Ep. 220: charles lindbergh's horrible heel turn

[00:00:04] Speaker A: What do you got for us? Come on. [00:00:06] Speaker B: Well, settle in, Marco, okay. Because this one's gonna be a bit of an epic. All right. [00:00:12] Speaker A: I just. I'll just chat some shit before you start, just to get my voice on here. [00:00:17] Speaker B: We do sad thing we're concerned about. [00:00:20] Speaker A: No, not in the least. Not in the least. Not in the least. [00:00:22] Speaker B: We need Marco's voice out the gator. People will be concerned. [00:00:25] Speaker A: Well, people will turn off in their millions. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Well, sure, yeah. [00:00:30] Speaker A: But, you know, I. What I bring is snappy tales of murders, isn't it? Really? And let's see what you got for us. [00:00:41] Speaker B: Yeah, mine is. [00:00:43] Speaker A: I'm sure I've said this before, but I think we learn more from yours. [00:00:48] Speaker B: It's probably true. We have a different. Yeah, we have a different mandate on this year podcast, each of us. So I'm about to learn you some things as I am want to do. [00:01:01] Speaker A: Like when two guys go out to a movie and a bar together. [00:01:07] Speaker B: A movie and a bar, A mandate. Oh, nice. Okay, Mark, that's what I bring. If I say the name Charles Lindbergh, does anything come to mind for you? [00:01:24] Speaker A: Ah, Charles Lindbergh. [00:01:27] Speaker B: Charles Lindbergh. [00:01:29] Speaker A: I have an image that has come to my mind of a guy in, like, an old. Like an Air Force uniform and planes. [00:01:36] Speaker B: Sure. [00:01:37] Speaker A: And you've got to start the. You've got to pull the propeller down, maybe pull the chalk off the wheel. [00:01:45] Speaker B: I don't know if we're going quite that far back on Charles Lindbergh here. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Okay. [00:01:51] Speaker B: But we are talking about early aviation, so. [00:01:54] Speaker A: Okay, so I was right. [00:01:55] Speaker B: You're in the ballpark. [00:01:56] Speaker A: Pilot. Great. Great. [00:01:57] Speaker B: He's a pilot. Yes. Great. We have that. I have, like, something stuck under my eyelids, so I apologize for anyone watching the video version as I, you know, just keep rubbing my eyes as I talk. But I think for probably a lot of people with interests such as ours, specifically, the most likely context for Charles Lindbergh is going to be what was once called the crime of the century. [00:02:20] Speaker A: Oh, Spirit of St. Louis. [00:02:22] Speaker B: Yes. [00:02:23] Speaker A: That's just come to me out of fucking no way. [00:02:26] Speaker B: Nice. Wow. I mean, it's St. Louis, but, yeah, that's the one. [00:02:30] Speaker A: Come to me from the fucking ether, mate. [00:02:33] Speaker B: The spirits told that one to you? That came straight from the void. [00:02:38] Speaker A: Incredible. The Spirit of St. Louis. [00:02:41] Speaker B: I'm glad you did that, because I was about to try, but I was like, don't. [00:02:44] Speaker A: You fucking did. [00:02:45] Speaker B: I don't have anywhere to summon that from. Is nowhere inside of me. Yes. Crime of the century. We'll get to why Marco is moaning after this. But the 1932 kidnapping and murder of Lindbergh's child, Charles Lindbergh Jr. The case not only became a national obsession, it spawned all kinds of questions about justice and the law and is still debated to this day. We're gonna get to that and more. But first let me tell you why anyone cared about Lindbergh's baby and why his massive heel turn later on was a shock that frankly, the US has more or less decided not to grapple with. [00:03:34] Speaker A: I know we'll get there and you don't like when I try to jump us around, but can you maybe give us a little bit more context into who this guy was and why he was famous in the film place, or was he not? [00:03:45] Speaker B: It's literally what I'm about to do there, Marty. You know I got you. [00:03:50] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:03:51] Speaker B: So I'm first gonna give you the absolute rosiest picture of this guy possible for two reasons. One, that's the version that most Americans probably know of this guy. In fact, when I was in my ma, I was taking a course where the Prof. Mentioned the more unseemly bits I'm going to tell you about and this middle aged Mormon lady got up nearly in tears and started screaming at the Prof. About besmirching the good name of an American hero. This guy here is revered, or at least was for a good amount of time. I don't know how many Gen zers around the office you could ask about Lindbergh and get more than a blank stare from, but for boomers and people kind of in the like Gen X and millennial age, he was taught kind of as a saint and a lot was left out to protect that image. So that's sort of the primary reason why I'm going to give you this rosy picture. Second being, you know, for contrast for what I'm going to get to later, sort of the image that we're given versus who the guy actually was. So the Rosie portrait here. Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born February 4, 1902, which is coincidentally my grandmother's birthday, was born in Detroit, Michigan, and grew up largely between Little Falls, Minnesota and Washington, D.C. because his father was a congressman. And by all accounts, Lindbergh showed an aptitude for engineering at an early age. And soon he became interested in the burgeoning field of aviation, eventually, eventually leaving the University of Wisconsin, Madison in his second year to enroll in flying school in Nebraska. He bought a World War I era plane and started doing stunt pilot stuff, touring throughout the south and the Midwest before eventually becoming an airmail pilot. And while an airmail pilot in 1927, he received backing from a group of businessmen from St. Louis to compete for the Orteg Prize in a $25,000 reward for the first person or flight crew to do a non stop flight between New York and Paris. So he started training, if you will, first flying from San Diego, California to New York with a stop in St. Louis as a test run. He did this in a specially built single engine monoplane he'd designed, which was equipped with extra fuel tanks, the positioning of which required Lindbergh to use a periscope to see out the front of the plane. This unique plane became known as what mark? [00:06:34] Speaker A: The spirit of St. Louis. [00:06:36] Speaker B: That's the one. The spirit of St. Louis. [00:06:39] Speaker A: So purpose built. [00:06:40] Speaker B: Mm. Yes. To fly from New York to Paris. [00:06:45] Speaker A: And we're, I guess we're now what in the 1930s, are we? [00:06:49] Speaker B: This is 1927. [00:06:52] Speaker A: Okay, okay, okay, great. [00:06:53] Speaker B: Yes. So. So the Orteg Prize was highly sought after. Obviously $25,000 is a lot of money, even now, let alone then, but it was also really hard to get. And people going after it sometimes paid the ultimate price, including Charles Nungesset and Francois Colley, an ace world war fighter pilot and his navigator, who made the attempt and were last seen flying over Ireland before disappearing forever. [00:07:21] Speaker A: Hmm. [00:07:22] Speaker B: Just 12 days later, on May 20th, Lindbergh took off alone from Roosevelt Field in long island at 7:52 in the morning. And at 10:24pm on May 21, 33.5 hours later, he landed at Le Bourget Field near Paris, 33 and a half hours. [00:07:41] Speaker A: Insane, isn't it? [00:07:42] Speaker B: To get from New York to Paris? That's unreal. [00:07:48] Speaker A: Come a long way. [00:07:50] Speaker B: Yeah, big time. And while he obviously knew this was a feat, he had no idea how huge a celebrity he was about to become for this accomplishment. Upon arrival in Paris, he was immediately mobbed by a crowd, and he became a folk hero in the US and Europe, quickly finding himself one of the most famous men in the entire world. His face was on every. Every magazine and newspaper. The first Mickey Mouse cartoon plane Crazy shows Mickey looking at a picture of Lindbergh before taking off in his own plane. [00:08:21] Speaker A: Well. [00:08:22] Speaker B: Well, yeah. And he became something of an ambassador for the US Having received the Distinguished Flying Cross from President Coolidge, who also made him a colonel in the Air Corps Reserve, which honestly just feels like giving him an unpaid job he didn't ask for. But at the time, you know, that was Cool. Getting sucked into the military. He was also given the Air Force Cross in the United Kingdom and was made a Commander of the Legion of Honor in France and a Knight of the Order of Leopold in Belgium. Just famous as fuck for being the first person to make this solo transatlantic journey from New York to Paris. [00:08:59] Speaker A: Like a superstar. Like the Fantastic Four, right? [00:09:03] Speaker B: Exactly. This dude is as close to a superhero as you get at this point. So along his travels, he ended up in Mexico where he met the daughter of the US Ambassador, Dwight Morrow, Anne. And no Slouch herself, apparently. Britannica points out that she ended up becoming his co pilot and navigator on many flights all over the world. She was also a very prolific author. On top of this and Charles himself was doing lots of other cool shit, like working with Nobel Prize winning surgeon Alexis Carell to develop something called a perfect perfusion pump, which makes it so that organs can be kept alive outside of the body. [00:09:41] Speaker A: What? [00:09:42] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Now, this never became standard. You wouldn't see a perfusion pump in the hospital now. However, it showed that it was indeed possible to preserve organs artificially and paved the way for the things that we do use now to do that. [00:09:57] Speaker A: And this is through his engineering prowess, I guess, because that's quite a fucking lane change. [00:10:04] Speaker B: Yeah, right. From pilot to inventing things. Experimental, right? [00:10:09] Speaker A: Engineer, surgeon. [00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. No, he very much had a mind for that as well and worked with this Dr. Carrel for a long time. And we will come around to that multiple times in this here story. So in a world that was obsessed with this new frontier of aviation and which was pretty big on scientists and inventors as well, here comes Lucky Lindy, as he was often known, doing all the things and making America proud in the wake of World War I. In fact, there's even a dance named after Lindbergh. I have sent you a video if. [00:10:43] Speaker A: You want to Lindy Hop, surely. [00:10:45] Speaker B: Yes. Skip 30 seconds in and maybe tell us a little bit about this here, Lindy Hop. [00:10:51] Speaker A: I'd love to, I'd love to. Again, just stuff I didn't even know I knew. [00:10:55] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. I mean, this is. I'm always interested in that when something sort of becomes so ingrained in popular culture that it just becomes like collective unconscious kind of shit. [00:11:07] Speaker A: Skip past this advert for Revolut. [00:11:09] Speaker B: Right, I forgot. [00:11:11] Speaker A: Where am I going? 30 secs. [00:11:12] Speaker B: 30 seconds in. Yeah. [00:11:15] Speaker A: Oh, fuck. Yes. Yes, yes. So we have just two people just getting right into this fucking dance, man. They be flipping. Whoa. Fucking. That was like a hurricane. Rana flailing limbs wildly they are gleeful. Just. Whoa, holy shit. Flipping one another upside down, doing the crab walk. This guy is scooching across the floor like a fucking dog with an itchy butt. You know what I mean? When dogs do that butt scratch, scrape thing on the car, fuck me. This ain't dancing. This is mayhem. This is. This is unbridled, balletic, choreographed chaos. Fucking hell. Spanish flight off the top rope. I could. I can imagine Excalibur calling this dance. It's crazy. [00:12:04] Speaker B: Yeah, honestly, you're right. [00:12:05] Speaker A: That is people flinging themselves around. Will Ospreay would be great at the Lindy Hop. [00:12:10] Speaker B: Okay, well. [00:12:11] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, Rip. Apologies, Will Ospreay, to give him his full name. [00:12:14] Speaker B: Thank you. Much appreciated. [00:12:15] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Incredible stuff. [00:12:18] Speaker B: I could be great at this, obviously. Yeah, naturally. That right there is the Lindy Hop, which is as you've described. [00:12:27] Speaker A: Did he invent that? [00:12:29] Speaker B: No, it's named that because of all those high flying moves that you just described there. There's a lot of throwing people in the air and all that kind of stuff. Much like old Lindy up in the air in his airplane. So just think about that saturation of pop culture, right? Especially because this is a black dance form and he is so popular that even still they're naming after him like this guy was everything but. In 1932, things turned dark for Ol Lucky Lindy when his two year old son was kidnapped from his nursery on the second floor of the Lindbergh's Hopewell, New Jersey home, about an hour from here near Princeton. And to put it into perspective, this is like Blue Ivy Carter or North west getting yoinked. This is a celebrity baby. Everyone knew who this kid was. Lindbergh himself had been known as the Lone Eagle for his feet and the baby had been dubbed the Eaglet. Now here's what the FBI says of the scene. The child's absence was discovered and reported to his parents, who were then at home at approximately 10:00pm by the child's nurse, Betty Gow. A search of the premises was immediately made and a ransom note demanding $50,000 was found on the nursery windows. After the Hopewell police were notified, the report was telephoned to the New Jersey State Police, who assumed charge of the investigation. During the search at the kidnapping scene, traces of mud were found on the floor of the nursery. Footprints, impossible to measure, were found under the nursery window. Two sections of the ladder had been used in reaching the window. One of the two sections was split or broken where it joined the other, indicating that the ladder had broken during the ascent or Descent. Descent. There were no blood stains in or about the nursery, nor were there any fingerprints. So we've got a baby missing from the second floor, a broken ladder up to the window, some mud and footprints, but no blood. And you can't measure those footprints. And there's no fingerprints either. [00:14:35] Speaker A: Yep. [00:14:36] Speaker B: According to a write up of Inside Job. [00:14:39] Speaker A: I'm getting big, big, big Inside Job vibes here. [00:14:42] Speaker B: Right. We'll get there. But you're getting ahead of me. But for sure. Yeah, according. So I actually when I was like reading about this, I was like, I wonder if the house is still standing. And I looked it up and there's a website called nightmare houses.com that talks about houses where crazy shit went down. House is still standing. And actually they have a great write up of it, of the events, all that stuff. There's sort of blueprints and all that for the house that is on this website. Obviously that's in the blog and in the description. [00:15:13] Speaker A: Still standing, but as a domicile. Or is it. You know, the. [00:15:16] Speaker B: It belongs to the state. I don't think anyone lives in it. [00:15:19] Speaker A: Okay. [00:15:19] Speaker B: I think it's just standing there at this point. But according to nightmarehouse.com the home was still under construction and a warped shutter that could not be closed provided a means of entry for the assailant. Which, you know, seems convenient. But according to Popular Mechanics, apparently kidnappings were not particularly uncommon at this point. Particular point in American history. [00:15:44] Speaker A: Yep. [00:15:45] Speaker B: And author Carolyn Cox, who wrote the book the Snatch Racket, the kidnapping epidemic that terrorized 1930s America, bless her, just at no point did dear Carolyn come across anyone who went snatch, wreck it. That. That's what we're gonna call it. Okay, bless her. But in this book, she pointed out that around 3,000 kidnappings for ransom happened in 1932 alone in America. It's a lot of kidnappings. [00:16:19] Speaker A: Huge. [00:16:21] Speaker B: The difference between this and the other 2,999 kidnappings we don't ever talk about, of course, is the target Charles Lindbergh. So people finding a way into a home to snatch a wee babe was just kind of par for the 1930s. Quite. Course, you know, because the past was terrible. So after finding the ransom note, the Nightmare Homes website also noted that Lindbergh grabbed a gun and the family's butler and went to search the grounds for any hints as to what had happened. It was then that they found the pieces of the ladder and the prints, those footprints. By the next day, March 2, 1932, word had gotten out to the public that The Lindbergh baby had been taken for ransom and the residence was frightened, flooded with everyone from journalists to looky loos to unsolicited volunteers, as psychics, mechanics put it, right. Basically the TikTok detectives of their time, of course, yes. And of course they came and they trampled all over everything, completely destroying the crime scene and making it impossible for anything further to be recovered because it was just people trampling all this shit like I'm helping, which is always good. By the day after that, the FBI had gotten involved. Despite the fact that this wasn't really FBI business at all, J. Edgar Hoover left no leaf unturned, even calling in organized crime contacts to see if they could help figure out what had happened through their networks of connections. Hoover also enlisted the help of a retired school principal in The Bronx named Dr. John F. Condon who for some reason inserted himself all up in the ransom business here, which Popular Mechanics referred to as a chaotic affair involving a shadowy figure named Cemetery John, which I really like. The hubbub involved the return of the baby's clothing as sort of evidence of what had happened. But it had been freshly laundered by the kidnappers and the false revelation that the Lindbergh baby could be found in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, a boat called the Nelly. While someone received tens of thousands of dollars in ransom money, the Eaglet was not on the Nelly Marco, if such a boat ever existed. No, he was about four and a half miles away from the Lindberghs home, discovered off the side of the highway 72 days after his disappearance by a black man named William Allen who had just happened to find the body when he'd pulled over to pee. Per the FBI, the baby's head was crushed, there was a hole in the skull and some of the body members were missing. And from every indication the baby had been killed the night of the kidnapping. And despite the fact that there had been over a dozen ransom notes over the course of that two months, there had never been a chance of the child's safe return. So given the high profile of the case, the search for the Lindbergh's Lindbergh baby's killer went into overdrive. As with any case of that magnitude, the public interest added an element of urgency and desperation to the search. People don't feel safe knowing that there's a baby murderer at large. And the police don't look good not being able to find someone who invaded the home of such a prominent figure. It took two more years though before they'd get their suspect and it came in a pretty interesting way. In 1933, FDR had taken the US off the gold standard, basically to prevent gold hoarding that had happened, you know, and been a contributing factor into the Great Depression. He was like, yep, we're just going to take us off the gold standard. Problem solved. And so people with gold certificates were meant to return them to the government, presumably for cash. Although it doesn't didn't say in like any of the things that I read what they were getting out of it. I assume they were then given cash in return for these certificates. Each of these certificates came with a serial number, so if you bought one, it could be traced right back to you. You have a question? [00:20:31] Speaker A: No, no, not at all. What, what form would. Like coins? [00:20:36] Speaker B: No, like you ever get like a savings bond? Do you have. [00:20:40] Speaker A: Oh, right, fine, fine, fine, fine, fine. Like a certificate, like paper and paper. [00:20:43] Speaker B: It's. Yeah, it's a paper that says you own this much in gold. [00:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm with you, I'm with you. [00:20:48] Speaker B: Yeah. So they, yeah, they come with a serial killer. Serial killer serial number. Well, that can be traced back to you if you buy it. [00:20:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:20:58] Speaker B: And because they'd been largely removed from circulation, it was really unusual to actually see one. [00:21:02] Speaker A: And they're held where? In, in the, in some vault somewhere. [00:21:08] Speaker B: The certificates? [00:21:09] Speaker A: No, no, the actual coin that you bought. [00:21:11] Speaker B: Oh, the actual gold, Yeah, I assume. I don't know where the government kept gold or keeps gold, things like that. [00:21:17] Speaker A: But you get like a deed, right? [00:21:20] Speaker B: Exactly. I own this somewhere. Sure. [00:21:24] Speaker A: Like when you, like when you buy a star or like some land on the moon. [00:21:28] Speaker B: Yes, right. It's totally there and it is definitely mine. Yes. I mean, that's how banking works in general, Right. Like, yeah, of course, theoretically have a number of monies in a bank, but it is not in my hands. Somebody else has that and I just hope that it does exist somewhere. So this driver rolls through the Warner Quinlan service station in upper Manhattan and pays with one of these gold certificates. He gives him a ten dollar gold certificate, which the cashier took note of, going so far as to write the driver's license plate number on it, lest it turn out to be a counterfeit. Like I said, you didn't see a whole lot of these. And there was a market for people counterfeiting this stuff. So he was like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna write down the license plate. So if this turns out to be a counterfeit, we can track this dude down. And that driver was a German immigrant by the Name of Bruno Richard Hauptman. And the gold certificate's serial number led back to the very ones that had been used to pay the Lindbergh ransom. So authorities searched his home and found more ransom certificates as well as wood that had been tied to the ladder from the kidnapping and the phone number of the ransom's intermediary. The arrest was kept. [00:22:47] Speaker A: Have I missed how that ransom was physically paid? [00:22:51] Speaker B: I mean, it's very convoluted, but there was a go between that I mentioned before. They called it chaotic. Some guy meeting the dude who went by Cemetery John. [00:23:04] Speaker A: Yes. [00:23:04] Speaker B: In order to pass that over, the baby clothes were passed back, but they were freshly laundered instead of being, you know, fresh off the baby, all that jazz. And during that transaction, money changed hands. [00:23:17] Speaker A: I'm with you. [00:23:18] Speaker B: In the form of these gold certificates, which doesn't seem smart if you don't want to get caught. But no, it is what it is. Leading of course to again your thoughts about inside jobness, but we'll get there. So like I said, Bruno Richard Hoffman is the guy that they find who had these gold certificates. They find more of them in his house. And the arrest was kept quiet for 24 hours before being released to the public and causing the inevitable frenzy as a result. And when asked at the announcement of the arrest whether this would solve the kidnapping, the police commissioner said, yes, it will. Which is of of course exactly what you say before due process is carried out. [00:23:59] Speaker A: Right, of course, yes, yes. [00:24:01] Speaker B: Innocent until guy stands on the steps of the precinct and says you're guilty a day after arresting you, bang up job. For his part, Hauptmann said that he'd been asked to hold the ransom bills found in his garage for a man who died in Germany before the trial. According to the New York Times, he never confessed to the crime. There were no fingerprints and never any particularly good explanation for how Hauptmann managed to kidnap a child from a second story window by himself without the baby crying and alerting anyone. And while five dogs were in the home, none of whom apparently barked when the invasion occurred. Regardless, after a six week trial, Hauptmann was sentenced to death and executed via electric chair. To this day, many doubt his guilt. And the most common suspect, Lindbergh himself. Much of the circumstance points to some sort of inside job. [00:24:59] Speaker A: Although you'd better be able to back this up because if you're besmirching a fucking hero, they need to dance after him, for fuck's sake. [00:25:05] Speaker B: Oh, I will besmirch the hell out of this guy. But this is not necessarily why, but I am going to, you know, just as a. A little thing that already causes a little pause about Lindbergh. One theory that has gained some traction in recent years comes from a retired California judge named Lisa Perlman who thinks that the real cause of Death for Charles Jr. Came at the hands of Lindbergh and the very doctor I mentioned earlier, Dr. Alex Carrel, the guy with whom he invented the method of preserving organs. [00:25:37] Speaker A: Wow. [00:25:38] Speaker B: You see point one of the huge Lindbergh heel turn that I'm about to get into is this. He was a huge fucking eugenicist. Charles Jr. Had several imperfections, including an unusually large head and was taking a medicine associated with rickets. Perlman thinks that the twosome had been doing eugenics experiments and either accidentally killed him on the operating table or intentionally killed him, hoping to harvest his organs to achieve a medical breakthrough that could be used to help his sister in law who had a damaged heart valve. [00:26:18] Speaker A: Good God. What? Just because he had a large cranium. [00:26:21] Speaker B: Just because his head was too big, then he maybe had rickets. [00:26:25] Speaker A: Good God. [00:26:27] Speaker B: He then concocted the whole convoluted kidnapping and ransom story to cover up their big oopsie. Yeah. Now this is an impossible theory to prove. She has requested that she be allowed to run DNA testing on the evidence that still exists, but has been denied that opportunity by the courts of the state of New Jersey on the grounds that random members of the public can't stroll into museums and demand to be allowed to conduct studies on artifacts that might fundamentally change them. Which is valid. [00:26:54] Speaker A: More's the pity. I'd be testing all manner of shit. [00:26:59] Speaker B: Right? We'd all be just wandering into museums being I shall have that science. [00:27:04] Speaker A: I would have licked the flesh book. So I would have tested it to see if it was delicious. [00:27:13] Speaker B: But yeah, so valid. But also like wouldn't she want to know all these years later? And others have also joined the fight to get access to the DNA and appeals are still ongoing about this. And even if she were able to get that, there'd be no way to prove her specific theory. Because the baby was cremated 90 years ago. We don't have a body of any sort to like go and like dig up and do an autopsy on. Right? So everything is going to be based off of sort of conjecture here. But through this DNA she might be able to show, say Lindbergh to be more involved than he claimed to have been, or show that Bruno Hauptman wasn't at the scene, or if there were other people who were involved, any of those kinds of things, if that access was granted. So all these years later, you'll rarely see an account of the Lindbergh kidnapping that takes for granted that Hauptmann killed the child. He went to his grave claiming innocence. And there's plenty of reason to think he could have been telling the truth. He had even been given the chance to save his own life by naming accomplices, but he refused. So if he had done it, surely he would have just named somebody, right? Why would he go to his grave unnecessarily? Whatever the case, it's unlikely one person worked alone on this. And whether it was Lindbergh himself or Hauptman or some other party who did it, that Lindbergh is even under suspicion all these years later is indicative of a giant nosedive in public opinion not too long after this occurred. And why was that? Well, mark you, scratch a eugenicist, a Nazi gum bleed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. American hero and global icon Charles Augustus Lindbergh was a whole ass Nazi. We're a Nazi sympathizer. But they're the same fucking thing. Of course, now you know how for like three years I had to keep reminding you that population control is a eugenicist concept that won't solve climate change? [00:29:18] Speaker A: Uh, yes. [00:29:21] Speaker B: Right. Well, let me introduce you to exhibit A of that whole issue here. [00:29:27] Speaker A: Uh, all right. [00:29:30] Speaker B: Don't you dare go back on this because you had a revelation not that long ago. [00:29:34] Speaker A: I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna. Right. I'm not going back on shit. I'm really not. But. [00:29:47] Speaker B: Go on. [00:29:48] Speaker A: There is that. That equ. Less people to fuck up the climate might lead to a less fucked up climate. That still seems to hold together to me. [00:30:06] Speaker B: I mean, it does. It. But I understand the logic behind it. Unless it's less white people. [00:30:12] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's less. [00:30:14] Speaker B: That's basically means less rich people. Yeah, yeah. It means if you could kill off just the capitalists and nobody else, then you might be able to solve climate change. But yeah, what I'm. [00:30:27] Speaker A: What I'm cautious of doing is, is talking shit here because I know that I'm speaking from a kind of a place where I'm not all together confident in what I am saying, but that, that basic equation seems to work for me. It's. [00:30:41] Speaker B: The issue is that you're thinking of it as the number of people in and of itself is the problem. When there's plenty of room for billions more people on this planet and that would be fine. The issue is not actually the number of people, it is the resources being used by the people at the very top of that. [00:31:00] Speaker A: Yeah, and of course that makes perfect sense. I, you know, less people in the population who are doing the fucking up. [00:31:09] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. It's just there's no way to do population control that only takes out that group of people. No, no, obviously restructuring society instead. So, yeah, basically, you know, this is a discussion that we've had, but we were going to get in a second to, you know, where this all comes from. Because Lindbergh's Nazi beliefs didn't start out with just being a hateful racist and anti Semite, although it played into it. There were other elements to this. Like, for one, he was the son of an isolationist, anti war politician. He'd grown up under the tutelage of someone who thought America should stay out of foreign wars. And that was the perspective he maintained pretty much regardless of the situation at this point. And that wasn't uncommon at this, you know, juncture of American history. I know you slept through most of Casablanca, but that was literally the whole point of that movie. It was a metaphor for isolationism, meant to show Americans why it would be a moral failing for us to stay out of World War II. Rick wants to stay neutral about what's going on and just run his little casino cafe away from all the politics. But when his ex Ilsa and her husband Victor Lazlo, who escaped a concentration camp show up, the events that follow show him that there's no virtue in staying out of conflict. And in fact, it reflects a lack of character to allow these things to go on without making a stand and taking a risk. This was a message to a country that largely saw themselves as non interventionist, despite the imperialism we'd been engaging in for half a century at this point, which we talked about at the beginning of our Palestine series with the Spanish American War. We'd been doing imperialism abroad since the late 1800s, but America still didn't see it that way. The PR was really good, made it seem like we weren't really intervening in anything. And so isolationism was a fairly standard thing that Americans sort of considered of us and had to be like propagandized out of basically if we were going to get involved in World War II. So Lindbergh wasn't necessarily a rare case there. And being anti war isn't an insane proposition either. But he took it a bit further. Lindbergh was also a staunch environmentalist, according to the American thinker quote. Throughout the 1960s, Lindbergh became increasingly concerned about deforestation, the extinction of species and marine wildlife. He also held a special soft spot for primitive peoples, I. E. The preservation of indigenous races in wild areas. He became heavily involved in protecting polar bears and blue whales, along with the saving of coral reefs in the equatorial Pacific. So possible he was a right. He was a director of the World Wildlife Fund, an advisor to the Nature Converse Conservancy organization, a representative of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, and also worked with the Oceanic Foundation. This helped to rehabilitate his image at that point, but was not unconnected to his previous eugenics beliefs. In fact, it was something he shared with Nazis like Goering, Hess and Speer. The Nazis had actually passed an animal rights law in 1933 that tried to outlaw animal experimentation. [00:34:28] Speaker A: I did not know that. [00:34:29] Speaker B: Oh, I'm about to blow your mind here with this stuff, because I had no idea on any of this either. That law also, however, barred elements of kosher slaughter, making Jewish dietary practices functionally illegal. The Nazis also promoted sustainable forestry and green hunting law and can easily be considered the first Western government to take seriously the idea of environmental sustainability as a national goal. Further, American Thinker explains, the Nazi regime explicitly sought a fascist synthesis between racial economic development and harmony with the natural landscape. Which makes sense, right? On multiple levels. It's easy to think of fascists as anti environmentalism because our current ones are. Yeah, the ones now want to strip the earth of all its resources for their own financial gain and they don't care what it does to the planet. But the Nazis were selling perfectionism, right? They were selling Aryan utopia. And nature was a huge part of that. And on top of that, the industrialized city was associated with filth and corruption as embodied by the presence of Jews who were seen as in control of the financial outlook of the country. And as part of a globalist cabal that would bring down Germany, Himmler implemented a back to the land movement, the goal of which was to de urbanize Germany, bringing some of the city folk back to the countryside, away from all those horrible Jewish influences. Nature was purity undefiled by Jewish influences, even as Nazis like Alwin Seifert, who pioneered stormwater management, praised the indigenous practices of environmental stewardship. He thought it important that they not mix with other races and should keep doing their indigenous thing far away from Germans and other whites. So there was much for Lindbergh to admire about the Nazis from an environmental perspective. And this was only increased by his shared passion with them for Outright eugenics. So let's once again go back to his work with French surgeon Alexis Carrel and frame their work from being neat surgical innovators to sinister eugenicist experimenters. The pair of Lindbergh and Carell were adamant that the advances that they made were specifically intended for the white race and the white race only. There's no escaping the fact that men are not created equal, as democracy invented in the 18th century when there was no science to refute it would have us believe. And went on to say, we don't yet understand the genesis of great men. Perhaps it would be effective to kill off the worst of us and keep the best as we do in the breeding of dogs. Big yikes. Just ouch. Big giant yikes right there. [00:37:28] Speaker A: And just for the interest of clarity, I do not believe that, right, this. [00:37:34] Speaker B: Goes beyond a little like accidental eco fascism. This is a whole other thing altogether. [00:37:42] Speaker A: Vile. [00:37:43] Speaker B: Vile and unfortunately not a totally uncommon view. Again, as we've talked about before, like the idea of social Darwinism and eugenics, stuff like that was super popular at the turn of the century, into the 30s and 40s in America and Europe. But he particularly admired the Nazi commitment to eugenics. And when Hermann Goring bestowed upon him the swastika shaped service cross of the German eagle, he happily accepted it and proudly showed it off. Carell and Lindbergh's central concern was staving off death and extending life far beyond what we currently experience. And just like the many rich dudes who attempt feats of bioengineering now, they thought the way to accomplish that was by crafting perfect humans. Like, look at that one awful guy that shows up on, you know, blue sky feeds and whatnot all the time, who like stole his kid's blood to make him young and all that shit, you know, real pasty looking dude. [00:38:43] Speaker A: I think, I think the last time I saw him he was bragging about his erection. Yes. I think maybe even studying the kind of duration and quality of like his son's erection. [00:38:54] Speaker B: Exactly. He's comparing it to his kids erections. Yeah, weird invasive things. Are you watching the White Lotus this season? [00:39:04] Speaker A: Not yet. I'm saving them up. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Okay. There's a, there's a family on there that would be very at home with this guy. I wonder if it's not based in some way on it, but Patrick Schwarzenegger plays a very weird, semi incesty dude who, okay, would very much be in line with this, but like him or all the other tech bros in Silicon Valley trying to biohack their way to longevity. It's a eugenicist endeavor. They're not trying to improve the environment or medical care or food security or disease control for people all over the world to extend human life. They're trying to find ways that the deserving elite can buy immortality. And in doing so, they see themselves as, you know, doing society a favor. Yeah, yeah, that's what Karel and Lindbergh were doing. We can go all the way back to these guys to see where that mindset comes from of just like biohacking your way into creating a perfect race that will survive longer than the rest of the world. But it wasn't just a quiet admiration for these policies that Lindbergh was engaging. He was a vocal white supremacist and anti Semite. In 1939 he wrote in Reader's Digest that Americans can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign, foreign races and not beating around the bush. He praised Hitler's results, saying that some fanaticism is required to be able to do such great things feels like an understatement for what Hitler was doing. Just some fanaticism. He hailed Hitler as a very great man, like an inspired religious leader and as such rather fanatical, but not scheming, not selfish, not greedy for power, but a mystic, a visionary who really wants the best for his country and on the whole has rather a broad view. Big yikes once again. Whereas about Jews he wrote a few add strength and character to a country, but too many create chaos and we are getting too many. It's no surprise then that Lindbergh counted among his besties America's most notorious anti Semite, Henry Ford, who once said, when Charles comes out here, we only discuss the Jews. Cool. It just reminds me of like all the right wingers who literally cannot talk about anything but like blue haired pronoun havers and illegals and whatnot. Like people who don't affect them in any way, but just occupy every single ounce of their brain power all day, every day. That's what Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh were just get together and they'd just be sitting there like Jews, Jews, Jews, Jews. You're like, what has that got to do with you? It's ridiculous. And they were in good company. And by that I mean fucking awful company. Of course, Lindbergh and Ford were among nearly a million people who called themselves the America First Committee, an anti interventionist group staunchly opposed to the war and also super opposed to Jews or blacks or anyone else who wouldn't have been on the Mayflower. Mayflower, basically. Do you know what the Mayflower is? [00:42:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:42:36] Speaker B: Okay. I just realized it was like, make a. Make a reference and then go. Is that a thing you again, vaguely. [00:42:42] Speaker A: But it's Pilgrim Fathers, isn't it? [00:42:45] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. It's how the. The original whites got here. In 1941, he went on the radio in Iowa and proclaimed, quote, their greatest danger to this country, the Jews, of course, lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. [00:43:06] Speaker A: Was that the greatest danger of the Jews? [00:43:08] Speaker B: Yes. [00:43:10] Speaker A: The bloody motion pictures, the movies, like. [00:43:13] Speaker B: It'S the exact same things people say now in 2025. Right. The Jews own everything, and that's, you know, they influence all the stuff, and that's why they're so dangerous to us. Like just straight Nazi playbook from 100 years ago. It's ridiculous stuff. And to be fair, there was immediate backlash to the speech, with the Des Moines Register calling the speech, quote, so intemperate, so unfair, so dangerous in its implications, that it cannot but turn many spirit spadefuls in the digging of the grave of his influence in this country. You weren't supposed to be that straightforward with your antisemitism dog whistles. You know, you're not just supposed to say it outright. On May 23, 1941, Lindbergh spoke to an audience of some 30,000 people at the America first rally at Madison Square Garden, the place where, just two years before, a famous Nazi rally had been held. There, in rhetoric that will once again sound very familiar, Lindbergh called the press contemptible and dishonest parasites and said that the media was controlled by dangerous elements who put their interests above America's. It's worth noting, too, by the way, I didn't write this down, but that the Trump rally, the really, like, crazy one with the guy who talked about, like, Puerto Rico being the floating garbage dump and like, all the, like, super racist stuff, also Madison Square Garden, so lots of real iffy history regarding politics and Nazis and whatnot at that place. But he said that it was time for America to build ramparts, AKA walls, to stave off the influx of alien blood and close our borders to preserve our American way of life. And the crowd fucking loved it. In response, as one reporter wrote, for six full minutes, he stood smiling as the mob leaped to its feet, waved flags, threw kisses and frenziedly rendered the Nazi salute. Just very cool and once again, a little familiar. [00:45:29] Speaker A: Prescient. Yes. [00:45:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, to America's credit, everyone outside of that event was appalled. The Lindbergh family immediately became villains, with people hissing at newsreels and cinemas when Lindbergh appeared on screen and booksellers refusing to sell his wife's work. Liberty magazine called him the most dangerous man in America and said that before Lindbergh, antisemites were shoddy little crooks and fanatics. But now all that has changed. He, the famous one, has stood up in public and given brazen tongue to what obscure malcontents have only whispered again. He was basically saying the quiet part loud. And America was not into that. [00:46:14] Speaker A: As you've been speaking. Right. I've been kind of just having the most cursory browser on the web about this guy. [00:46:26] Speaker B: Mm. [00:46:28] Speaker A: And this stuff is a footnote, largely. [00:46:33] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [00:46:35] Speaker A: I mean, he's, you know, famed aviator and engineer. [00:46:41] Speaker B: Right. And I'm gonna get to that in a minute because it's bananas that if you are just looking for information on Charles Lindbergh and not specifying that you're looking for the bad stuff about Charles Lindbergh, you're gonna get all of the wonderful things that he did instead. So at the end of 1941, the bombing of Pearl harbor made American isolation, isolationism fully untenable and we officially jumped into the war. The America First Committee disbanded as a result. But Lindbergh maintained his ideas even after the war ended. He continued to look at World War II as a thing that the Jews had pushed us into for their interests as opposed to ours. And just to like, add to the shittiness of all of this, not that it's worse than being a Nazi, but just to put, like, a little shit icing on the shitcake here. Lindbergh also had three secret families in Germany. Three secret families, seven kids with three separate women aside from his wife. And two of those women were physically disabled, which was odd considering the eugenics thing. [00:48:03] Speaker A: Oh, my God. [00:48:04] Speaker B: Yeah. This man is the most unprincipled person on. On the planet. And I don't feel bad for his wife, who is an ardent Hitler fan too. Like, it's not about her. But just the degree to which this guy had zero moral center is pretty staggering. To have such strong beliefs and principles when it comes to hating Jews, but to be wishy washy on how many women you secretly knock up does not exactly show great character. [00:48:32] Speaker A: That's deeply interesting to me. The fact that you know, despite being a eugenicist with a likely hand in experimenting and killing his own kid, still. [00:48:45] Speaker B: Made movies with disabled women. [00:48:47] Speaker A: Procreate with disabled women. That's incredible. Incredible. [00:48:50] Speaker B: Really fascinating. And further, 10 days before he died, he actually wrote to all three of them, begging them not to reveal his secret after he died. So he was a fucking coward on top of all of this stuff, like, oh, please don't hurt my legacy when I go. And his kids had no idea that he was their dad till a decade later. Meaning he wasn't even helping to raise them. Just straight Elon Musk shit. Just procreate, procreate, procreate, and that's it. I have no further investment in these children. Such a shit dude. So a lot of retconning of his legacy was done to try to shield us from all of this. For example, in 1977, his wartime journals were published almost completely unedited, but they conveniently did edit out his many diatribes about Jews in those journals. Thus, what you think about Lindbergh probably has a lot to do with when you were born, for the greatest generation, what we call the ones who actually fought World War II. He was a traitor and vile anti Semite who they hissed at in movie theaters. And that's saying something because it's not like America has ever not been anti Semitic. To be notably anti Semitic to the point where people go, bro, that's too far, is very telling. But by the time boomers reached 13 in adult years, Lindbergh was already being rebranded as an environmental advocate saving the planet. The conveniently edited journals were out there so you could read about his heroic ideas and actions and not the super evil ones. He also pushed his anti interventionist ideas to the side, saying that we needed to help Europe fight communism. And despite his love of the Nazis, he was a firm supporter of the Nuremberg trials, saying we could not let atrocities such as those of the concentration camps go unpunished. So much for needing a little fanaticism to get things done. Am I right? He received multiple awards and honors from the 60s on, including being inducted into National Aviation hall of Fame in 1967. Having a medal minted in his image by the Royal Air force Museum in 1972, and in 2002, having the Lindbergh Carell Prize posthumously named after him at the Medical University of South Carolina at Charleston, a prize named after Lindbergh and his white supremacist partner in 2002. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that's how much this has been rehabilitated so if you're a boomer, a Gen Xer, or a millennial, this is the shit you know about Charles Lindbergh, great American hero, rather than the truth that he was a white supremacist, Nazi eugenicist, deadbeat dad who may or may not have killed his own kid. [00:51:51] Speaker A: It was wonderful. [00:51:54] Speaker B: Yeah, right? Jesus Christ. And it's not even exhaustive. There's so much more than this. But, like, just as a survey, what a up dude this guy is. You know, it's. The thing that gets me is just all the incredible parallels to all of the people in charge right now. [00:52:15] Speaker A: Like, yeah, the. The song remains the same, doesn't it? The. The talking points, the accusations, the. The. The jumping at ghosts. It all has the same language. It all carries the same Just ridiculous, just fears about nothing. About media saturation and about hidden power and ruling from the shadows. It's fucking sick. [00:52:43] Speaker B: Precisely. So fuck these guys. Following his legacy utterly. [00:52:48] Speaker A: Thank you for that. [00:52:50] Speaker B: You're very welcome. [00:52:52] Speaker A: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:52:55] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:52:56] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:53:00] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:53:04] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:53:06] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:53:10] Speaker A: 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. [00:53:17] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark. [00:53:19] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. Listen, listen, listen, listen. Oh, I. [00:53:28] Speaker B: Man overboard. [00:53:30] Speaker A: No, listen. I have very little to say today. [00:53:33] Speaker B: Oh, look at you. [00:53:35] Speaker A: No, I'm all right. I'm all right. I'm all right. Other than I. I've turned up with nothing. I've turned up with nothing because it's a struggle. I'm clinging on for dear life. In fact, today having. What's the word I would use? Having kind of goosed my back earlier on in a run. And. And this is entirely my own fault. Right? I'll lay it out for you. I'll lay the story out for you. There's. There's. There's no more bitter pain than one that it was probably well within your. You know, your gift to avoid and you saw, coming from a long way away. I haven't changed my running shoes in. Fucking hell. 18 months. Two years. [00:54:16] Speaker B: Oh, Jesus. [00:54:18] Speaker A: For about a month now, probably, I've been getting home from a run and. Oh, God, my back is really hurting. And my ass muscles, you know. Your ass muscles? Sure. [00:54:30] Speaker B: I guess I probably have those somewhere in there. Yeah. [00:54:33] Speaker A: You know what I'm saying? The muscles that go up from your. The. The. Your upper thigh right up into your ass. [00:54:40] Speaker B: No, I do know when I. The first time that I played pickleball a couple weeks ago, I definitely was like, oh, there's muscles there that I don't think much about. [00:54:49] Speaker A: And all the time I thought, I really must change my shoes because it's obviously my shoes cushioning. My shoes is gone. They're old as fuck. They're fucking. Basically, I'm running in bare feet because there's no distance, which is interesting. Right. I. Somebody told me somebody gave me some advice a while back that said, let me think how they phrase this. Never skimp on anything that comes between you and the ground. [00:55:17] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:55:18] Speaker A: Yeah, Right. [00:55:19] Speaker B: That's probably valuable advice in many ways. [00:55:22] Speaker A: So. Tires. Mattress. [00:55:26] Speaker B: Okay. [00:55:27] Speaker A: You know, shoes. [00:55:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:55:30] Speaker A: Fucking hell. They were, dad. They were right. They were right. Because after my run today, it's true. I had to stop midway and do the kind of hobble walk of shame home. [00:55:38] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:55:39] Speaker A: Because it was vile. And all day I've been unable to sit properly. I've been uncomfortable standing. Bending down has been awful. I've screamed a few times. It's just awful. It's definitely muscular, not spinal, so I'm not in. I'm not really worried about it. And it'll be fine after a good, you know, after I sleep. But there we go. That's. That's. I've turned up for nothing. I've turned up with nothing to do. [00:56:01] Speaker B: But, yeah, let the record show, like, Mark pitched an idea for this week. We were like, ready to go or whatever. But it. [00:56:09] Speaker A: A good one too. [00:56:10] Speaker B: Yeah, a good one. And we'll get to it next week. But it was like. There was just. It was not gonna happen today, given. Yes, exactly. [00:56:22] Speaker A: Which we do. [00:56:23] Speaker B: But it worked out because I told him. I was like, you know, listen, I've got an epic to start us out with, so we'll have. I think everyone will be satisfied with the amount of information that they have been given. And then we'll talk about some movies and you can go and. And die. [00:56:37] Speaker A: I will tell you where. The only place I have that I know the name Charles Lindbergh from and the spirit of sin is. It's the Simpsons, Just like everything. [00:56:47] Speaker B: Oh, okay. Yeah. [00:56:49] Speaker A: Just like every other bit of American culture that Brits of a certain age absorbed, it's through the Simpsons and Of course they mentioned the Lindy Hop. And of course they mentioned the plane. [00:56:59] Speaker B: Yeah, the Spirit of St. Louis. It's all coming back. It's like, all just sort of sitting in there in your little Simpsons bank in your. [00:57:07] Speaker A: But they certainly didn't mention. [00:57:09] Speaker B: No, not, you know, all the other things, I don't think. [00:57:13] Speaker A: Well, that stuff. [00:57:16] Speaker B: Not so much. But no, I relate. A couple weeks ago, I did very similar things to my body the first time I played pickleball. And I was sinking yesterday. So, you know, Keo got home from traveling. He was in Florida, I think, And I texted him while he was, like, on the plane, like, do you want to play pickleball when you get home? And he was like, okay, as soon. [00:57:37] Speaker A: As he gets home. [00:57:38] Speaker B: Literally, as soon as he got home, he, like, changed into shorts and we went. Because he likes it as much as I do. We've immediately become addicted to playing pickleball. I guess, you know, that's our white sides of our family is coming through pickleball. And so we came home, we played that, and immediately my right foot was, like, giving me a ton of trouble. And I was like. Like, trying not to fall over the whole time, but I was like, I'm having too much fun. I want to keep playing. So I was ignoring it. And then the next day, I was like, do you want to play pickleball? And he was like, yes. And so we went. And of course, my right foot is, like, giving me all this shit. And I was like, you should not play. But I'm like, no, I'm gonna keep playing, pushing through it. And I know that this is going to lead to me dislocating something or whatever if I keep on doing it. [00:58:20] Speaker A: But it feels like it's been a while. It feels like you're behaving quite well. It feels like you're holding together quite well of late. [00:58:26] Speaker B: Well, I haven't been doing something like that, though, where I, like, run and stuff like that, change directions really quickly and all of that kind of stuff. So it's kind of taxing a little bit. But you saying that you were gonna get new shoes earlier reminded me that I was like, I should get a pair of Chucks, because my. My feet usually are fine in Chucks. So I did order some shoes after you said you bought some, so hopefully we not break ourselves. [00:58:53] Speaker A: I will tell you that that is exactly what I did. I hobbled my ass to fucking Vista Village and got myself a new pair of running shoes. [00:59:01] Speaker B: And hopefully that one is the worst. I remember I convinced Everyone to run a 10k in New Orleans once and then my right foot is the one that like often just gives out. And partway through I was like trying everything. I like took off my shoe and like all this kind of stuff and I basically had to like hop on my left foot for like a mile of the. Of the 10k. So it's like I literally can't put any pressure on this thing. [00:59:28] Speaker A: Ouch. [00:59:29] Speaker B: Yeah, getting old ain't for. Ain't for suckers or whatever, as they say. [00:59:34] Speaker A: I do have to explain some things I did this week. Ryan wanted to hear all about my clothes, so I'm going to tell you all about that. Just doesn't happen as often as it used to, but work sometimes springs good stuff on us was just taken for a nice day out in London. Firstly to an art exhibition. Right. Firstly to an installation which I feel. [00:59:59] Speaker B: Bad you texted me about. Like it was. It was this person and I was. [01:00:02] Speaker A: Like, I don't know, I was astounded. A party of like 15 of us and I was the only one who recognized that the artist that we were enjoying was none other than fucking Alex Gray. Famed surrealist, anatomical hallucinogen inspired art. Fractals and ever collapsing patterns. Quite spiritual, but the designer of many artworks for Tool. Many artworks and videos and visuals for Tool for their stage show and their album covers. So I was walking around the place going, fucking hell, that was great. And everybody's like, oh, this is a bit weird. I got it. And it was a lovely surprise. And after that, are you aware of the O2 arena in London? This domed structure that was opened at the millennium? [01:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I've seen it. [01:00:55] Speaker A: Yeah, you see it in the opening credits of EastEnders, famously on the bank of the Thames. [01:00:59] Speaker B: In fact, there's a movie theater in there, like in the facility. And I went and saw. Was it Dungeons and Dragons? I think I saw Dungeons and Dragons in there. And it was like the last night of Elton John's tour at the thing and us coming out of being the only two people in Dungeons & Dragons. There were three. There was a guy next to us who sat directly next to us and gassed us the entire time. Three of us coming out of Dungeons and Dragons. [01:01:30] Speaker A: What do you mean? You know, he was flatulent. [01:01:34] Speaker B: He was flatulent. [01:01:35] Speaker A: Oh dear. [01:01:37] Speaker B: All of Dungeons and Dragons. [01:01:38] Speaker A: And he sat right next to you in a fucking empty cinema. [01:01:41] Speaker B: Right next to us in an empty theater. Like, is. Are you getting off on this? Like, is this a thing you do or. But anyway, three of us coming out of that and then the bajillions of people coming out of the O2 all at the same time. And it was like absolute chaos afterwards. But anyways, yes, I know. [01:02:02] Speaker A: It likes me to know that you've been there, because what you can also do at the O2 is you can climb it, you can pay to climb it. [01:02:12] Speaker B: It's crazy. [01:02:12] Speaker A: So they'll, you know, harness you outside. [01:02:15] Speaker B: Of the building, you climb it. [01:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. They. They've put like a pathway up the fucking dome. [01:02:23] Speaker B: Okay. [01:02:23] Speaker A: Quite steep and it's quite hard going, and it was fucking freezing cold. But you can stand atop the O2 arena and view just massive, massive, massive amounts of the city skyline. [01:02:37] Speaker B: I'm of course, being the jock that I am very curious about the climb itself. So is it like you are feet on the wall climbing with a rope or are there like handholds, like a rock climbing wall or like. [01:02:50] Speaker A: So you get a. You get a carabiner and you clip yourself to a wire that they have going up. [01:02:56] Speaker B: Sure. [01:02:57] Speaker A: And they have laid a kind of flexible, almost bouncy kind of pathway up it. [01:03:05] Speaker B: Okay. So it's steep, but you're walking exactly this. [01:03:08] Speaker A: It's steep, but you're walking. And they give you boots and they give you everything you need and you climb this fucking thing. It's about 40 minutes up and it was great. [01:03:17] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [01:03:18] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a proper climbing. [01:03:19] Speaker B: Did everyone do it or did you have people who were, like, scared of fights who didn't do it? [01:03:22] Speaker A: There were some anxious ones among us, but we all made it nice. And yes, a lot of fun. A lot of fun. So there you go, Ryan. That was my claim. It was. It was great. And I wonder if it's contributed, I wonder, to my crippled state today. Who knows? [01:03:34] Speaker B: Well, yeah, that might be part of it. You got a little bit of the. The doms. [01:03:38] Speaker A: Yeah, possibly. It was quite heavy on the calves. [01:03:42] Speaker B: More than I was gonna say. Yeah. If you're walking on a bouncy surface. I did like a what, what do you call a trampoline workout once. And let me tell you, like, all of the ass area was like unusable. Yeah. But it was like. I can't remember if I told you about this, but it's like exactly what you were talking about before of like your body telling. Well, and what I was telling you of my, like, it's fun. I don't want to stop doing it. And I went to this class and I was the only one there and I like went super hard the Whole time, like, you know, on this thing. And at the end of it, the girl's like, oh, wow. Yeah. Usually people, like, take breaks in between. And I was like, I didn't know that was an option. I just kept going. [01:04:28] Speaker A: You've only got one speed, haven't you? You've only got one setting. Yeah, it's just all in. [01:04:34] Speaker B: Yes. 100% half asset. Every time you move, it's such an ordeal. [01:04:43] Speaker A: And obviously I've sneezed quite a few times today and that's been great. Owen made me take him to the shop to get him a drink. And getting out the car, I screamed, like in the street. Ah. Visiting the gents hasn't been fun. Sitting down on the toilet has been fucking awkward. [01:05:01] Speaker B: Oh, man. [01:05:03] Speaker A: And good times. Well, no, it isn't actually. It isn't good times at all. It's fucking awful times. [01:05:09] Speaker B: Bad times. [01:05:10] Speaker A: And I. And I've. I've had, like, opiate painkillers kicking around the house, but I've eaten them recreationally a long time ago. They're all gone. [01:05:19] Speaker B: They're all. They're all gone. [01:05:21] Speaker A: All gone. [01:05:21] Speaker B: In your time of need? [01:05:23] Speaker A: Yes. I'm not allowed to fucking restock anymore. [01:05:26] Speaker B: My mom often is given opioids for, like, surgeries and things like that that she has, but she doesn't really take them. The thing is, like, she probably has Ehlers Danlos too, and, like, medication doesn't really work super well on us. But, like, I pulled my back like a month ago and she was like, oh, do you want one of these? And, you know, she. She gave me a couple of some sort of thing, and I was like, yeah, I'm in so much pain, I'll give it a whirl. And I always forget that it doesn't actually help. [01:05:55] Speaker A: Doesn't touch you, pain. [01:05:57] Speaker B: No, except it makes me really sick. And so then, not only was I lying there in pain, but it was like, you know, that feeling, like when you go on, like the Gravitron or whatever, like at a county fair, and. [01:06:09] Speaker A: It, like, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:06:10] Speaker B: Feels like it's like pushing against your face, you know, like. And I was just sitting like that and trying not to throw up for like the next several hours as well, is like, fuck this stuff. [01:06:21] Speaker A: I don't know what the brand name is for you over there, but when you injure yourself or you break a bone or something over here, you generally get Tramadol. And when I broke my elbow like a decade ago, I was given Tramadol and I was, oh, beautiful. [01:06:37] Speaker B: So Beautiful. You lucky son of a bitch. [01:06:40] Speaker A: To the point where. Right. Opioid painkillers will make you itchy. They make your skin itch. They give you, like, itches. You get itchy everywhere. But I came to really enjoy that. I fucking love the opioid itch from taking opioid painkillers. [01:06:54] Speaker B: Have you seen that? There's. There's a new movie with Kelly Marie Tran, which, like that interested me. But like, it's about. It's like a horror movie about her having like a compulsive itch. And I was like, I'm not watching that. There's absolutely no way I'm going to watch that movie. I will the entire time just be like scratching my entire body. Not gonna do it. [01:07:17] Speaker A: Drinking the old water here. Hang on. [01:07:20] Speaker B: This brand new man over here in in good news. I said last week that I didn't have any envelopes to send my joag mailers in that I've been waiting patiently to send out. And as of yesterday, I have envelopes. So tomorrow I'm going to put the mailers together and send them out. And those of you who support us at the $10 level level are about to get some mail from Rome. [01:07:46] Speaker A: Nice. We had a let's Play go up this week. So do. If you haven't checked that out, do give that an hour of your time. [01:07:56] Speaker B: As well as a Fan cave talking about Battle Royale. Look at this. Which was a blast. [01:08:05] Speaker A: You say that it's held up quite well. Is it? [01:08:07] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, I think so. Absolutely. And Kristen liked it too. So, you know, that's a. If you can get the person who is not a horror head and this is their first time ever seeing it, to watch it and enjoy it. That's saying something in this episode of. [01:08:22] Speaker A: The film, doesn't it? [01:08:23] Speaker B: Yeah. And in every episode of the Fan Cave, I of course, try to add some sort of context to the film, whether that's like a historical thing related to it or, you know, something explaining something in the movie, a concept from it and stuff like that. And this time, for those of you who have seen Battle Royale and like me, of course knew that you were missing some cultural context in it. You know, I love the movie, but clearly there are things I don't understand about it. I went in and I looked at the politics of Battle Royale and of Japan at the time at which it was made and about the history of the director and why he made this film. So if you're interested in that context for what the heck Battle Royale is actually about such as. [01:09:08] Speaker A: Give me the CliffsNotes version here. [01:09:10] Speaker B: Well, I don't want to give away the thing that I'm, you know, having people pay me money for. Just in a light, in a. In a lot. I don't know. Mark, go, go listen to it. You have access to our. [01:09:30] Speaker A: Could do that. Good night. [01:09:31] Speaker B: You could just listen to me explain to you what the context for this movie is. I think it's really interesting and there's a lot about that director that plays into it that's very tragic and interesting and a lot of parallels as well of sort of recession politics between Japan in the late 90s and America in the late 2000s. So. Yeah, check it out. Battle Royale honor ko fi. [01:10:03] Speaker A: Yes. Corry and I are gonna workshop the upcoming snack series this week too. And I think it is gonna be a series, you know. [01:10:14] Speaker B: Oh, the one. The one that we're gonna do this month. [01:10:17] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a series, I think. So. There's just too much. There's just too much. Maybe you can do one or two as well. But the concept given to us by the wonderful Nick Redhead. Thanks, Nick. Is somebody has some fucking mad fool has put a load of old episodes of Noel's house party on YouTube. So we're gonna find a way that we can both watch that together. [01:10:42] Speaker B: Yes. And sort of walk through it together, this huge moment of cultural exchange and pop it up on our KO Fi. So keep an eye out for that. It's gonna. I think it's gonna be very fun for people on both sides of the pond, this one. [01:10:58] Speaker A: It has the potential to be kind of what this podcast has always been aiming towards. I think it has the potential to be a kind of a destination for the Joag journey. [01:11:11] Speaker B: Well, yes, so look out for that. But in the meantime, we're going to close out this episode with what we watched this here week. And Mark and I have had opposite weeks in that way. I've had a pretty good movie week. Mark, you've had a little less successful movie week. [01:11:30] Speaker A: Shitty week for movies. So let's. Let's talk about. Did you see the awful robot film? [01:11:36] Speaker B: No, I did not. That is so far outside of my interest. There is simply no way. [01:11:42] Speaker A: Well, I. Peter, Peter, my darling, darling, darling. Thirteen year old, soon to be 14, approached me and said, dad, I've seen this trailer. Should we watch this? Looks really good. All right then. So we all fucking watched the Electric State. Me, Owen, Laura, we all watched it. Me, Peter, Owen, Laura, the four of us. [01:11:58] Speaker B: I mean, to be fair, this seems, with this like what it was made for this a Russo Brothers Netflix film that seems very aimed at like whole family sitting down and watching Netflix together. [01:12:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's exactly what they got. They got, they got eight eyes on Netflix for two hours. [01:12:15] Speaker B: Yes. [01:12:17] Speaker A: I don't know where to start really. It's, it's. I mean it. You're maybe was it at the start of this year, at the start of last year, where I made a kind of an effort to myself on my journey of growth and discovery, to step back from the discourse and be less. To take things more on, just to deal with things myself and not to lean into online opinion as much maybe I have done in the past. Right. So I say this completely removed from the absolute fucking dapping that the Electric State is getting from the Internet. It is getting fucking shellacked. [01:12:59] Speaker B: Yep. [01:13:00] Speaker A: Online. [01:13:01] Speaker B: And I mean some of the just funniest reviews I've seen, but just most vicious reviews I've seen in a minute. [01:13:09] Speaker A: Yeah. And there's, there's a wider conversation going on about whether this film and its ilk, this, this Netflix expensive Netflix filler is a destructive force for movies as a whole. [01:13:27] Speaker B: Right. [01:13:28] Speaker A: I mean I, I was astounded at how stacked this fucking film is in terms of star power. Do you know who's in this fucking film? [01:13:37] Speaker B: I know. You got Millie, Bobby Brown. You got Chris, you got Stanley Tucci. [01:13:44] Speaker A: Yep. [01:13:44] Speaker B: KE Huy Quan. [01:13:46] Speaker A: Yep. Giancalito Esposito's in it. [01:13:51] Speaker B: Who's the voice in it? [01:13:53] Speaker A: Woody Harrelson is in it. [01:13:54] Speaker B: Woody Harrelson. [01:13:57] Speaker A: And a few others, I think. [01:13:59] Speaker B: Helen. [01:13:59] Speaker A: Not Helen Hunt. Who am I always, who do I always mistake for Helen Hunt? [01:14:03] Speaker B: I don't know. Is it someone similar to her or. [01:14:07] Speaker A: It'S not similar to contemporary of Helen Hunt. [01:14:11] Speaker B: Kind of talks like this kind of a small woman talk. [01:14:15] Speaker A: Voice of fucking Elastigirl. [01:14:18] Speaker B: Oh, Holly Hunter. [01:14:20] Speaker A: Holly Hunter. [01:14:22] Speaker B: She's in it. Okay. [01:14:26] Speaker A: Just a stacked as cast and it, you know, unverifiable, of course, but so many people are saying this is like a plus 300 million dollar movie. [01:14:37] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, I've seen that. [01:14:39] Speaker A: Right. Because it looks expensive as fuck. But it's terrible. It's a terrible, terrible film which is exquisitely designed and looks a million bucks and has a lot of things on the screen that I enjoy. Right. Like I love robots. I love robots fighting. I love, I love massive kind of man made alien looking structures. The fucking, the work that it's based on. I've spoken about the, the guy's work on the Cast before. I'll find his name now. [01:15:14] Speaker B: And people seem to really like the book and find that its themes are pretty different than what this is. [01:15:20] Speaker A: Well, not having read anything, I haven't actually read the book that it's based on, but it's based on the work of Simon Stalin Haag, whose, whose works are like landscapes, but scarred by huge industrial futuristic looking structures, like huge silos, huge robotic fucking, you know, really, really cool stuff like that. Yeah, the plot is a little bit District nine and a little bit Matrix. And the, it's very Spielberg influenced. Some of the shots in it are straight out to Spielberg. ET in particular, it's very heavily influenced by ET Hugely. And, and if you, if you ever do watch it, it just have ET in the back of your mind and you'd be like, but it's completely hollow. All of this beautiful world building and all of this beautiful, all of this star power comes, comes with no substance to it at all. It is obviously cynically created to be watched over another screen. Right, Right. This, this is a film that's made so you can dive in and out at any point and be left in no doubt as to what is happening. Who the bad guys and the good guys. I am, I, I said this to you before, but it bears repeating. I am, I am, I am confident. Right. I am, I am absolutely convinced that as we speak here in March 2025, this is the last year of Chris Pratt. He is done. [01:17:05] Speaker B: I feel like he has to know it too because like now he's doing that prayer app that Gwen Stefani and stuff are doing as well. Like he's, he's leaning into like partnering with Mark Wahlberg and Mel Gibson. Like something like that. Like real gross Christian stuff. What a crew. Exactly. [01:17:24] Speaker A: This is it. [01:17:25] Speaker B: Like he's, he's making his right wing turn done and he knows that's where his bread is buttered. And like this leading man shit is not panning out for him. [01:17:35] Speaker A: It's not exposed in this film. Like, I've never seen him before. I have never seen him so out on his own on this film. And the light that shines on him in this film is cruel and unforgiving and it shows him for what he fucking is. There is nothing to his performance at all. Just the same intonation to his lines, the same kind of raised eyebrow, the same kind of cadence. Horrible, horrible performance from a horrible performer. [01:18:08] Speaker B: I was saying to you that I had seen someone comment on Blue sky that the thing about Chris Pratt is that like, he was never a leading Man. And the only reason that he worked in Guardians of the Galaxy was being helmed by James Gunn, who knew exactly what to do with him as a leading man. [01:18:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:18:24] Speaker B: But it's like for the, you know, 15 years before that, he'd been sort of dumpy dumb side characters. Whether that was Everwood back in like the early 2000s or that was Parks and Rec, things like that. It was like he was. He was a side guy and he was really good at that. [01:18:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:18:44] Speaker B: And this, you know, he got thin and hot or whatever and everyone was like, well, then clearly he's a leading man. But it's just been stinker after stinker after stinker with. Yeah, him. Just not. He's just not good. [01:18:58] Speaker A: No, not in the least. [01:18:59] Speaker B: He had one thing and he did that well. And it's not this in. [01:19:04] Speaker A: In a movie where everything around him, everything that isn't CG around him isn't good either. [01:19:11] Speaker B: Right. [01:19:12] Speaker A: You know, he had a chance here to elevate this and. And whiffed it spectacularly. He is awful. Awful. Ah, man. And is. It. Is. Is. Is. Right. Okay, here's the question then, I guess. Is this what kids will think that movies are? [01:19:36] Speaker B: I feel like what's even worse is, is it what adults think movies are? Because I kind of, you know, I sent you this article earlier that, you know, had this sort of tongue in cheek title that was like, you know, I think this movie might be bad for movies or something like that. But like, their argument was basically like, you know, this has all. It's a really good knockoff. Right. And it has all of the parts that a good movie would have without actually, like having those things. It's a really good ripoff, like getting a fake purse. And as long as people sort of accept that as what a movie is, then it takes away from the fact that like, you know, the $300 million that was used for this rip off could be used for like real films that are real art and that say something and mean something and show skill and things like that. And I said the same thing basically about Wicked, right? That I was like this. Everyone's hailing this as a masterpiece and it's got the pieces and parts of what a good movie is, but it's not a good movie. And it's a problem that this is what, you know, this is what gets funded. And you know what we're gonna get stuck watching while they cancel everything else that's on Netflix and refuse to make, you know, these little things that are actually the work of people's, you know, creativity and not just like these committee made bullshit movies meant to appease the masses or whatever. You know, you. [01:21:16] Speaker A: This isn't the first movie I've said this about, but you could have told me that this was written by GPT and. Right. And I would believe you without a, you know, I would just hands down go, yeah, fair enough. That, that follows to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if there was some AI at work. [01:21:34] Speaker B: Right. And it's like, I mean, I think to that point, the last movie that I remember you talking about this with was the Taron Edgerton one. [01:21:42] Speaker A: That. [01:21:42] Speaker B: Which was also a Netflix. [01:21:44] Speaker A: Yes. [01:21:44] Speaker B: Movie. And I think like that's the thing is like Netflix is putting out these sort of big things that gather the family around the. The TV to sit and watch them and people being like good enough. And that is what makes them their money. And that it comes at the expense of other things. You know, every time your shit is getting canceled after a season or whatever, it's because they funneled that money into this. [01:22:09] Speaker A: So interesting. Because it, it. Listen, anecdotally, from my perspective, it works. I mean, Carry On. Me, Laura and I never watch movies together. We watch Carry on together. [01:22:21] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. It's bringing you all to the couch, isn't it? [01:22:25] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:22:27] Speaker B: They have figured out the formula for getting the whole family on the couch and that is make something that's mediocre, isn't going to offend anybody, isn't going to make you think so hard. Looks like it's something like something. Exactly. It's very much just a little. It's a pill. [01:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:22:46] Speaker B: Is what it is. [01:22:47] Speaker A: Yeah. So the danger is, you know, thank for parents like me is kind of what I'm saying, who will from time to time force a good film into. [01:23:03] Speaker B: Their kids to balance it out. [01:23:06] Speaker A: Like the kids from time to. To time. [01:23:10] Speaker B: You've seen American Hustle, right? I don't think I have not seen that one. This is, it's a thing we quote regularly in this house is there's a point where they get a microwave for the first time, which Jennifer Lawrence refers to as the science oven. And she. And then she is a disaster person and immediately like wrecks it and starts a fire. And as she's like explaining what happened or whatever, she starts blaming the science oven for being dangerous and goes like, you know, basically it's like, oh, it was such a good thing. I was here to test this out night and this. Saw this happen. And she just goes thank God for me. Well, so every time one of us does something that, you know, ultimately was our own fault, but worked out, thank God for me. [01:23:53] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And you. You look. You look across the kind of Netflix originals and. And that's. That's what they're doing, isn't it? That is what they're doing. They're making movies that look like they should be a thing, but they aren't. [01:24:07] Speaker B: Right. There's no there, there. [01:24:11] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:24:12] Speaker B: Let me talk about the opposite of that. I went. So there's like a limited engagement thing happening throughout the US that comes out of Austin, Texas. This guy, I guess, runs a drive through in Austin. I can't remember what's called Blue Starlight or something like that, I believe. And he, as sort of a side project, has started making these, Taking silent films and putting a modern soundtrack to them. Okay, so there was one that was Nosferatu with Radiohead was the first one. And this one is that I went to was buster Keaton's Sherlock Jr. With REM as the score. And listen, the scores are terrible. It's bad. They don't need this. There's no value in what he's doing with the. [01:24:59] Speaker A: Nosferatu with Radiohead does sound like Alan Partridge has just pitched that to me over fucking breakfast travel. Cannabis. [01:25:06] Speaker B: Yeah. From what I understand from people who saw that it was shitty. There was no reason for them to do that. Sherlock Jr. With R.E.M. it basically was like he, like, hit play on an ipod and just let it play through. It didn't feel, like, intentional at all. [01:25:19] Speaker A: Unlike Giorgio Moroda's movie. [01:25:21] Speaker B: Right? Unlike Giorgio Moroder's what's it called? [01:25:25] Speaker A: Metropolis. [01:25:26] Speaker B: Metropolis, which is obviously very intentional. Intentional with its music choices. This was not the case, however. Sherlock Jr. Blew my goddamn mind. I have never seen a Buster Keaton movie all the way through before. I've obviously seen clips. I know he's known for his stunts. I know that, you know, he does really cool stuff and things like that. But I'd never actually, like, sat down and watched an entire Buster Keaton film before, even in all of my years of film education and stuff like that. So I really didn't know what I was in for when I saw this. And the thing that I kept thinking while watching Sherlock Jr. Was that these days when I watch a movie, I never think, how did they do that? [01:26:19] Speaker A: Right? [01:26:20] Speaker B: There's never a point when I'm watching a movie today where I'm like, holy shit, how the hell did they pull that off? The answer is computers. Computers is how they pull that off. Right. Computers can do anything. And so there's no, like, awe or wonder at, like, movie magic when I watch something these days. And Sherlock Jr. I sat through that movie. Like, how the fuck did they do any of this? Where, like, your premise here. Have you seen it before? [01:26:47] Speaker A: I haven't, but I think. Whereas in 2025, the answer is computers. I think back then, the answer was danger. [01:26:55] Speaker B: Well, yes, Danger is a huge amount of it, for sure. The stunts that he was pulling in this, I was like, jesus Christ, this guy is gonna die. Absolutely that. But also, there's so much camera trickery, lighting trickery, mirrors, like, the whole thing. So, like, you know, the sort of premise of this being that, like, he's reading a book. He's basically. He's gotten in himself into a bit of trouble here where he is trying to woo this girl, and he brings her something from, like, the local pawn shop or whatever, and it cost a dollar, but he scratched that out and he writes $4 to make it look like it costs more and all that kind of stuff, and he wants to marry this girl. But then this other guy comes in and basically frames him for stealing somebody else's money. And, you know, oh, this thing was pawned for $4. Like, he steals a watch and pawns it for $4. It's, like, spent $4 on this, the amount the watch was pawned for. Here's the receipt. And so he's trying to sort of clear his name, but he's a projectionist, and he has. He falls asleep at the projector and dreams himself into a detective movie that's basically solving the same kind of thing. And you see him, this sort of ghostly version of him which is standing next to the real version of him. You know, they're doing the doubles and all that stuff, and he, like, walks up and he jumps into the screen, and you're, like, sitting there like, what the. How did. How. There's no computer here. How did he just jump into a scene in, like, another place entirely, so seamlessly, right? And throughout the movie, there's all these, like, bits like that where it's just doing this incredible. Just, you know, it's like watching a magician, like, you know, where you're just sitting there. Like, I know he's doing something. I know it's not magic, but I am baffled. I don't know how he pulled this off. [01:28:50] Speaker A: And that's fantastic, isn't it? [01:28:52] Speaker B: Yeah. It's just this mix of incredible stunts and incredible camera trickery, and it's like, just a reminder of, like, when you watched things and were like, I would love to do that. [01:29:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:29:02] Speaker B: You know, like, it makes you sit there going, like, I want to make something like, look how cool that is to be able to make something like this. [01:29:10] Speaker A: I don't know if I've ever talked about this, but there's one effect in all of cinema that had that effect on me as a kid. And I rewound it and rewound it and rewound it, and I could not fucking even conceptualize how that came to be on screen. I simply didn't understand how it came out. [01:29:26] Speaker B: I think I know which one it is. [01:29:27] Speaker A: Go on. [01:29:28] Speaker B: Is it the. The. The hole in. What's it called? Brain Dead? Is that the one? [01:29:37] Speaker A: No, it isn't. It isn't. It's actually Slimer from Ghostbusters. [01:29:40] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:29:41] Speaker A: Yeah. Obviously, it's a. It's just a puppet. That's all it is. [01:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. It's just a puppet. [01:29:46] Speaker A: It's simply a puppet. But the fact that it was translucent, the fact you could see through him. [01:29:51] Speaker B: Yes. [01:29:52] Speaker A: And it moved so brilliantly. I'm like, how the fuck have they conceptualized and made this creature be on screen? I couldn't. I simply could not get my fucking head around it. And that's all gone wrong. [01:30:06] Speaker B: Yeah, like, slimer in that. What you've just described is very similar to sort of the effect that they use for ghostly Buster Keaton in this. It's much like I've talked about some of, like. Like, silent film that I watched one day that had, like, ghosts and a horse and carriage and all that kind of stuff, and it was a similar effect. And I still think that's the best ghost effect you can do. I think that's the most. Like, that's a real ghost, as far as I'm concerned. You just add that translucent sort of glow around them, you know, and all that kind of stuff. Like, that's a ghost. I don't need any further technology. [01:30:39] Speaker A: Yeah, you nailed it. [01:30:40] Speaker B: Which is like, why, like, the ghosts in Ghostbusters Answer the Call Too is like. That's basically what they did. They just did an updated version of the glowy, translucent ghost. And it looks great as far as I'm concerned. [01:30:54] Speaker A: It's great. You don't need to, like, that effect is done. You've completed it. Just use that. [01:30:58] Speaker B: Yeah, just use it. You've perfected the art. Just keep doing that. [01:31:04] Speaker A: What else? [01:31:06] Speaker B: I also. The. Let's see. Before we. Obviously, we both watched the Same thing for the last thing. So I'll just get through the other ones and we'll talk about the thing that we both watched here. I watched a movie called A Face in the Crowd, which was directed by Elia Kazan, notable traitor who, as Orson Welles pointed out, an absolute abominable traitor, but one who made damn good movies. And A Face in the Crowd sort of follows this guy who becomes. He actually uses the term influencer in it. And this is made in like 1959, I believe. Yes. And he goes from being like, basically this sort of Podunk guy that this woman finds in jail, and he plays the guitar and, you know, he kind of wins a bunch of people over after she gets him on the radio recording sort of folk music. She's like traveling, recording folk music around the United States. And this guy becomes like a personality and he gets. He becomes a bigger and bigger personality until he starts becoming like this right wing talking head guy who becomes, like I said, what he calls an influencer in this, who just sort of influences public opinion and does so in a more and more sort of cynical and terrible way over the course of this movie. And it's played by Andy Griffith, of all people. This was really surprising to me because he is phenomenal in A Face in the Crowd. I'm like, Andy Griffith from the Andy Griffith Show. I did not know he had this in him. He's like 29 or 30 years old at this point. And watching him sort of descend into this crazy space of entitlement and sort of mania and whatnot throughout this movie is incredible. So I highly recommend, recommend A Face in the Crowd. It is quite a watch that, you know, like a lot of things, unfortunately from that time is very related to things that are going on now. Yeah. And I watched a movie called the Trial, which was directed by Orson Welles. So, you know, obviously another fantastic director. And there's nothing I can complain about directing or acting wise in this. Anthony Perkins plays the lead and he plays. It's based on a Kafka story. Yeah. So he plays a guy who at the beginning of this is arrested or told he's arrested by this sort of shadowy police officer who won't tell him what he's been arrested for. And the rest of the movie is spent with him sort of on trial in this very surreal way for a thing that we have no idea what it is, but he has to defend himself against anyway. And it kind of feels like if you made Alice in Wonderland a courtroom drama. Right. Like Alice in Wonderland is just sort of Like a series of weird shit happening. Right. You never really get like your footing. It's just like, oh, every time she finishes one weird thing, she walks somewhere else and there's another weird thing going on. You know, now there's caterpillar smoking. Now there's like people playing croquet with flamingos. Like everywhere she goes, some other fucking nuts thing is happening. That's kind of how the trial unfolds. It's just kind of him going from place to place as weird shit is going on. But he's trying to defend himself against these charges that we don't understand. It's a really interesting concept with really interesting themes. Perfectly acted, perfectly directed. It's hard to watch a two hour movie where you don't know what's happening. It's like this were 45 minutes shorter, it would be great. But for two hours being like, I don't know what's going on. Yes, that was a lot. So if you can kind of sit with just being lost for that long because you're supposed to, this is not an accident. It's not bad filmmaking that you're lost. [01:35:21] Speaker A: Oh, and I can, I can. If it's intentional, I can happily give myself. [01:35:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's just for me, I started being like, I should work on my duolingos, you know, it's like started thinking about other things. I was like, I don't know, I'm never gonna understand what's happening here. But if you can sit with that for the entirety of a movie, then of course, this is, you know, I recommend the trial. You're gonna have a good time with it. It was just for me a little much to sit with. [01:35:50] Speaker A: Yeah. Nice. All right. Thank you. That's a wreck for me, actually. [01:35:53] Speaker B: Yeah. You would really like A Face in the Crowd too, which is. That bears a lot of resemblance to things that you like a lot. Like 12 angry men and stuff like that. Yeah, people compare it to network. [01:36:07] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [01:36:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, people compare it to network a lot. It gets that a ton. So it. A Face in the Crowd has a lot of, like, comparisons to movies that you already love. And I think you would really enjoy that one as well. [01:36:21] Speaker A: I feel like after this week, I need. I need a banker, you know, I need something I can. That I'm. That I can really get some calories from some sustenance out of. Because fuck me, man, Electric State has made me dumber. [01:36:36] Speaker B: Yeah, well, watch one of these ones here. This is my future pick for like, obviously you've already set in what you want to do for some snacks for a while, but my. My later on pick for doing snacks on our Ko Fi is for me to finally get you to watch some old movies that I know you will love, but you wouldn't sit down and watch if I didn't force you to. [01:36:58] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, all right. That's fair. [01:37:03] Speaker B: I think I've got a fairly good finger on the pulse of, like, what old movies you would like. It's harder with more recent ones, but I feel like I know what you'd like from the things you like already. [01:37:16] Speaker A: Yes, we will do it. We will do it. [01:37:19] Speaker B: So the other thing that we both watched came out this weekend. We have slightly different takes on it, but that was the Parenting, which is now streaming on Max. And I will say this is my review of it on letterboxdes. It's exactly what it says on the box. Like, it's exactly what you're expecting from it. And as soon as I watched it, I was like, oh, Mark is gonna hate this. [01:37:43] Speaker A: See, perhaps this was the problem because I. I had no clue what I was getting into. No clue what I was watching. None. Like, none. I downloaded it based simply on seeing it on the list of fucking new movies that were stealing. [01:37:57] Speaker B: New horror movie. [01:37:58] Speaker A: Yeah. I'll take a look at that. I had no clue that it was what it was, otherwise I would not have watched it. [01:38:03] Speaker B: Yes, the Parenting is a horror comedy, which is already iffy for you. Your horror comedies have to be, like, very horror. [01:38:11] Speaker A: Less comedy. [01:38:12] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. You want it to lean horror ways, and this definitely leads more comedy ways. Yeah, it's like very family drama kind of movie about a pair of gay fellas who are meeting each other's parents for the first time, and one of them is planning to propose to the other. But once they arrive in this house, not only does, of course, everything go wrong and, you know, they fail to impress each other's parents, but also there is some sort of demonic presence in this house that immediately begins terrorizing them. [01:38:48] Speaker A: It's also raunchy. [01:38:53] Speaker B: Kind of. It is. [01:38:55] Speaker A: It's raunchy. [01:38:56] Speaker B: There's lots of Ryan Copy in it. [01:38:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I. Ah, fuck. I've never said that word as often as I just have. I fucking hate raunchy comedies, man. I hate a raunchy comedy. And this was a raunchy horror comedy in much. You know, this doesn't seem like a comparison, which. Come with me. [01:39:20] Speaker B: Okay. [01:39:21] Speaker A: It's. It's. It's this kind of comedy that I think put the bullet in the back of the head of heart eyes. For me, it's, it's, it's telling you that it's funny rather than simply being funny. [01:39:32] Speaker B: Too self aware. [01:39:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And not into it. Not into it at all. [01:39:35] Speaker B: Yeah. No. I could tell as soon as I watched it that I was like, no, Mark is gonna hate this. Unfortunately, my plan was, I was to tell you you were going to hate it on this here podcast to prevent you from watching it. [01:39:45] Speaker A: Yep. [01:39:46] Speaker B: And then you watched it during the day today. So I did not get a chance to give you the warning that you will hate the parenting. [01:39:53] Speaker A: My family, I think a lot of our audience, my family left me the fuck alone for a couple hours because they were sick of me moaning about my back. [01:39:59] Speaker B: So you annoyed yourself into time. [01:40:03] Speaker A: Yep. [01:40:05] Speaker B: Yeah. I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast though will enjoy the parenting well enough like it was, you know, it had some good little silly moments in it. It has some heart to it. I think Brian Cox is entertaining as the demonically possessed dad who, you know, he was puking on everybody. [01:40:25] Speaker A: He was also a voice in the electric state. Brian Cox fucking shot. [01:40:28] Speaker B: That's right. Yes. Brian Cox is for sure getting that retirement money 100%. He will do whatever. [01:40:39] Speaker A: But not in the Bruce Parker way. [01:40:41] Speaker B: No, no, no, not quite like that. But you got some good cute Parker Posey in there who I always enjoy. You know, the. [01:40:50] Speaker A: Great to see Lisa. [01:40:51] Speaker B: It's a little. Yeah, Lisa Kudrow is pretty fun in it. You know, the leads are a little annoying and grating, so you're certainly not in it for them. But yeah, it has, it has its fun moments, but very much a second screen kind of thing. Like, you know, you are not going to be like upset if you are also playing Wordle. Well, you are watching. Definitely has the second screen vibe. [01:41:18] Speaker A: Yes. More comedy than horror, but not a particularly good comedy and not a particularly good horror. I did not enjoy. [01:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I enjoyed it more than you did, obviously. And I think, you know, but I, I usually do. I have a little more of a tolerance for the horror comedy than you do. So I think if you, if you like that kind of thing and you're a little more easy to please when it comes to your horror comedies. You don't mind like just like stupid shit, then. Yeah, the parenting, it's fine in a pinch. If you're like Mark and will just be annoyed by that and prefer your. Your horror comedy to lean far more horror and less raunch. [01:41:55] Speaker A: Yes. [01:41:57] Speaker B: Don't bother with the parenting. You're not Gonna have a good time. [01:41:59] Speaker A: I didn't see it in a particularly receptive frame of mind either. I think I could have watched like a. Probably a really good film and not. [01:42:06] Speaker B: Enjoyed it today, right? Yeah, yeah. Sometimes you do get in that zone. [01:42:12] Speaker A: But I do have new running shoes. [01:42:15] Speaker B: Well, so there's that. And then maybe you'll be in a better mood for movies from now on. This week, for God's sakes, we're gonna watch that Kurt Russell movie I've been trying to watch with you. [01:42:26] Speaker A: Oh, what's it called? Borderlands? No, Breakaway. Breakout. [01:42:31] Speaker B: Breakout. [01:42:32] Speaker A: Breakaway, sure. We're gonna watch that this week. We'll have a lot of fun. [01:42:39] Speaker B: We'll call that. Because if you recall last week, dear listeners, because of Mark's slander of my choices of films, I said this week he had to accept my first choice and not veto it and go with my second, third, or fourth choice for movie. But then we didn't get a chance to. To watch this. [01:42:59] Speaker A: Is this a first watch for you? Is breakout? [01:43:01] Speaker B: Yes, it is a first watch. I mean, I always pick a first watch. [01:43:05] Speaker A: We'll fucking see. [01:43:07] Speaker B: But lots of our mutual friends have rated it highly. It's got like a 3.6 or something on letterbox. [01:43:14] Speaker A: Right. We can do this. [01:43:14] Speaker B: This doesn't always work in our favor. Okay, Tomorrow night we're gonna. We're gonna get this going. It's gonna be a stormy night around here. [01:43:22] Speaker A: Hey, people have been dying, haven't they? People have been dying a lot. [01:43:28] Speaker B: A lot of people have died. We've got tornadoes and ripping through the south. And I know we do have a lot of listeners who are in the South, So please, I hope you're all staying safe. Check in with us, let us know what's going on. You know, if you. If you need anything, Facebook, discord, whatever. Let us know how the Joag fam can support you. But hopefully everybody is doing well because, yeah, it was it. Absolutely devastating spate of tornadoes this past. [01:43:57] Speaker A: I'm not sure how much use I will be able to be, but drop me a line, let me know. Send me some pics. [01:44:05] Speaker B: Right? If you just, you know, I bet you have some, like, good, I don't know, weird pictures in your phone that someone could ask you to send for moral support or something like that. [01:44:16] Speaker A: For sure, yes. Memes and such. I'm good. I'm good with that. [01:44:18] Speaker B: Memes and such. Or, you know, yeah, whatever the case may be, let us know. But do. Do check in. Let us know that everything is okay in your neighborhood. And all of that. Oh, also, just as a side note to hey, I missed book club. So did everyone else almost because it was an early Saturday. This is two months in a row that we've had the third Saturday of the month, be the 15th, and we all forget that that's the case. I posted in the Discord, like, I am so sorry, forgot about this and seemed like several people did too. So this Saturday, if you want to try and do book club, some people said they're in for that as well. FYI, I'll show up this time. So sorry about that, Colin. Sorry about that. Laura. [01:45:03] Speaker A: Oh, you didn't stand up calling Laura. [01:45:06] Speaker B: I did stand up. Colin and Laura. Yes. I got a text from Laura like 20 minutes after 7, like, hey, so it's book club tonight. And I was like, oh, Corey, my be. And the funny thing was I was literally like, at the time she texted this to me, I was listening to a book, playing my Yoku's Island Express, doing my thing. I could very well have been have finished the book, have, you know, been sitting there in book club, but I just forgot. So there it is. Dear friends, thank you so much for joining us on this journey. Let us know if you learned something new about Charles Lindbergh or the Nazis or whatever the case may be. Tell us how you're doing. You know, if you've got any movie wrecks, things like that you want to give to us, all of it, especially Discord. If you can start moving that way away from the meta things, always awesome. But we'll take your commentary everywhere. And what else must they do? [01:46:10] Speaker A: Mark Lewis, see you next week. Stay safe. But above all else, stay spooky. [01:46:16] Speaker B: Do it.