a sport parachute. As I mentioned, military parachutes are automatic. [00:35:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:35:09] Speaker B: They open when you jump. [00:35:10] Speaker A: Yep. [00:35:11] Speaker B: A sport parachute is user operated in order. In order to mortify, in order to modify one to the other, Causey had moved the ripcord handle from the left to the right side. He had also cut the straps and added D ring attachments and enlarged what's called the pack tray to hold a larger parachute. And all of this had been done with poorly executed stitching. All of this makes this parachute, basically one of a kind. This is the only one that he made like this. So we Fast forward to2022. The aforementioned Cooper obsessed YouTuber I mentioned earlier, Dan Grider, who had emulated the jump drops by the property of the family of a man named Richard McCoy II. Greider, who has been researching Cooper for 20 years, has been convinced for ages that McCoy was indeed D.B. cooper. Why? Well, first and foremost, McCoy pulled off almost the exact same heist just a few months after Cooper. McCoy had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, a decorated one, having received an Army Commendation Medal and a Distinguished Flying Cross. But like many of the guys who came back from that war, he came back with issues. Central among them was debilitating migraines. And while suffering the headache, he was supporting a wife and two children, serving in the Utah National Guard, and going to school to try to finish his criminal justice degree before the cutoff Age of 30 to join law enforcement. He was also a Mormon and as close to a pacifist as you can get for a guy who definitely killed people in war. He wrote of his struggles to do the deed, which his daughter considers to be evidence that in his hijacking or hijackings, the weapons he carried were never meant to be used. They were just props to get his way. His daughter also believes that McCoy had become even more desperate after being diagnosed with a brain tumor, which would have meant a loss of his FAA license and the end of his law enforcement aspirations. So In April of 1972, just five months after the skyjacking committed by D.B. cooper, McCoy hijacked a United Airlines flight above Provo, Utah, asking for half a million dollars and four parachutes, disguised in a wig, fake mustache, and aviators, and threatening the crew with empty weapons. [00:37:48] Speaker A: See, none of this is part of the DB Cooper folklore. [00:37:52] Speaker B: I mean, that's pretty much exactly what he did the other time. He asked for money, he asked for parachutes. [00:37:59] Speaker A: That's what I mean, the fact that somebody. Somebody did exactly the same thing a few months later. [00:38:05] Speaker B: Exactly. Like I said, like, there's, you know, all these different, like, theories, right? And he's just one of the many people that people have been like, I think that guy did it. And other people have been like, there's no way. Including, like, I was reading one of them. And it was like, people said it couldn't be him because the description of the guy was, like, a guy in, like, his 40s. And at this point, McCoy was, like, 29. But, I mean, there's no reason to Think he couldn't have faked that? You know, like, there's plenty of ways you can carry yourself or, you know, put some powder in your hair or something like that. Make yourself look older than you are. [00:38:44] Speaker A: Yes. [00:38:46] Speaker B: So, yeah, but this is stuff you don't usually hear about, that a guy did exactly the same thing right after this happened. So he survived the dive and he made off with the money. But this is a bizarre coincidence, considering what we're about to talk about today. But he was captured after an employee at a hamburger stand reported selling him a milkshake. Kind of interesting. Anyways, he was sentenced to 45 years in prison, but he broke out with three other inmates. [00:39:23] Speaker A: God. What? [00:39:23] Speaker B: While the other guy. I know, right? Good grief. While the other two were caught and returned to jail within days, McCoy was killed by FBA agents, FBI agents in Virginia three months later. So he managed three months on the lam and then was killed in a shootout with the FBI. So that's compelling, right? Pretty much the same crime successfully committed, but he was busted for it. And there's more to all of this. I'm gonna leave out a ton of details here because already this is a seven page intro, but one of this. All these links are going to be on the blog, as usual, for you to delve into it to your heart's desire. [00:40:06] Speaker A: Again. Again, I am driven to comment that our openings are very different. You turn up with seven pages of true crime, I turn up with Grey Poobs. [00:40:18] Speaker B: Sorry, Ebony and Ivory over here. [00:40:21] Speaker A: Very much so. I love it. I love it. [00:40:26] Speaker B: So, yeah, I'm gonna leave out a lot. But another one of the interesting elements is that his family is pretty sure his wife was an accomplice to all of this and that she was also an accomplice to the DB Cooper incident. Like I said, links on the blog. But there are some interesting bits of evidence about faked alibis revealed later and money appearing that couldn't be explained at the time. And the kids didn't really talk about any of this stuff until recently when their mother had died, so that they could be sure that, you know, she couldn't get in trouble for it. So it's 2022, and Grider and his son roll up on the McCoy property to go visit his grave. Currently, the property is being rented by an unrelated party. And that renter gives the Grider permission to poke around the grounds a bit. It's not his stuff. What does he care? [00:41:15] Speaker A: Very generous. [00:41:17] Speaker B: Right. In an outbuilding on the property, Grider stumbles upon some crates and what does he find inside the fucking rig? [00:41:29] Speaker A: The what? [00:41:31] Speaker B: The Kasi rig. The parachute. [00:41:33] Speaker A: Yes. Okay, good. [00:41:34] Speaker B: Yes, the parachute. Allegedly, of course. But according to Grider, there is no mistaking it. And it seems the FBI at least agree to the point where they low key made a trip to the property with a grip of agents to investigate. And this is another detail that I just love because they've kept this under wraps, right? They didn't say anything about reopening the case or anything like that, but they did show up like a month later and take the rig. And meanwhile, Greider and company were watching from afar and recording them on camera. The FBI had no idea he was doing this. He's just sitting there being like, I'm making content for YouTube, happily secretly filming the FBI, the greatest investigative unit in the world, can't turn around and go, does that guy have a camera? Just, oh, beautiful. [00:42:29] Speaker A: I enjoyed your YouTuber voice. [00:42:32] Speaker B: That's what they sound like, YouTube. So according to McCoy's son Rick, the agents told him that the next step might be to exhume McCoy's body and look for DNA. As of November of 2024, that hasn't happened yet. So while, as with everyone suspected of being DB Cooper, there are proponents and naysayers, there's a good chance that this parachute may have finally cracked the case open once and for all. [00:43:05] Speaker A: It sounds very plausible. [00:43:07] Speaker B: It sounds very plausible. And this is all brand new information, by the way. I was like, you know, for no reason, like I said, like, maybe I'll talk about D.B. cooper this week. And then when I started searching, found that all of this had broken at the end of November. So this is all like two weeks old information here. This stuff that's kind of fun. [00:43:28] Speaker A: It feels like this would have made the news. [00:43:31] Speaker B: Well, it was, I mean, it's, it's, it made the news in the sense. [00:43:36] Speaker A: Like, particularly in the online realm. It feels as though I would have seen something about this, right? [00:43:41] Speaker B: Like when I googled it, it's all like, NBC's reported on it, ABC, like all the major networks have articles about it. I watched the news a lot. I never saw anyone do like a report on it, but definitely they've all published stuff about it. I'm sure if the FBI comes out and says like, yes, this was the parachute and we've dug up this body. [00:44:03] Speaker A: And the DNA matches because BTK getting unveiled, unmasked, that made like global news. That was all over the news over here. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think, you know, it's that like they Want to be sure, right? So btk they put on trial. And also, you know, the evidence was on the floppy disk. There was no. There was no. Like, maybe this isn't the guy. I think the FBI doesn't want to say anything about this until they're like, yep, no, we can come out and. And say, this is. This is for sure, DB Cooper. Otherwise, it's just like, there will be more pressure to open the case back up. And they're like, we don't. We're not gonna put these resources to this. There's, like, actual shit to solve. [00:44:48] Speaker A: Yes, they've been busy. [00:44:51] Speaker B: They've been busy, and we're gonna talk about that. [00:44:57] Speaker A: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:45:00] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:45:01] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:45:05] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:45:09] Speaker A: The way I whispered, good sex, cannibal receiver. [00:45:11] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:45:15] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm. I'm gonna leg it. [00:45:21] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:45:24] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. [00:45:29] Speaker B: I'm gonna do the thing again, Mark. [00:45:31] Speaker A: Which thing again? [00:45:33] Speaker B: Yep. Yeah, I. I'm sorry, but I gotta. I gotta just. I gotta. Luigi Manjon, you've gotta stop that. [00:45:45] Speaker A: But you're going to Italy. [00:45:47] Speaker B: I can't. [00:45:48] Speaker A: You'll get. [00:45:49] Speaker B: I can't stop. [00:45:49] Speaker A: Like, Cosa Nostra will vanish. You. [00:45:53] Speaker B: Luigi Mangiori. [00:45:55] Speaker A: I don't like it. I think that's the closest you come to being racial. [00:46:01] Speaker B: Racial, yes. Not racist racial. [00:46:04] Speaker A: No. Racial. Racially questionable impersonation of a protected characteristic. Being Italian is a protected characteristic, and you're pissing all over it. [00:46:15] Speaker B: It's not. Ever since they got Columbus Day. We can make fun of them now. [00:46:19] Speaker A: All right, fine. You know more about that than me. [00:46:23] Speaker B: But we'll get into Luigi Mangione in a few. It's been. It's been a week. That's like a year. [00:46:35] Speaker A: Globally, in terms of world events, it feels as though like someone lay on the fast forward button. [00:46:42] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. [00:46:44] Speaker A: Do you mean like the dog trod on the remote, right? [00:46:47] Speaker B: Like, oh, no, no, don't do it. And the next thing you know, the credits are rolling on civilization. [00:46:53] Speaker A: So what have we had then? What have we had just in the last scant seven days? The fall of a regime. [00:46:59] Speaker B: The Fall. The fall of a regime. The Assad regime in Syria. Yeah, Dunzo. Which is bananas. But also France. [00:47:09] Speaker A: Yes. [00:47:10] Speaker B: France is like collapsing. [00:47:12] Speaker A: Well, certainly. Certainly the French government seems to be in shambles after. [00:47:19] Speaker B: Yeah. Turmoil. [00:47:20] Speaker A: Yeah. A non democratic introduction of a budget wasn't received well, I gather. [00:47:27] Speaker B: Hmm. Yeah. Something of that nature happened there. Martial law declared by the president of South Korea. [00:47:35] Speaker A: Briefly. [00:47:36] Speaker B: Briefly, before the people said, we will have none of this shit. And he went, oh, I'm. I'm very sorry. I didn't mean to anger anyone. [00:47:46] Speaker A: Oh, now you're doing a Korean voice. That's. [00:47:48] Speaker B: How. How is that Korean? [00:47:52] Speaker A: I don't know. It feels like you were inches away from fucking. You were inches away from committing an atrocity. [00:47:58] Speaker B: No, that was supposed to be like a small bean voice, like. Okay, I am so sorry. I didn't mean to. [00:48:04] Speaker A: Okay. I misinterpreted. [00:48:05] Speaker B: Oopsie. [00:48:06] Speaker A: I misinterpreted that. I thought you were about to, you know. [00:48:09] Speaker B: No, no, no. [00:48:10] Speaker A: Really shock me. [00:48:11] Speaker B: Oopsie daisy. [00:48:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. [00:48:13] Speaker B: That was what I did. [00:48:13] Speaker A: I declare martial war. [00:48:16] Speaker B: Exactly. That was. That was what I was aiming for. Apologies to anyone who thought I was suddenly going to do a Korean accent. [00:48:26] Speaker A: Next week. I'm gonna black out. [00:48:27] Speaker B: I genuinely don't even. I don't even know what a Korean accent sounds. [00:48:31] Speaker A: Neither do I. Neither do I. But that felt close. That felt dangerously close. [00:48:37] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. Maybe I'm doing it because I don't know what it sounds like. I've known many Koreans in my life, but. Yeah, well, I mean, I'm from California. [00:48:47] Speaker A: Oh, okay, fine. [00:48:49] Speaker B: So, yeah, there's a lot of Koreans in California, but I feel like either people were like, second generation, you know, they're born and raised there, or. [00:48:59] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah, they were, you know, Koreans from Korean. [00:49:01] Speaker B: I've heard them speak Korean. [00:49:03] Speaker A: Okay, fine. [00:49:04] Speaker B: And not English. All right, now. Yeah, now this is. I'm gonna look up what Koreans sound like after this. But anyway, that happened. And of course, the subject of today's show, Luigi Man Jones. [00:49:20] Speaker A: Ah, yes, allegedly. We'll get there. We always get there. You always get us there. But before we get there, I mean, I would say that I've been doing my best to stay just sensible about it. Right. I can't. I can't go through another billionaire submarine. I can't do it. I can't do it. [00:49:47] Speaker B: Can't take it. [00:49:48] Speaker A: No, I can't. I can't throw myself into the discourse. Like, again, like, I can't. I can't keep throwing myself into the discourse. That's, that's. [00:49:56] Speaker B: Well, I mean, this is. What's so fascinating about this one is that it's less discoursey. That's true. Than the billionaire submarine. It's a very interesting. [00:50:07] Speaker A: Yes. [00:50:08] Speaker B: Situation. [00:50:08] Speaker A: Oh, socially. [00:50:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:11] Speaker A: So fascinating. [00:50:12] Speaker B: Yeah. We'll. [00:50:13] Speaker A: We'll discuss. [00:50:14] Speaker B: This is, you know, it takes a lot for us to break from our. This is not a current events podcast thing, but like the billionaire submarine. Like, it's a. Like what. We're gonna sit here and not talk about it. Like let's, let's be real. So we'll get there. [00:50:30] Speaker A: Yes. In the meantime. And I'll underscore that we aren't a current event podcast. Absolutely not. But we are a podcast, I think, more and more about a world in decline. [00:50:42] Speaker B: Exactly right. And what is chronicling our end times. [00:50:45] Speaker A: 100 million billion percent. And we've, you know, we've seen big, big, big symptoms of this this week. [00:50:53] Speaker B: Yes, definitely. It is, it's quite a thing to watch. You know, just things happening at a rapid clip. [00:51:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:03] Speaker B: And having no idea, you know, where does that take us? Where do we. What's going to happen from this point forward after all of these things A lot up in the air. And, you know, that's the kind of thing that we will obviously revisit with this stuff is how is this going to shake out? Massive instability. [00:51:23] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:51:24] Speaker B: All over the place. So that. That's going on, but in our universe. Just a little heads up, normally we would have book club the third week in every month, the third Saturday of every month. But I will be in Natalia. [00:51:43] Speaker A: Nice. What are you. It's not. Kyo's not working. It's purely a holiday, isn't it? [00:51:49] Speaker B: No, this is, this is a holiday I have somehow sort. We've stumbled into now making a December holiday, like tradition, just sort of by accident. We, we went to Puerto Rico last year because we had like a flight credit to use. And it was like, oh, we got to go somewhere. The flight credit is going to expire. And Puerto Rico is very cheap and easy to get to from here. And so we went to Puerto Rico and then this year. I mean, Keough always has a bajillion airline miles because he travels for work. And I just sort of was like, maybe we should go to Italy this year. And he was like, okay. And so we are going to go to Italy this year and thus will not be here for book club. So the 28th for book club. Our last book club of the year. [00:52:39] Speaker A: And you've. You've grown right You've come a long way because you, you know, there's a version of you that would be fucking trying to put a book club together from Italy. [00:52:49] Speaker B: It's true. That's a really good point. I would. I would be in panic mode. I would be like, can I manage to do this from there? Even though it's going to be like, you know, 1:00am or whatever, do I ask Ryan to cover it and things like that? No, we're just gonna. We're just gonna move it on. Moving on back to the 28th. And hopefully, you know, everyone will have a little time off. [00:53:13] Speaker A: Yes. [00:53:14] Speaker B: Things like that. I mean, it's a Saturday or whatever, but hopefully everyone will be recovering from Christmas or Hanukkah or, you know, whatever the fuck. Nothing. [00:53:22] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:22] Speaker B: But yeah. Yeah. So just keep that in mind if you're a book clubber. 28th this month. We're gonna have a good time. I just wanted to. So I've mentioned that, like, I. You know how I am about New Year's resolutions, right? Yeah, I love a New Year's resolution. Big fan of those. This. This background that I have going on here at certain angles. Makes my hair, like, very Karen looking because it makes it look like, feathery, like a wave, which it is not in real life, but anyways, so, you know, this year, like, my. My 20, 25 resolutions are going to be like, well, you got to prepare. You can't. Like, I have a reason. [00:54:14] Speaker A: I'll get. You'll get there. [00:54:16] Speaker B: I'll get there. Come with me on my journey, Mark. Act like you've been talking to me for the past four and a half years. So my, like, resolutions this coming year are like, more kind of like how I spend my money based and, like, trying to be more responsible to the earth and to, like, you know, being conscious of, like, where I spent my money. [00:54:44] Speaker A: Right. [00:54:45] Speaker B: And so amongst the things that I decided to do was to, like, you know, I switched from Spotify to Deezer. [00:54:54] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:56] Speaker B: However many years ago it was that, you know, that Spotify started being more transparently evil for a while. [00:55:04] Speaker A: For a brief period a few years back, we got free access to Deezer through work. They just gave us all Deezer for free. Yeah. [00:55:12] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. I've been using it and it's literally the exact same thing as Spotify. It pays artists, like, a, you know, fraction of a few cents more than Spotify does and doesn't have, like, the transparently evil, like, people in charge. Right. And so, you know, it's been working for me. Or whatever. But like Spotify and everything else, they've like, raised their prices and I'm like, I don't think artists are getting paid anymore for that, of course. So I decided to switch to Title. It's like they the most. [00:55:53] Speaker A: I see now there's a fucking. There's a. There's an equation there that you've got to work out, isn't there? [00:56:00] Speaker B: There's maybe a bit of an equation. [00:56:04] Speaker A: Like, what I mean is, there's a balance between. [00:56:07] Speaker B: There's a balance here. [00:56:08] Speaker A: Do you want to support artists or do you want to support rapists? [00:56:13] Speaker B: Which this is like, which do you value more Struggle. Right. Which, to be fair, I probably. We probably don't want to know what the people in charge of Spotify have been up to either. Well, yeah, I'm just going to say I don't know if their values are going to match ours either, but. So I decided to switch to Title. And then like, of course, right after doing that, it comes out that, like, oh, BT Dubs, Jay Z is implicated in whatever's happening with P. Diddy. And like, okay, so that's neat. And listen, he doesn't own Title anymore. He's a shareholder. [00:56:55] Speaker A: He's got a stake, doesn't he? [00:56:56] Speaker B: He's got a stake in it, but he doesn't own it. I don't think the owner's great either. From what I can tell. It's like something Jack Dorsey related involved in whoever does own Title. But my, like, calculus here is when it comes to who I'm like, I feel like all of these are owned by evil people. But at least the artists get paid if I use Title. So I'm gonna use an evil corporations thing. At least, you know, it's putting some money in the pockets of the people getting plays. So there's that. But I was also. This has been. It's been quite a day because then I, you know, when you start a new service, yes. It asks you, like, hey, like, what kind of music are you into? And like, it'll give you a list and you choose a few artists or whatever, and it's like, hey, we'll make you some playlists. And so another one of the things that I was interested in for my New Year's resolutions is, you recall last year, my New Year's resolutions was to listen to new album. One new album a week failed miserably. And in fact, I listened to something like 1500less minutes of music, 1500 fewer minutes of music than I did last year. Like, crashed and burned. Oh, no on that. That's like completely. Oh, man. Putting pressure on myself to do that apparently just pushed me away from music further. Or maybe I was just busy. I don't know. [00:58:26] Speaker A: You've summed it up very well there, though. I. I think embracing resolutions like you do is putting undue pressure on yourself. I think that's what that is. [00:58:34] Speaker B: But I wouldn't accomplish the things if I didn't do it. I'm a goal oriented person, so I need a goal in front of me or it disappears. I mean, I don't. I don't do things just on a whim. I have to. I mean, I do do things on a whim, but not goal wise. I need to have the goal. And so I was like, okay, I walk my dog twice a day, like on long walks every day. On Mondays, I will listen to music instead of a podcast. That is an easy, achievable goal. One day a week. Listen to these things. So I, you know, I'm listening today on my walk, just getting a sense of what's it going to be like to listen to music on my walk. And the artists that I had chosen were David Bowie, Ghost, and. What was the third one? David Bowie, Ghost and Outcast. [00:59:22] Speaker A: Okay, right. [00:59:24] Speaker B: I just, you know, they gave me a list of artists and I was like, yeah, sure, that, that and that. Right. I like all three of those. [00:59:29] Speaker A: Yep. [00:59:31] Speaker B: The playlist that they gave me, like, first thing that it gives me is Dost. [00:59:37] Speaker A: Oh, God. [00:59:38] Speaker B: Which? Listen, listen. You listen. [00:59:42] Speaker A: You fucking listen. This isn't you. You know what I mean? Doing funny racial caricatures. Right. Doing funny little Korean racial voices, supporting the rape platform and listening to one of the sex pestiest bands in all of its. [01:00:06] Speaker B: Like, okay, I changed also. [01:00:08] Speaker A: Marilyn Manson's touring, I hear. [01:00:11] Speaker B: Might as well go grab some tickets. I was also, like, it kept playing Iron Maiden on there, which, like, I listened to two of those songs. I was like, I like me some Iron Maiden. I enjoy that. And immediately my Facebook algorithm started trying to sell me Iron Maiden things, which was disconcerting. [01:00:30] Speaker A: What do you say? [01:00:31] Speaker B: Immediately? Like, as in. I mean, that was this morning. And then when I looked at Facebook 2 hours ago or whatever, it was like, do you want this work? Iron Maiden things, Right. Like what? This is bananas. But this is just, you know, the moral calculus you have to do to try to do the right thing. And, you know, doing the right thing is important to me. That, like trying to be ethical. Yeah. Navigating that now in an exclusionary way. [01:01:04] Speaker A: But now that everything is commodity personally. And now that everything is. Now that you don't own anything and now that you just lose. [01:01:11] Speaker B: Yes, right. [01:01:12] Speaker A: IP for various providers. You make a really good point at how difficult it is to navigate through all this in an ethical way as a consumer. [01:01:22] Speaker B: Right. [01:01:22] Speaker A: What do you do? [01:01:23] Speaker B: Everything is a trap. [01:01:25] Speaker A: Unless you're gonna start collecting vinyl, right. [01:01:29] Speaker B: Which isn't even like, here's the thing, sometimes there will be a band I really like. [01:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:35] Speaker B: And they sell no physical music at all. [01:01:41] Speaker A: But even down that route, I mean, vinyl is made out of oil, for fuck's sake. [01:01:44] Speaker B: Sure, right, yeah, exactly. It's not exactly good for the planet either. It's just you can like, say, like people aren't buying as much of it. Right. But that is one of those conundrums when you have people like Taylor Swift, like, re releasing 18 vinyls of the same song that everyone has to collect the whole rainbow of. Or, you know, I know that like Billie Eilish has been criticized for doing that. Things like that. And it's like, yeah, there's all this, like, you're always doing this, like, math to try to figure out, like, on balance, where am I doing the least harm? And like, listen, it's the least we can do to try to balance and think about how much harm we do in the world. But it does. When you're trying to do that actively, it does make you realize how corrupt. [01:02:33] Speaker A: The world is, you know, that is such a fascinating point that I think we probably are doing an injustice too. I'd quite like us maybe on a future episode. Might it be an idea for us to map out all of the providers that we use? [01:02:52] Speaker B: Love that. [01:02:53] Speaker A: And get out the fucking pin board and the red string, you know? [01:02:56] Speaker B: Yeah, let's just see where our money is going, who's doing what with it, what are the characters behind it and just sit with it. [01:03:05] Speaker A: And is. Is it even trying to kind of take a sense of personal responsibility? Is that buying into a narrative whereby you can make a difference individually because you can't. [01:03:20] Speaker B: Right. I mean, and this is always like the question, obviously, like, that's a complicated idea, right? Like, because demand is how capitalism works and, you know, trying to change individual activities, of course, is going to make a difference on, you know, what's available to you and things like that, but it's not going to break all the structures. No, but at the same time, our own personal conscience matters, you know, it's why if I, if I, you know, wait a second, murder a random. [01:03:54] Speaker A: I'm going to roll back on what I just said. [01:03:57] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:03:58] Speaker A: You can. One person can make a difference, but it starts with a click, click. You know what I'm saying? [01:04:05] Speaker B: It's true. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, the point being, like, if I, if I do something terrible to one person, in the grand scheme of things, does that matter? Unless it's a very important person, you know? But does it matter if I harm someone? Right. Like, not really, but it does because my conscience has harming someone on it. So, you know, that's, that's the question, right? Is like, how much do we try to mitigate our harm knowing that that is only so helpful. How much does our own conscience have to come into play in the choices that we make, even if we know that we're not changing the world with them? [01:04:47] Speaker A: I came across an intriguing moral thought experiment this week, which I'll share now because it seems appropriate. Sure, right. I'm gonna, I'm, I'm probably gonna fudge this, but let me, Let me just take a run at this. Right? I'm gonna paraphrase. So you, through a chain of events which I'm not going to go into, have found yourself in the situation that you are the last person on earth, save for one other person. Right. There's no one else around on the planet, just you and one other person. Right? [01:05:28] Speaker B: Right. [01:05:29] Speaker A: That person has about their, about their, Their. Their. Their body. A, A necklace. Right. Which you covet. You want the necklace. Right. Is it wrong in that circumstance for you to kill that person and take that necklace from them? [01:05:53] Speaker B: Why wouldn't it be wrong? [01:05:55] Speaker A: Is it wrong? [01:05:57] Speaker B: Yes. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Why? [01:05:59] Speaker B: I don't understand what the moral conundrum is here. [01:06:02] Speaker A: Why is it wrong in that circumstance? [01:06:03] Speaker B: You're harming another person. [01:06:05] Speaker A: Okay. [01:06:06] Speaker B: The issue isn't. It's not like a tree fall in the woods thing. Like, if no one can see you, is your action still wrong? [01:06:12] Speaker A: Certainly not. But wrong according to who? [01:06:16] Speaker B: Me? [01:06:16] Speaker A: Right. Why? [01:06:18] Speaker B: Because harming another person is bad. [01:06:21] Speaker A: According to. [01:06:23] Speaker B: My knowing that if I were harmed, it would be bad. [01:06:28] Speaker A: Okay. So where does empathy. Where does that wrong exist? [01:06:37] Speaker B: Where does the wrong exist? If there is, I don't know, material. [01:06:41] Speaker A: Reality, I guess, a material reality which doesn't exist anymore. [01:06:45] Speaker B: In that circumstance, no material is in your body exists. [01:06:50] Speaker A: Right. [01:06:50] Speaker B: I mean, you can obviously get into the philosophy of what materiality is or whatever, but as long as I have a concept of bodies existing and harm being able to be done to them, and that if a harm were visited upon me, that would be negative for Me. So it would also be negative for another person. Unless somehow I don't understand that. You know, like, the reason that people get insanity. Please. I don't understand that other people experience emotions and feelings. Then it's the same no matter how many people are on the planet. It's not about the social construct of harm. It is about the actual experience of harm. [01:07:36] Speaker A: Uh, okay, fine. [01:07:41] Speaker B: I'm just. I'm confused by the premise of it. The idea that, like, the absence of people would determine whether something is bad. [01:07:51] Speaker A: Bad? [01:07:52] Speaker B: Why would that matter? [01:07:53] Speaker A: Does. Does. Does good and bad. [01:07:55] Speaker B: What's wrong? [01:07:56] Speaker A: Does good and bad only exist when observed? [01:08:00] Speaker B: No. That's the one thing that I remember. We always learned in church that you can take with you. Integrity is what you do when no one else is watching. Okay, so it's the idea that you only. I mean, honestly, that's what Christianity is about, right? It's like the idea that people only do things right, because they're being observed, because there is a God who watches them. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Yes. [01:08:23] Speaker B: And if you don't believe in God. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Yes. [01:08:25] Speaker B: To a Christian, that means that, like, oh, well, you should just do whatever you want. [01:08:29] Speaker A: Yes. [01:08:29] Speaker B: But for those of us who don't believe in a God, that's not where our moral compass is coming from. Being watched. [01:08:34] Speaker A: Yes. [01:08:34] Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't come from being watched. [01:08:36] Speaker A: Right and wrong don't exist on a kind of molecular level. Your fucking. Your fucking atoms don't give a shit about right or wrong. They simply exist. [01:08:49] Speaker B: This goes to what we were talking about last week where, you know, you said if you take the emotion out of it, you know, why do we save cancer victims? Right. Like, but because that's what the human experience is. You can't take those. Whatever mechanism creates who we are, you know, is where that understanding comes from. So the only way that you would be able to justify now that I'm not being observed, I can kill someone, would be to say, now that the society doesn't exist, I choose to not acknowledge those realities anymore. I choose to. I choose to personally divorce myself from a sense that what happens to me and what happens to that other person are similar experiences. And I have to see that other person as atoms and meat instead of another human being. [01:09:46] Speaker A: Yeah. For what it's worth, I completely agree with you. And on the. On the numerous occasions, I've come up against that argument. Well, if there's no God, if you don't believe in God, then what's to stop you? [01:10:03] Speaker B: Right? Like, that's what Christians always say. Yeah. [01:10:06] Speaker A: My kind of response to that is it goes down to pain. It comes back to pain. Because I know what pain feels like. [01:10:13] Speaker B: Exactly. That's empathy. [01:10:15] Speaker A: Yes. [01:10:15] Speaker B: You don't need someone to tell you what is wrong or right or good or bad. If you have the empathy to understand, I would not want this visited upon me, so I should not visit that upon another person. [01:10:27] Speaker A: Good. [01:10:30] Speaker B: Good. Where did you come across this? [01:10:33] Speaker A: Oh, tickers. [01:10:35] Speaker B: Oh, fucking TikTok. Only on TikTok would they ask a question like that. Obviously, that's wrong. [01:10:42] Speaker A: Tick is. This isn't gonna be a thing for you much longer, Irene. [01:10:44] Speaker B: I know. Isn't that. Isn't that bananas? I can't believe that that, like, genuinely went through. [01:10:50] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:52] Speaker B: Like, honestly, it's so unconstitutional and just everything about it is unreal to me that they have managed to ban TikTok. [01:11:05] Speaker A: Yeah. When I say that, I can't throw myself into the discourse again like I did with the submarine. That's a big part. Because take as I said, people have been writing songs about Luigi, man. People have been fucking. [01:11:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:21] Speaker A: What's the word? [01:11:25] Speaker B: I feel like I know what you're trying to say. Like, when you turn someone into, like, a folklore icon. [01:11:30] Speaker A: Idle. I do. What's the. [01:11:33] Speaker B: Like, it's not quite idolizing. [01:11:34] Speaker A: It's not quite idolizing. It's. [01:11:36] Speaker B: This is another one of those moments that someone is sitting there like, it's this. Mythologizing. [01:11:41] Speaker A: Possibly. [01:11:42] Speaker B: Yeah, something along those lines. Yeah, let's. Oh, we haven't talked about what we watched yet. Do we say, like, do we want to do this in the normal. Or what do we want to do? [01:11:53] Speaker A: Well, I want to just smash through movies because. [01:11:56] Speaker B: Yeah, let's do. All right, we're going to. We're going to briefly talk about what we watched. As always, timestamp you can skip. If you just want to hear about Luigi, man. Joan, stop it. [01:12:06] Speaker A: Italy is a big emerging market for us. We're just starting to take hold in Italy. [01:12:11] Speaker B: I think they get me. [01:12:16] Speaker A: So listen, what do we want? I got off my ass and watched Targets, and it was fucking great. [01:12:22] Speaker B: This was. I love that. You know, I described this last week, if you didn't listen last week, this is a Boris Karloff movie that I described to you, Marco, in discussing also, like, how difficult it can be to get you to watch an old movie, but this one hit immediately. [01:12:40] Speaker A: Yeah, it really did. [01:12:41] Speaker B: No, I need to watch it. [01:12:41] Speaker A: I got some questions. How in 70s, early to mid-70s, this. [01:12:48] Speaker B: Movie, I think we determined it was 68. [01:12:51] Speaker A: Right. They. There are Sequences of Boris Karloff watching old movies with him in it. How did the fuck are they? How did they swing that? [01:13:00] Speaker B: It's one movie, I think. Or no, I guess there's multiple in it because it mentions at the end. Like, there's the movie that has. What's. Is it Forster or. No, it's. There's one. It has Jack Nicholson in it. [01:13:14] Speaker A: That's right. [01:13:15] Speaker B: You know, and it. Like. Thanks. Like they. I know they were given permission specifically to use. [01:13:20] Speaker A: I love that. I thought that was so fucking. [01:13:22] Speaker B: Yeah. It's really interesting to use his own. [01:13:25] Speaker A: Movies because he's playing. He's playing a version of himself and watching movies with old movies with a younger version of him in it. In a fucking movie from the 60s. That's phenomenal. Absolutely phenomenal. [01:13:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:13:36] Speaker A: And it unfolds beautifully. It unfolds in this kind of Columbo episode kind of way. You know what I mean? [01:13:42] Speaker B: Right? [01:13:42] Speaker A: Doesn't Rush. Takes its fucking time. Great, great, great, great movie. And one that I would never even have heard of if not for this fucking cast. So thank you. [01:13:52] Speaker B: I love it. So that's two of us endorsing watching Target. You should, if you get the chance. And it is. It's streaming on a bunch of things, I think all the things that have commercials on them. It's streaming on like Tubi and all that kind of stuff, but you can rent it. [01:14:06] Speaker A: So again, plowing through this because we need to get onto the Adjuster. I watched the Suicide Squad with Owen, Right. And I'm not gonna go into again how deeply I love this film because I do love it. It's a five star film and it's better than both of his Guardians of the Galaxies. And I love Guardians of the Galaxy 2, as you know. But something occurred to me this time around, right? [01:14:33] Speaker B: Okay. [01:14:33] Speaker A: And this has to be my fourth watch of the Suicide Squad, if not more. And this is. [01:14:38] Speaker B: Which is rare for you. I'm like. For me, I've probably seen it four times, but that's like. If I like a movie. Yeah, I will do that. You don't rewatch movies. [01:14:45] Speaker A: No, I don't. But the Suicide Squad, it appeals to me on such a fucking. It's one of those films that just within the first 10 minutes, I connect to it so beautifully that I get a lump in my throat. I just love it. I love it. And yet this time, only this time and for the first time, something I noticed something which left just the beginnings of a sour taste in my mouth. Right? [01:15:11] Speaker B: Oh, no. [01:15:12] Speaker A: And I wonder if you've noticed this, okay, so Peter Capaldi's character, the Thinker. [01:15:18] Speaker B: Right, Right. [01:15:20] Speaker A: Is a misguided genius. And about two thirds of the way through, Rat Girl. Right. When they're taking him captive to get them into the fucking big tower, Jotunheim, Rat girl points her rat device at him and says something along the lines of, what would you say if I said I was gonna get 20 rats to crawl up your ass? Right. And he goes, well, my answer might not be what you'd expect. Right. Okay, so he's kink coded. [01:15:56] Speaker B: Sure. [01:15:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Possibly gay coded. Right? [01:15:59] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. [01:16:02] Speaker A: Which is fine, right? [01:16:05] Speaker B: Yep. [01:16:05] Speaker A: Until a little later on when they break into the tower and you've got all of the zombie people with the starfish on their face, and they all speak with one voice, and they all shout out, he kidnapped us. He tortured us. And he had his way with us, indicating that he was raping them. [01:16:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay, that does make the queer coding a little more complicated. [01:16:31] Speaker A: And it's overt that, you know, the only reason they didn't say he was raping us was because it's a 15, you know. [01:16:38] Speaker B: Yeah. Right. And it's not really funny if you say it that way. [01:16:42] Speaker A: And he acknowledges it. He goes, ooh, sorry. You know. [01:16:45] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's like. Yeah. If you phrase that any differently, you would think about how horrifying that is. [01:16:51] Speaker A: And for the first time, I noticed this line, this connective tissue between being gay and having kink with being a fucking sex criminal. And I didn't like it. [01:16:59] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a. Okay, that's a really good call. I have not. I had not really noticed that before. That is a valid criticism. [01:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all. [01:17:13] Speaker B: Watching movies with Pete has made you very astute. You're picking up things. [01:17:19] Speaker A: Maybe. [01:17:21] Speaker B: All right, well, that is a. Yeah, that's a fair critique of that movie. One I hadn't heard before. So. Hey, nicely done. [01:17:27] Speaker A: Thank you. So let's talk Night Beast. [01:17:32] Speaker B: Night Beast. Right. Night Beast. A movie where somehow it, like, is non stop and nothing happens. [01:17:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it's one of those movies that makes 81 minutes feel like 181 minutes. It's a trauma joint. [01:17:53] Speaker B: It feels like it. [01:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean, I didn't. I didn't hate it. Well, the one star would indicate that I did, but I mean, I. I like. [01:18:01] Speaker B: You're a complicated rater. [01:18:02] Speaker A: I am, Yeah. I really do rate with my heart. And one star. All right. It's a piece of shit. It's a fucking terrible film. Yeah, it's pretty bad, but it's a kind of terrible that I have time for. I can't objectively call it a good film. [01:18:16] Speaker B: We had fun talking about it. [01:18:17] Speaker A: Yeah. But the one star is for some fun decapitations, some fun juice and the idiocy of it all. [01:18:26] Speaker B: Yes. It's very deeply stupid. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Night Beast was like I said, it just. It goes like. It's basically a movie that is an 80 minute shootout. Yep. And they just forgot to put plot in there. Except for possibly one of the worst sex scenes I've ever seen in my entire life. [01:18:48] Speaker A: The least sexy, horrible close ups of puffy kind of white flesh. There's. [01:18:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:18:58] Speaker A: A guy's posture I've ever seen. [01:19:02] Speaker B: You were like. And for a guy who picks on your own posture a lot, it's really saying something how, like, upsetting you found. [01:19:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I. I'm developing a mighty hump in my old age, but this guy puts my posture to shame. [01:19:18] Speaker B: Oh, man. Yeah, he is. He looked. He was horrif. Not pleasant to look at. And this sex scene is truly terrible. So, you know. Night Beast. [01:19:29] Speaker A: Night Beast. If you have literally no other plans. [01:19:33] Speaker B: Right. [01:19:34] Speaker A: You might. [01:19:35] Speaker B: Sure. [01:19:35] Speaker A: You know, you might want to enjoy the one star Night Beast. No such problems with A Nightmare on Elm street, which I finally got my hands on the recent 4K release. [01:19:46] Speaker B: How many copies of this do you own? [01:19:48] Speaker A: Well, I'm looking at two and I think I've got another one coming for my birthday tomorrow. [01:19:55] Speaker B: Amazing. [01:19:56] Speaker A: I love them. I have to tell you, the 4K restoration of a Nightmare on Elm street looks fucking beautiful. [01:20:05] Speaker B: Someday I'll have a 4K TV to experience. [01:20:08] Speaker A: Just. The colors are beautiful. There's no, there's none of that kind of grain that you get on some earlier 4k upscales. It's just beautiful. And look, this release purports to be the uncut version. Right. [01:20:25] Speaker B: Okay. [01:20:26] Speaker A: Eight extra seconds. [01:20:30] Speaker B: And I bet you noticed exactly what they were. [01:20:33] Speaker A: Yes, I did. Absolutely. Yes, I did. When Tina gets spun around the bedroom and Freddie cuts her up and she lands on the bed and there's blood spatter, there's a couple of extra seconds of blood spatter. [01:20:46] Speaker B: Okay. [01:20:47] Speaker A: And she kind of slides off the bed and lands in a heap. Lands in a bloody heap on the side of the bed. And that sequence is a couple of seconds longer. There's. There's. There's more. She fills what they had to get. [01:20:58] Speaker B: Rid of to get the rating or whatever. [01:21:00] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. And sorry, in Johnny Depp's death scene, when the geezer of blood shoots out of his bed. There's one additional shot where it kind of pans up from the bed to the ceiling, which is no more than like a second or two. But it matters, man. You get more. It matters. It's just. [01:21:22] Speaker B: Well, it's fun because you can tell exactly why it got cut, right? Yeah, exactly. It's how arbitrary those ratings are is that in order to be able to get this and not be rated X or whatever, they needed to cut one second of blood from a giant gushing blood geyser and they needed to cut a few seconds of Tina getting tossed around or whatever. And that makes the difference. [01:21:47] Speaker A: Yep. And it's fascinating to me. It's just fascinating to me that that's the discussion that was had in a smoky fucking screening room somewhere. [01:21:55] Speaker B: Right Dead. Seriously? [01:21:57] Speaker A: Yes. I love that. I love that shit. I live for it. [01:22:00] Speaker B: Yeah, that's pretty great. [01:22:03] Speaker A: And then the bur. [01:22:06] Speaker B: This is. Okay, listen, I'm going to. I don't usually like, dispute your ratings of something, but I do have to call BS on this one a little bit. [01:22:18] Speaker A: All right. Just for context, we watched the Burrowers. This was last night. The Burrowers. [01:22:22] Speaker B: Yes. [01:22:22] Speaker A: A Western. Western creature feature. Yes. [01:22:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:27] Speaker A: Accurate. [01:22:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:29] Speaker A: Clancy Brown. Great to see Clancy Brown. Always great to see the Kurgan, you know, doing his thing. [01:22:33] Speaker B: Yep. [01:22:35] Speaker A: That's a movie I gotta set Pete in front of is Highlander. [01:22:38] Speaker B: It'll be interesting to see what he thinks of that. [01:22:40] Speaker A: I love Highlander. I don't give a fuck if you liked it or not. It'll be a chance for me to watch Highlander. [01:22:45] Speaker B: You gonna learn today. [01:22:48] Speaker A: And it. It's. It plays out like Tombstone. It plays out like a. It's a western, but it's got gribblies. [01:22:56] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. Which at the end of it, you rated it a half a star, which is insane for this movie. [01:23:06] Speaker A: No, again, I vote with my soul. I vote with my heart. And not a term I think I've ever used before, but the Burrowers. I was violently bored by this film. Bored to fucking hell. [01:23:19] Speaker B: Angrily bored. [01:23:21] Speaker A: Just. [01:23:22] Speaker B: Okay, so let me just talk through this here, because this is not a half star film. Even if you don't like it. Like, it's a well made movie. It's, you know, and it has a bunch of stuff you like in it. So a. For some reason, you acknowledged you were expecting it to be like From Dusk till Dawn. [01:23:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:23:43] Speaker B: Which is an insane expectation to have. [01:23:47] Speaker A: For some reason, a Movie that's not. [01:23:49] Speaker B: Made by Quentin Tarantino or Robert Rodriguez. [01:23:51] Speaker A: No, I use From Dusty dawn as an example. Right. What I was expecting was like a violent, breakneck kind of genre shift movie. So it's a Western. It's a western. It's a Western until fuck these Gribblies and then hell breaks loose. And that isn't what I got. What I got was. [01:24:09] Speaker B: I mean, you kind of did, but. [01:24:11] Speaker A: The Gribblies show up an hour of fucking ten minutes. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Not true. So this is. We'll get to this. Okay, so the expectation was wrong and you were. You were like annoyed that this was not the movie you expected. So you started on like a sour note from early on here. [01:24:29] Speaker A: Plus, I was in a shut. [01:24:30] Speaker B: You weren't in the mood for it. And that's fair. There's plenty of movies that I dislike because I am very much not in the mood to watch them. Yes, I get it. But also, you definitely were not paying attention to this. And I have evidence of this. Oh, you got receipts for one. I have receipts for one. You sent me a Facebook screenshot like 15 minutes into this movie. [01:24:54] Speaker A: I did. [01:24:55] Speaker B: Says like you're scrolling. [01:24:57] Speaker A: Kind of a smoking gun. [01:24:58] Speaker B: That's. Yes. So I knew from early on you were not paying full attention then. You never made any comment on the inside insane violence that happens throughout this movie, including the crazy way that Clancy Brown dies. [01:25:16] Speaker A: Nor does not just get shot in the neck. [01:25:19] Speaker B: No, no. It's a horrifying, deeply gross death that involves like the crushing of his face. And you had no reaction to it whatsoever. [01:25:32] Speaker A: I think like a tune. [01:25:34] Speaker B: There was. Yeah, there were multiple. Like, this movie is so violent and so many crazy deaths happen and you didn't notice any of them? [01:25:43] Speaker A: No, I didn't. [01:25:44] Speaker B: I was like, you did not catch a single death. And I was like, he's not watching this at all. Like, these are such grisly kills. And he has not mentioned one, nor reacted to my reactions to any of them. You're not watching this movie. And at the end of it you said an hour and 18 minutes. And the Gribblies finally showed up. When they had showed those gribblies constantly for like the last 45 minutes of the movie. They were just showing them throughout the. [01:26:15] Speaker A: Whole thing, prepared to accept that maybe my heart wasn't in it. [01:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah, I think you were just not in the right place for Burrowers, which, like I said, is fine. [01:26:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it seems quite well regarded. You know, it seems like a well thought of picture. [01:26:31] Speaker B: I think in another Zone. [01:26:34] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [01:26:35] Speaker B: You actually would have quite enjoyed this because this had a ton of stuff. [01:26:38] Speaker A: That I liked that I historically have. [01:26:40] Speaker B: Quite enjoyed that you normally like. It also had the thing that this is. For whatever reason, you know how I can't picture things. [01:26:47] Speaker A: Yes. [01:26:48] Speaker B: There's one thing. You have a fantasia. Yes. There's one thing on earth that I don't know if picture is the right word, but somehow something akin to picturing it exists. And that one thing is fingernails. [01:27:02] Speaker A: Yes. That I did see. That I did catch. [01:27:04] Speaker B: Yeah. That was the fingernail bend in that has. I have just spontaneously thought of it so many times in the past day since we watched it, and I'm like, it's so horrifying. So, yeah. Anyways, I don't think that was necessarily a fair thing, but like I said, fair to not like something because you're not in the mood. I just want to say for people looking at those ratings. [01:27:30] Speaker A: Yep. [01:27:31] Speaker B: That even if you don't like the Boroughs, it's really not a half star movie. The acting in it is really. Well, it's got a great cast, it moves like a Western. It is not from Dusk Till Dawn. It is like a regular Western. So just be ready for that. So other than watching Night Beast and Burrowers with you, I'm just gonna run through a few things real quick. Let's see, for those who are listening to Hellrankers last week, just real fast, gonna go through the Hallmark movies and give you a yes, watch it, or no, don't watch it. Not actually gonna talk about them this week. I have watched Three Wiser Men and a Boy. Yes, watch it. It was a great sequel. If you liked the Three Wise Men and a Baby, you're going to like Three Wiser Men and a Boy. I watched Sugar Plumed, the one that they've really been hyping up for the past week. Don't watch it. It's boring as fuck. Not a good time. And then the Christmas Quest. Hell, yeah. Movie of the Hallmark season. You gotta watch it. It involves the Yule lads. It's got Lacy Chabert. It's a really good time. And Christopher Palaha watched that one. That's my Hallmark rundown. [01:28:43] Speaker A: Thank you. [01:28:44] Speaker B: Mark is so disturbed by that. [01:28:46] Speaker A: No, I'm not. Yeah, it's. I enjoy that you enjoy them. [01:28:52] Speaker B: I appreciate that. I rewatched History of the Occult because someone had mentioned, like, kind of basically sort of criticizing Late Night with the Devil and, you know, saying a sort of style over substance, which I've watched it now, like, Three times. And at this point, I kind of agree with it. Just doesn't. Each time I watch it, I like it less than the last time that I watched it. [01:29:16] Speaker A: I haven't revisited it. I want to. [01:29:20] Speaker B: So you've only watched it the one time? [01:29:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And you know how big it hit for me. [01:29:24] Speaker B: Yeah, you loved it. And, you know, I thought. I think at the time I was like, it was good. I obviously was like, the AI Shit is like. Is dumb. And I don't know why they did that, but, like, you know, I liked it. And then each time I've watched it, I'm kind of like, ah, it hits less. I don't like the conceit of the movie. I don't like the way they framed it and don't really follow through with it and all that stuff. And I don't know, it just doesn't hit for me the same as it did, like, in a packed theater full of people, you know? But one of the things that I said when I saw it was that it reminded me of this Argentinian movie called History of the Occult, where it's. It's like a. Like a secret society kind of movie. It's short. I think it's only like 60 or 70 minutes. But about these people who. There's like a. They have discovered that there is some sort of conspiracy between, like, the president and, like, these shady organizations in Argentina or whatever. Super confusing movie. And that was kind of all I took from it. The first time that I watched it was like, this was confusing. I don't know what's going on. But within it, the sort of framing device they have in here is this last episode of a show called 60 Minutes to Midnight, where it's like, counting down. This is going to be the very last episode of it. And he has these guests on to sort of try to expose whatever this ring is. But one of those guests, it turns out one of them exposes, is a cult leader, okay? And the way that the broadcast unfolds is like, crazy similar to what happens in Late Night with the Devil, what's. [01:31:06] Speaker A: Called History of the Occult. [01:31:08] Speaker B: History of the Occult. This sort of back and forth between this sort of skeptic guy and this cult leader, even culminating in some of the same things happening in this. And so I watched it again and liked it a lot more this time with the understanding that I'm not going to know what the fuck is happening in this. And, like, leaning into, like, I don't need to understand the conspiracy theory web, that's not how my brain works. For some people, this probably makes perfect sense. I'm never going to understand this. But instead, it's like a very interesting weird movie where there's, like weird drug hallucination parts of this and this, you know, broadcast within a film and all these kinds of things going on. And History of the Cult is actually a pretty interesting little accomplishment. So I actually do recommend people watch that. It's black and white, sort of. It gets an interesting twist towards the end of it. Yeah, it's an interesting little movie. [01:32:05] Speaker A: And thank you. And I will just super quickly cap off. I'm. I. Every year. I don't know if I've mentioned this before. Right. But every year on Radio 4, at the start of December, kind of going Into Christmas, Radio 4 has a tradition called the Wreath Lectures. Right. [01:32:23] Speaker B: Okay. [01:32:23] Speaker A: Is this something you've heard of? [01:32:25] Speaker B: No. [01:32:26] Speaker A: Series of shows which are discussions led by kind of a prominent thinker in a particular field. Right. An academic, whether it be in science or the humanities or whatever. And they come on and they talk about their field and they talk about, you know, their area of expertise, and then they take questions from the audience. This year's Reith Lectures have been terrific. [01:32:49] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:32:50] Speaker A: All hosted by. Let me just double check. I'm getting her name right. All hosted by Gwen Adshead, who is much like erstwhile guest Dr. Ben Duffin Jones, a forensic psychiatrist. [01:33:03] Speaker B: Oh, nice. [01:33:04] Speaker A: Who for four episodes of an hour each, has been talking about evil. [01:33:09] Speaker B: Ooh, yes. [01:33:11] Speaker A: Heartily recommend. Heartily recommend. Questions about kind of violence, questions about human predilection towards bad deeds, physical violence, psychological violence, normalizing violence in culture. She's a Christian, so she talks about, you know, the kind of theological and philosophical angle on violent deeds and the violence in man. Gripping, Absolutely gripping. The Wreath Lectures are always good value, but this year they've been phenomenal once again. [01:33:46] Speaker B: Mark likes podcasts. As long as you don't call them podcasts. [01:33:49] Speaker A: I don't. [01:33:52] Speaker B: Drop me a link, I'll link to it. And I would like to listen to that. That sounds like a lot of. A lot of fun. I also. Okay, so I watched a documentary, came out earlier this year. I am a PBS subscriber because, of course, I'm a nerd like that. And on American Experience, I believe they did a doc called Nazi Town USA which talked about basically how many Americans got on board with the Nazis in the 20s and 30s when they first were, you know, making a big splash, I guess, doing this thing. And it is. I highly recommend watching it. You can actually watch it for free on YouTube. They have a whole thing on there, which is great. But yeah, Nazi Town, usa. I recommend just because the rhetoric is like word for word, the rhetoric that is used today against pretty much every marginalized group, whether that is Jews or black people or immigrants or, you know, whoever. And it is striking to watch. You know, like I was watching it thinking that a lot of especially conservative, but a lot of Americans would watch this today and I'm not sure they could discern who the bad guy was. [01:35:13] Speaker A: Well, interestingly, very interesting that you would mention this. I sat down with Peter and Owen. It was earlier on this week and. Or was it. Was it a week or two ago? It was, it was after the election results. After your election results. And I sat them down in front of that well known sign from the US Holocaust Museum. Early warning signs of fascism. [01:35:39] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [01:35:40] Speaker A: And went through them all. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. [01:35:45] Speaker B: See, this is why your kids are so smart and aware. Well, I bet their classmates, parents were not doing that. [01:35:54] Speaker A: Who knows? Who knows? But we certainly did. [01:35:57] Speaker B: I'm glad to hear that. Very glad to hear that. It's important to go back and look at this stuff because people are, I think it was like literally saying the exact same words. [01:36:08] Speaker A: Oh yeah, look. [01:36:08] Speaker B: That these Nazi supporters were saying back then. [01:36:11] Speaker A: There's no gray area on those, those warning signs. I think what led me to do this was Owen Spence. Despite our best efforts, Owen still spends a lot of time on YouTube shorts. [01:36:25] Speaker B: Right. [01:36:26] Speaker A: And I think I was pushing back against the kind of memeification of people like Elon Musk. [01:36:32] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [01:36:33] Speaker A: So I sat him down and fucking told him what was what. [01:36:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm glad you're doing it. That's all I'm saying. You know, that's always been my thing while teaching and all that kind of stuff is like, listen, watch your things, but just know what they're saying to you. [01:36:49] Speaker A: Comedy figures. They are really not. [01:36:52] Speaker B: No, exactly. So yeah, there's that. I watched, I watched a movie called Arctic Void. No, no, nothing happened, Nothing happened. Just it was really pretty. It's very well shot, you know, boat movie. I was, yeah, let's do this. [01:37:13] Speaker A: It's got void in the title. [01:37:15] Speaker B: Yeah, it's got void Arctic. It has a boat. Like everything was there. Beautifully shot and all that, but just nothing happened. It was, you know, basically a movie in which, you know, you have all these people on a boat and then all these people disappear, leaving just our main characters and they're trying to figure out what's Going on as, like, you know, their bad things are happening to them or whatever. And that sounds like a really cool setup, but it goes zero places. It doesn't go anywhere. So I do not recommend Arctic Void, nor do I recommend Trapped in the Rocky Mountains, which is a Lifetime movie. [01:37:53] Speaker A: What happens in that film then? [01:37:55] Speaker B: Well, Mark, this is gonna throw you for a loop, but some people go to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains and they get trapped there. [01:38:06] Speaker A: I write I quite enjoy. What's the word I would use? Kind of intellectual economy of titles like that. You know what I mean? Like, what was that fucking movie? It might have been Denzel, about a train, though. [01:38:24] Speaker B: Unstoppable. [01:38:25] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly. [01:38:28] Speaker B: Train can't stop. [01:38:29] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:38:30] Speaker B: Unstoppable. [01:38:30] Speaker A: Beautiful. You fucking encapsulated the movie in the title. I fucking adore that. [01:38:36] Speaker B: And this is. I mean, this is a Lifetime movie, which is a channel. It's kind of like Hallmark's saucy twin. So it makes more like, like, very salacious kind of movies, often ripped from the headlines. This is not a rip from the headlines one. It's like a whodunit kind of movie. And, yeah, their titles are always something like that because they just want you. I mean, it worked on me. I was flipping through channels. I'm like, I don't know. When I watch fate trapped in the Rocky Mountains. [01:39:03] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:39:04] Speaker B: I think I understand what that's going to be about. Yes, exactly. And it was terrible, but, you know, that was two hours of time or whatever. Just fine. [01:39:15] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:39:16] Speaker B: Running out the clock and. Yeah, exactly. It needed something to do with my time. Now, Mark, there's just one thing, okay? I just need to get off my chest just one movie that I watched this week. And this is. This is my controversial, unpopular opinion this week. [01:39:32] Speaker A: Oh, I'm not gonna like that. [01:39:33] Speaker B: I saw. No, you're. You're gonna be fine with it. I saw Wicked this week, as did. [01:39:40] Speaker A: Laura and Peter and Owen. [01:39:43] Speaker B: Fucking terrible. [01:39:44] Speaker A: Oh, you listen. [01:39:45] Speaker B: Awful movie. Preach, Preach. Yeah, I know you. We talked last week about this. Like, and I. And I still hold that. I think you would enjoy the musical just fine. But the movie, I don't understand. I feel like everyone's been brainwashed. [01:40:00] Speaker A: Everyone's full on gushing. [01:40:02] Speaker B: Yeah. People call it a masterpiece. And what's wild to me, though, is that if you read reviews of this movie, right, people will acknowledge it looks shitty, right? Like, it's not well made, but it's still a masterpiece. And this, this. I cannot abide this. Like, the idea that people have no expectation that a movie, a huge movie like this be art. [01:40:33] Speaker A: Yep. [01:40:34] Speaker B: In any way is deeply troubling to me. Right. Like that there's no expectation that a movie do anything but like, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, feed me. You know, like that. There's no. You expect nothing from it except like, oh, big pictures and sounds. [01:40:56] Speaker A: So I'm gonna tell you something else about Wicked. One. There's one. One, only one interesting thing about Wicked to me. [01:41:05] Speaker B: Right, okay. [01:41:06] Speaker A: And that is nothing to do with the movie, and it's nothing to do with the musical, and it's all to do with the book. [01:41:13] Speaker B: Okay. [01:41:13] Speaker A: From the 90s, right? [01:41:15] Speaker B: Yes. [01:41:16] Speaker A: It was written by a guy by the name of Gregory Maguire. Okay. [01:41:24] Speaker B: Okay. [01:41:25] Speaker A: And you might be fascinated to hear that while he was mulling over the themes of this book, and he knew that there was an idea in there about telling the story from the fucking witch's perspective, an event happened which spurred him into motion and crystallized those ideas and kicked his ass to write the book. And do you know what that event. [01:41:46] Speaker B: Was in the 90s? [01:41:48] Speaker A: Yes. [01:41:52] Speaker B: I don't. [01:41:53] Speaker A: It was. It was the murder of James Bulger. [01:41:59] Speaker B: Really? [01:42:00] Speaker A: I shit you not. It was that kid in Liverpool getting killed by those two other kids. [01:42:05] Speaker B: Wow. [01:42:06] Speaker A: Yes. And again, Again, thank you, Radio 4. He was interviewed on Radio 4 a couple of weeks back when the movie came out, and he spoke about how, well, obviously these kids have done something awful. Obviously an horrific fucking act of just vile violence has been perpetrated here. But where does that come from? Right, where nobody fucking just decides out of the fucking blue to do something like that. What's the story? And that played into the story, that played into his writing the book. [01:42:40] Speaker B: Yeah. That's really interesting. And from what I hear, the book is really good and does things that neither the musical nor the movie do and has much stronger themes than these, either of these things do. Yeah, I've got to read it. That sounds really interesting. And having knowing that as it sort. [01:42:59] Speaker A: Of catalysts, isn't that fascinating? [01:43:01] Speaker B: Fascinating. That's super fascinating. The movie is trash. It's shot, so it's ugly. It's just mucky cgi. [01:43:12] Speaker A: That's all I get from it, is. [01:43:14] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just a misery to look at from beginning to end. The way that dance scenes and things like that are shot is just chaotic. You can never see where who you're supposed to be focusing on is. It's just the art of this movie is absent and that's unfortunate because I like John M. Chu. I really, I like crazy rich Asians. I like in the Heights. I think, you know, generally I'm very into what he does. This movie is just anti art and I hate Wicked with my. [01:43:45] Speaker A: Very well put, very well put. [01:43:49] Speaker B: So this week, one of the. I like. I don't even know how to like begin talking about this event. Let's, let's say what happened, right? December 4th. So five days ago, a man who was wearing a face covering and a backpack walked up to the CEO of the largest health insurance company in America as he was coming out or entering a meeting and shot him and killed him in the street. Like 6:45am you know, daylight in front of people, hopped on a city bike and escaped. And for many days, until today, no one knew where the hell he was. He had left bullets where the casings had said on them. Deny, defend. And what was the third thing? Deny, Defend and Depose, which it turned out was a book about the health insurance industry. [01:45:09] Speaker A: I think the book was called something Subtly Different. [01:45:12] Speaker B: Okay, it was, yeah, something of that sort. [01:45:15] Speaker A: Defend, Deny or something similar. [01:45:18] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [01:45:18] Speaker A: So it had come from Defend, Deny, Depose. [01:45:20] Speaker B: Yes, Defend, Deny, Depose come from this book, which interestingly, we'll get there, but the alleged shooter's Goodreads is available for people to see and that book is not on there, which is kind of funny. But yeah, he. So he shot this man, escaped. And what is the most fascinating thing about this? Because gun violence is nothing interesting about America. Happens every day, all the time. I mean, I think the day after this there was like a school shooting that killed somebody. Like it's just a normal thing in America. But what was surprising about this was the response from pretty much everyone. And the response was, well, let me tell a little story from the library. The day that this happened that I think sums this up. I go into the library, right? Montclair Public Library, and I pick up some holds that I have and I take them to the self checkout, which is next to the circulation desk. And there's two librarians behind the circulation, both women, I would say, in their mid-60s, right? Gray hair, all that jazz. One of them says to the other one, did you hear about the United Healthcare CEO? He was gunned down or he was shot to death. She says, and the other one, 60 year old, gray haired lady says, hmm, I guess someone must have thought he was a problem and goes back to shelving books without a care in the world. And that seemed to be pretty Much the reaction of everyone in America, which, as you alluded to before, the last time there's been something that really, like, held our attention like this, and we were all watching, trying to figure out what happened, was the billionaire sub. Right. The Titan submersible. And, well, plenty of people were making memes and enjoying it and having fun with a bunch of dead billionaires. There was also plenty of people going, hey, hey, now those are people. [01:47:36] Speaker A: Yep. [01:47:38] Speaker B: We shouldn't celebrate the deaths of people. That is a minority of the responses to what happened here. [01:47:47] Speaker A: I don't think I've seen a single person saying that with a straight face. [01:47:51] Speaker B: Right. Like, I've seen a few here and there, largely from rich people. [01:47:56] Speaker A: Yes. [01:47:58] Speaker B: But overall, like, no matter what side of the political aisle you're on, like what generation, any of that kind of stuff, Americans largely went press conference about. [01:48:10] Speaker A: To go live now in Pennsylvania. [01:48:12] Speaker B: Oh, really? [01:48:12] Speaker A: Yes. [01:48:13] Speaker B: Oh, interesting. Fascinating. Let me know if anything happens on there. That's. That's worth remarking on. But yeah, this was. I have never seen anything like this before in my life, Mark. Like that someone was murdered out in the open, you know, and everyone just went, eh, it was probably. Probably fine, maybe good even. [01:48:40] Speaker A: So the flair and style of this just spoke to me. Right. [01:48:50] Speaker B: Yes. And to a lot of people, I think. [01:48:52] Speaker A: Yeah, of course. And more so than what unfolded afterwards. [01:48:57] Speaker B: Sure. [01:48:58] Speaker A: I was like everyone else. I was rooting for the fucking guy. Right. I was rooting for the guy. I wanted him to vanish. I wanted him to just. In a puff of air. [01:49:08] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:49:08] Speaker A: Kaiser. [01:49:09] Speaker B: So say it. [01:49:10] Speaker A: Exactly. Because that kind of made me wonder, would fucking. Would it lead to CEOs being a little bit more afraid of being out. [01:49:19] Speaker B: In public, you know, which it has. Yeah, absolutely. It's been interesting to watch some of the reactions from corporate situations. A lot of insurance companies scrubbed their websites of the information about. Who is the head of those now? [01:49:36] Speaker A: He is. He is. Like I said at the start, right at the top of this. Right. I've tried so hard this time to stay factual. [01:49:46] Speaker B: Right. [01:49:47] Speaker A: To try and maintain a little bit of distance from the discourse. Is that factually accurate? [01:49:57] Speaker B: Yes, that is factually accurate. [01:49:59] Speaker A: Okay. [01:50:00] Speaker B: Yes. [01:50:01] Speaker A: There was also some policy change. [01:50:06] Speaker B: In. [01:50:06] Speaker A: The immediate aftermath about anesthesia or something similar. Is that correct? [01:50:10] Speaker B: Yes. So basically, the day that this had happened, I can't remember what the medical group was, another one of our big ones here had like, announced that they were no longer covering some particular anesthesia. And then, like, you know, the news was covered in all this stuff. And the next day actually happened, they rolled that back. Now, of course, we can't say for sure that's why they did it. Why else would they have had that change of heart? I don't know. But they definitely did change that policy the day after this occurred, after having announced it that very same day. [01:50:53] Speaker A: I mean, again, I'm not fucking taking my cues from social media. I am not. [01:51:00] Speaker B: Right. [01:51:01] Speaker A: But if what you've just said is factually accurate, is that how we make a difference? [01:51:10] Speaker B: Right? I mean, that's the big thing here. [01:51:12] Speaker A: I'm saying it is. I'm asking questions. [01:51:16] Speaker B: You know, our specific FBI agents or whatever, we're just asking questions here. But this is what is so fascinating about this, right, is that what this comes down to is in the United States, we feel powerless when it comes to our healthcare, right? And nobody is offering better. Like, you know, the Kamala Harris rolled back her support of, you know, the Medicare for All, like, Joe Biden did nothing to fix this. You know, the ACA made things better, but it's still obviously terrible. This is. People go bankrupt over their medical bills all the time. You can see, you know, the denial of coverage for things that people need coverage for that ends up killing people. And there's nothing we can do about that. [01:52:01] Speaker A: What I'll also add is the group that owns UnitedHealth. 400, over 400 billion in revenue by the end of this year. [01:52:13] Speaker B: Right? [01:52:14] Speaker A: Which is fucking. A, it's astronomical, but B, it's ever, ever growing, ever climbing up. [01:52:20] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. That's an impossible amount of profit while people who are receiving that healthcare are suffering. And amongst the things that this particular CEO oversaw was the use of AI within UnitedHealthcare, which would automatically look at claims and decide whether to, you know, allow them or not. Right. [01:52:43] Speaker A: And forgive me, forgive me for repeating this over and over again. That is factually accurate. [01:52:48] Speaker B: Factual, yes. And this AI was found to have a 90% rate of being incorrect. And they kept using it. I don't know if it is still happening now, but they did not stop using it after it was found that it was denying claims incorrectly. [01:53:07] Speaker A: I'd love. I'd love a source for that. Please do share me a link that. I'd love to see that. [01:53:12] Speaker B: Yeah, this is all, you know, well documented stuff that you can find about this. And like, that's the thing is for you, that sounds crazy. Like, please source where, like, this is our reality here, that the, like, this is what it's like to get our care. We know that we are randomly getting denied all the time for stuff that we're supposed to be covered and that our health care costs are through the roof and we can't. There is just nothing, no politician is offering to solve this for us. [01:53:47] Speaker A: Right. [01:53:47] Speaker B: There was no presidential candidate that was like, we're going to sort this out, we're going to make this better for you. What do we do with that? Right. And people saw this guy. [01:53:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:53:59] Speaker B: Kill this CEO and then in a way people get scared. [01:54:06] Speaker A: Clearly. So brazen, you know, the, the murder, what the murder was the message. [01:54:13] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. Yeah. [01:54:16] Speaker A: And that I even, I even as a trained dramatist, I even think there's fucking semiotic significance in having shot the guy from behind. [01:54:27] Speaker B: Right. [01:54:28] Speaker A: He never saw the face of the guy who killed him. [01:54:31] Speaker B: Exactly. Like, and that's the thing, you know, I saw like someone, you know, try to criticize, you know, we shot a guy from behind. Like that's cowardly or whatever. It's like he wasn't trying to, like this wasn't a duel. [01:54:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:54:44] Speaker B: He wanted to end the man's life. That was the point. Like you said, that's the message. Right. So there's no reason for him to, you know, hey, look me in the eyes as I do this. The point is to send a message to the other people, not the guy who's dying, but to the people who live now. Which seems to have worked. And one of the reasons that, you know, it's going to be important now for authorities to try to control the narrative around this guy to make it so that we don't want to be like him. And you know, initially what, you know, the, there was the initial like idea that he was going to be some sort of radical leftist. Right. And there was part of me that was like, we, we don't. One of the reasons it's going to be a problem when we find this guy is he's not going to be who we think he is. Right. Like he's not going to be the Riddler. Everyone. Yeah, right. Like everyone wants him to be a complicated person. And if the guy that they found today, Luigi, is the guy, then that is absolutely the case. I think it's more compelling. [01:55:53] Speaker A: I agree. [01:55:54] Speaker B: There are already people who have turned like, oh, he has bad opinions about things, he's like a red pilled guy and things like that. This is more compelling to me than him being like a cool leftist ass guy. This guy is Gen z. [01:56:07] Speaker A: Yes. [01:56:08] Speaker B: He's 26 years old. Right. He is like an Elon Musk fan or was at one point, according to his Goodreads, he read like a biography of Elon Musk twice and rated it five stars, you know, four years ago or whatever. But who, you know and who is like on Twitter recently. Yes. Talking about dumbass Reddit ass 26 year old man shit. Right. He is a perfect picture of like your regular Gen Z boy at this point. Right. And he is not a radical by any stretch of the imagination. You can look at his tweets, you can look at his books and things like that. And the most you can say about him is that he thought the Unabomber had some good ideas, but he thought he went about it wrong, which is kind of true. Like, the Unabomber did have some good ideas, but he had a lot of really bad ones on top of it. [01:57:12] Speaker A: Complicated. [01:57:13] Speaker B: This guy has no. Yeah, there's no indication here that this guy is like sitting reading marks or anything like that. Right. He's. And another thing that people have pointed out is like, this is so representative of where, like the political state of a lot of people in America, where they're not left, they're not right per se, their ideology doesn't make sense. It's a mix of like, well, they know certain things are wrong. Right? Like they grew up with a certain degree of wokeness or whatever. And so there are certain things that they understand are wrong while at the same time they're watching TikTok, they're reading Reddit, and they're being exposed to the manosphere and all of that kind of shit and learning a bunch of awful right wing things. So his ideology is completely incoherent, which makes him super relatable to a lot of Americans, not me. [01:58:10] Speaker A: What has been a lot of Americans, what has been revelatory, is seeing people coming to the fucking truth. That it isn't a left or a right wing thing. [01:58:22] Speaker B: Right, exactly. [01:58:24] Speaker A: That this issue you have is dicking everyone, no matter what side of the political fence you are. And there are those fantastic screenshots of Ben Shapiro's fucking comment section becoming self aware. [01:58:36] Speaker B: This is the first time they've noticed what Ben Shapiro is doing. [01:58:40] Speaker A: Yes. [01:58:40] Speaker B: That they're like, wait a minute, he's. He's trying to turn us against each other. Yes, like. Yes, yes, exactly. [01:58:49] Speaker A: What? You know the fact that he isn't a fucking. That he isn't a crank. [01:58:55] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, he's. There's no indication. This kid is crazy. [01:58:58] Speaker A: You are so right in that. That makes it all the more compelling. As I put it earlier on, if he could be anyone, then he could be everyone. And I think that is so that. That. That I hope gives more cause for those people who are pulling the strings to sit up and terrified and worry that. Hang on, right? [01:59:19] Speaker B: Like, it's not some insane person. [01:59:22] Speaker A: Yeah. If we can't write this guy off as a fucking whack job, then hang on, right? [01:59:30] Speaker B: Like, are people going to start doing this? Like, that's the real risk. And like I said, it's going to be important to control the narrative for the cops and, you know, all that kind of stuff, to try to make him look as bad as possible and as unrelatable as possible. Because as it stands, yeah, he's. He's any guy. He's just a normal dude who was fed up, from what we can tell. And, you know. Yeah. It's not. It's not an endorsement or anything either way. I mean, I am not going to lose any sleep over this guy. [02:00:03] Speaker A: No, no. [02:00:04] Speaker B: It's just what this says, I think, like you said, is. It's like, is this. People have been saying for years, right? Like, if they don't. If they're not willing to throw us anything and our elections don't mean anything, they have to expect that people are going to start. [02:00:22] Speaker A: The guy was caught in a McDonald's. Is that correct? [02:00:25] Speaker B: He was caught in a McDonald's, yes. An employee turned him in. So much like what happened with DB Cooper. [02:00:31] Speaker A: Look, this might be a reach. [02:00:34] Speaker B: Mm. [02:00:36] Speaker A: I wonder if getting caught was all part of the plan. [02:00:43] Speaker B: Honestly. I mean, it feels like, what with the ditching the backpack full of Monopoly money and all this kind of stuff, it feels too easy that he was just in Pennsylvania where he lived, and. [02:00:55] Speaker A: Here'S where I've got to try and keep that distance. He is. Where. [02:00:58] Speaker B: Don't become conspiracy theorist about it. But. [02:01:01] Speaker A: But now the guy gets the chance to fucking talk about this, say his. [02:01:08] Speaker B: Piece, which is interesting, too. I'm really surprised they didn't. Christopher Dorner. This guy that they. [02:01:12] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. Same. [02:01:13] Speaker B: I expected that they were gonna murder the shit out of him and we were never gonna get. [02:01:17] Speaker A: Best case scenario, he vanished. Second best case scenario, he's taken alive. [02:01:21] Speaker B: He gets to speak. [02:01:22] Speaker A: Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. [02:01:23] Speaker B: So now I can't believe that they let that happen. [02:01:25] Speaker A: This. This. This has legs, mate. [02:01:28] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, it's really interesting. It'll see. It'll be interesting to see where it goes and then, you know, as such, how people react to it, because, like I said, the. The narrative is going to be. They're going to try to control it, Right? Like, people who don't want this to occur and don't want to challenge the structure are going to try to make sure that we don't know everything and that we only know unflattering things and, and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And it'll be interesting to see who changes their mind. [02:01:57] Speaker A: Yes. [02:01:58] Speaker B: Based on that narrative. And it's always interesting to see, like, is this, you know, was this a principled stance? Was this, you know, whatever? Or was it only because you thought that there was like this cute guy on our side that you. You were like, on board with what he did now that he's like a, you know, 26 year old doofus who went to Penn and, you know, likes AI and talks about Fleshlights on Twitter. Like, is he still, you know, on our. On our side or are you gonna buy. Buy into. [02:02:30] Speaker A: Yep. [02:02:30] Speaker B: Whatever's being sold to you about this man? Because at the root of all of this, why people reacted the way he did, what the way they did was because of a visceral rage and a sense that the system is unfair and we needed someone to do something about that. And this guy was a tension release for us. It's like the first time that something has happened here that people go, is this gonna. Is this gonna change? [02:02:57] Speaker A: Is this a moment? [02:02:59] Speaker B: Is this a moment? Like, is there a chance that this will scare power enough? Because they're not scared. They're not scared of us. They're not scared of anything. There are no repercussions for anything they do. And the only thing, the only language that these capitalists can understand is either money or violence. And we don't have the money to fight that. So violence is all we have left. And if they want to keep that from happening, because surely there are people who are readying, you know, their homemade 3D printed weapons to go and do this elsewhere. You know, if they want to prevent that from happening, the only thing that they can do is, you know, hire more guards and change things. So, yeah, it's interesting. It's. You know, I'm not. There was certainly times in my life I considered myself a pacifist. You know, where my sort of thought process is of violence solves nothing or things like that. But, you know, as someone who also studies history, literally the only thing that solves anything is violence when it comes to power. [02:04:10] Speaker A: Look, and the number of times. And yes, my theses are often clumsy. [02:04:17] Speaker B: Sure, right. But this is a podcast. Nobody is expecting anything fully developed here. [02:04:21] Speaker A: We are way past. We are way past. I mean, globally, economically, Socially, we are, the trajectory is only pointing in one direction and we are way past passive change. We are way past ushering in change through sit ins and vigils. Fucking it isn't happening. [02:04:41] Speaker B: Nobody cares. [02:04:42] Speaker A: So if this guy has managed to fucking crack the system just a little bit, maybe, maybe there might be something. [02:04:53] Speaker B: In that, maybe that's good. You know, it's, you know, hate to say it, but this is how things change and always has been, no matter what people say about it and how narratives are rewritten. The way things change has always been the threat of violence or actual violence. And so, yeah, it's going to be interesting to see where, where we go from here. I mean, because the other end of that, of course is, you know, cracking down and we have an incoming president who is unbothered by concepts of like the Constitution, of course, like that. And so, yeah, the other, the other side of this is you end up with escalation, Deeper. Yeah, escalation with deeper fascism with bars on what we can do and say and things like that. So, you know, it could spiral wildly the other direction. It's a similar kind of thing to what people say about the end of Assad's regime. Right. Like it's great, unequivocally great that all these people, you know, are free from having been imprisoned for years and horrible things having been happening to them all this time. Now the question is, what next? You know, do things get better or do they get, they get worse? [02:06:14] Speaker A: Well, exactly. I mean, what happened to Afghanistan in the vacuum? [02:06:19] Speaker B: Right, exactly. It's like just, just because, you know, the power cracks in some way doesn't necessarily mean that what follows is better. So it's an ambiguous thing, but I think, you know, it's going to be interesting to see what he says. It's going to be interesting to see how it's presented to us by the news and things like that. It'll be interesting to see how people's perspectives change or stay the same based on knowing more about this person. And it'll be interesting to see if we get any, you know, improvements because these people are running scared or not. [02:06:57] Speaker A: Hey, it's my birthday. [02:07:00] Speaker B: Mark. Happy birthday. [02:07:04] Speaker A: Thank you very much. [02:07:05] Speaker B: Got you a vigilante. Yay. [02:07:07] Speaker A: It's just where I always went. [02:07:10] Speaker B: The big four six, right? [02:07:13] Speaker A: Indeed, yes. [02:07:15] Speaker B: Do you get to do anything today? [02:07:17] Speaker A: I'll decide in the morning. I got day off work. [02:07:21] Speaker B: Oh, hell yeah. It's a beautiful thing. You enjoy that. [02:07:25] Speaker A: Thank you, friends. [02:07:26] Speaker B: Hey, let us know what you think about this whole Luigi Manjoni situation. [02:07:31] Speaker A: Right. I'm. I'm cracking down on that. That's the last time I'm going to allow you to do that with me as your co host. Understand? I'm out of here. I'll walk. On behalf of Italian accent On behalf of our Birch. [02:07:44] Speaker B: Well, I didn't know you were such an ally to the Italians. [02:07:47] Speaker A: What can I say? It's been a journey. [02:07:51] Speaker B: Let us know what you think. Do you have any predictions on where this is going to go? Do you think we're morally, morally in the wrong for cheering on or questioning whether, hey, maybe it's a good thing that this happened? I don't know. Let us know your opinions on what happened with this guy. Tell us your stories about it. Oh, that reminds me. I actually did get one interesting story. Let me see if I'm allowed to share it real quick. I just think this be interesting to close out on, but I had to ask if it was okay. Yes, okay. I have permission from a listener. I did get this message earlier. So I actually work for a branch of uhc and last week was definitely wild. Wednesday morning in the work chat, someone brought up the shooting. This was when only the New York Post and one local news station were reporting on it. Even then people were talking about it being a hired hit or a professional. It was crazy. Getting video messages from our CEO about how great of a person Brian was while also having my Facebook feed be one 100% memes and celebration about his murder. A couple key notes. One of the meetings from the head CEO talked about safety and addressing the concerns of staff members who were worried. Relax, Barb. No one's going to track you down at the office where you're making $19 an hour. I'm almost positive my raise last year was negated by the amount our insurance went up. Guess which insurance I have that? I've been told to dump it on more than one occasion by health care professionals. We've had numerous town hall meetings this year about how we continue to meet and exceed trends for record profits. Yeah. So, interesting little note from inside of the company there. They also added that, whoops, I lost it again. They also added that I feel bad for my supervisor, who is leftist and now has to deal with some of my coworkers who are firmly in the you should never celebrate someone's death camp. Fascinating to be on the inside of. [02:09:54] Speaker A: Very much so. More of those are welcome, by the way. [02:09:57] Speaker B: Yes. If you have any, any such insights, please do share them and wish our dear mark a happy 46th B day. [02:10:07] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. [02:10:09] Speaker B: We are very lucky to have you. And we look forward to spending this next year with you. [02:10:16] Speaker A: 46 more. [02:10:18] Speaker B: 46 more. 46 more.46 more. Let's go with the one I don't know if you want to. And then we'll. We'll see where we go from there. [02:10:28] Speaker A: Okay? [02:10:30] Speaker B: And everyone stay spooky.