Ep. 221: body farms & the nature of gods

[00:00:04] Speaker A: I'll ask. I'll ask you first. I'll ask you first and see what you think. Corey, let's say pre. Pre 19th century. So let's say 1700s. 17. Mid 1600s. Mid 1700s. That kind of. Let's say you wanted to investigate a murder back then. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Oh, okay, right. [00:00:27] Speaker A: Let's say you had. You. You know, you were like a monk. Like a detective monk. Like CAD File or some. Right? [00:00:34] Speaker B: Cad file. [00:00:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. [00:00:36] Speaker B: There's one I haven't thought about since, like, childhood. [00:00:39] Speaker A: Did you. [00:00:39] Speaker B: You didn't see that coming? [00:00:41] Speaker A: So. Father Cadfile. There's been a horrendous murder, sir. Father Cadfile and your Father Cadfile and you. Like a candle and you. And you've discovered a body. What tools would you say you have available to you in the investigation of this murder? You've got a body in the Father Cad file. [00:01:05] Speaker B: Sure. [00:01:06] Speaker A: The body's in front of you. What are you. What are you gonna do? What methods. You gonna fall back to where you. What are you. What are your methods? Where have you gone? [00:01:13] Speaker B: I mean, I guess, you know, just like observation, you know, you gotta Sherlock it or whatever. Look at. [00:01:19] Speaker A: Yes. [00:01:19] Speaker B: Look at the scene. Look around you. I mean, I guess there'd be certain tells, obviously, of, like, how things occurred. Like. [00:01:30] Speaker A: All right, so you're talking about kind of. Yes. Situational observation. [00:01:34] Speaker B: Right. Are they. Are there, like, marks where they were choked? Are there stab wounds? Is there foam coming from their mouth? [00:01:43] Speaker A: All right. [00:01:43] Speaker B: Things like that. [00:01:44] Speaker A: All right. All right. [00:01:46] Speaker B: Witnesses, I guess. You see who was around. [00:01:50] Speaker A: Yeah. So just investigation. [00:01:52] Speaker B: What you don't have investigation. [00:01:54] Speaker A: What you don't really have is the gift of forensics, do you? You don't really have the gift of modern forensics. [00:02:04] Speaker B: Sure. [00:02:04] Speaker A: I don't know. In case it hasn't been clear. Been made clear by now. I don't really know when Cadfile was set. [00:02:11] Speaker B: No, me neither. [00:02:13] Speaker A: Right, fine. We'll run with it. [00:02:16] Speaker B: I'm now actually interested because, like I said, that's a name I haven't heard of. Cadfile, British television series. Oh, that haircut so good. Brother. Cad Files. It was aired between 94 and 98. [00:02:29] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [00:02:30] Speaker B: And plots and settings. 12th century. 12th century England. Benedictine Abbey in Shrewsbury. [00:02:39] Speaker A: It works. You're off a little bit. We'll run with it. We'll go with it. We'll go with it. [00:02:43] Speaker B: I imagine the forensic techniques didn't improve much between CAD File times and the time that you're talking about. [00:02:50] Speaker A: Well, do you know what I think you'd probably be right. Observation and old school detective work is what you would basically have at your disposal. But when it comes to things like estimating of times of death and the circumstances of death, the main kind of, the main kind of methods you've got available are things like body temperature, you know. Right, so you've got very, very early forensics in the 1816. [00:03:20] Speaker B: They probably would have known things about like lividity and stuff like that. Right? [00:03:24] Speaker A: Well, yes, yes, yes, yes. But even these methods were really unrefined. Just taking body temperature estimation, the, the study of which is algor mortis. Al Algor mortis as opposed to rigor mortis, which is stiffening Algor mortis. A L G O R Algor. [00:03:45] Speaker B: Right, like the guy who invented the Internet. [00:03:48] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Series of tubes. Yes, even that in, in the kind of 19th, 18th centuries. Super inaccurate because it, you know, it assumes temperature loss, but it didn't take into account things like clothing, environmental factors, fat distribution on the body. Super, super, super vague. [00:04:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:09] Speaker A: Of course you've got then rigor mortis, which we know about. Then you've got liver mortis. L I V O R liver mortis. [00:04:18] Speaker B: Which is obviously we talked about two weeks ago. [00:04:21] Speaker A: Did we know blood pooling and such. [00:04:23] Speaker B: Blood pooling, yeah. Lividity. Yes, yes, the blood. Oh, it was a lot longer ago than that now that I think about it. We talked about it when we talked about the cows, the cow abduction, cattle mutilation. [00:04:35] Speaker A: Of course we did. Yes. That rings bells. That rings bells. I was there. I was there. [00:04:39] Speaker B: You were there? Yeah. You were there for this. Or blood would pool on the bottom of the cows, making people think that blood had been drained from them. [00:04:47] Speaker A: Yes. Brother Cadfile might also analyze stomach contents. [00:04:53] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. [00:04:54] Speaker A: You know, a little bit later on if we're going into the early 20th century. So, you know, the, the turn of the 19th to the 20th century is insect activity. [00:05:06] Speaker B: Yes, yes. [00:05:07] Speaker A: So you'd be looking at, you know. [00:05:09] Speaker B: Again, this also came up in the cattle mutilations thing. Basically they figured out the cattle mutilations using 18th century techniques. [00:05:16] Speaker A: They did, they absolutely did. Maggot presence. [00:05:19] Speaker B: Right. [00:05:21] Speaker A: If you were looking at things like location of death, you'd be looking at, you know, again, in the early 20th century, you'd be looking at things like blood spatter, you'd be looking at soil and plant evidence in the, in the mid, kind of early 1900s. But if you were looking from around the 1940s onwards, that's when things get a Little bit more interesting. [00:05:49] Speaker B: Okay. [00:05:50] Speaker A: Right. Yes. I would like to introduce you to the work of one Ivan Evramov. [00:05:58] Speaker B: Okay. I'm gonna assume he's a Russian bloke. [00:06:02] Speaker A: Russian lad, yes. By trade, or, you know, for most of his life. Studied paleontology. Right. Fossilization. [00:06:11] Speaker B: Nice. [00:06:11] Speaker A: But it was he. It was Dr. Evramov who coined firstly, the term taphonomy. [00:06:22] Speaker B: Taphonomy. [00:06:24] Speaker A: T A P H O N O M Y. Taphonomy. [00:06:29] Speaker B: All right. [00:06:30] Speaker A: Which is the work of the study. Forensic taphonomy. It's the study of what happens to a body between the moment of death and the moment of discovery. [00:06:43] Speaker B: Ooh. Okay. [00:06:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:45] Speaker B: I didn't know that had, like, a specific name. [00:06:47] Speaker A: Taphonomy, that. Neither did I until this week, when the subject caught my attention. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Beautiful. [00:06:54] Speaker A: Ah. Forensic taphonomy and the major work. The geezer, who I'm gonna talk about in a little bit more depth. And by a little, I mean a little. Not much depth at all, but a little bit more depth. A geezer who is still with us. A lad by the name of. Cut this pause. Cut this pause. Cut this pause. Makes it look stupid. Here we go. Dr. William Bass. Dr. William Bass, born in 1928. Still with us now. And it was in the 1970s, same. [00:07:29] Speaker B: Year as my grandmother. [00:07:30] Speaker A: There you go. Go. Maybe they knew one another. Maybe that's an old dude. Maybe he was from New Jersey. He wasn't from New Jersey. Okay. He worked in the University of Tennessee. Right? He worked in. [00:07:44] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:07:45] Speaker A: University of Tennessee. And it was Dr. Bass who established the University of Tennessee anthropological research Facility, AKA the very first body farm. [00:08:01] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:08:04] Speaker A: Body farms. [00:08:05] Speaker B: Excellent. [00:08:06] Speaker A: Body farm, yeah. It was Dr. Bass who repeatedly coming up against cases where it became more and more difficult to determine the time of death. He realized it was time to think radically. It was time to fucking think outside the box here and conceived this idea of creating a facility, an academic facility where human decay, human decomposition could be observed and studied under controlled conditions. [00:08:44] Speaker B: Beautiful. [00:08:45] Speaker A: Very cool indeed. [00:08:47] Speaker B: I want to say some. Someone who listens to this podcast, like, lives near one or something like that. If that's you, let us know. I think there is someone who lives near it. May be this very one. I'm not sure, but I feel like someone has mentioned that they live near a body farm, which I'm sure you're going to explain what that is, too. [00:09:05] Speaker A: I would love to hear from you if you live near a body farm, if you have been in a body. [00:09:09] Speaker B: Farm, if you've been to one. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you see, we don't have any in the uk. [00:09:15] Speaker B: Okay, well, tell us about what it is first. I mean, we've already basically introduced it. [00:09:19] Speaker A: Sure, sure, sure, sure. A body farm is a facility where medically sourced, ethically sourced, donated human corpses are placed in various reconstruction scenarios, various kind of crime scene, you know, affected kind of crime scenes. So we're talking wrapped in plastic. We'll stick a body wrapped in plastic. We'll stick a body in the fucking boot of a car. We'll bury a body in a shallow grave. We'll leave fucking straight up. Just leave one out in the open. And what we'll do is we'll fucking watch it with the lads, won't we? [00:10:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that's one way of putting it, yes. [00:10:03] Speaker A: Me and the lads will get our fucking. [00:10:05] Speaker B: Sound like a lot creepier. [00:10:08] Speaker A: What? [00:10:08] Speaker B: So everybody's sitting around with tins watching. [00:10:11] Speaker A: The bodies like, baby, when the fucking. [00:10:14] Speaker B: Maybe when the. [00:10:15] Speaker A: You know, when the professors go home. [00:10:19] Speaker B: Six pack of Coronas and entertainment's on, boys. [00:10:23] Speaker A: Pack a Kanzo. If you lived on Albert Square and you sit back and join. But look, I jest, right? But the kind of stuff that. The kind of advances in taphonomy that body farms have kind of ushered us towards these places are used in. I said earlier on about insect observation. Forensic entomology is a big part of the body farm. Training your fucking cadaver dogs. Your cadaver dogs. [00:10:55] Speaker B: Sure. [00:10:56] Speaker A: You know what I mean. Stash a couple of bodies around the fucking farm. Get the dogs. [00:10:59] Speaker B: Yes, you gotta. You gotta have some way for them to get used to smelling corpses. [00:11:03] Speaker A: Sniff them out. You've got trauma study, the study of trauma on bodies. So let's stick a body, real life. [00:11:16] Speaker B: Crash test dummy type shit. [00:11:17] Speaker A: Exactly. Get the boys in, get the interns in. Yeah, tool them up. Yeah, tell her what we'll do. Who's this guy? Don't matter. Let's just fucking wail on him for a little bit. [00:11:30] Speaker B: Right? Yeah. [00:11:31] Speaker A: And write down what happens. [00:11:34] Speaker B: That'd be a wild research job. That's fair. So, B. I mean, presumably. Well, I don't know. I guess I don't know if people would like work like I work at the body farm or if it'd be like, I am a scientist researching X thing and for this week I need to go into the body form and get a. [00:11:56] Speaker A: You raise a fantastic point. [00:11:58] Speaker B: Okay. [00:11:59] Speaker A: The first ever body in the body farm in the University of Tennessee. We're talking 1981, right? This is when the. The facility had got its first ever body donation. [00:12:13] Speaker B: Nice. [00:12:14] Speaker A: And Bass came up against significant kind of ethical pushback. You had to go through a lot of hoops here, go through a lot of board meetings, you know, before you could start wailing on the. On the corpses, before you could really get busy with it. You know what I mean? [00:12:33] Speaker B: I just feel like. You don't have to be phrasing it this way. [00:12:37] Speaker A: I am not a doctor. Right. Well, I'm an enthusiast. I'm a hobbyist. [00:12:43] Speaker B: Sure. [00:12:44] Speaker A: And to me, I don't know, look, what do we. Corrigan. What did we talk about just a couple of weeks ago? How cool it would be if we could walk through crime scenes in VR. [00:12:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:12:55] Speaker A: You know, yeah, I'm an enthusiast and I. I wonder, you know, are there work experience opportunities in the body farm? [00:13:06] Speaker B: Like, you know, I wonder if they, like. Because I'm sure there are a lot of people who would, like, freaking love. I'm thinking, like, take an internship there. I don't know about that. I don't know if they're gonna open it up like it's an escape room. They probably have to like, screen so hard for anyone who's, like, interested in. [00:13:30] Speaker A: Doing research, you know, you've got like an inflatable. [00:13:32] Speaker B: Get the girlies. [00:13:34] Speaker A: And you're on the prosecco whale on a fucking corpse down at the body farm. [00:13:39] Speaker B: Yeah. Throw some axes at it. [00:13:42] Speaker A: But yes. So look. Huge, huge, huge scientific value here. Time of death estimation, bug infestation studies, cadaver dog training. Different climates, so. Taphonomy in different climates. Let's keep this guy warm. Have a little look. Keep this guy on ice. Have a little look, you know. All I'm saying is, all I'm saying is be thankful for the body farms because you never know who you're gonna find and you're never gonna know when you're gonna need them. There are body farms all around the world. I think, in fact, I was gonna. [00:14:17] Speaker B: Say, I was like, are we the only ones who have them? [00:14:18] Speaker A: No, no, no, no, no, no. There's. There are body farms in Australia quite recently opened in Australia. The Australian Facility for Taphonomic Experimental Research. [00:14:30] Speaker B: That sounds like so old timey like that very much. Sounds like something out of a movie, like the 1920s. [00:14:37] Speaker A: It sounds like a cronenberg facility to. To me. [00:14:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:40] Speaker A: The Facility for Tapharmonic Experimental Research. Interestingly, the acronym is after which I love. The Australian Facility. [00:14:46] Speaker B: Oh, that's good. [00:14:47] Speaker A: Taphonomic Experimental Research. Isn't that cool? [00:14:50] Speaker B: Yeah, I like it. [00:14:52] Speaker A: In fact, I seem to recall maybe last year at some point we talked about the closest UK equivalent, which is the pig studies, hiding dead pigs around London. [00:15:03] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:06] Speaker A: But I read that there is lots of progress toward the first UK body farm opening. Apparently, it's something that we're quite close to realizing, which is fantastic. [00:15:19] Speaker B: Is it like an. Is it an ethical legal thing? That's like the final battle. Like, what is. What's the last hurdle for them to open up the British body farm? [00:15:29] Speaker A: That is a great question, and it isn't one I have the answer to. I can only assume that it's, you know, stiff upper lip, nation of shopkeepers queuing. We aren't really maybe the type to get our science through to go beat up some wailing on someone's old man. Sure, right. [00:15:49] Speaker B: You got a little more decorum than. [00:15:52] Speaker A: The average heirs and graces, mate. You know what I mean? God, yes. God bless the fucking Queen Mother. Oh, look, all this is all I'm saying. [00:16:02] Speaker B: Many pearls being clutch. [00:16:03] Speaker A: Exactly. This past watershed, you know, I mean. Ooh. Not around here. But all I'm saying is just saying. [00:16:11] Speaker B: British shit, and I can't tell if you're making it up off the top of your head. [00:16:14] Speaker A: No, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not all. All British. Just. All I'm saying is next time you find a body and you have to call the cops, thank Dr. Bass. [00:16:25] Speaker B: Waiting on it first. [00:16:26] Speaker A: Oh, Dr. William Bass. Because he walked so we could run. That's all I'm saying. [00:16:33] Speaker B: Thanks, Dr. Bass. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Still with us. Still with us. [00:16:37] Speaker B: And bananas. [00:16:38] Speaker A: What I also gather is that he is consulting with UK medicine on opening our first body farm. He's actually involved in sharing the learning. [00:16:49] Speaker B: That's crazy, because that dude should be very retired. He's like, what, like 95. That is. Hey, 97. [00:16:56] Speaker A: Do you think maybe 97 he's made arrangements to donate himself? [00:17:01] Speaker B: Oh, he's gotta have. Right? Like, that would be crazy. I would abs. If I created something like that. That would be the ultimate. [00:17:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:17:09] Speaker B: Thing to do with my. Either that or he's like, I know what you're gonna do with it in there. [00:17:12] Speaker A: I'm looking at him right now. He's 96. [00:17:16] Speaker B: He's 96, consulting on shit. [00:17:19] Speaker A: Daunton, Virginia. A wildly published, widely published author. He's written a lot of fiction. He's written loads of crime fiction. [00:17:29] Speaker B: You know what? I love shit like that. This is my favorite thing because I've always. You know, as you get older, you obviously get that sort of like, oh, my God, life is short. Feeling like every Year passing by really quickly and all that kind of stuff. However, whenever I see, like, the 30 careers some people have by the time they're like 94, I'm like, you know what? Life is also long. You can do a lot of shit. [00:17:54] Speaker A: You can pack a lot in, and it's never too late. [00:17:56] Speaker B: You can pack so much in. You just gotta. You just gotta do it. You just gotta go. And doing a whole bunch of shit is how you live to be 96 years old. Because as soon as you slow down, you're done, Zo. [00:18:07] Speaker A: That's when it sets in. You gotta keep going, gotta keep fucking hungry. And just the best possible footnote I can give to this brief and cursory conversation about the life of Dr. Dr. Bass. [00:18:19] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:19] Speaker A: His learning from setting up the body farm in 2007. Right. In 2007. So less than a decade ago, Dr. Bass assisted in the case of the exhumation and re. Autopsy of the Big Bopper. [00:18:40] Speaker B: What? [00:18:40] Speaker A: I'm fucking serious. [00:18:43] Speaker B: Why? [00:18:44] Speaker A: Well, because at the time of his death, his. His cause of death hadn't been properly confirmed. [00:18:51] Speaker B: Did he not die in a plane crash? [00:18:52] Speaker A: Oh, he did. Yeah. Absolutely. [00:18:54] Speaker B: Okay. [00:18:55] Speaker A: Chantilly lady got a pretty. Oh, actually, that's a little bit. I think the Big Bopper is one of those artists that. His music very kind of icky when you revisit that. [00:19:09] Speaker B: But they were like. They exhumed him. [00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah. Big Bopper was exhumed in 2007 to properly establish his cause of death. [00:19:20] Speaker B: Was it plane crash? [00:19:23] Speaker A: So the Big Boppers son. Right. His son Jay. In 2007. I'm going off Wikipedia here. I apologize. [00:19:31] Speaker B: That's fine. This isn't all of us. This is an out of, you know. You're being asked further questions. [00:19:35] Speaker A: Exactly. January 2007. Richardson's son, J, he requested his father's body be exhumed and an autopsy be performed. Oh, my God. In response to an Internet rumor about guns being about guns being fired aboard the aircraft and the Big Bopper initially surviving the crash. [00:19:55] Speaker B: So he got taken by an Internet conspiracy theory. [00:19:59] Speaker A: Yep. [00:19:59] Speaker B: And had his father exhumed in response. [00:20:02] Speaker A: To an Internet rumor about guns being fired on the plane. [00:20:06] Speaker B: That's. That's incredible. That's. That's like. That's like Paul McCartney's kids getting a DNA test to see if he's the same guy from the original Beatles. [00:20:17] Speaker A: The autopsy was performed by William Bass. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Incredible. [00:20:22] Speaker A: And how dark is this? Richardson, the Big Bopper's son, was present throughout the autopsy, observing the casket as it was opened. [00:20:31] Speaker B: He Was like, really? Like, I am not gonna. [00:20:34] Speaker A: I'm not. [00:20:34] Speaker B: There is. [00:20:35] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:20:35] Speaker B: If there's bullet holes in this dude, I'm gonna see it. [00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And both men exhibited surprise that the remains were well enough preserved to be recognizable as those of the late Rock. No. Isn't that incredible? He was in good nick when they cracked him open. [00:20:49] Speaker B: That's what, 40, 50 years after his death, eight years later. [00:20:57] Speaker A: Wow, that's interesting, isn't it? [00:21:00] Speaker B: That's. Yeah. Props to whoever embalmed him or whatever. [00:21:03] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. Great job. Great job. Just. [00:21:07] Speaker B: Well, I love that little footnote. That's great. [00:21:09] Speaker A: Yeah, me too, actually. Really? Really. Me too. Now I just wanna look at the lyrics to Chantilly Lace and see if. [00:21:18] Speaker B: Also I presume that they did not in fact find bullet holes. [00:21:22] Speaker A: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. And he was reburied with no. You know, with no. It was fucking shenanigans at all. [00:21:32] Speaker B: Yeah, right. Just pop them back in, bass. [00:21:34] Speaker A: Findings indicated no signs of foul play. Fractures from head to toe, massive fractures. Richardson died immediately. He didn't crawl away. He didn't walk away from the plane. [00:21:42] Speaker B: That's good. [00:21:43] Speaker A: Close that case. [00:21:45] Speaker B: Yeah, I would definitely want to hear. It was immediate. He felt nothing. As opposed to whatever the Internet was saying about that. [00:21:53] Speaker A: Ain't nothing in the world like a big eyed girl to make me act so funny make me spend my money Made me feel real loose Like a long necked goose Like a girl oh baby, that's a. What I like. [00:22:06] Speaker B: I don't see anything particularly. [00:22:08] Speaker A: I don't know. Chantilly lace and a pretty face Ponytail are hanging down Just start to sound a little, you know, a wiggle and a giggle in a talk. I don't know. [00:22:17] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:22:19] Speaker A: You know. [00:22:19] Speaker B: Okay, well, let's exhume him and ask him about that. [00:22:25] Speaker A: That's what we like. Let me quote directly from my notes if I. [00:22:30] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:22:31] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:22:35] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:22:39] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:22:41] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:22:45] 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. [00:22:51] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:22:54] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another. Another fun episode of Milfcast, the podcast what the world's only Podcast about milfs and MILF news and MILF updates. [00:23:17] Speaker B: I guarantee this would not be the only podcast about that. To be honest with you, it is. Go ahead, give that a Google safe search off. [00:23:27] Speaker A: I'm your host, Marco, and you can find me on MSN as xxmilflover69 xx. The. The O is a zero. Got there too quick. The name was taken. That's on me. So this week we're gonna kick off like we always do with MILF news. Corry over to you. [00:23:52] Speaker B: I don't. I don't know, Mark. I don't even know how to. Yes, and this, this bit, that's the. [00:24:00] Speaker A: First rule of the improv. [00:24:01] Speaker B: I am not. I don't know enough about milfs to be able to engage with this bit. [00:24:05] Speaker A: First rule of improv, you pick it up and you run with it. Come on. This is fucking. This is improv 101. [00:24:14] Speaker B: I'm sorry, but this did make me. My brain. My brain's sort of like ADHD loop on. This thought, though, was I thought like MILFs, and then I thought porn category, and then I thought like Big Diddy goth girlfriends, which then reminded me this morning. So, Mark, a thing that I've taken up is morning, like yoga, morning stretches. [00:24:39] Speaker A: Things M, O, R, N, I, N, G. Yes. Okay, right, fine. [00:24:45] Speaker B: In the morning. Not like, like sad yoga, although real, real sad yoga, but no morning yoga. And so this morning I, you know, was doing my thing, stretching out, getting loose, getting limber, and I. You've done some yoga. I know a couple years ago, you kind of. [00:25:06] Speaker A: A little bit. I dabbled. Yes. [00:25:07] Speaker B: I didn't quite dabbled in the yoga. [00:25:09] Speaker A: I wanted to achieve the yoga flame, but I didn't quite get there. [00:25:13] Speaker B: Yeah, it just feels. It feels nice. I'm like suddenly realizing, like, oh. Oh. Everything doesn't have to be like, my shoulders don't have to be in my ears at all, which is nice. But in your dabbling, you would have known the position. Downward facing dog, obviously. Right. Like, that's a basic day one, you know, day one yoga pose. You're kind of in a. You're hands and feet on the floor. Kind of like you're doing a plank, but more in like a triangle and arched sort of situation. Uh, but I was trying to do this earlier today and realized that my. My boobs are too big. And whenever I try to do like downward facing dog or like the. What's the thing where you just like kind of hang like a fold. The downward fold pose. I can't breathe oh, no. Because my boobs suffocate because of the Buddies. It is harshing my yoga vibe. [00:26:11] Speaker A: I'm sure that they are adaptations. [00:26:16] Speaker B: It's like, there's, like, modifications for, like, disabilities and shit like that. But no one's ever, like, if your tits are suffocating you, here's one move that you can do to avoid that. Like, that never comes up in a yoga video. [00:26:29] Speaker A: One of our listeners will have intel on this, I'm sure. [00:26:32] Speaker B: Please. If you've got big titty goth girlfriend yoga tips. [00:26:35] Speaker A: Yeah. If you do big tit yoga or have experience of Body Farm, we'd love to hear from you. I'd like to give a shout out, if I may, as we kick off this episode. As we kick off this episode of Milfcast is going out to one guy in particular, right? One guy in particular. I know he's a listener. I know he's a fan, so I wanna right now say, great work, the Pope, you fucking absolute mad cunt. [00:27:07] Speaker B: You've gone and done it, buddy. [00:27:09] Speaker A: Fucking. You kicked out the 2.9 from the most. [00:27:14] Speaker B: I'm genuinely so glad you said this, because right before we started, I was like, I wonder if we can get the Pope in here. [00:27:21] Speaker A: Ah, mate, I've been. [00:27:22] Speaker B: If we can think of nothing, shout out. [00:27:25] Speaker A: Walked it. Fucking walked it off. [00:27:27] Speaker B: Double double pneumonia. All the articles are like, yeah, they were just gonna let him die. [00:27:32] Speaker A: Yep. [00:27:35] Speaker B: They were like, you know what? Send him off. Put two between the eyes. [00:27:39] Speaker A: But you walked off. Double pneumonia. Kicked out of the most devastating maneuver in all of respiratory disease, double pneumonia. [00:27:49] Speaker B: And look, I mean, it's not like he was the portrait of health either. Like, look at that guy. That guy looks like he's been in a microwave. [00:27:56] Speaker A: He's starting to resemble Baron Harkonnen. [00:28:00] Speaker B: Yeah, straight up. [00:28:02] Speaker A: Just all neck and jowl. [00:28:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:28:06] Speaker A: It would be amazing to start floating above his black poo of regenerative ichor as he, you know, hatched his plan. [00:28:15] Speaker B: Is that how that word is pronounced? [00:28:17] Speaker A: Ichor? I would think so, yeah. Icar. [00:28:19] Speaker B: Is that. Have you heard it said out loud, or is this. Have you only read it? [00:28:24] Speaker A: I believe I've heard it in possibly a Tim Burton poem or something like that. Ichor? Yeah, for sure. [00:28:32] Speaker B: Okay. Just curious, because it comes up in, like, Hades, I want to say, but in my head, I've been saying it. Ichor. [00:28:38] Speaker A: Nah. Ichor for sure. [00:28:40] Speaker B: Ichor. Ichor. Ichor. [00:28:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:43] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:28:44] Speaker A: Ah, it's actually. And I seem to remember this is where I. This is where I've heard Ikor in Lord of the Rings or maybe even the Hobbit when they're hiding up in the trees from the spiders. Bilbo stabs one of the spiders, and instead of blood, a black echo pours out of it. [00:29:06] Speaker B: Huh. [00:29:07] Speaker A: Yeah, man. [00:29:07] Speaker B: This is a reference I would not have expected from you. [00:29:09] Speaker A: I love the Hobbit. I adore. I adore the movie. Nah, fuck off. [00:29:15] Speaker B: Oh, okay. No, the book is great. I will definitely give you that. I thought you were referencing the film, and I thought that was weird. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Nope. Absolutely not. The book. I don't think I've sat through all three of the films because they. [00:29:29] Speaker B: There are three, aren't there? [00:29:31] Speaker A: There are three. And the fact that there are three. It is a similar encapsulation of what I hate about what Star wars is now. I fucking detest. I detest the artificial stretching out of stories in motion picture form because of capitalism, false trilogies. There is nothing more about modern movie making that I detest more than that fucking affectation. Yeah, same part one. You know what I mean? Wicked. Part one. [00:30:06] Speaker B: Like, the Hobbit is, like two pages long. You don't need. It doesn't need to be three movies. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Genuinely. You can read the book in the time it takes to watch one of those bastard films. Bastard. [00:30:15] Speaker B: Bastard abominations. Go to the LA premiere of the Hobbit, which, you know, a friend from the Internet who I'd met when I met Karl Urban was like, oh, you're gonna go down and do this? And I was like, hell, yeah. Let's go see the premiere. Go meet some celebs on the red carpet or whatever. But we were like, maybe we can figure out how to get tickets to get in and then be, like, right up there when the celebs introduce it and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Which we did end up managing to get tickets to get in. But then, like, the celebs didn't. Didn't even, like, come in, really. Just, like, walked up to the balcony, sat for, like, two minutes, and left. And, like, we were like, oh, well, that sucks. Now we're just sitting here watching the Hobbit. [00:30:57] Speaker A: Worst outcome, right? [00:31:00] Speaker B: And it was like, in, like, hfr, you know, so it looked like a video game in, like, we were sitting in, like, the very front row of the Kodak Theater in Hollywood. But during this, like, the most interesting thing that happened, which I was thinking about the other day, was that we ended up sitting outside with this guy named Doug Dunning, who was, like, clearly homeless, but he had, like, this rich fantasy life in which he was, like, a famous actor, and he, like, he's, like, mentored by Christopher Lee, and he was, like, had, like, this tiny little flip phone that he was, like, opening up and showing us, like, pictures of him with, like, famous people like Christopher Lee and stuff like that. And he spoke in, like, a. An affected British accent that clearly wasn't really British, you know, like one of those kinds of things, like, you know, and a British accent from nowhere. Yeah, like, you know, that kind of thing. [00:31:59] Speaker A: Like, it sounds like Siri McAllen, like, exactly. [00:32:03] Speaker B: You know, like, it's just like a really put on sort of theatrical sort of thing. And, you know, he spent this, like, three hours. We were singing line telling us about, like, his life and, you know, all the famous people that he'd worked with and all this kind of stuff. And all of his photos were clearly, like, from photo ops. These were not, like, his friends, you know, but there's a documentary about him. And I was. Yeah, about Doug. I was on. I subscribed to this app called Nightflight, and I opened it the other day. I knew he had mentioned something about people making a documentary about him, but, like, everything he said was a lie. So it was like, clearly. I was just like, yeah, okay, sure, sure, Doug, if you say so. But it's real, and it is on the Nightflight app. So one of these days, I'm gonna have to watch it and learn. [00:32:56] Speaker A: How did you strike up a conversation with Fantasy Doug? How did you get chatting to him? [00:33:00] Speaker B: Every time I've ever been to Hollywood, there's, like, some crazy thing like this. Like, when we went to the Star Trek premiere, we ended up standing with the Hollywood Boulevard Superman. And, you know, him telling us all about, like, his life and all that. Unfortunately, he died really tragically shortly after that. But, like, he was, like, known as, like, the Hollywood Boulevard Superman. And, you know, people would recognize him everywhere. He looked a lot like, he's like a very skinny version of Christopher Reeve. Like, it's just one of those things. If you go to these things, characters turn up. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. Come out of the woodworker. [00:33:35] Speaker B: If you so much as look them in the eye, they're going to. Yeah, Tractor. [00:33:41] Speaker A: You're gonna know about it. [00:33:42] Speaker B: You're gonna know about it. [00:33:44] Speaker A: I guess Doug is no longer with us either. No. Doug. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Oh, did he die? [00:33:48] Speaker A: Well, I'm asking you. He must be gone by now. [00:33:50] Speaker B: Oh, I. I don't know. I mean, this was only. When did the Hobbit come out? Like, 10 years ago. [00:33:56] Speaker A: I think it might be longer, you know, time. [00:34:00] Speaker B: This is what I was talking about, man. Actor Doug Dunning, born 1952. I don't see a death date. [00:34:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:07] Speaker B: Age 72. [00:34:08] Speaker A: Go on, Doug. Fucking love it. [00:34:11] Speaker B: He appeared as a background alien delegate in Star Trek 6. [00:34:16] Speaker A: Oh, Doug looks good. [00:34:17] Speaker B: Oh. Host and commentator of GLOW. [00:34:20] Speaker A: There you go. [00:34:23] Speaker B: Yes. Deconstructing Dunning is the name of the documentary. So if you have the Nightflight app, which is if you like weird shit, like the stuff that you would see if you stayed up too late and watched like MTV or. Because Night Flight was an actual show. I think it was on TNT or something like that. But like weird interviews with indie. Well, or with major rock artists, like stuff like that. Weird sort of shorts and films. That kind of stuff you would see later on and like Adult Swim and things like that. Nightflight is a very interesting app that also has a whole bunch of, like, horror movies and stuff like that on it as well. [00:34:58] Speaker A: I do like those. [00:34:59] Speaker B: Doug Dunning documentary. [00:35:00] Speaker A: I do like. [00:35:01] Speaker B: I should give you the login and see if you can use it over there. [00:35:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I would enjoy that. Yeah, I would enjoy that a great deal, I think. [00:35:06] Speaker B: I think you'd enjoy a lot of the stuff that's on there. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Super briefly. [00:35:13] Speaker B: Yes. [00:35:16] Speaker A: Not a movie that I've seen, but. [00:35:18] Speaker B: Okay. [00:35:20] Speaker A: On the weekend, Laura and Owen. Not Peter, but Laura and Owen, okay, Went to see Snow White, right? [00:35:35] Speaker B: Sure. [00:35:37] Speaker A: Now, this is interesting, isn't it? Because the. I don't know if this had escaped your attention or what, but the Disney original, the animated original movie do you know of. [00:35:54] Speaker B: Rings a bell? Yeah. [00:35:55] Speaker A: Right. Now, that film is called Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, if you remember. [00:36:04] Speaker B: It is called that. Yeah. [00:36:06] Speaker A: Now, I. I booked the tickets for Laura because she doesn't. She doesn't know about things like that. Absent. That's not her. The Internet, it's not her kind of thing. So I booked the tickets for her and I thought maybe I'd got the wrong movie because this one's just called Snow White, isn't it? [00:36:25] Speaker B: And the lady, she ain't even. What. [00:36:29] Speaker A: Yeah, she's of. Of. Of. What do we say? Is she Mexican? [00:36:35] Speaker B: Um, I am not sure. She is some kind of Latina. I don't know of which country specifically. [00:36:43] Speaker A: It feels to me, Corrie, that this is just another example of what I'm hearing a lot of people refer to as the woke mind virus, isn't it? [00:36:59] Speaker B: Can I tell you, this is what's hilarious about this movie, is that it has pissed off Everyone from like every single possible group. Because so it got, you know, woke mind virus shit happening here with a non white lead. Yeah. You know, and the non dwarves in it. But also leftists are upset because of Gal Gadot, the, you know, Israeli military sympathizer. And then on top of it. So did you hear about like the whole controversy with the dwarves? [00:37:38] Speaker A: What, in terms of they're not dwarves now. [00:37:42] Speaker B: So when they like announced the movie or whatever. Peter Dinklage. [00:37:45] Speaker A: Yeah, Dinklage weighed it in, didn't he? Of course. [00:37:47] Speaker B: Yeah, he weighed in. He was like, hello, this is like, you know, awful stereotype or whatever. I thought we're past this in Hollywood. So they were like, no, no, no, don't worry about it. They're not going to be like dwarves. They're going to be like CGI guys, like no big deal or whatever. But then the dwarf actors who like call themselves dwarves. I'm not using this in like a. You know what I'm like, You say little person or whatever, but these people legitimately said dwarf. That's why I'm saying it. [00:38:16] Speaker A: Yep. [00:38:16] Speaker B: They were like, hey, there are like no roles in Hollywood for dwarves. And you just took seven away from us. Literally just seven, seven roles. [00:38:26] Speaker A: What other movie is gonna give you on a plate the chance to catch? [00:38:31] Speaker B: Right. So then you pissed off them as well. Like cursed movie on every possible level. Just like no one is happy. It cost of course like $250 million to make and made like 42 million. Just absolutely cursed on top of then everyone saying, like, Gal Gadot is unwatchable. So quality aside, it was already cursed. [00:38:57] Speaker A: I often say, go woke, go broke. Right. That's something I'm fond of saying. I say this a lot about a lot of different things. Yes. [00:39:07] Speaker B: Obviously, famously, it's on our T shirts. [00:39:10] Speaker A: It's never been more true than in the case of Snow White. [00:39:14] Speaker B: In the case of Snow White. [00:39:17] Speaker A: Let this be a lesson to the bean counters at Disney. [00:39:21] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a classic case of you gotta pick one. You either gotta go woke or you gotta not. But you can't like sit in the middle of it. You know, like you either gotta go Louis CK with it or you gotta lean in and go woke. But you can't, can't ride that line. [00:39:39] Speaker A: You're not gonna everybody mad. Particularly when you're reviving properties from like the 50s. You are not. [00:39:46] Speaker B: It's even. It's like the 30s, isn't it? [00:39:48] Speaker A: Well, there we go. [00:39:49] Speaker B: Here's the other thing which I think is hilarious, is and we'll. We're gonna talk more about Corey's Christian life later on in this episode. But I've seen because, you know, Rachel Ziegler made some comments about, like, how sort of outdated some of the ideas from the original Snow White were and how they were changing that for this one. And this pissed off conservatives, obviously. So now the past couple days I've been seeing on Facebook this thing going around where, like, some guy talks about how important Snow White actually was in terms of, like, the Great Depression and yada yada. And so when you talk about outdated ideals, you're actually, you know, shitting on that. Like, he doesn't say shitting on because it's like, Christian. But, like, a bunch of my Christian friends have shared this. Like, so true. Such good perspective. Like, shut up. You do not care about the Depression. And you did not know about this. Absolutely not posted about it. You're just. You're just mad. [00:40:45] Speaker A: No, I. I wonder even if the way forward for Disney's ambition to just remake all of them is, obviously they won't because, you know, capitalism and the endless need for expansion and growth. But is there, I wonder, space for somebody to make a bold decision that you simply aren't going to please everyone. [00:41:12] Speaker B: Right. [00:41:12] Speaker A: You know, you're not. And what is this? Not an exercise in trying to keep everyone fucking happy in 2025 whilst still generating new income streams? [00:41:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, that's. That's the Disney issue all around, isn't it, at this point? But just turning out, churning out tons and tons of content that they're trying not to offend anyone at all. [00:41:35] Speaker A: Did I talk about the shit? Did I talk about Mufasa the other week? Did I mention that? Did I talk about it? [00:41:40] Speaker B: I think you might have. [00:41:43] Speaker A: Unreal. Un. F. Real. And I, I couldn't. I'm an adult. I couldn't really give a fuck at the end of the day, but just absolutely no reason to exist. No reason to exist. Nothing to say. No dramatic kind of stakes. No. No value to this fucking enterprise. It is just utterly fucking without merit. No value. [00:42:09] Speaker B: Even stuff like that's not in that, like, new live action nonsense like the Moana 2. Totally unnecessary. I watched like 45 minutes of it and I was like, this is. This is not a movie. This is just. Hey, remember you like these characters. [00:42:23] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. [00:42:24] Speaker B: You don't even have Lin Manuel Miranda, like, so it's not even like, hey, remember you like this? [00:42:29] Speaker A: Do you know you hit the nail on the head. This is not a fucking movie. This is not a film. This is not an artistic endeavor. It is simply nothing. It has no reason to exist. [00:42:40] Speaker B: Yeah. Not into it. I don't want anything to do with it. Not feeling upset about having canceled Disney plus when they upped the prices on everything. [00:42:48] Speaker A: Absolutely not. I'm not playing their game. I fucking. I no hightailed it the out of there as soon as they tried to gouge me. Get. [00:42:55] Speaker B: Yes. Someone the other day on. On Blue sky was like, oh, I finally bit the bullet and got Disney plus. I was like, now. [00:43:01] Speaker A: Wow. [00:43:01] Speaker B: When it costs like a paycheck. This is when you got Disney plus. Get Plex. Go steal some shit. [00:43:09] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:12] Speaker B: Well, what did we watch this week, Mark Lewis? [00:43:15] Speaker A: I think we had some fucking good old movie fun this week. [00:43:19] Speaker B: We did. We had a. We had a good time. [00:43:21] Speaker A: Hey, congratulations to you. [00:43:24] Speaker B: Hey, big day for me. Big week. [00:43:27] Speaker A: Ladies and gentlemen, friends, Pope John Francis, MILF lovers the world over, rejoice. Corey picked a John Francis. Is that his name? No, Pope Francis. [00:43:43] Speaker B: You made a mega pope. You mixed the last one with this. [00:43:46] Speaker A: I did the uber pope. Das uber pope. [00:43:50] Speaker B: I think that was the Nazi Pope in between is the uber pope, but that's right. Yeah. No, I had. I gave us a banger, didn't I? [00:43:57] Speaker A: You did the absolutely wonderful, wonderfully fun. Jonathan Mostow Directed breakdown from 1997. [00:44:07] Speaker B: Waa. [00:44:08] Speaker A: Fucking great. [00:44:10] Speaker B: Do you like if you recall last week Friends. If you recall last week, Friends, the challenge this time because Mark was ragging on my picks was that he had to accept whatever the first movie I picked was and could not veto it based on mood. [00:44:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:24] Speaker B: And so Breakdown was what I picked. Now go on. [00:44:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Look, all I'm saying is do you like the thrillers? You know, do you like the action movies? Do you like the 90s, right? When people traveled to a place to shoot outdoor scenes outdoors? [00:44:43] Speaker B: Right. When they didn't just put you in front of a green screen to do shit. [00:44:48] Speaker A: God, I sound like an old cunt this week, don't I? [00:44:52] Speaker B: I think it's okay to miss when they did real stuff like that. Doesn't seem old cadre to me. [00:45:01] Speaker A: Well, I'll, I'll kind of. I'll expand on this. Right? This isn't just me being reactionary, but when I talk about an action movie, what I'm saying here is a film that. Right. It's a nearly 20 year old movie. So spoilers. I'm. I'm disregarding all that. This. If you think about, think about this. [00:45:21] Speaker B: Movie that we're talking about. [00:45:23] Speaker A: Yeah, Breakdown. [00:45:24] Speaker B: It is nearly 30 years old. [00:45:26] Speaker A: Well, there we go. Yes, I misspoke, I apologize. But take a. Take a. Pick a recent action film for me. Anyone. I'm certain my thesis holds up. [00:45:39] Speaker B: Just pick any action movies. [00:45:41] Speaker A: I want an action movie for me. Just off the top, alright? Just off the top of my head. The Electric State or something of it. [00:45:49] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, there you go. Sure. Movies. It's like I cannot think of a recent action movie. [00:45:54] Speaker A: Yeah, good point. But. But I'm talking about movies which are just so hyper and without any sense of build. And every scene is colossal and fucking, you know, just high octane spectacle and bang and fucking. This movie breakdown, right? Two hour film and the big stunt, the culmination of this tension is a truck driving through a trailer, right? Like that is. That's where it's building to, but the build makes it feel fucking. [00:46:30] Speaker B: Oh my fucking God, totally. [00:46:33] Speaker A: He drove the truck through the fucking trailer. And you can't believe that this act of destruction, this beautifully shot and choreographed and timed. It feels like some Buster Keaton shit with a house falling on it. [00:46:45] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [00:46:46] Speaker A: It feels choreographed and beautifully created and produced and worked out. It feels beautiful because the build, the tension. You got Jeff Bridges playing against type, as I remarked to you at the time. Isn't it interesting seeing Jeff Bridges? Jeff Bridges, Sorry, not Jeff. [00:47:06] Speaker B: Kurt Russell. [00:47:07] Speaker A: Fucking. What the fuck is wrong with me? Where do you want to start? Kurt Russell. And he's not fucking Snake Plissken. [00:47:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:47:16] Speaker A: You know what I mean. [00:47:17] Speaker B: No, he's not Jack Burton. Absolutely not. [00:47:20] Speaker A: He's Every man. He's an every dude. Yeah. You know, white collar, fucking kind of new money, driving a smart car. Driving a posh car out of his depth on a road trip through the dusty, you know, American countryside. I was gonna go that back. [00:47:44] Speaker B: I don't know if you'd call it. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I. It's just like general like American highway, like Middle America highway kind of situation. Because I think they're. They're supposed to be in like Oklahoma or something like that. I want to say maybe, maybe it's Kansas, I want to say just barren. Lots of it. Does look like the outback. But I thought it was really funny because it was like, you know, they're from Massachusetts in this. And then they go into like a local bar where everyone's like, oh, who are these newbies? Or whatever. But like the bartender is the one like short firefighter from Rescue Me who has like the thunder thickest New York accent. You've ever heard in your life. Like, yes, this is definitely the guy at the local bar in Kansas that they run into. But it works, you know? [00:48:39] Speaker A: Yeah. I mean plot wise think the vanishing, you know what I mean? The car breaks down. The wife a ride from a trucker and she's never. And she just vanishes off the face of the earth. Conspiracy of silence. Rednecks who have taken a dislike to Kurt Russell. And he fucking digs in. Not fucking, not me. He goes to the cops, he does detective work. He drives around the place and he fucking finds her. So good. So good. Like stunts with a sense of jeopardy, you know, Climbing on moving cars, hanging on to the undercarriage of a. Of an 18 wheeler. You know, again, I, I use that, that it reminds me of Buster KEATON now in 2025. Is it basically the. That famous sequence where he's riding on the train, the wood off the train tracks. You kind of feel the one wrong move and this guy is crippled. And that's even though I'm sure health and safety regulations were as present in movies then as they are now. Because it's so tangible and because it's actually filmed on a car in a fucking. You know, in a. In a ravine, in a lake, in a river, in a. You know, in a squall. It just feels so physical and sweaty and real. [00:50:03] Speaker B: Right. [00:50:04] Speaker A: And because it's so tight and because it's so beautifully tense. Even. Even a stunt that today you would get 15 times before the first half hour of a movie was up. It just feels like this amazing blow off. What a great. Really, really fun. [00:50:22] Speaker B: Yes. Breakdown. Highly recommend. Was a grand old time. [00:50:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:50:28] Speaker B: Yeah. You want an old fashioned 90s action thriller. [00:50:31] Speaker A: Yeah. By Jonathan Mostow. And I thought I knew the name. [00:50:36] Speaker B: Yes. [00:50:36] Speaker A: And I thought I knew the name and I did. You did Terminator 3, Rise of the Machines. There you go. [00:50:45] Speaker B: Right? Yes. Which you said. And I was like, okay, well not my fave. But weirdly then I was like, what else did he do? Would I know him from anything? He only directed one of my favorite movies of all time, which I then watched immediately after we finished this U571 submarine. Ever seen U571 submarine movie? [00:51:06] Speaker A: Yeah, haven't seen it. Know of it. [00:51:08] Speaker B: Yes, this is. Oh man. This was a big one for 15 year old Corey. Came out in the year 2000 and it starred so many sort of big people who would appeal to like a teenager at the time. So you had like Will Estes, Tom Geary from the Sandlot. You Had John Bon Jovi is in it. Matthew McConaughey is the lead. Bill Paxton is captain in this. You got just an incredible. Eric Palladino. Just a huge cast. Everyone you look at and you're like, oh, I know, I know him. That kind of cast. And so it is about a crew of American naval officers. Actually, I think, yeah, they're naval officers. I believe they are going to carry out this secret mission on a boat that is sort of dressed up to look like a German U boat. Yeah. But they end up sort of as they're carrying out this mission, their U boat looking boat gets torpedoed. [00:52:16] Speaker A: Help me out. [00:52:16] Speaker B: And they end up. [00:52:17] Speaker A: I've never quite understood what is meant by a U boat. [00:52:22] Speaker B: It's a German submarine. [00:52:24] Speaker A: That's all that means. Is it? [00:52:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:52:26] Speaker A: Okay. I. Yeah. So I think I've always been, you know, like, in Star wars, you've got an X wing, which is so cold because. [00:52:36] Speaker B: Sure. [00:52:37] Speaker A: You know, I've always wondered if. If. [00:52:40] Speaker B: All right, so it looked like you. [00:52:42] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, yeah. [00:52:44] Speaker B: If you wanna pin me down, it looks like a regular submarine. I'm sure there are other classes of German submarines, but if you're talking about U boat, you're talking about a German sub. World War II era German sub. [00:52:55] Speaker A: So why is it called a U boat then? Why you. [00:52:58] Speaker B: It's probably a German word I have heard. [00:52:59] Speaker A: Unterwasse. [00:53:01] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds right. [00:53:04] Speaker A: Wouldn't it be amazing if it wasn't? [00:53:07] Speaker B: Their ship is torpedoed, so they end up stuck on the actual German U boat that they went to infiltrate and retrieve this Enigma machine from, which is horrendously broken. And they spend this entire movie trying to fix the boat while also being like attacked from a ship above. And, well, they've also got like this sort of infiltrator on board as well. And it is like super high tension the whole time. And it's a submarine movie, which makes it scary as in and of itself, I mean. And what a cast you've got going on here. [00:53:41] Speaker A: Insanely good cast. [00:53:42] Speaker B: Yeah, it's. It is just like. It is one of my favorites. And watching it after watching Breakdown was just a delight. I remembered how much I love it. It's one of those movies I love. I know every single word from. You know, as I'm sitting there watching it trying not to quote because Kia was sitting with me. I never want to quote along with some. Something when there's someone watching it with me, but. Oh, I was. Everything was on my lips. [00:54:08] Speaker A: What I will. [00:54:09] Speaker B: You've never seen you571. [00:54:10] Speaker A: I'll also just super quickly say that break down some amazing road work, some amazing road stunts, amazing car chases. Like Kurt Russell's car being kind of sandwiched between two other cars that are trying to crush it and whatever. And that that comes to bear in his Terminator 3 as well. There's an Amaz car chase in Terminator 3 with a truck. [00:54:35] Speaker B: I do remember that. [00:54:35] Speaker A: And the crane. And Arnold is hanging off the crane, smashing through buildings and stuff. Really fucking cool. [00:54:42] Speaker B: Yeah. And U571 does, you know, have some CG stuff in it or whatever, but largely has that very real feel to it. You know, real fire, real water, all that kind of stuff that I really enjoy. [00:54:56] Speaker A: So, you know, I'm sure you'll be delighted to hear that the term U boat comes from the German, a shortened form of untersee boat. [00:55:06] Speaker B: You were. You had unter. Right? That is what you said. [00:55:09] Speaker A: I did means underwater boat. [00:55:12] Speaker B: Well, well, wait, didn't you say like Unterwasser or something like that? Is that not water? [00:55:17] Speaker A: No, sea. Seaboat. S W E B O B W T Z. [00:55:21] Speaker B: Right, but what you said. Yeah, yeah. What you said before though was like underwater, wasn't it? [00:55:27] Speaker A: But I was almost right. I did pretty good. [00:55:29] Speaker B: You were almost right. You were. You were. You were there. [00:55:33] Speaker A: Yes. [00:55:33] Speaker B: Good job. [00:55:34] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:55:36] Speaker B: I also watched another. Revisited another thing from when I was young this week that was less successful than watching U571. I watched the movie Ghost Story. Have you ever seen ghost story 1990? I'm possibly heading the old old Fred Astaire, old Douglas Fairbanks Jr. A couple other old guys from the classic movies. [00:56:04] Speaker A: I'm looking at it and no, have. [00:56:05] Speaker B: I. Heck, it is. This movie was on TV a lot when I was a kid and I remember watching it quite often and I think I liked it. Watching it as an adult. I have no idea why I like this movie. For one, it had to have been edited heavily when it was on tv because this has so much nudity in it. Including the like second scene, the lead is shown falling fully naked. Man. Man falling fully naked, full frontal nudity. Out of a window with his peen just waggling back and forth. [00:56:43] Speaker A: In 1981. [00:56:45] Speaker B: Is it 1981? Yeah, I guess it is that old, isn't it? Yeah, it's bananas for this movie at the time that it came out. Was it Fred Astaire? Yep. It's not Fred Astaire. No Fred Astaire nudity. But it is bananas to me. That Fred Astaire is in a movie in which the second scene, you're just watching a dude's peen as he falls out a window. And, like, there's multiple falling deaths in this movie that are pretty graphic. Like, they show them hitting the ground and everything, which, yeah, it was like, 1981. That's. That's bananas. [00:57:18] Speaker A: Why didn't it hold up? What was it you might have liked about initially? [00:57:22] Speaker B: And it's so boring. Nothing happens in this movie for, like, the vast majority of its runtime. And I think it's over two hours. Or it might be two hours. But at, like, an hour in, I was like, oh, surely this is almost over. And it was just getting started. [00:57:40] Speaker A: No, no, no, not for me. [00:57:42] Speaker B: And then this is a problem. That will be the other movie that I watched this week, too. But it felt like your sympathies were lying in the wrong place in this movie because it's about, like, these old men. Like, it starts with this guy getting killed who's played by the lead actor, but it's his twin brother who dies the beginning of this. And it's like this vengeful ghost that later on we find out as it's killing off these old men and whatnot, that they had killed this woman when they were in college. You know, they'd kind of gotten into an argument or whatever. She knocked over, accidentally died. They try to cover it up, put her in a car and try to push it in the water. But as it's going under, she wakes up and she's, like, pounding, and they all watch her drown in the car. So, like, they are the villains here. Right. But, like, we're ultimately kind of supposed to root for them getting away at the end. So it's like she's kind of painted as, like, this, like, horrendous spirit or whatever and stuff like that. But, like, I mean, she was. She was murdered by a group of men. [00:58:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:51] Speaker B: You know, let her kill him. [00:58:53] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:58:56] Speaker B: So it's like this sort of happy ending where she's finally defeated. You're like, I don't know. That doesn't. [00:59:02] Speaker A: So how come you enjoyed it so much when you saw it as a kid then? [00:59:05] Speaker B: Probably because I was, like, five. [00:59:07] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:59:09] Speaker B: I think I'm gonna say lack of options had a lot to do with that. [00:59:14] Speaker A: Just thinking about you. 571 again, right? Is it Jaws that is your origin story of why you love wet films so much? [00:59:24] Speaker B: No, I don't think so. I think. I think I've always Kind of been into them. But what was it? I actually. The other day, was there, like, a. [00:59:33] Speaker A: First one that you can remember going, fucking hell, I love wet movies. [00:59:38] Speaker B: This came up just the other day. And I'm trying to remember what it was. I mean, I did, like, I loved Jaws as a kid and everything, especially when I was a kid. I really loved Jaws too. [00:59:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:59:49] Speaker B: You know, it's like, no accounting for taste when you're a child. But that one, I think, was on TV all the time, and I really liked it. But I don't think it sparked, like. It sparked an obsession with Jaws, but not with, like, maritime things. I think U571 is probably, like, really where it, like, set off. But Dos Boot was probably, like, the. The original thing. My uncle made me watch Dos Boot with him, and I was, like, fascinated because I like things that scare me, obviously. And so submarines are terrifying. And this sort of, like, idea of the domain of, like, the ocean. And as we've talked about many times, like, all the ways in which the ocean is trying to boot us out of it and we're not supposed to be there, I think, like, really heavily caused me to sort of fixate on that. So I think, like, DOS boot and U571 were probably the, like, things that, like, hooked me initially and made me, like, an enthusiast. [01:00:45] Speaker A: Fascinating. [01:00:46] Speaker B: It was always kind of there. [01:00:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:00:49] Speaker B: Which brings us the seeds were there. [01:00:50] Speaker A: You know, speaking of not being supposed to be in the ocean and the ocean wanted to kick us out and. [01:00:57] Speaker B: The ocean wanted to kill us. [01:01:00] Speaker A: Now, were you aware of Last Breath before we did the saturation divers topic? Because that's interesting. [01:01:08] Speaker B: Let me tell you. I had never heard of saturation diving. I researched it for that thing, and then someone, like, multiple people on Blue sky were like, hey, did you know there's a movie about this out right now? Like, no, absolutely did not know that. So completely unfamiliar with this before that. And then I talked last week. No, I didn't. I watched the documentary earlier in the week, and then you and I watched. [01:01:36] Speaker A: The movie last night. [01:01:38] Speaker B: Last night? Yes, yes. Of Last Breath. And let me just, like, quickly, before we talk about the movie, the documentary, I will say, I mean, it's. It's drawn out. And if you watch the movie, you can see that, like, there's not a whole lot to this story. It's kind of guy nearly dies being deprived of oxygen for a long period of time, and a rescue is put together to save him from dying. That's basically the whole thing. It's kind of technical how he's rescued. So it's not like, like the most riveting thing in the world, you know, it's more this, like the situation itself is what creates the tension and the interest. Not really how they do it, you know, but the documentary there is sort of the guy who goes down and retrieves this diver. So it's about a diver, like I said, who gets disconnected from the boat and is left without oxygen for 40 minutes or something like that. And he is saved by another one of the divers named David, who in the documentary you're like, this man is a sociopath. Like he. They mention in the movie that, like people call him the Vulcan or whatever, which he talks about in the movie. [01:02:58] Speaker A: He's just like a little bit curmudgeonly, isn't he? [01:03:00] Speaker B: Right. He just comes off like a little. [01:03:02] Speaker A: Standoffish after the first 20 minutes. He's just a guy. [01:03:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Then he's just a guy. It's like they kind of want to put a nod to it. But I think if you like, put him like he is in this documentary, in the movie, people would be wondering if he was going to kill Chris. Like, he is so emotionless. And there's a point in this documentary where like the whole time you're kind of like, buddy, like you're a little detached or whatever. And then he says, like, I wasn't sad at all when we thought Chris was gonna die down there. It's a tough job. It happens. He says, shit happens. That's. And you're like, sir, what? [01:03:41] Speaker A: See, I mean, even if the. Of course I haven't seen the documentary, but even if the documentary was a drawn out affair, I didn't think the movie was at all. I thought the movie was. [01:03:50] Speaker B: No, like they figured out how to write. I think the doc is longer than the movie is and obviously it isn't like acted right. Like, you know, a lot of it is just kind of like long music montage Y type things and stuff like that. So it feels more drawn out. Whereas the movie. Yeah. By the time was over, I was like, oh, wow, already. [01:04:11] Speaker A: I was exactly the same. I. Yeah, I. Again, I didn't know anything about the story. I didn't know what I was in for. I just knew that it was gonna be a kind of a tense, uncomfortable kind of diving movie. I didn't know it was based on a real life event. I didn't know that it was gonna be based on just that one real life event. Yeah. I didn't hate it one bit. Does that mean I completely believe the sequence of events that it tells of? Maybe not. How. Right. I'm not a doctor. We've established this. [01:04:53] Speaker B: No, you're not yet. [01:04:54] Speaker A: We've established this. But I know that you can't survive 40 minutes without oxygen. You just can't. [01:05:03] Speaker B: Absolutely can. This is, in fact, this. This is a horrible story, but a kid I went to school with when I was young actually, so was doing a, like a first aid kind of demonstration at summer camp, like, basically where they have like a kid volunteer to, like, pretend to be drowning or whatever, and then someone's supposed to rescue him, but he got stuck under the water and was under there for longer than that. I can't remember the exact amount of time that he was under there, but was underwater for a very long time. And they did manage to pull him out eventually, and he survived. But because of the, you know, lack of oxygen to the brain, for how long he'd been under there, he ended up being permanently disabled. [01:05:56] Speaker A: Brain damage. This happened in front of a fucking bunch of school. [01:06:02] Speaker B: Class of kids. Yeah, bunch of. We were in, like, I want to say, sixth grade around then. When you were there. I wasn't there. No, no, no, no, no. But he was a kid I went to school with. Yeah, he was in my grade, Adam Jazzalo. And yeah, we were. He was either. We were 13 or 14 when this happened. So, yeah, he was like sixth or seventh grade. But, yeah, he was permanently brain damaged. But he lived until 20, 21. I did look that up. He died four years ago at 35. But so living for sure, you can do after being deprived of oxygen for that long. The crazy thing is that he was okay. [01:06:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And was back under the fucking water after a few weeks. [01:06:51] Speaker B: Three weeks. Yeah, three weeks. He was back down there to finish the job. But like I said, there's a whole documentary. They have all the footage of this having happened, you know, because they had. He had been filming things leading up to this. There was all kinds of cameras on there because that's how they keep track of what you're doing when you're underwater. And it's terrifying. One thing I will say for the movie is it does a really good job of recreating shit from what actually happened, including him, like, lying there on his side with his hands twitching and. [01:07:24] Speaker A: Very, very, very chilling image that. [01:07:26] Speaker B: Yeah, extremely. And that's exactly what it looked like in the real footage of this having happened to this poor guy. But it's a matter of. I mean, one thing That I like about this is like, you know, it does bring that skepticism to mind of like, it's not really. How did he just walk it off? [01:07:46] Speaker A: Well, yeah, and I. [01:07:47] Speaker B: But. [01:07:47] Speaker A: But I recall when watching this movie last night, I wished that it had catered to people like me who had no clue about the real events that it was based on. Because as soon as the umbilical got cut off and is. And his a expired and they start that clock on the screen, you know, one minute without oxygen, I knew immediately then that he was going to survive. [01:08:09] Speaker B: Right. [01:08:10] Speaker A: You know what I mean? You may as well just tell us this ends fine. He's fine. Yeah, so I. [01:08:16] Speaker B: Which I think it's kind of like advertised as a tale of survival or whatever. So you're supposed to kind of know what you get into. But they do give you that, like, point when they first pull them out where you're like, did he make it? Oh, no. Did he die? But, like, I think it's kind of advertised away, otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it like this and spoiling it for everyone. Yes, good point, good point. But being a movie about something like diving or whatever, like, you can see how in another context this would have been made as like a Christian film where this was a miracle. [01:08:47] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. [01:08:48] Speaker B: You know, like. And nobody knows. It must have been angels. He heard angels singing while he was down there or whatever. And instead it's just kind of like they're not sure. That's what the. That's what the answer is. And is that really the nobody knows. [01:09:00] Speaker A: Explanation there is for how this guy managed 40 minutes without air and lived and is fine? Nobody. [01:09:06] Speaker B: Nobody knows. [01:09:07] Speaker A: That's all you got for me, is it? Because that can. Fuck off. I hate. [01:09:10] Speaker B: Well, you're asking them to make shit up. That's what a Christian would do is come up with something like, you know, we don't know, but it was probably angels. Do they have no idea? What, are they just supposed to make something up for a satisfying ending? [01:09:22] Speaker A: Well, no, but let's speculate. I mean, didn't. Did you say. [01:09:25] Speaker B: Oh, I'm sure they've speculated plenty a. [01:09:27] Speaker A: Few weeks back about the part of the kind of habituation and the acclimation to the pressure. Don't they, like, saturate you with oxygen before you go down? They fucking absolutely soak your cells with oxygen before you go in the suit and go in the water. So I think maybe it was that. I'm gonna say it was that. [01:09:47] Speaker B: I would. I would imagine it probably has Something to do with it. I think the thing for them is that there's no way for them to test that, you know, you can't be like, hey, somebody get in there. Saturated with shit. We're just gonna put you underwater. I got send you to the body farm. [01:10:01] Speaker A: Don't tell me there's not a way. There's just no way that anyone's gonna do right. [01:10:06] Speaker B: Think ethically you're gonna come again, Come up against some walls trying to prove that. So I think. I'm sure they have their theories and things like that, but they just can't say for sure. [01:10:18] Speaker A: Could they use a monkey? [01:10:19] Speaker B: What it would have been. No, you can't drown monkeys, Mark Lewis. Just to find out how this one guy survived, we're gonna need to drown a few monkeys, find out why this guy didn't die. [01:10:36] Speaker A: Super soldiers. [01:10:40] Speaker B: No, Mark. No. [01:10:41] Speaker A: No. Obviously. [01:10:42] Speaker B: Obviously, the last breath was a good time. [01:10:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it was actually. It was a solid three stars. It was tense. It was, you know, for someone like me, even though they blow visually, they blow. The fact that the guy's gonna live, it's still great. I. Despite the fact. Beautifully shot, beautifully shot. Scotland looks beautiful. Crystal clear. Blue skies, sunshine, rippling kind of reflections on water on the ocean. Stunningly short film. Beautiful, beautifully shot film. Woody Harrelson's a piece of shit, isn't he? [01:11:15] Speaker B: I think he's. I mean, I feel like he's like kind of a piece of shit in earnest. Like, I mean, he's like anti vax and stuff like that. Not like a RA racist or an abuser or anything. I think he's just like a crackpot. [01:11:26] Speaker A: Okay. From what I understand, in the hierarchy of pieces of shit. Crackpot. [01:11:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:31] Speaker A: It's like a crank is like maybe two or three down, right? Not enough for me to not watch. And I stole this anyway, so I'm not, you know, my conscience is clear on this one. [01:11:43] Speaker B: Yeah, I feel okay. [01:11:44] Speaker A: Plus, I've met him, so that, you know. That's another reason. [01:11:47] Speaker B: You met Woody Harrelson? [01:11:48] Speaker A: Yes, I did meet Woody Harrelson. [01:11:50] Speaker B: Where'd you meet Woody Harrelson? I don't remember this one. [01:11:52] Speaker A: Come on, I've told this fucking tale before. Surely. [01:11:56] Speaker B: Have you? Maybe. Maybe I just forgot. Remind me. [01:12:00] Speaker A: Okay, where are we time wise here? I think we are in the very early zeros. Maybe 2002, 2001 or thereabouts. I'll look it up. Kyle McLaughlin and Woody Harrelson were in a play in London's West End. And liking them both, I Went to see it. [01:12:25] Speaker B: Sure. [01:12:25] Speaker A: And doorstep them at the stage door afterwards, got a lovely autograph and a little Twin Peaks doodle from Kyle MacLachlan. [01:12:35] Speaker B: Oh, that's delightful. [01:12:36] Speaker A: Yes. And got shunned. Totally shunned by Woody Harrelson. [01:12:43] Speaker B: Oh, I did. [01:12:47] Speaker A: I would have shunned me too, because I was. I think I was probably insufferable. [01:12:54] Speaker B: Did he just, like, ignore you, like. [01:12:56] Speaker A: No, no, he just muttered something under his breath and. And. [01:13:00] Speaker B: Wow. [01:13:01] Speaker A: Yeah, just. Just entirely disregarded me. But that's fine. You know what I mean? It was Agent Cooper I was there to see. [01:13:09] Speaker B: Yeah, that's fair. You got what you came for. Sure. [01:13:11] Speaker A: Did somebody still got the autograph somewhere in a box. [01:13:14] Speaker B: Love that. The other thing that I watched was also a little bit of a disappointment to me. I was kind of surprised. But I think that this may be a movie that just hasn't aged well in light of current times. And that was Green Room. I had never seen that and it has, like, quite a reputation. [01:13:38] Speaker A: Everyone loves Green Room. [01:13:40] Speaker B: Everyone loves Green Room. [01:13:42] Speaker A: I think I love Green Room. [01:13:43] Speaker B: So fair enough. Yeah. I was like, yeah, fuck, let's do this. Like, I've heard all this time about how great Green Room is. I'm ready for it. Like, I've never seen any of. Is it Saulnier? Jeremy Saulnier? Is that what his last name is? [01:13:58] Speaker A: That wins a bell? Yes. [01:13:59] Speaker B: Yeah. He did Blue Ruin. [01:14:01] Speaker A: Yes. [01:14:02] Speaker B: Whatever that thing is. I've never seen any of his movies and people like, oh, he just never misses. So I was like, great. I will watch Green Room, which, if you, dear listener, have never seen it, is about a punk band that ends up witnessing a stabbing in a Nazi bar and then ends up sort of stuck trying to get their way out of there while these Nazis want to kill them for what they have witnessed. Which sounds great on paper, but much like Ghost Story, this is a sympathies lying in the wrong place issue where you have this punk band who knew they were going to a Nazi bar. So it's not like, oh, no, they accidentally ended up in a Nazi bar. It's like they just wanted money and they were willing to take money from Nazis. So, like, they're not good guys, right? And then they go in and they befriend a couple of the Nazis who team up with them in this siege against the other Nazis. And throughout this movie, that they're Nazis is not really the problem like that. The issue is, like, there are good Nazis and there are bad Nazis, and the bad Nazis are like, the Violent ones who like want to kill people or whatever. But the good Nazis are peaceful. And that is a huge problem, I think. You know, like how I can't. I'm sympathizing with a band who is okay playing for Nazis and then a couple of their cute new Nazi friends. Like, I don't. [01:15:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:15:42] Speaker B: How do I sit here and root for that? You know. [01:15:47] Speaker A: Take it on those terms. Yes. Difficult to get behind. [01:15:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:15:51] Speaker A: I. I suspect, much like I often I seem to recall Green Room being mentioned in the same breath as. What's the soccer hooligan movie? Green Street. [01:16:06] Speaker B: Green Street Hooligans. [01:16:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People who like the one I. This. It might be a 10 years connection, but people like the one seem to like the other. And I think that. [01:16:16] Speaker B: Correct. Yes. [01:16:17] Speaker A: It suffers from the same issue of. Hang on, you're rooting for fucking awful. Awful, awful people. [01:16:21] Speaker B: Yeah. The worst people. Yeah, it was. I was surprised by that because I felt like people had framed it as a punks versus Nazis. [01:16:31] Speaker A: Yes. [01:16:31] Speaker B: Movie, which I would be into. But it is not that. It is punks and good Nazis versus bad Nazis. And it's like, that's not great. It's also not like it's kind of repetitive and not that interesting, but it does have really good effects. Like, I think, you know, I remember. [01:16:49] Speaker A: There being some excellent throat cuttings and stabbings. [01:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Throat cutting. There's like Anton Yelchin's hand gets like almost severed off and it really looks like he's about to lose a hand. Like it's. The effects are fantastic, but also like Patrick Stewart. [01:17:07] Speaker A: I did. I got a great. Oh, was he bad in it? [01:17:10] Speaker B: Oh, awful. Just like, what is he even doing there? There's no reason for Patrick Stewart to be in this movie. [01:17:17] Speaker A: I really enjoyed. I seem to really remember enjoying Captain Picard as a Nazi. [01:17:23] Speaker B: You got. You got to watch it again and just be like, what the fuck? And maybe this is like, if you're a Brit, maybe you can forgive it more than if you're an American. Like the. Is this guy doing here? This is. There is no way this man would be a part of anything that's going on here. And Imagin Poots is also terrible in it. Doing like a weird Momson. What was her. Taylor Momson. What was her name? Don't know. Can't remember what her. Her first name is. But that very like emo girl thing, like just woof. Does not match the movie at all. Just like overall, aside from the effects is like not good. But I Think I thought it was interesting because like pretty much everyone I know who's rated it has rated like a 5. But I think they all saw it when it came out, you know. [01:18:14] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:18:15] Speaker B: And so I was looking at like. I just clicked recent reviews on. On letterboxd to see what people say recently. And the recent reviews are a lot lower than like. Yeah, I think. I think, you know, people were not as in tune to being like, you can't have good Nazis. [01:18:35] Speaker A: No. [01:18:36] Speaker B: That's just not a plot line that you can have in something, you know, 13 years ago or whatever is they. [01:18:43] Speaker A: Are now you can't. They are diametrically opposed terms. There's an oxymoron, Right? [01:18:49] Speaker B: Mm. It's that you watch one more thing, Mark. [01:18:55] Speaker A: Did I. Let me just take a little look. Don't tell me, don't tell me, don't tell me. [01:19:00] Speaker B: It'd be quicker if I did. [01:19:02] Speaker A: Oh, the Dead Thing. [01:19:04] Speaker B: Yes. [01:19:06] Speaker A: I don't really know what to say. I mean, in much the same way as I discussed Heart Eyes. Great time for horror. Doesn't mean all horror films are great. Right. A lot of people enjoy the Dead Thing. A very modern, a very, you know, 2000 and 20s tale. Right. Of a emotionally troubled and empty lady in the States who kind of obsessive use of hookup apps and, you know, serial dating. Yearning for something to fill something in her life. Her work is unfulfilling and falls for. Are you gonna watch the Dead Thing? I don't know if you are. [01:19:57] Speaker B: Not really up my alley. [01:19:58] Speaker A: Falls in love with a ghost. [01:20:03] Speaker B: I do like that idea. [01:20:05] Speaker A: It's not. [01:20:06] Speaker B: I love a good ghost romance. [01:20:07] Speaker A: If I made it sound fun, I apologize because it isn't. It's moribund. It is very slow and I. I liked. I liked a lot about it. Right. It's beautiful to look at. Oh my God. It's got a kind of giallo sensibility to it. It is slow, a lovely synth soundtrack. Kind of grainy, over saturated kind of film look to it. [01:20:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:20:30] Speaker A: But if you're gonna. It's gotta build, you know, and. And the tone that it's. Settles on quite rapidly in the first kind of 20 minutes is the tone where it stays. It is. It is. Languid is a word I'm looking for. [01:20:45] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. [01:20:47] Speaker A: It does get where it's going. But, you know, I. I lost interest before I arrived. The journey was. [01:20:54] Speaker B: And if you lost interest, you know, I would have been gone long before that. You have a higher tolerance for languidity than I do. [01:20:59] Speaker A: I like Skinamarink. [01:21:01] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:21:03] Speaker A: A lot like. I love it. [01:21:05] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. [01:21:07] Speaker A: But, yeah, this is, this is, this is. This is slow to the point of, you know. Did you run out of ideas? I don't know. [01:21:14] Speaker B: I don't know. [01:21:16] Speaker A: Listen, committed performances. It's raunchy. You know what I mean? I. You know, just like always, just like with every film in the world, take 20 minutes off it, chuck in some gore. [01:21:29] Speaker B: Right. [01:21:29] Speaker A: But now wasn't the kind of film I wanted to see. I'm sure loads of people love it. It's quite critically acclaimed. A lot of people seem to enjoy it. Not for me. [01:21:37] Speaker B: I mean, it seems like it's kind of middle. [01:21:39] Speaker A: It is. It's mid. It's, it's. It's. You're going to scroll past it on shudder. You're going to see it on shudder. You're going to scroll right past it. [01:21:46] Speaker B: Yeah. So, Mark, you had an idea for what you wanted to talk about this week. And I'm actually kind of curious where this came from. [01:21:56] Speaker A: Where it came from. I don't know. Right. Where it came from. The only answer to that is my idle mind fills gaps with whatever it pulls from what I'm feeling or what I'm thinking about at the time. Right. And you'll know that one of my preoccupations, one of my long standing preoccupations is this idea of us versus the rest of the animal kingdom is us. The gymnastics that we go through as a species, socially, culturally, physically, to reconcile our temporary existence. Right, sure. To try and make sense of our own fleeting nature, our impermanence. [01:22:48] Speaker B: Mm. [01:22:49] Speaker A: And what answers did you have, Corrigan, when you were in it. When you were in. When you were an evangelical. Right. When you were in the squad. Right, right. I. I'd love to workshop some questions with you to see what your answers would have been. [01:23:13] Speaker B: I love that. Right. Because basically your question was kind of like, why do certain, like cultures and. And people at certain points in time come with. Come up with the gods and religions that they do? [01:23:29] Speaker A: Right. [01:23:29] Speaker B: Like, that's, that's. [01:23:31] Speaker A: That's where I'm going. Right. That's the end. That's the question at the end of this. But you ask our theme here. Exactly. But you asked how I got there. Right. And it's. I've. I've. I've marveled before at. Because I. All right, maybe it's a. It's a kind of a. Woo. Kind of airy perspective, but I do consider us, I do consider consciousness an evolved form of the universe. Looking at itself. I can't see it from any other angle. I love it. I love that explanation for our consciousness. [01:24:03] Speaker B: Right. [01:24:04] Speaker A: But if it's so prevalent in so many different cultures and societies to invent God. Firstly, as an ex evangelical, what would be your response to me from an atheist perspective asking you why your God is the right one? [01:24:26] Speaker B: Oh, that is a really good question. And it's, It's a complicated one because obviously, you know, there's the very circular answer of the Bible says so. Yes, right, of course, of course. [01:24:40] Speaker A: Which is, yeah, circular. You can't prove God by quoting God exactly. [01:24:46] Speaker B: Like, okay, but. And then from that point forward, you got kind of different roots from there. There's sort of the experiential element of it. Like, well, I feel him, you know, and thus I feel that he's saying this is the, the right path. Right. Like, you know, you get a feeling of spirituality, a feeling of, you know, when I pray, it is being answered or someone is listening, or, you know, I'm being told that the path that I'm on is the correct path. So you've got that kind of like, experiential way of looking at it, or there's like, kind of the element of like apologetics or historical sort of ways of looking at things where you go, well, okay, the Bible says this, and I can prove that that occurred, whether, you know, it is a metaphor for something that happened or there's evidence. So we've talked before about like, people thinking that the Ark is like, chilling up on Mount Ararat, Right? So you're trying to find physical ways of showing that, like, actually the things the Bible said happened really physically, we have proof it happened. So you've got a couple different ways that you can kind of approach the question of, like, how do I know mine is the right one? It's a mix of the experiential and like tangential or physical, tangible evidence. [01:26:08] Speaker A: Were there ever conversations that you had when you, you gave an answer along those lines, I feel it. I know my God to be the true God because I feel, feel it. And, but, but surely, you know, a Hindi would say the same thing. A Muslim would say the same thing. A Buddhist, a Rastafarian, they would all say the same thing. They feel God themselves. They feel their own gods. Right, so why is yours. Why is your feelings so different and more true than the others? [01:26:39] Speaker B: Right, yeah. And I think a lot of I would point to also one way you see this is like in, if you look at Facebook conversations about issues of morality yeah. You'll find a lot of people who will claim, like, you know, morality is based on Christianity. [01:26:58] Speaker A: Yeah, Right. [01:27:00] Speaker B: So, you know, the things that we believe about what's good and what's bad, and that's not just talking about things like abortion or things like that that we fight over, but, like, basically, do not kill. [01:27:08] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:27:09] Speaker B: You know, like, stuff like that. That's from the Bible. [01:27:11] Speaker A: So. [01:27:11] Speaker B: So, like, again, a lot of sort of defenses of this is that, like, well, if you look at the book and what this God says, this is what, you know, we sort of universally understand as morality, and it all comes from God. And so our God has given us a standard of living, which is the perfect standard. And so you can tell by how our lives reflect that morality that we have picked the right God. Right. Like, the thing that's gonna happen with anything that I try to explain to you about this is that there's obviously gonna be huge holes in it because there is no way for this to be a thing. Right. And that goes for any religion that thinks that their God is the one true God. Like, ultimately, at the end of it, like, it has to come down to something like you choosing that. Right. Because you're never going to have, like, an actual thing that no one can poke holes in, because that's. It's impossible. There's no way for us to know if there's a God, which one is like, the. The guy. [01:28:16] Speaker A: So is not then the. The only reasonable outcome to realize that none of them are. [01:28:26] Speaker B: I mean, from the outside. Sure. But there is. You know, the other thing you're always going to hear is about faith. Right. For people who are believers, faith is important. And the idea. So if we're grappling with, like you said, like a sort of unknown world around us, Right. And trying to figure out what to. What to do with that. And like, there's so much out there that we don't understand. We're trying to sort of grasp and put together, like, what. What the fuck is going on here? We understand that we don't know things. And so if we don't know things, then we put faith in things happening. And that'll be compared to, say, like, I think there's like a D.C. talk song that's quoting, like a famous, famous preacher or something like that. But it's like, can you catch the wind? See a breeze? Its nature is revealed in the Leave on a tree an image in my faith in the unseen. Right. So it's like. Right. But like, that's the Idea, Right. Like you can't, you have faith in the wind being a thing even though you can't touch it, you know, but you feel it, you see it go through the trees. Like that is what faith is supposed to be. Is this the invisible force that like. No, I can't touch it, but I can feel it and I can see the evidence of it around me. [01:30:04] Speaker A: That's such a, you know, in that context the word evidence is utterly misused. [01:30:13] Speaker B: Well sure, yes, but it is the word that a Christian would use. [01:30:19] Speaker A: Evidence. Evidence. Evidence, yeah, as evidence of nothing. [01:30:25] Speaker B: Right. And you're talking about, I mean it's using it wrong if you're using evidence in terms of like scientific inquiry. Right, yeah, but evidence is just, you know, the idea of like you can see something and reason out that if this, then that. Right, yeah. And so for someone who believes this stuff, then yeah, that is, that kind of analogy makes sense. Right. Like because seeing the wind in the trees is evidence of wind. Right. If I look out my window and I cannot feel it on me and I see the trees moving, I can either think like King Kong is out there shaking the tree or it's windy today. Like, you know, that's, that's evidence of the fact that the, it is windy out there. And so it's using that same kind of idea that, that scientific rationality or that idea of if this, then that applies also to, you know, if I believe this, you know, if I see this in my life, if I, you know, if I ask God for his favor and then I get a big bonus at work, then I've seen the evidence. [01:31:42] Speaker A: Evidence, of course, cause and effect. [01:31:43] Speaker B: Right. [01:31:44] Speaker A: So in character as a missionary, then as I know you, you, you, you were. [01:31:50] Speaker B: Yes, uh huh. [01:31:54] Speaker A: When I don't use the word challenged because I'm really not that kind of atheist. Right. I'm really not. I'm really fucking not. Go to it. As long as you're causing. [01:32:03] Speaker B: No, I've probably made you more militantly against Christian than you ever were. [01:32:06] Speaker A: You might have been actually. Yeah, you might have done. You might have done even in the face of that line of inquiry that every fucking culture pretty much that I could, that I, that I could point to has a version of God, yet you can't evidence that yours is correct. And to push that a little bit further, how would you account for every culture creating a version of God which reflects that culture's kind of questions and genesis and environment and circumstances? [01:32:47] Speaker B: I love that you're asking me this. And for the record, everyone this was not. We did not plan that Mark was going to ask me any of these questions. But it fits in perfectly with an experience I had earlier today when trying to like, think, think through this concept of like, where do gods come come from and how do they reflect cultures. And I was thinking about how when we talked about Captain Cook and then sort of what happened to the Hawaiians upon like white missionaries coming there and then colonizers and all that kind of stuff, that when those missionaries came, they used some of the Hawaiians like traditional beliefs and sort of melded them with Christian spirituality to sort of, you know, get the point across and be like, all right, like, we may not be able to like fully change what they believe here, but we can get them to understand like Jesus using their own sort of pre existing beliefs that they have about the world. Right? [01:33:44] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [01:33:45] Speaker B: And so then I was thinking about how, like you said, I've done various sort of missions things throughout my life, as many Christians do, and especially ones who go to like Christian University and things like that, in large part because it's basically a vacation that you can convince other people to pay for. But when I was in, in college, before you could go on any school sanctioned missions, you had to take a missions class. And there was a story that I may have even referenced on here when we talked about Captain Cook, I can't remember, but this story was about a Christian missionary named Dawn Richardson who wrote a book called Peace Child. And this book was about how Richardson and his family, which included his wife and a baby, moved to New guinea, to western New guinea, where according to Christian lore, according to his book, they encountered a cannibalistic tribe called the Saue. And the Saue valued treachery and murder. Like their culture was like real into that. Right? And as the story goes, when Richardson first told them the gospel, they were super bored by the whole thing until he told them about Judas, which made their ears perk. [01:35:08] Speaker A: Hello? [01:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Because they thought, tell me more. Judas was the hero. [01:35:13] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [01:35:15] Speaker B: Like, look at this guy and his betrayal of Jesus. As Barbara Lee Harper put it in a blog quote. They listened intently to the story of Judas close relationship with Christ and his betrayal. They whistled with admiration. In their culture, treachery and deception were virtues, the admirable stuff of legends. They valued not just cold murder, but the fattening with friendship of an unsuspecting victim, then delighted in telling about the look of astonishment on his face when he realized they were about to kill and eat him. [01:35:46] Speaker A: This is an actual tribunal. What Bastards. The bastard trail. [01:35:50] Speaker B: Well, give me a second here, okay? [01:35:52] Speaker A: We'll get there. [01:35:54] Speaker B: So Don here had to explain to these savages that actually betrayal was bad, but they didn't get it. When they got into some sort of skirmish with a neighboring village. Don tried to urge peace between them, but he soon came to realize that he was the problem. These villages normally didn't settle so close together, but they were all there to be near him. So he was like, I'm gonna leave. But the villagers begged him not to go and agreed to broker some sort of peace so that he would stay. The next day, each of the warring groups exchanged one of their own children to be adopted by the other villagers or villages as a gesture of peace. Dawn wrote that the Sami had found that they could prove the sincerity of their desire for peace with the gesture saying, quote, if a man would actually give his own son to his enemies, that man could be trusted. What does that sound like, Mark? [01:36:51] Speaker A: Well. [01:36:54] Speaker B: I mean, it's Jesus. [01:36:57] Speaker A: It's right there. [01:36:58] Speaker B: It's Jesus, Mark. [01:36:59] Speaker A: It's right there. [01:37:01] Speaker B: Greater love hath no man than he that laid down his life for his friends, you know, so he was able to take this Peace Child gesture and use it to teach them about Jesus, God's Peace Child. And thus their civilization was changed into a peaceful one in which they could coexist and didn't kill and eat each other anymore. Christians argue that if it hadn't been for Don Richardson, the Saudi probably would have just annihilated each other over time. And Richardson's son, some 50 years later, claims that that tribe still practices Christianity and has spread Christianity throughout New Guinea. So it's this. [01:37:42] Speaker A: Go on. Sorry. [01:37:44] Speaker B: I was reading about this earlier today, and as a 39 year old atheist, a lot of red flags started waving that I had not thought about before. This is a well established story among Christians. I texted the group chat and I was like, you guys, do you ever hear the story of Don Richardson and the Saui people who, you know, they thought Judas was a hero and like, all but like two of them were like, yeah, totally, I remember that story. Definitely learned that growing up. Really popular one. I was like, fascinating. Okay. Because I started looking into it. I don't think the Saui people ever existed. The Wikipedia page for the Saui people only references Peace Child and other Christian publications that are talking about Peace Child. There's no like, you know, anthropological study of the Saui or anything like that. There is no discussion of a cannibalistic group that believed in treachery. And murder. And if you know anything about, like, cannibalistic groups, it's not really what they're like. [01:38:54] Speaker A: Nah, they're kind of upfront, aren't they? A little bit more. [01:38:56] Speaker B: Yeah. There usually it has to do with, you know, like, there's often, like, a sense of honor to cannibalistic tribes, you know, a sort of way of bequeathing. [01:39:06] Speaker A: Qualities and passing all kinds of things. [01:39:10] Speaker B: Right. This is not something that they do, like, for laughs because they think it's funny, you know, like, there's a whole lot more to it than that. And I was like, hold on. There is no record of these people from anything I can tell except this story, which was fascinating to me. And then my friend Emily, who used to work for an organization that works with persecuted Christians throughout the world, was like, yes. So I started. She was like, this is actually super common. There is a book called Jesus Freaks that was like a huge thing when we were young. Like, millennials grew up on this. And it's stories of martyrs, people who were killed for Christianity. Right. And she said she had sort of what for work? Her boss had, like, put out this newsletter, and it had this story in it of a Christian who had been killed, a missionary who had been killed. And she started looking into it. She was like, I can't find any evidence of this. [01:40:11] Speaker A: Incredible. [01:40:11] Speaker B: We can't put this newsletter out. So then she started looking at the book Jesus Freaks and realized there were no sources for, like, any of the stories in here. They're essentially parables. [01:40:22] Speaker A: Yep. [01:40:23] Speaker B: That Christians are spreading, but as if they're true. Right. They're not using them as parables. They're using them as like. No, this is. This is like, a thing that happened with these people. There is for sure a cannibalistic tribe that's now fully Christians because he taught them about the Peace Child, which is, like, very convenient. They just happen to have a ritual that is exactly the same thing. [01:40:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:40:49] Speaker B: As Jesus being given up. [01:40:51] Speaker A: Yep. [01:40:51] Speaker B: Right. [01:40:52] Speaker A: Very interesting. [01:40:53] Speaker B: So this whole thing, like you asked me, this is so funny that I was, like, blown away by this earlier today to think about, you know, the stories. Christians are hyper aware of the fact that the gods we create are cultural. Like you're talking about. [01:41:09] Speaker A: Is that. Is that true? Is that something. Is that true? [01:41:13] Speaker B: Yes, absolutely. They're a reflection of society. They won't say that about their own God, though, is the thing. It's just everybody else's are cultural. So the only way to reach a people whose culture say, said Murder and treachery was good, was to find some analog within their culture that would help them to relate to the God of the Bible. And this is basically how Christians have approached converting people for pretty much ever A. Especially since like violent conquest has stopped being in fashion. If you go to tribes that have been Christianized, say in Africa or New Guinea, New guinea is a super popular place for Christians to go. They probably still retain some of their traditional beliefs and have blended them into the Christian faith. As long as they get the main theme being about Jesus, that can kind of keep their own cultural stuff, you know what I mean? [01:42:06] Speaker A: See, I'm very hung up on this word evidence, right? And what I am more and more becoming convinced is willful self deception. [01:42:20] Speaker B: Sure. [01:42:21] Speaker A: Right. This, this idea of, of the gods that a culture creates, reflecting the culture that creates them is, is. Is completely undeniable. [01:42:33] Speaker B: Right? [01:42:33] Speaker A: Just to pull an example, like take the Vikings, right? The Norse lads with their fucking. Their religion, you know, embodying things, you know, battle and bravery and sacrifice and Ragnarok and fucking Odin from a people who are, you know, warrior culture, boat dwellers, seafarers, raiders. It's fucking. It's so clear that that is a religion born of that people. Would it not be a stronger case for, for God if those gods appeared to the Egyptians? [01:43:15] Speaker B: Sure. [01:43:15] Speaker A: You know what I mean? If those gods appeared to the fucking, you know, the, the Japanese Shinto lads, right? [01:43:22] Speaker B: People who didn't believe. [01:43:23] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. If. If all cultures told similar stories of God, fine. I could maybe get on board. [01:43:34] Speaker B: The thing that I think is key too, when you think about stuff like that is power. Yeah, right. Because it often comes down to the structures of power in a particular society. So like, say for Vikings, you know, you want to have like a Valhalla or whatever, right? Is that Vikings? [01:43:54] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:43:55] Speaker B: Right. You want to have something like a Valhalla because you can convince people to go fight and die for your expansion, right? Like, you know, if you want your soldiers to go out and do shit, give them a God who is going to reward them in eternity so that being alive on earth doesn't matter as much, right? Like that it makes perfect sense for a culture where people need to be sacrificed for the sake of whatever they're trying to do, would then believe that they're going to be rewarded in the afterlife for having done that. And so you see that come up in a lot of. I mean, ultimately that's kind of the thing with Christianity too, right? Is like, if you follow all of these Sort of rules for Christianity then, you know, you may. Life here may be sucky, but you don't challenge kind of whatever those structures are you give to Caesar, what Caesar's, all that kind of stuff. And then when you die, you get to see the rewards of that. So it's a really good way to sort of keep. In societies that, like, require a degree of hierarchy and a degree of understanding that we will. A bunch of us are gonna suffer. Right. Like that. When I was researching Mother Teresa, that was one of the things that's such a huge problem with. With Mother Teresa is like, the mindset that some of us are destined to suffer means, like, you don't need to really do anything to change those material needs. So it's not a challenge to the status quo. Make people comfortable, donate to them, whatever, feed them, yada, yada. But, like, we don't need to change the structures because at the end of the day, their rewards in heaven. [01:45:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:45:45] Speaker B: Not here. [01:45:45] Speaker A: Yeah. And. And to workshop that conversation a bit further, where I. When you're in missionary mode, if I. If I were to put it to you that your. Your Christianity is down to an accident of birth, and had you been born in Egypt or, you know, Iraq, you would be a totally different faith following a totally different God. What. What. What might, what twists might you pull to just to counteract that? How. How can you disagree with that? [01:46:29] Speaker B: There's a couple things to that. For one, obviously, there are Christians all over the world. [01:46:34] Speaker A: Right, Right, right. [01:46:35] Speaker B: You know, we can be anywhere. Obviously, Christians didn't start in America. They didn't start in, you know, England. Didn't start things like that. Like. So, you know, it's a. It's a religion that's all over the place. Right. So you've got that. It's not necessarily located in a specific place. It's a thing that's all over the world. Obviously, that's because of people evangelizing over the years, but. And conquering as well, a lot of conquering to make people Christian. But so it's a thing that, you know, happens everywhere. There is sort of this idea that some will have that, like, kind of like, say, especially gods, like, you know, the Islamic God, the Jewish God, the Christian God, that these are actually all the same God there. [01:47:23] Speaker A: It is. [01:47:23] Speaker B: That's what I was expecting. [01:47:25] Speaker A: Yes. [01:47:26] Speaker B: Right. But they have been sort of interpreted. [01:47:28] Speaker A: Yes. [01:47:28] Speaker B: Differently. [01:47:29] Speaker A: Yes. [01:47:30] Speaker B: Right. So, you know, it's a matter of interpreting. [01:47:33] Speaker A: That's very much what I was. [01:47:34] Speaker B: God. [01:47:35] Speaker A: Yeah. Expecting to hear. [01:47:37] Speaker B: Right. So that's another sort of angle on that as well. There was one more thing I was going to. To say about that because how do you say that? It's the. Oh, man, I lost my train of thought on what the third part of this was. And I feel like it was the. [01:47:57] Speaker A: Part that I would tell you the only important. [01:47:58] Speaker B: But we'll come back to it. [01:48:00] Speaker A: I keep coming back to something that our good friend Sam said in. In a group chat over the past couple of days. And I don't know if this is his line or if it's from a song or whatever. Delulu is the Sululu is the Salulu delusion. Willful delusion in the face of the ineffable truths of humanity. [01:48:20] Speaker B: I think the thing is that's not necessarily true. [01:48:24] Speaker A: Okay. [01:48:24] Speaker B: Because I think if you are coming from a place where you were not indoctrinated into any of this, then yeah, there's a degree of you are sort of shunning the evidence of your eyes and things like that. To believe something that makes no sense, however. [01:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's powerful. [01:48:49] Speaker B: Most people who, you know, are. Whatever religion they are didn't necessarily like, choose it right. Or, you know, don't necessarily see the world the same way that you do. Aren't. Aren't super invested in science or, you know, various things like that. Not everyone has the same evidence. [01:49:11] Speaker A: Yeah, sure. [01:49:11] Speaker B: And when you don't look at things through that lens, then it is not delusion because you don't. You're not convincing yourself of something. It is what you truly believe. The other thing I was going to say, by the way, in terms of the idea of, you know, accident of birth and stuff like that, is this kind of idea that every culture, if they heard the gospel. [01:49:41] Speaker A: Yes, yes. [01:49:42] Speaker B: Would accept it. Right. But that if they haven't for some reason, if they're an uncontacted tribe, no missionaries have gotten to them or whatever, that God has the grace to sort of not necessarily hold them accountable or that he will reveal himself to them in some way. [01:50:00] Speaker A: Right. [01:50:00] Speaker B: Like we all have the ability to see and know God, even if it's just sort of that, like, sense that he's. [01:50:10] Speaker A: There's just two types of people. There's Christians and pending Christians. [01:50:15] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or people who are, you know, the third category being people who then know and choose actively to not follow God. But yeah, all of this, I, yeah, I would say delusion is not the right word because that implies you know better and are actively fooling yourself into thinking something different. Which I think Most people are not doing now for me, like I think, you know, and delusion, I wouldn't even say is there is the right word. So much more like trying to reconcile what I want with what is real, you know, wanting a sense that the universe is in control somehow. Things like that. Right. And that things aren't chaotic and, and all of that and sort of trying to reconcile that with what I do observe and know about the universe. And I think there's definitely a degree of cognitive dissonance to that. But yeah, maybe that's a better term that I didn't. Yeah, I don't. I still felt, I truly felt these things. You know, it just ultimately got to a point where I was like, I don't, you know, I don't think I can reconcile these two really divergent ways of looking at the world anymore. Yeah. But this kind of a thing that I thought was interesting was thinking about like in terms of all of this, like America is still deeply religious and you know, the Christian nationalism is obviously what rules our country at this moment. The people in power are largely Christian. But I was thinking about like, you know, what gods do we make now? Right. Like what is. If you were thinking about like what is reflected by our culture, I think it's fascinating to think about like the kind of individual, individualistic gods that we worship at this point. Right. And I mean kind of literally like so, you know, Christianity is on the wane for younger age groups and things like that. But like people are more interested in astrology. I see. That's like become like pretty normal for young people in the United States. Which is about you, right? [01:52:34] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [01:52:35] Speaker B: It's about what. It's about your personality and then judging who can be in your orbit based on their star signs and how that relates to your personality. It's like a very individualistic sort of thing. Right. That's not, not a community sort of oriented thing. There's no like structure of mutual aid in a astrology or anything like that. It is, yeah, very individualistic belief system. [01:53:00] Speaker A: Wellness. Well being. [01:53:01] Speaker B: I was about to say wellness. Self help cults. Yeah, things like that. [01:53:05] Speaker A: Like those self. It's in the title. [01:53:08] Speaker B: All about you. Right. Like as we kind of, you know, I think most people have noticed, especially post lockdown era, people seem to becoming more and more selfish and less community minded. And even in like your crunchy hippie sphere, which if we look like historically at hippies, if you look at like the 1960s and 70s, like they were known for collectivism, they were known for feeding each other and stuff like that. Now, what are hippies? They're anti vaxxers and shit like that, right? Like, they're people who say, my kid not being autistic is more important than your kid not dying of measles and things like that. That. So, you know, I hadn't really thought about this, but when I was trying to like, think about, like, what gods do we make or would we make in American culture that like, reflects us now, I think we see it all the time. It's very much like an individualism that manifests through the various belief systems that people have. [01:54:07] Speaker A: It's thrilling, isn't it, to see it live? [01:54:10] Speaker B: It's great. I really like it being a thing where nobody gives a fuck about anybody else. A very cool time. [01:54:17] Speaker A: I mean, conceptually thrilling. I mean, what we've just talked about in terms of cultures coming up with their own gods that reflect their place and time, it is. It is super insightful that you've just pointed out that it is a live process. It is happening still around us. [01:54:36] Speaker B: Right. If you, like, zoom out, we can kind of see where we are in history and that we participate in the same ways. Like someday we will be a part of a history textbook, you know, and what will they have said about this time? Well, if you zoom out, you can look and see exactly what that is that's happening right now. [01:54:55] Speaker A: Bold of you to assume we are shaped. There will be anyone left to write them. [01:54:58] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I was gonna say it and then I decided I'll just leave it. [01:55:04] Speaker A: Very nice, Very nice. Yeah, let's just leave it. [01:55:08] Speaker B: Let's leave it there. But it's an interesting, sorry, interesting sort of thing to think about, you know, that. And I think an important sort of part of the journey out of evangelicalism and any kind of oppressive religion is to go, yeah, why? Why is mine right? And ultimately, I think any answer you're gonna have to that is going to be a little bit circular. It has to kind of come down to you as an individual because there isn't any way to say that yours is more correct than others. [01:55:45] Speaker A: None. None at all. Which is. Which is kind of what I'm getting at. But it's very. It. Don't take this at face value. Take this comment in the spirit it's intended. You are an excellent resource for me. You are an excellent resource to talk this kind of stuff out. [01:56:05] Speaker B: Put me in a petri dish. [01:56:06] Speaker A: Well, yeah, maybe I will, but it's. It's very nice to be able to talk These, these little avenues that occur to me during my working week out with someone. [01:56:18] Speaker B: Yeah, it's interesting to think about. You know, like, in many ways, I feel very far removed from those thoughts and I try to, you know, put myself back in that mindset. The nice thing is being sort of far enough out of it that it's not like straight up triggering because for a while it was, you know, it's a traumatic sort of thing to break away from those belief systems and think about the awful things and the oppressive things that were a part of it. But being this far removed now, it's really fascinating to kind of, whenever you ask these questions, think about a person that I haven't been in a decade, you know, and. And these, you know, how did I conceptualize these things? I can tell you how, like, what those things are that people said. But I think honestly, you know, people also don't like, necessarily challenge you to your face on this shit. Like, unless you're on the Internet or something like that. Like, if I were on Reddit, I'm sure people would be like, hey, prove your God is real or whatever. But, like, in your day to day life, nobody is like, you know, well, yeah, answer for this. [01:57:26] Speaker A: Well, look, if you accost me in the street, I'll let you. I'll let you touch me and prey on me. [01:57:32] Speaker B: Right? [01:57:33] Speaker A: I'm not gonna get in your face again. Well, in Egypt, me, yeah. You know what I mean? [01:57:39] Speaker B: I had like, you know, the people that I worked for when I graduated from college and was a nanny, they loved when, like Jehovah's Witnesses would come to their house and things like that. They'd invite them in, have like, you know, a conversation. And that's. Now looking back, like, it's just different forms of, you know, the same religion, essentially, like trying to prove to the other one, yes, why, like, no, actually, mine is the right one. You know, like, it seems silly in hindsight, but those distinctions were very important. [01:58:12] Speaker A: Much to consider and much to consider. The great thing about this conversation is it never ends. There's. [01:58:18] Speaker B: There's no. [01:58:19] Speaker A: There's more. We'll pick this up in future episodes, I'm sure of which, of course, there will be many. As long as there's milfs, there'll be. [01:58:26] Speaker B: MILF cast, They'll be MILF cast. I never know, Mark. Never know where, where you're going. It's always a wild ride with you, my dear friend. [01:58:41] Speaker A: May the ride never end. Friends, I mean that sincerely for each one of us. If the Pope can walk it off. You can walk off with whatever you're going through this week because we're going through it, too. We love you. We thank you just by hitting play and listening and doing the right thing. We see you. We appreciate you. And the only thing I would ask, actually, if you do one thing for us, Corey, that might be what, exactly? [01:59:05] Speaker B: I think they gotta stay spooky.