Ep. 234: the gorilla lady murder

[00:00:04] Speaker A: If I were to say to you, hey, Marco, what's the name of that? You know, the lady with the gorillas, what would you say? [00:00:15] Speaker B: Do you mean Jane Goodall? [00:00:19] Speaker A: No, I don't. But yeah, same right. We would both be wrong. [00:00:24] Speaker B: Sigourney Weaver. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Sigourney Weaver, exactly. But Jane Goodall works with chimps. Yes, not gorillas. And this tripped me up while watching Jeopardy. A few weeks ago. The clue had to do with a woman working with gorillas in Africa. And the correct response was, of course, Dian Fosse. And I immediately was like, ah, yeah, no, that's right, the Gorillas in the Mist lady. And I thought, nothing further into it, right. [00:00:53] Speaker B: I would have been shit on that expedition. I couldn't have done that. [00:00:58] Speaker A: Let's get into it in a bit. But let me tell it, let me get there first because I'm clumsy, you see. [00:01:06] Speaker B: And it's true. I would be treading on branches and smearing kind of feces everywhere. Gorilla poo everywhere. I'd be treading and shit. And as soon as I saw a gorilla, I'd be like, top off, come on, fucking fight me. And they would all be extinct. [00:01:23] Speaker A: As we'll learn. Dian Fossey would not be okay with that kind of activity. Now, I've never seen nor read Gorillas in the Mist, have you? [00:01:36] Speaker B: I believe I have seen it would have been very young, would have been on tv, would have not been that interested. [00:01:43] Speaker A: But I. Yeah, exactly. [00:01:45] Speaker B: I've been in a room where it's been on. [00:01:49] Speaker A: I remember it used to be on TV a fair amount when I was a kid. But I don't know, I've never been like a big primate person. So I was never like bored enough that I was like, yeah, I'm gonna watch Gorillas in the Mist. That sounds like a good idea. [00:02:04] Speaker B: Who does that? Is it? I mean, this is something that I often ponder on. Is that anyone's all time fucking favorite go to banger movie. I wonder. Like they've got merch. [00:02:17] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [00:02:18] Speaker B: Like loads of different editions. [00:02:20] Speaker A: They go on pilgrimages to. [00:02:21] Speaker B: Exactly. There's like, they got a Japanese location, box set, tattoos. [00:02:27] Speaker A: There's always someone for sure. As I sit here in my Titanic hat, it's always gonna be somebody's bag. But if I had seen or read Gorillas in the Mist, I might not have been shocked when I came across a post from a Blue Sky Mutual with a link to Dian Fossey's wiki. And, and the comment, quote, one of the guys who may have ordered her murder, may have helped kicked off the Rwandan genocide. That's a hell of a statement. [00:02:54] Speaker B: It's a butterfly in and of itself. [00:02:57] Speaker A: Indeed. But this is an especially jarring one because, Mark, I had no idea Dian Fosse was dead, let alone murdered. [00:03:06] Speaker B: Well, you've, Yeah, I learned a lot in the last kind of eight seconds. [00:03:12] Speaker A: Right. A lot of stuff coming at you. This was. This. Someone had never come up in the few things I'd learned about her. And I'm not the only one. When I commented that I hadn't known about this, someone else replied that this was the first they were hearing of it too. [00:03:26] Speaker B: And interestingly, complete flip reverse. I was recently surprised to learn that Jane Goodall is still alive. [00:03:32] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, she's still kicking. She's, she's in Attenborough. She'll be around for. [00:03:36] Speaker B: Yes, still alive, still active, still does. You know, I, I, I found this out when I heard her on Radio 4, giving an interview. She's still around. Incredible. [00:03:44] Speaker A: Yeah, she's in her 90s. Friend of mine met her a few years ago. She's, you know. [00:03:48] Speaker B: Is that right? [00:03:49] Speaker A: She doesn't slow down, you know, that's the, that's the key. You can't slow down. If you slow down, you die. Keep going. You just go forever. Well, until the inevitable cancer, but yes, nonetheless. Right. So someone else commented that they had not heard this before as well. And I then asked Keo if he knew that Dian Fossey was murdered, as he was considerably more of a sentient being at the time this happened in 1985 than I was, he was, you know, 13. I was 2 months old. But no, he said it must have been on the news, but he had no recollection of this happening. Did you know Dian Fossey was murdered? [00:04:34] Speaker B: Absolutely no clue. None at all. [00:04:36] Speaker A: Okay, great. Love it. And I'm, I'm assuming that there are, I'm sure there's plenty of listeners who did know this, but I'm sure there are also many of you that are going, sorry, what? So, naturally, given what we do here and the person I've established myself to be, this fascinated me, it became very important to me that I find out how the fuck does Dian Fossey died and why someone would want to violently murder a lady who spent all her time with great apes. So today I'm going to tell you about the life and death of Dian Fosse. [00:05:11] Speaker B: Phenomenal. Might I just interject super quickly? I've been scanning Jane Goodall's wiki page. [00:05:17] Speaker A: Right, sure, go ahead. [00:05:19] Speaker B: Very short paragraph, about two thirds of the way down. Goodall is known to support the possibility that undiscovered species of primate may still exist today, including cryptids such as Sasquatch, Yerin, and other types of Bigfoot. She's a fucking Bigfoot truther. [00:05:34] Speaker A: Sasquatch. [00:05:35] Speaker B: She's a Bigfoot truther, which I love. And I will close that and give you my full. And then divided. Fucking. [00:05:41] Speaker A: Fuck me. I appreciate that aside. That was a good aside. It will not come up again. But Dian Fossey was an only child whose parents divorced when she was young. Her mother remarried a wealthy builder named Richard Price, and they lived in San Francisco, where she would take her meals with the housekeeper while her parents ate together in the dining room. Which is fucking weird. Rich people behavior. Like this is probably what, like, a lot of Trump and Musk types are like now. But it's always weird to me how, like, just fucking strange rich people were about their kids in history. [00:06:20] Speaker B: I had a friend in school, right. This makes me think of Jonathan Mealing. I haven't thought of Jonathan Mealing in fucking decades. But he was the closest that I had to a mate who was like, his family had money and he lived, like, in the new houses in Triniga, right? [00:06:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:38] Speaker B: Went around his house one fucking time, one time only. And he told us, oh, I'm not allowed to go in the living room. What the fuck is all that about? [00:06:48] Speaker A: Well, yeah, like, I feel like that's always the case. Like, every time you have rich friends, there's always, like, parts of the house you're not allowed in and stuff like that. What? Why? I don't understand. What's the point of the house or the kids? Yeah, it's such a bizarre thing that, like. And it just seems like every time you look at the past and you hear about, like, someone's like, what rich people were like, it was always like, you know, they had like, a horde of nannies to make sure that, like, the parents never spoke to the children. [00:07:23] Speaker B: Yeah. Addressing your dad as sir, right? [00:07:26] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. What is this? So it sounds like she had parents like that. I don't know why they chose to have a child. Maybe it was an accident, since she's the only one, but they apparently didn't want to be around her. And from what I read, once she grew up, she did not talk to them again. So anyway, Diane responded to this lonely, neglected childhood the way so many little white girls before and after her did. Do you Want to guess, Mark? [00:07:55] Speaker B: Nope. [00:07:57] Speaker A: She became a horse girl. [00:07:58] Speaker B: Oh, Christ. [00:08:01] Speaker A: Completely isolating herself from the social scene at her high school and focusing on her academics and winning writing competitions as such. Unsurprisingly, she went on to study animal husbandry at UC Davis, which you probably don't know this Mark, but UC Davis there, the Aggies, it's a agricultural school, historically. [00:08:20] Speaker B: Fine, fine, fine, fine. I have, I have known horse people in my life. I lived with one of my first year of uni. I know, you know, and they would go to like horse parties and occasionally bring horsey people back to the house. And it was all of a particular. [00:08:37] Speaker A: One of the, like, you know, obviously it's like you get like your, your like train autistics that we're all used to and things like that. Your key autistics, you know, you got your ocean autistics, your marine autistic, but then you like the math, right? But horse ones are like a special kind, you know, it's like, I think there's something about the fact that it's like such an inaccessible to most of us that it's like to fixate on them makes it especially like othering, I guess, where it's like no one can relate to that. None of us have horses or see horses in our day to day lives, you know? [00:09:18] Speaker B: You know, I don't like them. I don't like horses one fucking bit. So this is a very alien fixation to me that you would rather like buy the clothes, you know, and just do horse things with your horse all the time there. Very, very, very niche weirdos. [00:09:38] Speaker A: Yeah. I think it's just like for a lot of us, it's just such an unrelatable, kind of completely out of my realm of experience. [00:09:45] Speaker B: Completely. [00:09:46] Speaker A: Yes. But after two years studying there, she actually ended up transferring to San Jose State and changed her major to occupational therapy. And at the age of 23 in 1955, she saw an employment ad for an occupational therapist position at a children's hospital in Kentucky and was like, yeah, they got horses in Kentucky. [00:10:06] Speaker B: Famously. [00:10:08] Speaker A: Famously. They got, they got the horses. Wild, wild horses. So she worked with kids suffering polio naturally, given the time this is before the vaccine, but also according to Vanity Fair, with, quote, inbred mountain children suffering from birth defects. Now this article is nearly 40 years old and I'm gonna call maybe a little bullshit on that. That feels like an elite journalist perspective on like, what kind of kids have birth defects in Kentucky? [00:10:40] Speaker B: Inbred mountain children, kids. [00:10:45] Speaker A: Like I have, I have questions about that especially if you go back. I did talk about inbreeding episode of Joag and the degree to which like kids just instantly come out, like with all kinds of deformities and defects is like exaggerated, funny looking. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna call a little on that. But we will say Diane Fossey worked with kids with birth defects. For sure. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Works for me. [00:11:15] Speaker A: But anyways, regardless, she was described by a friend at the time as having been, quote, a neat person to be with, generous to a fault, extraordinarily disciplined, with a delightful self deprecating sense of humor, tall, slim and perfectly gorgeous. I didn't write this anymore, but she was six feet tall. Just for the record, which tall drink of water. [00:11:33] Speaker B: Now this I knew. Which is what made Sigourney Weaver such fantastic casting. [00:11:38] Speaker A: Is she 6ft? She's got to be like, I mean, she's tall for Hollywood, whatever she is. [00:11:43] Speaker B: When I think of Sigourney Weaver, I think of an absolute fucking statue of a woman. Like a tree. [00:11:48] Speaker A: 100% beautiful. [00:11:50] Speaker B: Beautiful tree. [00:11:52] Speaker A: It always stands out. You know, I always say that like if you google a height. Yeah, right. You always have to subtract at least 2 inches, of course, from that height. And it goes even further with like, with women sometimes they add because you have to explain why they're so much taller than men. So like if a guy's. If you google a guy, you look at his IMDb and it says that he's 5 10, right? Yeah, yeah, he's 57 or 5 8. If you look at a woman's IMDb and it says she's 6ft feet, she is 5 10. But they have to account for why she's so much taller. [00:12:28] Speaker B: It's kayfabe in it. It's like, it's like resting. [00:12:30] Speaker A: It is totally kayfabe. It's exact. It's them saying, you know, weighing in exactly 370 pounds. [00:12:37] Speaker B: Fact fans, Sigourney Weaver is just a hair under six foot. [00:12:40] Speaker A: There you go. Which means she may be, you know, 5 10, but regardless, yeah, she's tall. [00:12:46] Speaker B: I'm gonna add on to Sigourney Weaver. I think she's 6:2. [00:12:51] Speaker A: I'm willing to accept that. Yeah, she's larger than life, as big as our dreams. It was 1963 when Diane Fossey would take the trip that would change the trajectory of her life. Wanting to see the animals of Africa for herself, she took out a bank loan and she flew to Tanzania where she looked up the world famous anthropological duo Louis And Mary Leakey, who researched at a site there called Olduvai Gorge. On her next stop, at the Kabara Meadow in Congo, she met a couple who lived in Kenya named Joan and Alan Root, who took her with them to see the mountain gorillas they were currently photographing for a photo documentary. And she was changed by the experience. She was no longer a horse girl. [00:13:36] Speaker B: Monkey girl, yes. [00:13:39] Speaker A: She went back to Louisville and began publishing articles about the gorillas. And three years later, she re encountered the Leakeys when they came to Kentucky on a lecture tour. Now, Louis Leakey wanted to encourage research into great apes, and he had a theory that the ideal candidate to do such research would be a single woman who had not received formal scientific training. His reasoning was that, for one, she wouldn't be bogged down by other responsibilities nor shit to pay for so she could work for free. And for two, she could be more unbiased in her observations than someone who came with all the preconceptions instilled in them from their education. He also thought women were, quote, tougher and more tenacious than men and that a woman would be less of a threat to local people. As we'll get into. The latter did not end up being the case. [00:14:33] Speaker B: He felt the women were tougher and more tenacious than men. [00:14:37] Speaker A: Yes. [00:14:38] Speaker B: Feels progressive. [00:14:39] Speaker A: It does, right, doesn't it? Like, he's right. But also, nobody was saying that in 1960 or whatever, you know, like, oh, ladies need to stay at home. What are they gonna do? And he was like, nah, man, they'll take whatever. So for him, Jane Goodall was a perfect example of his theory at work. You know, that's what she was doing. She was out there by herself. Single lady Jane Goodall. Jane Goodall, yes. [00:15:07] Speaker B: Okay. [00:15:07] Speaker A: The chimpanzee lady. [00:15:09] Speaker B: Yes, of course. [00:15:11] Speaker A: So in 1966, when he came to Kentucky, he was already on the prowl for a gorilla girl, as he called it. It became clear after talking to Diane that she was the one. He told her upon awarding her the job that she would need to have a preemptive appendectomy, which she immediately agreed to a few weeks later. [00:15:33] Speaker B: He's not right. [00:15:35] Speaker A: He told her there was actually no reason to do that and she could keep her appendix. He was just testing to see how far she was willing to go for this unpaid position in the African wilderness. It turns out she was would voluntary remove an organ. Dedicated and had already done it. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Oh, amazing, amazing, amazing. [00:15:58] Speaker A: She's just like, oh, the appendix needs to go. Sweet. [00:16:01] Speaker B: I get right on that. [00:16:02] Speaker A: Got that out? Yep. [00:16:04] Speaker B: Well, well, well. [00:16:05] Speaker A: So at the. Yeah. So at the end of 1966, Fosse found herself back in Africa. She first visited Jane Goodall to see how she set up her camp and then moved on to the Kabara Meadow to build her own research base. But before long, a civil war broke out in the Congo and rebel soldiers came and removed her from her base, essentially imprisoning her. Somehow, though, she got them to drive her to Uganda, where she said she'd be retrieving her car and some money. Instead, she had the soldiers arrested by Ugandan officials upon arrival. [00:16:40] Speaker B: Where are we here? Time wise 50s. [00:16:43] Speaker A: 1966. [00:16:44] Speaker B: Okay, okay, okay. [00:16:47] Speaker A: For the better part of 18 years, Fosse dedicated herself to living and working among the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. According to a 1986 Vanity Fair article published a few months after her death, she had set up her camp in the virunga Mountains in 1967. And the article describes the Virungas as a chain of mostly extinct volcanoes along the Zaire and Uganda borders. Because of the location between Mount Karasimbe and Mount Visoki, she named her research base Karasoki. This area was home at the time to about 240 gorillas dispersed amongst 20 different groups which were each led by a dominant silverback male. It was the largest population of these gorillas in the world, which is obviously not great. There should probably be more than 240 gorillas in the largest concentration of them in the world, which is why she was there. She spent years trying to win the trust of these gorillas and eventually they started to let her hang out with them while they went about their day to day lives. And what marked out her approach as different from Jane Goodall's friendship with the chimps was that Goodall had to essentially bribe the chimpanzees to get them to accept her, giving them when she wanted them to do stuff. This is called provisioning. Fosse did not do provisioning. She simply spent years and years methodically learning about them and their behavior and habituating them to her presence until they became unperturbed by her being there and even welcomed her. After 11,000 hours in the field, Diane identified the individuals in four groups from their characteristic nose prints and figured out their probable genealogical relationships. She explored little understood behavior like infanticide and the migration of females among groups. Her scientific work was, according to a colleague, quote, very factual and detailed. It had the ring of authenticity. She left the theorizing to others. Her research led her to become sort of an unlikely celebrity. Both locally and globally. Rwandans called her Nira Mask Sibily, which means the woman who lives alone in the forest. Meanwhile, Westerners looked at her as a major girl boss, along the lines of feminist heroes like Amelia Earhart or Nellie Bly. But there's some irony to her celebrity, because she was notoriously not a people person. [00:19:15] Speaker B: You don't. You don't. You don't go down that career path if you are, do you? [00:19:20] Speaker A: Probably not. At least not the way she did it to, like, basically live alone amongst the gorillas and whatnot. You're probably not a big people person, especially, you know, given her background being into horses and, like, not into social life in high school and stuff like that. As one co worker told the New Yorker in 1986, quote, she didn't suffer fools gladly and she didn't suffer intelligent people gladly either. The article described her as, quote, impatient with clumsy researchers and with tourists eager for a glimpse of the gorillas, and noted that she was singularly devoted to her work, considering research to be its own reward. She never understood why people expected to be paid to do these things. She spent the vast majority of her 18 years in the mountains alone, meticulously collecting data about the gorillas and people who worked with her. Often left on unfriendly terms. She trained many students to do the work, but it's safe to say she preferred her own company and the company of apes to that of people. In documentary footage shot in the early 1970s, her rapport with the gorillas is clear. In one scene, a gorilla takes her notebook and pencil, looks them over and hands them back to her as if they're just chums. Footage of her makes life in the mountains look almost serene, but there was a lot going on that didn't make it on screen or back to the people in the US and UK who were following her research and cheering her on. She was running a research facility in a mountain camp on a meager budget and didn't speak the language. Apparently she was shit at learning languages in general and could not do it. This all made it difficult to get supplies to the camp and the dismal conditions were off putting to students who came there with this idea of a romantic adventure and found themselves living in squalor instead. The Congolese Civil war was an ever present threat and she was also dealing with something like PTSD due to having been sexually assaulted during her captured by the rebel soldiers. And that experience shifted her attitudes towards local people for the worse, which is bad any way you slice it, but it's also really bad when it's vital for you to maintain those relationships. [00:21:29] Speaker B: Was there. And if we get to this, I apologize, but were there with her or any of her students or any of the people running her science, Any ever. Any kind of guerrilla conflict interactions? Did anyone ever get hurt by the gorillas? [00:21:48] Speaker A: Like, by the gorillas? [00:21:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:21:51] Speaker A: That's a good question. As far as I know, no. [00:21:53] Speaker B: Because it seems like an extraordinary run of luck to not get hurt by the gorillas. [00:21:58] Speaker A: Well, I mean, this is. Gorillas are different from chimpanzees, right? Like, chimps we know are, like, pretty aggressive. They're gonna, like, fight you if you come at them wrong. [00:22:09] Speaker B: And they'll win. They'll win. [00:22:11] Speaker A: But one of the things that we learned from Dian Fosse is actually that gorillas aren't really like that. They're pretty peaceful. They, you know, largely don't want any trouble. She kind of did a lot to dispel these ideas that they were somehow like these, like, hugely violent creatures. Like, yeah, if you don't fuck with them, they won't fuck with you. [00:22:32] Speaker B: Fine. I'm speaking from a place of ignorance. [00:22:34] Speaker A: In that case, that's what she was there for, you know, to dispel that for people like you. But. So there was a lot of internal struggle between various Rwandan groups that complicated her work at the gorillas as well. The Batutsi people, also known as the Watusi, were cattle herders who had for centuries subjugated another group called the Bahutu. And when Rwanda gained its independence From Belgium in 1962, a Bahutu uprising occurred in which they slaughtered their Batusi masters, causing the Batutsi who lived to flee with their cattle into the forests and disturb the gorillas living out there. [00:23:18] Speaker B: Independence from Belgium, from the great Belgian Empire. [00:23:22] Speaker A: Yes. [00:23:22] Speaker B: Well, well, well. [00:23:24] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, it's a huge thing, the Belgians and their really vicious colonization of Africa. Not great folks to have in charge of you. [00:23:35] Speaker B: Okay. [00:23:37] Speaker A: But, yeah, they. They did get their independence in. In the 60s. But, yeah, it resulted in other uprisings as well, like this one. So the Patootsis flee with their cattle into the forest where the gorillas are. And the gorillas don't love the cattle. They disturb them, all that stuff. And Fosse was like, fuck you for this, even though Rwandans had no problem with this arrangement. And then there were the poachers, who were largely members of the Botwa pygmy ethnic group who had been hunter gatherers for pretty much Ever. The label of poacher was relatively new to them and based on recent legislation, what they would do is they would set out snares for the animals that they were hunting. And occasionally a gorilla would get caught in one and end up with a mangled extremity which would become fatal because gorillas don't have medicine. So they would get gangrene and shit like that and die about a month later from these wounds. One of Fosse's closest gorilla companions was one she had named Digit. Because Digit didn't have any other gorillas in his age group to pal around with, he grew close to Diane. But in the late 70s, there began to be a rash of gorilla poaching. And on New year's Eve in 1977, Digit was found decapitated with his hands cut off, causing Fosse to become about. As John Wick about gorilla conservation as a small. As a white woman anthropologist. [00:25:01] Speaker B: I think that made it into the movie. [00:25:03] Speaker A: Yeah, I would imagine, because this was like, this is the inciting incident right here. You know, she's going along, she's doing her research, you know, maybe a little antisocial, the things like that. She's trying to push back against the poachers. And then Digit gets killed and Fosse goes off the fucking deep end here. This was personal from this point forward. So to Phosse, these indigenous Rwandans were just a giant threat to her precious gorillas, rather than people groups engaging in the forms of subsistence that they'd been doing for centuries and even millennia. The thing about Phassi is that she really didn't give a shit about humans. She wasn't an anthropologist. So while someone like, say, Margaret Mead would have taken into account the traditional practice of the locals and tried to work with them to find a solution, Fosse did not do that. Instead, as Vanity Fair put it, she devoted increasing energy to cutting their snares, destroying their traps, raiding their villages, terrorizing and punishing them. So while Westerners loved the mythology of Dian Fossey and thought of her as a hero, locals and the scientists she worked with alike pretty much fucking hated her. [00:26:15] Speaker B: Big pain in the ass, I would imagine. [00:26:17] Speaker A: Big pain in the ass. By the mid-70s, attitudes towards research like hers were changing. New PhDs did take more of an anthropological approach, emphasizing relationships with local people and language learning and trying to do conservation in a way that was mutually beneficial. The idea was to make the animals worth more to the local people alive than dead and thus make them invested in their survival. I think we would think of that now as like a pretty standard way to engage in conservation efforts, of course. Make sure it works in tandem with what people are already doing there. Make sure it works with their lifestyle. Don't try to change a culture that's existed for thousands of years overnight because of our hang ups about, you know, conservation. But this irritated the shit out of Fosse, who was frustrated that all these folks wanted to do was to observe the gorillas and collect data and they weren't interested in going and cutting snares and otherwise getting in the way of poachers. For their part, the young scientists thought that what she was doing was nasty and inappropriate. But Digit's death had driven her further into herself. She spent little time with people or gorillas and became bitter and hard to be around. Some say she started drinking heavily, while other friends say, no, that's not true. [00:27:43] Speaker B: All the while still in the field, though never return in the field. [00:27:46] Speaker A: Always still there. Yep, still in Rwanda. But she did have a two pack a day cigarette habit which had given her emphysema. And all she thought about all day, every day was punishing poachers. Once she put a noose around a captured pygmy, threw the rope over a rafter and threatened to hoist him if he didn't start talking. Horrible rumors began circulating among the Belgian doctors in Kigali that she'd injected one poacher with gorilla dung to give him septicemia. That she had hired a sorcerer to poison another particularly incorrigible one. There are obviously varying levels of truth to these accusations, but that this is how people talked about her gives you a sense of her reputation in area. [00:28:35] Speaker B: She proper Baba Yaga. She really is the John Wick of the jungle. Yeah. [00:28:42] Speaker A: Yep. While Rwandan authorities were often just as brutal to poachers as she was, they too hated Fosse because she was so contemptuous of them and often accused them of collusion with the poachers. She was hostile towards everyone, but her mistrust of Africans in particular was glaring. But again, Westerners had no idea any of this was happening. She was raising awareness and hella money for these gorillas, which seemed like a net positive, but even there she was being a giant. I have to say it. [00:29:19] Speaker B: Marco, do it. [00:29:21] Speaker A: She was being a giant cunt about it. [00:29:22] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:29:25] Speaker A: Initially, the funds were being channeled through an organization called the African Wildlife foundation, but the AWF didn't want the money to be used for her weird, violent vendetta against the poachers. The AWF was like, we need to cooperate with the Rwandans and they don't like you terrorizing people on your whims. So she severed ties with them and started her own organization, the Digit Fund. And for good measure, she accused the AWF of stealing her money. What they actually did was create the Mountain Gorilla Project, which worked with several other conservation groups to implement a three pronged approach to gorilla conservation. Set up tourism as a way of providing Rwanda with income from the animals and a reason for keeping them alive. Train and increase the number of park guards, and educate the local people about the value of the gorillas and their habitat. She didn't like that. No. Diane, if you recall, hated tourists. And on one occasion, she even fired several rounds in the air over the heads of a group of Dutch tourists who'd hiked to Karisoke. And at this point, Karisoke was being so poorly run that pretty much everyone, whether they loved or hated Diane, agreed that her presence there was a problem. In a letter to National Geographic, her main backer, Bill Webber, noted that pretty much the only gorillas being killed were the ones in her study groups and that it was probable that. That the reason they were being killed was specifically because she was being a vigilante. [00:30:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Escalation, right? [00:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah. Cuz, like, why. Why cut off the head and hands of a gorilla? You know, like, what are you. What are you gonna do with that? [00:31:09] Speaker B: It's not really message, isn't it? [00:31:10] Speaker A: Yeah, anything that's a message. Yeah. So, you know, they're like, it's. She's causing it. The reason these gorillas are dying is her. Fosse saw the letter, though, and it increased an already rising paranoia in her that there was a conspiracy against her. This led to her essentially spying on other researchers, eavesdropping on their combos, and even reading their mail. Finally, she was lured out of Africa for a visiting associate professorship at Cornell, but she returned in 1983. In that time, a British zoologist named Sandy Harcourt, who had been friendly with Vossi, had taken over as director of Karisoke, and he began a relationship and cohabitation with another mutual friend of theirs. Kelly Stewart and Fosse, who had a lot of hang ups about couples that I did not get into in this, turned on them pretty quickly. Kelly didn't have much good to say about Fosse either, telling Vanity Fair she had a pretty colonial attitude towards the Africans. On Christmas, she'd give the most extravagant presents to them. Other times, she'd humiliate Them spit on the ground in front of them. Once I even saw her spit on one of the workers, break into their cabin and accuse them of stealing and dock their pay. So by 1985, it's fair to say that Fosse had made more than a handful of enemies in Rwanda. From the white people she worked with to the locals and staffers that she tormented. And to be clear, this is not me saying thus she deserved what happened to her. [00:32:46] Speaker B: No, no, of course. [00:32:47] Speaker A: But it gives. [00:32:49] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Complicated relationship. [00:32:52] Speaker A: Exactly that. And it gives context to why what happened next was such a difficult situation to investigate and parse. So in the early hours of December 27, 1985, Dian Fossey was discovered murdered in her cabin on Karisoke, having taken two blows to the face from a machete. There was no burglary and no sign of a struggle, and the weapon was found under her bed. And as you can imagine, pretty much everyone, including people who loved her, were like, yeah. I mean, she spent the past decades terrorizing the locals. It was probably one of them. [00:33:31] Speaker B: And she would have been warned. [00:33:33] Speaker A: Right? [00:33:34] Speaker B: Exactly. [00:33:35] Speaker A: Every dead gorilla was a warning, for that matter. [00:33:38] Speaker B: You know, bang on. Listen, this whole tale has such Tim Treadwell vibes to it. [00:33:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:33:47] Speaker B: Like, why are you doing this, really? You know what I mean? You've. [00:33:52] Speaker A: Right. [00:33:52] Speaker B: Obviously dealing with such a colossal amount of baggage, like you said, ptsd, your own, that you're working through. Is this really for the Gorillaz, Diane? Is it? [00:34:02] Speaker A: Right, that's exactly it. I mean, when you hear it all taken together, it's a woman who had a fucked up childhood. [00:34:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:34:11] Speaker A: Who kind of became a misanthrope, who invested all of her emotional energy into these gorillas and began to sort of think she was their exact protector. [00:34:24] Speaker B: Exactly. Giving them names. [00:34:27] Speaker A: Right. And then as a result, you know, having this trauma that she already had experienced in multiple ways, let alone the sexual assault that she experienced, you know, just hardened. [00:34:40] Speaker B: And I can tell you something. Right. [00:34:41] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:42] Speaker B: There's a video doing the rounds on social media currently, which I've been sent, that depicts a gorilla in a zoo picking up and throwing a capybara at someone. Right. [00:34:59] Speaker A: Nice. Yeah. Mm. I can't believe you haven't sent me that video. [00:35:02] Speaker B: No, I thought it would upset you because of how much you like capybara. [00:35:05] Speaker A: Did it die? [00:35:08] Speaker B: Flung this motherfucker gotta be about 40ft. [00:35:11] Speaker A: Crazy. [00:35:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Don't tell me that just because you've been giving them some bananas and got yourself in. What was the word you used? [00:35:21] Speaker A: Oh, like provisioning. [00:35:22] Speaker B: Provisioned your way into their, to their family group and giving them names and whatnot. Yeah, well, and they'll throw a capaba at you at any given moment. [00:35:31] Speaker A: Sure. But also, I mean, much like humans, right. The, the issue here for like this, this gorilla is in a zoo, Right. If it's in close proximity with the capybara. [00:35:43] Speaker B: Yes. [00:35:44] Speaker A: And it's probably stressed the out. [00:35:47] Speaker B: Well, yeah, Right. [00:35:48] Speaker A: Like this is a case of like you're putting a wild animal in a situation that is extremely stressful for them as opposed to you sort of habituating them to your presence in their natural habitat where you don't intervene or anything like that. You're just kind of sitting there. Right. Thus, obviously it's not a thing that like, oh, just any of us can walk up to a gorilla in the wild and it's gonna treat us like family. That's not what the research was showing, but more just the fact that like, they're not inherently more violent than we are. It's just if they're stressed out. [00:36:27] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And she must have been up there for what, 15 years? [00:36:31] Speaker A: 18 years. [00:36:31] Speaker B: 18 years. Wowee. [00:36:33] Speaker A: Yes. So like I said, most people assumed it was one of the people that she was coming after that had done this. The Rwandan government, however, accused her 34 year old research assistant, Wayne McGuire, who was now running the camp in the wake of her death. They also charged five Rwandan staffers as accomplices. The alleged motive, theft of Fosse's research and jealousy over her accomplishments. Maguire fled to the US and a Rwandan court found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. The Wikipedia says death by shooting, but like the articles that I read from 1986 said hanging, so I'm gonna go with that either way, lucky for him, we don't have an extradition treaty with Rwanda, so he was under no obligation to go back and get himself hanged or shot. [00:37:24] Speaker B: Yep. [00:37:26] Speaker A: From what I can tell, I don't think anyone really believes that this is what happened. Maguire already had ready access to the research that he was supposed to have killed her for, and from all accounts seemed to have a pretty healthy mentor mentee relationship with her. They were not adversarial with each other like so many of the other people she interacted with because of her not great relationships with most people she encountered. There are about a bajillion theories as to who killed her. It could have been as simple as a botched robbery attempt. It could have been poachers who were finally sick of her Cutting their snares and burning down their huts. It could have been political. And indeed, as my blue sky pal alluded to in their post, it's even theorized that one Proteus Zigiran Yarazo, also known as Monsieur Zed, orchestrated the murder, as he had been the governor of the Ruangiri province at the time and wanted to stop her campaign against the poachers. [00:38:24] Speaker B: And no one has come close to. [00:38:26] Speaker A: Hold on. Let me finish. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Okay, okay, okay, okay. [00:38:29] Speaker A: Monsieur Zed would go on to be arrested in 2001 for planning the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which killed nearly a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus. So I guess I can see why our teachers didn't dive deep into the legacy of Dian Fosse and instead chose to briefly touch on her contributions to guerrilla conservation before focusing our attention on the lessons problematic. Jane Goodall, to this day, to what I think you're about to ask, we still don't know who killed Diane Fossey. An autopsy was never conducted because there was no one in Rwanda who could conduct autopsies at the time. [00:39:08] Speaker B: How long had she been dead, Corey, before discovery? Do we know? [00:39:13] Speaker A: I think it was, like, the same. Like, okay, that night she'd been killed. They found her in the morning. Yeah. It wasn't like she'd been sitting there for ages. The. The assistant went in. In the. In the morning and found her that way. [00:39:26] Speaker B: Can we autopsy an attack by one of Digit's family? [00:39:32] Speaker A: Can we learn to use a machete? [00:39:34] Speaker B: I don't think we can. [00:39:36] Speaker A: Well, I know. I guess it's possible. We don't know what they're capable of. Yeah. Autopsy was never conducted and evidence never collected in the way that we're used to in modern Western forensics. But her legacy, fraught as it may be, lives on. The mountain gorilla project, which is now called the International Gorilla Conservation Program Program, and which largely, largely exists due to her, even if she hated it, has been a success, with the number of wild mountain gorillas having increased from that paltry 240 to 1063. [00:40:08] Speaker B: See, there you go. [00:40:10] Speaker A: While they're still endangered. They were taken off the critically endangered list in 2018. And, hey, every now and again, she gets to be a Jeopardy. Clue. [00:40:22] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:40:25] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:40:26] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:40:30] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [00:40:34] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal received. [00:40:36] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:40:40] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm. I'm going to leg it. [00:40:47] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:40:49] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. Raising an entire species off the endangered list. The ends have to be worth some cuntitude along the way. [00:41:04] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's. It's an interesting thing because it's hard to say. [00:41:09] Speaker B: I mean, listen, it's a fascinating case study in, you know, at what point do the methods outweigh the results? But I think in this case, based on everything you've just said, taking everything you've just said at face value, I think the ends absolutely justify the results. [00:41:26] Speaker A: It's tricky, though, because arguably what she did, she would not. She did not want that mountain gorilla project to exist. [00:41:34] Speaker B: Right. [00:41:34] Speaker A: Because she did not want tourism as a part of any of this. She just wanted to keep, you know, tormenting poachers to stop this from happening. So if Louis Leakey had picked a different gorilla girl, we might have had, you know, someone similarly dedicated to the research and stuff, but that didn't get a bunch of gorillas killed in the process, and that wasn't hostile to the Africans or to tourists and would have been able to put together something long before what this, you know, became. So it's. It's a. It's one of those things where it's. [00:42:13] Speaker B: Like, but we didn't. Did we? [00:42:14] Speaker A: You know, we didn't. Right. Like. But there are other paths that could have gotten here that would not have caused all of this drama on the way. Right. But, yeah, it's hard to say. I mean, at the end of the day, that is. That's the legacy is she did bring awareness to this issue, and the. The view that Westerners had of her was positive, and therefore they looked at her work positively and her cause positively, and it caused people to donate money to this. So, you know. Yeah, it sucks for Digit and every other gorilla that was killed by poachers who were pissed off at her. But, yeah, ultimately we are seeing an increase in the numbers. [00:43:02] Speaker B: Now, look, it's just one more fantastic and beautifully rendered. Thank you. Example of a topic that we've spoken about time and time again. How progress often comes with a sketchy ledger. You know, it often comes with. [00:43:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:43:23] Speaker B: Questions, you know, baggage. Baggage. Dilemmas. [00:43:30] Speaker A: Dilemmas. Oh, the dilemmas. So many dilemmas. [00:43:33] Speaker B: They're huge, aren't they? [00:43:35] Speaker A: Yeah. I hope you're all dilemma free this fine day. [00:43:40] Speaker B: No, I don't agree, Corey. I hope you want every. [00:43:43] Speaker A: You want people to have dilemmas. [00:43:44] Speaker B: I want you to have dilemmas. But I want them to be nice dilemmas. I want you to. The only things you need to choose between to be whether you go for a bracing walk or. Or stay in and eat ice cream, you know, those are the dilemmas that I want you to be burdened with this week, listeners. You know, do you. Do you. Do you read a book or watch a movie? You know? [00:44:06] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. Like my dad would always say, you know, may all life's problems be such as this. [00:44:12] Speaker B: Wonderful. Oh, what a wonderful phrase. May all life's problems be such as this. [00:44:17] Speaker A: This is usually when I ate so much that I felt like I was going to puke. [00:44:20] Speaker B: Did he really say that? What a lovely thing. [00:44:22] Speaker A: Yeah, that was his. His concept. If I ever complained about something that was like kind of a good thing, he would always say, may all life's problems be such as this. [00:44:33] Speaker B: Were I as eloquent as your dad, because in similar situations, I'll probably say something to my kids like the. You moaning about. Do you know? Are you. This is what you're moaning about. [00:44:46] Speaker A: That's fair. How you doing, Marco? [00:44:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm good. I just. If you don't mind, I just want to just recap a few things here. Right. I just want to just talk a few things out here just to make sure that we're on the same page and that I've got the right idea here. Right. That I've got everything straight, if you don't mind. So this is the state of affairs as I see it. Right? [00:45:08] Speaker A: Oh, boy. Mm. [00:45:09] Speaker B: And if I'm wrong on any of this, jump in and set me straight. But I think I've got the right kind of angle here. I just want to make sure. I just want to lay this out. [00:45:17] Speaker A: Hit me. [00:45:18] Speaker B: Right. So you're. You're telling me. You're seriously telling me that you and I. That you and I and in fact, everyone listening to this now, and everyone who you know, and everyone who you interact with and who you see, you are telling me that we're all kind of. We're all organic kind of organisms? Yes, sure. [00:45:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:45:44] Speaker B: With you so far, kind of made of, let's say, meat and tissue stretched over a kind of a calcium based carbon frame. Skeletal kind of frame? Yes. Is that what you're telling me? [00:45:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it feels right. [00:46:01] Speaker B: Okay, I'll just explain this. Just go a little Bit further. And we each have a kind of a command center that sends kind of electrical impulses. Yes. Generated internally by us. Yeah, Electrical kind of impulses which we can send up and down this meat and bone frame to get it to move. We can move our own frame using the electricity in our brain. Is that correct? [00:46:35] Speaker A: Yeah, from what I understand. Right, yeah. [00:46:38] Speaker B: And we all. We have, like, equipment, sensory equipment that we can use to interpret what's going around us. And we send these electrical impulses around our brains to kind of make sense of what's going on around us. Yes. All with these, so far, this is all true. [00:46:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:46:58] Speaker B: Right. And we can repair damage. So if we're injured or harmed in any way, generally, we'll use this energy. We'll use this power, this electrochemical power to patch up injuries up to a degree. [00:47:11] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. Our cells are doing some shit. [00:47:14] Speaker B: There we go. Good. And just like I'm doing now, we can expel air from our. Over. Over our meats, over the flappy bits of our meat to make noise that we've learned to interpret, to give instructions and things like that. [00:47:30] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:47:32] Speaker B: Right. Okay, fine. Let's go on a bit more. And to sustain this process within ourselves, what we do is we put organic material into our meat and then dissolve it internally with acids and such. And that converts the potential energy of the organic stuff we put in to energy that our body can use to fire these electrical signals around and move us around the place. Correct, Right. And we. And we can reproduce. We can create more of ourselves through various processes. Yeah. [00:48:11] Speaker A: Correct. Yes. [00:48:12] Speaker B: And we. And we each last about 80 odd years. [00:48:16] Speaker A: Yes. Somewhere in that vicinity. [00:48:18] Speaker B: Right. We know this somehow. We know this about ourselves. We know that we're gonna. That it's only a short time and it's gonna end. So we kind of build stuff and pass stuff down to the ones that come after us because we're dead. And we kind of memorialize the, you know, the beings, the meat kind of frame coverings that have been before us. [00:48:42] Speaker A: Mm. [00:48:44] Speaker B: And I'm just supposed to accept all that, am I to supposed. I'm just supposed to. I'm just supposed to just take all of that at face value as being just completely cool and fine and that's just the way things are. [00:48:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:48:58] Speaker B: Is that right? [00:48:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's about right. Yeah. [00:49:01] Speaker B: Come on. That's fucking absolute nonsense. That is a nonsense state of affairs. That is ridiculous. [00:49:12] Speaker A: This is why people become Christians, Mark. [00:49:15] Speaker B: Well, yeah. Isn't that a fucking stupid state of affairs that I'VE just outlined it is. [00:49:23] Speaker A: Well, I think about this a lot, especially because, you know, my favorite thing in the world is eating. Right? [00:49:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:49:29] Speaker A: Love food. Think about food. 24. [00:49:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:49:32] Speaker A: And I often think obviously about what I put into my body and you know, try to be careful about it and things like that. But I constantly think about how odd it is that to me eating something, there's no physical difference, right. Between me munching on a salad or a sandwich or whatever, except maybe mouth feel or, you know, whatever the case may be. And yet in my body, they're having completely different reactions. And some things are fueling it and some things are not. And you know, I mean, they're all fueling it in one way or another. But then on top of it, I've always been a fluctuating weight person. Right? [00:50:14] Speaker B: Okay. [00:50:14] Speaker A: Like ever since like adult life, I never stay in the same range. It's kind of, you know, it's one way or the other. That process is crazy to me that like sometimes you put stuff in you and like it converts to these fat cells and things like that that like fill up. And then other times you go and do some shit and you burn more. [00:50:41] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:50:41] Speaker A: Energy than you have taken in. And then that stuff goes away and the cells are still there. But like the maths to it is gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there is. [00:50:51] Speaker B: But also just energy. [00:50:53] Speaker A: The fact that without like, you know, obviously we expel things and we go to the bathroom and stuff like that. But like that there's a process going inside on inside of us that we liken to burning, right? Of burning away or adding fat and things like that. Or muscle. That's crazy. That's bananas. [00:51:15] Speaker B: What I'm getting at with this, what I'm saying here is that I'm. I struggle with that from time to time. I struggle with the material of it all. [00:51:23] Speaker A: That we're just processes upon processes. [00:51:26] Speaker B: Yeah. But processes that have learned to regard their own process and become aware of it all. That's the bit, right? Fucking hell. That's the bit that I keep struggling with. Where and how has that occurred? [00:51:45] Speaker A: Right? [00:51:46] Speaker B: That I can talk to you about this from across the other side of the world, right? That we're fucking jelly and carbon and calcium and meat. That has some fucking how got ideas. [00:51:59] Speaker A: Become aware of itself. [00:52:00] Speaker B: Yes. [00:52:01] Speaker A: I was even thinking of this this morning when I was. I was whistling. My dog was watching me whistle. And then I started thinking about the process of whistling and that somehow beautiful. I think about a tune and then I move my Mouth in such a way that it comes out in that tune. And so. Yeah. How, by what process did humans get to the point at which I can be whistling ghost in my kitchen completely? [00:52:26] Speaker B: And, and there's another layer of, of incredulity to me that if, if I had, if I had a time machine, right. I wouldn't kill baby Hitler. [00:52:38] Speaker A: You can make it a side quest. [00:52:39] Speaker B: But not first at least maybe I'd save that until a bit later on. What I would do is I would more and more I think I would certainly try and divert the course of humanity away from discovering that if you dig a mile into the surface, you'll find explodey stuff that you can use to go fast. I would, I would try and take us off the go fast path. [00:53:04] Speaker A: Mm. [00:53:05] Speaker B: Which. [00:53:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:07] Speaker B: Which probably isn't realistic because I guess loads of people discovered it. [00:53:12] Speaker A: Right, Exactly. There's never one. [00:53:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:53:14] Speaker A: You can't take away one event to stop the, the wheels of progress. [00:53:20] Speaker B: But I, I fucking hate, I, I hate the, the idea that there was a fork in the road and we chose the fork collectively that you know, got us here over dependent on plastic and choking and burning. [00:53:37] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. Because it's interesting, you know, I. Oh, go ahead. [00:53:41] Speaker B: No, please. [00:53:42] Speaker A: Well, I was just gonna say, you know, I went to see Ghost last night. Right. And their shows, this tour, as you know, because you went earlier in the year, require you to put your phone in a little pouch that locks up for the duration of the concert. [00:53:58] Speaker B: I wonder if they're the same kind of lock, you know, crates of pouches that they use all over the world. Might you have had the same pouches in. [00:54:07] Speaker A: Oh, I think silk, yonder, yonder packs. [00:54:10] Speaker B: We could have had the same pouch. [00:54:11] Speaker A: We could have had the same non zero chance. Thousands of. Of pouches that they have. Yeah. You know, you put your things in there and it was, you know, it was interesting. It felt like I'd gone back in time for one thing that it's like you're in a place where there's just like not one person looking at a device. Right. And it made me, you know, sort of consider those things of over reliance. Not just in the sense of like, oh, we're all so reliant on social media, blah, blah, blah, you know, like. But yeah, like you're saying though is just kind of the way that we have come to rely on these resource heavy technologies and things like that to go about our day to day lives and yeah. That there's, there's a lot more that is fraught about that than just our social media habits, you know, that, that this is the, the path we took. [00:55:06] Speaker B: The path we took. [00:55:06] Speaker A: There's a lot of things that are great, but a lot of things that we can see. We're kind of hastening our own ends with here. [00:55:13] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's a done deal, isn't it? As far as I'm concerned. It's signed, seal delivered. We're just waiting on the clock now. But there are, but you know, not only are we, you know, exhaling meat that is aware of one another and can talk it out and can think it through, but we can look out. [00:55:31] Speaker A: And fucking meat wad. Get the honey, see if you like, if you like. [00:55:36] Speaker B: But are there, are there, are there non industrial planets where people kind of progressed up to that point and didn't take that fucking fork and have like evolved the ultimate in wood cultures, wood races. You know what I mean? If the Industrial revolution was based around wood and rope. [00:56:02] Speaker A: I mean, I think the other thing that I think about is like, you know, as a lifelong Star Trek fan, as I know you are as well, is the idea of that the technology itself is not the thing that was. The two paths diverged in the wood and we took the one that hastened our demise. But the idea that there was potentially a path that wasn't capitalistic destruction. Well, yeah, yeah, like that we could have had the technology and things like that and used it in ways that weren't so exploited. [00:56:36] Speaker B: I don't know. My. [00:56:37] Speaker A: Had the Star Trek future. [00:56:39] Speaker B: I, you know, I don't have a keen grasp of the history, but I'm reasonably sure that the Industrial Revolution led to capitalism, didn't it? Led to kind of global globalism and. [00:56:49] Speaker A: Where we're at now. [00:56:50] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure, for sure. So, yeah, I don't know. I don't know, man. It, it doesn't feel like that was a smart move. [00:56:58] Speaker A: No, we definitely did it wrong. Yeah, for sure. We had the Industrial revolution and within 300 years just fucked everything. [00:57:09] Speaker B: Yeah, in a, in a very, very short space of time. I'd, I'm gonna put the call out there actually, if anyone knows of any fiction that might deal with, you know, an Earth that didn't do that. I'd love to. I'd love to know. [00:57:22] Speaker A: I'm sure there's plenty. But also, have you ever read. It's not quite the same thing, of course, but have you read Station 11? [00:57:30] Speaker B: I don't think so. [00:57:31] Speaker A: They made a show of it too. But I really loved this book. And it revolves around you know a future near future thing where something happens that all sort of electricity and electronics and stuff like that is zapped out of existence on the planet. And you have these people sort of crafting a new life in a world without it. And it centers on this girl who joins like a traveling Shakespeare troupe essentially. [00:58:01] Speaker B: Wonderful. [00:58:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And they go around sort of performing in all these different places and you know lots of horrifying things happen in it and too. But that's kind of the central conceit. While she also carries around this comic book that is kind of her last theme thing from before times rhetoric. She was born like right when it happened or whatever. It's one that I keep meaning to reread. But it's fantastic in terms of like just this. This image of this world without technology. And what would we rebuild if we lost all of this all of a sudden? What would become. [00:58:36] Speaker B: A lot of the post apocalyptic fiction seems to be you know that when shit hits the fan it's about humanity trying to rebuild in the image lost. Yeah. I'm. I'm more interested as I sit here and now. And it'll. It'll pass in the next hour. But as I speak to you right now I'm more interested in what society would look like had we never gone down this fork. You know what I mean? I want to see Wood World. I want to see 2025 in the land of twine and tree houses and smoke signals and things like that. [00:59:14] Speaker A: It's an interesting idea. Yeah. If anyone knows of any stories like that. That actually is really interesting as a concept of just what if. That's. What if. That's how we developed. Yeah. I like it. [00:59:26] Speaker B: What would be the. How would our gods look? [00:59:29] Speaker A: You know, how would we. [00:59:31] Speaker B: How would our entertainment look? [00:59:32] Speaker A: How would our society look Corrie. If it wasn't for Hoyle? Yeah. And interesting stuff. [00:59:40] Speaker B: And Facebook. [00:59:44] Speaker A: Do you know what I mean? Facebook. [00:59:46] Speaker B: It just all. It just this. None of this feels right to me. And it hasn't done for such a long time. Just none of this feels right. And this train of thought stems from a conversation I was having my kids in the car the other day. We were off driving somewhere like we do something was on the news and it sparked a conversation with. About de. Plasticizing society. And you can't. You can't do it. It's impossible. You can't fucking do it. Not only can we not do. It's it. It. Even if we could we wouldn't. Because it serves no capitalist interest to Deplasticize society. [01:00:19] Speaker A: I mean, yeah, that's what it comes down to. Yeah, absolutely. Could over. [01:00:23] Speaker B: Over a long time. [01:00:24] Speaker A: We won't. [01:00:24] Speaker B: But. We won't. But we won't. [01:00:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:00:27] Speaker B: And me and the boys had this conversation, you know, that's, that's what I would do if I could. If I could travel time and space, I would do my best to shunt us off the explodey path of, you know, oil and petroleum and plastics. I would get, I would, I would try and remap our future. [01:00:46] Speaker A: Right. And it's always, like I said, I kind of look to like the Star Trek y aspect of it. It's like it goes back to if we were to go to like the 1920s or whatever it is when like the first scientists went, hey, we might have a climate change issue. [01:01:04] Speaker B: Yep. [01:01:05] Speaker A: If we keep on doing this to, you know, go, okay, have people take it seriously. Or to the 50s and the 70s when, you know, people really were like, this is going to be a problem around 2020. Yes. And like just like listened and then followed those paths, which again, we'd have a completely different thing going on. [01:01:29] Speaker B: Which leads me to. About something very cool, which I discovered this week. It's. It's been around for a couple of weeks. Right. And you can experience this too. This is something that's available a. It's a game is absolutely not what it is. It's an interactive experience that is launched on PlayStation 5 called Climate Station. [01:01:52] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [01:01:53] Speaker B: Right. And I urge you to check this out. It's VR compatible, but you don't need it. What it is is an incredible interactive database of global temperature, biodiversity, deforestation, Arctic ice loss, coral bleaching, ocean heating. It maps in a timeline, in apps, in as much detail as you can handle the change in climate, the coral, whichever, bleaching, really. [01:02:29] Speaker A: Oh, that's like one of the first frames that comes up when you look it up on the PS5 app is the coral bleaching. And that's one of those things that like, gives me despair. [01:02:38] Speaker B: Yes. Oh, same because. Because that's one of the things that is, you know, by many accounts past the tipping point. [01:02:45] Speaker A: That's not coming back. [01:02:46] Speaker B: Yeah, but you can, you know, you can set where you are on the planet and project in 10, 20, 30, 40, 100 years into the future against a varying slider of risk at what the impacts are going to be if we meet like 4.5 degree climate change to 2 degrees, 1.5 degrees shows you how biodiversity is going to be impacted in the future. Where you are. It's really fucking interesting. And you know, pulls from loads and loads of different sources, has mixed media, you know, kind of different ways of visualizing data depending on how involved you want to get. It's fascinating. Me and Owen sat there with this thing for a good couple of hours yesterday, kind of just looking through it all. It's fascinating. If you've. If you've got a. I don't know if it's on previous consoles, but if you've got a PS5, I massively recommend Climate Station. It's really, really interesting. [01:03:42] Speaker A: Interesting. I'll have to check that out. [01:03:43] Speaker B: You should. [01:03:45] Speaker A: At some point. When I am okay with being depressed. [01:03:48] Speaker B: Yeah, good. As am I. I mean. Yeah, you. You need to be. Because, you know, even at the most conservative projections of. Of climate increase, the. It's bleak as man. [01:04:00] Speaker A: I watched some special. I think it was on pbs. I use the PBS app a lot. And hey, now that PBS has been defunded, make sure that you subscribe to your local channel. $5 or more. It's pay what you want. $5 or more per month gets you access to PBS Passport, which is like all their back shows and all that kind of stuff. So important right now get on to PBS.org and subscribe to whichever your local one is. But I was watching a show. There's like a whole series on pbs. I can't think of what it's called right now, but it is, like, about human sort of. Cause like all the different human causes of climate change and things like that and goes to all these various different places and looks at that. And one of the ones they were talking to these people who are trying to sort of bring back certain coral reefs because as we've discussed, like, once they're gone, they're gone. [01:04:54] Speaker B: Right. [01:04:54] Speaker A: But there are certain ones that they can kind of grow synthetically, if you will. And it was horrifying because this one episode of it, like, it takes a very long time. And they had been working on these coral for like two years or whatever, and they finally. They'd grown them, they put them in the water, and then it was in Florida and a heat wave came through and killed them. And you just see these people just devastated by, like, that's. They're gone. We spent years on this and this took them out just immediately, you know. Yeah, it's like seeing people trying to do their best to fight what we're doing to the planet and then it ending up being so futile is like, oh, it's just so hard to watch. [01:05:43] Speaker B: One thing that climate station doesn't account for, at least not that I saw while Owen and I were playing with it the other day, one thing that it doesn't account for is population drift and population changes, density changes, population migration. [01:05:58] Speaker A: That'S a big one. [01:06:00] Speaker B: It just accounts for climate and biodiversity and Arctic drift and so on. Doesn't account for population migration because again, you know, within Owen's lifetime, you know, the, the, the hotspots, the biggest change is ocean temperature warming and Arctic ice loss. [01:06:24] Speaker A: Yes. [01:06:26] Speaker B: Coastal areas at risk. That's all a present concern. It's a present danger. It's, it's a my lifetime, in his lifetime kind of problem. And if, you know, if the, if the fucking populace are stuck in the fires of migration descent, no, hell, fucking hell, 30, 40 years time, it's gonna be an absolute fucking shit show. [01:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah. I will say on the plus side of, you know, just thinking about our own, you know, little attempts, as futile as they may be, to fix things, you know that one of my New Year's resolutions this year was to go as plastic free as possible. So cheating in the grocery shop and you know, all that kind of stuff and trying to keep as much plastic out of the house as possible. And there's things that like, over time I kind of realized I needed to negotiate with myself on, right? Like I was baking bread, but homemade bread goes bad so fast that I was like, I'm wasting a loaf of bread every week because I eat a piece, two pieces, and then it becomes a brick and I can't eat it anymore. And so I was like, all right, I need to buy like plastic wrapped, pre sliced bread that has preservatives in it from the grocery store. But I've noticed, especially since my mother moved out and it's only me and Kyo in the house that it's given me a chance to really look at like what my output of waste is. And at this point we use, we make so little waste that garbage pickup is twice a week and we usually don't have enough garbage for either of those in a week. It takes us about like a week and a half to have a bag. [01:08:15] Speaker B: Very nice car. [01:08:16] Speaker A: And normally we put out the bag mostly just because like food gets stinky sitting in it for that long or whatever. And so, you know, I think if anyone is kind of thinking about that, like just considering, you know, for, I think a lot of us, it's, it's, especially in America, I don't know about you guys over there. I know you're like Trash system and all that kind of stuff is like much more advanced than we are and you got to separate all the shit and whatnot. [01:08:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:08:41] Speaker A: But I think Americans often are putting out, you know, several bags of trash several times a week. [01:08:48] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:08:49] Speaker A: And just being like, marginally more mindful about that. You can keep so much trash out of the landfills that it's kind of, it's kind of wild going. And it also addresses kind of the issue of like now so many studies are finding that like ultra processed foods are like killing us and whatnot. And it's hard to eat ultra processed foods when you are trying not to. To use plastic. [01:09:12] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:09:13] Speaker A: You start eating a lot more whole foods that way as a result. So I, you know, my little positive update on things to close out all that doom is to say, you know, changes on our part are possible. They're not going to save the world in and of themselves, but we can make changes that contribute. The less demand we have for that shit, the less they're going to make of it. [01:09:43] Speaker B: Yes. Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll allow it. I'll allow it to pass. [01:09:48] Speaker A: I know you're more cynical. [01:09:50] Speaker B: Yes. [01:09:50] Speaker A: About that than I am, but I do think, you know, we can't let ourselves off the hook. That's always my thing. You know, it's like when people use. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism. Like, well, no, but that doesn't mean that you just carry on that things are going to be exploited and all those kinds of things. If you can cut something out that you don't need that is exploitative, do that. Right. Like we may all need a phone or whatever, but you don't need every phone. Right. You may need like, you know, X. Things that, like, if you're disabled or whatever, you rely on Amazon fucking fine. I'm not gonna get on you about that. But if you can go to the store, go to the goddamn store, you know? And so I think it's important to remind ourselves, because we are not the only contributor to something, doesn't mean we're off the hook for doing the right thing. [01:10:45] Speaker B: Beautifully put. Beautifully put. I don't. I can't remember the last time I bought a book off Jeff Bezos. I don't think it's been a long fucking time. Long time. [01:10:55] Speaker A: It's a beautiful thing. I always feel good about purchasing else either going to the library or purchasing elsewhere. I kind of get a kick out of seeing how much money I've spent to get Gibson's over the past five years, they have the. You can keep track of everything you've bought there. And every now and again, I tally it up and I'm like, I feel good that I have spent several hundred dollars at this little bookstore in New Hampshire instead of just paying for one meal at Jeff Bezos wedding. [01:11:25] Speaker B: Repugnant. Because not only are we talking talking meat organisms over a skeletal structure, we also like to watch other fucking skeletal organisms doing things on our shiny, glowing rectangles. [01:11:42] Speaker A: True. [01:11:43] Speaker B: So have you seen any of those this week? Have you seen any telly plays or picture shows that you think might be. Let me just talk a little bit more about Ghost. By the way, how did you find this show? [01:11:52] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say, yep, Ghost was absolutely wonderful. Obviously, I'm not gonna, like, go in depth on it because there's going to be people who are still going to see it, but, I mean, overall, like, it's just a great. I was saying to your brother this morning, actually, I was like, I want more of the. I want all of their tours to be like this, where it's just. You go. I think they put your phone in a bag. They. They play for two hours. You leave, unlock your phone and go home. I was like, this was perfect. [01:12:20] Speaker B: They're not going back from time to time. [01:12:23] Speaker A: Yeah, they're certainly not gonna let us have our phones back after this. But the entire vibe, I mean, every Ghost show, the vibe is so good. And they, you know, played from all the eras of Ghost. Once again, there's always my favorite song that they will not play. I was sure that they would play Marks of the Evil One. I was like, this is made for a concert. They did not play that. Just like, I've been waiting for years for them to play Griftwood and they will never play it. So, you know, I have to come to terms with the fact that that, like, my favorite song on each album is just never going to be performed. But it was an absolute blast. I love the way everything looked and how theatrical it was. And when they. Like, an hour into it, it really kind of like, fucking goes. And they start bringing in the backgrounds and all that kind of stuff. [01:13:13] Speaker B: And it was huge. [01:13:14] Speaker A: Isn't it so fun. Huge. Huge. It was so great. [01:13:17] Speaker B: Yep. It makes you wonder why you would ever need your phone out. [01:13:21] Speaker A: Exactly. Like I was thinking, you know, beforehand. The only. I kept on going to check because we left our dog at home and a sitter was coming, but, like, for a couple hours he was by himself. And so I kept wanting to check his nanny cam and then being like, ah, what's my dog doing? He was fine. He was asleep the whole time. Like, no big deal. But other than that, it was like, once the show started, there was not a single moment where I thought, like, oh, where's my phone? Even to be like, oh, I should record this. Like, it never dawned on me. I just danced through the whole thing. [01:13:53] Speaker B: And it just passes so quickly, doesn't it? Goes over. [01:13:55] Speaker A: It does, yeah. I have this, like, I do this with everything where if I anticipate something when it comes, I suddenly kind of get a little panic about it being over. And so, like, as soon as something starts, I suddenly start being like, oh, no, it's gonna end. And so it was like, I knew, obviously, I've been to three ghost shows before this that it's like once it starts, you're kind of like, it's over. Before you know it, you're having a blast. You're in, and then it's. It's gone. And so I found myself with this. I'm like, I know there's two hours, but, like, I'm already upset that the show is about to end. It's like, that's. I did, like, even with, like, our meetup and stuff like that, it was like there was so much anticipation. And then, like, the moment I picked you up at the airport, I was like, oh, no, it's gonna be over in a few days. [01:14:44] Speaker B: The clock is ticking now. [01:14:46] Speaker A: Yeah, right. I have trouble with the. As much as I am a live in the moment kind of person, sometimes they have trouble with the. Like when the moment comes, not anticipating it ending. [01:14:57] Speaker B: Well, then it's on to the next one, isn't it? What's the next moment? [01:15:00] Speaker A: Onto the next, of course. Indeed. Which in that case, we are working on. [01:15:04] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Let me tell you, 2026, baby. [01:15:07] Speaker A: 2026, UK. It's gonna happen. Yeah, we're already working on it. [01:15:12] Speaker B: We sure are. [01:15:14] Speaker A: So other than that, what I watched this week, so it was. It was a lot of. It was sort of a re. Watch heavy week for me. I made you download the River Wild for me. Yeah. The nineties. Don't you laugh. [01:15:32] Speaker B: No, I'm not doing. [01:15:33] Speaker A: I've never seen it in my typical vein of the past. However long a 90s thriller which takes place, this is the perfect kind of thrill. It's a 90s nature thriller starring Meryl Streep, John C. Reilly, David Stratharan, Joe Mazzello, and did I say Kevin Bacon? Kevin Bacon, John c. Reilly. John C. Reilly. Yes. And it basically, it revolves around a family who is kind of going through some things, like a wealthy family, but the dad works too much and they're gonna go on a rafting trip. His. The mother, Meryl, was a rafting guide, and so she takes them on a trip each year, but the husband's not gonna go along as he has too much work to do. He does surprise them and show up, but as they're going down the river, they encounter these two fellas who are doing nefarious things, who then commandeer their boat and make them take them down the river. And it's. Oh, it's so good. Meryl is the most beautiful she's ever been in her entire career in this movie. She's just like. Just otherworldly, gorgeous in this movie and all that. That cast is incredible. You know, Joe Mazzello, peak kid actor. And it's. Yeah, it's tense. I mean, Kevin Bacon at his scuzzy finest, you know, playing this, like, just sociopathic, manipulative guy in this. And if you've never seen the River Wild, it is well worth your time. I highly recommend checking it out and if you have revisit it. [01:17:18] Speaker B: There has been more than one occasion where prime Meryl Streep has been physically compared to my darling wife, Laura. [01:17:29] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. [01:17:31] Speaker B: True story. And if you look at them side by side, you can see it. You can totally see it. [01:17:35] Speaker A: I should pull it up later, give a little comparison. Yeah, she's gorgeous in this. It's just, like, ridiculous. There are some shots of her where you're just like, that's. That's not a person. That's like some sort of. Yeah, just being. It's just too beautiful. And I had a huge crush on David Strathairan when I was a teenager, too, even though he's, like, very dad, like. So it's like, really just. There's. There's plenty of eye candy for all involved, especially if you like Kevin Bacon. All that just beautifully shot, you know, like, gorgeous outdoor river and forest shots. Yeah, the River Wild is beautiful. [01:18:17] Speaker B: Wonderful, beautiful. It's. It's. It's one that I remember walking past at the video shop lots of times to get to the movies, you know? [01:18:24] Speaker A: Yeah, right. It's. Honestly, it comes from, like. I remember the first time I saw it that I used to, when I was in high school, I lived, like, 20, 30 minutes from Ben, my boyfriend at the time. And so I would sleep on his family couch instead of him taking me home at the end. Of the evening because I went to independent study school so I didn't like have to go to school in the morning. [01:18:48] Speaker B: Okay. [01:18:48] Speaker A: And then he would go to school and I would just like chill, do my homework or whatever, like sitting around his empty house. And so I was sitting in his bedroom and he had like a little old TV in there, you know, like a 12 inch TV in his bedroom. And I was just sitting on the like bottom bunk in his bedroom watching tv and it came on and I was like, what is this? This is my favorite movie. Now I never heard of this. And ever since then, every, every opportunity I take to watch that flick, I'm gonna buy it on Blu Ray. But you know, I was like, that's gonna take a couple days and I need to watch it now. [01:19:29] Speaker B: Interesting in that Blu Rays are made of plastic, isn't it? [01:19:34] Speaker A: It's true, yeah. I mean that's, I think we've talked about that before. The kind of balance of that kind of thing where it's like, well, you know, you're using a lot of shit to watch something streaming and to host all those streaming things too and it could just disappear. I'm not planning on putting my River Wild Blu Ray into a landfill, I guess until I die. At which case I hope someone does something. [01:19:56] Speaker B: And yet you contribute to society and let you live in society. How interesting. [01:20:01] Speaker A: How interesting. I'm very smart. [01:20:04] Speaker B: Delighted you enjoyed the River Wild. I will talk about and apologize for Megan too because I made you not watch it all week because I was. [01:20:13] Speaker A: Like, hey, all week? [01:20:13] Speaker B: Do you Wanna watch Megan 2? Do you wanna watch Megan 2? [01:20:16] Speaker A: And then every time, oh, sorry, I gotta do something else. [01:20:19] Speaker B: Yeah, but then the boys wanted to watch it, so obviously I just watched it without you. So I apologize. I did ask you though, didn't I? I wasn't in a complete shit. [01:20:26] Speaker A: I mean, it wasn't like, it was like a formality, but that's a formality more than you would have like, no, don't, don't do that. You would have been like, I mean, I'm gonna watch it. [01:20:34] Speaker B: Yeah, I probably would have lied if I'm honest and go, oh, alright. You would have seen it pop up on my letterbox, right? [01:20:41] Speaker A: You would have lied and then forgotten and then rated it. [01:20:48] Speaker B: So yes, I apologize for that. But I, I, I've heard a lot of people saying some pretty unkind things about Megan too. Right? And you can all fuck off. Leave Megan 2 alone. Just leave it alone. Because it perfectly fun. It's a load of fun. Even if you didn't like the first one. Actually, no. [01:21:07] Speaker A: Which is. I. I honestly, I did not realize that the first one was as polarizing as it was because I feel like everyone I talked to really likes it. And I looked at Letterbox and has like a 2.7 on there, and I was like, wait, stupid. [01:21:20] Speaker B: What is wrong? [01:21:20] Speaker A: People don't like Megan. Yeah. It's like, I thought everyone loved that movie, but apparently not. Which causes me then to take the Megan 2.0 reviews with a grain of salt, because I feel like I know what I'm getting into. [01:21:33] Speaker B: Well, maybe you don't. Right. Because it's a genre swerve. [01:21:38] Speaker A: I have heard that. [01:21:39] Speaker B: Yeah. This is by no means the left middle column horror of the first, but I'll tell you what else it is. It is a shameless, shameless exercise in. Just have a bit of Terminator 2. Thank you. I'll take a little bit of. What's the one with the chip in the back of the head? What's the fucking. The fucking download. Upgrade. Upgrade. [01:22:10] Speaker A: Upgrade. [01:22:11] Speaker B: I'll take a little bit of. Upgrade. I'll take a little bit of. I'll take a little bit of. I'll take a little bit of lots of things. [01:22:18] Speaker A: Yeah, okay. I'm into that. I like something that wears its influences on its sleeve. In fact, this week, another thing that we were watching is. So there's a new season of Dexter out. And have you watched any of the new Dexter? [01:22:35] Speaker B: No, I haven't seen Dexter since the original show ended, since the. [01:22:41] Speaker A: Universally recognized as a shit show at the end. But the new season looked interesting, but I was like, I haven't watched any. Any of the reboot seasons. So I was like, hey, Kyo, do you want to watch Dexter with me? And so we watched the. We just finished the first reboot season, New Blood, last night, which I had a great time with. [01:23:02] Speaker B: Super, super fun. I was fucking afraid you were going to say that. [01:23:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, I apologize. But it is so fun. Clancy Brown is in it. [01:23:12] Speaker B: So it did always have good villains. [01:23:15] Speaker A: The villains were always great villain. Yeah. So I watched this and towards the end of it, I was like, there's like several kind of ways in which it makes a bunch of just blatant reference. Like he does the. Like Danny from the Shining stepping backwards in the snow footprints. Or at one point he. He walks in and, you know, gives the cup of coffee line from Twin Peaks. There's like various things in this that I was like, this is. Oh, this is funny. It keeps on, like, just Referencing other things in here. Just like not drawing attention to it necessarily, but just kind of. Here's a reference, here's a reference, here's a reference. And I enjoyed those little Easter eggs in it. I like when you can kind of pick out like that. [01:24:01] Speaker B: It's saying, hey, well, it's, it's none. Nowhere, anywhere near as subtle. Megan too. It's, it's simply an exercise in intellectual copying. But then again, it's for kids, right? They, they, they haven't seen Clee Whannell's upgrade, you know what I mean? They've not seen that movie. So it's presenting ideas to them in a, you know, in a way. And you get everything that you might expect you'd get in from Megan doing all of, all of her little Megan things that people seem to like from the first movie. And it's, it's a nice little sci fi action thriller for kids. I keep them coming. Keep them coming. Although the fact that this one was on streaming after a fortnight indicates that maybe they won't be keeping them coming. [01:24:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, two is probably, like enough. Not. I mean, I haven't seen it, but. And I don't mean that in a judgy way, but I feel like sometimes that's like, it doesn't need to be a franchise, you know, it's like sometimes that's. That's fine. [01:25:01] Speaker B: Well, I don't agree because the fact that the second one was a genre switch and stayed fun. [01:25:07] Speaker A: Oh, sure. So there's like, yeah. Potential for. [01:25:11] Speaker B: Let's have Megan on a Heist is the next one. [01:25:14] Speaker A: Let's have Megan on a Boat. Megan on a boat, exactly. [01:25:18] Speaker B: I say lean in, pivot, think on your feet and lean into what people enjoy. [01:25:22] Speaker A: But that's definitely fair. [01:25:24] Speaker B: Yeah, stop being mean to Megan. It's really fun. [01:25:27] Speaker A: All right into it, I watched. I got my Blu Ray of the Monkey, which unfortunately did not have as many special features as I was hoping they had kind of more those kind of special features that you see like on TV or whatever to get you very, like, into this. Like, here's some interviews with the cast talking about why this is cool and things like that. But I did think it was funny. It was the second Blu Ray that I've bought and watched in the past two weeks that had a feature about filming a single actor as twins. I had not really thought about that. And then I was like, oh, yeah, hold on. I watched Sinners last week and the Monkey this week, and those are both twin movies. [01:26:07] Speaker B: I Think I actually have to look up. I had to check in with you. Didn't I have to see the monkey? Was it the same kid? [01:26:12] Speaker A: Yeah, the kid. The kid is really convincing. And the. The outfits and everything that they gave them made themselves distinct enough that you question. [01:26:22] Speaker B: Yes. [01:26:23] Speaker A: Whether that's two different kids. Yeah. Really, really good. I really enjoyed the monkey. And one of the things that, you know, this came to mind when I first watched the monkey and even more set into my mind watching it now is that it's very fun. I've compared to be compared. It's like grown up. Goosebumps if you like. Goosebumps if you like. Are you afraid of the dark? And you. Creep show, like I said at the time, creep show. [01:26:46] Speaker B: 100% creepy show. [01:26:47] Speaker A: Tez from the Crypt slides right into those kind of anthology kind of television shows you once liked. But also, I think what really makes the movie like, it gives it the kind of emotional core of it is that Oz Perkins lost his parents in two of the hugest American tragedies of the past half century, right? His dad died in the AIDS epidemic and his mother died on 9 11. And you've got a guy who is processing the trauma of death in these really interesting ways. And like, how do you move on from, like losing your parents in just insane ways like that? Right? And his kind of approach to this is much like yours that we kind of, you know, the revelation that you had years ago about meaninglessness, right. If you look at the monkey on the surface, it can look really nihilistic because, you know, the mother throughout this is kind of talking about like, yeah, we all live and then we all die. Some of us badly, some of us, you know, in our sleep, like, whatever. And it's inevitable. And everything is this inexorable drive towards death. Every single day of our lives, we are always dying and we don't know how. And it can look like the point of this is like. And thus nothing matters. But that's not what this movie is saying. Instead, it's like that makes everything that we do here matter more and the relationships that we build matter more. The fact that of all this chaos and everything that can happen, that we, like, are able to build these sort of relationships and things like that is like, that's the point, right? And I just think the way that this movie almost could only be made by someone who has been through fucking work through trauma, right? Who is trying to, you know, come to terms with when horrible things, one in a million things. One in a billion things. Happen to people close to you. What does that tell you about life? And that's what this movie is. Is. Is Oz. Perkins, processing that. And so I just. I love the monkey. I think it's just a. Yeah. It's a great one. [01:29:03] Speaker B: And I. And I think that's very insightful. I think that's really well put, you know, I think in the last third of that movie, like one in a billion chance tragedies come thick and fast, and they happen, like, every fucking five minutes. [01:29:16] Speaker A: Just right. [01:29:18] Speaker B: So. Yes. Yeah. I think that's really insightful. And I. I would. I would love to see if Perkins has borne that out, if that's something that he's spoken about, because I think you might have hit the nail on the head with that. [01:29:30] Speaker A: Yeah. And unfortunately, that isn't something that's touched on in the special features of this. But I think, you know, I think that's something It. That's really at the heart of this. And even to the point where, like, there's a part where there's a plane crash. [01:29:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:29:43] Speaker A: Corpses are raining, shooting to the ground and whatnot. Yeah. Right. So, you know. Yeah. Just an interesting. My take on the monkey. [01:29:52] Speaker B: And you. You can choose to disregard any of that subtext and just enjoy the fucked. [01:29:58] Speaker A: Up and just enjoy the ride. [01:30:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:00] Speaker A: Yes. [01:30:02] Speaker B: I don't know if he's my pick for Texas, though, if I want him to win the bidding war for Texas. I look at the monkey, I look at long legs, and I don't know. I don't know if it's right. Texas needs. [01:30:18] Speaker A: I mean, if there's one thing you can say for him is he's not. I was putting him in a box for years because of his earlier work. But with long legs and the monkey, if there's anything we can say is that he's got. He's. [01:30:30] Speaker B: He's growing. Yeah, sure, sure. [01:30:32] Speaker A: Right. So. It's hard to say. It's hard to say. [01:30:36] Speaker B: Yes, it is. Good. Very nice, Very nice, Very nice. I'll talk very briefly about Tron. What? I don't know why. Maybe I got a brush of blood to the head with that new Nine Inch Nails track. And I'm not gonna watch the last one, and I'm not gonna probably watch the new one depending on how much Jared Leto's in it. I have no interest in seeing it, you know, at all. What a strange little film Tron is. [01:30:58] Speaker A: It's weird, right? [01:30:59] Speaker B: Very funny. [01:31:00] Speaker A: It is bizarre that that became such a huge hit. [01:31:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Really, really uncanny. No idea. [01:31:06] Speaker A: Have you Seen it before? [01:31:07] Speaker B: Nope. First watch. [01:31:08] Speaker A: Okay. [01:31:09] Speaker B: Yeah, just the. The ultimate. Is this computers movie. No idea what a computer is at all. Nobody did. [01:31:18] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:19] Speaker B: I. So arcane are the visuals of Tron that I think I'm overthinking how they were produced. Behind the camera was probably like super lo fi and, you know, really kind of spit and sawdust guerrilla filmmaking. But I'm looking at thinking, how the fuck have they done that in 1982? I think I'm. I'm putting too much thought. [01:31:41] Speaker A: Yeah, you are projecting technology that is not being used there. [01:31:45] Speaker B: Yeah, a real curio. Lovely to see Jeff Bridges. Always lovely to see him in something new. Looking like a million bucks, but just. Yeah, just really. It's. It's got things to say. Tron. When did you see it last? [01:32:03] Speaker A: I think before the, like, first reboot movie came out. So what, 15 years ago or something like that? It's been a minute. [01:32:12] Speaker B: Was that that long ago, the Daft Punk movie? The Daft Punk. Tron. [01:32:17] Speaker A: Was it deaf? Was Daft Punk involved in that? All I remember is that Disneyland had a Tron land that I really liked at the same time that. That. So, like, as a promotion of Tron, Disneyland did a Tron land and they had like dance music and drinks with life and stuff like that. And that feels like. There you go. I was like, it feels like right at the beginning of my marriage. So, yes, a year in un. [01:32:46] Speaker B: Real. So the last. The last shot of Tron, Right. The very last shot of the movie is a view of like the city skyline at night and blocks of street lights looking for all the world, like a cpu, you know, who's really stuck in the machine? Is it. Is it us? Yeah. Are we really the ones who are being. [01:33:10] Speaker A: Let me be a good. Is this computers movie for the. [01:33:13] Speaker B: I'm never watching that again. [01:33:15] Speaker A: I'm never again. [01:33:17] Speaker B: Because it was tough. It was hard work, but really, really fun. [01:33:19] Speaker A: Well, that's what I remember of watching because I don't think I'd seen it until then, but I was like, there's a new Tron coming out. I should see the old one. I maybe might have seen it when I was a kid, but, yeah, I remember it being a slog. [01:33:30] Speaker B: It's really hard work. [01:33:33] Speaker A: I think you have to have been 12 when this came out for this to hit. [01:33:39] Speaker B: Unlike. Unlike a little something called slime city from, ooh, 1988. [01:33:48] Speaker A: 88. [01:33:49] Speaker B: I've got. [01:33:50] Speaker A: That's right. [01:33:51] Speaker B: And I. I couldn't even. I couldn't even tell you confidently how this came across my desk. I don't know. [01:33:58] Speaker A: I was curious. [01:33:59] Speaker B: Honestly. It's not a movie I'd hear of until I saw a reference to it online in passing. And I thought this has to be a movie that I see. See now I have to watch this film now. [01:34:07] Speaker A: Cuz I know it's rare that like I'm usually the one who like sends a screenshot and like can we watch this? But the other. The other day you were like this feels like I like we need to do this. [01:34:17] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:34:17] Speaker A: Okay. [01:34:18] Speaker B: Well I'll. I'll put it like this. Right. We have a very grimy, very grimy New York set. Very gory, very gruesome, very. Just batshit horror movie. And Anna Martin hasn't seen it. [01:34:37] Speaker A: That's true. Yeah. I. I was telling you there's only two people on my letterboxd who have seen it. And none of the Scream and Chat people are amongst the people who have seen it. [01:34:50] Speaker B: Slime City I think has got Scream and Chat written all over it. [01:34:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it really does. For sure. Just what's the story here? [01:34:57] Speaker B: So what's the story? So young Alex and his girlfriend studying art and move to the big city. Alex gets an apartment. And the apartment building is owned by acolytes of a Satanist wizard. Stop me if I'm. If I'm wrong. [01:35:19] Speaker A: There's a lot of Satanist wizards in 80s stuff. [01:35:21] Speaker B: Yeah, there is. [01:35:22] Speaker A: It's kind of bizarre. [01:35:23] Speaker B: A Satanist wizard who practices magic called Flesh Control. And this. [01:35:31] Speaker A: I love that when they pulled out the book. [01:35:33] Speaker B: Flesh Control. And this Satanist wizard has brewed up his own special kind of elixir. Ectoplasmic fucking Flesh Control potion. Which he keeps in this block of flats. And his acolytes feed some of this elixir to young Alex. Which makes him go slimy and do. Do murders. Do. Really? Really? [01:35:57] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:35:57] Speaker B: As was the style at the time in the 80s. All of the budget is gone on the gore here. [01:36:04] Speaker A: Yes. Very much so. Yeah. Nothing else. [01:36:08] Speaker B: All of it. If Troma had. If Troma was. Let me think the way I described it to you was. It's like if an A24 movie was in. Was. Was made in 1988. Right. Because it's culty. It's got, you know, cult overtones and witchcraft. [01:36:24] Speaker A: Folk horror esque. [01:36:25] Speaker B: There you go. There you go. But shot through a trauma esque lens. [01:36:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:31] Speaker B: It's not as self consciously. Hey. Are you shocked? What about now? Are you shocked now? We just said the N word. Are you shocked? It isn't that kind of trauma. Although there are slurs which I didn't enjoy. [01:36:43] Speaker A: There are, yeah, but less so than some others. [01:36:47] Speaker B: Less so. This. Think if you want a tonal reference point for Slime City, we're closer to Basket Case. I think we're closer to that kind of batshit grimy than with a wonderful. [01:37:02] Speaker A: Moment or wonderful scene that is just straight ripped from Night of the Demons. It just full on does the Angela dance scene from Night of the Demons in it. But yeah, I think Basket Case is for sure the closest sort of thing to this. [01:37:18] Speaker B: Reanimator. Flavors as well with the. The kind of. The escalating gore at the end. [01:37:24] Speaker A: Yeah, it sure gets weird. [01:37:25] Speaker B: It really does. It really gets weird. But it's like an 1890 minute movie. It just absolutely rips by ridiculous performances. No budget. There's an Irish cop, the cop on the case, and his name's Irish. O', Donoghue, is it? Or Irish o'. [01:37:42] Speaker A: Bannon. [01:37:43] Speaker B: Irish o', Bannon, yes. Hey, kid. Just a lot of fun. It's just everything that I like in a film, it's specifically the kind of film I enjoy to watch. [01:37:54] Speaker A: And it's the kind of one that also, like, there's not as much of a gap between you and I on. Right. It doesn't have as many things in it that like, makes me go like, ah. No, there's a. [01:38:05] Speaker B: It's kind of a common ground between us both, isn't it? [01:38:08] Speaker A: Yes. [01:38:09] Speaker B: It isn't as slurry as some of its contemporaries. And it's got the gore and it's old. So there's another part where we meet, you know. [01:38:17] Speaker A: Yes. [01:38:17] Speaker B: Slime City is great. And I also love that. There's another one. There's a. There's a sequel, Slime City Massacre, which for reasons known only to himself, the same filmmaker made 20 years later in 2010 with the same fucking cast. It's the same guy in the lead role, slime city massacre, 20 years later, which I'm desperate to watch this week. I cannot wait. [01:38:36] Speaker A: Yeah. From what I read, it doesn't seem like it lives up to this one, but I do like that it was like they were dedicated to getting the band back together. [01:38:44] Speaker B: Do we have a watch along in the calendar? [01:38:47] Speaker A: We don't. We don't have one because I'm. [01:38:49] Speaker B: I gotta get that going, you know, if you'll trust me with the reins again, if you'll trust me to nominate a movie again, if I. If I can have the power. [01:38:58] Speaker A: Well, if I already know what it is. That's helpful. [01:39:02] Speaker B: Yeah, that's true. Slime City Massacre, I think might be our next watch along movie in a couple of weeks. But watch this space. [01:39:06] Speaker A: Okay. I like the sound of that. [01:39:07] Speaker B: Good. Yes, good, good. Have you seen anything else or could we talk about Superman? [01:39:14] Speaker A: No, I think just Dexter would just been House and Dexter. Now we're gonna move on to the next one. [01:39:21] Speaker B: I'm never watching it, you know, because that's. [01:39:24] Speaker A: I'm not trying to convince you. [01:39:25] Speaker B: No, I understand. [01:39:26] Speaker A: But they are quite. That one at least was quite good. So I'm feeling good about it. [01:39:32] Speaker B: Something quite niche about Dexter that always pissed me off. Right. Even when it was good. [01:39:36] Speaker A: Mm. [01:39:39] Speaker B: So. Ever. Oh, the title sequence for Dexter is so good. And it is when he's frying up a bacon and he's hitting the mosquito. [01:39:45] Speaker A: That is not the case with Dexter New Blood. The titles are fucking insane. [01:39:50] Speaker B: Oh, really? In a good way? [01:39:52] Speaker A: Yeah. No. [01:39:53] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:39:53] Speaker A: They. They look like, like if you're using after effects or something like that. And like it's giving you ideas of what you could do for titles. [01:40:02] Speaker B: I see. [01:40:03] Speaker A: Like that's what the titles on Dexter and they're so. Like just, ooh, there they are. It's insane. [01:40:09] Speaker B: But the whole deal with the titles was, you see Dexter going about his morning routine and he's mirroring his mop, his hand exactly. And there's a shot of him shaving and he cuts himself shaving and mops up the blood like he would with his slides. And then at the end of the titles, he walks out of his apartment and he's clearly stubbled. He's clearly got stubble. And I always drove me nuts, man. [01:40:34] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:40:35] Speaker B: Every fucking episode. It would drive me nuts. And I really enjoyed that show up until like season four. [01:40:42] Speaker A: Yeah, well, there's. There's nothing like that to complain about in this. But I, I understand the dedication to not watching it, but I. It's rare that I like actually want to sit and watch a TV show, you know, that I don't really watch, like, listen a lot of. Especially hour long tv. But this got me, right? I was like, this feels like the old days, sitting and watching a TV show with Kyo. [01:41:03] Speaker B: I. It's. It's a. It's a. It's a current thing for me. Right. And we both know why. But I can't. I can't finish anything currently. [01:41:13] Speaker A: Like, it's about the bear. [01:41:15] Speaker B: It's about the bear. It's about Rick and Morty. I've got God knows how many Books piled up that I'm like a third of the way. [01:41:21] Speaker A: I've been struggling there this month or this summer too. [01:41:24] Speaker B: I just. I can't seem to fucking see anything through right now. I was really enjoying the bear. I'm like, I'm two thirds of the way through really enjoying it. All of a sudden I haven't even started. I can. Nothing happens. I mean, all of the reviews of it are correct. It doesn't. Nothing moves a fucking inch forward plot wise in the whole fucking show so far. And Rick and Morty have been really enjoying the season up to now. Books that I'm really, really enjoying watching it. But for some reason I just cannot fucking see things through to the extent. Conclusion currently, yeah, I feel that I'm. [01:41:56] Speaker A: Reading like five books right now that I've like started and I'm enjoying all of them and I am not making any progress on them. [01:42:02] Speaker B: On the other hand, I am. I'm really in a groove when it comes to the gym. I'm going to the gym a lot and. [01:42:09] Speaker A: Oh, nice. [01:42:10] Speaker B: Yes. And my shoulder seems to be behaving really. [01:42:14] Speaker A: Glad to hear that. [01:42:15] Speaker B: I've taken some advice from some people and I'm warming up properly currently, you know, doing little lifts before going into the main movement and taking my protein and. Yeah, so that's something that I'm eating your bland chicken. I am eating my blanche. I am. I actually am. I've got a fridge full of fucking plastic packed bland chicken in there for me to finish with a protein shake at the end of every. Every session. [01:42:39] Speaker A: Good. [01:42:40] Speaker B: And I'm saying training, I'm saying my prayers, need my vitamins. Just like the Hulkster tells me, you know. [01:42:47] Speaker A: I just switched because they didn't have the vitamins that I have been taking for, you know, two years or whatever. At the grocery store when I went, they only had the gummy version of them. Same vitamin. It's just gummy. But I was thinking, I keep thinking this and I was thinking about it this morning that like every time I take a gummy vitamin, I want to eat more gummy vitamins. It's candy. Like the other thing was like kind of hard to swallow. The pill was huge. It was like a chore. I keep them next to the coffee maker so that when I go, I like force myself to take my pill. But now every time I have one gummy, I just have like gummy aftertaste in my mouth and I'm like, delicious. [01:43:26] Speaker B: Let's have another bag of those gum. [01:43:27] Speaker A: I'd like to eat More. [01:43:28] Speaker B: Whereas right before your eyes, I just dry swallowed four pills in one go. How do you feel about that? [01:43:34] Speaker A: I can't do that. I have such an active gag reflex. [01:43:38] Speaker B: Is that so? [01:43:40] Speaker A: Shut up. Don't take it to mean anything. [01:43:45] Speaker B: I'm not. [01:43:46] Speaker A: Jesus Christ. [01:43:47] Speaker B: You inferred there, mate. I gave you nothing to go on there. I just. In a purely conversational way. Is that so? Wherever you went is entirely down to you there, because I did not lead you there. [01:43:59] Speaker A: Well, sure, okay. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one, but, yeah, no. [01:44:03] Speaker B: I was firing about your taco a week or so ago. [01:44:05] Speaker A: I've learned a lesson, right? [01:44:06] Speaker B: I can't trust I check myself lest I wreck myself. [01:44:12] Speaker A: No. Yeah, I have a super active gag reflex. And so, you know, swallowing pills is like a. It's like a 50, 50 kind of thing. Sometimes I'm just like, there it is, no problem. And then other times, I will literally spend 20 minutes just throwing my head back. Come on, let's do this. [01:44:32] Speaker B: I've posted as much on Blue Sky. When I dry swallow a handful of medicine, I just. I feel just manly. I just feel as though I've just felled a tree or fixed a car. You know what I mean? [01:44:44] Speaker A: Your ancestors smile upon you. [01:44:47] Speaker B: Exactly this. I love doing it. And I look down on those who require fluids to take medications. You. [01:44:57] Speaker A: Make me sick. [01:44:59] Speaker B: All right, let's talk about Superman then. What can I. What can I. And can't I say here? Because it's quite new, I think. But surely everyone who's gonna see it. [01:45:05] Speaker A: Yeah. And I haven't seen it. [01:45:06] Speaker B: Are you gonna. [01:45:08] Speaker A: I don't know. I haven't decided because multiple movies have come out this week that I want to see. The new I Know what yout Did Last Summer came out. Eddington came out. There's. Yeah, there's like, a few things that, like, are kind of higher on my priority list than Superman is. [01:45:24] Speaker B: All right, but let me ask you this. Let me start with a question. [01:45:27] Speaker A: Okay. [01:45:28] Speaker B: Where on the letterbox scale of 5 stars, half stars being permissible, what kind of A rating is 3 stars to you? [01:45:39] Speaker A: I feel like this has changed over time. Like, I've, like, morphed a little bit towards your scale more than mine. It is a good scale, but when I think three stars, I think, perfectly serviceable. Like, you know what? [01:45:54] Speaker B: Six out of ten? [01:45:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, it's like. I mean, when you say six out of ten, then I start thinking about percentages. And then I'm like, no, maybe it's because that's. That's a D. Right? Like, that's failing. Yeah, it's not failing. A three star on letterboxd is, like, good enough. Maybe if it was on TV I would put it on again, but I'm not, like, gonna seek it out. [01:46:15] Speaker B: Okay, good. Well, good, good, good, good. Because I went with owen, who is 11, and he. I felt hastily. 4.5. Jad. Right. Was all over it. [01:46:27] Speaker A: I was like, that is so cute. He needs a letterbox. Can we get him a letterbox? [01:46:31] Speaker B: I think I've looked. I think it's 13. I think 13 is so close. Yes. [01:46:36] Speaker A: Okay. [01:46:38] Speaker B: If. If three stars. [01:46:39] Speaker A: If you think every review is just cracking film. [01:46:42] Speaker B: That's right. Yeah. He just has it in a. On a clipboard ready to paste into. [01:46:47] Speaker A: Every single review he does. [01:46:51] Speaker B: I'm on a run of three stars. Right. And if you. I will. I will start this by saying I gave Megan 2.03 stars. [01:47:00] Speaker A: You did. [01:47:00] Speaker B: I gave Slime City three stars. [01:47:03] Speaker A: You did. [01:47:04] Speaker B: I have given a lot of three star ratings lately. Shoot to kill. Three stars. [01:47:11] Speaker A: That's true. Yeah. [01:47:12] Speaker B: Superman was. [01:47:13] Speaker A: I've been looking at. I feel like you've been very benevolent lately because you are. You're harder to please. [01:47:18] Speaker B: Yes. And Superman's three star review is not an indicator of it being mediocre, because it isn't. It's very good. [01:47:27] Speaker A: Okay. [01:47:28] Speaker B: But there are opposing forces within this film. Some of which make me want to give it two and a half, some of which make me want to give it three and a half and four and they cancel one another out. And I arrived at 3 simply because I couldn't go either way in any. In. In the other direction. Does that make sense? It is. [01:47:48] Speaker A: Yeah. No, totally. [01:47:49] Speaker B: It is not rationally a two and a half star film, but neither to me is it a three and a half or a four. [01:47:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:57] Speaker B: Oh, man. [01:47:58] Speaker A: It's a three by default. [01:48:00] Speaker B: It's a. Yeah, it's. It's. It's a. It's. It's a three. Because it cannot be anything else. [01:48:06] Speaker A: Right. Okay. [01:48:10] Speaker B: There's lots to enjoy and lots. Right. But it's so telling that I never. I've never liked Superman. He's always bored, the fucker. [01:48:20] Speaker A: Me neither. [01:48:21] Speaker B: Right. Just bores the. Out of me. And. [01:48:26] Speaker A: Except Smallville, of course. But people, a lot of Superman fans will say that's not a Superman show. So. [01:48:31] Speaker B: Never saw it, you know, Never watched it. Never watched it. [01:48:33] Speaker A: But I own all of them on dvd. [01:48:36] Speaker B: Richard Donner, Superman, I always found very boring. That Brandon Routh one me. That was boring. The Snyder verse, just so tedious. [01:48:47] Speaker A: Without saying. [01:48:47] Speaker B: And even in some of the comics I've read, even the Superman comics that everybody supposedly loves, like All Star Superman, I read that and I was bored shitless because there's never any sense of threat with Superman. [01:48:58] Speaker A: Right? [01:48:58] Speaker B: There's never any jeopardy. Oh, he's so lonely. He came from space. So dull, so boring. Oh, I don't care. And this film tackles that, right? They. Yeah, it's found ways of making Superman vulnerable, which I find was super, super interesting. It's found ways of. Of humanizing Superman in ways I've never known before. It, you know, you. You get this feeling that he is fallible. His kind of. [01:49:31] Speaker A: Yeah, that would help. [01:49:32] Speaker B: Is his drive to just do good for all people all the time and to see the best in everyone. It isn't boring this time. He actually. It's. It's grounded, it's relatable. Right. You actually make Superman something that you can relate to, which I've never known before. Very cool. Very cool. Right? And all of the other stuff that James Gunn does really well is in this film. It's really funny. The ensemble is great. The music cues are fantastic. There's one particular music cue before a battle where Owen at 11 turned to me, went, classic James Gunn music cue there, dad. Those were his words, right? Those were his fucking. [01:50:08] Speaker A: You gotta teach him the term needle drop to really just like, that's what he said. [01:50:13] Speaker B: Right. And this isn't like, oh, my son said, oh, isn't capitalism awful? No, those were. [01:50:17] Speaker A: And everyone clapped. [01:50:18] Speaker B: Yeah. Those were his words. Classic James Gunn music. That's what he said. [01:50:21] Speaker A: Love that. I love when kids recognize patterns. I think I've said it before, but, like, that was one of my favorite moments when I was a babysitter. That my ringtone when Kyo called, was Invisible Touch. [01:50:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:50:33] Speaker A: And one of the little girls looked at me really confused and started ringing. Then she went, is that Tarzan? Because she recognized Phil Collins voice. I love that kids recognizing music and things like that. [01:50:49] Speaker B: But why I couldn't go any higher than three stars. All of this, I'm certain, is. Is a choice, right. Is a direction, is a decision that has been made with this film. But firstly, there is no sense of jeopardy anywhere in this film. Right? [01:51:10] Speaker A: Sure. [01:51:11] Speaker B: There is absolutely no sense of danger anywhere anyway in this fucking film, which is absolutely intentional. I've seen plenty of times. James Gunn himself has described it as a comic book movie. Not necessarily a superhero movie, but a comic book movie. The experience of reading a comic. And in a film where every 10 minutes a fucking city is leveled or a fucking, you know, 200 foot tall gribbly is terrorizing a city center, or there's somebody about to get killed, or somebody is about to die, one of your heroes is inches away from calamity. There are so many fucking super chums in this film that you just know that at the last minute somebody's gonna fly in. And they do. At the last minute, somebody's gonna make the save. And they do. Repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. [01:51:56] Speaker A: I mean, the bigness of Superman conflicts is one of the problems in Superman as well. Just in general. Superman's conflicts are too big to be interesting. [01:52:09] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes. And. And that was murdered here. But even. Even in. Even in the cg, right, Even in the effects, which are obviously ubiquitous in every single shot, there's. There's even less weight to the effects than you'd see in something like Marvel or a Disney film. Everything feels just so flimsy. Like even a regular powered human like me could bat away a falling building because there's just no sense of jeopardy or risk or danger to any of this fucking film. [01:52:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:52:44] Speaker B: And how can they be. Obviously, there's such a lot riding on it. It has to set up a million other movies so you know that nothing is. [01:52:51] Speaker A: This is the flagship of the dce. [01:52:53] Speaker B: Exactly. And Corrie. It's so telling. And so everything you need to know for me is that I ended this movie with a sense of dread almost. [01:53:07] Speaker A: It's like the reverse of the. What's the. What's the Marvel one that came out recently? [01:53:13] Speaker B: Thunderbolts. [01:53:15] Speaker A: Thunderbolts, yeah. [01:53:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I thought to myself, they've already got a slate of films going on for the next 15 fucking years of this franchise. I can't. I can't deal with 15. [01:53:25] Speaker A: Please. No. Please, God. [01:53:29] Speaker B: And, you know, he's making all the right noises about them being tonally different. Like Clayface is gonna be a horror and la la, la, la. But I can't fucking commit to fucking conservative guess. Fifteen years of films in this. In this fucking universe, man. [01:53:44] Speaker A: No, I guess maybe there's something to, like. The one thing I'll say about that is depending on how they play it, of course, one of the things about the. The MCU was that you did need to see. See every single movie. Right. Like, you couldn't skip a movie. If I could pick and choose which movies from the DCEU I watch, like, yeah, I'll watch horror, Clayface, you know, things like that. And not watch the shit that, like, I don't want to if they can swing it that way. [01:54:14] Speaker B: That's a great point. [01:54:15] Speaker A: I'm on board. [01:54:15] Speaker B: That is a great point. Maybe it's conditioning because, you know, as Marvel themselves have recently admitted, the last kind of three, four years has been a mess. Where you're thinking, right, which one was this guy in? What the. Do I need to. If they can cut those ties and not make it feel like homework for 15 years. All right, fair enough. I'll engage. But Christ on a bike. I can't do 15 years of flimsy. Oh, look, he's. Oh, it's all fine. Oh, great. Okay. I can't be doing that for another decade in my life. Sorry. I can't do it. [01:54:49] Speaker A: Agreed. [01:54:50] Speaker B: And this is a me problem, but I just. I just want to see Batman. I just want to see Batman, please. That's all I want to see. It's the only thing I care about. [01:54:58] Speaker A: It's true. Your brand is strong. Do you think you would ever get a Batman tattoo that's not your tramp stamp? Or is it just. Is the one One and done? [01:55:09] Speaker B: Probably not now. [01:55:12] Speaker A: When. What do you mean? [01:55:13] Speaker B: I'm not. I'm not about to be getting a fucking Batman tattoo at 46 years of age. Although I know people who have. [01:55:20] Speaker A: When would you. [01:55:21] Speaker B: No. [01:55:22] Speaker A: Like, would you get one at 70? What? What do you mean, no? [01:55:25] Speaker B: I'm not gonna be getting comic book tattoos now. [01:55:27] Speaker A: You will not. Okay, gotcha. You're done with your. Okay. [01:55:31] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, I've got. I've got tattoos in my head that I'm. That I'm there. I've got space marked over him. I know what I'm getting next. I'm not done getting ink. Certainly not. But. [01:55:42] Speaker A: Well, next, obviously, you're getting a Jack of all Graves tattoo, but. [01:55:45] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:55:46] Speaker A: Do you. Mm. Do you have tattoos that you are considering? Because I know, like, you've thought about, like, a ghost tattoo, obviously, Joag tattoo, things like that. Do you have tattoos that are, like, not any form of media property really related thing that you have on your slate? [01:56:06] Speaker B: That's a great question. No, I don't. [01:56:09] Speaker A: Interesting. [01:56:10] Speaker B: No, I don't. I. Right. I think I'm thinking more and more about tattoos now, is, what if there was a T shirt I didn't ever have to take off? [01:56:22] Speaker A: I mean, I definitely do that too. For sure. I'm like a very mixed of that. From what you can see, I've got, like, my Northern Ireland tattoo and my Massachusetts tattoo, but then I've got an over the garden wall and Totoro and stuff like that. That. It's like all my tattoos are like. I think I'm maybe, like, 60, 40, 60 things that are not pop culture related and 40 things that are. [01:56:48] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean. I mean, I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna have, you know, like, only God can judge me or any. Any of that. [01:56:55] Speaker A: No regrets. [01:56:56] Speaker B: A lion with blue eyes and a clock. You know what I mean? [01:57:00] Speaker A: Mm. [01:57:01] Speaker B: No. I'm just gonna get sick band tattoos from now on. I think that's fair. [01:57:06] Speaker A: Do you think you'll, like, like, sleeve it or just kind of, like, patchwork the Gen Z tattoo or sleeving it? What's your plan? [01:57:14] Speaker B: Legs and thighs. A nice big piece on the other side of my RoboCop tattoo. Symmetrically on the other calf. And if you know, this very thought occurred to me at the gym earlier today, right? Every single fucking time. Like, every goddamn time I catch a reflection of my RoboCop tattoo in a mirror, I think, fucking hell. That is sick as fuck. That is so sick. [01:57:38] Speaker A: I do that with my tattoos all the time. I love the way that looks. [01:57:42] Speaker B: Last week, some guy got my attention at the gym, and I took an airpod out. Mate, that's fucking awesome. Roll code. Yeah, thanks, mate. Every time I see it, I'm blown away at how sick it is. So I want something equally as sick on the other leg and then just bits. [01:57:57] Speaker A: Why not Just, like. What about filling in that leg? [01:58:00] Speaker B: No, no. I feel no need to do that. [01:58:02] Speaker A: No. You want them both sides? Yep. Just curious, I have to say. Like, when I was leaving Japan, a Japanese girl, like, was like, oh, I really like your. This. The over the garden wall tattoo. And I would, like, felt, like, especially special because, like, Japanese people are not, like, huge on tattoos, famously. And I was like, this is the best compliment I've ever gotten on my tattoos. This Japanese girl likes my walking around. [01:58:32] Speaker B: When I was in the Philippines, walking around the Philippines with a very, very heavily tattooed girl in our party was something, man. [01:58:40] Speaker A: That was because the Philippines. Not into it either. [01:58:42] Speaker B: I don't know about into it, but Christ. Like, just people just following us and looking through fucking shop windows at her. Hello, Hannah. You don't listen, but fuck it. How you doing? One evening we went bowling, and it was like that scene in the playground in the birds. We'd, like, bowl, turn around, and, like, four other Filipinos had joined to go up at us, okay. Bit weird. Bowl, turn around. Oh, shit, now there's more Filipinos. And it just stood there wordlessly watching. [01:59:18] Speaker A: It's so funny because like that's the thing is like Japan is not like that. Like, you know, whatever you might be. Obviously, as I talked about, I think I at least ranted about it on my, my Instagram. But like that I tried to go get lunch somewhere and I couldn't go because of my tattoos. [01:59:34] Speaker B: Oh really? [01:59:35] Speaker A: And like they were, they were like pointed at the sign. They're like, no tattoos here. And I was like, fuck, I walked like two miles to get here. And it's the only restaurant around and they don't allow tattoos. God damn it. Is because it was in the restaurant was on the top floor of an onsen. And onsens you obviously can't have tattoos in unless they're like specifically geared towards westerners. Otherwise that's pretty much a no go. So I was like, God damn it, this is such a pain. But otherwise, like nobody gives you the time of day. And I always find it so funny when people are like, oh, you can't have tattoos in Japan because they're gonna think you're yakuza. [02:00:17] Speaker B: Yeah, sure. [02:00:17] Speaker A: Like they are going to think that some nerdy 39 year old black American woman is Yakuza. Like you fucking kidding? That's not. It's just like a cultural like taboo that they haven't quite shifted out of. But most people there are used to it and know that it has nothing to do with criminality. Like you want to feel special. But no, nobody is going to think that you're part of Japanese organized crime because you have Greg from the garden wall. I have a tattoo of my grandmother on the back of my leg. Just a teddy bear in an astronaut suit. Like nobody is confused about what that means. But yeah, it's not like that. You don't get a collection of people following you, just people don't notice you at all. [02:01:06] Speaker B: Fascinating. [02:01:06] Speaker A: Just another person. I did see this one girl though. One of my favorites is we were in the zoo, the UNO zoo. And this girl, Japanese girl, had the shortest mini skirt I have ever seen in my life. Like just full ass cheeks out. Like, you know, this is, this, this skirt was a formality. It was not covering anything. And then she had a tattoo on her chest that said like baby girl or something like that on it. And I was like, props to you. Yeah, this is. That is trashy as fuck and I applaud you. Yes, good for you. [02:01:48] Speaker B: Good for you, darling. [02:01:50] Speaker A: Good for you. Doing your thing. [02:01:52] Speaker B: Now we had a topic lined up and everything, but us. [02:01:55] Speaker A: It's not gonna happen. [02:01:56] Speaker B: No, no, no, no, no, no. This was just a delightful conversation and lovely to spend the time with you. Corrigan. And lovely spend the time with you. Likewise, dear, dear listener. [02:02:05] Speaker A: Yeah, so next week we've got a. We've got a topic for you, or whatever. It happens, like we said last week, it's summer, so we do what we want. I mean, we always do what we want, but especially in the summer. [02:02:15] Speaker B: Listen, do you have any parameters for me when I. When. When is our fifth anniversary? [02:02:20] Speaker A: For a start, I believe it's August 30th or 31st. [02:02:24] Speaker B: Right. How big does it have to be? [02:02:29] Speaker A: Our anniversary? [02:02:30] Speaker B: No, no, the inevitable Joag tattoo that you're gonna press Ganymede into getting this month. [02:02:35] Speaker A: Like, do I need you? It needs to be a full back tattoo, obviously. [02:02:40] Speaker B: On my face? [02:02:42] Speaker A: Yes. Right. [02:02:43] Speaker B: Stay spooky on each eyelid. Like that girl in Indiana Jones in the lesson. [02:02:47] Speaker A: Precisely. Yeah. That's what I'm expecting. Nothing less than that. [02:02:52] Speaker B: Well, I'm not committing to it yet, but I'm thinking of it. Seriously, you've committed rats. All right, stay spooky, do it.