Ep. 225: grifters & the sleep room

[00:00:04] Speaker A: So I think it's probably safe to say at this point for you, for me, for our listeners, I am very interested in historical medical atrocities. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Yeah, you are right, that. Yep. Second, an unsolved mystery is. [00:00:24] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Medical atrocities in days gone by. I know that we've covered. We've talked about kind of early prosthetics. [00:00:37] Speaker B: Yes. [00:00:38] Speaker A: On this cast. And you know, the, the havoc that they wreaked on young kind of disabled kids lives. I know we've talked about. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Virtus Hardiman. [00:00:55] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. [00:00:57] Speaker B: You were, you were doing that with your head. I thought it was like a hole in the head. Was. What you're. [00:01:00] Speaker A: What I was doing was. I was trying to remember the word lobotomy. [00:01:03] Speaker B: Oh, lobotomy, yes, check. Mm, that too. [00:01:07] Speaker A: It's. It's a. It's a. A real. You know, it grips me. It grips me. So. And let me tell you, I have been gripped. Oh, have I been gripped today. [00:01:19] Speaker B: These are never, never feel good stuff stories, these ones. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Oh, this is not. This is a feel bad story. So, friends, are you ready to feel bad? [00:01:28] Speaker B: Prepare yourselves, let's. [00:01:30] Speaker A: Are you ready to ask questions? Are you ready to wonder how the. And are you ready also to confront the truth that often throughout history. Many, many times, in many, many cases. [00:01:47] Speaker B: I know. [00:01:47] Speaker A: Progress. Yeah, progress comes from pain. Progress comes from people who do bad things. Don't. Doesn't it, doesn't it though? [00:02:01] Speaker B: You know, I'll always say the same thing, which is the person who did the bad thing might just barely beat someone else to it, but someone. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a great. Anyway, that's a great point. That's a great point. Look, this topic came to my attention whilst driving this week. A book has recently been released about this very subject. And the topic gripped me, just gripped me. And as I'm hoping it will you. Okay, so like I often say, come with me, if you will come with me. [00:02:33] Speaker B: And I'm always on board. Let's go. [00:02:35] Speaker A: Good. [00:02:36] Speaker B: On this journey. [00:02:37] Speaker A: Good. Because we are in London. We're in London in the very early 1900s. [00:02:46] Speaker B: What part of London's accent was that, out of curiosity? [00:02:49] Speaker A: That's the way they talk in London from the north to the south. The way they talk. [00:03:00] Speaker B: It's a very Bowie esque tone taken there. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, there'll be a call back to that very shortly. [00:03:06] Speaker B: Oh, good. [00:03:07] Speaker A: Later on in this episode, there's a reason why I think London. I went to that accident, but. [00:03:10] Speaker B: All right, all right. [00:03:11] Speaker A: Grass. [00:03:12] Speaker B: Do it. [00:03:14] Speaker A: Born. Born in 1907. Born in 1907 to a very Methodist upbringing, a very Methodist family, which maybe has bearing on this, I don't know. Was a guy who became an eminent practitioner in the realm of psychiatry. Okay, Doctor. A guy by the name of William Sargent, trained and educated through the classic means. Went to Cambridge, got himself a scholarship to St. Mary's Hospital in. In London, very prominent in Waterloo area. I believe it is St. Mary's Hospital. [00:03:59] Speaker B: Medical degree scholarship to a hospital. [00:04:02] Speaker A: Yes, a teaching scholarship, I imagine. [00:04:06] Speaker B: Okay, go on. Other people I'm sure will understand how that works. That's fine. [00:04:12] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Yeah. A scholarship to study this. [00:04:15] Speaker B: A scholarship study at a hospital? [00:04:18] Speaker A: Oh, for sure. It's part of. Part of the medical education is just. Is to study on the job. On the job in a hospital. [00:04:25] Speaker B: Sure. Like a residency. Right, but like they pay you, right? [00:04:32] Speaker A: Yeah, but I believe as a junior doctor. Yeah, for sure, for sure. You earn. [00:04:37] Speaker B: Okay, I'm confused by the scholarship part, but this is neither here nor there. [00:04:41] Speaker A: Listen, whatever questions you might have, this is not the time. [00:04:46] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. I'm confused. Too early. Let's just get into it. I will Google how you get a scholarship to a hospital after we finish. [00:04:55] Speaker A: Point is, this guy was prodigious. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Yes. He was good at what he was doing, apparently. [00:04:59] Speaker A: Yes. By the 1930s, he was the youngest ever kind of medical superintendent at that hospital at St. Mary's okay. Now, during his studies, during his training, he discovered his specialty was psychiatry. Right. And it was. It was during one of his residencies at a hospital, it was the Maudley Hospital, where he really built a kind of a working reputation for being super zealous in his application of physical treatment for psychiatric disorders. [00:05:52] Speaker B: Oh boy. [00:05:53] Speaker A: Right. This guy was fucking super into his pharmacology and having. If I hadn't seen photos of the guy, which I have, you might. He's got Herbert west vibes, man. [00:06:09] Speaker B: Oh, no, okay. [00:06:11] Speaker A: Big, big, big Herbert west vibes, sure. He was at the forefront of amphetamine treatments for depression, you know, insulin treatments for schizophrenia. And let me tell you, Corrigan, this guy was a motherfucker for his electroconvulsive therapy. My God, he fucking loved that shit. [00:06:34] Speaker B: So he liked to shoot people up full of stuff and that included shocked. [00:06:39] Speaker A: The shit out of them. [00:06:41] Speaker B: Nice. [00:06:41] Speaker A: So whack em full of uppers and downers and shock the hell out of them at the same time. He. He pioneered using barbiturates instead of sedatives to treat eating disorders. Things like anorexia. Give him fucking uppers to treat the anorexia. And he was, he was decorated. You know, he won awards, he won fellowships, he studied in the States, came back to the UK around the outbreak of the Second World War. Right, okay. Where he really got into dealing with what we now call ptsd. War neurosis is what it was referred to at the time. Sure, yeah. [00:07:29] Speaker B: Because I know for like a long time they thought that like, only soldiers could have ptsd. [00:07:34] Speaker A: Yes, of course. Shell shock. Of course. [00:07:36] Speaker B: Shell shock. Right, yeah, it's like almost pretty recent that it's like. Oh, no, actually you can get it from like a bunch of different shit. [00:07:42] Speaker A: Yes. But his, his trademarks came to be sedation. Sedation and a technique, a technique which I've heard about for the first time today, known as ether abreaction. [00:07:55] Speaker B: Okay. [00:07:57] Speaker A: Which is the technique of whacking somebody the fuck up with ether. And whilst under the influence, the patient is encouraged to relive and express traumatic memories and emotions with the aim of kind of helping them surface and process psychological trauma, all while under a fucking healthy dose of ethereum. [00:08:26] Speaker B: I mean, that's, I feel like, you know, obviously that's sort of just like talk therapy. Crank to 11, right? [00:08:32] Speaker A: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. [00:08:34] Speaker B: Like, what if you, like, came in here and talked about all your trauma stuff, but also you were like, yeah. [00:08:41] Speaker A: Does this rag smell like ether? Just tell me if that. Yeah, talk therapy again, more on in a little bit. Because this was an area that he could not have been less interested in. [00:08:53] Speaker B: Yeah. It doesn't sound like it would be as bad. Seems like he's got other things in mind for how you solve problems. [00:08:58] Speaker A: Very much so. Very much so. So as his reputation grows, as, you know, he, he picks up awards and by the 1940s, by, by late 40s, 48, he was the physician in charge of psychological medicine at St. Thomas's Hospital. Right. And he developed a huge clinical and teaching practice. Very influential, almost, you know, almost hell, you know, held in thrall by his pupils and by his colleagues. This was a guy, almost a cult like following developed around him. He was known as having a very flamboyant style, built like a brick shithouse. By all accounts, he was built like a rugby player. A big, huge, imposing man with a very captivating method of teaching and of practicing his craft. Right. [00:09:54] Speaker B: And it's not super surprising considering, you know, we've talked a lot of times on here about how like, medicine is actually very new. And like, if you think about this, like, you know, when you're looking at when he starts practicing in the 30s and 40s or whatever. Like you are fresh out of the phrenology era, which had like the same thing. Right. Like when phrenology was developed, the guy who invented it like basically developed an immediate cult following that they like built statues to him and like that, you know. So the idea that this guy coming up with these ideas and people just like jumping head first into it and being like, this is our new God. [00:10:34] Speaker A: Bold and daring and fresh. Let's throw money and acclaim at this guy. [00:10:41] Speaker B: People had a really different reaction to experts back then than they do now, that's for sure. [00:10:46] Speaker A: Now that very insightful Corrigan. Very, very insightful. Back then me, you know, an expert was lauded. You know what I mean? [00:10:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:59] Speaker A: Celebrated. [00:11:00] Speaker B: And even if he maybe shouldn't be, but you know, it was like the idea of expertise was like. [00:11:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:11:07] Speaker B: Oh fuck. Yeah. It's not really how people look at it these days. [00:11:12] Speaker A: And you know, he was able to extend his reach. He wrote what were really influential instructional books, textbooks. In 44 he wrote introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry. [00:11:25] Speaker B: Okay. [00:11:26] Speaker A: Which was basically his creed, his doctrine of popularizing those kind of treatments, ECT and, and something which I'm gonna drop this term here. Barbiturate narcosis. [00:11:43] Speaker B: Okay. [00:11:45] Speaker A: You're going to sleep for a long time. Under Dr. Sargent. Right. His work continues into the 50s where he is all about pioneering new antidepressant drugs. In the 60s, he is regarded as being the first practitioner to use a drug called phenelzine, an MAO inhibitor. Right. [00:12:15] Speaker B: What's an MAO inhibitor? I feel like I hear that term. [00:12:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Great that you asked some other examples of MAO inhibitors. Oh, bear with me a second because you're right, it's a, it's. These are drugs that are still used. [00:12:30] Speaker B: Yeah. Like I feel like I hear it in like, you know, your favorite American drug ads. Just like that. So. I know I've heard the phrase before. [00:12:38] Speaker A: You are looking at. Let's see. Okay, so not necessarily not so prescribed anymore, but tranylcypromine, phenelzine, isocarbozene, acid antidepressants. Antidepressant drugs. [00:12:59] Speaker B: Gotcha. [00:12:59] Speaker A: None. I can't find brand names. Let's find some brand names. [00:13:02] Speaker B: Yeah. What, what was it? What were they calling it back in the day? We love to name a drug. [00:13:10] Speaker A: Safenomide, Selegiline, Zelopyr, Azilect, Zadigo. Oh, fuck me. They're all so sci fi just, aren't they? Yeah, yeah, completely. [00:13:21] Speaker B: It's not like now they all have like like they're a little sci fi, but they're all. [00:13:25] Speaker A: I don't know, like now they're all like, aren't they? [00:13:28] Speaker B: You hear things. No, not even like that. Like things like some that I see on TV a lot are like Abilify, which like doesn't mean anything but sounds vaguely inspirational. You know, things like that. What's my. Oh, breast tree. Which is. But it's B R E Z T R I. But if you're listening from another room, they're like, did they just say breast. Breast tree. [00:13:51] Speaker A: Breast tree. But you remember it to make you grow tits. [00:13:56] Speaker B: Completely tittyless drug. But the association is in your mind. [00:14:03] Speaker A: But yes. And a pioneer of this pharmacological approach. Right. [00:14:09] Speaker B: So like mental illness, particularly depression and things like that. [00:14:14] Speaker A: We're talking depression, we are talking eating disorders, we are talking stress, post traumatic stress disorders, that kind of thing. Don't talk it out. Fucking drug. The. That's what he's talking about. And shock the fuck out of. You see, central to his, you know, one of his core pillars of his approach was this idea that as an organ the brain can be fucking reset. Right. You can press off and volume down for a few seconds, plugs and electric currents and reset yourself, shock yourself better. As well as a. Like I said, as well as what feels like a cult like figure within his circles. He was a media personality as well. He was on TV all the time talking about psychiatry. You know, this. This burgeoning field of psychiatry as a science. [00:15:08] Speaker B: Mm. [00:15:12] Speaker A: But again, all. You can kind of boil it all down, all of his approach down to this idea that you can just shock someone better. [00:15:20] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. That there is some physical thing you can do to someone that will fix whatever. [00:15:28] Speaker A: Exactly, exactly, exactly. And he sharply moved away from. To talking therapies, as we said just there. Right. One of his. A quote that he stuck to. Not this isn't one of his. But one of his contemporaries. Cut the cackle, shut the talk. Cut the cackle, no talking. [00:15:48] Speaker B: Right. [00:15:49] Speaker A: This belief that extreme symptoms needed extreme remedies. [00:15:54] Speaker B: Sure. Which is, you know, true. We know that in many cases a thing. Absolutely. That there's only so far that talk therapy can necessarily take you. So yeah. At its core that's not necessarily, you know, a bad vibe. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Well, some of his. Some of the methods that we're talking about. I mean I've talked about ect, but you know, insulin coma therapy. So really massive injections of insulin to induce in patients with schizophrenia and psychosis, long term comas. [00:16:30] Speaker B: What was that supposed to do when you're sleeping, you can't be schizophrenic. [00:16:35] Speaker A: Or when, when you're sleeping, you can't not consent to being shocked. [00:16:40] Speaker B: Oh, well, okay, sure. So the coma was not the treatment, that was how you administer the treatment so that the person can't protest. [00:16:48] Speaker A: We'll get there. [00:16:49] Speaker B: Okay. Right, go ahead. [00:16:55] Speaker A: Psychosurgical interventions. So something called leucotomy. [00:17:00] Speaker B: Okay. [00:17:02] Speaker A: So patients with obsessional air quotes, obsessional disorders. Leukotomy is almost like a trapination surgery. I've talked about deep sleep therapy, something which was known as continuous narcosis. This became his most notorious procedure. Right. Continuous narcosis. [00:17:25] Speaker B: I like the sound of it. [00:17:26] Speaker A: Yeah. AKA deep sleep therapy. Inducing patients into a coma which would last for often months only. Only interrupted to feed and to administer electro compulsive. Electroconvulsive therapy. Right. This was, he would call this his sleep treatment with his idea being that you could erase fixed and abnormal behavioral patterns. Right. In his, in his writings, quote, narcosis combined with ECT can break up, set circuits in the brain and allow. This is a, quote, a factory reset of the mind. [00:18:10] Speaker B: A factory like an iPhone. [00:18:12] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. [00:18:13] Speaker B: This, like just, you know, put a pin in the hole. [00:18:17] Speaker A: If your apps aren't taking a bit too long to load, wipe it, take it out the box. And just absolutely. Massive doses of both sedatives and stimulants. You absolutely happy to prescribe, uppers, downers, amphetamines, barbiturates. And these methods were often combined, you know. [00:18:40] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:41] Speaker A: With huge intensity me, man. There are so many descriptions of Sargent treating persistent depressive disorder by putting patients either completely to sleep or absolutely just on the brink of unconsciousness for months at a time. [00:19:04] Speaker B: Oh God. [00:19:06] Speaker A: Right up to three months at a time. During which whilst under, they would receive repeated high dose ECT antidepressant drugs. And upon waking, patients would often, quote, have no memory about the length of the treatment or the numbers or incidences of ECT used. [00:19:28] Speaker B: Right, Yeah. I mean if you think about it, it's like. Yeah. How much do you remember when you sleep? Doesn't necessarily mean you didn't experience anything when you sleep though. You could very much be, you know, tormented that whole time, but, you know, wake up completely unaware that it happened. [00:19:48] Speaker A: So we're in the 1960s. [00:19:50] Speaker B: Okay. A lot of weird shit going on medically in the 60s. [00:19:54] Speaker A: Yeah. You're not wrong. We are in the Royal Waterloo Hospital, Ward 5, in fact. [00:20:03] Speaker B: Okay. [00:20:04] Speaker A: In a ward which became known as the sleep room. [00:20:08] Speaker B: Oh, I just don't like anything that's like the something room is like kind of. [00:20:13] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. It's never, it's never like the cake. [00:20:16] Speaker B: Room, the cuddle room or anything like that. [00:20:20] Speaker A: No, no, no. [00:20:21] Speaker B: Right. [00:20:21] Speaker A: The sleep room in this ward, Ward 5 award full of patients all worth noting. Young women, all admitted for disorders like depression, for sake. Whatever that meant in the 1960s. [00:20:43] Speaker B: Right. Of course. Just like not wanting to do housework 247 corrigan. [00:20:48] Speaker A: What if I said waywardness? [00:20:51] Speaker B: Waywardness, right. That's the kind of. That got like Rosemary Kennedy lobotomized. Is like. [00:20:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:21:00] Speaker B: She keeps sneaking out of the house. She keeps, you know, hanging out with friends. [00:21:05] Speaker A: She's wayward. [00:21:08] Speaker B: Wayward. [00:21:08] Speaker A: Take her, take her to Dr. Sergeant. Patients in Ward 5, patients in the sleep room put into continuous barbiturate narcosis. Continuous sleep. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Barits too, like in the like 50s and 60s were really like the solution to everything, especially when it came to women. It was like. Yep, yep, Exactly. It's like anything going on with a woman. Just like barber up. [00:21:38] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep, yep. One account describes the sleep room as a twilight zone, where you would find something like six female patients on mattresses in comas, in drug induced comas for weeks and months at a time. There was a highly specialized nursing staff assigned specifically to Sergeant and specifically to this ward who would just super briefly wake patients every kind of four, five, six hours to be fed, to be washed and to be shocked. [00:22:20] Speaker B: That's honestly bonkers to me that they would wake them up too. Like just the how taxing it has to be on your body to be put in an induced coma and then awakened and then put back in a coma and then awakened like. Jesus Christ. Just in general, being constantly awakened when you're trying to sleep is hard, let alone when it's like under the influence of something that is like, you know, causing you to sleep like that. Like, have you ever woken up, like been forced awake when you've taken like a hardcore sleeping pill? It's just like. [00:22:54] Speaker A: Who are you fucking speaking to? Corrigan? How do you know? Yes, I know exactly what it's like. [00:23:01] Speaker B: There's like nothing worse than that feeling. [00:23:05] Speaker A: At the peak of my insomnia a year or two ago, I would. I would just stay awake through zopiclone doses. And terrible though the world is an entirely different place. [00:23:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:19] Speaker A: To one when you're well rested, it's entirely different. Imagine then it's like the upside down. Yeah. Imagine then dealing with that for three months, being woken only to have your fucking synapses shocked with 110 volts of electroconvulsive therapy. And Sergeant, again, being the media courting flamboyant personality that he was, he would talk about this. He would talk about how this would. This would reprogram disturbed minds. [00:23:54] Speaker B: I know you're gonna get there, so take this as a rhetorical question, but what evidence of this did he have? You know, like how reprogrammed were these people afterwards, you know, once he finished this? [00:24:08] Speaker A: Well, reprogrammed as in people died, right? [00:24:13] Speaker B: Like that's what I'm thinking is like to go back to Rosemary Kennedy, right? Like the. And people like her. The issue here, she was probably autistic, right? And her family was like, she's embarrassing the family because she's going out and like doing shit, you know, with boys or whatever and friends. And so they had her lobotomized. And this poor woman just lived like, you know, a drooling mess for the next like 60 years. After that, it's like, well, I guess they fixed the problem. [00:24:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:24:45] Speaker B: If the problem was autonomy. [00:24:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And you know, his mask would slip time and again. He's recorded as having told media that the narcosis enabled him to overcome patients resistance. One could give many kinds of physical treatments while the patient slept with minimal protest. [00:25:13] Speaker B: Oh, don't. I don't like that at all. [00:25:15] Speaker A: No, same here. What if I told you, do you know. Know YE Corrigan of the British actress Celia Imrie? I'm certain you know Celia Imrie. [00:25:27] Speaker B: That does not sound familiar. [00:25:28] Speaker A: You will know her by sight. I'm gonna send you a little. [00:25:31] Speaker B: Send me a picture. Because that name does not sound at all familiar to me. Celia. [00:25:36] Speaker A: You will know her by sight. She is a something of a national treasure. [00:25:39] Speaker B: Okay. Still alive. [00:25:42] Speaker A: Oh yeah. 100%. If you check your signal. There you go. [00:25:50] Speaker B: She looks familiar. [00:25:54] Speaker A: Every. Every Brit listening to this will know who Celia Imrie was. And at age 14 in 1966, she was admitted to the sleep room for anorexia. Yeah, she talks of being completely immobilized in a coma. She talks of the experience, quote, like being in a prison camp. [00:26:20] Speaker B: Jesus. [00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah, she talks about her recovery owing nothing at all to Sargent's methods. [00:26:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll bet. [00:26:31] Speaker A: There are reports from a lady by the name of Linda Keith. In her youth, she was a model. She recalls undergoing roughly 50, 50 fucking sessions of electroconvulsive therapy under Sargent's watch. [00:26:44] Speaker B: She recalls, like she remembers this happen to her. It's not the thing where it's like, oh, well, they just, they didn't know. [00:26:51] Speaker A: She. A quote from her, she says it left her hugely mentally incapacitated, left her temporarily unable to read. [00:26:58] Speaker B: Jesus. And I. I just feel like the fact of like these two examples you've given here being like an actress and a model just does not lend well to the. What was he doing? When they could not protest. [00:27:15] Speaker A: That one angle that I found that there is nothing on. Right. [00:27:19] Speaker B: I imagine they wouldn't know if it was happening to them. [00:27:22] Speaker A: Well, well, one can only speculate. [00:27:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:27:26] Speaker A: Another patient, a lady by the name of Mary Thornton, waking up terrified, disoriented. Quote, I didn't even know who I was after. She was kept in constant narcosis for anxiety. Patients would lose memories of weeks and months of their life, profound identity crises, amnesia. There's one anonymous patient who reports seeing patients with bandaged heads, implying lobotomies whilst whilst in a long term medically induced coma. [00:27:59] Speaker B: I mean, was he like a psychopath? Like, what was he saying about. [00:28:03] Speaker A: We'll get there. [00:28:04] Speaker B: What was happening. Okay. Sorry, just, I'm so, like, what the fuck? [00:28:09] Speaker A: And testimonies indicate that several people died under this regimen. Right. [00:28:19] Speaker B: Jesus Christ. Yeah, I can imagine. [00:28:22] Speaker A: Investigation notes that incredibly, Sergeant only lost five of his patients in the state room. Yeah, well, yeah. [00:28:29] Speaker B: No one's supposed to die from treatment for anorexia. Like that's like basic. [00:28:34] Speaker A: That's quite f. Cking. Right. Well, what if I told you this? There was a very similar case in a hospital in Australia, right? Near. In New South Wales, Chelmsford Private Hospital, where a fucking almost identical version of Sargent's technique, right? Deep sleep therapy. Patients up to, you know, months at a time, heavily sedated, Valium, barbiturates, and in that case, at least 25 fucking people died. Yeah. Whether during treatment, shortly afterwards, lots of permanent brain damage, memory loss, trauma. Dubious, if not entirely absent consent, of course. [00:29:24] Speaker B: Right. I mean, that's what like, is so terrifying about this stuff too, is like that period of time in the early 20th century where medicine was, you know, really developing and surgical procedures, especially ones around the brain and things like that, like women had so little recourse for just being like thrown into places and like whatever happens, happens, you know, like whether that is, you know, things that happened in, you know, Irish unwed mothers homes or things like this or whatever. It was like wherever you went, you were just trapped, like there was nothing you could do. You're wayward, you know, you're wayward. What do you. This is what happens like, what a horrifying time to be alive. [00:30:11] Speaker A: Now, obviously, he was fully investigated and convicted of all manner of malpractice, of course. [00:30:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:22] Speaker A: And retired and died in shame. [00:30:24] Speaker B: All of the awards taken away from. [00:30:25] Speaker A: Him and imprisoned, obviously. Not a fucking bit of it. Not a bit of it. Right. [00:30:33] Speaker B: Of course. [00:30:36] Speaker A: He was never subject to any kind of formal criminal or professional investigation, no public inquiries. The only scrutiny, really, started to come posthumously after his death, of course. [00:30:55] Speaker B: Mm. [00:30:57] Speaker A: This Australian case that I talk about, that triggered a full Australian Medical Commission, or whatever they're called, inquiry in the 80s. And lots of the case studies used sergeant's notes. [00:31:13] Speaker B: Interesting. [00:31:14] Speaker A: They're like, you know, built. [00:31:15] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:31:16] Speaker A: Built upon his work. [00:31:17] Speaker B: But this didn't come out of nowhere. They stole it from another. [00:31:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. 25 people. So no charges, no tribunal, no redress, no compensation, nothing. No recourse. Any complaints that did get made, as you would imagine, lost in bureaucracy, of course. Outright dismissed, redacted or fucking just vanished. Records entirely. [00:31:44] Speaker B: Sure. [00:31:46] Speaker A: Yeah. So, like I said, posthumously, in waves, in dribs and drabs, was. Was how the exposure came. And he's. He's now kind of. Like I said, this. This book that has been released about him blows the lid right off. [00:32:05] Speaker B: And. [00:32:07] Speaker A: Rather than, you know, he is he. It feels to me as though he's largely viewed not so much as a pioneer, but more as a cautionary example, you know, a cautionary tale of unchecked authority and ambition. And like I said, this. This cult, like institutional status, can almost override whatever ethics there were at the time. We know medical ethics in the 2020s are completely different to what they might have been in the. In the 40s, 50s, 60s. But even that ethical framework, such as it, was completely steamrolled. [00:32:49] Speaker B: Mm. Yeah, that's. So it's absolutely true. That. That's the thing is, it's like, you get people like that who. Like, he wasn't doing anything. Right. Like, he. In a positive sense, he didn't accomplish anything by doing this stuff, but he faked it till he made it, essentially by presenting himself as succeeding in doing something. And everyone just kind of fell in line. [00:33:18] Speaker A: Your daughter isn't anorexic anymore. She can't count her own fucking toes. Yeah, but she's not anorexic anymore, you know. [00:33:25] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Like, it's incredible to me, and. And that is a thing that still exists, obviously, the. You know, especially men. But, you know, it obviously happens, too, with people like Elizabeth Holmes and stuff like that. But. But people who manage to get Into a position where their own self image and confidence, by projecting that they're able to trick people into something that like they're, the results aren't there. There's no evidence of them ever having done anything. And yet. Yeah, still allowed to carry on like that. [00:34:04] Speaker A: Isn't it incredible? Isn't it incredible? And you know when you talk about the, the heyday of the lobotomy, remember that? I can't remember the guy's name but he did like 50 lobotomies in a day. Just stab, stab, stab, sweep, sweep, sweep. [00:34:19] Speaker B: Going for the Guinness Book of World Records this time. [00:34:22] Speaker A: Exactly this, exactly this. But that feels like some, you know, a relic of the distant past, a relic of ancient history. This was in the fucking 1960s, right. [00:34:30] Speaker B: Like all of our parents were alive at that point. [00:34:34] Speaker A: Chelmsford, it, I, I believe Chelmsford was the 80s. [00:34:38] Speaker B: Yeah. That's. [00:34:39] Speaker A: Or the inquiry was in the inquiry. [00:34:41] Speaker B: Yeah. It probably was 20, 30 years earlier than it actually happened. You know, that's when people actually looked into it and were like, hey, was that bad? [00:34:50] Speaker A: Yes, my mistake. This was also in the 60s and into the 70s. [00:34:55] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, I mean that's another thing too is like we're always thinking about these things as being so distant or whatever and realizing how recently this kind of stuff was carried out. That you have like, like this woman that, that Celia Imrie. [00:35:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:35:10] Speaker B: She's only 72. [00:35:12] Speaker A: Yep. [00:35:12] Speaker B: You know, like and she's lived a full life since then but you know, it was within her lifetime that she was in this place. Yeah. [00:35:26] Speaker A: Do you know what it makes me wonder? Oh and it makes me wonder in 50 years time, is there anything we're doing now? [00:35:38] Speaker B: Yes. Right. I mean I think about this a lot with like Ozempic for one. Right. Like how substance. It's the substance. It's like every. Because I watch the evening news every day. Right. Like the local evening news and it's like every week there's new like, oh, Ozempic actually also might cure this and it might do this and this and like all these different like miracle things it's supposed to do. And it's like, do we think maybe before we medicate the entire country with this for profit drug, we should. [00:36:14] Speaker A: I read this week that the American arm of Weight Watchers is on the brink of going into administration, is on. [00:36:21] Speaker B: The brink of collapse because of the substances taking the drug. Nobody is. Yeah. Nobody is like working out to get fit or anything anymore. Nobody's dieting, they're just taking a Drug to do it. There is simply no way that that doesn't have repercussions. Like, that's just. [00:36:37] Speaker A: Who knows? I know people on the substance, good people, people I love on the substance. [00:36:41] Speaker B: No, tons of people I know are. Because that's the thing is like it is the miracle drug right now and no one is asking any questions about it. Doctors are prescribing it for everything they've. There's like new factories popping up all over the place to make more of it. It is dystopian and it's. Remember you are welcome to think about. Right. But I think that, I was thinking that from the beginning of you talking about this is like how quick we are to like when a sort of medical genius seems to come around, like immediately just be like, wow and like jump in and we're all on board and all that kind of stuff. When it's like, this is amazing. How often do we find out, like you talk about these things on this here show all the time. These different things that have come out that were supposed to be miracle drugs or miracle treatments and things like that that were actually horrifying. And I don't think that like we have like, we obviously have different ethical standards now than we did then, but I don't think we've like, I don't think we have solved the problem of just assuming that everything is above board and there's not gonna be long term consequences for stuff, you know, I think we are very quick to approve things now. [00:38:03] Speaker A: I look forward to the next 50 years of Jack of all Graves when we can look back on the 2020s. [00:38:11] Speaker B: When all the Ozempic people sprout second heads and whatnot. We will be here to talk about it. [00:38:17] Speaker A: We sure will. Don't say we didn't fucking warn you. Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:38:24] Speaker B: Yes, please do. [00:38:25] Speaker A: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:38:29] Speaker B: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:38:33] Speaker A: The way I whispered the word sex cannibal recently. [00:38:35] Speaker B: Worst comes to worst. Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:38:39] Speaker A: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas serious. He's talking to me. I'm fucking. I'm gonna leg it. [00:38:46] Speaker B: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:38:48] Speaker A: I think you feel great about it. [00:38:51] Speaker B: I have a question. [00:38:53] Speaker A: Bring it. [00:38:54] Speaker B: You have a very deep voice like a. Not all the time. Like when you just went, oh, that was not deep, but like before we, before we started recording, you were like almost growling at me. It's like a real, like real I. [00:39:07] Speaker A: Apologize if you were from the soul kind of. I'm, I, I, my, my vocalizations are led very much by what I'm speaking about at the time, you know? [00:39:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:39:20] Speaker A: I try to embody my fucking topic. [00:39:22] Speaker B: It's true. Absolutely. And I think I do that to a degree too. I think people are often surprised by like how I talk in like normal conversation compared to how I talk here, where my voice is like probably like three octaves deeper on this show than it is when I'm like speaking to you. [00:39:38] Speaker A: I think we all know how you talk, don't we? [00:39:40] Speaker B: People are surprised at how I talk when I speak in real life. Yeah. Because that's what I sound like. That's why you're always doing it is because when this stops rolling. Great episode, Mark. I really look forward to this every week. [00:39:55] Speaker A: Mark, where you going with this? [00:40:00] Speaker B: That's it. I just wanted to tell you have a deep voice. No, I think about. So like your kids are getting older and you know, Pete's got a little bit, he's dropped an octave or two, you know, as he's. [00:40:13] Speaker A: It's so precious. It is a beautiful thing. [00:40:16] Speaker B: It's very precious when this is a thing that I guess because as you're growing up, you don't necessarily notice it in your friends because you're like there for the journey or whatever. But like, when did you develop Mark voice? Like, when does that happen? [00:40:29] Speaker A: I vividly remember. [00:40:31] Speaker B: This is gonna sound to you when is vividly? [00:40:34] Speaker A: Anytime now, actually. I mean. [00:40:35] Speaker B: No, come on. Really? You sounded like this in high school. [00:40:39] Speaker A: My, my voice lowered in what was the second year, so it would be year eight called now in school. [00:40:48] Speaker B: Okay. [00:40:48] Speaker A: And I would have been. Yeah, 14, 13, 14. [00:40:52] Speaker B: That deeply like your current level of deep voice? [00:40:56] Speaker A: Well, I don't know about that, but the reason I remember it so vividly was I would often, every year the school would have kind of a competition, like a little eisteddfod. Do you know of the phenomenon of an aysdeathod? We'd have a little. [00:41:13] Speaker B: Our listeners probably do not know what an aisted fod is. [00:41:16] Speaker A: So think of almost like a well intentioned and wholesome contest of song and poetry and the spoken word performance and choral singing. And we would have a little fun. [00:41:31] Speaker B: Like this is specifically a Welsh tradition for. [00:41:34] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. [00:41:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:35] Speaker A: And we'd have a little iced airflow and I would always take part being you know, trained dramatist. And I would often get grief for it because not all the kids would take part in their stairwood. I would often get, ugh, fuck off. That kind of thing. [00:41:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm sure a lot of kids are like, too cool to be a part of something like that. [00:41:51] Speaker A: And now you see, I was both. [00:41:54] Speaker B: Right, Your, your personality is constant duality. [00:41:58] Speaker A: In that way, I was metal as fuck and quite difficult to get a handle on. At least I think looking back. I mean, if I were to see me at the time, I would probably just think, fuck me, look at, look at this fucking nerd. Yeah, but I, I know, I think I was quite difficult to pigeonhole. But anyway, that fate flies deadfoot in the second year. The fucking teacher introducing me on stage said, be kind. His voice is just broke. [00:42:27] Speaker B: No, stop. Oh, no. That is the most horrifying thing I could possibly imagine. [00:42:32] Speaker A: Yeah, Remember him well? Dave Hoyle, who was remembering very well, Lovely guy. [00:42:38] Speaker B: Come back on stage. I would have just left. [00:42:40] Speaker A: Lovely guy. But he announced to the gathered, like 800 or so people, it's like just. [00:42:44] Speaker B: Being like, hey, you be nice. She just got her period. [00:42:48] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. All right, now we've got Mark Lewis, right? Everybody be nice. His voice is just broke. So I carry, I'll carry that one to the grave. I need a couple of months of barbiturate and ECT to fucking erase that fucker. [00:43:01] Speaker B: But see, here's the thing, like, right, because your voice is like, just broken, right? So then you get that like in between thing, which is kind of like where, where your boy is in between stages. But like, when did you land on the guy, the 46 year old man in front of me, that voice, you know, like, when is it possible to say? [00:43:20] Speaker A: Because I've always had, you know, I listen to myself every day. It's hard. [00:43:23] Speaker B: Yeah, so you're used to it too. [00:43:24] Speaker A: You know, I don't know. I don't know. [00:43:27] Speaker B: It's just like one of those things I always wonder because like, also, obviously when you like get old, you know, your vocal cords get that kind of strained sound to them or whatever, and so you start to sound a little raspier or whatever. You know, the Winona Rider and Edward Scissorhands kind of voice at the end of the movie. But she also does that in Star Trek. Spock. But anyway, when was she in Star Trek? She's Spock's mom in 2009. Star Trek. Yeah. She falls in the hole. [00:44:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I've kind of wiped all that out. Didn't really enjoy it, you know, I don't. I don't. I don't like the Abraham's verse really much. [00:44:10] Speaker B: The first one is so good, though. That's Orchie verse, is what that is. [00:44:13] Speaker A: Oh, is that what it is? Pull one out, Pull one out. [00:44:16] Speaker B: Pour one out for Orchie. But anyways, so, like, you know, obviously you don't know when exactly that starts or whatever, but I'm so curious because obviously, like, if you were. If you were 15 and sounded exactly like you do right now, like. Well, I feel like I'd be like, yeah, like, what is the deal with that kid? Why does he sound like that? [00:44:38] Speaker A: Yes, that would be. [00:44:38] Speaker B: It's like, when does it settle in? [00:44:41] Speaker A: I'd be a medical anomaly is what I'd be. I'd be studied. [00:44:45] Speaker B: Well, it's like the. You still haven't fucking seen it. You have to go see Sinners sometime this week. But the. [00:44:52] Speaker A: I've come to terms with the fact that I'm gonna miss it at the theater. I think it's time you did as well. [00:44:56] Speaker B: I'm not going to do that. That would be. That is outside of my personality to accept that. You gotta go see. [00:45:02] Speaker A: I could lie if you'd like. I could tell you I'd gone. [00:45:04] Speaker B: No, you just. [00:45:04] Speaker A: I'm happy to do that. [00:45:05] Speaker B: Go see the movie. Just go see it. [00:45:07] Speaker A: But now Final Destination is out and I'm more interested in seeing. [00:45:10] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Because Final Destination, you can watch anywhere, anytime. It is not gonna matter if you see that on a big screen. You gotta go see Sinners. But it's not my point. My point is that the. The kid in Sinners, who. I think the actor is like 19 or 20 years old, but he's got this real deep voice, you know? Real deep voice in it that, like, the first time he talks, you're like, what? That's not what a boy is meant to sound like. It's incredible. Maybe that's what put the thought in my head in the first place. I don't know. Against you. Growling. [00:45:46] Speaker A: There is. There is VHS footage of me in. In my home, currently at 1918. [00:45:54] Speaker B: In your home? The home that you're in right now. [00:45:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that I'm. That I'm looking at right now. I. She dug it up last time I saw. [00:46:00] Speaker B: We are getting closer. [00:46:02] Speaker A: We're getting closer. I've got. I've got the tapes. I've got the tapes, Corry. All I need to do is just to get my ass down to the. There's a locksmith in town that will also put your VHS on a fucking dvd. [00:46:14] Speaker B: That is the absolute perfect combination of skills. Great as Nate. Absolutely love that. [00:46:19] Speaker A: I just gotta just be asked to take a denture. [00:46:22] Speaker B: It makes like 90s life feel like medieval, you know, or it's like you're watching like a movie and it's like you go in and it's like, he's the barber. Dentist. Yeah, exactly. Great. Go get my. My tapes digitized. And also maybe get a key for the housemaid. [00:46:41] Speaker A: Forge me a broadsword. [00:46:42] Speaker B: Yeah, right. I love that. That is fantastic. I look forward to you getting up and doing that so that we can see this. This maybe is like for, you know, whenever we get to doing like a UK meetup, I think we just. [00:46:58] Speaker A: What a great idea. [00:46:59] Speaker B: Get a projector out. Maybe you narrate some. [00:47:03] Speaker A: What a great idea. A little director's commentary. A little. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:47:07] Speaker B: I think that's the way to do it. And then we can. We can make a final verdict. When did Mark start sounding like this? [00:47:13] Speaker A: Beautiful. Really nice idea. [00:47:16] Speaker B: Great, Perfect. [00:47:17] Speaker A: I plugged when I. When I got together with Hannah a couple weeks back at Ghost, I kind of floated the idea of a UK joag meet with her in Oat. And I would hope she would say nothing less, but, yeah, she's well up front. [00:47:33] Speaker B: Good. We gotta get the. Get the posse together and everything, you know, we'll maybe, you know, we'll see what it works. We gotta make it so that we can get like, you know, Anna and Steve out again to like, do another, like, joint situation because they got a lot of the lobsters, as they called them, for dead. And lovely, too. Just get everybody. Everybody together. [00:47:53] Speaker A: Yes. Rent a room above a pub or something, you know? [00:47:56] Speaker B: Yes. I love it. So great stuff. Couple things for people to know about up on our KO Fi, because we try to keep that content coming, you know, we do. We can. [00:48:10] Speaker A: What you get as a listener and supporter of Jack of All Graves is a plurality of formats from us. Right. Yes, I know, I know. It's the cast is the thing. Right. The cast is the main thing, but there's so much fucking more. [00:48:25] Speaker B: There is. You're missing out on a whole universe. [00:48:28] Speaker A: If you are not subscribing constant barrage and onslaught of just the most cutting edge content that I think any podcast has ever generated. That's what you get from us. [00:48:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's a fair thing to say. [00:48:45] Speaker A: Well, fuck, prove me wrong. [00:48:49] Speaker B: I will say for, like, what, you know, what We've got going here. We, we do more content on that thing than most podcasts do for stuff. So you're get, you're getting, you're getting a good amount of stuff on there and I highly recommend it. [00:49:05] Speaker A: We're very unassuming about it, you know, very modest about it to the point where we, we don't promote ourselves at all outside of a very narrow channel. [00:49:17] Speaker B: We rely on you subscribing because we will never promote this podcast. We will die before we promote this podcast. [00:49:25] Speaker A: But listen, something I've been just something I would just. Listeners, right? Listeners. I know you're out there. I know you're out there and I know you're listening. Would you do your boy Marco and your gal Corrigan, would you do us a solid, right, whatever platform you're listening on, drop us a little review? [00:49:46] Speaker B: Oh yeah, we haven't said that. See, this is. We're so bad at promoting. We don't even do like the one little thing that takes you 10 seconds to say during an episode. [00:49:56] Speaker A: Don't even do that. [00:49:57] Speaker B: Would you just pop a review up somewhere, give us a little. [00:50:00] Speaker A: Do you know what? [00:50:01] Speaker B: Five stars. [00:50:03] Speaker A: Life is really difficult sometimes and the moments of pleasure, those little oases of joy can be so few and so far between. If you were to give us a review this week or even. Or just jump onto Reddit and just comment on one of the many posts on our forward slash podcast because, right, not. Barely a day goes by when I don't jump on Reddit and read R podcasts and every fucking other day there'll be somebody asking a question. I like dark factual podcasts that are kind of left leaning and atheist and tell good stories and have good presenter chemistry. Anyone know anything? [00:50:41] Speaker B: Please someone just say, you know. [00:50:46] Speaker A: We have got comments like that. Like one every couple of years somebody will go, you should listen to Jack of All Graves. They're quite small, but they're really fucking good. So just write us a review somewhere. [00:50:56] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, tell somebody. [00:50:58] Speaker A: That would make me so fucking happy, man. I swear to God. [00:51:02] Speaker B: Tell the person you're in line with at the DMV or whatever, you know, while you're getting your real id, go ahead and tell someone about. [00:51:09] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, if you're in a conversation with somebody in podcast, come up, go, do you know what you should fucking. There's this really deep voiced Welsh guy and they just. Honestly, great bunch of lads. It would, it would, it would actually make it worth carrying on breathing for another week if you would do that. [00:51:32] Speaker B: So you Know, just think about, just think about that. What you can do for us. So on that note, ask not what. [00:51:39] Speaker A: Your podcast can do for you. Right? Ask instead. Why haven't I fucking reviewed these guys on Spotify? That's how the quote goes up here. [00:51:48] Speaker B: Here. Yeah. So new fan cave up from Thursday. So check that out. We just talked about ready or not, which is always a fun time. [00:52:00] Speaker A: Will you, will you next month go a little bit harder? [00:52:04] Speaker B: Maybe next month. So prepare yourselves, everybody, to watch this one. We are doing Cabin in the Woods. [00:52:13] Speaker A: Oh, fuck. Wow. [00:52:17] Speaker B: Yeah, this is. I'm excited about this because. So the sort of ongoing conversation we've had the past couple months is about tropes. And I've been introducing Kristen to the idea of tropes and seeing, you know, where she can identify them in the things that we watch and stuff like that. And so Cabin in the Woods I took. When I went to go see it the first time, I went with my friend Michelle, who does not like horror movies. But I told her, oh, it's like from like the Whedon verse. And at the time that was a good thing. [00:52:46] Speaker A: Before the unpleasantness. [00:52:47] Speaker B: Yeah, before the unpleasantness. And she was like, okay. And then we walked out of it. She was like, that was not a fucking Joss Whedon movie. So it's scary for people who do not like horror movies. So it's, it's definitely taking it up a notch. But also like, this is a movie that revels in tropes. That's the whole point of this. Right? So I was like, this is. This is the next. It's like taking the exam. Right. She's learned, you know, a few things about tropes, stuff like that, and by watching this, she's taking the trope exam. So, yeah. [00:53:20] Speaker A: Stoked on that. High time that I rewatched that movie. Fuck me. I've seen it so many times. It's been a watch along movie for us in the past. [00:53:28] Speaker B: Yeah. Yep. [00:53:30] Speaker A: It's Peerless. There's. There has never been a film like it. There's never been a film like, maybe. [00:53:35] Speaker B: You can join us. Maybe you can join Kristen and I to talk about this next month. [00:53:39] Speaker A: Find a time to be very happy to do so. I'd be very happy to do so. [00:53:44] Speaker B: Has. [00:53:47] Speaker A: Is there a Cabin in the woods for other genres? Does action movies have a cabin in the woods? Does Rom Cabin Last Action Hero? That was. Do you know what? That was exactly the first thing that came to my mind also. [00:53:59] Speaker B: Is it though. [00:54:02] Speaker A: And I don't mean A movie that pays homage to other action movies. Cabin in the woods is a dissection of the genre. It absolutely dismantles it down to its core components and still manages, I would. [00:54:13] Speaker B: Say, Last Action here was like, closest to doing that kind of thing, at least in the action genre, where it's really. Yeah. Taking it apart without being like. Because, like, you know, there's stuff like. What's that one that came out recently with Emily Blunt and was it Ryan Gosling? Oh, the four bay Fall guy. Right, Ryan Reynolds. Which one was that? Who was in that? [00:54:37] Speaker A: It was Ryan. It was Gosling. [00:54:39] Speaker B: Okay, it was Gosling. It's like, I cannot remember for the life of me. [00:54:44] Speaker A: The Ryan. [00:54:45] Speaker B: It's got Orion in it for sure. But, like, you know, that's kind of like, obviously taking apart the genre, but in like, more of like a love letter to stunts sort of way, you know, not like in a. Like, really. That's not stripping down to a ton. [00:54:59] Speaker A: That isn't quite it. That is. [00:55:00] Speaker B: I think Last Action Hero is doing that to an extent. Nothing's gonna be quite Cabin in the woods, but I think it's like, it's trying to do the same thing where it's like really sort of commenting on, like, what the parts are that make an action movie what it is. [00:55:16] Speaker A: It's. It's. It's. It's at the core of just why I love Cabin in the woods so much. Because it. It doesn't just refer to other movies and tropes and tricks and. And whatever of horror rewards the degrees that you put into it. You know, you can zoom in and out and in and out on Cabin in the woods and it just is so rewarding at every fucking level. And I don't think it's got an equal in other genres. I'm sorry. [00:55:44] Speaker B: No, I don't think it has. [00:55:44] Speaker A: It doesn't have anything. Like, it's clever, but it's never smug. [00:55:50] Speaker B: Yeah. No. [00:55:51] Speaker A: Do you know what I mean? It works at face value, but. Yeah, that's the best way I can put it. It is smart as. But it never. It. It's. It's never self consciously, so it's gleeful. [00:56:04] Speaker B: Which is funny because obviously it isn't a Whedon movie. He just produced it. But of course, considering, like, Whedon is kind of who we attribute to the fact that stuff is too clever about itself now. Right. Like everything commenting on itself and knowing it's a movie and all that stuff like that. This doesn't do that. Despite being produced by him is kind of. If you made the same movie now, they would. It would not be that. It would be too Whedonesque. [00:56:32] Speaker A: Drew Goddard, wasn't it? He was the writer. He's the guy who wrote that. [00:56:35] Speaker B: Is that so? [00:56:36] Speaker A: Yeah, take your word for it. One of the guys behind Cloverfield. [00:56:41] Speaker B: Right. [00:56:42] Speaker A: Which tracks. Yeah. Fuck me, man. I could just talk for days about Cabin the Wooden episode. [00:56:50] Speaker B: Okay, well, next month you can join us to talk about it, and it'll be great. And, yeah, we will discuss that. So the current one that just went up on Thursday is. What did I say? [00:57:03] Speaker A: That we watched Ready or Not? [00:57:06] Speaker B: Ready or Not. Yes. Ready or Not. [00:57:10] Speaker A: And is going on here. I'm reminding you of things you've just said. What is this bizarro episode that we're on here? [00:57:19] Speaker B: Ready or Not. So check that out. That is up there. I sent out mailers. So if you subscribe to our $10 tier, that means you've got mail coming. Let me tell you, sending out the stuff. So I have. I always try to get ahead of it, you know? You know me, I'm a planner. So I have, like, envelopes and all that kind of stuff. I have my forever stamps, both international and domestic, so I'm, like, ready to put them on all my stuff. Stuff every time. But the goddamn mailman never takes anything that I put in the mailbox. And so, like, no matter. One job to do that, right? Like, all you have to do is just take the things out. Like, come on. But he's always. [00:58:04] Speaker A: I. I know this. I've been there. But do you have one of those mailboxes that you put the little flag up? [00:58:08] Speaker B: We don't have a flag. That's. That's like, the problem. So what I did is I, like, put, like, a clip in it so that it's like, here's a big red clip so you can see there's something in the mailbox. This should be an indicator to. You completely ignored it. Not only did he ignore it, but he then, like, because there were cards in, was, like, blocking the mail from going in. So he just shoved the mail down really hard and, like, bent several of the cards. So, like, I know one of them was Nick. I apologize that, like, your cards might be bent on a little bit, and. [00:58:41] Speaker A: You can't complain to the guy who might catch a bullet. [00:58:43] Speaker B: Right? You know, we know they're packing, so. Yeah, yeah. It's just all of. All of the mail carriers around here are, like, always talking on the phone on their, like, Bluetooth tooth as they work, and so they're just distracted, and so they just. [00:58:58] Speaker A: Did you just get things stuck between Bluetooth and blue tit? [00:59:02] Speaker B: What is a blue tit? [00:59:04] Speaker A: It's a kind of bird. Surely you've heard of the blue title. It's a bird part of a tit family. [00:59:09] Speaker B: No, I did not. [00:59:10] Speaker A: Okay. [00:59:10] Speaker B: I did not get. Got between those things. Did you? So mailers are coming, and a new JOAG radio as well is coming. I'm just editing it right now. This one is me doing the Floyd Collins story. So, you know, that's a story I told you about a guy who got stuck in a cave. I can't remember if I mentioned this, but weirdly, there are two Broadway musicals out right now that are about things we've talked about on this show. [00:59:50] Speaker A: Oh, nice, nice. [00:59:51] Speaker B: Two brand new musicals. So Floyd Collins, starring Jeremy Jordan is about Floyd Collins, who was a man who was trying to dig out a cave on his property as a tourist attraction and got stuck and became the most famous man in the United States for a period of time as people tried to pull him out of this hole, and they failed, and he died in there. I don't. It seems like a dark musical. I don't know where this thing is going to go. But, you know, an interesting story. And then the other one is called Dead Outlaw, and that is the story of Elmer McCurdy, who I talked about in our Halloween episode two years ago, I think. [01:00:32] Speaker A: Right. [01:00:32] Speaker B: And he was a corpse of an outlaw who had been killed by the cops and nobody came to. [01:00:41] Speaker A: How do you remember this stuff? Yeah, we talked about this in Halloween two years ago. How the fuck do you remember that? Both of those things I remember for the first time, as far as I'm concerned. True. [01:00:55] Speaker B: Yeah. I'm just gonna start telling you the same stories and see if you might as well. [01:01:00] Speaker A: You might as well. You might as well. You could rock up next week with a cold open from, like, six weeks ago, and I'd be like, really? [01:01:06] Speaker B: No idea. [01:01:07] Speaker A: It's mad. [01:01:10] Speaker B: Elmer McCurdy was an outlaw whose body went unclaimed. And he. And then eventually someone claimed it and put it into, like, a sideshow. And then the body got passed around this corpse and so forth over the years until eventually people forgot that it was a real corpse. And it wasn't until, like, a Hollywood film crew was, like, filming something that, like, he was, like, hanging in a fun house and they knocked into it and the arm fell off, and they were like, that's a bone. [01:01:39] Speaker A: Also not typically a musical. [01:01:42] Speaker B: Right? Yeah, this one is, like, supposed to be funny, though. Like. So, like all the videos I'm thinking, right, yeah. All the videos I've seen of it has, like, the guy, like, in like a coffin, looking like a wax guy and all that stuff. Like, it looks. It looks like fun. I don't know what they're doing with the Floyd Collins one, but the Elmer McCurdy one looks like a. A good time. But look at that, guys. Finger on the pulse as usual. [01:02:05] Speaker A: Oh, as always, as always. [01:02:08] Speaker B: You know what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna do a cold open of like a story you've told before and see if you recognize it. [01:02:16] Speaker A: You know, I wouldn't, you know, I'm gonna tell you. [01:02:21] Speaker B: The agents stuck in the bag or whatever in the duffel bag. See, the dead MI5 guy or whatever. [01:02:32] Speaker A: Now that I do remember. But okay, Corey, if it would give you pleasure to get one over on a mentally infirm guy who's just trying his best, right? If that's something that you would enjoy, go to it. [01:02:44] Speaker B: That's what I said. My brain fog is funny. [01:02:46] Speaker A: I hope it feels good. Hope you enjoy it. [01:02:51] Speaker B: Indeed. So all of that on the Ko Fi. Go and subscribe and check it out and enjoy some stories and some movie chat and, you know, some mail. All there for you. K-O-F I.com jackofallgraves it's also very funny that one of my friends from blue sky listened to the cast and then was like, wait, is it pronounced Kofi? I begin saying it coffee. And I'm like, no, no, it's absolutely pronounced coffee. But no one would be able to find this website if we didn't say it like that. So. Ko-fi.com jackofallgraves Nice. [01:03:30] Speaker A: And that's all of the business. [01:03:32] Speaker B: It's all the business. So why don't we talk about what we've watched this fight. [01:03:36] Speaker A: Absolutely. Love to. Just the thing about me, right? Love movies, man. They are the greatest. They are the absolute greatest. And both real movies and genre movies. Big movies, little movies, you know, I. When I say real movie, you know what I'm talking about? Capital R, capital M. Okay, sure. [01:03:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:03:58] Speaker A: You know, award bait. So good. [01:04:01] Speaker B: Yeah. Gotcha. Our conclave of last week. [01:04:04] Speaker A: Exactly. [01:04:05] Speaker B: It got my ass American Pope, by the way. What the fuck? [01:04:08] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [01:04:10] Speaker B: That's crazy. [01:04:12] Speaker A: It's a shame. It's a shame. I mean, here in the Lewis household, obviously, probably, like many of you dear listeners, we were all about Pierre Batista, pizza baller. [01:04:21] Speaker B: Well, Naturally, yeah. I mean, that guy was nowhere near being Pope, but everybody wanted him to be. [01:04:26] Speaker A: Yeah, me and Owen were big, big in his camp. Really big in his camp. [01:04:30] Speaker B: I also wish his name meant Pizza Balls instead of Pizza Dance, but either way, I feel good about it. [01:04:36] Speaker A: Either way, it's a hell of a name. And I hope he's waiting in the wings when fucking Bob Edwards or whatever his fucking name is ascends. Which is to say, yeah, we got ourselves out to see Thunderbolt. You were quite right. Yes, it's great. And while I'm not as in the thrall of the Marvel Cinematic Universe as I would have been maybe this time two years ago, I mean, I remember talking about it in terms of it being like, the most staggering cinematic achievement in my lifetime. [01:05:07] Speaker B: And you've been like, bless you. You've been, like, really trying to champion it even as it's, like, crumbling before us. Because even as I've been, like, fatigued by it, you've been like, no, I'm still in. [01:05:20] Speaker A: Yep, yep, yep. But it, yeah, it's been, it's hard. It's become harder and harder to deny that the shine is dulled somewhat, you know? [01:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:29] Speaker A: But I, I, I will, you know, I'll, I'll still stick to those claims for as recently, like two or three years ago. Staggering what they achieved in that tank. It's just absolutely staggering. And Thunderbolts is great. It's a, it's, it's the, it's the rewards, I think, of the genre maturing as much as it has. [01:05:52] Speaker B: Right. [01:05:53] Speaker A: This, this, you, you know, you couldn't do this in Phase Two. [01:05:57] Speaker B: No. Right. [01:05:58] Speaker A: You know what I mean? [01:05:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:05:59] Speaker A: You couldn't do this without a lot of work having been done beforehand. This is the result of a lot of work because audiences have grown, you know, audiences have grown up with the mcu. And I, I, I, I don't know, I just, I find something really, really rewarding about a movie that can put just real. Fucking, real things at the heart of, you know, the, with the dressing of a superhero film. These are real fucking things that are being talked about here. Yes, Just the fucking things that we all struggle with. The things every fucking single one of us deals with. You've dressed them up as a superhero movie and the conversation is real as fuck in this film. [01:06:48] Speaker B: Yeah. 1,000% completely. [01:06:50] Speaker A: Weight of the world, man. The weight of our experiences, the things that we all deal with. And just think, that's just how life should be. That's how life is. A lot of Us are so used to fucking carrying our shit around with us that we think that that's just how it is. And it doesn't fucking have to be, man. It doesn't have to be with the right people and with the right support. You don't. You know, it's not. It isn't. It isn't the status quo that you should accept to just feel crushed by the weight of fucking just being alive. [01:07:20] Speaker B: Yes. [01:07:21] Speaker A: And it's wonderful that a movie that has that conversation and says that out and proud is. Is doing, you know, $100 million. [01:07:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I was talking to another Blue Sky Mutual about this too, and, like, he said that he had gone with, like, his, I want to say, like, 13 year old or something like that, or. No, it's like 11, I think. And he was like. And even they caught the, like, you know, the message of this and everything, too. And I think that that, like, speaking that to young audiences and everything is. Is so important. Like you said, audiences are in a different place now than they were before. But it also is sort of the payoff of kind of the emotional arc that we had with Tony Stark, too. Right. Like, we started this conversation in those early phases of. [01:08:05] Speaker A: We did. [01:08:06] Speaker B: Of the mcu, and now we are in a place where, like, the. That stuff can be the bad guy. You know, like, we can really have that, you know, mental health conversation at the, like, center of the film instead of it being sort of a side arc for a single character. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Very, very, very rewarding. [01:08:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Loved it. Go see Thunderbolts. [01:08:30] Speaker A: Yeah, you really should. Let me see. Do you want to do one? [01:08:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, so let's see here. This is a little outside of Purview. I won't talk a whole lot about it, but I just kind of think it's funny, you know, it's adjacent because it's a thriller. I rewatched A Simple favorite the other day because I wanted to watch another Simple Favor which just came out. I still love A Simple Favor. Love how dark it is. Blake Lively is great in it. Anna Kendrick is so good at playing, like, just the biggest dork on the planet. She's another one that I think is, like, very, like. She's, like an unconventional kind of hot girl because, like, she's not, like. It's. I don't know. She's not hot, by the way, that if she was walking down the street and she was nobody, you would ever look at her, but she is. You would not. She's a very regular looking person, but it's Fully like her. Everything that makes her so attractive. [01:09:35] Speaker A: I've never heard of A Simple Favor, btw. Never heard of it. [01:09:38] Speaker B: You've never heard about Simple Favor? [01:09:39] Speaker A: Nope. [01:09:40] Speaker B: Okay, well, Simple Favor, if you're like Mark and have never heard of it. Paul Feig movie from 2018 where Anna Kendrick plays a widowed mother living in a very rich neighborhood who's like a very much like type A overachiever type, very goofy, very dorky, doesn't fit in with any of the other parents at school or whatever, but ends up making friends with Blake Lively's character who is like this ultra rich, glamorous publicist lady or marketing lady for like the hottest, like the Tom Ford of the simple favorite universe, right? And they become friends and their sons become besties. And then one day Blake Lively drops her child off with Anna Kendrick and doesn't return. And then her body is found a week later. But there's more. And so, you know, it's sort of the untangling of this web of deception and all this kind of stuff. And it's, yeah, very fun, you know, sort of in the vein of like 90s sort of sexy thrillers and whatnot, but with a Paul Feig silliness to it as well. So love A simple favorite, but they put out a sequel. Another Simple Favor that the way I put it when I reviewed it was like this. So Keo, as we know, works conventions and conferences and whatnot. And for a long time every year he would work this conference in January in Hawaii for eye doctors called Hawaiian Eye. Okay, did they need to have a conference in Hawaii every year for optometrists? Absolutely not. Half of the optometrists just like fuck everything off and go like surf and like have fun with their friends or whatever. Gives them a chance to reconnect with the fellas they haven't seen in a year or whatever. [01:11:38] Speaker A: Network. [01:11:39] Speaker B: Yeah, sure, network, all that stuff, right? [01:11:41] Speaker A: Take pics from LinkedIn, right? [01:11:42] Speaker B: And it's a write off. So like a business trip to Hawaii. Another simple favor is that for the cast of A Simple Favor, that it was a chance for them to go and hang out in Capri together and you know, catch up or whatever. And they used a movie to make it happen. The movie itself is awful. Absolutely terrible. But I'm happy for them that they got this opportunity to go and just have fun together. Good Delight has a fan of everybody involved with this. The big the. I mean, it's got like Alice and Janney in it. It's like got like all these different People, People in the movie. And you're like, I love everybody. Movie's trash, but good for them. [01:12:29] Speaker A: Yes. Let me see. I. Once again, outside of the purview. But I will talk of First Blood, which I saw. [01:12:40] Speaker B: Yes. [01:12:41] Speaker A: This weekend. Whatever. Whatever Rambo became. And we all know what Rambo became, right? It's. It's a franchise I adore. I adore. I love it, I love it. But it's worth reminding yourself that First Blood is not what Rambo became at all. First Blood is. It's just a. It's a real movie. It's a great movie. And I don't think. I don't think Stallone gets anywhere near the credit he deserves. Again, you know, for whatever reason, his career took him in a different path, but had. Had Stallone made some different choices, he would. You would be talking about him in the same breath as De Niro and Pacino. You would. He would be absolutely one of the legacy greats because he does stuff in First Blood, which is wonderful. He is wonderful in that film. You know, he starts, he starts the film as just this Nam vet who is desperate to find anything to reconnect him to the world, to reconnect him to civilian life, just to find something to fucking bring him back into, into society. You know, he opens the film looking for an old squad mate of his, only to be told that he died of cancer that he got from Agent Orange. And from that fucking moment, the hope leaves his eyes, you know, and it's, it's. He's this, this fucking chilling disconnection in his eyes from a world that he just simply doesn't understand. And Brian Denny is fucking great. As well as the cops are shitheads, Rambo is abused and wrongfully arrested and assaulted by the cops and bang. Fucking forget it. And the, the last bit of dialogue in the film between Rambo and Troutman after the game is up and he's wreaked absolute merry havoc on this town. It is devastating. Corey, he. He just. Everything from the war just comes back through his eyes and through his voice. It is absolutely devastating what he does in that last, last kind of monologue he has in that film. And. All right, look, you know, that isn't necessarily what you think of when you, when you hear Rambo, but. No, but fuck me, man. Stallone does some absolutely trans fucking sentental work in First Blood. It is brilliant. And I feel like you really, really encourage you to read it. [01:15:40] Speaker B: I definitely want to. And I feel like that's kind of like the case with Rocky too. Right. Like, maybe not quite to the extent of the brilliance of this, but like, yeah, sure. The first Rocky is not what that became. And when you actually, like, look at the character work and everything that he was doing in that first movie, it's, it's. I didn't see it until I was in grad school and I remember being just shocked that, like, because I'd seen like Rocky 4 before, but I'd never seen like the original one. [01:16:10] Speaker A: And God, I love Rocky Force so much. [01:16:12] Speaker B: But those are very different. [01:16:15] Speaker A: Completely. Yeah, completely differently different. [01:16:17] Speaker B: Those. Yeah, you could change all the names and things like that and it would be like, yeah, sure, why not? But the first one is like, you know, so much stronger of, you know, a character story than that becomes. So it's not entirely surprising. It's just an interesting trajectory of sort of like creating these really interesting and fleshed out characters with so much going on and then they just. [01:16:43] Speaker A: Well, then the 80s has its way, doesn't it? [01:16:44] Speaker B: Then the 80s has steps in. That's exactly it, right? Cocaine creeps into everything and you get what you get. [01:16:51] Speaker A: Blockbuster culture fucking gets a grip on these characters. But listen, please don't. Don't think I'm overstating just how powerful Stallone is in First Blood. He is fucking absolutely revelatory. It's brilliant. [01:17:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I gotta, gotta watch that one. You said the version that's on Plex is a little weird, so I will. [01:17:12] Speaker A: Actually write it is a bit weird and watch this. But yeah, yeah, do. And I'm very, very keen to hear if you agree. [01:17:19] Speaker B: Nice. For Screaming chat the other night we watched Ring. The original version of the Ring. [01:17:32] Speaker A: Fucking hell. Nah, bullshit. [01:17:34] Speaker B: Waste of time. This was. I mean, not like a full waste of time, but it is. This was. The thing is like, you know, in that period in like the early 2000s, like men got really into J Horror. And it was like every time you. Every time you watched anything, it was like, ugh, it's nothing compared to the original. [01:17:53] Speaker A: He sure did. [01:17:54] Speaker B: Every single time I've watched the original of anything, I've been like, this blows. And Ring is almost the same movie as the Ring. Every beat is almost exactly the same, except it adds like more weird supernatural stuff to it. End is a like, lot slower. Like, way, way slower. And the characters are like way more overwrought. Like the. The boyfriend is like so emo that you're just like, come on, guy, have. Have a single feeling in this movie. [01:18:28] Speaker A: Guys really did get into J Horror, right? [01:18:31] Speaker B: It was like all the time. Anytime you mention anything, all men would do would be, like, nothing compared to Japanese horror. And I have not found myself wowed by any Japanese horror that I have seen since then. Like, now, as an adult with access to that, every time I watch it, I'm like, this is not as good as the one we made. I'm sorry. We did a better job. [01:18:54] Speaker A: The bit, though. The bit. Fuck. I have never recoiled from a movie like I did at the bit at the end of Ring. [01:19:02] Speaker B: What part? [01:19:03] Speaker A: The Bitman. When Sadako comes out the telly. Come on. [01:19:07] Speaker B: I mean, I've seen the Ring, so, like, I've seen the, you know, the act. The, like, other one. So it's not like it was a surprise. [01:19:15] Speaker A: Just vividly, vividly, vividly recall seeing it on a. On, you know, on a tv, in uni. And I physically recoiled from the screen. [01:19:24] Speaker B: Fuck. [01:19:24] Speaker A: Just melted me. Absolutely ruined. [01:19:27] Speaker B: Yeah. And I could see, like, if I had not seen the Ring, because when I watch the Ring, I'm always like, jesus, that is an insane moment. You know, in Ring, it's like the. The technology is so far behind the ring that you're just sitting there. Like, it doesn't look real. So it's like, it comes as like a step down. Like, it's fine. It's just like. It wasn't like the huge step up I was expecting. I was like. It is very similar. Like, most of the beats down to, like, exactly how scenes are played out are exactly the same as the Ring, but just. I think the Ring fixed some of the problems with Ring, which is what I want a remake to do. Right? Like, that's what we always say. It's like. You know, people remake movies that were already, like, perfect. Why would you do that? Why not take something that was like, yeah, it was on its way, but it could use tweaking, you know? And it's like, Ring. Yeah, it's like, it's good enough, you know? [01:20:23] Speaker A: It's the inverse of Psycho, isn't it? It's the inverse, right? Psycho. Exactly. I know, let's make it worse. [01:20:29] Speaker B: Let's just make the exact same thing, but just, like, have him masturbate. [01:20:33] Speaker A: Beating off. What if Norman Bates would beat off here? That would really put the. [01:20:38] Speaker B: This is the one thing that was absent from the original shot for shot. But let's just. [01:20:45] Speaker A: I'm gonna put in a little bit of him beating off. Hear me out. [01:20:53] Speaker B: Yeah. So Ring was, you know, it was like, it was fine. It was not like, it wasn't mind blowing, but I'M glad that I have finally after, you know, 25 years. [01:21:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:03] Speaker B: Seen it. Yes. [01:21:05] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:21:05] Speaker B: I still need to see the Canadian boy. Ryan was saying this, that the Grudge. Actually, that one, the. The J Horror. Is it J Horror? Is it K Horror? [01:21:16] Speaker A: Oh, good question. I couldn't say with authority. [01:21:19] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's called Ju On. I think it's Juan the Grudge. Yeah. But yeah, I have not seen that. And he said that one actually is legitimate. [01:21:29] Speaker A: Again, I seem to remember that being the case. Yes. There was a big period where wet horror was a thing, wasn't it? [01:21:36] Speaker B: Like, right. [01:21:38] Speaker A: Wet core, wet core, puddle core, Puddle horror. [01:21:42] Speaker B: The thing was though, so after watching Ring, I was like, I am finally going to watch Scary Movie, which I had never seen because at the age of 15 when it came out, I was like, that looks very stupid. And I don't feel like I am the target audience of this. And watching it now, I was right. There is not one single thing that I laughed at in that movie. I was like, this is woof. This is. It's worse than I thought it was. It's like if you watch something in the 2000s, like, I think I would have not liked it in 2000 for. [01:22:25] Speaker A: Exactly the same reasons. I've given all of that weighins genre a complete fucking slurp. I know it ain't for me, it's not my thing. [01:22:31] Speaker B: And so. But it's like, I know I wouldn't have liked it at the time, right? But to have not seen it and then to watch it now, Now I have 20, 25 eyes on two, so I don't even have that. Like, oh, it's normal for things to be like homophobic and misogynistic and whatnot. Like, so, like, I don't have the like lens of that either. So then it's just like there is. This is a mix of like humor for 10 year olds and like the most offensive shit you can imagine. [01:22:59] Speaker A: What in many ways the Scary Movie verse is, it's the flip side of Cabin in the woods, isn't it? It's the other side of that. [01:23:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:23:10] Speaker A: When you refer to everything with no insight at all, right. You bring no insight. [01:23:15] Speaker B: No insight. Remember when this happened? What if also like someone's boobs came out while that happened? [01:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah. What if they were stoned? [01:23:23] Speaker B: What if someone like farted? Oh, okay. Wow, you've really given me something to think about. [01:23:32] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes. Absolutely. No insight. [01:23:35] Speaker B: No insight at all. [01:23:36] Speaker A: Like Norman Bates having a wank would be the kind of thing that Scary Movie 4 would do if they were doing a riff on Psycho. Oh, dude, he's beaten off. [01:23:49] Speaker B: Yeah. That is the level of the humor. Yeah, 100%. So I've seen it now. I have seen original Ring and I have seen Scary Movie and I have been left wanting. Did you watch anything else? [01:24:04] Speaker A: I did. I will talk of one more movie. A first watch for me, you might be surprised to hear. Not the, The. The source material I've seen several times. [01:24:15] Speaker B: Okay. [01:24:16] Speaker A: But what a treat. What a treat. What a four and a half star treat. In fact, okay. It was to sit with my little mini me, my little petri dish, cultivated clone Owen. Yeah. Grown from cheek cells in a fucking test tube. To be my little doppelganger duplicate. To sit with him and watch Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd. [01:24:43] Speaker B: Huh? [01:24:44] Speaker A: You didn't see that come in, did you? [01:24:45] Speaker B: Not at all. I did not like that movie when I saw it in the theaters. So I am very surprised by this. I also, I cannot stand Sondheim. So, like, okay, I was predisposed towards not being into this movie because the music makes me want to die. [01:25:00] Speaker A: Fair enough. All very different reactions to mine. I love the musical. I've seen it on more than two or three occasions. [01:25:09] Speaker B: Do you generally like Sondheim? [01:25:13] Speaker A: I wouldn't. I wouldn't write down that I'm a Sondheim, you know, enthusiast. [01:25:17] Speaker B: Sure. [01:25:18] Speaker A: You know, But Sweeney Todd, I go big for. And gotcha. It was. It was great to kind of have a conversation with Owen about Tim Burton. It was great to have a little conversation with him about, you know, we even got into a little kind of surface conversation about what's going on visually in the film. Look, Owen, he's looking in the mirror. And the mirror's cracked, isn't it? Because sometimes good films will show you the story as well as tell you the story. [01:25:40] Speaker B: So we had that little conversation. Love that media literacy. [01:25:43] Speaker A: Really, really, really rewarding. And, you know, put the subtitles on so we could kind of, you know, match up some of that quite arcane language. Dad was on Mountain bank, you know. [01:25:55] Speaker B: Nice. What's a Mountain Bank? [01:25:58] Speaker A: Mountain Bank. A street. Mountain Bank. A charlatan. A snake oil salesman. [01:26:04] Speaker B: I'm learning, too. [01:26:05] Speaker A: Mountain Bank. Let me see. How to. How to. How to put this into perspective. You will know that I enjoy a filmmaker who will spend a career telling you one story. Yes. [01:26:22] Speaker B: Like old Jimmy C. Exactly this. [01:26:25] Speaker A: And I believe that Tim Burton is exactly such a filmmaker. You can see that. You can. You can describe. You could write on the back of a postage stamp, the headlines of his career. And they would apply to every one of his films. [01:26:41] Speaker B: Sure, yeah. Something about, like, sort of an outcasty. [01:26:44] Speaker A: It's a weird kid doing weird things in an unfamiliar place. [01:26:46] Speaker B: Right. Yeah. [01:26:47] Speaker A: There you go. [01:26:47] Speaker B: Yes. Yeah, there you go. That is it. [01:26:50] Speaker A: That's. That's Tim Burton's story. And he is so dedicated to telling that fucking story. He will tell that story in whatever fucking script you give him. [01:26:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:27:00] Speaker A: He writes. That will be the story he's telling. And he's done the same thing with a fucking Sondheim musical. Told his fucking story with it. Visually, yeah, it's beautiful. And. And I started to think about this and I started, you know, God forbid, when the day comes that he's gone, we will fucking celebrate Tim Burton. We will fucking celebrate him because you. I opened up his letterbox and I just went down his fucking catwalk. And the hit rate is astonishing. Yeah, they're duds. Yes, but who the fuck remembers them? [01:27:41] Speaker B: A lot of people only remember the Tim Burton duds. I think it so on Hell Rankers, Anna and Steve were talking about Carpenter and I trying to remember what the movie was that Anna liked Village of the Damned. [01:28:00] Speaker A: Okay. [01:28:01] Speaker B: And you know, Steve was trying to contextualize it with, like, why people hate it so much, and they consider it, like, the downfall of Carpenter. Right. Like, so you've got all these hits. All these hits, and then, you know, basically from that point forward, you get all duds as opposed to, like, the other side of being like Wes Craven. Right. Like, he made so much shit, but then, like, mid career made a whole bunch of just absolute bangers. Right? So you. You kind of forget that he made so much shit. It's surprising when you watch, like, Wes Craven movies and they suck because his. He went through that high in the middle of things. And I think that's kind of the thing with Tim Burton is that, like, he was riding high for so long and then it was like a stream of ones that were like, you can. And so that. [01:28:51] Speaker A: Yeah, you think that though. [01:28:53] Speaker B: Legacy, right. [01:28:54] Speaker A: You can count the shitters on one hand, I think. Dark Shadows, Shitter. [01:29:00] Speaker B: Oh, I love Dark Shadows. That I will disagree with. I've seen that. Probably see fair enough. 15 times. Yeah. [01:29:06] Speaker A: All right. Is two. [01:29:07] Speaker B: But yes, a lot of people hate it. Yeah. [01:29:09] Speaker A: The Alice in Wonderlands were Charlie and Chocolate Factory, maybe. Even though it's got its, like, as it's got its fans. Planet of the Apes. [01:29:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, that was pretty early. [01:29:18] Speaker A: Maybe Dumbo and Dumbo's Biggest crime is that it's in offense. Disney's Dumbo, the live action Dumbo. That was him. [01:29:24] Speaker B: I didn't even know that existed. [01:29:26] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. But everything else is just shockingly good. Everything else. [01:29:33] Speaker B: I don't like Sweeney Todd. I don't like Corpse Bottom Bride. [01:29:38] Speaker A: Okay. [01:29:40] Speaker B: Trying to think of, like, what else off the top of my head. [01:29:43] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing. [01:29:44] Speaker B: It was like that. Well, but if I ask you to name some of his Charlie and Chalka Factory, the Alice in Wonderland ones. I don't like Sweeney Todd. I didn't like Frankenweenie. Yeah. Big Eyes. I didn't make it through the whole thing. Did he direct that or was he. Yeah, he directed that. Big Eyes was a waste of time to me. Yeah. So there's like a bunch of them that I do not like at all. Ms. Peregrine's. That was terrible. [01:30:15] Speaker A: Oh, I had a solidly good time with that. [01:30:17] Speaker B: Really? Oh, I hated that one. I don't like the book either, but, yeah, no, that. That movie was unwatchable to me. So for me, there's like a ton of like, he's kind of equal on. [01:30:29] Speaker A: Maybe I'm a little bit more forgiving than you are. [01:30:31] Speaker B: Right. But my peculiar Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice. [01:30:36] Speaker A: My peculiar London accent in the first half, in the first part of this podcast. Yes. [01:30:39] Speaker B: I was going to ask about. [01:30:40] Speaker A: That was a. What now I realize was a subconscious callback to Johnny Depp's interesting choice of voice in Sweeney Todd. [01:30:50] Speaker B: Fair enough. Yeah. That is a hallmark of Johnny Depp is interesting choices of accents. [01:30:57] Speaker A: Vocally much like Sir Thomas Hardy. He will reliably do an unusual. [01:31:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Something you've never heard a person who sounds like that before. [01:31:08] Speaker A: You will not see it coming. [01:31:09] Speaker B: Yes. [01:31:10] Speaker A: But I loved it. I loved swimming Todd. [01:31:12] Speaker B: It was fantastic. I'm glad you guys enjoyed that, that time. And the other thing that we watched, of course, was with our watch along. [01:31:20] Speaker A: Oh, the watch along. What a great crowd. What a great crew. [01:31:24] Speaker B: Time. [01:31:24] Speaker A: What a great time. What great a vibe. Great atmosphere, Great chat. [01:31:28] Speaker B: Film creature from 1980. [01:31:32] Speaker A: Very disappointing. Listen, I think it should be punishable legally or some kind of legislation that if you're going to literally call the film Creature, you know, and I've paid money to see that. I didn't pay a stolen off the Internet. But if I paid money to see the film called Creature and the Creature isn't in it, I want recompense. I want justice. [01:32:00] Speaker B: Yeah, it seems fair. [01:32:02] Speaker A: Creature is terrible. It is. There's nothing to recommend other than Ferris Bueller's dad in what has to be his first is. It's either his last film pre Ferris. [01:32:12] Speaker B: Or his first film around the same time. Yeah. Depending on when it was shot. I was optimistic from like the opening scene of it. Clearly the someone's. I said, there's like a criterion or. Not criterion. It's. [01:32:26] Speaker A: There's a director's cut. Yeah. There's a Blu ray. [01:32:28] Speaker B: Well, no, but like the. The Blu ray is like arrow or someone like that, like put out this Blu Ray of it. So it's been remastered. So the sound is actually really good in this movie. And so from the beginning of it, it like starts with this scene with these, like two, you know, astronaut guys or whatever talking to each other before one of them inevitably gets creatured. And I was like, the dialogue is actually pretty good. Like, it sounded like real people just sounded like two dads joking around or whatever while they were on the job. And the sound was really. I was like, oh, we're off to a really good start here. And yeah, that was. That was where it peaked, was the jokes between two guys in the beginning. [01:33:11] Speaker A: Of the movie goes nowhere. No momentum to the film. No kind of. It's not propulsive. There's no kind of escalating events. It's. It's an absolute fucking stinker. [01:33:22] Speaker B: Yeah. There was a point at which I was like, oh, wow. They're like explaining what has transpired in this movie and like, what the creature is with, like at the end of the movie before the credit scroll. And then I looked, I was like, oh, no, there's still 20 minutes left of this. [01:33:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:33:35] Speaker B: Somehow more things are going to happen, I guess. [01:33:38] Speaker A: And yet they didn't. [01:33:39] Speaker B: And then they didn't. [01:33:40] Speaker A: Nope. Impossible to recommend. So don't be watching that. But that said, you know, you don't put. You don't put conclave on a watch along do. [01:33:48] Speaker B: Exactly. Like, we knew what we were in for, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, we have done a couple of genuinely good movies like the Ring or Prey or things like that, but, you know, creatures. [01:34:00] Speaker A: But this was not one of them. This was. The pleasure here was all about the company and a pleasure. It was indeed, friends. So thank you very much indeed for those who attended. It was lovely to see Walt. [01:34:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it was wonderful. Much laughter and love was shared. [01:34:13] Speaker A: Yes, yes, yes, yes. [01:34:15] Speaker B: So we're gonna get today now to the topic that we meant to get to last week. And really this is just an opportunity for Mark and I to info dump each about a person that we Think a lot about who takes up a lot of our brain energy. Today we're going to talk a little bit with you about grifters and we see them all the time. From your Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame, to fake heiress Anna Delvey, to Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, to cancer faker Belle Gibson, to the myriad randos on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter selling you supplements and weight loss lollipops and miracle drugs and so on. [01:34:53] Speaker A: From a certain perspective, right, we are both here in the UK and you in the United States of America in the thrall of grifters, right? [01:35:05] Speaker B: Yes. [01:35:05] Speaker A: On a global fucking scale. In the grifter era, Brexit was a grift, you know. [01:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:12] Speaker A: Populism is a grift. Trump be grifting all the time. [01:35:18] Speaker B: All the time, absolutely. [01:35:20] Speaker A: So this, you know, on both micro macro fucking global social levels, we are all in the grip of the grift right now, being sold a fucking fugazi, you know? [01:35:33] Speaker B: Yes. And an article on Internet isscary.org, which I love the name of this website, introduces the grifter thusly, quote. Where scammers strike quickly and move on, grifters play a longer, more sophisticated game. They build communities, cultivate authority and create ecosystems of trust, all to enable sustained exploitation. Understanding the grifter means understanding how trust itself can become a weapon. Yeah, I love that. And completely speaks to what you said about sort of living in this time of grift upon grift upon grift, you. [01:36:10] Speaker A: Know, I mean, socially. Right. I recently read a book by the name of Minority Rule by a journalist, an academic, and punned it over here by the name of Ash Saka. And that really does bring into light the grift that we're all in the grip of over here in the uk, this grift that. The enemy is one another. Not the fucking billionaires, not the politicians, not the rich, not capitalism. The enemy is someone who looks different to you or who has different fucking predilections to you or speaks a different way to you. They're the enemy. Don't aim your fucking fury upwards. No, no, no, no, no. In fight, fight amongst yourselves. That's the fucking grift, you know. [01:36:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:36:54] Speaker A: And I think I mentioned on our way out of the cast last week that, hey, individual grifters, I have a kind of begrudging, kind of. I quite like a grifter, Right. In the same way as. As a. In work, right. If. If I've invited you to a Meeting. Right. And if you turn up late with a coffee, I like you because you clearly have so little regard for the. The framework that we're working all in here. You simply give that little of a. You're gonna turn up late with a. [01:37:30] Speaker B: This happened when I went with my best friend to her ultrasound that, like, her husband walked in late with Starbucks and the tech looked about to do a murder. Only your child that you're missing. Finding out the gender of. No big deal. [01:37:49] Speaker A: But if. If you do that, what you're telling me is that you've seen through the matrix, right? [01:37:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:37:54] Speaker A: You know what I mean? [01:37:55] Speaker B: Nothing applies. [01:37:56] Speaker A: We're on your time and it's cool as fuck. [01:38:00] Speaker B: And that's one of the things that I kept reading about sort of grifters in general and sort of the. The way that they thrive is like, there's a part of us that is like, open to being scammed and to being grifted on and like, that begrudgingly respects the grift. And so I want to give. This is a context, this is a story, if you will, an ongoing story that I have wanted to talk about because it is a thing that I think about every single day of my life. Every day I check in on this grift and it is absolutely fascinating to me. [01:38:41] Speaker A: Nice. Nice. You've got me hooked. [01:38:44] Speaker B: I'm on the fucking line here. Yeah. And it's not so you. We've talked about this many times, right? Like, people who ask for mutual aid on social media and all that kind of stuff and how I have no problem with this or whatever. I live in a country where life is extremely hard. You gotta do what you gotta do. [01:39:03] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:39:04] Speaker B: But there are people who take advantage of that. Right. And so this, this is a small scale grift, you know, not a Brexit, not a Trump, anything like that, but one that has fascinated me for five years now. A doozy of a grift, but one you will absolutely never see on the news or facing any repercussions at all. And a grift that's probably being carried out by thousands of other people every single day on our timelines, which is what makes it so interesting to me. [01:39:40] Speaker A: Wow. [01:39:42] Speaker B: So, as you'll recall, in 2020, I nuked the Twitter I'd been using since 2008 and started a new one. And this time I said I was going to focus my follows on people in the world of science, nature conservation, etc. Pieced out of my other account. Yeah, pieced out of my other account. Basically because of centrists and liberals who were dedicating all their energy to blaming anyone who at any point supported Bernie for basically every loss that Democrats had ever suffered. And I was like, I'm out. I'm just going to chill with folks who are actively making the world a better place, instead of people who are spending all their time placing the blame, like you said, on their peers, on the people around them who can't look at the structure and just want to blame other people. So I started following said sciency people, and one of them was a young black woman who claimed to be an aspiring aerospace engineer in her fifth year of her degree at a university in Alabama. She posted lots of fun science communication stuff, and people invited her on podcasts to discuss things like shuttle launches and her passion for being an astronaut someday. Pretty standard stuff for science communicators on Twitter. I don't know if you follow any of those kinds of people, but, like, it's pretty basic. There's. It's kind of like an insular community. There's like, a handful of people who, like, really are sort of known in the community. And, yeah, they go on each other's podcasts and they just talk about their love of science and try to get other people to be into it too wholesome. So I followed a lot of those. What'd you say? [01:41:17] Speaker A: Wholesome. [01:41:18] Speaker B: Wholesome. Super wholesome. Occasionally, though, she would post that she was struggling with bills and ask if people could help her to pay them. And as we've discussed, I have absolutely no problem with mutual aid posts, even though that's not really what mutual aid is. But, you know, it's fine. Poverty is expensive, and a lot of folks in this country are excluded for various reasons from being able to get ahead. So, fine, ask away. But I started to notice there was something off about this gal's request. For one, they seemed to happen too often. She seemed to never have money for her car payment. Every month. It was like it snuck up on her and she didn't know it was coming. Just like, oh, my God, how am I going to pay for my car? Please? My account is in the negatives. Can someone help me pay my car payment? And then the request would disappear, then deleted. She just delete it from the timeline, right? Then insurance and utilities, always in the negatives every month. Then rent, then her school meal plan, and then school. She was gonna have to drop out of school in her fifth year if she didn't get, like, $7,000 for tuition. And she did. She raised the Money. But then the next semester, she announced she decided not to attend school that term due to not being able to afford it and mental health schemes, setbacks. She said she would go back next January and finish. Now, just to zoom forward before I go back and explain more. As far as I can tell, she never finished school. There is no record of her ever having graduated. I have, like, gone to the school website and looked. There's no person by her name who has graduated from this school. And she has a unique name. It's not like there's like a dozen others. Right. [01:43:03] Speaker A: Are you prepared to share this name? [01:43:05] Speaker B: No, I'm not gonna share it. I'm not going to do that. [01:43:10] Speaker A: You're right. That's not what we do. We're not. [01:43:11] Speaker B: That's not what. That's not what we do. [01:43:12] Speaker A: No, no. [01:43:14] Speaker B: But, yeah, this. This person cannot find a record of her graduating. And to go back, I started kind of getting fixated on this and I started looking at her replies and sort of screenshotting her requests since they kept disappearing. I was like, I just. I want to see, like, how often she's asking for things and stuff like that. Right. In one exchange on Twitter, someone asked if she was in the aerospace engineering program at that university. And she was like, sure am. And then that person was like, oh, that's weird, because it's a small department and I'm in it and I've never seen you. And she had all kinds of excuses about commuting and not being on campus a lot except for classes. It was like, really sus. I was like, that's. That's pretty weird. [01:44:01] Speaker A: Sounds like bullshit. [01:44:03] Speaker B: Sounds a little like bullshit. And I was not the only one noticing a whole Twitter account then popped up to follow her scamming. It was called, like, her name is a scammer. That was the thing. And that person started posting, you know, screenshots of her requests and things like that. Receipts. Yeah, exactly. And the requests are almost like clockwork. She'll build up to them. Like, she'll discuss how her mental health is in the trash, or her birthday is coming up and so on. And then bam. Mutual aid requests related to those things. It's like building an alibi. She's making you. Oh, spreading these seeds so, you know, these things are going wrong in her life. So then she can ask for money about them. So then she gets married and has a kid. Now the requests turn towards the kid, please, I can't afford diapers or formula. Can someone help me? I'm Screenshotting she's requesting $80 for diapers pretty much every week. Now, I don't have kids, but I'm pretty sure if it was $80 for diapers weekly, nobody would be having children. I even googled it, and diapers on the high end will cost about that much per month. But she's deleting the request afterwards, so people aren't seeing that she's asking this every single week. And Twitter has an algorithm, of course, so all of her tens of thousands of followers aren't necessarily seeing her ask every single time. It's just whenever Twitter shows it to them. I noticed that she starts implying that she's a single mom, acting like she needs to afford all of these things on her own, and she's just a poor, poor, struggling, aspiring astronaut. Week after week, same requests. She's asking for a grand or more each month. The Same article on internetiscary.com that I referenced before has another great, great quote. It says, grifters are masters of legitimacy laundering. Love that phrase. They often begin with genuine expertise or valuable insights, gradually mix in fraudulent claims, and explain exploitative practices like slowly boiling a frog. They increase their manipulation so gradually that followers often don't notice the shift. And that's exactly what happened here. She built up legitimacy posting all sorts of science communication things, and then switched to the grift so expertly over time, her followers didn't necessarily notice. And by the way, I went and just, like, looked at some of the, like, podcasts that she was on and stuff like that, and. And this was phenomenal. I was, like, dying laughing watching this. So, like, there was one that she had claimed that she had published the first, some sort of, like, rocket propulsion formula or whatever. She was the first black woman to publish this rocket propulsion formula like that. Right? So I'm like, whoa. So I Google, and there is no record of anything of the sort, which seems like the kind of thing that would, like, make at least the school newspaper, right? [01:47:05] Speaker A: If you're gonna. If you're gonna, yeah, start small, claim to have invented something small. [01:47:10] Speaker B: And so I'm like, okay, but, like, I'm gonna click this podcast and. And see what she has to say about it. And the beginning of the podcast, it was like a live stream. This group of people live streamed all the time, these science communication things. And the beginning of the podcast, the person's like, unfortunately, she couldn't make it today because there was a power outage, and so she couldn't log in for the chat. Come on now. Oh, there's A power outage. Is that what happened? [01:47:43] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:47:43] Speaker B: She couldn't come on to talk about her, her cool rocket propulsion thing. The dog ate my homework kind of shit, 100%. And so then I find a couple that she actually was on and Mark, I know more about space than this woman does this. It was like I could not believe the audacity that she had to go on these podcasts with real scientists who are talking about like their work and all this kind of stuff and just be like, I just love space so much. I'm going to be like an astronaut someday. And like I'm just really invented rocket propulsion. Like she just had nothing to say say on any of these things. It's like very clear when you watch them that like she's bullshitting and not bullshitting. Well, bullshitting like a teenager who did not do the homework. I was like, okay, fascinating. But who's gonna like invite like a, a young black woman in STEM onto their podcast and be like, are you lying? [01:48:39] Speaker A: Exactly. Take her down. [01:48:40] Speaker B: Like, she very much has herself positioned in a place where it's really, really hard to like call her out on this. So fast forward to now, literally five years later, and she's still doing this, but of course has switched to Blue Sky. But Blue sky doesn't have an algo like Twitter's. So people can see this stuff in timeline order as she's posting it. Right. And she also never really established herself as a scicom person on Bluesky. There's no more podcast experiences and she doesn't even really pretend to that now. Like she, it's like in her bio or whatever, she does not post any science communication based stuff. She mostly just posts puns and mutual aid requests. But still she's made it onto some SciCom starter packs from people who knew her on Twitter. But since she doesn't post science content, her. Her account growth has been pretty minimal. She only has like 5000 followers or something like that as opposed to having like 40,000 on Twitter. [01:49:45] Speaker A: So still we've got like 160 odd followers. [01:49:48] Speaker B: Well, it's also like a. So she's in starter packs, of course. So people just kind of follow whole starter packs. They're not necessarily actively being like, I click on this person to follow. They just click the whole starter pack. And like also she follows up, follows people back. It's like a follow for follow thing anyway. So like she follows like 4,000 people or something like that, you know, so it's not as, yeah, not as impressive as it sounds. If we just Followed everyone on Blue Sky. We could also get 7,000 followers, but again, we would rather die than do anything that would help grow this podcast. But okay, so she persists. And the grift sort of has been morphing as a result. Years ago, she had people add her on Instagram, right? With the same username that she had on Twitter. So I've been following her on Instagram for this whole time as well. But she seems to have forgotten this, which means that there's sort of a built in fact checking mechanism here. So she claims to have gotten an aerospace job. Hooray. Happy days are good for her. [01:50:57] Speaker A: Yes. Yeah, no more panhandling on social media. [01:51:01] Speaker B: Yeah, could it be the end of the grift? But I messaged my friend Jay, who also has been watching this unfold for years and was like, okay, how long until she loses this pretend job and needs money again? And then we went back and forth trying to predict why she was still going to need to beg despite the new fancy job. Because, like, there aren't low paying aerospace engineering jobs, right? Like, that's not a thing. You don't work in the mailroom at NASA and call it an aerospace engineering job. So if she really had a job, she'd be on her way out of poverty, right? [01:51:40] Speaker A: But nay, she's still at it. [01:51:42] Speaker B: She's still at it. It starts with, I don't get paid for my aerospace job for two weeks and I'm in the negatives. Can anyone help? And then the two weeks seem to stretch. A week later, there's still two weeks, days later, still two weeks till finally it's, I got paid, but bills took everything I have and now I can't eat. Can anyone help? Car payment, insurance, food, her son's daycare. Every week, these bills and not a single dime to pay them, despite her. [01:52:10] Speaker A: Aerospace job, despite having invented rocket propulsion. [01:52:14] Speaker B: Right, exactly. Her dad invented the post it. And yet still she cannot pay. And then she starts being unable to get to work because she has no gas for her car and no money to pay for her kid to get to daycare. She's missing days. Please, can anyone help her get to work? Meanwhile, on Instagram, she's posting pictures of herself with a brand new weave in the driver's seat of her car. Mark, do you know how much a weave costs? [01:52:46] Speaker A: Oh, I can only speculate. $500? [01:52:49] Speaker B: Yes. Like, honestly. [01:52:51] Speaker A: Oh, wow. Really? [01:52:51] Speaker B: Yeah, you're talking like a low end, like 200, like a, you know, high end. And she's got a nice weave, so we're doing like 500 ish dollars of weave that she's got, brand new weave. She's sitting in her car, she's posting pictures of, like, taking her son to. To get, like, professional photos done. She is, like, posting all these things of, like, taking him to get, like, haircuts. So, you know, not stuff. [01:53:19] Speaker A: You know I'm gonna be looking into this, don't you? You know, I'm gonna. [01:53:22] Speaker B: I'll tell you who this is. I'm just not gonna, like, put her on blast. Everyone who listens to this podcast, and you will be, oh, man, you'll be fascinated by this person. But. So then she gets bit by a dog and she's got to take time off work to heal from the bite. [01:53:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:53:42] Speaker B: Then she gets the flu and she can't go to work. Then her grandmother is dying and has dementia and she needs to take time off to go see her. Then her friend dies. Then she gets divorced from the husband she hasn't spoken of in years. And she needs money because divorce is expensive. By the way, there was a point I forgot that this happened, but Jay brought this up, that she had implied on Twitter that she was. She had left an abusive relationship. But, like, her husband was also on Twitter. And so then everyone was like, oh, my God, not so and so. And then she had to, like, backtrack and be like, oh, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm talking about. It's a different situation. It was like, everyone knows who your husband is. What are you doing? [01:54:31] Speaker A: This is not the type of grifter that I warm to, by the way. [01:54:34] Speaker B: Right. This is a fucked up sort of grift. But again, one that probably goes on all the time. It's so small scale. Like, there will never be any form of consequence for doing this, except maybe someday she just will not be able to pull it off anymore. She won't get any money. But. So she gets divorced. And she really did get divorced, but on Blue sky, she talks about it, like, in the same sort of, like, veiled he abused me kind of things or whatever. And I have left this man or whatever. On her Instagram, she's like, he and I are the best of friends and you know all this kind of stuff. And you're like, okay, interesting. That's a very different story that we've got here. So she needs money for her divorce, and then somehow, in the midst of her not being able to leave her home because she has no gas, no daycare, is hypoglycemic. And has no food and has split from her husband. She suddenly has a miscarriage and ptsd, which she has self diagnosed and is going to need to be out of work for a long while to heal from it again. I follow her on Instagram and she has been showing full body shots of herself with no baby bump. So if she did miscarry, she is not nearly far enough along to be in a week's of recovery situation. [01:55:51] Speaker A: No dog bite. [01:55:53] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, like where was the dog bite? Where was all of this stuff, you know, in your Instagram pictures Here, like I said. She's also insinuating that her husband was an abusive monster while talking about how good of friends they are despite their divorce. And their requests are coming harder and faster now. Every few days showing screenshots allegedly of her counts, showing her hundreds of thousands of dollars in the negatives. Not hundreds, thousands, hundred, 2000s of dollars in the negatives. If this aerospace job were real, which it isn't. She's missed at least two months of the two and a half months she's worked there, but still claims that she is absolutely working at this aerospace job and it is unhinged. And I'm literally only scratching the surface here. There's many more details to all of this stuff. [01:56:41] Speaker A: This is a hell of a grift. [01:56:42] Speaker B: The, yeah, vaguest outline of a grift. And it has consum. Consumed me. Like I said, for five years I think about this every single day. Me and Jay check in. What's. What's the situation with her today? Because it is. It has to be working right? Like she has to be getting something from this. Even if it's just a little at a time. It has to be worth it for her to keep it up and just like keep posting this shit every single day. [01:57:10] Speaker A: You won't agree to this, but I, I wonder if we position ourselves as like a sci tech podcast, this inviter on. You know what I mean? If we're doing like an astrophysics special series and we're reaching out to trailblazers and innovators of, you know, black excellence in the aerospace field. [01:57:35] Speaker B: We can't grift back, Mark. We can't. [01:57:38] Speaker A: That's kind of what I'm getting at. Can we reverse grift? [01:57:42] Speaker B: Right? In this case, I don't think so. But also like, the thing is, I think she's completely like given up on that. Like she knows. [01:57:51] Speaker A: Oh, okay, okay, okay. She's ditched that angle. [01:57:53] Speaker B: She can't bullshit through that anymore. So, like, you know, saying she has an aerospace job. [01:58:00] Speaker A: Fascinating. [01:58:01] Speaker B: Is as far as she's gonna go, but she's not gonna, like, go on and try to like. [01:58:04] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, I was, you know, I had warm feelings towards her until she brought in. Until, you know, her. Her husband or ex got sucked into her orbit. [01:58:15] Speaker B: Right, yeah. [01:58:16] Speaker A: Deceit, you know. [01:58:17] Speaker B: Exactly. Then I was like, yeah, she posted. Oh, the. The story has changed too. Right. Like, so she had. A couple weeks ago, she had left him and they were divorcing, but now he's abandoned her and left her with all the bills while pregnant and whatnot. Which is wild. Also, like, I looked at like, their. His Facebook and it's like he and the kid are just like hanging out with his parents all the time. Like, they clearly have like, local relatives and stuff like that that the kid is with constantly. Like, there's no. Nobody has been abandoned here or anything like that. Like, they're. They're all hanging out. It's fine. And like. Yeah, that's what makes it like, really. I mean, the idea of someone lying about, like, being abused and having miscarriages, that takes it beyond it being. [01:59:06] Speaker A: It does, it does. But that's fascinating in itself, isn't it? Because to the people in her personal life who I dare say she walks amongst day in, day out, having no. [01:59:15] Speaker B: Idea, no idea that she's doing this. Right. No thing. I was like, that there's this shadow life. Yeah. I said to Jay, I was like, I'm not going to do this. But like, there's a chaotic part of me that just wants, like, to screenshot what she's saying about her husband and send it to him. Just be like, wow, why are you such a deadbeat? And like, I'm not going to. I'm not that person. You know, I'm not getting involved in someone else's life. I am watching from afar. That's why I'm also not actually saying this person's name. But, you know, it's just that thing where it's like. Like you're on the Internet, like, saying all this stuff and like, you said her. I am sure nobody who knows her in person has any sense that. [01:59:57] Speaker A: That's fascinating to me that that speaks to a potential, you know, what's the word I'm looking for a kind of self confidence bordering on narcissism. That you just do that completely invisibly. Dr. Sargent would have prescribed eight months. [02:00:15] Speaker B: Of definitely a wayward woman and a. [02:00:18] Speaker A: Very vigorous program of electroconvulsive therapy for her. [02:00:23] Speaker B: Yeah. But it's so Fascinating to me that people can, you know, pull these kinds of things because it's like the. Like, I feel like there has to be personality disorders at the root of this stuff, and maybe it's just a detachment, like, through. One of the things that living in the screen era has done is make it so easy for us to see people as humans, maybe. And, like, did you see Beekeeper? [02:00:48] Speaker A: The movie? [02:00:48] Speaker B: Yeah. Jason Statham. It's great. But, like, the thing about, like, in Beekeeper is it's like all these people sitting in a room, like, taking advantage of, like, old people from, like, a room full of computers or whatever, where it's like they don't have any connection to the people on the other end. [02:01:08] Speaker A: Degrees of separation. Yes. [02:01:09] Speaker B: Right. Like, Jason Statham, like, you have killed someone important to me and now you all are gonna die or whatever. But, like, there's like, this degree of separation by just doing things on a screen that I feel like breeds some weird sociopathy. Wouldn't be there. [02:01:26] Speaker A: Well, yes, right. And all the time, you know, you get reach outs from grifters trying their fucking luck. I mean, twice in the past week, I've had a text that says, hi, Mum. Save, save. This is my new. This is my new number. Save. My new number, Mum. [02:01:47] Speaker B: Right, yeah, you know. Oh, this is your mom. Oh, I'm so sorry. You sound nice. Where are you from? [02:01:53] Speaker A: No, no, no, but this. This is a different scam. This isn't the kind of the. The wrong number scam. This is. This is actually. [02:02:01] Speaker B: Oh, it's actually trying to commit to. It's your mother. [02:02:03] Speaker A: Yes, exactly. And then we'll say, oh, I've got a new phone. My phone broke. Can you send me money for a new phone? [02:02:08] Speaker B: Ah, yeah. [02:02:10] Speaker A: My response is always, what's my name? [02:02:14] Speaker B: These days, though, things have gotten so advanced. Like, even just. It was. Has to have been like six or seven years ago now that my friend's dad was taken in by one of the things where they had someone pretend to be his daughter and called and asked for ransom. And she's, like, screaming in the background or whatever and all that stuff. And he. It was awful, and he panicked and he went to. She worked at my university. He came to the school still on the phone, and was like, in the quad screaming like, amanda, Amanda, your dad. No, not my dad. Her dad. [02:02:51] Speaker A: Oh, right, fine. [02:02:52] Speaker B: Okay, sorry. My friend's dad came to the school. He's an elderly man, you know, who was like, oh, my God, my daughter has been kidnapped. Or whatever. Came to. To her place. Of work screaming for her and you know, thankfully small school. Someone was immediately like, I will go get Amanda. No worries, she's here. And she came out like, what? And this is before they started do it. They do this now with AI voices so like they can fully, like impersonate your loved one. [02:03:21] Speaker A: Recently, my mother thought she was in a conversation via WhatsApp with Paul Hollywood from Bake Off. [02:03:28] Speaker B: This is a, like, this happens all the time with my old mother. Yeah. Like it's, it's constant. [02:03:35] Speaker A: I could find you the text now. She replied. After a while, she replied to me, was a scam. Lol. [02:03:44] Speaker B: Okay, that's amazing. How did, did you ask her about it? I'm curious. Like, how did it. [02:03:49] Speaker A: I don't know how it plays out. [02:03:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:03:52] Speaker A: But she, she, Paul Hollywood is texting me, exclamation mark, exclamation mark. Mama goes quiet. And then like two or three days later. It was a scam. Lol. [02:04:05] Speaker B: It happens all the time. And it's just lucky that like, she didn't give this person money or anything like that, you know? [02:04:13] Speaker A: But they only have to be successful once, don't they? [02:04:15] Speaker B: Right, Exactly. [02:04:16] Speaker A: The rate of return versus effort has to be huge. [02:04:19] Speaker B: It's like, you know the one that was in the news a month or so or a couple months ago with the woman who thought that she was in a relationship with Brad Pitt with the like horribly photoshopped things of him, but she gave him like 70 grand or something like that. Like, that's all you need. [02:04:35] Speaker A: But then on the other hand, on the other hand, which must be fueling that fucking fire, you've got Mercedes Monet who is charging like for an automated text bot service, $99 a month. [02:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah. Or Mark Wahlberg's prayer app or whatever. Right, Hang on. [02:04:54] Speaker A: If you can communicate with me, why, why isn't this Paul Hollywood technique? [02:04:57] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, right. Like we know that's a thing you can do now. Like, you know, I can get in contact with celebs simply by paying X subscription fee or whatever. So yeah, sure. Why wouldn't Paul Hollywood send me a Facebook message? [02:05:12] Speaker A: It's a grift. It's a grift, friends. And you know, maybe it adds context, maybe it gives you a little bit of power almost to look around, look around your situation and at the fucking information receiving from who and just ask, who is fucking grifting me today? [02:05:32] Speaker B: Yes. Right. Who's your grifter? Who is. You were real excited to tell me about. [02:05:36] Speaker A: Well, grifter here. Well, again, we've we've hit two hours, so. [02:05:40] Speaker B: Oh no. [02:05:41] Speaker A: I might even keep it in my pocket for another week. I might keep it in my pocket. But what I will do, right, what I will do, I'll give you a little tip. Tease. [02:05:50] Speaker B: Yeah, tease. On maximum. [02:05:52] Speaker A: I'm gonna just tickle you in a little bit. I'm gonna send you a photo and I'd like you to describe this image for me. What do you see? There you go. Just describe this image. What is this that I've sent you? [02:06:06] Speaker B: Look closely. It is a. [02:06:08] Speaker A: Describe it for our listeners. [02:06:09] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a hand holding some sort of device. It's a plastic, black, rectangular plastic box with an antenna. Like an old radio. Would have had an extendable antenna coming out of it. Could not tell you what this device is supposed to do. [02:06:29] Speaker A: Well, because I love this grift, I'll give you the Cliffs Notes, right? I'll just, I'll, I'll, I'll just smash you through this. What you're looking at there, what, what you are looking at in that image is a device which was developed in the 1990s, right? This was called the Gopher. Okay? [02:06:50] Speaker B: Gopher. [02:06:50] Speaker A: Okay, The Gopher developed in the States by a guy called Malcolm Stig Rowe. And the purpose of the Gopher was to detect lost golf balls. [02:07:02] Speaker B: Nice. Okay, right, sure, yeah. [02:07:04] Speaker A: This is a device which you would take out on the green. Ah, lost my golf balls. Whip out the Gopher. It'll find your golf ball for you. Right? [02:07:12] Speaker B: Uh huh. [02:07:13] Speaker A: Now, Malcolm Stig Row, he thinks to himself, wait a fucking minute, I can. I got a little idea here. He repurposes the device into a device which he claims can detect narcotics. [02:07:31] Speaker B: Did it work for the golf balls? Like, first and foremost, was it ever a thing that worked? [02:07:35] Speaker A: Did it? Fuck. [02:07:36] Speaker B: Okay, it's divining rods for golf ball. [02:07:39] Speaker A: Exactly. And this device, I think it's probably worth pointing out at this point, costs something like $2 to assemble. [02:07:45] Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Yeah. [02:07:47] Speaker A: He convinces schools, local law enforcement agencies and sells this device to fucking police under the auspices that it can detect drugs. [02:08:01] Speaker B: Oh my gosh. Yeah, now I see why you respect this guy already. [02:08:06] Speaker A: Oh, big time. And through the 90s, this, this gains traction to the point where the FBI put out communications to law enforcement. They put out comms saying, do not buy the fucking device off this guy. It is horseshit. So, right, the jig is up, right? [02:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:08:25] Speaker A: Malcolm Stegro, he's like, oh, fuck. Oh, better fucking exit this. [02:08:29] Speaker B: How much was he selling it for? [02:08:31] Speaker A: Oh, wait, I'm not even. [02:08:33] Speaker B: Oh, you haven't gotten there. Okay, I thought I missed it. Go ahead. [02:08:36] Speaker A: So he relocates to the UK. [02:08:39] Speaker B: Oh boy. [02:08:40] Speaker A: Right, 2000, 2005, 2009, love, a grifter. [02:08:44] Speaker B: Who, when the jig is up, just. [02:08:45] Speaker A: Moves, just takes it elsewhere. Sells his monorail in the next town. [02:08:50] Speaker B: Exactly. [02:08:51] Speaker A: Over here in the uk, he forms, he builds a kind of a crew. He hooks up with a couple by the name of Samuel and Joan Tree who work in the security industry, right? They hook up with some salesmen, a guy by the name of Gary Bolton, a guy by the name of James McCormick, and they develop the gopher into a modified version which they claim can detect bombs. [02:09:17] Speaker B: Bombs, Honestly? Listen, that is more reasonable to me than the drugs because this looks like something like you. I mean, it doesn't look like it does anything. It looks like a piece of plastic with an antenna sitting on it. [02:09:31] Speaker A: They were building these in their garden shed for £2 a time. I swear to the Christ. They were building these. [02:09:36] Speaker B: You told me it was to detect like a form of like metal or something. That would make more sense than how the. Is that supposed to find drugs? Like what, what element of that would find drugs? [02:09:47] Speaker A: But they, they demoed this at kind of trade fairs, arms shows. Like it started getting international traction. And Corey, they started to sell this device under a load of different names, right? The ADE651, the Alpha 6, the Mole Programmable Detection System, the Quadro Tracker. One version of it was called the Sniff X. [02:10:13] Speaker B: Amazing. And then they're just fucking with people at that point. [02:10:17] Speaker A: Not just people. Nations. By the year 2000, right again, two bucks a time, two great British pounds a time to build one of these fuckers in their shed. And they were selling them for 22 grand a piece. [02:10:33] Speaker B: £22,000. [02:10:35] Speaker A: I'm fucking serious. In one case, they sold one of these devices for 500 grand, right? And they had clients, check this shit out. They had clients globally. Bahrain, Djibouti, Egypt, India, Georgia, Iraq, Lebanon, Mexico, Pakistan, Niger, Syria, Thailand, Uzbekistan. Iraq, right? Iraq were their largest purchaser who invested 53 million. [02:11:10] Speaker B: Oh my. Did anyone, like have them do a demonstration first? [02:11:16] Speaker A: Well, this is where grift becomes fucking large scale geopolitical fucking like this. [02:11:23] Speaker B: You are in too deep at this point. This is too far. This is like you're about to. Your car is about to find a bomb. [02:11:32] Speaker A: Well, exactly this. All of these countries were going through various degrees of, you know, civil and international conflict. This put a lot of lives at risk, you know, Thailand bought 1400 of the Mexico, bought 1200 of them. They printed out, you know, the glossiest brochures and, and, you know, promotional videos advertising their devices. They, the marketing claim that if you changed the kind of card that you insert into the gopher, it can, it can, it can detect explosives, a varying range of drugs. You know, you just, you just pop in the right cart, pop in the right, you know, the plug and that changes its functionality. [02:12:16] Speaker B: Incredible. [02:12:18] Speaker A: Incredible shit. But then obviously, reports start coming back from the us. [02:12:24] Speaker B: This doesn't seem to fucking do anything right. [02:12:27] Speaker A: UK and US military personnel stationed in Iraq start coming back with the reports that this shit doesn't fucking work. Right. [02:12:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:12:35] Speaker A: Meanwhile, RO and his crew are still here in the UK and they start getting investigated by the Avon and Somerset police where they live. The Home Office gets involved. There's a BBC get involved on like Newsnight. They do a documentary on these fucking absolute legends of the grass. [02:12:54] Speaker B: Imagining like, you know, UK authorities showing up to, like, their, their house, going into the backyard and finding, like, middle school kids assembling these things. [02:13:04] Speaker A: Well, that's not too far from the truth. Like, the manufacturing was all done on house, on, on, you know, private property. Let me see. Government kind of puts an export ban on these things. You can't send them to Iraq anymore, you can't send them to Afghanistan anymore. And they get arrested big time. Like, big time. [02:13:27] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:13:28] Speaker A: It was just in the last couple of weeks that the main crew, Malcolm Stig, Row, he's still, I believe, under trial. No conviction of his has been reported, but the market does 10 years in prison, seven years in prison. You know what I mean? They, they've all done real time for this, but they made million dollars, untold millions. Like I said, Iraq invested phenomenal amounts of money. [02:13:56] Speaker B: Remember a few weeks ago when we were talking about like the organ harvesting and you were like, how do, like whole governments and things like that fall for this? [02:14:06] Speaker A: Great point. [02:14:07] Speaker B: You make a great point, you guys. Someone take the thing apart. Like, look at what. It doesn't look like it does anything. It's a. Looks like one of those ads Richard always sends us off of, like TEMU or whatever. Like, this is not a real thing. [02:14:25] Speaker A: If anything, maybe I would say like, maybe like a pocket theremin at best. [02:14:29] Speaker B: If I was being like, maybe you'll get some sweet spooky tunes out of this thing. Yeah, I would. Looking at this, I think my closest, if I were like to guess would be it is some sort of radio. Like, what's crazy is the antenna that's a receiver, right? [02:14:49] Speaker A: It's an aerial. Yeah. [02:14:50] Speaker B: So like what? [02:14:51] Speaker A: It's like a car aerial that they've snapped off and chucked. [02:14:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:14:54] Speaker A: Walkman. [02:14:55] Speaker B: So like, just think about it. Like it's supposed to detect something. It is supposed to take in something and detect it. And they have put a receiver of waves on like. [02:15:12] Speaker A: Yeah. Incredible. [02:15:13] Speaker B: It's so obvious. It's amazing. [02:15:16] Speaker A: Jesus. One of the team. One of the team after arrest, forfeited 8 million in assets. In assets. [02:15:23] Speaker B: It's crazy. Yeah, Absolutely nuts. [02:15:27] Speaker A: Just the audacity. The audacity, yes. The fucking balls on this crew. But moving into a fucking very dangerous market with the fucking Iraqi military, Afghanistan. [02:15:38] Speaker B: Military, genuinely, this is the kind of stuff that like gets you killed. You know, aside from all the other people it potentially could get killed. This is the kind of thing that like you fuck with the government of a foreign, you know, country and like this is the kind of thing where you end up dead. [02:15:55] Speaker A: Oh, completely. [02:15:56] Speaker B: They're lucky they're just arrested. [02:15:57] Speaker A: Mexico, for fuck's sake. In Mexico. Where? [02:16:01] Speaker B: Unreal. [02:16:02] Speaker A: Where until quite recently the fucking Mexicans were still trying to use these fuckers. [02:16:07] Speaker B: Wow. [02:16:08] Speaker A: You know what I mean? They were still whipping out the fucking gopher to look for, you know, and. [02:16:12] Speaker B: It is, it's glorified divining rods. It's, you know, finding water with two, you know, sticks kind of situation. Like there it is just so clearly nothing to it. [02:16:22] Speaker A: If you have no moral compass at all, right? And you see an opening and all. [02:16:27] Speaker B: The confidence in the world that you can grift. [02:16:30] Speaker A: Go, young man, grift. [02:16:33] Speaker B: There you go. This is, I mean aside from the fact that, you know, this endangers people, whatever, we'll see if you part like dumbasses from their money in ways like this. Like eh, I don't know. [02:16:47] Speaker A: Look, if no one gets hurt and you're not accusing anyone of abuse falsely. [02:16:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:16:51] Speaker A: Or people aren't getting blown up in war torn countries, right? [02:16:54] Speaker B: If people waste their money on bullshit like whatever like that is, that's the TEMU business model, right? Is show people they don't need and that doesn't do anything and they waste their money on it and whatever. [02:17:08] Speaker A: Like keep showing it to them. [02:17:09] Speaker B: Keep showing, right? And it's, you know, when you start using it in like active war zones and whatnot, that's, you know, now maybe you've crossed a line. [02:17:18] Speaker A: Yes, indeed. And people continue to cross that line day in, day out, all around us on global scale. Personal scales. On your social media. It's in your phone, it's on your tv. It's in the news, it's in the literature, it's in the stories they tell you. It's a grift. All I would say is your fellow people are not the ones who are pushing you down. It is not your immigrant neighbor. It is not those arriving on your shores. They aren't the fucking problem. They aren't the enemy. It's those who want you to believe they are. That's the grift. That's the fucking grift we're all laboring under right now. [02:18:00] Speaker B: Truth. [02:18:01] Speaker A: The NHS isn't broken because of whoever might have turned up in your town, right? [02:18:07] Speaker B: Yeah. It's broken because the people in charge are breaking it. Yep, there's that. There's that growl you see, I embody, right, Corey? [02:18:19] Speaker A: Not for the first time, right? In case you need a reminding, I'm a fucking trained dramatist, right? I don't just. I don't just read and talk on this podcast. I perform on this podcast every fucking Sunday. I hear. And I'm giving the best performance of my life. I'm timeless. [02:18:35] Speaker B: And you do that for us? [02:18:37] Speaker A: For you. You out there on the other end of this podcast. I'm doing it for you. So write me a review. Yeah. [02:18:46] Speaker B: Maybe you're here. And tell us about any of your favorite grifters. Who have you had your eye on? Who is selling something about absurd, whether in history or now? You know, what stories have you got of the grifters of this world? Because Lord knows, they are everywhere you look. [02:19:05] Speaker A: They're everywhere. They're everywhere. They're all around us. And you should stay spooky.