Ep. 238: the conspiracies that broke america

[00:00:04] Speaker A: Listen. [00:00:04] Speaker B: Oh. [00:00:07] Speaker A: Tricked you. I swerved yesterday. Marco. [00:00:13] Speaker B: Yep. [00:00:14] Speaker A: I watched the movie Eddington, and as you predicted, I did not like it. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:00:21] Speaker A: And I'll talk about most of those reasons a little later when we get into what we watched, but one of. [00:00:27] Speaker B: Them, just to preface this, and I'm not gonna preempt or anything like that at all doing this episode. I'm really not gonna do it. But you'll know. You'll know how I enjoy it when I feel things. Right. [00:00:42] Speaker A: Mm. [00:00:43] Speaker B: It's my favorite thing. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Yep. [00:00:46] Speaker B: The worst crime that any piece of art can commit is to leave one in unchanged. [00:00:53] Speaker A: I can think of a worse crime. [00:00:55] Speaker B: Ah, well, okay. I had. I was pretty much, for the entire runtime of Eddington, suffused with feelings. Right. And chief among them was my podcast co host is going to fucking, violently, viscerally, vehemently hate this. This film. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Yep. Yes, you texted me as much and, yeah, warned me in advance that, no, I was. I was not going to like this. And you were correct. [00:01:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:33] Speaker A: On many, many levels. But in my opener here, I'm going to deal with one of those that kind of speaks to a larger thing, which is this new wave of flicks made by rich white men that look at the political landscape, remove all the context from it, turn all the characters into caricatures of how they think normies act, and then go. Really makes you think in the world of Eddington, there's no Trump. [00:02:05] Speaker B: Give me a. Give me a. To call it a wave implies, you know, a context of other movies of this ilk. Give me. Give me some. Some examples. [00:02:14] Speaker A: For example, Civil War and whatever that other Alex Garland movie was that came out recently about Iraq. Those are amongst those, I would argue weapons does this as well, but we'll talk about weapons a little later, now that you have seen it as well. But does that sort of bird's eye view of issues without naming any of the things that it's actively talking about, leaving it very open to interpretation from its audience, is able to sort of be absorbed by whoever watches it along, along the lines of whatever they already believe about a thing. And often these things kind of make it seem like, oh, who can understand, you know, why are we like this? How did we get here? Gosh, hard to say. And in this movie, like I was saying, there's no Trump in this movie. No, never mentioned no Republican Party. Just shadowy radio shows of no particular political alignment and sketchy email forwards that appear in the hands of chaotic boomers out of nowhere. Eddington exists in a bubble why should anyone in Eddington care about racial injustice when there are so few people of color? Why should they wear masks when no one in Eddington has Covid? The world is just Eddington. And while this maybe says something about how we feel felt during lockdown, it isn't truthful about what was really going on or why people might be like this. So I'm going to restore a little context here, Marco, and talk about the world in which Eddington happens and the world that we live in now. And for those of you who have not seen Eddington, just to sort of summarize this, what it's basically about, it is about a town in the middle of COVID lockdowns that is dealing with sort of political and social strife as a result, or that's exacerbated by being in lockdown. So In November of 2016, WikiLeaks released a trove of emails belonging to Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, resulting in consequences I don't think they could have possibly imagined, because frankly, the consequences were fucking batshit and destroyed whatever semblance of normal politics we had left in the United States and spiraled into the hellscape we're in now. Among those emails was a set of very normal and boring exchanges between Podesta and and a man named James Alefontis, the owner of a local D.C. pizza shop called Comet Ping Pong. And those emails were about hosting a fundraiser in his establishment. Users of the forum 8chan seized on these emails for some reason, convincing themselves that cheese pizza was code for child porn. They combed Podesta's other emails for mentions of pizza and other Italian foods and found things like this email. The realtor found a handkerchief. I think it has a map that seemed pizza related. Is it yours? They can send it if you want. I know you're busy, so feel free to not respond if it's not yours or you don't want it. The recipient responded, it's mine, but not worth worrying about. That's the whole exchange. A map on a handkerchief and pizza. There was only one conclusion to draw. The Hillary Clinton campaign was at the center of a child pornography ring and they were doing their dark deeds in the basement of Comet Ping Pong. They further extrapolated codes like hot dog means boy, pizza means girl. Cheese little girl pasta, little boy ice cream, male prostitute, walnut, person of color map. Semen and sauce means orgy, which I feel like I would have switched those. But sure, sauce feels like the obvious semen thing, but I guess it didn't fit the code. I don't know. You're being very quiet. [00:06:34] Speaker B: I am. Listen, I'm. I'm absorbing. [00:06:39] Speaker A: Well, continue absorbing further. They determined that the symbols on the outside of the restaurant were related to baphomet and satanic imagery. Because it ain't a moral panic that ol Satanism. In it, they invented a whole world of coded language and imagery surrounding pizza and Ping pong. And pretty soon anything related to either thing was evidence of a grand pedophilic conspiracy, including innocuous shit like a framed photo of Barack Obama playing ping pong in the White House. Fake and misleading images were spread, including a sinister looking walk in refrigerator that was claimed to be the sex dungeon in the basement of the of Comet Ping Pong. I don't think it's going to surprise you to learn, Mark, that Comet Ping Pong has neither a basement nor a walk in fridge. In fact, they actually use a refrigerator at a different restaurant two doors down to store their stuff. [00:07:36] Speaker B: Yes, I knew this. I knew this. It's a topic which is covered in depth in the first series of a wonderful BBC podcast called the Coming Storm. [00:07:47] Speaker A: That's right. Yes. You. You were talking about this. [00:07:49] Speaker B: So, yes, while I don't, you know, you know what my, my brain is. It's. It's porridge and maybe a little leaky. [00:07:57] Speaker A: But you know the. [00:07:58] Speaker B: But I know this tale. Yes, yes, yes. [00:08:01] Speaker A: Yeah, but. So that's how deeply wrong these people were. The place doesn't even have a walk in refrigerator or a basement. And yet they had come up with this sinister idea about these things. They even found a photo on the owner's Instagram they said proved he was a pedo. I'm proud of showed what they said was him wearing a shirt that said J' adore l', enfant, which is basically I love the child in French. [00:08:32] Speaker B: Well done for leading into that. [00:08:35] Speaker A: The photo was not actually of Oliphatus and in fact was the owner of a bar called. You want to guess, Mark? [00:08:45] Speaker B: I love the child l'. [00:08:48] Speaker A: Enfant. [00:08:49] Speaker B: Yeah, okay. [00:08:51] Speaker A: That's why. Yeah, he makes sense. Yes. The conspiracy got so wide in its scope, it was claimed that Podesta and his brother actually kidnapped Madeleine McCann in Portugal. Just so absurd. They were just like filling in anything. Like they were this close to being like, hey, he also time traveled and killed JonBenet. Like ridiculous shit. Now this manufactured scandal that came to be known as Pizzagate could be chalked up to the bizarre rantings of a few understimulated nerds on a crank message board. But the story broke containment when on December 4, 2016, 28 year old. Yes. [00:09:35] Speaker B: Where did these discussions all take place? Was it Reddit? Was it 4chan? [00:09:38] Speaker A: Was it 4chan largely okay. Or 8chan? [00:09:41] Speaker B: 8Chan I believe. [00:09:43] Speaker A: Yes. On December 4, 2016, 28 year old Edgar Welch showed up at Comet ping pong with an AR15 and a handgun, fired the rifle and demanded to be taken to the basement to free the child slaves. This brought the whole conspiracy theory to the light in the mainstream. Now this wasn't something you had to be very online to know about as it had been before it was on the evening news now your shut in stoner neighbor knew about it and your boomer uncle and instead of going wow, that's so silly, what a fucking crackpot. They went, well, hey, maybe these people are onto something. In October of 2017, an anonymous 4chan user who would eventually come to be known as Q wrote their first post on the message board claiming that they had secret information they would reveal in cryptic posts that other users would have to decode in order to. These came to be known as Q drops and the movement QAnon. Among these early drops was one claiming that Hillary and Podesta were going to be arrested. It read in part HRC extradition already in motion effective yesterday with several countries in case of cross border run passport approved to be flagged effective 10:30 at 12:01am Expect massive riots organized in Defiance and others fleeing the US to occur. USMS will conduct the operation while NG activated proof check. Locate an NG member and ask if activated for duty 1030 across most major cities. It's like kind of a big prediction. [00:11:29] Speaker B: It's very, very specific, isn't it? Very detailed. [00:11:31] Speaker A: Very specific, yes. Yeah, it's not leaving room for like, oh, you could like interpret that. [00:11:37] Speaker B: And it's like Rasputin talking about the end times. This is dates, times, individuals, people, places. [00:11:44] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. This kind of message played into something they called the storm. As you referenced from that podcast, a reference to a Trump quote in which he told military leaders. Maybe it's the calm before the storm. You'll find out, which is cryptic if you take it at face value. But if you've ever listened to Trump speak, you know it's because he's just talking out his ass and has no idea what he's saying. But the Anons took this to mean soon Trump would orchestrate mass arrests and executions of the Democrats involved in. You want to take a stab? [00:12:24] Speaker B: No, no, please go for it. [00:12:28] Speaker A: Demonic underground pedophile ring, complete with child trafficking and even ste healing of children's blood to keep themselves young using a chemical called adrenochrome. Coarse. [00:12:38] Speaker B: Naturally harvested from children. Yes. [00:12:43] Speaker A: Yep. You get them all, basically. You torture them and then it's like. It's like Evil Monsters, Inc. You know? [00:12:50] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, cool. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Torture the kids and then you harvest their adrenochrome and it keeps you young. Mm. Yeah, exactly. Naturally, neither Hilary, nor Podesta, nor any other Dem for that matter, was arrested. But like adherence to cults that keep moving the timeline for the end of the world, QAnon's adherents soldiered on as Q kept leaving them hints and promises that the storm was coming. For sure it was gonna happen. It was even claimed that actually these Dems had been executed by Trump, but they were replaced with doubles to. To keep up their appearances, they analyzed photos of people like Obama, Biden, Hillary, and even Tom fucking Hanks to prove that these were not the original versions and they had been replaced by doppelgangers to fool us all. Depending on the poll, you followed, by 2020, anywhere from 4 to 7% of Americans said they believed in QAnon specifically. But another study in 2021 showed that 15 to 20% of Americans believed in its core ideas. That the government, media and financial worlds in the US Are controlled by a group of Satan worshipping pedophiles who run a global child sex trafficking operation. 15 to 20%? [00:14:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:14:12] Speaker A: That's over 30 million Americans going. Yep, that is a thing that absolutely makes sense to me and I shall vote and live my life accordingly. Yes, these people weren't getting these ideas from message boards. They were getting it from the media. Right wing news like Fox, OANN, Newsmax, etc. Were telling them that this was a thing that was happening. And of course, there was social media, particularly Facebook, which was absolutely rampant with disinformation relating to these conspiracies and which found the engagement far too profitable for them to want to actually do anything about it. While sites like TikTok and Twitter made at least a cursory effort at first to try to stem the flow of batshit. According to Vice, in 2019, a researcher set up a fake Facebook account for a fictitious Carol Smith, a hypothetical Wilmington, North Carolina mom who was politically conservative. Within just two days of her profile being created, Smith received recommendations to join Facebook groups that were dedicated to QAnon. Even without following these groups, within a week, her feed was full of hate speech and disinformation that violated Facebook's policies. They were actively pumping this onto people's feeds. [00:15:31] Speaker B: Trying my best to be charitable towards people. [00:15:36] Speaker A: Right, yeah. [00:15:40] Speaker B: You, you mentioned like a minimum 4% of people polled would buy this. [00:15:50] Speaker A: Yeah. And that's specifically asked about QAnon. [00:15:54] Speaker B: Yes. [00:15:55] Speaker A: So a minimum of 4% of people said they believed QAnon. Specifically a minimum of 15% said they believed the things at the heart of QAnon. Without being asked about QAnon. [00:16:09] Speaker B: I have to believe that I, I feel there is a distance, a gulf between stating your views on a poll and having invested time and energy and thought and arriving at a conclusion in support of a set of a story. You know. [00:16:33] Speaker A: Sure. [00:16:37] Speaker B: Think about, you know, I think about ah, how to articulate this. [00:16:42] Speaker A: I get where you're going with it, but go on. [00:16:44] Speaker B: Voting for something or saying that you agree with something isn't the same as a wholesale reasoned and considered commitment of your beliefs and energy. And I think that's how we got to a lot of the weird places that we're at right now. I think that's a lot to do with why your president is in office. I think that's a lot to do with why Brexit happened. This idea that ah, fuck it, I'll just vote and that'll fucking show him. Haha. [00:17:19] Speaker A: Right. Yes. [00:17:20] Speaker B: Without thinking through the actual full term commitments and consequences of what you are claiming you believe. There you go. That's the closest I can come to articulating that. What people claim they believe and what they actually believe and the reasons why they might claim that, I think are two different things. And I know that it's vague, but it's the closest I can come. [00:17:42] Speaker A: No, I think you're, you're onto something here. I think when asked in polls, for example, about that, like that's why there is that discrepancy. Right. Like 4% of people said they believe in QAnon while 15 said they believe in the theory. Yes, 15 to 20. Right. Is that a lot of people, they aren't dedicating every day to these beliefs. Right. Like it isn't, they aren't sitting scrolling all the feeds and watching, you know, all the things and stuff like that. I almost think it's. Well, and I think that's kind of what you're alluding to. What's worse is that people aren't necessarily coming at this from a considered place. Right. They're knee jerk reacting and going, you know what? No, I think that, I think that absolutely makes sense. And then they're voting along with like A thing that they have not put. [00:18:22] Speaker B: Exactly a whole lot of thoughts. And I, that my cousin votes for and he told me, and I see it on the TV and I see it on my Facebook. I remember. What's the guy called? Is it Andrew Callahan, the guy who had the YouTube channel, who would talk to people outside Trump rallies in the queue. [00:18:41] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, I know who you're talking about. I didn't know his name. [00:18:45] Speaker B: And that's the sort. That's the, that's the, that's the person that we're talking about here who will have fucking, you know, lock her up T shirts on, Stop the steel. I think Trump is still president in the middle of the Biden presidency, but when pushed, when offered logic or challenged to logically link those beliefs together, it just completely goes to shit. There's nothing there. [00:19:13] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we're gonna get that. [00:19:15] Speaker B: Yes, of course, of course. I don't, I don't doubt it. But they would not to want to speak for anyone, but they would tick a box on a pole without pulling on the thread properly. That's, that's the most charitable I can be here. [00:19:29] Speaker A: Right, well, and the, and the other end of that, I think you have the people who are like that and the people who will discuss as I go on, who are so deep into it that it doesn't matter the fact checking on things. Things. And therefore they have actually dedicated a lot of time into seeing their side of this. And when presented with opposite information, their response isn't, oh, I didn't know that. It's. Well, you're fake news or things like that, right? Or you must, you must have your facts incorrect. Which, like, there was one of those and I don't know if it was the same guy. I can't remember who it was at this point. But when the tariff things were coming around, like, who famously interviewed some folks outside of Trump rally who were like so excited about the tariffs and how, like, you know, China was gonna pay their fair share and stuff like that. And when the guy was like, but you do know that, like, that's on us. [00:20:26] Speaker B: Like, we pay, we pay that. [00:20:27] Speaker A: Yeah, right. They were like, no, that's not true. And like, no, that is, that's what a tariff is. Like, we will. Our businesses pay that. And they're like, no, that's not true. That's absolutely not true. Like China is going to pay. Like, that's not how it works. And it's like being presented with the accurate facts instead. It's like it caused them to glitch it doesn't cause them to, you know, rethink their worldview, but we will get into it. And I think you make a good point there, you know, and maybe it's a charitable one, but I think there is some truth to that. I think we all know how completely incapable of assessing sources most people are. The AI boom is obviously showing us this more and more every single day. Folks, especially Gen X and boomers who didn't grow up with this kind of technology tend to approach the Internet with an I saw it, so it must be true. [00:21:22] Speaker B: Oh, listen, coming out of the gym yesterday. Yesterday, yesterday I was walking into Sainsbury's to buy my bland chicken behind two women of. I would. I would guesstimate in their kind of 60s, early 60s. And as I was walking past, I heard one of them say to the other day. Oh, well, yeah, I asked Chat GTP the other day and I just kind of walked off. People are asking it the most. Just normal, cursory, ridiculous things. Yeah, right. [00:21:57] Speaker A: There's like a whole thing earlier today on gma, which is constantly. Good Morning America, they call it GMA now. They're constantly pushing AI on that show. And there's a whole thing about people like planning their weddings with Chat GPT. And the other day they had one about like, oh, you can use it to like meal plan and stuff like that. I'm like a don't do that because Chat GPT notoriously will feed you poison. And like two, these are not things you need to ask AI for. [00:22:28] Speaker B: No. [00:22:29] Speaker A: Like, you know, you can Google wedding venue near me. [00:22:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:22:33] Speaker A: And it'll show you wedding venues. Like, there's no reason for this, but people have completely lost the ability to outsourcing anything for themselves. Like, thinking is hard. Just put it in the machine and there you go. So, yeah, people are not great and are getting worse actively at evaluating the sources. I remember a conspiracy theorist friend who I will talk about multiple times in here because he's my perfect example of everything. But he used to constantly show me shit on his phone. Like, see, this proves whatever insane thing. And I would be like, did you look it up elsewhere? And he'd be like, I don't need to. Like, I can see it right here. He once showed me a screenshot of a screenshot of. Of a headline from Reuters or AP or something like that. Not the article, screenshot of the article. And it had a headline that said like a. A shooter had shouted God is great while committing a shooting. And to him he said this proved that the fake news Media was trying to hide that Muslims were doing crimes. You know, why didn't it say Allah Akbar? Which is what a Muslim would say. So I asked him if he looked at the actual article. Of course not. He'd seen the screenshot. What more did he need to know about this? So I looked it up right there next to him, and it says plainly in the actual text that the shooter had said Allu Akbar. And then I looked up the headline standards for the outlet, and it said that they always translate foreign words and headlines for clarity in case people don't know what that foreign word means. So there was an obvious reason why they did this. No conspiracy behind it. Naturally, his response was, well, the fake news is still trying to hide it. Yes, of course, because as the MIT Technology Review explained in July of 2020, it was far too late to stop the spread of this ideology with things like fact checks and, and account bans. People who were down this rabbit hole were being fed so much disinformation from every single angle. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube message boards, on and on, that you could shoot down one thing. But there was a whole algorithmic media ecosystem bombarding them with shit that validated their alternate reality. Even as sites like Reddit clamped down on Q and more or less eradicated it from the site, it simply moved elsewhere. Mental health counselor Stephen Hassan, who had escaped from the Moonies cult when he was younger, said that QAnon needed to be looked at and approached as a cult. He explained, when you get recruited into a mind control cult and get indoctrinated into a new belief system, a lot of it is motivated by fear. And he went on to explain that people can be deprogrammed, but often it requires the people closest to them to be trained on how to do so, which is wild. You have to learn how to deprogram someone from QAnon just like you would if they were fucking Aum Shinrikyo. [00:25:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the circumstances you describe are almost. I mean, what are the hallmarks of a cult? You are surrounded by that all the time. You are surrounded by and sequestered and taken away from what is normal. And it's all you see and all you hear. [00:26:03] Speaker A: Thought terminating cliches to keep you from looking at other sides of this, pulling you away from any kind of counter balancing thought or influence, like your family, things like that. [00:26:17] Speaker B: But I mean, the amount of time that one spends in front of a screen, and I'm as guilty as fucking everyone. If algorithmically all you are seeing is stuff that confirms, you know, what what it thinks you want to see. [00:26:36] Speaker A: Right. [00:26:37] Speaker B: That is the, the equivalent process of being sequestered, of being taken away, of being kidnapped. [00:26:41] Speaker A: Almost fucking holding your eyes open and having you watch propaganda videos. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're just, you're doing it yourself, but the algorithm is doing it to you. Yes, just as much. And back in 2020, I remember finding a Reddit sub for people who had lost family members to QAnon, which was regularly happening and it was depressing as fuck. Every now and again someone would manage to deprogram their loved one and there would be just hundreds of replies from people begging for specifics so they could try to get their own loved ones back. The damage was so widespread, there's a whole book about it called the Quiet Damage. Marriage has ended, children were estranged from parents, and even multiple murders and family annihilations occurred. In January of 2019, 26 year old James Wolf stabbed his brother to death with a four foot long sword, believing he was a lizard person. A common belief among Q supporters, including the guy I knew. I just want to make that very clear. The beliefs in QAnon, as unhinged as they sound, common and regular people were being so inundated with evidence from every angle that they ate it up. [00:27:56] Speaker B: Well, I said at the time, it reached over here, it got over here. [00:28:00] Speaker A: Oh yeah, it's global. It's absolutely global. And like, I wouldn't describe my conspiracy theorist friend as crazy. I think he had a chip on his shoulder about having a hard time in school and felt like people looked down on him. So having secret knowledge made him feel better than other people? Yes, but he was not mentally ill. His entire media intake was simply telling him that all of this was real and showing images and headlines that validated it. And because this is a cult, he simply could not take in anything that refuted this stuff. Anything that said no, there are not lizard people was a conspiracy by the lizard people. To tell you that, completely circular. In March of 2019, Anthony Comello murdered Frank Calley of the Ghost Gambino crime family because he thought that he was a member of the Deep State. Camello understood himself to be under Trump's protection and had MAGA Forever written on his hand. At his first court appearance In November of 2020, a man who had changed his name to Jason Neo Bourne after the exact two people it sounds like killed one of his neighbors and and their housekeeper and paralyzed their teen daughter before kidnapping their 12 year old son and killing him in a parking lot. It was later found that he was deeply enmeshed in QAnon theories. Although he was killed by police before he could explain it for himself, they found all the information on his computer. In January of 2021, Troy Burke murdered his wife Jessica, claiming he had been receiving messages from QAnon telling him to do it and that Jessica had been a transgender offspring of President Joe Biden and a CIA linked trafficker. In April of 2021, Liliana Carrillo killed all three of her children after spiraling into QAnon conspiracies. In August of the same year, Matthew Taylor Coleman took his two children to Mexico and killed them with a spear gun, saying that he had been enlightened by QAnon and found out that his wife had passed on Serpent DNA. [00:30:07] Speaker B: I remember that case. I remember that case. [00:30:08] Speaker A: It was a big one. Yeah. As recently as last year, Danielle Johnson pushed her two children out of a car on the PCH in la, killing one of them before crashing the car and dying herself. She had murdered her partner the night before. She was an astrology influencer who regularly posted about QAnon. There are more murders, more incidents, but you see what I'm getting at here. The consequences of following QAnon and its adjacent conspiracies ranged from familial estrangement to. To family annihilation, from posting disinformation on Facebook to participating in harassment campaigns against whichever celebrity or everyday Joe was deemed a lizard person or pedophile or member of the deep state. And all of this was made exponentially worse by Covid, which saw people suddenly isolated from whatever counterbalancing forces they may have had in their lives before. An analysis by HuffPost showed that the largest QAnon decoder accounts, I.e. people who decode whatever Q drops come in, saw an explosive increase in subscribers in mid March 2020 as the pandemic began. And by June, most of these accounts followings had at least tripled, while one Facebook group of QAnon decoders membership increased by over 5,000 thousand percent. That's pretty stark. Pandemic hits and all of a sudden these things are going through the roof. People are sitting at home googling it, going on these Facebooks, joining these things and trying to find out more about this. And this is when it became impossible to be friends with my conspiracy theory chum anymore. He'd been listening to people like Alex Jones and saying dumbass shit for years. And we'd argue about it, but it came something entirely different when Covid hit. And instead of working and going out of the house, he was spending all day scrolling Facebook 4chan and YouTube. He'd start responding to any of my Instagram stories that so much as mentioned a vaguely left political issue or politician with rants about my support for pedophilia. And Covid itself became, yeah, oh, all the time. Then when I was like, I don't think we can be friends, he was like, why can't you disagree with people? Because you keep saying I support pedophiles. I don't, I don't think that's one of those like we can just hug it out issues. But Covid itself became a massive trigger where adherence to any sort of restrictions around it or getting vaccines to avoid it was participating in some deep state population control tactic. People weren't dying of COVID they were dying of the vaccine. And all those bodies and refrigerated trucks in New York City because there wasn't enough room for all of the dead in the morgues. False flags, nobody in there. All just an excuse for the government to control us. This was all bolstered by lots of slick propaganda films disguised as documentaries like Fall of the Cabal, out of the Shadows, and probably the one we all encountered one point or another. Plandemic. The hidden agenda behind COVID 19. [00:33:29] Speaker B: They go back even further as well. I mean, around 9 11, did Zeitgeist ever cross your path? [00:33:35] Speaker A: Well, I don't know if I, if I've come across that one specifically. [00:33:39] Speaker B: Have a little bit of a look at Zeitgeist and Loose Change. They were, they were two that I remember people, you know, in fucking South Wales talking animatedly about, watch Zeitgeist. [00:33:53] Speaker A: My dad used to give me DVDs of weird propaganda shit like that all the time when I would come to visit him. Be like, oh, I heard about this one. Like, okay, yep, yep, yep, yep, sure buddy. But of course social media made it so that, you know, you didn't have to have your boomer dad hand you a DVD he hastily scrawled on in Sharpie, right? Instead it was all over your Facebook network. Like my Facebook was covered in people sharing plandemic. It was constant. That was not a thing that you could have happen before, right? According to an article by Jeremiah Morlock and Felipe Ziotti Narita in the Critical Sociology Journal entitled the nexus of QAnon COVID 19, legitimation crisis and Epistemic Crisis, A study identified a whopping 637 COVID 19 related conspiracy theories, especially around the vaccine. These included things like the vaccine actually increasing susceptibility to the virus that Covid was created to sell vaccines, that the vaccine contained a micro chip, there was no virus at all, and that the vaccine altered people's DNA. And that one hits close to home because Keo's dad literally called him crying when he realized we were going to take the vaccine. And he was like, that's going to change your DNA. You can't do that. Kyo talked him down the best that he could, but all of his sources of information are extremely right wing. He keeps Newsmax on 247 in the bakery that he owns, and all of his friends are creepy racist white dudes who bring him email forwards and whatnot printed out so that he can read up on all of this. And as an evangelical, he's extremely prone to superstition. He's been primed for 80 years to believe the incredible. And as an article called the Revelations of Dissemination and resonance of the QAnon conspiracy theory among US evangelical Christians and the role of the COVID 19 crisis, evangelicalism, due to its biblicism, is characterized by the belief that its perception of reality holds absolute truth, that the world can be clearly divided into good and evil, and that salvation can be achieved through political means. Those beliefs in turn, in the uncertain times of COVID crisis, resonate with the cognitive, the affective and conative elements of the conspiracy theories, the epistemic, moral and eschatological. Which is all to say that QAnon and Covid conspiracy fits neatly into the evangelical beliefs about good and evil and play into their convictions that conservative politics are critical to salvation. So conspiracies target them on pretty much every ideological level imaginable. As the Critical socio. As the Critical Sociology article put. Go ahead. [00:36:56] Speaker B: I'm thinking on that and I'll talk a little bit more about it later. But I've watched and I think it's responsible for my state of mind tonight, which is I'm not kind of. I'm not, I'm not. I'm not really all that present this evening. And a lot of that is due, I think, to the fact that I've somehow managed to watch four hours of Adam Curtis documentaries this week. And the last one I watched focused quite heavily on the Reagan era. Right. [00:37:33] Speaker A: Mm. Which as I, as the entire Wisecrack staff will tell you, you can draw a line from Ronald Reagan to every single problem. [00:37:46] Speaker B: Exactly. This and what you just said, I'm paraphrasing, but I, I rewound this quote a couple of times. I'm sure you know it and I'm Paraphrasing. But it went something like. In an address to the people, Reagan said, God has placed the fate of an uncertain world into the hands of America. Fuck. Fuck. [00:38:11] Speaker A: Which is, you know, he's. What he's doing there rhetorically and maybe this talked about that is bringing us back to the shining city on a hill speech, right? [00:38:19] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:38:20] Speaker A: The 17th century, the idea that America was going to be, you know, the place that everyone could look to as a beacon of guidance. And that's something that's like very much at the core of, you know, American identity. And he knew that he was speaking to something that we conceive of ourselves as, but which has terrible implications because we are not a moral country and should not be trying to be the guide of anybody. But yeah, he destroyed everything, basically. So, as the Critical Sociology article put it, the current popularity of conspiracy theories is one aspect of a general retreat from rationality that is central to the rise of authoritarian populist movements. In this respect, post truth, anti science, anti intellectualism and conspiracy theories among the far right can be understood not as isolated trends, but rather as separate but homologous and overlapping components of a widespread flight into irrationalism. So all of these things are completely intertwined with each other to make us into a society that struggles with rationality. [00:39:30] Speaker B: If I may, into the hands of America, God has placed the destiny of an afflicted mankind. [00:39:38] Speaker A: Bars, let's be real for sure. [00:39:40] Speaker B: Don't get me wrong, it's a banger. [00:39:42] Speaker A: It's a banger. But. [00:39:44] Speaker B: But is that not everything that you've just been talking about distilled into a fucking sentence and some, you know, 40 years ago? This, this is not a 2019 thing. [00:39:57] Speaker A: Right? This is. It has. All of this has deep roots in Reagan, the rise of the Christian right, all of that stuff. Inextricable from that. But that article goes on to cite Habermas explaining, quote, on a societal level, crises erupt when social integration is at stake. That is when normative principles of common life become impaired and the trust in social institutions affects the legitimation of economic system, political systems and socioeconomic. Cultural. [00:40:27] Speaker B: Cultural systems, yeah. You are now describing exactly the subject matter of Hyper Normalization, the last documentary that I watched this week, and again, I'll speak of it in a bit, but you are now talking directly. [00:40:41] Speaker A: Directly. All right, interesting. Love that overlap here. Yeah. The result of this is that legitimacy of the structures tasked with solving societal problems come into question. If society doesn't trust the elites in charge, we end up with not only an erosion in trust, but an erosion in rationality. The more the elites try to legitimize themselves, the more hostility this causes in society, especially when people can see that there is in fact a discrepancy between what we're told about society and what it's like to actually live in it. [00:41:16] Speaker B: Very interesting again how we've overlapped this week. [00:41:19] Speaker A: I love when that happens. And we didn't talk about this at. [00:41:22] Speaker B: All, not even slightly, not even a little bit. [00:41:26] Speaker A: Yeah, but for example, we're taught that if we get a good education, we'll be privy to career success and thus upward mobility. That's not, however, how it works. Less and less we see the correlation between education and achievement, which undermines and delegitimizes the education system imposed upon us by elites in the eyes of many. And rather than question the capitalist system that has got us here, people question the value of education in and of itself and whether people in charge are in fact using it to control or indoctrinate us or to further separate an elite few experts from the rest of us slobs. This feeds into culture wars like the opposition to Black Lives Matter. And we can see this going all the way back to the 1960s. Again, this doesn't just happen in a bubble here, but when kids who cared about civil rights or questioned the war in Vietnam were framed as privileged doofuses who contracted a case of white guilt from their college professors who indoctrinated them with books about Africa. Rather than seeing a shift in societal ideas about marginalized groups as reflecting an expansion of our knowledge and empathy, it framed it as disingenuous posturing by the elites who want uneducated whites to feel bad about themselves and to raise up blacks and gays into the rightful positions these salt of the earth white Americans should be entitled to. Social justice becomes seen as top down imposed upon society and thus it should be regarded with suspicion. And there was plenty of disinformation spread to back that up in 2020, from misidentified or faked videos to false stories about George Floyd's criminal background. Conspiracy friend posted a photo of the cop cars surrounding George Floyd that had police on all of their license plates and said that this showed it was a clear hoax because cop cars don't say that on the license plates. I googled it and two seconds later found that Minneapolis police cars do indeed say police on the license plates. He told me that Google's search results had obviously been altered. I really like the way that the article Put this it said, people are drawn to conspiracy theories. They do not simply adopt one or another based on rational and epistemic factors. They go on to explain that the relation of the larger society and its developments to the individual is an emotional matter. And in this sense, the legitimation crisis and the paranoid style are emotional matters. The motivational motor behind the contemporary rampant adoption of conspiracy theory should be understood as an affectual response to structural change. In other words, feelings don't care about your facts. Yes, conspiracy theory is about how you feel about the world. And in 2020, people felt real bad. And as they sat home, barred from seeing their friends and families, unable to go to the gym or school or non essential work, the elites and the government seemed a solid target for all of those bad feelings. And to be clear, that's not entirely wrong. Anyone who says lockdown and public health communication and vaccine rollouts and whatnot were done perfectly and shouldn't be criticized either slept through the whole thing or was one of those government folks who rolled it out. But what we got wasn't reasoned criticism of these things. People had been primed for years by Pizzagate and qanon to believe that the government wasn't just inept, but actively evil and satanic. Came to believe that the COVID hoax was engineered by deep state agents like Anthony Fauci, Biden's chief medical advisor, who was at the center of many of these conspiracies. Alex Jones even went on the air and said he fantasized about seeing him hanged. Which is a dangerous thing for someone like Alex Jones to say about a public figure. As we know, you know, when he talked about the Sandy Hook hoax, as he saw it, the families of the children who are murdered at Sandy Hook received so much harassment that eventually, you know, he lost a lawsuit. That now means that he has to give over his entire media empire to those people. It got dark all of a sudden, and now it's storming. You see Walter get up. He heard the thunder and was like. [00:46:01] Speaker B: I'm pretty sure the onion is. Is gonna pick up in four wars, aren't they? [00:46:04] Speaker A: There they were going to. And then a judge thought that they bought it for too cheap and that that wasn't fair to the families, even though the families had orchestrated it. And so they were denied the chance to purchase it. It was one of those things where it's like, you have a good heart, judge, but like, maybe do what the family wanted. They've already lost their kids. Can you let them have this? It's not about money, but whatever. But yeah, so you know, you have people. Obviously Fauci was coming under threat from a lot of folks as having these big conspiracy people come out and say like, he should die. He should die for what he's done here. And as all this unfolded, these ideas became more mainstream. Adherents to QAnon like Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene were elected to Congress on January 6, 2021. A mob, spurred on by QAnon, sure that they were finally seeing the storm that had been so long promised, stormed the US Capitol, causing political officials to have to run and hide for their lives as quickly crowds burst through doors and ransacked offices. They believed that the election had been stolen by the deep state elites they'd spent the last several years immersed in horrifying conspiracies about. And they'd been activated by Trump to finally take back the country and restore it to its rightful heirs. As Morlock and Zarita put it in that critical sociology article, QAnon has never been an identifiable group nor a traditional form of conspiracy theory that connects small groups of individuals. It assembles different elements of the far right, imaginary pro weapons campaigns, antisemitism, etc. Along with the belief in the existence of a deep state where immoral elites like politicians and experts formulate policies to assert domination over the people. And this is the world we live in now. Guided by this amorphous conglomeration of right wing conspiracy theories that emerge from the delegitimization of authority and expertise free fed to Americans and indeed people around the world, as you pointed out, by social media algorithms hungry for their views at a time of great upheaval and isolation, much like the Tea Party movement, seemed fringed but pushed our politics irretrievably. Right. As Julian Field put it in Jacobin, QAnon's ideology, networks and practices are now integrated into American politics. And how the population processes current events, the movement has attached to the mainstream like a parasitic fungus working in symbiosis with its hosts while causing long term changes to its behavior. So that's how we are, how we got here. [00:48:54] Speaker B: It is certainly a thread of how we got here, for sure. [00:49:00] Speaker A: Yes. [00:49:01] Speaker B: Right. To talk a little. I mean, I feel like we're abandoning our fucking format this week. [00:49:09] Speaker A: Are we? [00:49:10] Speaker B: Yeah. But to go straight in on hyper normalization. [00:49:14] Speaker A: Okay, yeah, please do. [00:49:17] Speaker B: This is a 2 hour, 40 minute documentary in a very similar style to the rest of Adam Curtis's stuff. And if you aren't familiar with his kind of the, the format that he works in more. Let me see, what's the best way to describe this? Have you ever seen those cross section slides of an X ray of a corpse, but when you kind of put them all together, you see the picture of the cadaver, but you pull them out and they just show like slivers of the entire body. What? What? Both Shifty, which I've watched most of this week, and Hypernormalization, what they do is they stick stack circumstances, they stack history up on top of each other so that you can see the whole. But pull out slides and almost deal with the component parts of the problem, but all at the same time. Right. Shifty, for example, is. [00:50:27] Speaker A: Can I just real quick have you move your mic so you don't keep hitting it with your arm? [00:50:31] Speaker B: Oh, I didn't realize I was. I apologize. So we got a five part series in Shifty which talks about. Starts in the kind of early 70s, going up to present day about kind of how we got to where we are in the UK now. Right. But it, it isn't linear and it deals. It, you know, talks about the overarching narrative is it's all the Tories. The Tories did it, right? Thatcher's monetary policies or economic policies, the privatization. [00:51:10] Speaker A: I mean the pairing of Thatcher and Reagan is about the biggest nightmare. Blunt rotation you can imagine, 100% up big time. [00:51:20] Speaker B: But the move to individualism as opposed to the greater good, the kind of the pursuit of wealth and luxury. But then on the other hand, the, the other part of the slide that he stacks up are things like fucking hell, you know, music culture, the press, the, the culture of press intrusion at the time, identity politics and even astrophysics. It tells the story of Stephen Hawking at the same time and zooms right out to a cosmic scale about how, you know, fucking hell, what's the point? Tells a beautiful story. But the other one, hyper normalization is about. The word is from a Soviet author, a Soviet anthropologist and author in the 70s and 80s, but it's this phenomenon of knowing, ah, fuck, I watched this at exactly the right time. I watched this this week at exactly the right time because it put a word to the fucking sensation that I've spoken about at length with you of knowing that something's fucking wrong, but seeing the fucking news and your leaders and your media and everyone else pretending that it isn't. Yes, hyper normalization. [00:52:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we talked about it last week is like basically it feels like gaslighting, right? [00:52:54] Speaker B: But yeah, globally global gaslighting and hypernormaization starts with Kissinger vs Al Assad, the Syrian conflict, which then through time you get to Reagan and Gaddafi and the Ayatollah Khomeini. He, the slides build to build the picture. He talks about like LSD culture, Timothy Leary, William Gibson, you know what I mean? Net linking, neuromancer, that kind of thing. [00:53:27] Speaker A: Then. [00:53:29] Speaker B: Gets us, you know, to 9, 11. Gets us to the Gulf War 9 11, and just builds this. And Trump, he folds in. Donald Trump about, about how, you know, in the 70s, this idea that politics almost abandoned the control of society to the finance sector. [00:53:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:53:53] Speaker B: Have you heard of. What's it called? Aladdin? BlackRock, the system that black finance runs that's folded in. There's a, you know, a part of the slideshow is all about BlackRock, about how it predicts the future by drawing on global events. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Right. [00:54:11] Speaker B: You know, looking after the financial market which actually controls everything. And now I, I sound like a crank now. [00:54:19] Speaker A: Well, I mean that's, you know, we've both read Naomi Klein and things too. The book Dark Money, which talks about a lot of this stuff as well. [00:54:29] Speaker B: I mean, over the last 40, 50, 60 years, the. It's finance that is in control of everything now, right? Everything. [00:54:42] Speaker A: That's. What's the difference between like conspiracy theory, as you know, is constructed here that kind of poses this like good and evil and shady cabals and things like that, where what is actually happening is what we can clearly see that money is behind everything that is happening and it's transparent. You can watch the, the trail of money buying everything and changing the way everything is shaped quite clearly. [00:55:11] Speaker B: And I strongly feel that this catalyst that Covid acted as when everyone was locked away with their screens and with their uncle yapping in their ear and getting the chance to accelerate the crankism of it all, that. That just feels like a big, big, big fucking symptom of this hypernormalization. I know that everything is wrong, but I can't fucking get my head around why or what it is because everything I see is, you know, telling me that it's fine, but I fucking know it isn't. [00:55:49] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. So having like what we talked about, about like the vibe session idea last week as well. Right. Like where I. I know this isn't a vibe. I know there's something deeply wrong. [00:56:02] Speaker B: So having yet almost. Man, I don't mean this to sound patronizing, I really don't, but having a kind of a mulched down conspiracy theory like QAnon, which is pretty easy to wrap your head around and feed and repeat Back to your friends and relatives. [00:56:22] Speaker A: Why it's so. Absolutely. [00:56:24] Speaker B: Exactly. Because. Because the actual conspiracy is a little bit more difficult to wrap your head around. [00:56:32] Speaker A: Right. [00:56:32] Speaker B: So talk about so. [00:56:34] Speaker A: Well, and it. On top of that, I think besides being more difficult to wrap your head around, it also requires you to question all of the ideologies that you have learned. Right. Like if we live under capitalism and want to believe that we have a chance under capitalism, that we have to believe that capitalism is good. [00:56:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:56:55] Speaker A: And therefore, if we start to look at the fact that, like, what it has actually done has made it impossible for us to live and has made it so that people with tons of money, largely right wing people with lots of money, can shape our entire politics and have made it so that you do not have access to the American dream or upward mobility anymore and things like that, that is more shattering to your ideology than going, there's a bunch of like, just evil demon people. You know, they're lizards and they. Yeah, right. And they're, you know, stealing kids and doing all this stuff. And that's like, that's at the root of it. That's easier to believe than like actually the entire system that you've come to rely on is fundamentally flawed. [00:57:43] Speaker B: Yes. So while that's how we got here. I, I don't know, man. It all happened within our fucking lifetime. It's, it's, it's the last 50, 60 years. [00:57:54] Speaker A: Right. [00:57:57] Speaker B: The, the, the, the documentary I'm speaking about there also talks of the. Oh, man. It draws this beautiful, beautiful direct line to the introduction into the west of suicide bombing, suicide bombing attacks and how kind of America's sanctioning and arming and, and, and, you know, using Israel in proxy wars enabled that to come over to the UK as well and kind of tied into how 911 was carried out. Oh, it's, it's very sobering and can send you off into a fucking absolute spiral of pointlessness. [00:58:44] Speaker A: Well, and I mean, that's, I think that really kind of gets to the root of it too. Right. Because when it comes down to conspiracies like QAnon, which are largely what has driven Trump to be in office, it gives us this very simple picture of a defeatable evil. Right. So Trump is going to come in here and he's going to drain the swamp, he's going to arrest the pedophiles and then the US will be better, will be restored as a shining city on the hill and, you know, life will be good. That is a much more hopeful narrative. [00:59:25] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:59:26] Speaker A: Then we will never have the money to defeat the people who are holding us down. [00:59:33] Speaker B: Yeah. And that's, you know, at least. At least at the end of Naomi Klein, it offered a fucking, you know, a sketch about how to get us out of this. Right. Yeah. Organize and get back to grassroots and work with your friends and your neighbors. Adam Curtis offers nothing of the sort. Just fucking ends. Oh, okay. We're fucked. So, yeah, very interesting that you. That you would choose tonight to talk about this. Very strange. But hypernormalization is the closest I've ever seen to putting a name and a reason to what I feel right now. [01:00:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's fascinating. I'll have to check that out. [01:00:18] Speaker B: And I just think, quite a piece of work. [01:00:19] Speaker A: Yeah. Overall, all of this, I mean, it shows the way none of this happens in a vacuum. Right. It is all this, you know, these little intertwining, these dominoes. Even 100. Knocking over, knocking over, knocking over. [01:00:35] Speaker B: Less like domino's. It's. It's more of a mesh. It's more of. It's. It's. It's interconnected with. I hate. With money at the center, with capitalism at the center. [01:00:49] Speaker A: It is some big thunder. Can you hear that? [01:00:52] Speaker B: No, I can't. [01:00:54] Speaker A: It's huge. But yes, that's exactly it. It's. I mean, that is. It's what I always said to the conspiracy friend. I said, you know, you're. You're digging and trying to find these elaborate, complicated schemes that involve deep secrets that, you know, hundreds or thousands of people are keeping when what's really happening is you can look it up on Google. It's in the financial records. We know who's in control. [01:01:26] Speaker B: Yes. [01:01:26] Speaker A: And that's why. That's why they don't care. That's the thing that I always said to him, is that was like, if they cared that you were spreading these conspiracy theories, they would kill Alex Jones, wouldn't they? [01:01:37] Speaker B: They would come very, very much. [01:01:39] Speaker A: The conspiracy theory guys. [01:01:41] Speaker B: Capitalist interests for that to just keep you unchecked. [01:01:46] Speaker A: 100%. There's your conspiracy theory. [01:01:50] Speaker B: Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [01:01:53] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [01:01:54] Speaker B: Fucking these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [01:01:58] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene in such a horny way before. [01:02:02] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal rece. [01:02:05] Speaker A: Worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [01:02:08] 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 let it. [01:02:15] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark. [01:02:17] Speaker B: I think you feel great about very upsetting. I find myself very upset. [01:02:26] Speaker A: It is extremely upsetting. I agree. Everything is upsetting at this point. [01:02:36] Speaker B: It's. It is difficult, Corrigan. I mean, as we, as we approach our fifth birthday, I don't have a sense of humor about it all anymore. You know what I mean? [01:02:46] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. [01:02:46] Speaker B: I, if I can be completely frank, I don't feel as though I speak on Joag in the same tone of voice as I did in years. 1, 2, 3. I simply don't find it funny anymore. [01:03:03] Speaker A: No, yeah, I think that's exactly it. It was kind of a like, lol, it's the end of the world kind of thing. [01:03:10] Speaker B: Chuckle our way through it with your pals. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't feel that anymore. I'm thoroughly fucking stressed about it all. [01:03:19] Speaker A: Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. I think, you know, to me, and I know sometimes you feel like maybe this stresses you out more talking about it, but I feel like I have to work through these things, you know, that just sitting with them is. It makes me feel crazy. It makes me feel insane to sit with this stuff. [01:03:43] Speaker B: And it isn't, it isn't lost on me that when we talk about, you know, a. A mesh of malign influences bringing down the civilized world with capitalism, it's called. We speak in the same language as conspiracy theorists. We. We sound like cranks. [01:04:02] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. It's always at the, at the center of it is like. It's hard to talk about. Like, you know what conspiracy theorists get right is that indeed there is a division between the people who make the decisions and the people who bear the repercussions of them. They're just misdiagnosing how that happens, that's all. [01:04:28] Speaker B: Yep. [01:04:30] Speaker A: But other than that, you haven't. Are you having a good, good weekend, Mark? [01:04:33] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. Look, I mean, I'm on fumes when it comes to work, but I've got a couple of days in this week and then I got 12 off, which is nice. A nice 12. The heat wave is broken, so the kids are still off school, so gonna have 12 days. And there's a new Metal Gear Solid game coming out to remake that that coincidentally has landed on my time off. [01:04:57] Speaker A: So I'm gonna play a lot of coincidentally. It wasn't planned that way. [01:05:00] Speaker B: Wasn't actually. It's a happy, happy, happy, happy accident. [01:05:03] Speaker A: Very nice. Which means, dear friends, you've got. Let's Plays comin. [01:05:07] Speaker B: Yeah, we got a Chance to catch up. We'll bang out a couple of let's plays this week. And should you be minded friends, should you be of the whim to spend a little bit of time with your fucking end of the world besties, I declare hereby that this coming Saturday is a watch along evening. So what date is that? [01:05:27] Speaker A: Yeah, I've already forgotten. 23 third. [01:05:30] Speaker B: That is indeed the 23rd of August, this coming Saturday. I've mentioned the movie before, but we saw Slime City a few weeks back and really fucking enjoyed it. And there's a 30 years later sequel with the same cast and the same director. And that has to be a good thing. Has to be a good time. [01:05:49] Speaker A: I mean it doesn't have to, but it will be a good time with friends. [01:05:53] Speaker B: Yes. This coming Saturday, the 23rd of August. I shall diarize it and publicize it and. [01:06:01] Speaker A: And if you're an Anna Martin, you can watch the first one on YouTube. [01:06:06] Speaker B: And you really should. It's easy. [01:06:09] Speaker A: Like 80 minutes, 70, 80 minutes, something like that. [01:06:12] Speaker B: If you're anything like me, and I know I am, you will have a great time with Slime City. So we're gonna watch the sequel this coming Saturday. [01:06:20] Speaker A: Beautiful. Yeah, looking forward to it. We're catching up on all the things now that we, you know, our Marco is getting a little bit of a well deserved break, that's for sure. He says grumble, but yes. So join us for those. Once again, it was an early third Saturday of the month and both Ryan and I forgot about book club. But I hear several of you got together and had a good time with it. I tried to outsmart myself. I wrote it on my physical calendar this time. Like, yeah, definitely gonna remember. And then I did not look at my physical calendar. So it snuck by me again. I wasn't even doing anything. I was just sitting on the porch with my dog. So watching, watching some collision. What are you gonna do? But I hope it was wonderful. And I am going to set several alarms for next month's. Can you believe this time next month, Mark. [01:07:22] Speaker B: Yep. [01:07:23] Speaker A: I will be in my 40s. [01:07:25] Speaker B: I can believe that. Obviously you don't. Look at, you look like a lady. [01:07:30] Speaker A: Oh, you half your age. [01:07:33] Speaker B: But what a privilege, what a privilege it is to have reached that age. What a privilege. What the things we've seen. [01:07:39] Speaker A: Yeah, I know, right? It's so, it's so interesting. I think, you know, every decade is always a little bit of like a panic initially, right? Like oh my God, like it's a new decade. I'm it makes you feel markedly older, you know, like, each year, it's a. It's an increment, but then when you hit a decade, it's like, oh, what the fuck? But I feel like every time it happens, it's like a great decade, the next one. And so, you know, I think the 30s were way better than my 20s. I think the 40s are gonna be a solid time. [01:08:15] Speaker B: I'm delighted you feel that way. That's really. You are, you know, I feel you're an optimist. An optimist at heart, Corrigan, and it's true. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:08:26] Speaker B: You know, which in the face of all of the overwhelming reasons to not be, that is commendable. So good for you. [01:08:36] Speaker A: I mean, let's be real. There's a lot of, like, privileged reasons for that, too, you know, Like, I'm in a place of economic stability that I wasn't in previous times. You know, Know, we live in a beautiful place and have a house and, you know, we travel. I get to hang out with my bestie on this podcast every week and occasionally come to see you and have you come to see me. So, like, you know, recognizing that as the world gets more terrible, that my individual situation tends to be on the up and up, I am going to optimistically project for myself that that will continue to be the case and hopefully nothing shall, you know, break that. But, yeah, I think you're right. I'm an optimist at heart. I like to see things as working out eventually. So I'm trying to not do the thing where, like, I panic about no longer being in my 30s because I feel like, like, in your 30s? [01:09:39] Speaker B: Oh, listen, that's for chumps, man. That's for chumps. That's. That mean. It means fuck all. It means nothing. [01:09:44] Speaker A: It doesn't y. [01:09:45] Speaker B: Nothing. [01:09:46] Speaker A: But it definitely is the point at which, like, once you hit 40, no one's gonna. No one calls you young anymore. I mean, people. I'm gonna look the same, you know, so, yes, people will still, in person, think that I'm young or whatever, but it's like, when you go to the doctor, they're not gonna be like, oh, you're too young for that to happen to you. Like, you're in your 40s. [01:10:05] Speaker B: Yeah. I often think of it in terms of, were I to die, would the response be right? [01:10:14] Speaker A: Would it be like, oh, yeah, exactly. I think the same thing, you know, like, 40 is too young to die, but it's also in the, like, well, things start happening to you in your 40s. You know? [01:10:25] Speaker B: Exactly. I won't lie. There are times, more than a few occasions I look up the kind of the axis of time and mortality likelihood and just kind of plot. [01:10:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:10:37] Speaker B: The way it just put my ex in the line. [01:10:39] Speaker A: Well, listen, my husband is 52. [01:10:44] Speaker B: Do any friends die? [01:10:46] Speaker A: Me? Yeah, well, many, but, like, not of old age, so just suicides, you know, things like that. You know, various. That kind of stuff. Yeah, plenty of those kinds of things. But Kyo, you know, obviously when you're in your 50s, like, people start having heart attacks and like that. So the other day, he's telling me the story of this guy that he works with who, like this, he was found unresponsive in his hotel room when they were working on, like, a show a month or so ago. Taken to the hospital, all this stuff, he was fine. But the story he eventually told was that, like, a woman had drugged him and robbed him. And so that's why he, you know, they found him like that. He'd been roofied. And so, yeah, terrible story, but I'm like, well, thank God he's okay, right? And, yeah, he was like, yeah, yeah, you know, it was really good. But then he's like, but unfortunately, another one of my colleagues was found dead in his hotel room yesterday. Jesus Christ. I was like, when. When you come back here, I'm sorry, but you are eating nothing but salads and going on runs and, you know, like, it. When stuff like that happens, it's just. You start to realize, like, how this shit can, like, suddenly occur. You know, you're. One day you're chug, chugging along, you're working at a convention, and the next they find you dead in your hotel room. Just. [01:12:17] Speaker B: Yes, well, you know, day by day, probabilities coalesce toward that. Figure one. [01:12:24] Speaker A: Exactly. But at any time you get hit by a bus, too. So, you know, at the end of the day, you just gotta live. [01:12:31] Speaker B: Don't fall victim to the birthday curse. Don't go dying on or around. [01:12:36] Speaker A: I know, right? At least not the 30th one. Yeah, indeed. No, not gonna Shakespeare it. I'm gonna go and have a cool party with my friends and it's gonna be a grand old time. [01:12:50] Speaker B: Love that. [01:12:52] Speaker A: Shall we get into what we watched? [01:12:54] Speaker B: Yeah, we can. I have. Do I. I have had the kind of the strong feeling this week that I'd quite like a little something, you know, like a tin or a vape. [01:13:07] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [01:13:08] Speaker B: I have kind of very strongly thought on a few occasions or this week, a little something would be nice. [01:13:17] Speaker A: Can I tell you a little silly story about me getting more intoxicated than I meant to this week? [01:13:24] Speaker B: This week? Yeah, please. [01:13:25] Speaker A: This week? Yes. So I go to the liquor store to get a diet cola, and they have THC seltzer. [01:13:36] Speaker B: Okay. [01:13:38] Speaker A: And so I'm like, you know what? Maybe I'll give that a whirl. Right. I feel like that sounds. Sounds good. I've had one, like, once before, and it was years ago, and they were only, like, 5 milligrams at the time, but now it's like a 10 milligram. [01:13:55] Speaker B: Weed pop. [01:13:56] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [01:13:57] Speaker B: Incredible. Incredible. [01:14:00] Speaker A: So I take it home, right? And it's sitting in my fridge for days. Because the thing about having quit, as someone who doesn't, like, I'm not. I'm not addicted to things. I guess, like. Like, my addiction to anything is more of an ADHD response, right. I just want to, like, keep going with something. I don't actually, like, want the thing so much, and so I generally am like, I don't actually want to be intoxicated by the thing. I want the drink or whatever, but I don't want to suffer from, like. [01:14:36] Speaker B: The effects of the. It's the thing you want, not the. [01:14:38] Speaker A: Yeah. I want the taste of the thing. I don't want the brain element of the thing. And so it was just sitting in there. And then one day I was like, I'm going. I'm sitting on my porch reading a book. This seems like a great time to have this little weed seltzer. So I read the side of it, and it's like. It's a mellow sort of high. It takes effect, like, 10 to 15 minutes, which is. Yeah. Because I'm, like, used. Like, edibles take too long. And you're, like, sitting there, like, what's gonna happen when it hits? You know? So I was like, 10 to 15 minutes. Great. What I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna, like, drink, like, three or four sips of it. Wait 15 minutes. [01:15:16] Speaker B: Very sensible, very pragmatic. Yes. [01:15:18] Speaker A: Yeah. I'm like, I don't want to be high. [01:15:21] Speaker B: You can always drink the rest. You can't undrink. [01:15:24] Speaker A: You can't undrink it, right? So I'm sitting there. I'm like, okay, great. Like, 15 minutes goes by. I'm sitting there reading my book, having a good time, feel nothing, right? So I'm like, okay, great. This is, like, a really low high. So I'm like, I will drink the rest of it. And I do it slowly or whatever. Probably Takes me, you know, an hour or something to drink this can of seltzer as I'm sitting there reading my book. And I don't really feel anything. Don't really feel anything. I finish my book, I put it down, and I stand up. That's when I realized I am very high. Just extremely, extremely high. [01:16:07] Speaker B: Was this recently? Was this this week? [01:16:09] Speaker A: This was. Yeah, this was like, Monday or Tuesday. It had to be Monday, because what happened was then I was like, I have to take the trash out. But I get, like, the paranoid high, you know? And so I go to take the trash out, and I am, like, convinced that someone is going to jump me while I'm taking out my trash. And so you can see, like, on my blink cam, me, like, pushing my wheelie bin down the. Like, down the pathway and, like, looking over my shoulder, like, noises. What is that? Like, setting it up and coming back, like, kind of hustling back into the house. And I'm, like, just tripping over absolutely everything. I go upstairs and I'm like, love to see this. I'm trying to. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna watch. I can't remember what I was gonna watch, but I was like, I'm gonna watch this thing to, like, wind down or whatever. And, like, you know, I watched, like, five minutes of something, and I'm like, this will not do. I'm not. I don't like this. And so I'm like, you know, I just bought the hello Kitty game that's like Animal Crossing, but hello Kitty. So I'm like, I am going to just play hello Kitty. [01:17:25] Speaker B: What could go wrong, right? [01:17:27] Speaker A: What could go wrong? And I kid you not, I opened it up and I just stared at the screen for, like, 45 minutes without moving. Just sat there, controller in hand, staring. [01:17:46] Speaker B: Good. [01:17:46] Speaker A: Shit, hello Kitty. So it's finally, like. I think. I think maybe I just need to go to bed, write the night off. Turned it off. And I did crash. And I slept quite well, which was nice. I didn't wake up until, like, 9am When Walter was like, help, let me out. It was. It was truly incredible. I was like, oh, the mistakes were made here. And that was my. My unintentional intoxication story. [01:18:18] Speaker B: Look, you got a good night's sleep out of it. [01:18:20] Speaker A: I did, yeah. It wasn't too. I think, in the morning, like, I had that kind of grogginess of, like, anything that, like, you were intoxicated the night before. But I'm also weaning myself off coffee. So I'M always a little groggy in the morning anyway. But yeah. So you can live vicariously through me. [01:18:39] Speaker B: I did enjoy this week. [01:18:42] Speaker A: If you just want to remember what it's like to be I. There you go. [01:18:47] Speaker B: Thank you. Most kind. What have I been watching? Let's see. Let me just pull up the old. Okay, so do my love affair with James Stewart continues. [01:19:00] Speaker A: Yes. [01:19:02] Speaker B: With Rear Window. What can be said? What more can be said about this movie? Why am I in that zone then? [01:19:13] Speaker A: It was funny because you watched it and I saw it on your letterboxd and I was like, oh, no. I thought you were in a good mood because you explained that you tend to watch these when you're in more of like a dark place, but you're like, no, I am. [01:19:25] Speaker B: Oh, again, just wonderful. It's another. It's another play on screen, isn't it? It's another stage show on screen. James Stewart, war and military photographer, breaks his leg and is housebound with only his camera lens for company. And pieces together a mystery happening opposite him in the. The wall of his neighbor's apartment windows. Oh, man. Just slow chest. The film just unfolds before you. No rush, no hurry. Just the writing and the characters just speaking and thinking and Jimmy Stewart's fucking eyes doing the work that they do. Wonderful. I can see myself doing this forever. It's so good. [01:20:19] Speaker A: Watching Hitchcock or. [01:20:21] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just. In the back of my head, I've got this dumbass idea of just finding a kind of a Jimmy Stewart watch list and just going down and taking them all off. [01:20:32] Speaker A: Listen, this is a thing that we used to call army hammering before we found out that he was terrible cannibal. Yes. And we now tend to call hiddle spotting because Tom Hiddleston seems to be okay. But it's the thing where you pull up somebody's IMDb that you're really into and you just watch everything. [01:20:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:20:57] Speaker A: That they've. They've made. This started with Brienne and Armie Hammer. I've done it with James Badge Dale. I've done it with Robert Shaw. All kinds of people. But yeah, it's a. It's a thing that, you know, it's always fun to do when you get really into an actor. Just like top of your head. [01:21:13] Speaker B: What his last movie would have been James Stewart. Yeah. [01:21:18] Speaker A: I feel like I do know this. I think I. Because I know I encountered this recently, but I don't. I don't remember. [01:21:25] Speaker B: His last movie was actually a piece of voice acting. [01:21:29] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [01:21:30] Speaker B: He did A voiceover. And it was in 1991 and it was an American. Fievel goes west. [01:21:40] Speaker A: This. That's exactly why I was looking at the IMDb for Fievel goes west recently. So I have somewhere out there stuck in my head most days. [01:21:51] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. I. I am that enamored with him currently that I can really see myself going in. [01:21:58] Speaker A: You're gonna go as far as Fievel? [01:22:00] Speaker B: I might. I fucking might. [01:22:02] Speaker A: Listen, when Brienne was army hammering, she even watched Flicka, which he has one line in. So you gotta go all in. [01:22:13] Speaker B: I'll either go all in or I will have forgotten about it by this time next week. [01:22:16] Speaker A: Yeah, or it's going to be your next Tudor phase. [01:22:18] Speaker B: Exactly. Which by which is still a thing. I have a big Tudor guy. A lot of people say that about me. People have started saying it about me now. They call me Mark. Come over here. This guy mentions Alan Cleaves. [01:22:38] Speaker A: I appreciate this as your semi fake, semi real obsession, just because it's like something that I know zero things about. And so it's a delightful little like. [01:22:52] Speaker B: Yeah, I caught it off Laura. Just her enthusiasm for it. [01:22:58] Speaker A: Rubbing. That's one of the fun things about sharing interests with your partner. Sometimes it just. [01:23:04] Speaker B: Yes. You know, only ever seems to be one way in this instance. [01:23:11] Speaker A: Yeah, that's usually how it happens. [01:23:12] Speaker B: In 20 odd years she's picked up precisely zero of my interests. None. Not even fucking one of them. [01:23:19] Speaker A: I think occasionally I'm. I don't know. Yeah. I don't usually pick up interest from Kyo. It's usually only this way. But it works out like. He just like. If he wants to go see a band, he'll like. He'll be like, Well, I was. I mean, if you wanted to go. I'm like, you know, I don't. He's like, great. And he'll go see shows by himself and stuff like that, but it works. I watched. I hung out with the Screamin Chat on Friday. [01:23:49] Speaker B: Great bunch of lads and. [01:23:51] Speaker A: Great bunch of lads. And we watched a movie from 1990 called Rocula. Have you encountered this one? [01:23:57] Speaker B: Nope. Sounds great though. [01:23:59] Speaker A: It's about a. A Dracula who has been an incel for the last 500 years. Because the woman that he's destined to be with in every reincarnation keeps getting beaten to get death with a hand ham bone by a reincarnation of a different villain. [01:24:24] Speaker B: I see. [01:24:25] Speaker A: And so in his 1990 incarnation, he starts a rock band to impress her and has to stop her from getting beaten to death. By a ham bone in this life so that he can finally have sex. [01:24:38] Speaker B: It doesn't sound great. [01:24:41] Speaker A: No, but it has heart. Gosh darn it. Yeah, it's like. It's gory cute. No, no, no, not at all. Not gory at all. It's like. It's more of a sex comedy type thing. It's. But it's cute enough or whatever. But the music is terrible. I'm not recommending Rocula to anyone, to be clear, but if you were in a group, you could do worse than sitting there and trying to figure out what the fuck is going on in. [01:25:08] Speaker B: This movie super briefly. Sex comedy, right, is a. Is a. A genre that I've never got on with ever. At all. [01:25:15] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. It's not really. As you can imagine, it's not really my vibe either. [01:25:20] Speaker B: I can't think of a single sex comedy that I enjoy. [01:25:27] Speaker A: I mean, I want to say like. Like, Can't Hardly Wait maybe straddles the line of sex comedy. And I like that one, but I don't know if that's that. [01:25:36] Speaker B: What was the umbrella, the Viagra one with fucking Donnie Darko? [01:25:43] Speaker A: Oh, wait, no. Is that the one that was like, the same as the. Like, there was like a friends with benefits and, you know, like, things about. Was it with Anne Hathaway? [01:25:54] Speaker B: It could have been 40 year old virgin. Nope. [01:25:58] Speaker A: Okay. Yeah, no, just the American Pies. [01:26:02] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. Yes. Not my genre at all. [01:26:07] Speaker A: No, me neither. But I mean, Rocula isn't as like. It's a sex comedy without sex, really. It's. It's a weird kind of movie. It's a boss without anyone having any. [01:26:20] Speaker B: Hey, if you're gonna do a Dracula sex comedy and you don't explain how they can achieve tumescence, I am not interested. [01:26:29] Speaker A: And hey, if you can't do that in a sex comedy, where can ya? [01:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah, show me. Show me the appliances that he uses. [01:26:37] Speaker A: Coincidentally, this was an entire conversation on last podcast on the left this past week. [01:26:44] Speaker B: Coincidentally. Coincidentally, I don't think so. [01:26:48] Speaker A: What? You were listening to last podcast? [01:26:50] Speaker B: No. Have they been listening to us? You know what I mean? [01:26:53] Speaker A: But like, in backwards, they might. [01:26:58] Speaker B: They may have been going through the back catalog. In fact, Jacques, fucking get off our dick, man. Okay? [01:27:08] Speaker A: They had theories. So. [01:27:10] Speaker B: Well, it's either magic or it's a pump, isn't it? I can boil it down. [01:27:15] Speaker A: Yeah, when you eliminate their theories. [01:27:19] Speaker B: Okay, just for the record, because I am interested. What? How do they believe that Draculas get. [01:27:25] Speaker A: Oh, I don't remember. It was A silly conversation. [01:27:28] Speaker B: Okay. [01:27:30] Speaker A: Not as interesting as Eileen talking to us about it. [01:27:33] Speaker B: Okay. [01:27:34] Speaker A: Okie doke. [01:27:36] Speaker B: Incidentally, if you can find the time this week, I've noticed a movie on shudder called Wolf Cop, which I really watch. I've never seen Wolf Cop. [01:27:46] Speaker A: You've absolutely seen Wolf Cop. [01:27:47] Speaker B: You are wrong. [01:27:50] Speaker A: You have 100% seen Wolf Cop. The fuck I know when it came out. Yes, we went 100% watch. [01:27:58] Speaker B: Oh, maybe. Actually, I'm looking at it. [01:28:00] Speaker A: Yeah. See, like, we watched this together. You have seen. [01:28:03] Speaker B: Not on my letterbox, though. And this was in my letterbox era. [01:28:06] Speaker A: Mm. Yeah. [01:28:07] Speaker B: Well, okay. There's a sequel called Another Wolf Cop. [01:28:10] Speaker A: So I haven't seen that one. [01:28:12] Speaker B: Here we go. Maybe we'll watch that. [01:28:13] Speaker A: Okay. There we go. Nice. I also, you know, going back, which is normal for me, I watched the OG the Invisible man, from, like, 1933, I believe, with Claude Rains. [01:28:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:28:31] Speaker A: TCM did a Claude Rains marathon the other day. They do this throughout August. They call it Summer of Stars. And they, you know, different day, different star, and they show all their movies. Movies. But the ones that they picked for Cloud Rains, I was, like, not super into. But then it put me in a mood where I was like, I need to. I need to see more of his movies. So I got this. [01:28:51] Speaker B: What else is on his list? What else has he been in? [01:28:56] Speaker A: Well, he's in Casablanca, which you. [01:28:58] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [01:28:59] Speaker A: Almost watched. [01:29:00] Speaker B: Very close. Came so close to seeing that. [01:29:03] Speaker A: Yes. He's in other things that I like, like now Voyager. [01:29:06] Speaker B: Did I make it past the opening credits? [01:29:08] Speaker A: No, absolutely not. You didn't even make it through the Ben Mankiewicz introduction that I was specifically so excited to show you. [01:29:18] Speaker B: Love that for me. [01:29:21] Speaker A: All this time waiting. Anyways, so I watched the Invisible Man. Have you seen it? [01:29:27] Speaker B: No, I have not. [01:29:29] Speaker A: It is so much fun. It is just a funny. Great funny effects. Yeah, it is surprisingly funny. It's got a really good sense of humor about it. Claude Rains is this, you know, just gleeful, evil guy. You know, it's. You can see what, like, Hollow. Hollow Man. Is that the Kevin Bacon one? What? Hollow man is kind of playing off. [01:29:54] Speaker B: Of the definitive Invisible man story. [01:29:57] Speaker A: Yeah, obviously, it's. You can see that he's playing off of what Claude Rains did in Invisible man of being this just gleefully evil, murderous guy. And there's, like, a lot of sort of almost slapsticky things that go on where he's like, you know, there's a whole bunch of cops trying to take him down, but he's invisible. So he's just like, bopping him on the heads with things and stuff like that. And, you know, it's got a lot of really good sort of silliness to it while also, you know, having. He's a sociopath. He's a terrifying character who terrifies everyone who comes in contact with him. And then these effects of him being an invisible man, which I'm always amazed by early effects, you know, him unwrapping his, you know, mummy gauze or whatever and there being no guy underneath. [01:30:45] Speaker B: I vividly remember seeing the Chevy Chase Invisible man and being. How the. Are they doing this? [01:30:53] Speaker A: Right? [01:30:53] Speaker B: I love it. [01:30:54] Speaker A: It's. Yeah, it's such a fun feeling. And I've talked about that before, that I don't feel that way watching movies now. [01:31:00] Speaker B: Oh, never again. Ever, ever again. I have to study and rewind. [01:31:05] Speaker A: I have no questions. Yeah. [01:31:07] Speaker B: What do you. [01:31:08] Speaker A: Watching something like this. You do. [01:31:10] Speaker B: What would you do? Were you invisible for a day? What would you do? [01:31:15] Speaker A: I feel like invisibility is not power that I could do anything with. I'm not really. Like, if I'm trying not to be seen, I just stay home. I don't have, like, anything interesting to do. I don't know. What would you. What would you do? [01:31:29] Speaker B: Well, yeah, I'd have to get into the detail. You know what I mean? Do my clothes become invisible? Does. Do I just. Can people just see my food and shit walking around? [01:31:39] Speaker A: Well, that's the funny thing in this too, because am I blind? He gets into some of the, like, things about this, you know, like if there's, like. If there's a fog, people can see him. And, like, you know, when he's walking, like, he has to be naked, and when he's walking, he can't see his feet, which cause him to trip if he's going downstairs. Things like that. Like, it's. It's really interesting the way it is. Like, you know, the conditions basically have to be perfect or people will be able to see me. [01:32:11] Speaker B: Yeah, you're right. In and of itself, invisibility is kind of a wiener, isn't it? It's not a great power. [01:32:17] Speaker A: Like, it's only a useful power if either you want to prank people or you want to do nefarious things. Like. [01:32:24] Speaker B: But, like, you know, as you said, if you can't see your own limbs, you don't know where you're walking. You would. You wouldn't be able to see at all anyway. You'd be completely fucking blind. [01:32:32] Speaker A: That's a good point, I guess, for the purpose of the thought experiment. [01:32:35] Speaker B: Somehow you can see, okay, well, crime. I'd become rich somehow. [01:32:41] Speaker A: That's the only thing that it's useful for is like committing crimes. [01:32:46] Speaker B: Because if you're doing good things, it doesn't matter if people can see you. [01:32:49] Speaker A: Yeah, right. You can be seen when you're doing good things. It's not like. Yeah, I feel like there's. It's not like if you could fly or teleport or something like that, you know, it's like. It's not. It's not particularly useful if you're not trying to be shifty. [01:33:08] Speaker B: Square that away. Good that we've had that conversation. [01:33:11] Speaker A: Glad we got that sorted. [01:33:15] Speaker B: So past a certain point we have to talk about weapons, don't we? [01:33:18] Speaker A: Because of weapons. Right. And I still think we probably shouldn't like spoil it too much. [01:33:24] Speaker B: No, certainly not. But you look, you're not going to change your opinion, I'm not going to change mine. It's good. It's a good movie. [01:33:32] Speaker A: Well, and even still, like when we talked about it, you know, you said some of the same things that I said. I think, you know, you said it dragged in the. [01:33:42] Speaker B: The first third is very hard work to the point where I was thinking, me, man, this had better warm up. Or I am. [01:33:49] Speaker A: Right, exactly. [01:33:50] Speaker B: We're in like one and a half star territory here. If this doesn't get a muon. But it did. It did get a move on. It got a hell of a move on and it became. It found a voice, it found a vibe. I didn't have any problem with the ending at all. When it fucking. When it told me where it was headed, I was like, fine, let's fucking go. Let's go. I don't know why everybody had to run in that kind of derpy way. [01:34:20] Speaker A: Yeah, the. The Naruto. [01:34:22] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. I don't know why that choice was particularly made that when you get witchcrafted, you run around like a dick with. [01:34:28] Speaker A: Your arms flapping around like a weird little airplane. [01:34:30] Speaker B: But great cast. Very, very pleasing scares. Very pleasing gore. I very pleasing witch. Gribbly. Very pleasing. I thought she was great. [01:34:43] Speaker A: See, all of these things are not the things that I. That's where we disagree. I did not find a single. No, there was one scare. There's one scare in the movie. People keep talking about jump scares and stuff like that. I'm like, neither I nor anyone else in the theater jumped at any point during this, but there was one scare that made me gasp. [01:35:00] Speaker B: I've had A few reports from people who've seen Weapons of people laughing through it. [01:35:09] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. [01:35:10] Speaker B: And I experienced that, too. The audience was broadly very well behaved. [01:35:15] Speaker A: Mm. [01:35:15] Speaker B: But people were laughing at the derby running and Wong's eyes popping out. [01:35:21] Speaker A: Mm. It just. That was a little nightmarish. I mean, I have issues beyond, like, you know, I don't think this is particularly spoilery because you do see him go berserk in the trailer for the movie. But, like, there's. There's things in this that I think, like, part of it. The problem for me is that I don't think that Zack Kreger thinks through what his movies mean very well. And there's a lot of ideas in this, but once it kind of goes batshit, it kind of stops trying to say anything and is just like, let's fucking go. [01:35:55] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:35:56] Speaker A: And as such, makes some mistakes, I think. Like, the fact that in this movie, it has the most egregious case of burying the gays I have seen in a long time. Like. [01:36:08] Speaker B: Well, on that. [01:36:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:12] Speaker B: Going into weapons and coming out of weapons. Your words were ringing in my ears. I don't. I'm not on board with Zach Kreger's world view. Those were your words, I think, or something like that. [01:36:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:36:27] Speaker B: Let me have a little more on that, if I may. [01:36:30] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I think, you know, for one, there was this issue, you know, which I think wasn't intentional but wasn't thought through, that he. The worst deaths in this are reserved for his queer characters, one of which is the only minority in the movie, you know, or the only, like, named one that we know anything about, which is a trope that people rightfully call out that you can always kill your gays harder than you kill everyone else. You know, both for the purpose of making it more tragic and also because they're expendable characters. And I don't think he meant it to be like that, but he perpetuated a trope that is rightfully criticized and is very commonly criticized, and he should have known better. It's like killing the black character first. Like, you should know. Don't bury your gaze. And he does that here in a. In a way I haven't seen anyone do in a very long time. But I also think, you know, in. In both of his films, your baddie is an ill woman. [01:37:41] Speaker B: Yes. [01:37:42] Speaker A: With who is ugly. Sticks out of the way by conventional standards. Right. Stringy hair, old, sick. [01:37:49] Speaker B: Yes. [01:37:51] Speaker A: And. And I think that is problematic in and of itself that it says something about, like, the view of Disability and the view of old women and things like that in society that I don't like. And a lot of people have pointed out that it also parallels moral panics because there's this theme of parasitism throughout this. Right? Like, it's constantly, you know, these background things talking about parasites, telling you about parasites. And so you have this old sick woman who is a parasite, an outsider who comes into a community and, you know, causes all hell to break loose, which many have pointed out, parallels very conservative lines of thinking about who is responsible for destroying communities. It's not the community. It's someone from the outside, a parasite coming in. That's trans people, that's immigrants. [01:38:51] Speaker B: Sure. [01:38:51] Speaker A: You know, all these different people. And that. Again, I don't think that's what he wants to say, but because he abandons the threads of all the other things that he. The only thing you're left with is that. [01:39:06] Speaker B: Tell you what, how about this? How about this? He's got one more go. How about that? [01:39:13] Speaker A: One more. One more. If the next one has an old lady as the Gribbly, I'm fucking out. [01:39:19] Speaker B: One more fucking go, pal. And then I'm on Corrie's side. Right now. I'm on your side, but I can't keep defending you if you do that again. [01:39:29] Speaker A: Yeah, I think, you know, I know he's a listener. It's. Yeah, it's clear. He's. He's a comedian, right? [01:39:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:39:35] Speaker A: And so I think that's the thing, is that when it gets to the third act of his films, yeah, he wants it to be funny. You know, he wants it to be gory, but he wants it to be funny. And he loses track of the point when it hits that in service of making us go, oh, bro, that was crazy. You know, and that's where he loses me. So to me, he's. Yeah, he's got it. He's got another shot. [01:39:59] Speaker B: But why don't I ask you this, Corrigan, how many more shots does Ari Aster have? How many? [01:40:08] Speaker A: Zero shots. [01:40:09] Speaker B: He's got no more shots left. [01:40:11] Speaker A: Zero shots. Listen, and. And I. I told Mark this before, beforehand. I want to. I want to have a conversation about Eddington. That is not us talking about our. Our, like, defending, like, oh, it's a good movie, it's a bad movie. Because I. That's not my issue with. With this one. And I would rather have a conversation about why this movie, like, wounded me. And what I said to Mark beforehand was, like, if you try to argue with this with me, I Think that's unfair to you because you're gonna look like an asshole. [01:40:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:40:48] Speaker A: Like, trying to, you know, diminish what a black woman has to say about this film. And that's not what I'm trying to do is. Is be like, you're wrong about why you like this movie so much as talk about why I have such a problem with it. [01:41:02] Speaker B: On that. Right. On that specific thread, I'm certain I will have put things in those terms before. Right. But before. Before you talk about Ellington, I will reiterate that my position is firmly a place of awareness that on paper, as a white 40s man, straight cis fucking, you know, dude. Right. On paper, I am the issue Red. Right. And. And my approach to the fucking world really comes very much from that standpoint. Not me personally, but people who look like me and with my background are the fucking. It's my. It's our fault. Right, Right. [01:42:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is why I think, you know, we've had so many conversations about this before and why I think, you know, that makes it safe for me to discuss these things with you and to say to you, mark, like, I don't want you to argue with me on this. I want you to hear me on knowing that, you know why I'm saying that. Right. And I think, you know, people listening to this, I hope, understand that as well, that, you know, I'm not talking about the quality of the movie at this point. We can disagree or agree on that to whatever extent. But I kind of wanted to talk about why this really. I had such a negative reaction to it. And obviously I talked in the beginning about, you know, my sort of issues with it in creating a small world that is, like, un. Impacted by what's outside of it and it's its context in which it lives and whatnot. But the thing about this movie is it reminded me a lot of Three Billboards. Do you ever see that one? [01:43:06] Speaker B: I did indeed. I quite enjoyed it. [01:43:11] Speaker A: The thing that Three Billboards and this have in common is that they play to you as if they are stories about racism, about conspiracy theory, about things like that. But they're not. They're about racists. They are about conspiracy theorists and the horrors inflicted upon black and brown. And indigenous bodies in this are exposed only as a means of trying to grapple with something in the white psyche. Right. These movies are about white people. What's. What's up with white people? Why are they like this? You know, can we. Can we get to the bottom of what's going on in white people's? Heads that make them do this. And we watch them terrorize people of color so that we can try to process what's going on with them. And so you have in this, this movie that ostensibly is about horrors that are visited upon other people, largely marginalized people, and it asks the question, what are the stressors and anxieties that lead a white man to treating people this way? But tell me something about our one black character in this, other than that he's a cop. [01:44:36] Speaker B: Oh, he gets blown up. [01:44:39] Speaker A: Who gets blown up? Right. What about his personality? [01:44:44] Speaker B: He is ambitious. He has a failed relationship with a white girl. He's conflicted. That's about it. It's quite superficial. [01:44:58] Speaker A: Extremely superficial. What about the indigenous character? The indigenous cop, Silent wise, right? Just quiet. [01:45:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:45:10] Speaker A: Stands are observing. Right. And intentionally using them as cops is there to sort of upend our expectations, right? Like, well, you BLM liberals out there think cops are racist, but what about bipoc cops, right? And their identity is only wrapped up in being cops in this. Right. Which in and of itself is a problem. But on top of that, it plays bigotry against them for laughs, along with character development. Things like using the R word for shock value as sort of a laugh line in it, or having a character spew anti indigenous racism at the native character without any real commentary on what these. On these things or the reflections of the pain this causes the people it's levied at. We are not privy to the native guy's thoughts on this or the black guy's thoughts on this. It's not subverting anything because we don't get to hear them say anything about their story. What is this subverting? It's just a white man unloading racism onto an empty target. And yes, we're supposed to think that's bad, but we don't get to see the interiority of the people that this is being levied at. It's just supposed to make us go like, ah, he shouldn't do that, you know, and this happens. There's a similar plot line between this and Three Billboards in which a black character is sort of wrongfully arrested and put away for something, you know, a white person did. And then we kind of lose that character again, we don't get to hear sort of their point of view. It goes back to being about the white character, in this case, Joaquin Phoenix. And again, we're sort of robbing. None of this is about these characters. They're here to push this story along about Joaquin Phoenix, who, yes, is A terrible guy. We get that. But how come the people of color don't have a voice about this? Why are they just standing there quietly accepting this? And you get this point at which, you know, the sort of white girl leading all the BLM stuff starts, you know, yelling at the black guy about how he should care about this stuff because he's black and he's experienced racism and she has privilege and it's not her place, blah, blah, blah. But he needs to be mad. And it becomes this thing where white people are constantly projecting onto black people. And that's supposed to be tell us the BLM people are wrong, but it doesn't tell us anything from his perspective. He just takes it. He doesn't have anything to say in response to being told all of these things from a white character. Everything is projected onto the people of color in this as a means of us trying to understand why white people are the way they are in America. And watching this is. It's like watching your voice get wrenched from your body. You know, you're seeing people talk about all the terrible things that are inflicted upon you and not getting to say, hey, this hurts. You know, this is. This is written from a distance. This is written by someone who has never experienced this, who can only understand this story from the perspective of the white people that he's examining. And he knows racism is bad and wrong, but he won't let me say why. He won't let me tell him that he's hurting me and that he is unloading all of this racism on me and I don't get to say anything back. And that playing of people of color as these sort of just blank canvases upon which we project white anxieties is something that is sort of making a comeback in films as society sort of recenters whiteness in it and, you know, are trying to sort of roll back the like perspective of, like, it's DEI to have people of color in films. And now you're fighting movies that have fewer people of color in them, like 28 years later, for example, that sees no reason to have a person of color exist in that world. And I was telling you before that I turned on Superman after watching this and found that, like, I was so deeply just hurt by the way Ari Aster treated people of color in Eddington, that there comes a point in Superman where just a Middle Eastern falafel truck guy is murdered by Lex Luthor for the purpose of making Clark Kent sad. And I turned off the movie. I was like, I can't I can't watch this. I can't watch white men keep making movies where our bodies are used to tell a white story. I can't do that. It. It just. I can't keep seeing this in a world that is becoming increasingly hostile to anyone who is not a cishet white man. You know, I don't. It is. It's breaking me to keep seeing this perspective played out in things. And so, you know, that's my. That's my thing with this. I just don't feel like it much. Like Three Billboards, which is heavily criticized for this at the time too. These are movies that say that they are saying something about racism, but that's not what they're doing. They're talking about racists and trying to understand, gosh, what happens to a white man to make him this. This way. And I don't give a fuck what makes a white man that way. [01:51:32] Speaker B: I saw all of that, right? [01:51:35] Speaker A: Mm. [01:51:38] Speaker B: How could you not? [01:51:40] Speaker A: I think a lot of people didn't, but I'm glad you did. [01:51:48] Speaker B: When I say how could I not? I think it was so self evident that I credited the film with that being the point as opposed to we will just platform one fucking side of the story. I think the point was, or at least the point that landed for me was it's so broadly written and in huge, huge, huge caps that. What am I trying to articulate? [01:52:31] Speaker A: Hell. [01:52:34] Speaker B: I didn't see it as an oversight. I saw it as the whole fucking point that, you know, the. The minority characters are, as you say, largely silent and underwritten. And every action of the white people in this film is so patently fucking stupid on all sides and easily led. And there's no independent kind of thought or rationality displayed by any fucking white member of the cast, no matter which, you know, air quote side they're on. [01:53:19] Speaker A: Right. [01:53:20] Speaker B: That. I took that to be the whole. [01:53:21] Speaker A: Fucking point of the film as well. Yeah. And I think to a degree, you're. You're correct. And I think that's exactly what I'm talking about, is that white men think they're making a point when they say this. You know, they think that they're making a point when they go, oh, wow, look at how white people just go and steamroll over the bodies of people of color in order to blah, blah, blah, blah. No, we fucking know that. [01:53:47] Speaker B: Yes, yes, yes, yes. [01:53:48] Speaker A: I've been watching this my whole life. And for five minutes we got some media that centered us and gave us voices and things like that. And that is swiftly Being stripped of us in favor of movies like this and like Civil War that use us as cannon fodder. [01:54:07] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:54:07] Speaker A: And. [01:54:08] Speaker B: But to your point earlier on about how this all takes place in a time where there is no fucking Covid. [01:54:15] Speaker A: Right? [01:54:16] Speaker B: Again, that, to me, was the whole fucking point. You behave like this when there is no threat, no present threat to you at all. And this is how you fucking behave because of what you see that's such. [01:54:25] Speaker A: A problem, because that's not reality, right? There's no Covid in that town because at the time, there were measures put in place to prevent it from spreading. You know, six months later, that town would have Covid. Right? And this plays it as if both sides are equally extreme, right? That, like, everybody is thinking about things from, like, some extreme perspective and nobody is genuine. You know, the only reason that Pedro Pascal cares about any of this because he wants to put in his AI super center. The only reason these white kids care about Black Lives Matter is because it's, you know, the issue du jour that puts them, you know, makes them feel special or things like that. And these are conservative things to say, right? They're not true. They are things that conservatives say about the world, you know, that nobody could possibly care about something that's going on beyond the borders of their town. You know, they couldn't want to be safe from something that's killing people. They couldn't care about black people because there aren't any in their town. Right? Like, the only reason that anyone would care about this is to get laid, right? Or because, you know, they've been indoctrinated by some book they read. It's the exact same argument that has been levied by conservatives against activists for, you know, 60 years now. It's a conservative argument he's making throughout this entire entire movie and trying to play that as, you know, this. This enlightened centrist position. I can see why both sides were wrong. And that's. That's misrepresenting what happened. Right? Like I said, there are things about the reaction to Covid that certainly were not handled well. But we're talking about people doing the best they could with the information they had at the time. That's not about people being extreme or crazy or, you know, trying to virtue signal or anything like that. This is about people who, at the time were faced with multiple huge crises going on in the United States and were reacting to that happening, you know, to finally seeing that, oh, my God, like, for black people in this country, like. Like, shit is Terrible. And they are unsafe, including from the people meant to protect them. And this idea that that was somehow a hyperbolic response for a kid to have in New Mexico because, well, you don't have any black friends. What's it matter? Fuck you. Right? Fuck you. We exist whether you know us or not. That's not. It just. It's infuriating to me for this kind of thing to come out and. And for filmmakers like him, who is too young to have this perspective. He's a year younger than I am. There's no reason he should think this way. This is Boomer shit to talk about us this way. [01:57:41] Speaker B: That's the only kind of. That's where I think the comparison between Civil war doesn't hold for me, in that I didn't see anywhere where this was glorified in Eddington. What do you mean? Civil war is quite clearly. As is warfare. You are. You are on the side of the fucking soldiers in these movies. I didn't. I didn't get any sense in Eddington that you were being asked. [01:58:20] Speaker A: It's doing the opposite thing. Right? You're not on anyone's side in this. Everybody's bad. It's not true. It's not true. Everybody's not bad. These teenagers trying to make a better world are not just as bad as people who go, oh, I can't breathe with my mask on. I need to go. I have the right to go in here and spread a deadly disease to everybody that is around me. Like, they're not the same thing. It's the same argument just written from a more cynical perspective that, you know what? I'm enlightened enough to see that all of you are the bad guy, and that's not true. [01:59:03] Speaker B: So is the ambiguity the big problem, then? [01:59:07] Speaker A: I think that's a. That's a part of it, yeah. If you look at reviews of it, you can see people see it from their side. [01:59:14] Speaker B: Yes. [01:59:14] Speaker A: You know, there's plenty of people on there saying liberals hate this because it's actually showing. We had a good point, and they were wrong. And, you know, things like that. That kind of ambiguity, I think, is for sure a problem, but it's not the problem. The problem is that it's racist in its depictions of people of color. To not give us a voice as it hurls epithets and insults at us is racist, full stop. I don't care what it's trying to say about that. If you don't give us a chance to speak back to those characters, you have created a racist Racist movie. [01:59:57] Speaker B: And I don't think that's something you get another shot at. [02:00:02] Speaker A: No, no, I think, I think I'm pretty well done on this. And to be fair, like, I don't, I haven't seen Beau is afraid. I don't know what the fuck that's about. [02:00:14] Speaker B: I have and I agree. [02:00:19] Speaker A: And my issues with, you know, hereditary have nothing to do with social issues aside from my hating hysterical white people. So I, I think, you know, maybe, maybe the same thing I said about Zach Kreger is something that I can say about Ari Aster is that I don't like his worldview. I think he's a white privileged kid. Both of his parents were artists. He didn't have a normal upbringing. You know, things like that. He, he's been insulated from dealing with regular people and regular people's problems. And I think that top down view he takes of people is repugnant. And, you know, I don't want to see what he has to say about us anymore. He can stick to white people. Stick to your screaming white women. That's fine. [02:01:14] Speaker B: Nice. Plenty of, I mean, we said this earlier, but I always enjoy when I'm in the middle of a film of feeling stuff left, right and center, and before the film was over, I fucking had to text you. You're gonna fucking hate this. [02:01:33] Speaker A: Yep. There are some things that you can just. I mean, to be fair, I think you also knew that just from like a, just a movie perspective that was not gonna be a thing I was into either. Think you could probably predict if, predict I was going to have, you know, ideological issues, but also that this is just like not the kind of movie I enjoy. So, you know, there's that as well. But thank you for letting me, you know, explain. Cued you up why I hated this and why it also ruined Superman for me, of course. [02:02:07] Speaker B: Well, friends, no happy endings here. [02:02:12] Speaker A: No. Except for maybe your theories about hints about Freddy or whatever in there. [02:02:18] Speaker B: Yeah, which I'll. It's, it's not even a theory. It's. It's, it's fucking overt and extant in the film. [02:02:25] Speaker A: What do you think? Is he making Freddy? Like, why? Is he. [02:02:28] Speaker B: No, no, no. I, I, Well, I'll talk about this next week, but there's a. There is an absolutely fucking overt and undeniable visual reference to Freddy Krueger in this film. And it. Cat. All right, I've started till I Finish at about 55 minutes in, right? At about, about 55 minutes into Eddington in the background, Emma Stone's character is a, is a, an artist and paints and makes models and whatever. In the background of a scene about 55 minutes in, there's a. Just in the set dressing, there's a stack of those plastic kind of clip away boxes that you get to store junk in. And they're stacked up and they have red lids, sorry, green lids. And the boxes are red, creating the illusion of red and green stripes. And on top of this stack of boxes is a portrait of a creepy looking guy with a kind of disfigured looking face in a brown floppy hat. And any one of those things on its own is all right, fine. But those together are an undeniable visual reference to Freddy Krueger. It cannot be denied, particularly in a filmmaker who is so, you know, well known for being as in, as, as meticulous in, in the detail that he shows an audience. Nobody, nobody can tell me that this film doesn't visually metatextually reference Freddy at 55 minutes in. I will not be argued with on this. Please feel free to take a look for yourself and tell me that I'm wrong. [02:04:03] Speaker A: Why do you think that, like, Freddy is like a metaphor somewhere in, well, possibly. I mean, represent something. [02:04:09] Speaker B: Who fucking knows? I mean, you know, themes about being dragged into subconscious nightmares, about being influenced by things that you see and having, you know, and playing those evils out amongst you in the people and the community that you walk around. You know, the later Elm street films, if you, if you remember Freddie, if you talk about him, it's almost a meme, you know, I don't, I can only guess and speculate, but the facts are those are a very specific set of visual cues that are together in one place at one time in that film. And I can't for the life of me work out if it was an accident, if it was an accident. It's a very fun accident, but I don't believe it is an accident. And I don't think if it was Ari Aster, if it was a set designer or somebody, somebody dropped in a Freddy Q in that film and I don't know why, and it drives me nuts. It's there 55 minutes in. Go look at it yourself. [02:05:08] Speaker A: Yeah. If you have a theory, it's also on Mark's blue sky. Maybe I'll make the image for this week's episode. But if you have a theory, is it Freddy? Is it something else entirely? [02:05:22] Speaker B: It's less. Is it Freddy? Why is it Freddy? [02:05:24] Speaker A: Metaphor. Why is it Freddy? Let us know if you have a theory on that. [02:05:28] Speaker B: Bring back Elm street and stay.