Episode Transcript
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Happy to you sneak attack.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Happy to you Go on. I won't do it again, I promise.
[00:00:18] Speaker A: I've heard that before.
Stop it.
[00:00:22] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: I've said on many occasions that as far as dark tours go, New Orleans, take this. Takes the cake for the place I've been with the darkest, most horrifying stories, like, so terrible that they're not even really fun to listen to. Because if you really think about it, it's just, like, the most horrendous human suffering and it happened to real people.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: I imagine it's a pretty dark place to be today also.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, Unfortunate timing on that intro because horrible things once again have happened.
[00:00:54] Speaker B: So you planned this before podcast before. Okay, okay. Because I thought that's a bit opportunistic even.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that'll be pretty horrific, like, to just be like, oh, in the news today, a guy did a. Horrible atrocities that Ain't Us. Work that in. Just a cute little intro a little bit. No, I'm referring to things like, you know, there's, like, the house there that they based one of the seasons of American Horror Story on, where, like, you know, the slaves were, like, tortured horribly by the rich people who owned the house. And, you know, there's like, all kinds of stories like that that are just like, you know, ghost stories aside, like, the thing happened. And that is really horrible to think about.
But, Mark, I'm afraid NOLA is gonna have to slip down to number two, because the tour I took in Rome, which I will link to because it was wonderful, makes it the darkest place I've ever been to in my entire life.
[00:01:52] Speaker B: Beautiful. Beautiful.
And I use the word intentionally because some of the photos you sent me of the catacombs and the fucking bone sellers and such were just art. Art in death, you know, just to dabber into a fucking work of necrotic beauty.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: Yeah, I'll have to post some pictures that on our Instagram, because we did. We went on, like, a catacombs tour, and the capuchin monks are the guys who that came from, and they are basically monks of death. Right. Like, they came from, like, a pagan tradition essentially, and they wanted to sort of, like a lot of people are doing now, take away the stigma from death, which people were terrified of. And so their entire, like, religious practice centered around death.
And they have. There's a separate spot that I actually saw in my dark tour separately from the catacombs tour.
And they had, like, a church of death. So it looks from the outside like any church, but then if you look at the decorations on it. It's all, like, skulls and skeletons and stuff. And eventually, you know, the Catholic Church wasn't really into, like, pagans, obviously, but the monks proved themselves to be, like, helpful when there was, like, some. I think there was a flood in Rome, and they sort of helped with the bodies and taking care of all of that stuff. And so the church was like, okay, we're gonna let you have, like, your death church, you know, and we'll help you out with that whole thing, but you have to convert to Catholicism. And the monks were like, yeah, okay.
But they, like, very much sort of blend the pagan traditions. So, like Halloween, you see all these, like, hooded guys going through the street, going to their death church and going in, and you can see all the, like, bones and stuff like that that they decorate in all these ornate.
[00:03:54] Speaker B: Ever since. Ever since reading the Merchant of Venice back in school.
[00:03:58] Speaker A: Right, okay.
[00:04:00] Speaker B: This caveat that the church often puts attaches to their good deeds. We'll do this for you, but you got to convert. Gotta convert. That's always struck me as being such an easy thing to fake.
[00:04:13] Speaker A: Oh, very much so.
[00:04:14] Speaker B: Why can't I just go, all right.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Then, yeah, let me move forward and we will discuss that. Because this is a thing. Before I really get into everything that I want to discuss, because this was. This was a journey for me here, a really interesting one.
Like I said, Rome is the darkest place I've ever been. And as you can imagine, a lot of that has to do with the Catholic Church. Not all of it. There's a lot of other shit that makes Italy a pretty horrendous place for women in particular. But the Catholic Church plays no small part in that.
[00:04:43] Speaker B: It does still have that reputation. You know, Italy, is that earned?
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Oh, we're. Yes, very much so. We are going to go through why that is earned. And as such, this cold open will be a little bit of a downer. I'll say that outright, but we're gonna give it the joag treatment and not make light of it, but sort of pull out the absurdity of it all. You know, it's dark, it's a downer, all that. But it's interesting. And, yeah, in that vein, I want to talk a little bit about. Into why Catholic. About why Catholicism has made Rome and Italy generally a hellhole for many people.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Feels like I'm gonna need to take a little rip of this grape ice vape that I've got here.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Lots of. Lots of vapes in Italy.
Plenty of those all over the place.
I like the purple so this was. This was kind of a fascinating story. Stop for the Corrigan spirituality train. You're going from the stuff in Rome that we all acknowledge as mythology, right? Like, all the pagan gods and, you know, the founding myths and all that stuff that, like, you learn about when you're in sixth grade or whatever.
[00:05:58] Speaker B: For example, just super briefly, for example.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: Like, you know, the gods and stuff like that. Roman gods. Right, okay.
[00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Fine, fine, fine.
[00:06:07] Speaker A: Yes, yes.
All of those kinds of things that were foundational parts of Rome when it started, and appeasing the gods and, you know, them being in charge of stuff and. And all of that. So you have all of that, and then you're seeing what is considered totally reasonable religion, the Catholic Church, and that it just basically took the stuff that they were already doing and like, seamlessly transitioned it into Catholicism. Like, obviously a lot of people died and whatnot in the process. But in terms of, like, the beliefs, they would straight up take, like, places like the. The pantheon, right? And it had, like, seven pagan figures in it.
And when the Catholics took over, they were just like, these are Christian saints now. Like, they just straight took the stuff and, like, there's, like, hills that were significant to pagan religion, and they were just like, actually, that's about Christian stuff now. And they just adopted everything that the Romans believed and were like, let's just tweak it and make it Catholic.
This was so fascinating.
[00:07:21] Speaker B: I'm gonna say this out loud because this is. This is news to me, and, you know, I have to understand and speak it.
[00:07:25] Speaker A: Yes, do it.
[00:07:26] Speaker B: So you're saying, unless I've misunderstood the foundation of Catholicism, Roman Catholicism is just a kind of remixed version of what.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: I'm saying is Mount Olympus and shit. Well, right. So one of the things that you learn, and we talked about this with, like, Captain Cook and stuff like that, right? When you're a Christian, you know, like, if you're a missionary or something like that, or when you're learning about missionaries, right. A lot of times when Christians go into other cultures, they will use what religious beliefs or things like that those people already had to help them to understand Christianity. And what you get afterwards is sort of a melding of those things where there are certain beliefs from that tribe or whoever that become a part of that area's religion of Christianity, teaching through analogy, right?
[00:08:31] Speaker B: To the point where it just becomes integrated into the faith, right?
[00:08:35] Speaker A: And so then you have, like, stuff that normally Christians would look down upon pagan religion, things like that. But it's got a Christian twist. So it's fine. They believe in Jesus and all that. And they just maybe have like a weird tradition that the rest of us don't do or something like that, you know, but the. Ultimately your goal is to convert them or whatever. So if you need to use their own faith, whatever that is, to do it, then fine. Right. Like that's how we translate it. And looking at Rome, the sort of beginning of this, you know, huge Catholic empire here, you see them doing that, right. Like taking on whatever beliefs people already had there and bringing them into Catholicism.
And it. As I, as we were walking through these places, right. And what really got me is we're going. We went to the Vatican and the 2025 is a Jubilee year, which is important in the Catholic Church, in the Bible, this whole thing, obviously, this is not how people do it, but in the Bible, all your debts are forgiven in a jubilee year. And it's like this whole deal.
And on this jubilee year, the Pope opens up this special door. He takes a hammer and he opens up this sealed door. And for the year that door will be open. And it said, if you pass through it, your sins are forgiven.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: It's fucking stupid, isn't it?
Isn't it?
[00:10:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: In exactly the same.
It just, it just puts me in mind of some of the ridiculous traditions associated with things like royalty. Yes. You know, this particular crown, this particular scepter, anointed by God. I wear this because I'm chosen. It's fucking sick.
[00:10:25] Speaker A: It's arbitrary bullshit that people clearly made up. And the, the portal thing, along with all the stuff of like. Oh, they just reappropriated stuff that was Roman and made it Christian. But the portal, the door really got me because I was thinking like, okay, I was an evangelical and obviously that's more relationship centered than Catholicism, in which case your sins are forgiven by acceptance of Jesus. Right. Like you, you know, you accept Christ into your heart. Sins are forgiven. That's how this works. Right. So it's directly between you and God. And in Catholicism, obviously, you go through like an intermediary. Right. You pray to saints, you go to confession, you know, your sins are forgiven through the act of confession.
And the idea that you can walk through a magic door and skip that stuff.
[00:11:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:22] Speaker A: Is so transparently bullshit.
[00:11:25] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:27] Speaker A: That I.
[00:11:28] Speaker B: This is a live practice, a live belief in 2025. This is happening as we.
[00:11:32] Speaker A: This is happening.
[00:11:33] Speaker B: The magic door is open.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: That door was opened Christmas Eve and people will be walking through it to get their sins forgiven.
[00:11:42] Speaker B: And is there like, what if I was a child Molester. What if I was a fucking forgiven.
[00:11:49] Speaker A: I mean, I don't know if that's true because I know that, like, Catholicism has, like, mortal sins. And like, oh, there is a venial sins or whatever. There is a hierarchy, right? Evangelicalism, there is no tier. If you accept Jesus, you're in. But Catholicism does have a hierarchy of sin. So I don't know if, like, the door forgives everything. I'm not sure how the magic is supposed to work, but it was so fascinating to me because, like, when I was in college, I studied a lot of, like, I took a class on new religions and cults and studied a lot of American religious history. And one of the things that we talked about was Mormonism, right? And Mormonism is so easy to see, is fake because we live where it started, right? It's an American religion. Joseph Smith took things and, like, placed them in, like, you know, parts of the Book of Mormon.
[00:12:42] Speaker B: I've seen heretic. I know a bunch about Mormonism.
[00:12:45] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, he took stuff and it was like. And had it happen in upstate New York, right? Like. And since we live here and we know that, like, this only started, you know, 200 years ago or whatever, and that these things never happened, there's no archaeological record of any of the stuff that. That he said occurred or any of that. It's very easy to go, that's transparently right. And then when you stand where so much of the Christian faith began and spread and look at how it began, it's like, how does anyone believe this? You know, when you stand where they made it and you hear the history of, like, the popes and all of that stuff and like, that they were deeply corrupt and terrible people a lot of the time. How do people stand in the place where all of this happened and not go, oh my God, do I believe Bullshit.
[00:13:37] Speaker B: It's, you know, very much where I'm at with it all.
Just with the slightest bit of scrutiny, just the slightest bit of interrogation, and none of it fucking holds together. None of it. And even with, you know, fucking Cliff's Notes, you know, Logic 101 kind of approach to any of this stuff, none of it sticks together in the slightest. And in 2025, I just. I just can't grasp how it still is a thing.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: And I think evangelicalism skirts this by being such a spiritual sort of religion. It's not as concerned with tradition, right? So you don't necessarily have to do, like, everything's kind of optional. You don't necessarily have to get baptized. I Mean, some denominations you do, but you don't necessarily have to. You don't necessarily, like, have to take communion. Like, things like that. Like, the ceremony is not the important part of it, and it's about, like, relationship, which is much more. It's harder to nail down. Right.
[00:14:41] Speaker B: Like, as a Catholic, then are there routes by which I can be absolved of sin with confession outside of confession?
[00:14:49] Speaker A: No. So that's the thing is, like, in Catholicism, the traditions are key, right. Like, you have to take part in those things. And that's why, like, people, you know, like, all my cousins are Catholic, you know, they're all Italian, and they go on Christmas and Easter and they, like, confess once or twice a year.
[00:15:09] Speaker B: American? Italian.
[00:15:10] Speaker A: Yes, American. Italian or Italian American.
[00:15:14] Speaker B: All right.
[00:15:16] Speaker A: But like I said when we discussed this whole thing, because we have ethnic enclaves and this country is racist, so people stay amongst their people.
But yeah, as such, they have the traditions of Roman Catholicism because they are Italian Americans.
And, yeah, they don't. They don't go all the time. They're not. They don't practice. Right. It's not like in evangelicalism, your whole life revolves around Jesus. And Catholics aren't necessarily like that because they just have traditions that make it so they can kind of shortcut that whole thing. And as long as they perform those acts, you're good.
And that is so clear when you go that this is just like, people taking stuff from religions that already existed, speaking to people in a way that they understood and transforming those things into this stuff that also then, like, upheld a whole bunch of structures that kept very powerful people powerful, of course, and, you know, the lowest of the low without any power.
And it's. Yeah, it was an interesting stop for me on the, like, you know, this has been. When we first started talking to each other 13, 14 years ago, whatever, Like, I was still a Christian. And, you know, all these kinds of things have unraveled over time. And this was such a. Just a fascinating spot to really sit with.
[00:16:44] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:16:45] Speaker A: How it all started and how far you've come. Right. And, like, just. Yeah. Really think about what it all means, you know, what it was meant for, how it's been used.
[00:16:59] Speaker B: I didn't. I didn't realize at the time. I didn't realize at the time when you and I first started communicating that you were still in it.
[00:17:05] Speaker A: Right. It's.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: Yeah. Very, very fun for me to find that out after the fact. That secret Christian that. Yeah. You know, you still. You were in a very, very different place, different position in the Journey back then.
[00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
So, yeah, it was really interesting just to, to see that and how, you know, all of this stuff, you know, it's just very man made and silly, but it has so much bearing, it has had so much bearing on culture. You know, this is defined Italian culture for literally two millennia.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Just back to the magic door for a moment.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Yeah, sure.
[00:17:41] Speaker B: Is it, is it publicly accessible? Can anyone just queue up and walk through the door or do I have to. So I haven't got a reply. Okay, good.
[00:17:50] Speaker A: Just gotta line up. I'm sure there's gonna be long lines, but.
Yeah, you know, I mean, no more sins.
[00:17:57] Speaker B: Worth it.
[00:17:58] Speaker A: Free trip to heaven. Yeah, yeah. But then like, I guess you'd have to go through it in another 25 years if you plan to do any sinning in the interim. But.
[00:18:07] Speaker B: Well, yeah, but if, if the door opens every 25 years.
[00:18:12] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:18:12] Speaker B: And you're a fit and healthy human.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: You can, you can plan, hit it a couple times.
[00:18:19] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. If you've got two goes at the door, maybe three if you're very lucky. Yeah, let me see, 46.
I could go through the door now.
[00:18:28] Speaker A: Yeah, potentially one more time.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. And then I'd still have another run at the door before the big day.
[00:18:38] Speaker A: So there you go. If you're Catholic. Hey, get on over there. This year you want to get a. You want to get in before, before it closes up next Christmas Eve.
[00:18:48] Speaker B: Love that. Oh, it's open for a year.
[00:18:50] Speaker A: It's only open for a year. Yeah, not forever, just for the year.
[00:18:53] Speaker B: So I haven't even, I haven't even got it. There's no real rush because, I mean, I guess at the end of the year the queue will be a lot.
[00:18:58] Speaker A: Shorter maybe, or everyone's gonna be there trying to get through.
[00:19:02] Speaker B: It's like the sails at Bicester Village.
[00:19:04] Speaker A: You gotta time it.
[00:19:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:19:09] Speaker A: So, yeah, like I said, all of this has defined Italian culture for 2,000 years.
And often the people in charge of the Catholic Church were pretty much the righteous gemstones of their time. Popes weren't like excessively holy people. They were born of the equivalent of royal families. They had unseemly proclivities. They had enemies that they used their power to punish.
And far from the ideas of Christian love that we hear people spout about today, the Church was often an instrument of vengeance and torture.
[00:19:43] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: There's this big castle in Rome, Castel Sant Angelo, and I think it's the oldest structure still standing, like full structure. It's definitely older than The Coliseum. And it's still intact. Like, you know, the Coliseum is like, has the chunk out of it and all that kind of stuff. But Castel Sant Angelo is still intact pretty much as it always been, because it has been in consistent use. It was built by Emperor Hadrian, and then the Catholics eventually took it over and they used it as a prison until Italian independence in the late 19th century.
And they tortured the ever loving shit out of people there.
If you were accused of pretty much anything, they'd send you there and they'd torment you to give you an idea of what you were in for in the afterlife for your sins.
And then they'd execute you and send you off presumably to that eternal torment, which seems bonkers to me. Like, listen, they're gonna know what that eternal torment is like. I don't feel like you need to give them a preview. No, no, that's fine.
[00:20:53] Speaker B: What's the word that seems gratuitous.
[00:20:56] Speaker A: Gratuitous, yeah, exactly. And it was right where the townspeople could hear the just 247 screaming and wailing of the prisoners. The executions were carried out on the bridge in front of it, which is now called Ponte Sant'Angelo. And it was carried out under the Pope's authority. This is what he wanted, for people to be just excruciatingly horrendously punished for little things, literally, like if you stole something, Castel Sant'Angelo. And yeah, like there was no sin that wouldn't land you in there. So you had to be careful because it's about keeping the plebs in line. Right. Like you want people to be terrified to challenge power in any.
[00:21:40] Speaker B: You want the screams to be heard.
[00:21:42] Speaker A: Yes, exactly.
And considering all the dirty laundry we know about the church now, it's no surprise that their attitudes towards women have always been shit, with women being punished for pretty much any action that made a man feel affronted.
Roman Catholicism, despite all its neat imagery of Mary and other female saints, is steeped in patriarchy. A good chunk of the reason there are so many female saints is because broads were getting murdered all the time for stepping out of line. Just constant, constant murder of women.
Associate professor at Colorado State University Julia Krebton Horhager considers Catholicism to be just one piece of the puzzle, though one of the unavoidable contributing factors is the history of Italy itself, including its founding myths. For example, in Rome's origin story, the burgeoning city doesn't have enough women. So patriarch Romulus kidnaps unmarried girls from a nearby tribe called Sabine and keeps them as concubines to impregnate and populate the city.
And this scene is celebrated, appearing in famous works of art that are not only on display in Italy, but around the world. You can see them in like paintings of this in Italy. Just great. I mean, in England, just great big artistic renderings of girls being sexually assaulted for the sake of the nation.
Not a great start.
[00:23:02] Speaker B: So we'll fought.
[00:23:04] Speaker A: Yeah. Krypton Whorehogger goes on to point out that from its earliest days, Roman women were second class citizens who were physically punished for any act of disobedience. Those punishments going so far as being kicked to death, drowned and defenestrated at gladiatorial competitions. Huh?
[00:23:21] Speaker B: Deflayed. What is defenestrated thus?
[00:23:23] Speaker A: Oh, thrown out windows.
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Huh?
[00:23:26] Speaker A: Yeah, just like a horrifying idea.
[00:23:29] Speaker B: I've always thought that meant something else.
[00:23:33] Speaker A: Hey, look at this. First day of the year and you're already learning new things. Come on, Joanne Journey. At gladiatorial competitions, women were only allowed to sit with the slaves, which is a lot to unpack in and of itself, let me tell you. I could do a whole thing on the gladiators, that whole thing, which is just, yeah, beyond awful.
But it's just an illustration of how they were seen in society, right? Like even the women of high status were treated like that. Nero had his first wife and mother killed and his second wife kicked to death while pregnant.
And no one's gonna claim Nero was a good guy, but fuck, if vestal virgins violated their chastity vows or were thought to have, they were buried alive.
And women were subject to something called the right to kiss, which meant that men were allowed to kiss them in order to test to see that they weren't drunk. And if they were found to have had alcohol, they could be killed.
So obviously, if you tried to refuse some random man making out with you, you put yourself at risk of him being like, she's drunk and having you thrown out a window.
[00:24:49] Speaker B: Defenestrated.
[00:24:51] Speaker A: Defenestrated.
There it is.
[00:24:56] Speaker B: I'm not. Just FYI, I'm not enjoying this one bit.
[00:24:59] Speaker A: I told you it was going to be dark. This is a rough one. Yes. Both prostitutes and actresses were traded around, sexually assaulted and murdered at the whims of the men who employed them. And in Roman law, it was more important that a woman's virginity be preserved than a rapist be punished. So if a woman or girl was being abused, a man close to her would just murder her to protect her chastity better dead than deflowered.
It was a meme that men are obsessed with the Roman Empire, but when you start to actually look at what the Roman Empire was, it is actually very chilling to think that anyone would be like obsessed with this period of time.
And while here in the US or over there in the uk, our governments and politicians put a lot of work into downplaying the atrocities that we did to become the nations we are now. Italy doesn't disavow this legacy. These stories are everywhere. You would learn them in school. You got paintings and sculptures and all that kind of stuff. And it's a point of pride instead of something that they're like, oh, sorry about that. You know, the old people were terrible.
And then you've got fascism, which rose in the 1930s under Mussolini and held that women's primary role in society was baby making.
Otherwise they were to shut the fuck up and let men run things.
And you would think after the collapse of that whole thing and being the out and out baddies in a whole ass world war, they'd have rebranded. But instead they've leaned in with a female president who is not only a member of the fascist party, but actively says that she is not a fascist. I mean, is not a feminist.
One of the articles I read even pointed out that she uses the masculine article eel before her presidential title, which is wild. Like, imagine that. Like, you know, to. If you're not a language person, right? Like you have a masculine and a feminine article. You know, you've heard like, you know, a table can be masculine and a chair can be feminine or things like that. Right. So if you are the president, you would be la presidente.
[00:27:03] Speaker B: I mean, you're describing, for example, if Thatcher had insisted on being called Mr. Thatcher.
[00:27:10] Speaker A: Exactly, right, yeah.
She's insisting on being called sir is essentially what's happening here. Like, that's how much she wants to distance herself from the idea of being a feminist.
So I guess she got picked. Good for her.
But this isn't a country where women couldn't vote until the late 1940s and divorce wasn't legal till 1980.
All of this taken together has led to a country where women are still not only subjugated in both the public and private sphere, but where they're murdered at absolutely obscene rates.
[00:27:49] Speaker B: All this said feels.
Doesn't feel particularly corrie like that you would voluntarily go there.
[00:27:57] Speaker A: I didn't know this.
[00:27:59] Speaker B: Ah, right, okay, fine.
[00:28:00] Speaker A: I went on a. You know, and this is an interesting thing, like I think a thing that all women know about Italy is like, the men are kind of, like, sure, they'll grow. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, things like that. And, like, you know, I'm walking around with my husband. I've been all over the world. I'm, like, generally not concerned with, like, what people tell you is scary about another country.
Like, everywhere you go, people are like, oh, watch your stuff. You're gonna get pickpocketed. Although some guy did definitely try to pickpocket Kyo while we were there. So I will say, you know, if you're near, like, the Colosseum or, like, really touristy areas, someone comes up and tries to, like, shake your hand or something, don't do that.
But, yeah, I like, generally with this kind of stuff, I take it with a grain of salt, like, everyone thinks another country is scary, of course, but I didn't know about, like, this more endemic, like, structural stuff. And what was great is on our tour, our tour guide was named Yash, and he was from Nepal, but he had been in Italy. He came for college and had been there ever since, so for about a decade. And he had this really great, like, insider, outsider perspective of being someone who came from elsewhere and was able to sort of see the place for what it is without the, like, growing up and being indoctrinated into this being normal.
And so he was really honest about the fact that, like, he loves it there and all that stuff. But also, it's awful. Like, it's like, if you're a woman here, it is really shitty. You have no rights, and people get murdered. Women get murdered all the time.
And, you know, I thought that was one of the things that was so interesting about this tour is just. Yeah. Like, you don't really get that from.
You're not going to get it in a.
You won't get it from most tour guides, like, if they're from a place, they're not going to tell you this place kind of sucks. And, you know, your guides to tourism are not going to be like, also, ladies get murdered a lot, you know? But the thing is, like, I'm not in danger because I'm not from there, right? Like, no one's going to take away my American rights while I'm there. And as I'll discuss, it has more to do with intimate partner violence. Right? So, like, Keo isn't suddenly going to murder me because we're in Italy. He's grown up with the norms of America. So, you know, it's. I don't feel like, as a tourist, you're in danger in this place, but this is a society that has a huge problem here.
So that said, the women are murdered at obscene rates and being murdered by a partner wasn't criminalized in Italy until the 80s.
[00:30:46] Speaker B: Just cross off another country where we ain't getting a fan base.
Right? Italy, right under Australia.
[00:30:54] Speaker A: Apologies to John Benfield's wife, but yeah, even still, now that it is criminalized, men who kill their partners or exes over jealousy, infidelity, etc, are dealt with with leniency as being driven to murder by women who now that it's criminalized since the 80s, but yeah, murdering a woman who, who insults them, defies them, etc. Is considered totally reasonable.
Unless you think this is exaggerated. And I'm an American condemning a culture I don't understand. The Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia Treccani named femicide its word of the year in 2023 in Italy. Dictionary in Italy, 2023, Word of the year, femicide. So this is a problem that is not just me being like, whoa, look at these crazy foreigners and their problems. Like they are dealing with shit right now.
A woman is murdered by her partner on average every three days in Italy. And the sister of 22 year old Julia Chekatine, who was killed by her ex boyfriend, summed this up in a banger of a quote. She said, monsters are healthy sons of the patriarchy and rape culture.
In other words, this is a feature, not a bug. Men are like this because it's how society is built to run.
[00:32:15] Speaker B: Nicely put.
[00:32:16] Speaker A: Mm.
So with all of that in mind, I'm gonna tell you two stories, Marco, and I'm going to tell you right now, there is simply no way of knowing the truth of what happened in either one.
Normally, I'm in the business of myth busting, but we're gonna lean in a little bit today and here's why.
The details aren't as important as what the stories mean to Italian women. The sort of skeletons of the stories are true, but the details are all over the place, which makes perfect sense. These things happened hundreds of years ago to people who weren't like an emperor or the Pope, So the records are not exhaustive of their lives.
[00:32:56] Speaker B: Not that I'm expecting you to know this off, off, just off the top of your head, but how does Italy react to your president elect?
And what that might mean for Italian.
[00:33:13] Speaker A: American relations was not brought up by anyone there.
It wasn't like. Which is interesting, that might say something in and of itself, because the last election we were in Ireland, the week of Trump's inauguration, and every Irish person wanted to talk about it, and all of them, without fail, kept saying to us, don't worry about it. Someone will kill him.
Every single. Every taxi we got in, every person we met in a pub, don't worry, somebody will kill him. I'm like, I regret to inform you, we are not Irish, that that is not going to happen. But I digress. Yeah, but in Italy, no, no one, no one brought it up, but it's a, you know, it is a fascist country, so they're probably not super concerned about Trump.
So let's see. So the other reason why it's hard to separate truth from fiction in these stories I'm going to tell you is that the women at their centers have become larger than life in the Italian imagination. And the stories have been tweaked and exaggerated over and over to make them more relevant or more exciting or bloodier or more tragic. So I'm going to tell you these tales that are true. Ish. But that are emotionally true more than anything else.
So, as I've explained, Italy is patriarchal as fuck and always has been. And when the Catholic Church came along, it only made things far worse. There was a general attitude that women were property and whatever you did with them in the privacy of your own family life was no one else's business. And this is still basically true, as you can tell by that insane femicide rate.
But this went double if you were someone of importance, like one Count Francesco Cenci.
It's 1599 and Cenci fucking sucks.
He's a filthy rich aristocrat from a family of long and storied lineage, but he's horrible to the point of what historycollection.com referred to as cartoonish villainy.
At home, he was physically and sexually abusive to his first and second wives, his daughter, his sons, and his mistress, along with starving his servants to the point that the papal court had to get involved and tell him to feed his staff outside of his own house. He was also known for being cruel and violent and confessed to molesting boys.
Everyone hated him. He was reviled by all of the locals. And it's even said that Chenchi would just straight up kill poor folks for fun.
Although this is one of those little tidbits to take with a grain of salt. Not sure if that's accurate or if his, like, he was just so vile that it was, like, wouldn't be surprised, you know.
Regardless, no one in Rome was Team Francesco. He was a terror to his family and the locals and kind of a pain in the ass to the Papal authority that had to be lenient with him, even though he was a total menace. It's like you got this guy who you can't really punish, and yet he is, like, you know, constantly causing a ton of problems. He was jailed for a period in his life, but not long because he's rich and untouchable.
His daughter, Beatrice Cenci, informed authorities that she was being sexually abused by her father on numerous occasions. But like I said, what happens in his own house is his own business.
Eventually, someone told the Count that she was ratting him out. As punishment, he sent Beatrice, her little brother Bernardo, and her mother, Lucrezia, away to one of his castles outside the city. And there he escalated his horrific behavior, being further away from the prying eyes of the authorities.
Now, this castle, known as La Rocca, basically stood on a cliff with a village below, which is kind of a cinematic image, right?
And on September 9th, my birthday, give or take a few centuries, Count Cenci came to La Rocca and visited. All of his usual abuse upon his wife and daughter. But Beatrice and Lucrezia had had enough. Her other siblings, aside from one younger brother, had escaped her father's grasp in their own ways. Her older sister had petitioned the Pope to marry without her dad's consent, and it was granted. Two of her brothers died in duels, and her older brother Giacomo, had disowned Francesco and just fucked off elsewhere. But Beatrice wrote to Giacomo, begging for help as her situation worsened and the authorities continued to turn a blind eye to her pleas. Once again, Francesco had discovered Beatrice was telling on him, and he beat her to a pulp. And she told Giacomo that using the ol. Proper channel simply wasn't going to cut it. They had to go nuclear.
So Giacomo got on board, as did Lucrezia and Bernardo.
Oh, sorry, I read that sentence wrong. As did Lucrezia and Bernardo. The end of sentence. She also brought along a man it said she seduced specifically for the purpose of using him in the plot. Olympio Calvetti and a man simply known as Marzio, who was to be the hitman.
The idea was that they were to kill Francesco in his bed and then toss him off the aforementioned cliff so that it seemed like an accident.
[00:38:27] Speaker B: And there were no actual correct channels for this man.
[00:38:31] Speaker A: Right. Like, no one could punish him. He was just. The worst you could do was, you know, let him cool his heels in the. In the jail for a month or whatever, and then he'd be Released right back into the wild to do this. So no choices, zero options here. Had to go full Gypsy Rose on this dude.
So the guys kind of went too hard, though. After Beatrice dosed her father with a sleeping potion, Olympio and Marzo snuck into the Count's bedroom, pinned him to the bed, and drove an iron spike through his head before putting his clothes back on him and yeeting him off the ledge.
[00:39:07] Speaker B: That's better, right?
[00:39:10] Speaker A: They even broke part of the balcony to make it look like it'd given way, causing him to plunge to his death. As you can imagine, when his body was found, the authorities were immediately like, uh, this is not a wound you get from falling off a balcony. And the body was already cold as well, indicating it was not freshly dead from the fall.
So then they went and they checked out the room from which he'd allegedly fallen. And while the hitman had taken the sheets, they hadn't cleaned up blood spatter elsewhere in the room.
And honestly, there's something kind of funny to me about the fact that the guys who can be talked into being hitmen have always been fucking idiots. Like, if this were 2024, their Google history would just be variations of how to murder someone and make it look like they fell off a balcony.
Bless their hearts.
[00:39:58] Speaker B: Best spike for piercing heads, right?
[00:40:01] Speaker A: Exactly.
So it took the papal folks no time at all to realize that the Count's family had ganked him, and they were swiftly arrested. When the people of Rome found out what happened, it was a real Luigi Mangione situation. They were like, hell, yeah, Beatrice, fuck that guy.
And this is a problem for Pope Clement viii, who was like, whoa, we don't want other folks to start committing copycat patricides, because obviously everyone's dad sucked at that point. Like, women are property. Men can do whatever they want at home. If you start letting people get away with it, then there's gonna be a whole bunch more murders of terrible men in Rome. So the Pope was like, no. No way.
And as was custom at the time, they tortured the shit out of all of them in Castel Sant'Angelo, including that whole stretching on the rack deal. They did that to Beatrice. And while Beatrice and lovelorn Olympio kept their mouths shut, Giacomo, Lucrezia and Bernardo were like, it was Beatrice. It was her idea. She was in charge.
All but Bernardo, who is only 12, were sentenced to death.
The Romans protested and even managed.
[00:41:14] Speaker B: He was 12.
[00:41:15] Speaker A: He was 12. Her little brother was only 12 years old. The Romans protested and even managed to get the Execution temporarily stopped. But the Pope was like, absolutely not. Kill these clowns. We have to. So they were brought in front of Castle Sant'Angelo on September 11th and executed in various different ways, all to send a message.
I'm not exactly sure why he got the worst of it, but Giacomo, he was tortured en route from the castle to the scaffold. And then once there, they smashed his head with a mallet and quartered his corpse. I didn't even know that was an option, just giving him the Gallagher treatment.
Lucrezia. Oh, go ahead.
[00:41:58] Speaker B: And they. And they even tortured him in the bus on the way.
[00:42:01] Speaker A: Right? Exactly. Like, come on, man.
Lucrezia and Beatrice were often the old fashioned way. A choppity chop at the neck with an axe. Little Bernardo had to watch all this happen before being sent to spend the rest of his life as a galley slave in the prison.
He was released a year later, however.
And do you have any guesses as to what happened to all the property of the Chenxy family now that they'd all been done away with?
[00:42:28] Speaker B: I want to say, was given to the church.
[00:42:31] Speaker A: It's given to the Pope. Pope Clement VIII got it and he gave it away to his family.
[00:42:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Seems fair.
[00:42:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
Certainly no ulterior motive to kill this entire family here.
This is like, honestly the best thing that could have happened for him. It's like he got rid of the, like, terrible guy that he couldn't do anything about and then got to kill the family and take all their land.
Catholicism.
So for the other story. Oh, go ahead.
[00:43:01] Speaker B: Yeah. No, I mean, listen, that was. That was like 600 years ago.
[00:43:07] Speaker A: It was 400 years ago. Something like that.
[00:43:12] Speaker B: Somewhere in that.
[00:43:16] Speaker A: Great. And femicide was the word of the year in 2023. So everything's going swimmingly over there. But the other story. And then I'll kind of tie them together with a little bow for you. We move forward in time just a few decades to sometime around 1630 in Sicily.
The patriarchy hasn't changed in those intervening years. Women are the property of men, and marriage isn't about love. Often very young girls are wedded to much older men. What basically equates to being sold. And your best bet at the time was to marry a rich but sickly guy who'd kick the bucket and leave you to spend the rest of your days a loaded widow.
While women worked, there's pretty much zero upward mobility for them. And everything they did was controlled by their husbands or the church.
This led, of course, to basically the same kinds of Black markets for things like abortion that we have now, but with a little dose of magic, what historian Linwood Molyneux dubbed the criminal magical underworld.
Mike Dash of the University of Cambridge explains, this community may have been at least 200 strong in mid 17th century Rome and numbered among its members wise women, astrologers, alchemists, confidence men, witches, shady apothecaries, and backstreet abortionists who, between them told fortunes and cast horoscopes, sold love potions and lucky charms, cured toothache, and offered to dispose of unwanted babies and husbands.
So basically, we're talking about a time before modern medicine, a time of total control over women, a time of superstition, and a time when people were doing whatever the heck they could to get by. So you get these people dealing various solutions to life's problems, all on the down low because the church was not too kind to folks practicing, practicing pagan rituals and the like.
[00:45:00] Speaker B: Backstreet abortionists.
[00:45:02] Speaker A: It's a good punk band name, isn't it?
[00:45:05] Speaker B: Am I illegal?
[00:45:10] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:45:11] Speaker B: Am I criminal?
[00:45:13] Speaker A: Oh, there it is.
[00:45:17] Speaker B: We're not making light.
[00:45:19] Speaker A: Like I said, we're pointing out the absurdity, aren't we?
[00:45:21] Speaker B: There you go. Yes.
[00:45:23] Speaker A: So, July 1633. A woman named Tegania D'Adamo is put to death in Sydney, Sicily, for murdering her husband with poison.
The year before, a woman named Francesca La Sarda had been executed for a similar crime.
In 1881, a revisiting of documents and diaries related to the case determined that the two women had conspired to make and sell a poison potion known as Aqua Tufania, and that their crime had been considered so heinous that in various accounts, it's said that D'Adama had been either hanged, drawn and quartered, or. Or, and this is a hell of a thing, closed and bound alive in a canvas sack and thrown from the roofs of the Bishop's palace into the street in the presence of the populace.
[00:46:09] Speaker B: Turbo. Defenestrated. Yeah, defenestrated in a bag.
[00:46:13] Speaker A: They. Ooh, they really were creative with their tortures and deaths in those days.
[00:46:21] Speaker B: That one kind of feels like they'd run out of ideas, though.
[00:46:25] Speaker A: Maybe. I don't know. I'm thinking, you know, they wanted to throw someone out of thing, but they figured out it was, you know, the cleanup sucked, so they just put you in a bag instead.
[00:46:34] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:46:36] Speaker A: So the whole game being up in Sicily, everyone associated with their operation fled, ending up in Rome, where they continued to make the poison.
Among these associates was Julia Tofana, who's thought to be the daughter of Teofania d'adamo, although it can't be known for sure.
Regardless, she and a woman named Girolamo Sparra got together a motley crew of accomplices to help them to get the word out about their potion, which was now being called Aqua Tofana.
[00:47:03] Speaker B: What was in this potion? Do we know?
[00:47:05] Speaker A: Among the ingredients was.
[00:47:07] Speaker B: Hey, we'll get.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: There was arsenic, which was supplied by a priest named Father Girolamo of Sant Agnese in Agone, whose brother was an apothecary. I love that it was a priest who was supplying the arsenic.
[00:47:21] Speaker B: That just very nice.
[00:47:22] Speaker A: Seems perfect, right? The other ingredients, it just kind of depends on where you're reading it from. Arsenic definitely was one of the things. And the other ones are all, like, depends on who. Who's saying what it was.
[00:47:34] Speaker B: Red color. 48. 3.
[00:47:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:47:37] Speaker B: Caramel flavor.
[00:47:41] Speaker A: Now, as the story goes, women started coming from all over the city to get their hands on some of this Aqua tofana, which Julia was selling out of an unassuming storefront, ostensibly selling cosmetics and soaps and little tinctures and such. A 17th century bath and body works.
We're talking folks lined up around the block like it's crumbles, cookies. While they'd know to ask for Aqua tofana, the mixture would come in a jar labeled manna of St Nicholas, which was a healing oil lots of people would have had in their homes and wouldn't have raised any suspicions. Which also, this oil, it said in one of the articles was, like, said to, like, drip from, like, drip from, like, the coffin of this guy or something like that, or drip from, like, a.
An icon of this man or whatever, which just grossed me out. Honestly, I just don't like the idea of things like dripping from something and me ingesting it.
[00:48:33] Speaker B: No, I don't like that.
[00:48:34] Speaker A: I don't like it. But the Romans love their tradition and whatnot, so there you go.
According to legend, some 600 men around the city dropped dead over the course of a few years, and no one could figure out what this affliction was. That seemed to only be affecting them.
Meanwhile, these women who had endured terrible arranged marriages were free to live out the rest of their lives with their own money and freedom, thanks to Julia and her gang, that is, the story goes, until one woman got cold feet as she went to feed her husband poisoned soup and begged him not to eat it.
Realizing she had tried to kill him, he beat her and made her tell him where she got the Offending concoction, she gave up the Tifana operation and Julia was caught red handed making batches of the stuff. She, her daughter and her accomplices were taken to jail, tortured and then executed for their crimes. Thus ending Roman women's access to the deadly drink and no doubt saving the lives of many Roman men.
[00:49:32] Speaker B: Sure.
[00:49:33] Speaker A: Now, according to Dash, records show that actually Julia Tofana died at home around 1651, neither imprisoned nor even apparently suspected of the crimes she'd been committing. Which I think is kind of interesting. Like this is one of the, like if you read most things here, including. So I got this reference to this book that mentioned this from the sources of another article that I was reading, which in that article said that Tofana had been executed for this. And they referenced this book where the guy was like, she was not. She, she died at home. She's. Nothing happened to her. And it's always fascinating, like, you know, a legend being like, like it comes to the point where everyone says this and even when you're reading the book with the records, people are like, no, she definitely died.
She totally died. It's important to the story people are telling about her that she was punished for this. You know, it's part of her sort of martyrhoodom to tell this story. But from what we can tell, she was not, she was never prosecuted for any of this. Upon her death, her partner Sparra took over the operation. And perhaps it was because she was moved in aristocratic circles rather than laying low. But the Roman authorities finally caught up with their shenanigans in 1658.
Court records claim that Giovanna de Grandis, an associate of the crime ring, was entrapped by a police agent who said that she would pay for a poison that could kill her awful husband and end her unhappy marriage.
With that, the Acqua Tofana racket was officially done. Spada and DeGrandis were charged with 46 murders and hanged in front of a crowd along with one of their clients. In 1659, six other accomplices and 40 lower class customers were imprisoned for life.
More well to do and well connected ladies claim that they were shocked, shocked to find out that their cosmetics contained poison. And some of them were kept out of the trial by the Pope himself, seeking to avoid scandal.
And now, some 350 years later, feminist movements in Italy have claimed both Beatrice Cenci and Giulia Tofana as symbols in their fight against the violent patriarchy that is still so prevalent in Italy. Beatrice is sort of a sad reminder that this has been going on forever. And the other is sort of a cheeky reminder of women's agency in all this, that you can only push them so far before they take their power back.
And obviously, this is a tacit endorsement from Jack of all graves. Women of Italy, go poison some men or drive a spike through their head. You know, whatever you gotta do.
[00:52:14] Speaker B: I didn't. Again, I didn't enjoy any of that.
[00:52:18] Speaker A: You're welcome.
[00:52:22] Speaker B: It's, It's. It's.
It's. It's something that we do. Something this podcast does to me from time to time is remind me how in many ways, even though we've come so far, we haven't. We haven't come far at all.
And, yeah, thanks for that. That was lovely.
[00:52:40] Speaker A: That's so one way of putting it. Like I said at the beginning, I think, you know, it's an interesting reminder, like you said. And, like, when I went on that New Orleans tour, I was like, this is so dark as to not be fun. Like, if you connect yourself and have empathy for people who this happened to, it's really hard for it to be fun. And that was how I felt on this. Like, again, our tour guide, Yash, was amazing. And if you're in Rome, I highly recommend going to get a good tour from him. But at the same time, it was like, on this, I was like, oof, this is sad.
[00:53:13] Speaker B: This is sad, grueling.
[00:53:14] Speaker A: This is not fun stuff. But it's also kind of like, you know, I think, important to recognize that this stuff persists and that as the world moves further, right, this battle gets more difficult. You know, that we have to. We have to be vigilant in making sure that this doesn't become everywhere. You know.
[00:53:39] Speaker B: The lessons, though, tell us that vigilance solves nothing. Even if it. Even if. Even if. Even if we stay vigilant. I mean, vigilance in noticing something happening is all well and good, right?
[00:53:56] Speaker A: But you do have to be willing to use the spike.
[00:53:59] Speaker B: Yes, thank you. Yes, exactly that.
Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: Yes, please do.
[00:54:07] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene.
[00:54:11] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before.
[00:54:15] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex.
[00:54:16] Speaker A: Cannibal receiving worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science.
[00:54:21] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it.
[00:54:28] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark.
[00:54:30] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it.
[00:54:33] Speaker A: Let's get into happier things, shall we?
[00:54:36] Speaker B: Yeah. All right. Okay.
If you still have your 2024 calendar up, do me a favor, don't be a fucking chump, right? Take it down, rip it up, spit on it.
[00:54:47] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:54:48] Speaker B: Fucking set it on fire. Defenestrate it.
Just get rid of that shit. Because it is January 1st. It's 2025. It's a new day. Yes, it is. And I think, I think it behooves us well here at this point on the award winning, not so much in Italy, but globally, you know, globally beloved and celebrated podcast, Jack of all graves, to maybe take a little look back over the last 12 and maybe take a look forward to the next 12. Not just, not just on a personal level, but globally, culturally, politically, and let's just fucking take a moment as people. Let's just take a moment as human beings to use that fucking big cerebellum of ours and think on and think back and take a moment just to reflect backwards and forwards. It's one of my favorite bits of this season right before favorite parts of this times of year. Something I love doing.
Not to any real end. I mean, you know, and the question is going to come to you soon because you're the. You're the resolutions girl.
[00:55:56] Speaker A: I am? Yeah.
[00:55:57] Speaker B: I'm not the resolutions girl.
[00:56:00] Speaker A: I'm gonna have to stop telling people that. You know, Mark, he's the resolutions girl.
[00:56:04] Speaker B: Fucking hell. No, I'm not. Because then they meet me and they're like, what?
[00:56:08] Speaker A: That's the resolutions girl?
[00:56:11] Speaker B: Which is to say, welcome, friends. I know we've been away for a week and I, I.
[00:56:16] Speaker A: Two weeks, you know.
[00:56:16] Speaker B: Again, it's been two weeks. Good Lord.
But I sincerely hope that you found some time over the past two weeks to, you know, enjoy what you can. What there is left to enjoy, you know, you're here.
I was in such a great mood before that.
[00:56:36] Speaker A: Oh, no, you were in a good mood. We'll get back. We'll get back into it. I'm sorry I didn't.
[00:56:41] Speaker B: Such a fucking fantastic mood before you.
[00:56:43] Speaker A: Seriously, I didn't expect you to be in a good mood. That's the problem.
Listen, I had a great vacation.
[00:56:51] Speaker B: Well, good.
[00:56:51] Speaker A: In spite of. Yeah, no murders or anything that I was aware of.
Aside from the fact that the way people drive there, I'm surprised that more people aren't killed every single day. People drive crazy in Rome. Oh, and our tour guide was saying that he Was like, you know, you have to be really careful here because everyone drinks and drives.
Like, oh my God. I was like, that explains a lot because we saw a guy rear end an army truck. There's like, military all over the place in Rome. And we were, you know, that's a whole other cold open. I'm sure there's military everywhere. Like, standing outside of places with their guns and their camo and all that kind of stuff.
I just kind of get used to it after a while. But this, we were. We went across this street and then all of a sudden heard like. And looked. And a guy had rear ended the soldiers. Like, ooh, bruh. I was like, yeah, okay. If everyone drives drunk, this makes a lot more sense about everything that we have seen here.
[00:57:56] Speaker B: Did you see what became of him?
[00:57:58] Speaker A: It seemed pretty chill. Everyone got out and the thing is, like, it's a military truck. So, like, his little, like, tiny Euro car sustained more damage than theirs did.
Like, they're like, oh, yeah. All right, well, peace. Though I do wonder, like, do they. Do they have insurance? Like, do the soldiers have insurance? How does that work? I don't know. Anyway, I don't know.
[00:58:22] Speaker B: Would you like to know how I. How my 2025 began?
[00:58:26] Speaker A: I would love to. Tell me about it.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Right at about 8:00 this morning. Mm, January 1st. I spasmed a muscle in my back.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:58:37] Speaker B: Standing up from the toilet?
[00:58:40] Speaker A: No, not the toilet.
[00:58:44] Speaker B: It's good, isn't it?
[00:58:45] Speaker A: Oh, no.
[00:58:46] Speaker B: First morning of the year.
A beautiful reminder that I'm 46. 20, 25.
[00:58:54] Speaker A: Time moves inexorably forward.
[00:58:57] Speaker B: Yes, it does.
[00:58:59] Speaker A: That's rough. Are you feeling okay now? Is your back better now?
[00:59:01] Speaker B: Oh, listen, I feel fantastic. Horrific 45 minute stories notwithstanding.
Other than that, I feel terrific. Thank you. And it's lovely to be here.
[00:59:12] Speaker A: Oh, good. Listen, some days. Some days you get to be the downer. Some days I get to be the downer. It is what it is. But I ate. I learned to make pasta. Mark, that was great.
[00:59:23] Speaker B: I saw, and it seemed like for a newbie, you did a great job of it.
[00:59:27] Speaker A: Yeah, it was fun. I thought it was going to be a lot worse. My. My mother bought like, pasta attachments for this KitchenAid mixer, which I already don't use. And, like, that thing weighs like 70 pounds and I don't like cleaning all the parts. And every time I put something in it, I end up, like, splashing flour all over myself. I don't bake. I don't want anything to do with this. My mom buys pasta attachments like a Muppet. Straight up. Yes, my mom buys pasta attachments. She's like, oh, I thought you might like to make fresh pasta. I was like, no, I don't want to do that ever. Like, that's. I have tons of pasta in the pantry. I do not need to do that. But after making it there by hand, no mixers or anything like that necessary, I might consider making more fresh pasta.
[01:00:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, is it. Is it a transferable skill? Could you do it now?
[01:00:16] Speaker A: I think so. Yeah. I think I would need some practice to not, like, screw it up or whatever, but, like, it was much easier than I thought.
[01:00:24] Speaker B: There you go. I mean, that's one thing that the holiday. That's one positive impression that Italy has made on.
[01:00:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Oh, it made tons of positive impressions. Everyone was very friendly.
You know, everywhere we went, we walked into places and people were really helpful and helped us pick out things everywhere we went. And like I said, great tours. Saw those cool bones.
It was pretty rad. I like the death monks a lot. Those are pretty cool. There was literally a room in this. This place that was called, like, the Room of Pelvises.
How often do you get to see a room of pelvises? Bark.
[01:01:06] Speaker B: Fair enough.
[01:01:06] Speaker A: Riddle me.
[01:01:07] Speaker B: You have a picture of that I would like to see?
[01:01:08] Speaker A: I do. Yes. I will for sure. I will post pictures of the bones. When we were in the Uber on the way back from the airport, the driver had actually. He just got remarried, and he and his new wife spent like a month backpacking through Italy, which I thought was crazy. This guy's like, gotta be 50ish. And I'm like. He was like, you guys gotta do that. You gotta backpack. And I was like, sir, I am too bougie for that. I need to be in a fine Airbnb with all the amenities. There's just simply no way I am backpacking anywhere. I want nothing on my back at any point.
But he. He said that they did the catacombs tour, but, like, I could tell he was, like, a little religious or whatever, and he was, like, really disturbed by the whole thing. It's like the bones did not like that. I got, like, a really. I felt like a dark sort of spirit coming over me and, like, all this stuff. And, you know, I prayed and I was in the catacombs and that feeling left. And, you know, it's like, oh.
[01:02:11] Speaker B: I mean, death as art is one thing, but all those bodies had to come from somewhere. Where. What were those people?
[01:02:17] Speaker A: The. The monks, They're Their own people. Yeah, it's not. They didn't murder anyone. They're not like, you know, anything like that. It was their own. Their own guys they would, they would do that with. So, yeah, there's like, you know, it's interesting to see that difference in, like, interpretation of people sort of seeing death as, like, such a dark entity that it makes them feel like they're being spiritually attacked, you know, to be amongst that kind of thing, as opposed to, like, me being in there. Like, wow, this is. How cool is this?
It was great, though. You know, obviously, like I said, very. Everyone's very Catholic and everything. And we went to these, these catacombs that were, like, very sacred. You weren't allowed to take pictures or anything like that. Like, you know, you're just supposed to be very reverent in these catacombs. There'd been pilgrimages there for like a thousand years and stuff like that.
And this one, like, American, like 18 year old, was like, at the end of it, the guy was like, do you have any questions for me? And he's like, are there any ghost stories? And the guy was just like, no, there are no ghosts here. Like, it's supposed to be consecrated full of, like, ghosts.
[01:03:29] Speaker B: You were thinking it. Don't tell me you weren't thinking it.
[01:03:32] Speaker A: No, I understood that. Obviously, again, was supposed to be a place where like, yeah, like, Christians died. There shouldn't be any ghosts. Right. Like, ghosts are supposed to be restless spirits. Everyone who's buried in this place should be with God. So, yeah, they're not gonna have ghost stories.
You're still smelling your shirt right now.
[01:03:56] Speaker B: I am. And I. I. Until I get the chance to change it. I will do. Darling listeners, we had a delicious kind of beef brisket for lunch. It was beautiful. And I tried to shred it and got a load of juice over myself and I didn't change my top immediately. So as a result, I'm sat here podcasting right now in the middle of the day, and I stink of beef juices. And I've come to really like it.
[01:04:19] Speaker A: You know, you're like, offering that. You're like, I wish I could, like, send this smell to you. And I just. I don't think secondhand beef is a smell anyone is looking for.
[01:04:28] Speaker B: If you could smell me right now, you would love it. I could actually dab it behind my ears. I'm going to the movies in a bit to see Nosferatu, and I think I will change my top before then.
[01:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah, you probably should.
[01:04:39] Speaker B: That's the last thing you're gonna want sat next to somebody, isn't it?
[01:04:42] Speaker A: It's when you're watching, like a, like, disgusting vampire movie and just smelling beef the whole time.
[01:04:49] Speaker B: Right.
Just to talk about that a little bit. Is it disgusting then? Because you saw it yesterday? Yes.
[01:04:54] Speaker A: There's some parts of it that like. Well, I plugged my ears a few times during this movie.
You know, let's.
[01:05:03] Speaker B: Neck core. Is it necky?
[01:05:04] Speaker A: It's. No, because he goes for the heart, not the neck. So it's a lot of just like straight to the heart, sucking sounds in it. It's interesting. So we'll jump in and just talk about what we watch. Since we're gonna move through it. We're gonna get into our. Looking back over the year, looking forward. We're gonna look at our highlights of things that we watched and read and all that stuff. But I did. I went and saw Nosferatu yesterday and I hated it, which was such a bummer. I was so looking forward to this movie and it just didn't.
[01:05:39] Speaker B: But what I mean, what you've said to me is you hated it, and it's all vibes. And I think all this has done is made me even more enthusiastic about seeing it than I was in the first place. I think we have another Skinnamarink on our hands, don't we?
[01:05:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I don't. Here's, like. Here's my thing with Nosferatu. I think it's hugely miscast, for one, which is a problem in and of itself. You do not buy anyone in this movie. It feels like cosplay, especially. It's got Aaron Taylor Johnson, who is, bless him, one of the worst actors on the planet. And there was a point. There's a point in it. This is not a spoiler at all, but there's a point in this movie where he opens the door and there's, like, people there. And I can't remember exactly what he says, but in, like, this exaggerated accent he does. He says something. What's the meaning of this? And, like, I could not help. I, like, straight, just burst out laughing.
But mostly my issue with it is it's boring. But, like, not in the same way that Skinamarink is. I don't know. It's a. It's weird. And I cannot predict what you're going to make of this movie. It's just. It's baffling to me. And I love Robert Eggers even when things don't work for me. Like, I didn't really, like, enjoy The Northman. Just because it's like, not my kind of movie, right. But like watching. I'm like, it's well made, you know, whether I enjoy this or not. I'm like, it's a really well done movie, well cast. Well, all this stuff. And this is one of those, like, it's. The story's bad, the acting's bad, you can't see shit, you can't hear shit. The dialogue is mumbled. It is so hard.
[01:07:20] Speaker B: Oh, did you see this mumbling?
[01:07:22] Speaker A: It's just. Yeah. Everyone speaking in unintelligible accents. The Count Orlok sounds like Nandor with Copd.
It's just.
And for some reason has a mustache. And there's nothing scary about a vampire with a mustache.
[01:07:39] Speaker B: Stop at once. I will hear no more.
[01:07:42] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm very curious to see, which I just cannot. I can't predict what you will think this movie. Good.
But one thing that I really. I really have been looking forward to talking about and I want to get to it right away, is that you and the rest of the Lewis family watched Twister.
[01:08:02] Speaker B: Oh, we. We did. And it came out of nowhere. Right. This wasn't. It wasn't planned. It was on tv. So Laura's. Oh, should we see Twister? I was like, yes, yes, yes, here we go. So we didn't watch the TV version. I got it downloaded. Fucking hell. You were right. And I have no qualms about saying it. I have. I'm delighted.
[01:08:18] Speaker A: It's not like you were too fine a naysayer. No, certainly not. But you just simply had not seen it.
[01:08:25] Speaker B: It was. I. Let me try and articulate this.
I was kind of. I suspected that you loved it so much because you kind of made it one of your autistic pet things. I mean.
[01:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, no, that's.
[01:08:40] Speaker B: I thought that you'd kind of. Your love for it was kind of.
[01:08:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that blend of like a nostalgia and hyper fixation.
[01:08:48] Speaker B: Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. But no, it's. It's just fucking stunning. It was a fight. It was a. I think I gave it a 5.
[01:08:55] Speaker A: In fact, I think you might have done 4.5. But like, I was.
[01:08:59] Speaker B: Do you know what it is? It's relentless, this film. It is tornado. 15 minute break for some food and a chat. Tornado, Break. Tornado. It's just bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
Just ever more absurd and just huge action sequences. It. It. The fucking pace on this film and the chemistry with all the kind. What a cast, by the way. I didn't even realize Alan Ruck popping up was just rabbit Is good.
[01:09:28] Speaker A: Rabbit is wax Hoffman. I'm eight. You've got.
[01:09:34] Speaker B: I'm not gonna bother watching Twisters. I don't want to see. No interest in seeing.
[01:09:39] Speaker A: You've seen the perfect film. You do not need to see Twisters and see what they did to it.
[01:09:45] Speaker B: That's a lovely little period at the end of that chapter of the Joag journey.
[01:09:48] Speaker A: I'm so happy about that.
[01:09:50] Speaker B: And seeing it land so well with the boys as well. Laura's the only one of the four of us who'd seen it and she has no memory of it. And so it just unfolded before us and we were all bundled up on the sofa. It was horrific weather outside and it was.
[01:10:03] Speaker A: It was perfect sea Twister for the first time again. Oh, man, I can only imagine. But I love that. That made me so happy to see that hit so well and everything because, yeah, it's genuinely, you know, just a movie that he said, I watch multiple times a year. Probably the movie that I watch the most, like, even I would. I probably watch Twister more than I watch Jaws.
I love this movie dearly. And it just. It really is. It's magic. Like the. You know, it's got all. It's yonder, bont yonder.
[01:10:35] Speaker B: Which again, I didn't know until the credits rolled.
[01:10:38] Speaker A: Right. It's like, you know, you've got. He's the cinematographer of Die Hard. He did speed and he did this like. Come on.
[01:10:46] Speaker B: And James Cameron's fingerprints are all over it as well.
[01:10:49] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[01:10:49] Speaker B: Kathleen Kennedy involved and, you know, Bill Paxton in there. It's. It has that. That kind of essence to it as well. I loved it. Just fucking so. It was one of the filmic highlights of last year for me. No, no question. It was super beautiful.
[01:11:06] Speaker A: Love that. Well, else, after all this time. Wonderful.
[01:11:11] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:11:12] Speaker A: What else. What else did you get to watching?
[01:11:15] Speaker B: Well, look, us having been away for a couple of weeks, I'm just gonna punctuate with the. The highs and the lows. Right?
[01:11:24] Speaker A: Mm.
[01:11:25] Speaker B: Let's. Let's not bother wading through the kind of middle ground stuff.
[01:11:28] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good plan. I like it.
[01:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I will talk about.
Fucking hell. A movie that the Internet reckons people are talking about in the same breath as Die Hard. Right. A new. A new Christmas action classic.
Carry on. Right.
[01:11:47] Speaker A: Yeah. This is an interesting. I've been watching, I have not seen it and I'd never even heard of it. And then all of a sudden it popped up that, like everyone I know on letterboxd is watching it and the reviews are all over the place on this.
[01:12:00] Speaker B: I.
Fuck me. It's the stupidest film.
It is the stupidest film. And I know it's by the Taken guy. Is that right?
[01:12:08] Speaker A: Oh, is it?
[01:12:09] Speaker B: What's his fucking name?
[01:12:11] Speaker A: I don't. I don't even know, honestly.
[01:12:13] Speaker B: Jeum. Colin Serra.
[01:12:15] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I know, I know people like that guy a lot, but I don't know of anything, I guess, other than Taken that. I mean, I may have seen other.
[01:12:23] Speaker B: Stuff by him, but it feels trite to say that it's.
It's a Netflix kind of film.
[01:12:30] Speaker A: Right?
[01:12:30] Speaker B: Right. Yeah, but it, but it really is. It is just an act of spoon feeding you sludge.
Everything is, Is signposted in fucking huge red neon lights. Every kind of plot development is shown to you and given to you in a. In a n. Little kind of easy way.
You know my problem with. How do you. How do you convey texting on a phone on screen? How should you do. How should you do it? How should you do it?
[01:13:02] Speaker A: We disagree on this.
[01:13:03] Speaker B: So you should simply show the phone. Simply show the message.
[01:13:06] Speaker A: No, I can't read that shit.
[01:13:08] Speaker B: On multiple, numerous occasions, the fucking. The phone graphic takes up like half of the screen and it's in neon. And it's a big stylistic choice to fucking just blow this up in a horrible kind of gauche, just offensive, stupid way you talk about shit. Performers like Aaron Taylor Johnson. Taron Egerton's fucking awful.
[01:13:33] Speaker A: I think I normally like him. I like Rocket man and I like Kingsman, so I don't really have a complaint about him.
[01:13:40] Speaker B: Stupid. It's stupid. And his character is stupid. And the situation he finds himself in is stupid.
Jason Bateman's the only halfway good thing about it.
[01:13:50] Speaker A: And even he didn't even know he was stupid.
[01:13:52] Speaker B: Yeah, he's a baddie. He's a baddie. He's Jason Bateman.
[01:13:54] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Okay.
[01:13:57] Speaker B: Oh, it's terrible. Terrible. And having watched Die Hard as well this year.
[01:14:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I did too.
[01:14:05] Speaker B: If, if you, if you watch Carry on and you believe that it's of a caliber of Die Hard, I don't know what to fucking say to you. I don't know what to say to you. Die Hard is a real movie, a real piece of work. Whereas this is like I think I said on letterbox, if. If you told me that that screenplay had been delivered in one prompt by GPT, I would believe you, hands down. I wouldn't even question you for a second.
[01:14:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it reads.
[01:14:32] Speaker B: Oh God, it's so fucking. It's just tepid and lukewarm and it reads like a fucking picture book, you know? It's horrible.
[01:14:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I feel like, you know, I'm not necessarily against those kinds of movies, just as, like, you talk about it being like a Netflix movie. Like, anything made for Netflix is made to be half watched, right? It's made for you to be on your phone while you're watching it. And so it's like, fine. There's a place for that. You don't put it in, like, the. You know, the same branch with stuff that is, like, cinema but, like, you know, like, that's. It's not gonna be Die Hard, but fine, make like a dumbass movie that I can sit there and Facebook or whatever while I watch it, you know? Yeah, fine.
[01:15:14] Speaker B: It.
Is. It. Is it horrific and. And horrible and pretentious to say that it worries me about what a younger movie watcher might then go on to feel that that is what a movie ought to be?
[01:15:35] Speaker A: Well, that's. Yeah, that's like, how does that become.
[01:15:38] Speaker B: The standard by which you then build your. Your, you know, what you think a film ought to be?
[01:15:44] Speaker A: I mean, I think that, like, there's always been shit movies, right? Like, Van Damme was making, like, dumbass shit back in the day, you know? But it, like, I do get what you mean, because it's like what I was saying about Wicked, where I was like, people are, like, acknowledging that it looks bad and all this kind of stuff, but are calling it a masterpiece. And it's like, okay, where are our. Like, like, is art dead? Do we not make. Like, nobody is going to fund making art anymore because everyone is like, it's a masterpiece when you make shit.
[01:16:14] Speaker B: What doesn't probably help carry on at all is that I went out of my way to watch some really good fucking films. The Christmas period just gone, right? And the night after I watched Carry On, I watched LA Confidential, right? First watch for me.
[01:16:30] Speaker A: Oh, you'd never seen it before?
[01:16:32] Speaker B: Never seen before. Oh, and I don't even know again, I was just. I was driven. I think I'd seen somebody.
[01:16:38] Speaker A: If you had known you hadn't seen that, I would have recommended it ages ago. That's a pretty near perfect movie.
[01:16:44] Speaker B: And that is the real thing, isn't it? That's the real fucking work.
[01:16:48] Speaker A: Yep.
[01:16:51] Speaker B: And again, Twister, the night after that, the night after that, Full Metal Jacket. I've been fucking. Just squeezing in really fucking substantial films. This. This.
[01:17:01] Speaker A: Well, and you're doing exactly what I've been doing all, all year, which is going back 20, 30 years instead of watching what's coming out now. And I hope it's like Growing Pains and that this is just not like it's a phase. Like you know how music in the 2010s was just awful and like it's kind of righted itself since then. But like from like 2010 to like 2016, 2017, just music was terrible.
I hope that's where we are with movies that it's just like we're in like a weird zone where like everyone is aiming at like tick tock generation or whatever. And like hopefully it'll write itself, come back around. Yeah. And like people will start giving money because like that's really the issue is like fine, make as much as you want, but the problem is that like no good, like mid budget, anything is being made because no one's gonna, you know, fund an artist when you can put out carry on, you know.
[01:17:58] Speaker B: Yeah. Which I agree with up to a point. I mean as I've said so often, as and as hopefully I will be able to continue to say there's still wonderful things being done in our genre. You know what I mean?
[01:18:09] Speaker A: Absolutely. It is, it is one of the few places that we still get mid budget movies instead of, you know, blockbusters and low budget for that matter, you know that you can still get horror and that's why they keep making them and putting them in theaters because they are the cheaper thing to make that we all go see.
And it's weird that that lesson doesn't play out like that. They don't think of that for other stuff.
What if we did that in other genres? Like it's 1996 to mid budget in other genres. Imagine.
[01:18:44] Speaker B: But look, nothing else really to write home about over the last couple of weeks that I haven't opined on until I'm blue in the face time and time again. I. One of my favoritest bits of Christmas every year is a few days before Christmas when I get to sit down on my own cross legged on the floor with my roll of wrapping paper and my Sellotape and just put a, you know, a banger on. And it was Robocop this year.
Find me something. Find me something wrong with that movie. Find me anything wrong with that film. And you can't, you can't find it. You can't find anything wrong with it.
Like as a lover and as a, as a, you know, like with my kids, I'll. I look for, I look for imperfections. Just truly they Aren't. They aren't as perfect as I think they are. And I was. I kind of looked at RoboCop through that lens this time. And there's. There's nothing to complain about in that film. Nothing. Even the bits, even the mistakes, like Dick Jones stupid long arms, they work in the context of that film. So find me something wrong. You cannot.
[01:19:56] Speaker A: I love that.
You know, like I said, I was on vacation, so I didn't watch like a ton.
You know, standard Christmas movies. All that new Christmas movie that I recommend, that Christmas, really delightful animated picture that we watched because we had Netflix in Rome. Big recommend, that one.
[01:20:16] Speaker B: We put it on. I'm afraid to say I fell asleep. Well, that's not surprising because that's a thing I do.
[01:20:21] Speaker A: Yeah, it is a thing I do.
[01:20:23] Speaker B: Yes, I will talk about werewolves super quick, which I watched the other night.
Again, stupid as fuck, but, like, in a good way. But in a better way than Carry On. Stupid as fuck, but not in a way that makes me angry. Finally. Finally, somebody made the Purge, but with werewolves.
[01:20:44] Speaker A: That's what I'll say. We've all been asking for it.
[01:20:47] Speaker B: You know what I mean? Gotta give. Finally, someone's given the people what they want. Frank Grillo is a globally renowned molecular biologist, which I think tells you everything you need to know about it.
[01:20:58] Speaker A: He's so typecast, that Frank Grillo, man.
[01:21:02] Speaker B: Great to see him, though. Always good to see Frank. Good to see Frank Grello all the time. He'd be a good Punisher.
[01:21:07] Speaker A: Oh, for sure, wouldn't he?
[01:21:10] Speaker B: But not. But yeah, he's equally at home playing the Punisher as he is playing a globally renowned molecular biologist. There's anything Frank Grillo couldn't do, and I wish nothing but the best of him for him in 2025.
[01:21:23] Speaker A: Here, here. I finally got around to watching the Speak. No evil remake. And okay, like everyone said, way better than the original.
[01:21:32] Speaker B: Oh, I was brace. That face is me bracing myself.
No, but no, it is, isn't it? Yes.
[01:21:38] Speaker A: Yeah, it's way better. We watched Resolution together. You hadn't watched. We did watch Synchronic years ago, but we hadn't watched. You apparently hadn't watched any of the other movies in that world.
[01:21:52] Speaker B: No. Did you watch Resolution or did we watch the Endless?
[01:21:55] Speaker A: Oh, we watched the Endless. Sorry, I watched both. So we watched the Endless and then afterwards that made me want to go back and watch Resolution, which is reverse order, but I actually feel like works well for these movies. Resolution is from 2012 and it's much less polished. As a movie. But if you've seen the Endless. The Endless. We did talk about last time, which was like a cult movie, basically. Like, Mark, you said you didn't want to give anything away, and I think that's correct. But resolution, that comes like. There's scenes in the Endless that come from resolution, essentially. So I watched that and I just, you know, I love those movies and I love those guys and I think it's. It's worthwhile. If you've never seen these movies, you can skip synchronic. I think it's, you know, fine, but nothing great. But the Endless and Resolution are such a good time taken together. And I think watching the later one first actually works in its favor. So you kind of forgive some of the, like, low budget, very first movie, ish feeling of resolution also.
[01:23:06] Speaker B: I certainly enjoyed the Endless enough to give them more of my life.
[01:23:10] Speaker A: Right?
Yeah, I like them a lot.
While in Rome, also watched Gladiator for the first time, finally. We were going to see. We were going to the Coliseum the next day and I was like, you know what? Let's do it. Let's watch gladiator. It's been 20, 24 years. Let's do it. Let's watch this movie.
[01:23:36] Speaker B: I think you watch it on your laptop in a hotel room. Yes. Just as Ridley would have wanted.
[01:23:40] Speaker A: Just as it was meant to be seen, obviously. And that is, like, one of the most baffling films I have ever seen in my life. It is bizarre.
Someone said.
I was reading, like, other, like, friends reviews and someone said that their partner was like. It feels like a different person directed this every 10 minutes. Like, yeah, that sounds about right. Like, it is love that all over the place.
It's one of those, you know, I'm not, like.
I'm not picky about, like, plot holes or, like, things like that. Like, a lot of times I can't even, like, follow a story. Whatever. It's like, if you got me entertained, I'm in. Right?
But this movie was, like, so crazy that it. Several times I was just like, surely not. Come on. That's.
[01:24:29] Speaker B: Yeah, that's.
[01:24:31] Speaker A: It's not what you're gonna do here, is it?
[01:24:34] Speaker B: It's one I've only seen, like, at the time it came out, so a long, long, long time ago. But I just don't get. I'm simply not interested in watching the second one. And I will eventually because it'll get to the point where I can't handle the people fucking telling me I should anymore. So I'll see it Eventually.
[01:24:50] Speaker A: But I literally only want to see this the second one because I hear Denzel's having a good time. Oh, good. If I managed to go 24 years without seeing the first one, despite peer pressure, I think I could go without seeing the second. But, yes, Denzel in Gladiator seems very fun to me. And I already. I think the thing is that people who saw Gladiator 2 and were like, it's not as good as the first one or whatever, like, have a memory of Gladiator that I don't think is interesting. Like, I think. I think it's like one of those ones that I can see in 2000 why people would have been into this. And then your nostalgia for it makes it stand the test of time. Right.
[01:25:32] Speaker B: I. Russell Crowe does fight a tiger, doesn't he? I haven't made that up.
[01:25:34] Speaker A: Yes, you. You were correct. That does happen. There is a tiger fight scene in it. But, yeah, it's just. It is a baffling movie on pretty much every level. It also only has one woman in the entire movie, which is wild 2000, baby. You didn't have to have women in your.
No one can make me put women in stuff.
Yeah, so there was that.
I watched Red one. It's as bad as everyone says that it is.
Yeah. And like.
[01:26:08] Speaker B: Well, everyone except the Rock.
[01:26:09] Speaker A: Except the Rock.
[01:26:10] Speaker B: The Rock seemed pretty pleased with it.
[01:26:13] Speaker A: What is. What happened?
[01:26:15] Speaker B: I don't think he's got a good 20, 25 coming up.
[01:26:18] Speaker A: No, I don't think so.
[01:26:19] Speaker B: I think the bubble might have finally.
[01:26:20] Speaker A: Burst on him big time. It's pretty wild to see that. The other weird thing about Red one that other people have pointed out is it's just bizarre that it's like Chris Evans is playing. Playing a Ryan Reynolds role. And it feels very weird the whole time. Like you're just. The whole time you say, like, this should really be Ryan Reynolds.
It's kind of odd.
But. Yeah. So that was. That was pretty much what I got up to.
[01:26:46] Speaker B: But I, I genuinely just want to throw out to our listeners. I really hope you had a good couple of weeks.
[01:26:51] Speaker A: You're here.
[01:26:52] Speaker B: It's. I blow. I kind of blow hot and cold with Christmas as a concept. Right. The, The. The fact that it's a manufactured couple of weeks that you. Everything stops except commerce. Everything stops except retail. Right.
I. I kind of let that get in the way, but it can. It can serve a purpose. It can give you space, you know, it can give you space to just look and let things in and decide what's important. And I hope you find some of that. I really do.
[01:27:27] Speaker A: You know, it's interesting just to that point, we were in New Zealand for Christmas like six years ago somewhere in that vicinity. And New Zealand straight up shuts down at Christmas time. So like the businesses, like the retail businesses, people go on vacation, you go, and the stores all have signs and we'll be back January 10th or whatever, you know, and I thought that was, that was really cool that it was like, no, everybody gets this time off. It's not, you know, it's not just like, yeah, you know, if you work a full time job or whatever, you get some time and then everyone else serves you. It's like, sure, there's restaurants open and stuff, but a lot weren't. It's just like, yeah, no, this is, this is family time, this is vacation time. Everybody goes away. And there's an expectation of that, like, beautiful. Good job, Kiwis.
[01:28:17] Speaker B: Yes, yes. As in many other things, kiwis are cool.
[01:28:23] Speaker A: It's true. So let's talk about some of that reflection, some of that looking forward, all of that stuff. Looking back over your year. What, what stands out to you about your 2024 Mark Lewis?
[01:28:36] Speaker B: Well, I certainly feel as though I left it in a very different place than I joined it.
[01:28:43] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure.
[01:28:45] Speaker B: I think you'd probably agree that.
Well, put it like this. Fucking hell. And I don't even know if I've spoken about this since we were on last. Right, the, the very notion, right, the very notion that Mark Alwyn Lewis would sail through his birthday and two works, Christmas fucking parties and Christmas itself and New Year's Eve, just utterly, completely sober.
[01:29:15] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:29:16] Speaker B: Is bonkers to me. Is wild.
[01:29:18] Speaker A: Right?
[01:29:18] Speaker B: Unheard of, Completely insane. And it's, it's, it's revealed as a lot I have found.
I have really, really, really realized that socially I am an awkward man.
If I'm, if I'm in a social situation, dry as I have been lately, particularly with people that I'm not necessarily 100% comfortable with a fucking man. I don't even. I can't, I can't carry a conversation on. I can't string words together. I don't know what to do with my face when people are talking at me.
I just cannot wait to leave. But, but at the same time, I think it's, it's been really fun.
It's been really fun learning that and sitting with that.
[01:30:05] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.
[01:30:07] Speaker B: Which is, which is why, just like in years previous, no resolutions here. None, no resolutions at all. Because a Resolution to me is a wish to change something, to swerve something, to add or remove something from your life.
And I feel as though I just want to keep charting this course. It's a good course to be on.
[01:30:29] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:30:30] Speaker B: One that I'm going to continue with. So good habits, good choices, pursuit of good physical conditioning. I mean, boxing day, around 14k.
[01:30:42] Speaker A: That's so different from your. Yeah. The boxing days you've had, the past, you know, several years that I've known you. That would have been. Yeah, just absolutely no go. You were already like wasted by 10:00am yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:57] Speaker B: Merrily so.
[01:30:58] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:31:00] Speaker B: So, yes. No big changes to me for me personally, I mean, have there been low points during the year? Fucking right, yeah.
Yeah. Low points. India, my favorite low point. Right. The low point that I just look back on hahaha. And cackle with now was graying out in the middle of a gig and smashing my face on the floor and having to be kind of ambulanced out as fucking blood poured down my face. That was a fucking. Oof. That was rough. And I hear that story for the first time from the guy that I went to see the band with and he told me about it.
He thought I died, man. He thought I was dead. Because it wasn't just that I grayed out and smashed my face once. I came to a few times and just went back out and fell and just continued like this one. For sure he thought I died.
[01:31:53] Speaker A: She's Christ.
[01:31:54] Speaker B: Yeah, so that was awful. But on the, on the, on the other hand, it's very. It's a gift to be self aware, isn't it? It's a gift to know that, that you control things and that you can control your own path and control your own way out of choppy waters.
So having done that and having been in the. On the position of being able to do that is a privilege.
[01:32:22] Speaker A: I love that. Yeah. And I like the idea that, you know, of just not having a resolution because just keep. You're. You're doing right, you're doing things well, you know, your end of this is going swimmingly, things happen to you, stuff occurs that's beyond your ability to control. But the way that you have been living is a place that you're satisfied with and you, you just want to keep doing that. Yes, I love that.
[01:32:48] Speaker B: Yep. Yes and yes. Just practicing those, just those fucking fundamental pillars of who I consider myself to be. My non negotiables, you know what I mean? Honesty with myself, self awareness and authenticity.
Just carry on being the fucking most pure Version of myself I can be.
[01:33:09] Speaker A: Absolutely love it now, of course, you know, I'm not, it's not that I, yeah, I think I've been doing well and all that kind of stuff, but, you know, I love a good goal.
[01:33:17] Speaker B: I know he's doing.
[01:33:19] Speaker A: You know, looking back over the years, the things that I said I was going to do, you know, I failed at my listening to music goal. I said that I was going to listen to one new album every week. I ended up, this was hilarious to me. When my like year end wrap up came up, I had listened to like 1400 minutes less than last year.
[01:33:42] Speaker B: Great.
[01:33:43] Speaker A: Like, oh man, I failed that hard.
So, you know, I think that was unrealistic the way that I approached it. But I still do want to listen to more music. So I mentioned this a couple weeks ago. So now I'm doing music Mondays. I walk my dog every single day, right?
And every day I listen to podcasts while I walk the dog. That's like an hour each day that I'm listening to a podcast. And so I decided on Mondays on my walks, I will listen to music.
And that way I will finally get a little music into my life, you know, because I do love music and everything and I love when I discover something new and all that. It's like the reason I make this goal is not to just be like, you should listen to music. It's because I really like it. I just don't make time for it. And so I need to, you know, I need to schedule when I do that. So Mondays this year are going to be my music day. And hopefully I'll make some good music discoveries that way.
Finished out sober 2024.
[01:34:50] Speaker B: The entire year? Yeah, the whole year.
[01:34:53] Speaker A: I mean, I had sips here and there, but, you know, other than that, nada. Great. Loved it. Like you, I think, you know, it just ended up being one of those things like, yeah, going to a social event or things like that, you know, I'm more likely to just leave, like without, without anything to kind of ease the social anxiety or things like that. I'm not gonna stick around in a situation. I, yeah, have trouble making conversations with people, making eye contact, all that kind of stuff.
[01:35:28] Speaker B: I mean, I, what I find myself doing. Because I, I hear you, right? Because I, I, I, I simply can't work out how people do it. How do people, right, like people interact.
[01:35:39] Speaker A: In a relaxed company, Actively enjoy it.
[01:35:43] Speaker B: All I do, all I fucking do is just fall back on that old cheat code.
Ask someone a question based on what they just said to you, Right.
[01:35:53] Speaker A: The only problem is a lot of times I zone out what they said to me and then I don' from there and I'm just, like, looking at them like, oh, no. Oh no, I'm failing a.
This has gone poorly. What do I do now?
[01:36:09] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I relate so much.
[01:36:11] Speaker A: I can't. I have trouble. I focus on trying to look at someone, right? Like, look them in their eye, don't look away from them. And then I'm thinking so hard about that that I stop listening to whatever they're saying. And I realize I've just been focusing on seeming like I'm listening and I wasn't doing it.
[01:36:32] Speaker B: When I say I don't know what to do with my face when people are talking to me, I mean it, man. I, I, I kind of. I've just become intensely aware of what my face is doing.
[01:36:42] Speaker A: Empathetic. Do I smile? Do I look weird?
[01:36:45] Speaker B: Exactly. Does my mouth look weird?
And yeah, it's very tough. It's very tough.
[01:36:51] Speaker A: It's difficult. Yeah. So that is definitely one of the things over the course this year is that, like, just not sticking around through things or, like, being very honest about me. Like, I will just tell people, like, I'm not great in social situations or things like that, which I wouldn't have done before. I try to fake it until I make it and that, you know, that's worked out for me at this point. Like, you know, Amina, the town counselor, keeps on hiring me for things. I'm like, listen, I'm not great at, like, the people part, but I will make nice videos for you and stuff like that. And she's like, great. She doesn't try to introduce me to anyone or anything like that. Like, cool. Do your thing.
[01:37:27] Speaker B: Very nice.
[01:37:28] Speaker A: Yeah. So I think, do you have any.
[01:37:31] Speaker B: Of those coming up, by the way?
[01:37:33] Speaker A: No, not, not in the near future. The council is falling apart at the moment. They've got other things they're dealing with. Oh, it's crazy shit in this town. Lots of good drama. Maybe I'll talk about it at a later date, but police reports were filed against one council member by two of the others last week. That's where we are.
[01:37:50] Speaker B: Oh, my God. God.
[01:37:52] Speaker A: Is he is.
[01:37:54] Speaker B: I guess it's a he. Is he somebody who's, who's shown up in one of your videos? Is he somebody I might have seen?
[01:37:58] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is.
[01:38:00] Speaker B: Okay.
[01:38:01] Speaker A: It's a guy from the other slate who shouldn't have won. But everybody votes for the rich people. So what are you gonna do?
But otherwise, I also made the goal to walk a mile every day. At least a mile every day, no matter the weather. I didn't necessarily do that. Some days I was just too tired or sore or it was cold or whatever. But on average, I walked far more than that every day. And I started basically not driving at all except to the grocery store. So I probably filled up my car, like, six times the whole year with gas. It's like, just, you know, never use the thing.
I walk for all errands everywhere. And that has been great. Love that for you.
[01:38:48] Speaker B: Not easy knowing your neighborhood as intimately as I do.
[01:38:53] Speaker A: The real problem is, like, there's a lot of uphill in the area, and that's when things. My poor sister is not used to it. We walked to the movie theater yesterday, and she had, like, shin splints like crazy by the time we got there. Like, I'm so sorry. I do this every day, so I don't think anything of it.
But my two, like, big goals for next year is. Or this year. I mean. Right. It is now 20 and 25 is to try to go as close to zero waste as possible.
So I have, you know, already started replacing things that I'm running out of, like deodorant and things like that with stuff that's compostable and stuff that comes in refill bags you can send back and then they send back to you and stuff like that. And just. Yeah. Trying to not have packaging on things as much as possible and.
[01:39:47] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[01:39:48] Speaker A: Minimize the amount of trash and waste that I produce. And as such, also just generally consumption. You know, like, if you are trying to reduce waste, that limits the amount that you can consume in general.
[01:40:03] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:40:03] Speaker A: So I'm very excited about this goal, really enjoying the process.
[01:40:08] Speaker B: It has been kind of on my mind that I might start to steer myself away from because I.
[01:40:19] Speaker A: Love consumption.
[01:40:22] Speaker B: Just new things coming through my door or, you know, just, ooh, that's the best. Oh, is that my new thing?
[01:40:30] Speaker A: I feel like it's like, for those of us who didn't grow up with, like, a lot of stuff that's like. And then we. Yeah, maybe social class or whatever and have, like, a little economic room.
There's, like. Yeah, it's, like, very exciting to, like, get new stuff. Like, oh, my God, I can do this. Like, if I want something, I can buy it and I can have it.
[01:40:49] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:40:49] Speaker A: And so that kind of overrides the do I need it?
Kind of element of this whole thing. And I'm trying to. Trying to avoid that. I'm also trying to get like, my family to divest entirely from. From Amazon.
And, you know, they're at least Keough is mostly on board with that.
[01:41:10] Speaker B: You know, I don't think, I don't think I bought a single thing from Bezos this year.
[01:41:17] Speaker A: Oh, that's amazing.
[01:41:19] Speaker B: All my books came from bookshops.
[01:41:21] Speaker A: Love that.
[01:41:21] Speaker B: All my clothes came from, you know.
[01:41:23] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:41:23] Speaker B: Like actual building. Yeah.
[01:41:25] Speaker A: Yeah, that's. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that I think in America, most people just buy everything on Amazon. It's, you know, you don't go to places to get things.
And so, you know, making a conscious effort to actually do that is like, when your prime subscription comes up, don't renew it. We're done, we're out.
So I'm stoked on that too. And then the last goal, do you know you've got.
[01:41:51] Speaker B: You've got kind of got me thinking about that. That's a. That, that is a big intentional step because I don't watch prime video every time.
[01:41:56] Speaker A: Right. Like, seriously, there's no reason to use prime video, especially now they've added commercials to it. Even if you like. Yeah, please. No, thanks. You can't watch things together with your friends anymore because there's ads like, fuck it off. Listen, if you're listening, cancel that shit. Steal it. I don't give a shit.
Don't pay Bezos in 2025. I think that that's a, you know, divest from billionaires as much as you can in 2025. I think is a good goal.
[01:42:27] Speaker B: Yes.
Or even, you know, 3D. Print yourself a gun.
[01:42:32] Speaker A: Well, I mean, you didn't hear it here. Shoot one, divest from one. Shoot one, you know, whatever is most convenient.
The other goal that I have, of course, that I've mentioned is my, like, you know, using this term loosely, but best shape of my life at 40, you know, I wanna. I wanna hit 40 and be like, you know. Tickets to the gun show.
[01:42:56] Speaker B: Yes.
[01:42:57] Speaker A: All my numbers at the doctor looking like, whoa, amazing, and all that stuff.
[01:43:04] Speaker B: What numbers in particular? What do you mean?
[01:43:06] Speaker A: Like your, you know, your blood work? Yeah, all your stuff, you know, look at it and be like, that's some. That's some good ass blood work.
That kind of thing.
Yeah, I just want to like. Yeah. Be fit and feel like I am age proofing myself, you know, because obviously my joints don't like me and all that kind of stuff. And making it so that as I go into the latter Half of my life I am feeling like fit and ready for it and as prepped as I can be.
[01:43:43] Speaker B: In the four and a half and some years that we've been doing this. How, how have you, how is that kind of, you know, your connective tissues, has there been any noticeable kind of decline in that?
[01:43:58] Speaker A: You know, I have. I think it's a little. I mean, it's varies day by day. So like some days it's like I walk a few steps and my hip dislocates or whatever. You know, sometimes it's like that or my knees hurt. I mean, my knees kind of always have like a low level pain, especially my right knee. But I do think that with all the walking and all that kind of stuff and building up the muscles and all that. Good. That in some ways it's better that, you know, I'm putting less pressure on them and building up the other things. So, you know, I, I can say I don't think it's. I don't think it's worse over time, which is good. And so we just want to keep that going as long as possible.
[01:44:46] Speaker B: Awesome. I mean, I, I have wondered if it might be time to start like, you know, taking collagen or something.
[01:44:56] Speaker A: Right. I don't know. Oh, there was something. Oh, someone. Oh, is it chondroitin? I think someone just posted and I took a screenshot of it. They were like, you know, there's so many like supplements and shit that people tell you to take and like 99% of them are like absolute bullshit. They don't do anything for you. Your body does it itself, you know, all that kind of stuff. And someone was like, turns out the one thing that actually does help think was chondroitin. And they were like, my joints feel like magic.
Chondroitin. I don't know how you spell it, but I see it.
Chondroitin.
[01:45:37] Speaker B: Listen, I'm happy to throw this one out to the team. I'm happy to throw this one out to our listeners.
If you have something that you take that you feel is actually having a, you know, a material benefit, an actual measurable benefit on your health in the face of the advancing years, I'd love to hear about it because I'm not, I'm not really looking forward to another 30 odd years of throwing my back out every time I poo.
[01:46:04] Speaker A: Right. What can we do to avoid that? That seems like a really good baseline.
[01:46:09] Speaker B: Yes.
Oh, have you sent me.
[01:46:12] Speaker A: I sent, I sent you what it is.
I see it in commercials during Jeopardy. All the time. So, you know, it's for the olds like us.
[01:46:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:46:22] Speaker A: So, Mark, with that all said, shall we just look back and give some of our highlights of the year? Run through what some of our favorite things were over the course of 2024?
[01:46:33] Speaker B: I would love to. I would actually love to. I mean, on a. On a personal note, my trip to New York was up there.
[01:46:40] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:46:41] Speaker B: Not just. Not just of 2024, but like, ever. It was. It was a real highlight of my life. I love it. I. In the, in signing off the episode of Joag that we did in your garden, I made some kind of off the cuff remark about, you know, this, this, that, that moment popping up in the highlights of my life.
[01:47:02] Speaker A: Right.
[01:47:03] Speaker B: Well, when I'm fucking. When my brain realizes it's about to die. And I meant. And I meant that. I meant, I meant that sincerely. I saw some fantastic gigs at a fantastic, you know, generally with my brother and bestie Alan. We had a fantastic time when we went to see Smashing Pumpkins and Weezer. Just a wonderful night. Pissing it down with rain in a really muddy field in Cardiff, Seeing really wonderful music and really wonderful company. It's just, you know, moments of that nature. There have been some lovely milestones with my kids.
[01:47:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:47:37] Speaker B: Seeing them kind of growing in confidence, seeing Peter's. Hearing Peter's voice deepening and watching them, you know, play their instruments on stage. And Owen did his taekwondo grading a few weeks back.
[01:47:50] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness.
[01:47:51] Speaker B: Oh, man. Just beautiful. Just moments like that, really.
There have been a lot of personal moments in my life that have been fucking great in 2020 for that I'll always look back on. Yes. It hasn't all been smashing my face in, in public and. Right.
[01:48:07] Speaker A: There's been some nice things.
[01:48:09] Speaker B: Appearing dead to friends.
[01:48:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Honestly, obviously the, you know, you coming and having everyone come here and, you know, fill my yard with love and all of that stuff and getting to take everyone around the city and everything was just absolutely magical and a thing I looked forward to. I mean, I feel like I've been looking forward to since the beginning of this thing, bringing you here, getting everyone together and. And it was just absolutely magical to. To finally get to do that, you know, and I had so much fun getting to, you know, over all this time. It's like you and I talk every day and, you know, if grown so close over these years and to be like, like, I've seen where you live and all that stuff and to finally be like, hey, you get to see my world felt really special.
[01:49:01] Speaker B: One of my.
I mean, I say one of my favorite memories from that trip, all of it in itself is one big favorite memory. But a standout for me was just that morning stroll that we took around the track. Around the running track.
[01:49:13] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah.
[01:49:14] Speaker B: Doing a couple of laps of that and just.
Just existing in a completely different spot.
[01:49:23] Speaker A: Yes, totally. We just went. We got. Yeah, we got some, like, coffee or whatever and just, like, walked. Walked around the track waiting for the pharmacy to open. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just you over here doing normal neighborhood things with me was just so cool, you know, your friend that you've never really gotten to, like, hang out with, you know, so it was so, so fun to have that, you know, went on some very fun trips, obviously, to Italy and earlier loved being in Belgium and in Amsterdam and stuff like that. So really got some great travel in this year. That was a lot of fun.
You know, I always just really enjoy expanding the things that I've seen and all of that stuff. A thing I never thought I'd be able to do.
[01:50:12] Speaker B: So on the kind of the American scale, you're kind of the. You know, the boxes you can tick on the world map, you've got to be on the kind of the upper.
[01:50:21] Speaker A: Probably. Yeah. Yeah, I would imagine so. I mean, people give Americans shit. We've talked about this before, about not having a passport or things like that, but it's a big country, you know, and people don't necessarily have a ton of money.
So, yeah, people don't necessarily get to travel outside of this country all the time. So it's never lost on me that it's, like, a very cool privilege to get to do that, that Kia works in places that we can. That he can let me tag along on with his airline miles and all that kind of stuff.
We're going to Japan in April, which will be super fun. And, yeah, it's a. So, yeah, I've gotten to do a lot of cool stuff this past year in that way that I've really enjoyed. Yeah, I think, like, overall, it's been just a good year for. For me in general. Like, just kind of everything is rolling along well, and I haven't felt particularly stressed out. And I think this is a thing that kind of started. We talked about it at the beginning of 2023, too, but it's like, when this podcast started, I felt like I was, like, in just such a place of stress and anxiety all the time and things like that and having panic and everything, and at this point, just feel like things personally are in a space where I don't feel that kind of stress anymore and I don't feel that kind of anxiety and, like, leaning into realizing that, like, you know, things have to do with, like, my neurodivergence and stuff like that and, like, understanding that instead of trying to fight it and be a different person than I am and stuff like that has made it so that I'm able to, like, manage myself better in a lot of ways and know what I need to do when I'm getting overwhelmed and all that. So, yeah, 2024 was a good one for me as well.
[01:52:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I. The way I've put it in other conversations with people is I. I'm such a fan of almost observing myself growing into my skin, almost, you know, taking a front seat in the process rather than being passive in it.
I love aging and. All right, fair enough. I'm griping about the fact that I can't remember things and my eyes are going to shit and, you know, my joints are hurting me. But I. I love aging. I love seeing my face evolve almost. I love seeing the lines deepen and I love. I, I don't know. I, I.
Man, how to put it? The, the Every. Every year tells itself more on my face, and I'm enjoying seeing them reflected back at me, I suppose.
[01:53:05] Speaker A: Yeah, totally. It's so interesting. And, and yeah, I think ultimately every year kind of gets better in that way. You know, I don't think that there's really a time that I want to go back to. I think every year I become more.
[01:53:22] Speaker B: I agree with that. I could not agree with that more. I wouldn't swap. I wouldn't swap who I am now for any of the other. My other incarnations ever.
[01:53:30] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
Well, what about things we've seen this year? What are some of the highlights for you? Right.
[01:53:40] Speaker B: What do you want to do? Do you want to break this down? Let's talk. Don't talk TV first.
[01:53:43] Speaker A: Sure. I didn't watch a lot of tv, so I don't have a lot to contribute to that. Although maybe when you say something, maybe some of it all.
[01:53:50] Speaker B: Well, let's have a think. It all seems to have been top loaded. I mean, and maybe that's recency bias. I don't know. Penguin sticks out.
[01:53:56] Speaker A: I do want to watch that. Yeah, you should.
[01:53:58] Speaker B: Get, get. Come on, get. Get busy. You should watch Penguin. You'd love it.
[01:54:01] Speaker A: Watch live tv. And now I've got Astrobot Game of the year.
[01:54:10] Speaker B: It's been a good gaming year, actually. Ghost Wire. I Dove into God of War. I dove into. Into Play a bit more Red Dead and then Astro Bot to finish the year off. Oh, yeah.
[01:54:20] Speaker A: I was saying that, like, normally at the end of the year, between Christmas and New Year's, I just read the whole time, but now I've got Astrobot. So I've just been playing Astrobot constantly. I've done some reading, but I have just been playing that in all my free time. Yeah, just like. Oh, so fun.
[01:54:35] Speaker B: We're gonna switch the roles for let's play in January. I'm gonna. I'm gonna watch. We're gonna watch. Corry.
[01:54:41] Speaker A: It'll be so funny because, listen, I love the game, but I am not good at it. So you can just watch me fall off of things and get burned by things and all that kind of stuff over and over and over to the point of farce.
[01:54:55] Speaker B: There are some.
I don't know if you've just. If you've unlocked any yet, but there are some of the levels that are just like a straight course and you've just got to survive to the end.
Fucking hell. Just the difficulty curve on that game is so exquisite. It is just this perfect. You get it just before.
Did I ever tell you about smashing my controller when I was playing Returnal, about war? Just. It never quite gets you to that.
[01:55:23] Speaker A: Right.
[01:55:24] Speaker B: Never quite gets me to that place where good sense leaves me and the red mist descends and I just want to damage things. But it does get you to that place because when you die, it's always your fault.
[01:55:34] Speaker A: It's always exactly, you know, giving you so much leeway.
[01:55:38] Speaker B: Yes. If I just learn that pattern a bit better. If I just time that a bit better, I can do it. I can do it. And you can. You can always do it. It's brilliant. A ritual saying this out loud sounds ridiculous, but a ritual during one of those challenge levels of Astro Bot is. I found I would perform a little bit better if after dying and just before respawning, I would say out loud, king of Games. And then do the private level again. I'm the King of Games. And that would help me. That would pump me up a little bit.
[01:56:10] Speaker A: I mean, I like, do essentially the same thing. I just don't have, like, a flashy tagline for it. I do like, like coincore again, you know, try it.
[01:56:17] Speaker B: Just say king of Games. King of Games before you do it and you just. It gives you that little boost.
[01:56:23] Speaker A: Okay. Give it a whirl. See what happens.
[01:56:26] Speaker B: Let me see. Agatha was great. Penguin was great. There Was. Was Immortelli. I don't think there was.
[01:56:32] Speaker A: I mean, we disagree on this one, but Baby Reindeer I loved.
Yeah, other than that, I can't even. I can't think of anything really.
[01:56:43] Speaker B: It looks very likely that real Martha is gonna get some millions of pounds.
[01:56:47] Speaker A: Oh, really?
[01:56:48] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:56:49] Speaker A: That's so crazy. She exposed herself like, so wild, like coming out and being like, I'm who this is based on.
And I feel shitty about that. Like, what. How does that work?
Okay.
[01:57:06] Speaker B: Yeah, we'll never agree on that. I. I still don't like it one bit. And you know, those two have been on various kind of end of year, catch up kind of retrospective shows in the past couple of weeks. What was the other one about? How Martha and his name is Gad. Is that his name?
[01:57:23] Speaker A: Richard Gadget.
[01:57:25] Speaker B: She's not, she's not called Martha.
[01:57:27] Speaker A: Who really is the actress you mean?
[01:57:29] Speaker B: Yes. Okay. And it's, it's just reignited how much I.
The sour taste in the mouth. That show left me with.
[01:57:38] Speaker A: Fair enough. But for me, it is on my top.
What about. Do you read anything that. That hit you this year?
[01:57:47] Speaker B: Well, I'm in the middle currently of a book called the Reformatory, which I.
[01:57:53] Speaker A: Have now downloaded from my library from your texts about it.
[01:57:58] Speaker B: I really, really, really hope you enjoy it as much as I'm doing it by Tanareave Dew and Tananarive Dew. I apologize. And it's. It's. It's, man, it's selling it really, really short to. To call it a ghost story. It's got flavors of the shining all over it.
[01:58:17] Speaker A: Yes, please.
[01:58:18] Speaker B: But it's told through the lens of racial segregation in Florida in the 1950s.
And it is searing, searingly fucking good. Like, I'm finding it really hard to tear myself away from right now as I'm talking to you.
[01:58:36] Speaker A: I just want to go read now.
Great.
[01:58:39] Speaker B: I'm. It's. It's teaching me a lot, but it's also a really accomplished page turner of a ghost story in itself. But the detail and the, and the, the kind of. The authentic feeling experiences of, you know, political, racial, class, you know, economic segregation in that place in that time.
It.
It's evocative as fuck. I'm enjoying it so much that what I'm doing, it's also got like a. It talks about the music of the time a lot, the music of the year a lot. Gospel and jazz. And as I'm reading it, whenever it mentions there's a song playing in the car or in a diner, I'M playing that song on my iPhone while I'm reading it, just to kind of flesh out the experience for me.
[01:59:28] Speaker A: That's so good.
[01:59:29] Speaker B: Like Nat King Cole and, you know, other kind of singers at the time is fucking great. Oh, war a book. War a book.
[01:59:36] Speaker A: Yeah.
[01:59:36] Speaker B: I'm looking forward to reading that big time in a. More. Well, in an equally kind of Joag vein, I've got a book next lined up called nothing to fear, which is Nothing to Fear. Demystifying death to live more fully.
[01:59:52] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, it's the book you bought for yourself that you forgot about.
[01:59:55] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly that. I found it in a. In a box when I was unwrapping, when I was wrapping presents, which is. Is very highly regarded, very highly rated. Just a nice little read about death. That would be a good laugh.
[02:00:12] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah.
I read a few books that I really liked this year. Not necessarily all from this year, but I. For book club, we read Sl Foot by Brahmos, which is definitely one of my favorites of the year. I did talk about it on here before, but a very cool sort of witchcraft book dealing with sort of subjugation of women and things like that in a very religious society and loved it. Slew Foot by Brahm. Big recommend. David Grann put out a book in 2023 called the A tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder. Come on, listen to that title.
[02:00:52] Speaker B: Hello.
[02:00:54] Speaker A: It was a blast. Absolutely loved that one. Chuck Tingle put out Bury your gaze. Chuck Tingle is always a great time.
What is that?
[02:01:05] Speaker B: Where's your book then?
[02:01:07] Speaker A: My book?
[02:01:09] Speaker B: Yes. Surely it's only a matter of time before you write a book, surely.
[02:01:13] Speaker A: Actually that is one of my goals for this year is on Fridays to actually write. And we'll see what comes out of that if that is, you know, a book or a diary or whatever. But I have set a goal on Fridays to take time to write, so.
[02:01:30] Speaker B: I wonder if there's even a. Because you've, you know, you've got at least half of four and a half years worth of topics from.
[02:01:42] Speaker A: I've considered that. Like, what if we. What if we put something together that was, you know, somehow wove our stories into something, you know, maybe that's. Maybe that's part of this year in Joag, you know, we'll see.
[02:01:57] Speaker B: Oh, my God. That's a great idea, isn't it?
[02:02:00] Speaker A: It's a pretty good idea.
Stay tuned. We'll see what we come up with. But it has crossed my mind before.
[02:02:09] Speaker B: It's a fucking great idea.
[02:02:11] Speaker A: A great idea. Mark.
Everything. Everything we touch turns to gold.
[02:02:17] Speaker B: Brilliant idea.
[02:02:20] Speaker A: We'll discuss.
So, yeah, but of books that already exist before we put out ours and change the world.
Yeah. Barrier Gaze by Chuck Tingle is great. If you've never read Chuck Tingle, he is wonderful. I mean, known mostly on the Internet for his Tinglers, his very observer. Absurd erotica books. I shouldn't say, because, you know, he always says you should. They're very serious, but they're, you know, you see, like it'll be something that like happened recently. Like I'm trying to think of like a good news story or whatever, but like it would be like something like pounded in the butt by the CEO killer or something like that. You know, like he'll take something like that and write like these short erotica books about them. And so that's like kind of what he's known for on the Internet, but he also writes actual horror books. The one before this was Camp Damascus, which I absolutely loved. And then he just put one out this year called Bury youy Gaze. Read it. It's excellent. It's a blast. He is a great writer.
And another one that I really loved that it didn't come out this year, but there was a documentary based on it this year that caused me to read it. I can't remember what the doc is called, but don't watch it if you come across it. I watched like half of an episode and I was like, this is the most exploitative thing I've ever seen in my life. And I went to see if I could read the story instead. And that story is called Hidden Valley Inside the Mind of an American Family.
And it is about a family in which there were like six brothers and all of them had schizophrenia, which is like exceedingly rare. And just basically this family is full of tragedy and it is a really interesting story. And look at the like, psychology of these guys and everything and genetics and like, you know, they're a family that because of this anomaly and everything that happened to them, like, there's a lot of interest in them from a psychological perspective. But it's a really great book. Hidden Valley Road, big time. Recommend it. We both read the Heat Will Kill youl First by Jeff Goodell. Big recommend that, but it's is a downer, but also I think one that provides some interesting ideas that are hopeful about climate change as well. It explains to you in no uncertain terms that we are all fucked. But it also is like there are some things people are doing and how we should sort of get on board with that stuff and Also Doppelganger by Naomi Klein. Also 2023 book that both of us read this year.
Read it.
[02:04:58] Speaker B: Yeah. On. On the.
Just super briefly on the climate piece. I mean, it. I've never been more sure that any progress or any. Any act of. Of fixing air quotes, the situation that we're in, I think can only now come about as a result of us accepting that we're fucked and kind of not, you know, not being ready to abandon the systems that have us being ready to just rip them up.
But again, that's not an answer, is it?
[02:05:35] Speaker A: Right.
I mean, it's. It's really a matter of all of us recognizing that we're very comfortable and that is keeping us from taking action that, you know, what have you.
[02:05:48] Speaker B: And I've been talking about, you know, how great it's been a year for.
[02:05:52] Speaker A: Us both on a personal basis, and that it will be uncomfortable to do anything because it's going to require dismantling a lot of things that bring us our comfort.
But it's going to be a lot more uncomfortable in 30 years if the sun kills us. So, you know. Yeah, those are my book highlights. Any new music that hit you this year?
[02:06:18] Speaker B: Off the top of my head, no. That's a question I hadn't prepared for. I mean, I.
[02:06:22] Speaker A: Sorry.
[02:06:23] Speaker B: Which I. Look, I'm not proud of it, but I'm more and more becoming a fucking playlist guy.
And as somebody who loves the. The format of an album, I've fucking always loved banging an album on from start to finish.
You know, banging out a 15k on a treadmill doesn't lend itself really well to consuming music in that format anymore.
[02:06:49] Speaker A: So not so much.
[02:06:50] Speaker B: There's. Look, there's loads of stuff that I've been enjoying, but not really in a format that I'm proud of adopting, you know?
[02:06:56] Speaker A: Right.
Modern times, man.
[02:07:00] Speaker B: Modern times indeed.
[02:07:01] Speaker A: But there is New Bayside, so, you know, there's New Bayside this year, and that was beautiful.
I also.
Yeah.
[02:07:10] Speaker B: What was it called? Because I think I've listened to a.
[02:07:12] Speaker A: Lot of it, I think, off the top of my head. And I can't think of what it is either, because if.
[02:07:18] Speaker B: If the track one of a Bayside track recently has become my rescue song.
And if.
[02:07:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it was from the. The new album.
Is the album called the Devils or was that the song?
[02:07:32] Speaker B: It's the. There are worse things than being alive.
[02:07:35] Speaker A: Yes, there are worse things than being alive. That's the.
[02:07:38] Speaker B: That's. The song I'm talking about is called Already Gone. And it isn't off their new album.
[02:07:42] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, yeah, that's right. I forgot.
[02:07:44] Speaker B: But me, man, that's. That track is like getting the star power up in. In a Mario game.
[02:07:52] Speaker A: Yes.
[02:07:52] Speaker B: I love that you could take me to the brink of exhaustion. From the brink of exhaustion to just grinding out another burst.
[02:08:00] Speaker A: This is probably amongst my proudest things, is how much you like Bayside. Because it was literally. I still remember that it was, you know, like five years ago. I did that, like 30 songs challenge or whatever on Instagram. And you were like, hold on, what's this one? I was like, oh, it's Devotion and Desire by Bayside. And you were like, terrific. And now that you superb band. Yeah, listen to this.
[02:08:23] Speaker B: I think the way I describe them to you is what if. What if? Brand new, but 30 times heavier.
[02:08:29] Speaker A: Right.
[02:08:30] Speaker B: And to the best of my knowledge, not a single sex pest.
[02:08:33] Speaker A: Yeah, no, as far as I know, not so much, which is great.
So let's.
[02:08:38] Speaker B: That is good, isn't it?
[02:08:39] Speaker A: Yeah, so rare.
Let's main event it. Movies. What are your. What are your big flicks this year?
[02:08:47] Speaker B: All right, here we fucking go.
None of this will be news to you, right? All things we've discussed just to smash through from the beginning of the year. Dune Part two. Fucking great. Right? Fucking great.
[02:09:01] Speaker A: Forgot that you liked that one. That one did nothing for me. But, you know, a lot of people really loved it.
[02:09:06] Speaker B: Fucking fantastic.
Just real chewy. Real big. Like a side of beef, that fucking film. But in. In sci fi form.
Monkey Man, Fantastic. Love Lies Bleeding Fantastic. Abigail. Fantastic. Let me see. First omen. What. What business did that have been so good?
[02:09:28] Speaker A: Well, it was a surprising one. Yeah.
[02:09:30] Speaker B: Quite a place.
I don't care what face you make when I say in a violent nature.
[02:09:38] Speaker A: I knew it was gonna come up, of course.
[02:09:40] Speaker B: How could it not? How could it not? I will always, always, always, always. Champion. Just a big swing. Try something different. Take a format that we think we know and just squeeze it and twist it a little bit. No long legs. All day long. All day. Listen, it's just a little indie horror Nick, all right? Don't be extra. Oh, Alien. Romulus. Inside out 2. I cried all of the salt from my body. I had to literally eat salt afterwards.
[02:10:08] Speaker A: I didn't do anything for me either.
[02:10:09] Speaker B: I had to lick salt like a horse after that film.
Cuckoo. Amazing. Terrify three.
Cuckoo's lovely. Ah, yeah.
[02:10:20] Speaker A: Anna was just raving about it this week on. Yeah, on Hell Rankers too.
[02:10:25] Speaker B: Yes.
But then in the upper. Upper echelons. Terrify three, Smile two.
But the year, the year belonged to the substance.
[02:10:37] Speaker A: I'm a reverse for you, but it's like such a close. Yeah, like thing that it's like it. It's barely a difference. Smile 2 gets the absolute top for me. I could watch that movie every single day and be happy as can be. You know, I enjoyed it in the theater. I watched it again. Then I watched it a third time with Kyo and having him react to it was just made it even better. Like enjoying someone else is. Seeing Smile 2 and experiencing it for the first time was like, ah, it's beautiful.
[02:11:05] Speaker B: Yes.
[02:11:06] Speaker A: But the substance was so great that like, obviously it's, you know, razor thin line between my first and second place here.
[02:11:14] Speaker B: I mean it, I mean it, It. It owned the entire year for me.
I saw. I'm gonna go ahead and call him a fool earlier on Blue sky complaining that the substance, I mean it was hardly subtle, was it?
[02:11:31] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw. I think I saw the same one. And I was like, sorry, mate, that wasn't what it was aiming for.
[02:11:38] Speaker B: You are, you are. You are leveling the wrong criticism of the wrong movie. It is not. It isn't meant to be. It's Scream.
[02:11:46] Speaker A: It never makes the claim that it.
[02:11:48] Speaker B: Is trying to be subtle even one fucking time. It paints its themes in lurid fucking lycra neon and gore right in front of you. It is brave. It is hilarious.
It's tightly written. It's got the best influences and not just the obvious ones either. It's. It's influenced by far more. It drives. It derives from a far wider pool of influence that you might think. There's Kubrick in there, there's lynch in there.
You know, fuck. It exists on the very edges of what a horror movie can and should be. And it is just a real piece of work. And I fucking loved it.
[02:12:30] Speaker A: The year I also saw Two Men discussion discussing yesterday on Blue sky how like, oh, it wouldn't have gone down that way if it had been me taking the substance or whatever and like they completely. It was like, you know, oh, just set yourself up as her manager and then enjoy your week. And I was like, this is like just such a wonderful example of men fully not getting the point. Like someone said, this movie isn't subtle. Here are two guys who did not get what this movie was about at all. Right. Like, sure, you may think it beat you over head the head with it, but there are still guys who have no clue.
[02:13:05] Speaker B: That's the kind of thing that I would say Is a bit.
[02:13:08] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing is when I saw the first one, I was like, oh, ha. That's like something Mark would say. And then I read the rest of the conversation. I was like, what guys, come on. Yes, what have I missed?
[02:13:22] Speaker B: Any of yours?
[02:13:23] Speaker A: I'm not sure, but did you say heretic on there?
[02:13:26] Speaker B: I did.
[02:13:27] Speaker A: For sure I did. You mentioned Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. But I just want to say, you know, that really, that really was just like a. A deep love for me, like a real return for me. And it was like it was something I didn't even know I needed and wanted so badly. And then when it like got to me, I was like, yes, this. This hits me in the heart space in a way I was not expecting. Milk and cereal, the short film. I mean, like hour long film on YouTube, like I think, you know, just low budget swing.
And it worked better for me than for you. But I think you would agree that just someone making something like that and putting it out.
[02:14:05] Speaker B: I applaud the industry of that film. Absolutely.
[02:14:09] Speaker A: Totally. I think that one is so worth watching. Also. Corey's the short film by Connor O'Malley, who you know, is just sort of an absurdist comedian, put out this really horrifying short that is very much worth watching and is also on YouTube. Corey's spelled C O R E Y S not like my name obviously, but I think, you know, he's wildly underrated comedian and this film kind of flew under the radar, but is super worth watching.
Ghost right here, right now.
[02:14:44] Speaker B: I didn't mention it, but yeah. Oh, did you watch it? I've watched it a few times since having the disc for Christmas.
[02:14:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just so much fun. You know, if you like Ghosts, there's nothing not to like there. And if like me, when you heard of them, you went and then watched all of their YouTube things and stuff like that. It's very fun little. All these continuations that are happening.
[02:15:07] Speaker B: They are a band with the world in the palm of their hand right now and they deserve every single bit of it. They're fucking so inventive and creative and just great at what they do.
[02:15:16] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely.
Otherwise, I think pretty much aside from those ones that you mentioned that I didn't like that you.
That you did. I think the list is pretty much exactly the same. Otherwise we had all the all the same like really top tier loves over the course of the year and there's so many of them. Like it was just such a good year, like when the year started out I was a little like, I don't know. Nothing's come out that's really like, hit me. And then like the last six months of the year was just banger after banger after banger after banger. It was such a good year for horror movies.
[02:15:52] Speaker B: And no reason at all to think that there's not another one ahead. Yeah, I don't feel I've asked this question for a while, right? So maybe this. And we've run over. So maybe this is how we'll. We'll end this, right?
[02:16:04] Speaker A: Yeah, do it.
[02:16:05] Speaker B: If.
If, as we've spoken about ad nauseam, if horror is in such a healthy place, right? And if it's such a money maker, which it is, you can put so many asses in seats for not a great deal of, you know, layout in terms of budget and franchise. Horror is huge as well, you know.
Where's my boy?
Where's my boy? Where's Freddy?
[02:16:34] Speaker A: Oh, man. Where is Freddy? That is the question. In 2025, will we find out?
[02:16:40] Speaker B: Maybe this is the year.
[02:16:42] Speaker A: Maybe this is it. Finally.
[02:16:43] Speaker B: Where's my boy?
[02:16:47] Speaker A: Darling friends, maybe you make the Freddy movie. Maybe you read the books. I don't know. But let us know. What. What are you looking forward to this year? What were your highlights from the past year?
You know, anything we answered, you answer. Keep us. Keep us in the know. We're all friends here and we want to hear about your takes on all of this stuff.
Anything else that everyone needs. Oh, next. Next week we'll do void shout outs, of course.
[02:17:17] Speaker B: Certainly, yes.
[02:17:18] Speaker A: So if you're not already on the Kofi, get on that Kofi so you can get a shout out.
[02:17:22] Speaker B: Some words of wisdom to carry you into the coming year.
[02:17:24] Speaker A: Yes.
We got the fan cave coming up, so make sure that you watch 10 Cloverfield Lane if you haven't seen it lately, because we'll be discussing that.
We'll be playing Astrobot. We'll be. We do need to pick a.
[02:17:41] Speaker B: We do need to watch along. Also, we need a.
[02:17:43] Speaker A: We need a watch along. We have to. We need a movie about the future for our snack. The future. Guys, we are coming in hot.
[02:17:49] Speaker B: Coming out.
[02:17:49] Speaker A: We are coming in serious hot. Crunch out the.
[02:17:53] Speaker B: Write a book.
[02:17:54] Speaker A: Yeah, we're gonna do it all, man. Every year is our year and 2025 is no different. Let's fucking go.
[02:18:02] Speaker B: Yeah, man. And we love the knowledge and the truth that you're going to be here with us every step of the way, friends.
[02:18:09] Speaker A: Amen. So go ahead and just stay spooky for us.
[02:18:16] Speaker B: I was gonna add something then, but it would have been surplus.
