Ep. 264: dolphin love & missing scientists

[00:00:04] Speaker A: How do you feel about dolphins, Mark? [00:00:06] Speaker B: Well, that's. You've put me on the spot there. I've got complicated feelings towards dolphins. [00:00:12] Speaker A: Okay, interesting. [00:00:14] Speaker B: And you really have put me on the spot. You've shone us. I'm like a rabbit in the headlights here, unsure of exactly how much to reveal here. How do I feel about dolphins? I respect them. [00:00:28] Speaker A: Okay, that's solid. [00:00:31] Speaker B: I find them fascinating. I am aware that they can be cunts. [00:00:38] Speaker A: Yes, absolutely. [00:00:39] Speaker B: I appreciate their ferocity, their mischievousness. I appreciate that they have a sadist kind of side, a sadistic kind of side to them, do they not? And. All right, look, it's Jack of all graves. You all know what it is. In years gone by, I have confessed in certain friendship groups that if you were to put a gun to my head and offer me the option of being killed or having to fuck an animal, I would do a dolphin. There you go. [00:01:14] Speaker A: Well, we'll come back around to that, [00:01:15] Speaker B: Mark, [00:01:18] Speaker A: you just let that thought simmer for a while here. [00:01:22] Speaker B: Don't. Don't think this means I want to fuck a dolphin. Please don't. I do not. But given the choice between death and some kind of beastial congress, an ultimatum [00:01:37] Speaker A: that is so often given, it's important to have that. [00:01:41] Speaker B: All right. You know, I'm curious to see where this is going, by the way. [00:01:46] Speaker A: Well, good. That's great. Yeah, no, you're right. Dolphins, they're majestic. They're playful, they're sleek, aerodynamic. Aerodynamic. [00:01:56] Speaker B: I have touched one. I have interacted with dolphin. On my honeymoon, Laura and I had a dolphin experience, unfortunately, but we were allowed to hold on to the fins of a dolphin as it swam. [00:02:14] Speaker A: Where was this? [00:02:15] Speaker B: This was in Jamaica. [00:02:16] Speaker A: Oh, Jamaica. You went to Jamaica for your honeymoon? [00:02:19] Speaker B: We sure did. [00:02:20] Speaker A: Nice. [00:02:21] Speaker B: Would you. Have you ever touched a dolphin? Listen, have you ever touched a dolphin? [00:02:26] Speaker A: I don't think I have touched a dolphin. I have swam with the smallest dolphins in the world. Hector's dolphins in New Zealand were allowed to touch them. [00:02:37] Speaker B: Is it? Well, few things. Who's Hector? And why were you not allowed to touch them? Is it because they're so small? Were they delicate? [00:02:44] Speaker A: Well, yeah, it was an eco tour, so they don't want you, like, fucking with things, you know, but they. But they give you a little one of those. It's like a wetsuit, but. Well, I think it's a dry suit, actually, and you, like bob in it, you know, it's like you. It gives you a little bit of buoyancy, and then, you know, you can, like, see them. There's like, penguins, there's dolphins, all that kind of stuff. And they, like, swim around you. But yeah, they're like. We're not trying to, like, screw with them. Just look at them. Enjoy that they are in here. [00:03:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:11] Speaker A: Your area. [00:03:12] Speaker B: Well, I. When I. If, you know, with the gift of hindsight, I think back on the experience and this was. This was, I think, a captive dolphin, you know. [00:03:19] Speaker A: Well, that's. Yeah. Like, a lot of these things are so sad. Like, we stayed in Waikoloa for a couple days in Hawaii in December, and. But not in, like, the resort proper, like, in condos outside of the resort. But we took a walk through and. And Keo has walked. Worked at that Waikoloa a bajillion times. The Hilton Waikoloa. I mean, and they have dolphins there. And like, a couple times a day they do, like a dolphin show or whatever. But it's like, when you walk through, you're like, I don't. I mean, they have like a. An okay amount of space and things like that. But it's not the ocean. [00:03:58] Speaker B: No. You know, but yeah. Given the choice, would those dolphins be there? Are they there for fun? [00:04:03] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe they do enjoy it. I don't know. But, like, I just imagine, like, a couple times a day a kid probably, like, you know, throws something at them or things like that, you know, like, they can't. Right. You know, it just can't be. It can't be fun. It's not a conservation thing, you know? [00:04:23] Speaker B: Yes. Well put. I can talk on how a dolphin feels if you'd like. They are, you know what? [00:04:29] Speaker A: Sure. Yeah. [00:04:30] Speaker B: They are so smooth. [00:04:31] Speaker A: That's. That's what I. That's what I think. This is why I'm, like, not sure. I don't think I've touched a dolphin. I think I just imagine them feeling like a ray. Like a bat ray. [00:04:41] Speaker B: Now, I've never touched a race, so there's no cross over here. I can't. But they are very. If you press the dolphin skin, this can give to it. They're quite rubbery, quite pliable, basically. [00:04:53] Speaker A: Exactly what they look like. [00:04:54] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah, completely. If you. If. Imagine how you think touching a dolphin feel and it's like that. They are super smooth. If you stroke your fingers down their skin, they get kind of. Kind of grippy because they're so smooth. You know what I mean? [00:05:06] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:05:08] Speaker B: No, just fucking evolutionary marvel. They're built to glide through water. [00:05:15] Speaker A: Right. But it's not like, you know, if you Feel a shark. It's not what you expect. That's what you expect from a shark. But then they're like sand. [00:05:21] Speaker B: Oh. But I say, correct. I've never touched a shark. [00:05:24] Speaker A: Do you have touch tanks over there? Like you go to an aquarium? Is there a touch tank? [00:05:29] Speaker B: I think that's probably a thing in places. Yeah. [00:05:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you should. You should go to one of those. They probably have rays. [00:05:34] Speaker B: Maybe I would like to touch a ray. Visualizing a ray. I can imagine it feeling just like a dolphin. [00:05:40] Speaker A: Yeah. Probably pretty similar. I think they're a little squishier, but. Or, you know, what else doesn't feel like what you expect? Starfish. [00:05:47] Speaker B: Oh, I've touched starfish. No, very much so. [00:05:49] Speaker A: You think they're gonna be squishy, and then they're hard. [00:05:51] Speaker B: Yeah, they. They are. They're like, almost like living. The. Very lumpy. Very like. Yeah, exactly. Very nice. Yeah, very nice. That's. [00:05:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:00] Speaker B: I've also seen dolphins in the wild. The more I think about it, the more I like dolphins. I really. [00:06:05] Speaker A: I know, right? [00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:07] Speaker A: It's like how I came to the conclusion that giraffes might be my favorite animal. Where it was like, the more I think about it. [00:06:12] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, like these. Oh, don't get me started. I find that if I start thinking about giraffes, that's me for days, whenever I may. Well, what about giraffes? Then? I just start thinking about. Thinking about them. But I really like a dolphin. But I am aware that they will. I think I've spoken about it on Jobhag, in fact. [00:06:36] Speaker A: Yeah, I think we've talked a little bit about. [00:06:38] Speaker B: Is it blowfish? Pufferfish. They'll just pass around and kill. [00:06:41] Speaker A: I'll go on. But, yeah. So, you know, for us, dolphins are very fun. They often do like to show off for us. They definitely. They're super smart. They like to. You know, I went on a whale and dolphin watching tour with Walter and Keo last year, and. And the. The whales didn't show up, but the dolphins showed up. And several pods came and, like, swam next to the boat and did little jumps and stuff like that. And they're not trained. They're in the wild. They're having fun. They just like to be like, oh, look at us. Look at what we can do. They're also, like you said, famously giant. They like to play with their food before eating it, chasing their prey on shore so that they die slowly and painfully before they go and retri them. Male dolphins see baby dolphins as competition for their mother's attention. So they'll attack. [00:07:33] Speaker B: Complicated. [00:07:35] Speaker A: Yes, complicated. They'll attack them until they die and then get to work mating with the mom to make a new one. [00:07:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:07:43] Speaker A: Which is pretty dark. They've also been seen tossing animals like you said, like pufferfish and sharks around like beach balls, seemingly just as a violent game. No purpose other than it's fun. So basically, it's very lucky for us that they live in the ocean because they're absolute sociopaths. [00:08:00] Speaker B: And they, I think, are the only fish that does that, aren't they? They're the only fish that. [00:08:05] Speaker A: Yeah, I was gonna say orcas, but orcas are dolphins, so. Yeah, as far as I know, you didn't bite. Yeah, they are. Oh. [00:08:15] Speaker B: So I got a lot of fun in the past. This is when I was in Cape Town. I went to Cape Town for work, right? And one of the. One of the people on my team, one of the girls on the team I was out there with had some fucking qualification in marine life, right? And I thought, this will be fine. I know what I'll do. I'll refer to dolphins as fish in front of her. And I did. And she didn't like it one bit and took umbrage at mammals market. Other mammals. Right. Wow. Are they, though? That was my actual response. Are they, though. Where do all the fish live? In the water. Where do dolphins live? The water. You know. And she got really, really fucking eggy about it after a bit. [00:09:02] Speaker A: That does seem like something you would do to me. Yeah. If I had caught that. You called it that. [00:09:08] Speaker B: That is actually one of my favorite bits. [00:09:10] Speaker A: Exact same exchange. [00:09:12] Speaker B: Making a factual error in front of somebody who knows their. About a particular topic on purpose. That's a good. I. I do enjoy that bit. Like dropping Owen off at tennis and in front of his coach. Owen remembered your bat and the. Watching the coach go, huh? Swing his head around at me. [00:09:32] Speaker A: I'm sure Owen loves that. [00:09:33] Speaker B: I do enjoy that bit. It's a good bit. [00:09:37] Speaker A: Well, yeah. So despite their sociopathy, you can see why people get pretty passionate about dolphins, like you said. [00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:44] Speaker A: The more you think about it, the more you like them. Yeah, they're fascinating creatures. [00:09:49] Speaker B: Think about lots to learn. [00:09:50] Speaker A: Yes. Well, such was the case for Margaret Howe Lovett. It was all animals, really. When she was a kid, her mother had given her a book called Miss Kelly about a cat that could talk to humans. Throughout her life, she'd keep coming back to this idea. Yes, Fictional. [00:10:09] Speaker B: Go check. [00:10:10] Speaker A: It's an important, important part of this yes. Fictional book about a cat that could talk to humans. Throughout her life, she kept coming back to this idea that maybe, just maybe, this could actually be possible. And that may sound crazy on the surface, but, hey, listen. Every dog owner knows that you can communicate at least one way. That's how you train them. Some people have even set up elaborate soundboards in their homes that make it so their dogs can talk back. Have you ever seen those? [00:10:39] Speaker B: I haven't seen the soundboards that you speak of. But it's surely well studied and well established that apes can use sign language after a while, right? [00:10:51] Speaker A: Exactly. They can learn at least a certain amount of words and things like that. And yeah, these. These are really interesting, these soundboards that people set up for dogs. They'll. They each have, like a word on them, right? So, you know, it might be your names. Corey Kio. You know, things like that. Food outside, you know, and they'll have these things that have 50 words on them or whatever. And the dogs can then communicate. [00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:11:20] Speaker A: What they want or need, you know, play things like that. I saw a video the other day on Facebook where they had each of their children's names on these things. And they had three kids, and one of them was like a baby. And the baby was sitting in her high chair, but she was sleeping, and so she hadn't eaten. And the dog was getting stressed about this and walked over and hit, like, the baby's name and then eat now. And, you know, so, like, clearly we can have some sort of communication of sorts. It's not completely, you know, an unheard of idea that we could do this. And scientific research starts with these kinds of questions. Right. If we can communicate to animals, can they communicate back? To what extent can they understand us? What would it take for us to develop some kind of fluency with animals? These kinds of questions followed Margaret throughout her life. An American, although I cannot for the life of me figure out where in America she's from, is not written down anywhere. Margaret was living on the island of St Thomas in the Caribbean in the early 1960s when she found out that there was a secret dolphin lab on the island. And she was like, right, nothing good happens there. Yeah. And she's like, well, obviously I gotta go see the secret dolphins. So she drove over and she found a big white building at the bottom of a cliff where a man named Gregory Bateson was standing outside smoking. And he was naturally like, what are you doing here? And she was like, came to see the secret dolphin lab, obviously. And she said that she was Interested in seeing if there was any way that she could help out at the secret dolphin lab. And it being 1963 and her being a cute white girl in her early 20s, Bateson was like, I like your gumption, kid, and assigned her a post observing dolphin behavior. She was surprisingly good at it. Even though she was in no way, shape or form a scientist. She was just some girl who liked animals a lot. There's like, not really a lot that I can find about, like her history. There's a BBC documentary, I can't find it anywhere. So maybe it talks a bit more about that. But yeah, as far as I know, I don't even know if she has like a bachelor's degree in anything. I think she's entirely untrained, just living in the Caribbean. Wandered up to this place and they're like, you're now a dolphin scientist. She had absolutely wandered into the right place. The lab was run by an American neuroscientist named John Lilly. And the whole point was to see if by keeping humans and dolphins in close quarters with each other, it would be possible to train dolphins to communicate by making human like sounds through their blowholes, According to the Guardian. Indeed. I don't know, but we'll go on. He had become fascinated with this after encountering a beached pilot whale in Massachusetts in 1949. At the time, scientists tended to believe that the larger the brain in an animal, the greater its intelligence. And holy shit, that whale had a huge ass brain. So Lilly and his wife began chartering boats in the Caribbean where they could observe other marine animals with large brains. [00:14:55] Speaker B: How big is a whale's brain? [00:14:58] Speaker A: I don't know. I feel like there's a punchline here. [00:15:02] Speaker B: No, there's not. There really isn't. There really isn't. [00:15:04] Speaker A: Okay. You were giggling to yourself so hard. I'm like, what? [00:15:12] Speaker B: I'm just imitating myself with the image of a beached whale talking through his blowhole. Like, hey, roll me the fuck back in the water, yo. Fucking. I'm drying out here. [00:15:23] Speaker A: The fuck? [00:15:24] Speaker B: Give me some of those potato chips. [00:15:32] Speaker A: Alas, it does not appear this, this pilot whale was able to do that [00:15:35] Speaker B: blow hole, you know? [00:15:41] Speaker A: Well, anyways, while they were cruising the Caribbean, they came across or not while they were cruising Caribbean, but while they were chartering these boats to try to find mammals with big brains, they came across a place in Miami called Marine Studios where they were keeping bottlenose dolphins and training them to do tricks. While this is how many people encounter and understand dolphins in this day and age. This was not how people were engaging with them previously. In fact, they were considered a sea pest as they competed with fishermen for their catch. They weren't known for being fun and playful. They were known for being in the way. This is obviously before we created a type of fishing that just gobbles them up and spits them back out again like we have now. [00:16:29] Speaker B: And I mean in the same way as Jaws did a fucking number on PR for sharks. It's surely our intervention in dolphin kind that give that is responsible for this reputation they've got as being, to use your words, fun and playful. [00:16:50] Speaker A: Right? Yeah, exactly. We did that. [00:16:52] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [00:16:54] Speaker A: I mean, like I said, in the wild they do things. Right. In the wild they do seem to like to engage with us and, and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, we definitely. RPR is what makes it so that we think of them as like, so sweet when they are little ocean sociopaths. [00:17:11] Speaker B: Yes. [00:17:12] Speaker A: Yeah. When the lilies found marine studios, they were like, holy, this is exactly what we've been looking for. And they began trying to understand these dolphins by mapping their brains, fine probes, which was a method that he'd actually developed to understand the brains of rhesus monkeys. There's a big hit. [00:17:29] Speaker B: Invasive. [00:17:30] Speaker A: Yes. And another big hitch in this, besides being invasive, is that you can't sedate a dolphin. They stop breathing when you do that. And they learned this the hard way, losing many dolphins to trying to sedate. [00:17:46] Speaker B: Well, of course, they are one of those fish that breathes oxygen from the surface of. Of the air, like we do. [00:17:53] Speaker A: Well, we'll come back to why they do this a little bit later. Actually, it comes back around. I was surprised to find. I thought this was a little interesting detail, but it'll. It'll come back. [00:18:06] Speaker B: So how much do you know about dolphins? Can I ask you questions? Because I've got some questions about them. If the. [00:18:11] Speaker A: I mean, you can try. [00:18:13] Speaker B: If they are mammals that breathe air, which they are. [00:18:17] Speaker A: Yes. [00:18:18] Speaker B: Why do they die on land? Do they die on land? [00:18:25] Speaker A: I'm assuming it's because of other functions besides that. But like I said, they do like they chase like prey onto the land. So obviously they can. Yeah, yeah, get on land and they can breathe, but I would imagine that they dry out and they don't have any other food to eat and they. They can't walk. So I'm going to guess it's a combination of other functions that are the reason why they can't survive on land. That's a valid question. [00:18:51] Speaker B: Could you put them in a kind of a tank with articulated legs. Could they be, you know, just walk [00:18:58] Speaker A: around like a, like vestigial whale pelvises or whatever. Just pop those into a dolphin, see what happens. [00:19:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I like that idea. Put them in a suit. [00:19:08] Speaker A: I don't know. I don't know. It's got a street shark sort of situation. But I'm not positive. [00:19:14] Speaker B: Has anyone tried. [00:19:14] Speaker A: I don't think you could run that test. [00:19:17] Speaker B: Get whale. I mean secret dolphin lab. [00:19:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Dolphin prosthetics. [00:19:22] Speaker B: That's the kind of thing I'm talking about. [00:19:25] Speaker A: I don't know that. I don't know. We'll have to look in further. If you listener know why dolphins can't live on land, if it is simply a matter of not having the appendages or some other thing, please do let us know. But one day in 1957, Mary Lily noticed something. She'd entered the operating theater and heard John talking. She said the dolphin would make a sort of like woah, woah, woah sound when he was talking. And then when his assistant Alice would talk, the dolphin would make like a high pitched sound. And she realized that the dolphin was mimicking their voices. [00:20:06] Speaker B: No way. [00:20:08] Speaker A: Yes. So this was a huge moment for the lilies. It looked like the dolphin was actively trying to either just imitate or even communicate with them. And they wanted to know if they could harness this. So Lilly published a book called man and dolphin in 1961 putting forth this theory of potential human cetacean communication. Noted noting the observations of dolphins doing impressions of human voices and asserting that we could not only teach them to speak English. [00:20:40] Speaker B: Yep. [00:20:41] Speaker A: But I love this that after doing so they would, and I'm not kidding here Mark, have an appointed representative to the United nations where they would have an enlightening input into world of. Right. The cetacean delegate to the un. [00:20:59] Speaker B: My mind is absolutely spinning. I love it. [00:21:02] Speaker A: I just, I love that leap. Like this. This dolphin went. Now it needs to sit on the. [00:21:11] Speaker B: Unwind them to the UN immediately. Put them in a suit. [00:21:15] Speaker A: Sir. Why not rig up a little, a [00:21:17] Speaker B: little dolphin prosthetics suit. Put a tie on it. [00:21:21] Speaker A: Yeah. But they were just so convinced of like the intelligence of dolphins. They were like they're gonna have, once we figure out what they're saying, they are going to have opinions and we are going to need to listen. Like dolphins are going to be scientists [00:21:33] Speaker B: opinions on the world of man. [00:21:36] Speaker A: Yes. [00:21:36] Speaker B: They're hubris. Like they give us shit. [00:21:39] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. Just incredible stuff. I absolutely Love this. [00:21:44] Speaker B: On the matters of humankind, yes. [00:21:47] Speaker A: And I could only assume it was this hypothesis that probably inspired the dolphins in Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Which are the second most intelligent species on the planet below mice. And which human things are being silly and amusing, doing all kinds of tricks for us when really they know the Earth is about to destroy it and they're trying to say, so long and thanks for all the fish, of course. But while this all sounds very silly to us, 65 years later, scientists were very interested in what he'd postulated. This was, of course, also the space age. And astronomers in particular were like, if we can figure out how to interact with dolphins in a common tongue, maybe we can use similar strategies to communicate with intelligent life in other parts of the universe. So because of this overlap in interests, NASA, amongst other government agencies, for funded Lily's Caribbean lab, which opened in 1963 and was almost immediately set upon by Margaret Howe Levitt a few months later in 1964. And Margaret was all in. As a reminder, no scientific training here. She's literally just some girl who wandered up to this place because she likes dolphins. [00:23:00] Speaker B: Yep. [00:23:00] Speaker A: But they basically put her entirely in charge of trying to teach the dolphins English. And soon she was like, you know, doing this all day isn't enough. I should be doing this 24 7. After all, she reasoned, a mother would live with her child all the time, teaching them how to human. It could only help for her to do the same thing with her dolphin charges. So she told Lily she wanted to live with the dolphins. She wanted to waterproof the top floors of the lab and then flood those floors, leaving just an elevated platform in the middle of her room for her to sleep on and a desk suspended from the ceiling on which she'd do her paperwork. [00:23:43] Speaker B: Good God. [00:23:44] Speaker A: Yeah, Right. She would spend six days a week in there with one of the dolphins, a male named Peter. And then on day seven, Peter would go back down to the downstairs pool where he'd hang out with the other two females, Pamela and Sissy. Now, I was gonna say, and that's all good and well, but things got weird. But. No, this is already weird. Yeah, yeah, obviously. [00:24:09] Speaker B: Cross the unicorn. [00:24:10] Speaker A: Yeah. I was listening to the last podcast on the left this morning, and they were saying how a lot of regulations that exist now came from people in the 1960s doing dumb shit you obviously shouldn't have even needed regulations to know were a bad idea. And that's exactly what this is. Because can you imagine having some early twenties rando show up at a government funded lab and tell the renowned scientist who runs it, I want you to build me a dolphin apartment where I'm going to sleep suspended from the ceiling so I can teach this animal English 24 hours a day. And then the scientist being like, yes, let's go. [00:24:45] Speaker B: Funded, yes. [00:24:48] Speaker A: Name on the check, right here inside the dotted line. So many levels of ludicrous. It's deeply wild that this happened, but it did. So Margaret lived with Peter six days a week, recording their sessions as she attempted to teach him how to speak. And to her credit, the dolphin seemed to at least get what she was trying to do, whether it was physically possible or not. She started trying to teach him to say, hello, Margaret. But she said the M sound was very difficult. She said, quote, I worked on the M sound and he eventually rolled over to bubble it through the water that M he worked on so hard. She said, and honestly, I have no fucking clue what that means. A lot of quotes from Argit sound as unintelligible as you might expect. And I'm not sure if that's because something is lost in how they're transcribed or if she's just an absolute Looney Tune. And I saw this repeated in multiple articles, so. So she seems to be saying that somehow he rolled over and used bubbles to make an M sound. I don't see how that is a thing. [00:25:59] Speaker B: No, I can visualize that perhaps. [00:26:03] Speaker A: Okay, how? [00:26:04] Speaker B: Go ahead, take a gulp of air from the surface and go down and, you know, pitch himself, roll himself over and blow the air out of his blowhole. You know, using the kind of the contractions and the chords of his blowhole to change the size and the, the volume of bubbles that he would blow up, thus, sure. Impacting the noise. I can believe that. I can, I can. [00:26:29] Speaker A: Okay, hey, listen, I'll buy it. She did say that one of the things that she tried was like, she painted her face like, you know, when [00:26:36] Speaker B: you goggle and you can make different noises with water. I think maybe that's what I'm visualizing. [00:26:46] Speaker A: Okay, that makes sense. And it goes along with. She said that she painted her face white and her lips black and would make the, make the face like, like M to try to like, emphasize it for him. So, yeah, so like, she was trying to get him to figure out, like, make that shape with your blowhole, which would kind of lend to what you're saying here that maybe he figured out how to kind of do that with whatever chords there are. Blowhole. I have no idea. What's going on in there? [00:27:18] Speaker B: Again, to really think my hardest about this, I wonder if she perceived the dolphin to be using almost the water in and around his blowhole almost as a kind of a vocal cord substitute, vibrating at different frequencies and at different speeds to conjure up what she's perceived to be different sounds. [00:27:44] Speaker A: Yeah. In one article, she said that, like, she taught him to say a couple words, including things like ball. Yeah. So I don't. I don't know if that is accurate or not, but that's what she claimed. [00:27:57] Speaker B: Okay. But I guess she wanted to see that, didn't she? [00:28:00] Speaker A: That's the thing. It's kind like, to me, there's that kind of. It's the EVP thing with ghost hunters. Right. Like, you know, if you're. If you think that the EVP says something and you play it back, you're like, yep, that's definitely what it says. But if you play it for someone without any leading, they'd be like, yeah, it went, huh? You know, like, that's so. I don't know. I would like to see if they have any of these, like, clips in the documentary. Like I said, there's. I can't find it here. It's not on BBC anymore. I think it's the Girl who Thought [00:28:33] Speaker B: she Could Talk to Dolphins. [00:28:36] Speaker A: Something along. [00:28:37] Speaker B: Dolphins can talk. [00:28:38] Speaker A: The Girl who Talked to dolphins. I spelled that very wrong, but, yeah, that's what it's called. The Girl who Talked to dolphins from 2014. [00:28:48] Speaker B: All right, leave it with me. I'll take a look. All right. [00:28:50] Speaker A: It was a doc on BBC4. Yeah. So, you know, these are the claims that she was making about what happened. [00:28:58] Speaker B: The girl who talked to dolphins. Got it. Yeah. [00:29:01] Speaker A: Beautiful. I will watch that tonight after this. I'm very interested to see. I mean, from everything that I have seen of, like, kind of, because this. And obviously I'll get into it, this is considered the worst experiment in the world. We've talked about worse ones. So, you know, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but from everything I've seen, it's considered that she made absolutely no progress on teaching this dolphin English. So I don't know. [00:29:30] Speaker B: But the girl who taught at dolphins. [00:29:33] Speaker A: Exactly. But yeah. According to Margaret, what ended up mattering more than the speech lessons were their interactions. The rest of the time she was in the dolphinarium, as she put it, quote, when we had nothing to do was when we did the most. And if that phrase in and of itself starts setting off alarm bells, it should. She said, quote, he was very interested in my anatomy. If I was sitting there and my legs were in the water, he would come up and he would look at the back of my knee for a long time. He wanted to know how that thing worked. And I was so charmed by it. [00:30:09] Speaker B: There's a lot of projecting happening here. [00:30:12] Speaker A: Yes, definitely. There's gonna be a lot of that throughout the rest of this. Now I'm fairly certain this is something we talked about before. In fact you referenced it earlier. Dolphins are big ol fuck monsters. [00:30:24] Speaker B: Sure. [00:30:26] Speaker A: They are known for, you know, basically being undiscerning. They are having a go. Yeah. Homosexual, heterosexual, necrophiles. They will attempt to have sex with other species of things. It. [00:30:43] Speaker B: Let's find out. [00:30:45] Speaker A: 100. They really. They are so sociopathic. Like they really are just like. They just want to like injure and. [00:30:52] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:53] Speaker A: Sexually assault things. And Peter the dolphin was like a teen boy with no impulse control. [00:31:00] Speaker B: Dolphin. [00:31:01] Speaker A: He's a dolphin man. [00:31:03] Speaker B: Dolphin. [00:31:04] Speaker A: Yes. And this tended to be a hindrance to his English lessons. He was constantly getting erections while he was trying to. While she was trying to teach him English. According to Margaret, quote, he would rub himself on my knee or my foot or my hand. And at first I would put him downstairs with the girls. And this was like described more violently in a different article where it was like he would like come at her knees and stuff so hard that she like bruises and stuff. It was just like, ah, sexually frustrated. But yeah, putting him downstairs with the girls, that's probably where things should have [00:31:42] Speaker B: ended to me as a human being. [00:31:46] Speaker A: Yes. [00:31:47] Speaker B: I derive precisely zero arousal from non human beings. None. [00:31:55] Speaker A: I. Yeah. [00:31:56] Speaker B: So is it interesting that a dolphin will have a go at whatever fucking species it seems to be passing at the time? [00:32:05] Speaker A: Yeah, it's. I mean I don't. This is the interesting thing about dolphins. It's. It's like. Is that an evolutionary thing? Is this a. Like they are just. [00:32:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:32:15] Speaker A: This is how they entertain themselves. I don't. I don't know why this is what they're like, you know, whatever led to dolphins being the way they are. Sounds complicated and interesting. Yes. [00:32:28] Speaker B: This week on Jack of All Graves we ask finally the big question like this. The dolphins the way they are. [00:32:36] Speaker A: I should read a book about this. Now I'm getting. Now I'm curious what the. Why are dolphins like this? Although, I mean from everything, like the multiple times that we have kind of talked about like cetacean behavior like this, it always seems like every article I read is like, scientists don't know why they do this. They have ideas. It looks like they're having fun, but we don't entirely understand why they. [00:33:01] Speaker B: Perhaps that's the long and short of it. Perhaps that is having a good time. Yeah. [00:33:06] Speaker A: You know, they are like a hedonistic species. [00:33:08] Speaker B: That's it. That is it. [00:33:10] Speaker A: Here for a good time, not a [00:33:11] Speaker B: long time to get amongst it. [00:33:13] Speaker A: Yes, but so, you know, she would put him downstairs. He's getting horny. Put him down there. No problem. Great idea. Maybe give him a snack, Distract him. Margaret, I don't know. Something like that. I regret to inform you that's not what Margaret did. [00:33:31] Speaker B: Oh, no, she didn't. [00:33:34] Speaker A: Since it was such a pain in the ass to have to keep bringing Peter up and down the stairs, she decided she would take matters into her own hands. Literally. That's right. Margaret began jerking off Peter the dolphin. [00:33:51] Speaker B: Margaret, I should have fucking seen where this was going. [00:33:56] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm surprised you were so in Dolphin Zone you forgot where we started. [00:34:01] Speaker B: Oh, no. [00:34:02] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, yeah. So that, that became a thing she had to deal with. And according to articles, you know, a dolphin can get an erection 12 to 14 times a day. That's a lot of, you know, pausing your English lessons to pleasure. Adult. [00:34:21] Speaker B: Heavens. [00:34:25] Speaker A: I like when something is like so far out there that you start talking like a grandmother. Oh, my Lord, my lucky stars. [00:34:37] Speaker B: Margaret, [00:34:41] Speaker A: she said, quote, it wasn't sexual on my part. Oh, sensuous. Sensuous, perhaps. Worse. Worse. Margaret. I don't like it. I don't like sensuous. It seemed to me that it made the bond closer, not because of the sexual activity, but because of the lack of having to keep breaking. And that's really all it was. I was there to get to know Peter that was part of Peter. [00:35:09] Speaker B: So we'll do an hour of English, quick wank break, and then we'll get right back to it, lads. [00:35:15] Speaker A: It is every teenage boy's dream, isn't it? [00:35:17] Speaker B: Well, listen. Ah, man, Margaret, you've really let me down. [00:35:25] Speaker A: This is all just so very 1960s and as such, if this whole time you've been wondering, as I was, if maybe drugs were involved in how any of this was allowed to happen. [00:35:39] Speaker B: Only a matter of time. [00:35:41] Speaker A: Of fucking course, yeah. Because Dr. Lilly wasn't just researching cetacean communication. He was also researching everyone's favorite mind altering substance of the day. [00:35:52] Speaker B: Acid. [00:35:53] Speaker A: Lsd. Yeah, exactly. [00:35:56] Speaker B: On dolphins or. [00:35:58] Speaker A: Well, because things were exactly this weird, he had first been introduced to the drug by the wife of the producer of the movie Flipper. You guys got Flipper over there? [00:36:08] Speaker B: Well, yeah. [00:36:09] Speaker A: Fucking hell. Well, yeah. I don't know. I don't know what gets exported to you. [00:36:17] Speaker B: Just this has taken on. This really has taken it on arms and legs, hasn't it? [00:36:20] Speaker A: I mean, so, sure. Much like a dolphin on land. [00:36:24] Speaker B: A producer of the Flipper movie. [00:36:28] Speaker A: So the producer of the Movie flipper, Ivan Tor, his wife at a party, gave LSD to Dr. Lily and he was like, this is my life now. As tended to be the case in the 60s. And Tor, as such, became one of the financiers of the St. Thomas lab. One friend said, I saw John go from scientists with a white coat to a friend, full blown hippie. And Lily even became friends with the Bridges family, as in Jeff Bridges, who described him as, above all, an explorer of the brain and mind and all those drugs that expand our consciousness. [00:37:09] Speaker B: Incredible. [00:37:10] Speaker A: Yep. And because none of these people seem to have any sense of human dolphin boundaries or the idea that animals can't consent to shit, Lilly started injecting the dolphins with lsd, too. No, thankfully, unlike the anesthesia that caused dolphins to forget how to breathe, LSD had absolutely zero effect on dolphins. Didn't do shit. Which was frustrating to Lily, but, yeah, nothing. And to her credit, Margaret was deeply opposed to the dolphins. [00:37:43] Speaker B: Nothing perceivable. At least nothing, right? [00:37:45] Speaker A: Exactly. Nothing that they could tell from their observations. You know, I don't know if it was shutting down their liver slowly or something like that, but, yeah, it didn't have any cognitive effect on the dolphins. But Margaret was opposed to dosing the dolphins and she convinced Lee to abstain from ejecting Peter. She couldn't stop him from doing it to the other two dolphins. However. She's just a young girl working in a government lab. There's not much that she can do. But still, her lessons with Peter carried on and she became more and more attached to the dolphin. She explained, quote, that relationship of having to be together sort of turned into really enjoying being together and wanting to be together and missing him when he wasn't there. She began to not even think of him as a dolphin. He was just Peter. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, given how weird this shit got, John Lilly kind of lost interest in the project in favor of his work with LSD and what the Guardian described as his cavalier attitude towards the dolphins welfare caused Gregory Bateson, the lab director who hired Margaret, to jump ship. Soon funding was cut and the lab shut down. Margaret was tasked with. Well, yeah, in a sense, but Margaret was tasked with preparing Peter to be sent to a poorly maintained lab in Florida with tiny tanks and little sunlight. Just a few weeks after being there, she received the terrible news. Peter had killed himself. Friends, Mark has drawn his hand up over his face in surprise. At this point, that was my reaction as well. Dolphins, it turns out, can kill themselves. Because a bonkers fact about dolphins that I said we would come back to is that they are not automatic breathers like humans are, which explains the whole issue with anesthesia. They have to actively, consciously breathe every breath. So when you anesthetize them, they stop consciously breathing, which is why they would die. So when dolphins experience injury or trauma and don't want to live anymore, what they'll do is they'll take a breath, sink to the bottom of the water, then not breathe again. And that's what Peter did. It's said at the time that people thought that Peter died of a broken heart, having been separated from the love of his life. I don't know, maybe it feels like they really anthropomorphized this dolphin, though, when he was probably just miserable from going from a pretty cushy life to being stuck in a dolphin jail. [00:40:32] Speaker B: I. I don't think any other dolphin has had it as good as Peter had it. [00:40:38] Speaker A: Right. It's just like learning English, getting jerked off on the hour. You know, he was living the dream. And then they transferred him to this tiny little spot with no windows or anything, and he was like, you know what? I'm good. I'm out. It's interesting, though, just. Just thinking about that, right? Because we know this is a thing dolphins intentionally do. [00:41:05] Speaker B: That's which we do. We know that. Do we? [00:41:08] Speaker A: Yeah. He's not the only one. I found another article that was like, what it means when dolphins commit suicide. This is the thing. But what that raises, though, is, like, so dolphins know they die. You know, like, that's what that means. Right. They may not have, like, a word for it, but they know that if they stop breathing, they go away forever. [00:41:35] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. [00:41:36] Speaker A: They end like. That's a. That's just a fascinating thought to me. [00:41:43] Speaker B: You have given me a lot to. [00:41:48] Speaker A: I know. So, you know, think on that. John Lilly did continue trying to figure out dolphin communication, albeit in exactly the ways you'd expect a guy tripping on LSD to do it. He started looking into telepathy and musical tones as ways to communicate with dolphins. No one since has tried to teach dolphins to speak English. Now people study dolphin's own language and how their communication gestures at incredibly high intelligence. In the species. There's absolutely no need to sexually satisfy them to study this. Margaret, well, she married the photographer who took the pictures of her experiment and they moved back into the dolphinarium. They converted it into a home where they raised three daughters. And while I hate to mention it, while Margaret always maintained her relationship with Peter wasn't sexual, despite the sexual stuff, sexual attractions to dolphins is common enough. It has a name, delphinophilia, and has been studied at length by Dr. Mark Griffiths of Nottingham Trent University. There are blogs and other online communities about this attraction. I was looking like I found something that had like a link to one of these and it was like, warning zoophilia. I was like, you know what, I'm not gonna click it. I think I get the idea. But there was also a man named Malcolm Brenner who wrote a whole ass novel based on his nine month relationship with a dolphin called Wet Goddess, which is an appropriately gross title made worse by the fact that Brenner claims the dolphin, which he called Dolly, seduced him. [00:43:38] Speaker B: Now, just to pause here, right, I know that we're being quite flippant, no pun intended, about this. [00:43:49] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:50] Speaker B: I don't think we would be anywhere near as flippant about this. Were we talking about, like, a dog? [00:43:58] Speaker A: No, no. You know, absolutely not. No. And. And I think, I mean, obviously it's horrifying at its edit. [00:44:06] Speaker B: Yeah, let's just check in with ourselves here. [00:44:08] Speaker A: No, we are talking about paraphilia. Yeah. And in fact, we're about to say we. We have talked about wholesome paraphilias before, but we can definitely file this one away as an unwholesome zoophilia and take a firm stance that Joag does not endorse this. [00:44:24] Speaker B: Let that be known. Yeah, Right. [00:44:27] Speaker A: This is icky and abusive, obviously. [00:44:32] Speaker B: Thank you. [00:44:34] Speaker A: A dolphin cannot consent, even if they do seem to not care what they fuck. [00:44:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't want. I just don't want people going around saying, hell listen to jog this week, because I know people do. People took we're water cooler fucking podcasting, you and I. And I don't want. I don't want anyone chatting shit about us saying that it's okay to tug off a dolphin. It is not. [00:45:00] Speaker A: No, I was about to say we disendorse that. That's not a word, is it? We condemn such behavior. [00:45:13] Speaker B: I'm not laughing. You're laughing. [00:45:19] Speaker A: It's just your expression. [00:45:22] Speaker B: Well, I can't stress enough how involved I was in that tale and how, you know, full of, full of Twists, full of turns. [00:45:33] Speaker A: Yeah. Makes you want to learn more about dolphins. [00:45:36] Speaker B: It does. And just illustrates. It's just a lovely kind of snapshot of nascent science, isn't it? How far. How far we've come, but at what cost, you know? [00:45:49] Speaker A: Yeah. Lovely is not the word I would use, but otherwise, spot on. [00:45:53] Speaker B: Yes. I mean, yeah, sociologically lovely in terms of. Look at where we are now. Look at where we've come. And we think we've learned so much, haven't we? Is there a place, I wonder, for that almost, you know, frivolous kind of whimsical, reckless science? Let's go. Whimsical. [00:46:16] Speaker A: Whimsical science. [00:46:17] Speaker B: Is there a place, I wonder, where we can rediscover a little bit of whimsy in how we conduct our search for knowledge amongst the animal kingdom and indeed the stars? You know, I'm not saying everything needs to be, you know, painting yourself up and trying to make a dolphin fart the letter M. I'm not saying that. But. But at the beginning of this, there was just a girl. Corrigan. A girl who liked dolphins. Right. And from that, we've learned nothing. Let me quote directly from my notes, if I may. [00:46:58] Speaker A: Yes, please do. [00:47:00] Speaker B: Fucking look at these nerds. Oh, mise en scene. [00:47:03] Speaker A: I don't think anyone has ever said mise en scene is such a horny way before. [00:47:07] Speaker B: The way I whispered the word sex. Cannibal. [00:47:09] Speaker A: Recently, worst comes to worst, Mark, I'm willing to guillotine you for science. [00:47:14] Speaker B: Thank you. That's really, really sweet. It's cold outside, but my pancreas is talking to me. I'm. I'm gonna leg it. [00:47:20] Speaker A: You know how I feel about that, Mark? [00:47:22] Speaker B: I think you feel great about it. You find me Corrigan listeners, you find me this week without a great deal to say. I mean, it's that kind of. That. That angst about the world that you and I speak of so often is very much in play with me this week. I am just walking among a world which more and more seems to be just falling to bits. The bits are coming off the world, it's true, And I feel that quite heavily this week. I see it on the news to which I remain addicted. I smell it. [00:47:58] Speaker A: Yeah. There does seem to be one way you could cut down on this dread. [00:48:04] Speaker B: But. But then I wouldn't. I wouldn't know then. I wouldn't be as informed as I am now. I like to. I love to be informed. [00:48:13] Speaker A: I don't know. I feel like it's a. It's A line, though, isn't it? Like, that idea of being informed versus, like, just being, like, entrenched in something, Right? Like, you could read a couple articles a day, you know, you could scroll your blue sky, get the highlights, things like that. You know, I don't watch. I never watch any of this kind of news stuff, but I feel like I know what's going on. [00:48:37] Speaker B: I'm so glad I remember to tell you this, because amongst all of this angst and dread amongst. Even amongst all of that, with the fucking doomsday clock of three seconds to midnight or whatever, this brings hope. [00:48:51] Speaker A: Oh, okay. Yeah. [00:48:52] Speaker B: Let me tell you something. I have been fucking buzzing from this all goddamn day, and you're gonna see why in a sec. [00:49:00] Speaker A: All right? [00:49:01] Speaker B: What have I told you about my father? What have I told you about my dad? [00:49:06] Speaker A: I mean, politically or like, as a. Yeah, I mean, you were last week talking about how there's a. This was before the show, but big election going on in Wales, where you got basically all of the UK in [00:49:21] Speaker B: fact, but Wales are going first. [00:49:22] Speaker A: Well, yes, the uk Wales is where your father lives, but where you got, like the. The shitty reform guys going against Plaid, which is like the lefty Wales first party type situation. And he is on the wrong side of it. [00:49:39] Speaker B: So last week he came to my place, we spent the day and we chatted. I asked him about his voting intentions, you know, and he confirmed my fears. And I, as articulately as I possibly could, laid out for him why that is fucking the wrong approach to be taking. Why the party that he is planning on voting for care nothing for working people, for change, for improving infrastructure, and want nothing more than to just keep. While flowing upward. Right? Want nothing more than to enrich themselves and their stakeholders and their donors. And it's. It's a. It's a hiding to nowhere. Right? So I spoke to my pops today, Corrigan. He's voting plied. I. Wow. [00:50:33] Speaker A: Can you believe you did it? [00:50:34] Speaker B: That. [00:50:36] Speaker A: That is wild. And your conversation is the, like, catalyst? [00:50:41] Speaker B: I believe so. [00:50:43] Speaker A: Incredible. Incredible. Because when we talked about this, you know, at first you were kind of like, oh, yeah. I asked him about his vote, like, the minute he walked in the door. And I was like, did you not want to, like, keep the peace for [00:50:54] Speaker B: the day or whatever? [00:50:55] Speaker A: But you were like, no, I had a purpose. You were like, yeah. You were like, I needed to get this across because there actually is an election coming up and is important he doesn't fuck this up. And so I was like, okay, that makes sense. It wasn't just to, like, let's start fighting when we walk in the door. [00:51:11] Speaker B: Certainly not. [00:51:12] Speaker A: And it worked. [00:51:13] Speaker B: For all my flaws. For all his flaws. I enjoy my relationship with my dad. I love him. He's great. And maybe I'm overselling. Maybe I had fuck all to do with me, right? [00:51:27] Speaker A: But it's a big change in a week. [00:51:29] Speaker B: It's a big change in a week. It's a fucking huge Volta face. Voltiface. How do you pronounce it? In a week? He's completely fucking. [00:51:37] Speaker A: Yeah, completely turned. And that's not like a. Because there's in betweens, right? Between reform and plied. Like, it's not like. That's the, like, oh, yeah, definitely. That you're gonna go for one to the other. Like, he could have taken, like, an incremental step, but he went all the way. [00:51:55] Speaker B: And it's made, you know, it's. It's hell. It's made me realize it. Talking about. Talking to people in rational way without, you know, polemic and without invective and without kind of insulting people and. And your family, you can. You can have conversations that make an impact, right? [00:52:21] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's. It's an important thing to recognize because we're. We're also online, you know, and online people. And I get this, like, I curate my online bubble so that I don't have to deal with people who, like, are on a different political spectrum than. Because I use it for fun. But there are people online who spend so much of their time just yelling shit at each other and nobody's mind changes. And, you know, and you see it kind of be like, I don't know, people expect that to kind of play out. Like, I always wonder, you know, is this what it's like in your real life? Right? Like, you simply. If you. If your family or friends or things like that have a different perspective than you do, you're first thing is, you know, to chew them out in some horrific way and call them names and stuff like that. And there's obviously lines that you draw, right? Like, there is like, one of our. One of Kio's cousins posted something where he was like, you know, if you're pro. Trans, unfriend me now. And I was like, I just wrote okay and unfriended him or whatever, you know, like, there's like, lines that obviously you're like, no, you. You know, but there's other things where it's like, you have to realize how propagandized people are. And, like, what is being fed to them 24 7. And there has just never been someone who sat down and went, that's not true. [00:53:48] Speaker B: Yep. [00:53:49] Speaker A: Here are the different ways in which that is not true. And you know, let's talk, talk that through. And you know, you know the difference with your family, whether they're like a hateful bigot or they're just someone who is being fed whole bunch of propaganda. Right, Exactly. That. [00:54:06] Speaker B: You know, with my dad, I think it's like column A. Column B. [00:54:10] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. I mean in a lot of cases it is a little bit of both. But. [00:54:17] Speaker B: But to bring it back to what we were originally talking about there, I, I could not. I would have had to have resorted to the invective and resorted. Oh, it started to piss it down with rain. It's throwing it down rain. That's lovely. [00:54:31] Speaker A: Oh, nice. [00:54:32] Speaker B: I don't think I could have been as objective and as fact based in the conversation were I not constantly watching the news. [00:54:42] Speaker A: I just, I don't think that's the case though. Like, you know what I mean? Like, like take for example, Keo. He works with a bunch of like conservative assholes all the time and he is very good at talking to them. And he does not watch the news at all. But he reads you. So he checks out what's on, you know, the major, you know, what's on AP, what's on Reuters, what's on ProPublica, things like that every day. And you know it's not. And then he doesn't spend his entire day doing that. It just, he's got like his facts down of what's going on and then he's able to communicate with people. I think that it's, you know, when you start. Because the thing is, if you can feel that it has an effect on your mental health, then like that's a point where it's like there's got to be a different way to do this, you know, like, how do I stay informed without feeling dread 24 7? Because it's like this is what I watch before I go to bed, you know? [00:55:42] Speaker B: Well, on that, I mean it. That's one thing I have changed. It is not what I watch before I go to bed. [00:55:50] Speaker A: That's true. Now you're. You're reading. [00:55:51] Speaker B: Exactly. I, I impose an hour without screens on myself before I go to bed. Book. [00:55:59] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:00] Speaker B: Podcast. Silly podcast. In my silly fucking eye mask thing. [00:56:06] Speaker A: I love it. It's like the, the picture of self care mark is just so great. You know, you just need like cucumbers over your eyes or something A little cooling? Yeah, sure, sure, totally. [00:56:20] Speaker B: But yeah, but so anyway, look, that's how, that's how, that's how this episode finds me. How does it find you? [00:56:26] Speaker A: Well, this morning you pushed your dread on me for a second. I had just come out of a nice massage and then I get a text message, like literally the second I get out of the massage and it says, have you bought your tickets for August yet? And I'm like, Mark thought, I swear to God, if you have something that you have to do, I am going to murder you. It's like the rage that instantly was like flowing through me. [00:56:55] Speaker B: I was like, obviously. And I was pretty actually appalled that that was immediately where. You're fucking right. [00:57:03] Speaker A: You were like, hold on, you think so low of me. But really you were just having a bit of doom moment about fuel prices. [00:57:14] Speaker B: It feels like in the last 24 hours, ever since the airline Sprint split Spirit Spirit, I Apologize closed in the States, the news cycle over here has really picked up and ran with think pieces and interviews and questions about what the continued blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and the conflict in Iran is going to do. Not just a recreational travel, but to all travel, transport, haulage. [00:57:47] Speaker A: Did you say like where you are is like the petrol getting more expensive? [00:57:53] Speaker B: Yes, it is. Absolutely. [00:57:54] Speaker A: It is, yeah. This is in the last week it's gone up 47 cents according to the news here, which is a lot. It's gone up like almost $2 since the start of this, which is insane. It's like I'd get to like, you know, anytime I drive by the cheap gas station, I just fill up the tank whether I need it or not. Just because I'm like someone was saying that like they went to a gas station and they noticed that all of the recent transactions on them were like for like five gallons. It's just like everyone is just topping off every time they, they go to the pump. [00:58:29] Speaker B: Let's take a little look here. Fuel prices over time. Here we go. In the uk. Oh my goodness. Absolutely colossal jump. [00:58:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:58:47] Speaker B: That's incredible. If you could just look at what I'm looking at. Just the jump in the last couple of weeks since February where petrol was 132.5 pence on the gallon, it now sits at 157 pence on the gallon. So the, the, you look at it on a map. Well, put it like this. The only other comparable Spike was in 2022. [00:59:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's when they said they were like, it's four years since the last time this happened. [00:59:21] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:59:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Which is big spike fun. [00:59:29] Speaker B: And when I say so, obviously I worry about recreational travel because that puts, you know, according to all the talking heads and all of the interviewees and the articles I've read about it in the last day, the. If, if things continue unabated or if there's any escalation or even, Even if things end tomorrow. [00:59:49] Speaker A: Yeah. It's not. It's not going down right. It'll probably take at least a year. [00:59:55] Speaker B: Exactly. And it starts to properly. Properly bite in the middle of summer. August, which is when we've got our event planned, which I'm worried about. [01:00:03] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, I think that pretty well cancels out any Americans that were thinking about coming over on. On this. Aside from me. I did. As soon as the whole thing started, I was like, we gotta. I gotta get tickets. And Kia was like, oh, we should wait. I mean, they're so high. We should wait it out. And I was like, it is not going to get lower. And sure enough, it's just skyrocketing more and more. United has also said they don't know if they'll ever go back to. Even if it falls, if they'll go back to, like, this is actually. Is a good evening out for us, you know, so airlines may keep those high prices. Yeah. So, you know, we may be seeing that, like, this becomes the new normal, regardless of what happens. Because capitalism, and it's not yet. It is not great. But I can get my tickets. I'll be there. [01:01:00] Speaker B: You pull. Pull on that fucking thread, man. The change that we have seen during the lifespan of this podcast and the fucking change that is still to come. [01:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:01:10] Speaker B: You know. [01:01:10] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a. It's crazy. Like, I feel like, you know, we said this at the beginning and I don't know that we like, fully. [01:01:18] Speaker B: I don't think we did fully processed. You're right. How true our fucking words would become. [01:01:23] Speaker A: Right. Yeah, you're like, you think like global pandemic where. Where we're stuck in our homes is like the most destabilizing thing you can imagine. And then it's like, no, just. It's just more destabilizing events. [01:01:37] Speaker B: I am kind of waiting any day now for my job to. To say, right, you gotta limit travel. I am waiting for that because, yeah, I use a fuel card. I pay for my private miles, but I, I just. Any day now, I'm certain my work [01:01:55] Speaker A: are gonna say, which would be nice for you, right? Oh, I don't know that would, that would work out okay. [01:02:01] Speaker B: But yeah, it's yes and no. Much like the pandemic, you'd think on paper. I mean, every time I see my fucking in laws, I miss it. Oh. Whenever I can't shoot those two fuckers off my sofa. [01:02:16] Speaker A: Lockdown at our house, [01:02:19] Speaker B: honestly. And I try my best to look as grumpy as possible and as unwelcoming as possible. I don't talk and I fucking walk away. But they all move. They'll. If they decide they're here for an [01:02:29] Speaker A: afternoon, they're just as stubborn as you are. They're like, if he's gonna be a pisses. [01:02:34] Speaker B: Moving. [01:02:36] Speaker A: But the. [01:02:37] Speaker B: Yeah, you'd think it would be nice. You'd think it would be good. [01:02:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:02:40] Speaker B: But while I don't for a second buy at all the, you know, office culture air quotes. [01:02:48] Speaker A: Right. [01:02:49] Speaker B: Horse, obviously I do get particularly from in my job, I do, I do get a sort of tactile feedback from. From being. [01:02:59] Speaker A: Right. From actually being around doing what I do. [01:03:02] Speaker B: Exactly. Yeah. From doing. From doing what I do, which is learning and development with actual people in an actual space is where it's at its best. [01:03:10] Speaker A: Right, that makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. I do wonder if it'll have sort of downstream effects for Kyo who travels for work, you know, so that becoming a greater cost for. For these people doing conventions or even in and of itself to hold conventions because obviously the big things are going to happen. He does things like Pokemon and, and Magic the Gathering, stuff like that, that. Like Star wars. Right? Star wars in LA next year. Do that. Like there's stuff like that that's always going to happen. But what about when it comes to like conventions, like, you know, optometry conventions and things like that that are for like more normal workplaces, are they just gonna be like, we, we cannot afford to do this anymore because it costs too much for people to travel here. And that cuts down on what Kyo does. So, you know, it'll be interesting to see if that has that kind of downstream effect as well. On top of everything else. It's a big hit. [01:04:06] Speaker B: Goodness. Will, you know Delphinophiliacon 2027. Go ahead. [01:04:14] Speaker A: I don't know. It's really up in the air at this point. [01:04:18] Speaker B: Put your dolphin suits on. Rub again. Fraught up against. [01:04:23] Speaker A: I wonder if they're like dolphin furries. You know what I mean? [01:04:27] Speaker B: They're absolutely. Why don't you look it up? [01:04:29] Speaker A: I'm not gonna do that. Simply not. Listen, if you're a furry all for it. You do your thing. I'll crack on everything that I hear as furries, the nice people in the world. I simply do not want to mess my algorithms up by so looking into that. [01:04:48] Speaker B: So. Yes. Not. Not for the first time, hard not to feel that we're on the cusp or the brink of something social, something. Something awful. Oh, no. [01:05:03] Speaker A: I don't know. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. It's kind of. I. I think there's like a degree of resignation to that, which is not to say a, you know, giving up on things or whatever, but a kind of, like, to the kind of point of what I was saying before, it's like you can't, like, spend all your time thinking about it or you become sort of paralyzed, like. Yeah, I mean, we'll cross the bridge when it comes to it, because everything is a surprise. Right. You know, it's like, I don't. I don't know what the next thing is going to be. So. [01:05:34] Speaker B: I know in. In years gone by, in an episode's past, that's very much a space that I've inhabited. I've been kind of resigned and, well, what the fuck, you know? But that isn't where I am. That isn't where I'm at. Don't. Don't stress. I'm not there. [01:05:48] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [01:05:50] Speaker B: But it's almost like an excited dread. The best kind of way I can think of, of describing that. That place of excited dread the first time your current president won the presidency. Right. I stayed up all night and watched the results. [01:06:09] Speaker A: Oh, God. [01:06:10] Speaker B: And group chats were buzzing and messenger was going off and la, la, la. And that was the pinnacle of excited dread. [01:06:19] Speaker A: Right. [01:06:20] Speaker B: When it became clear what was actually about to happen. [01:06:23] Speaker A: Right? [01:06:24] Speaker B: Just. This can't be fucking happening, can it? This is fucking thrillingly awful. [01:06:30] Speaker A: Right? [01:06:31] Speaker B: You know? [01:06:31] Speaker A: Yeah. Yep. I was teaching an Intro to American Studies class and had, you know, this. The, like, TV up on the. On the projector or whatever, you know, so people could watch the results. And a thing that historically does often happen is that, like, partway through, it looks like one, you know, one person is going to win and then it flips. Right? And we'd kind of talked about that a little bit beforehand and some of the, like, historical voting trends and stuff like that. And as it became clear that Trump was winning, I just remember one of my students raising their hand and going, so when does it usually flip? It's like my hands were, like, sweating. I was like, yeah. Oh, my God. Oh, My God. Like, this is. Yeah, excited dread, which I think is referred to as anxiety. But, yeah, excited dread is one way of saying. [01:07:23] Speaker B: No, I'm reclaiming it. I'm taking it back. It's excited. [01:07:26] Speaker A: This is like the standard autistic way of describing things of, like, there's a word for this, but we're going to invent our own. [01:07:34] Speaker B: It's like to dread. Can that be this week's title, please? I would love that if you could [01:07:37] Speaker A: do that for me. [01:07:38] Speaker B: Or the girl who taught dolphins nothing. [01:07:44] Speaker A: Absolutely. [01:07:45] Speaker B: The girl who jerked off a dolphin until it killed itself. Oh, no, listen, trying to. Trying to just pull on the threads and explain. Explore the angles here. Right. Might. Let's extrapolate. Right. Five years into the future, if that. And aviation fuel is now prohibitively expensive for recreational travel. [01:08:10] Speaker A: When. [01:08:11] Speaker B: And diesel, once again, is. Is scarce because it's diesel fuel. That. That is gonna. That will feel ahead of this before regular gasoline. Yeah. [01:08:25] Speaker A: Yes. [01:08:26] Speaker B: So let's pull on the thread. What's the next chapter of our story? Does recreational air travel decrease? Does intercity travel by car decrease? Hang on. Is that not a good thing? [01:08:42] Speaker A: Well, that's the thing is. So I've been seeing stuff about, like, what some countries are doing in relation to what's happening, and for some, it has been during COVID The fucking animals [01:08:54] Speaker B: came back into the cities, didn't they? [01:08:56] Speaker A: Well, that was largely a myth, you [01:08:58] Speaker B: know, as a Twitter myth, a TikTok. [01:09:00] Speaker A: Nature is healing. [01:09:03] Speaker B: But I'm certain I saw video of, like, deer gambling around city centers. [01:09:09] Speaker A: They're always doing that. Yeah, but maybe people noticed more because there weren't people all around. But no, I've seen that there are places that are using this as an opportunity to really lean into alternative sources of energy. America is not one of those. I don't know if the UK is amongst those places either. I would doubt it. But there are places that have thus been like, okay, well, this is, you know, this is something that we're realizing can be sort of. These destructive policies can happen on a whim. Do we want to be at the mercy of. Of the president of another country when it comes to our fuel prices and things like that? If not, then what do we do? We have to start investing in other forms of energy, you know, solar and wind and, you know, all these other different kinds of things. And so there's, like, been a push towards, like, all right, let's just get away from relying on this entirely, which is absolutely a good thing. You know, I just don't Know if that will like affect our particular countries, you know, depending on who keeps winning elections and things like that. But that is something that, you know, I think ultimately is a good thing and any way that we reduce reliance on oil is good. It's just a matter of then, you know, who's in charge and what do they do with that from that point forward. [01:10:37] Speaker B: Yes. [01:10:37] Speaker A: Does that mean that there's just, you know, half of America falls into even worse poverty than it's already in instead of there, you know, being some positive to it? Is the, is the question. [01:10:50] Speaker B: Yes, I'm just again, during COVID we got our vegetables from local suppliers. We didn't travel as much. We would go to a drop off point where a local kind of farmer's market would drop off veg and essentially the fucking dirt on it, you know what I mean? All just not, not even recognizable veg. It was just box of vegetables, just some fucking. Is this celeriac and shit? [01:11:15] Speaker A: I definitely got celeriac at a CSA once. [01:11:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:11:18] Speaker A: Like, I don't know what to do with it, but it smells nice. [01:11:21] Speaker B: Yeah. I don't know. Is it, might that happen? Might we stop? I don't know. [01:11:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it's, it's the, you're right in comparing it to Covid, because that was the thing is that like what a lot of people look at is like we had an unprecedented chance to like do something about a lot of. And capitalism came in and said, absolutely not. [01:11:41] Speaker B: Start doing the only thing as quickly as possible. [01:11:42] Speaker A: Start doing the old stuff right now. And that's the thing is it's like, yeah, I mean, all of this political instability and all that kind of stuff gives us the opportunity. Absolutely. The, the opportunity is there, wide open, you know. But will that result in anything? Is, you know, reliant on a lot of things, which in part, as I said last week, is also partly our responsibility. It is not just the corporations and we leave it at that. But very true. It does, it does matter, all of this. [01:12:19] Speaker B: So there we go. That's where I'm at. How are you? How do you think things are going? [01:12:24] Speaker A: Things not great. I'm all right though. Yeah. I, I, as I was saying to you earlier, I got a touch of the generalized anxieties sort of waywardly aimed at nothing but, you know, otherwise I'm, I'm exercising, I'm getting my massage, sleeping and getting things done, you know. [01:12:49] Speaker B: Okay. [01:12:49] Speaker A: Can't complain. [01:12:50] Speaker B: Sorry. [01:12:51] Speaker A: Although I will say I was like, listen, so. Oh, I love that, like this is how short my Memory for things are. This is. This is how I stay bubbly at a terrible week because my water heater broke. So, as you know, obviously early on in this podcast, a hurricane came through and flooded our basement. And since then, a few other things have come through, and every now and again, it floods down there. And so we have sensors all over the basement that say if anything's wet. And so we can. Like, a lot of times, it's like, easily. It's like, oh, I took a shower and something leaked. Or, you know, the. The. Someone left a faucet on in the laundry room or something like that. Like, it's very easy to find. So Kyo texts me at, like, 10pm and he's like, hey, the sensors are saying there's water in the middle of the basement. Which is like. Like, that's not great. But I'm like, you know what? I'm sure it's fine. Sure, it's nothing. I was like, all right, well, I'm finishing something, and then I'll go down and look. It's like an hour later, I go down, and the middle of the basement is under, like, an inch, two inches of water. And I'm like, oh, fuck. There's actually something wrong here. So I'm, like, looking around at, like, where this would come from, and I follow it to the closet where we have the water heater. And the water heater has died, has corroded out the bottom and just flooded the basement with the water that was inside of it. Which then took me several days of calling people, having them come at different times. Like, had to call the township to turn off the water, but they were like, we don't know where your water pipe is. And there's a chance that it's, like, under concrete, and we might have to excavate it, in which case we won't be able to do it. We'll have to come back a different day and do it. And I'm like, I need, like, hot water. I can't shower or anything. Like, what. What am I supposed to do with this? And it was a lot. [01:14:51] Speaker B: Excellent in a crisis, though, aren't you? As we've spoken of. [01:14:54] Speaker A: Right. Yeah. You know, it's. I. I got it figured out. You know, I overcame my millennial aversion to talking on the phone and made all the calls that I needed to make and, you know, had to do all of this. This stuff always happens when Kio leaves town. He was here for three weeks, and then he left, and the water heater broke, and I was like, me, Seriously. The last time the water heater pilot stopped working, I had to fix it myself. He wasn't here when the flood happened. He wasn't here. Just always me. But I got that all fixed and I was like, I am going to have a glass of wine. And so I went. I was like, I always, whenever I am gonna get like wine, I'm like, I want to like get something and experiment, get something good or whatever. But because I drink so rarely, I'm like, I don't want to buy a bottle of wine. And then it's bad. And so I went with my standby, which is the 19 crimes. Snoop Dogg wine always good. What do you mean? Bleh. [01:15:54] Speaker B: No. [01:15:54] Speaker A: Have you had it? [01:15:56] Speaker B: I've had. Not the Snoop Dogg bottle specifically, but I've had 19 crimes before and it's horrible. [01:16:01] Speaker A: They're all different. They all taste different. And the Snoop Dogg Cali red is delicious. And that was. So I got that and I had like a glass and a half of it. And then I just had weird ass dreams all night afterwards. It was like my body was like, what have you put in here? [01:16:20] Speaker B: Wine dreams? [01:16:21] Speaker A: Yeah. Gave me super weird wine dreams. I was like, well, that's. That's enough of that. But that was my, was my reaction to the week was, I'm gonna have a glass of wine. And then I had super bizarre dreams, including one where our dear friend Jericho, he. He is fluent in Spanish. And I had a dream that we went to some other Spanish speaking country and he forgot how to speak Spanish. And then I had to translate everything for him. But I am a notoriously bad translator and it was very stressful. This is amongst my wine dreams this week. [01:16:57] Speaker B: Well, look, what we have squeezed in this week is a few movies. So why don't we. [01:17:01] Speaker A: We have. [01:17:02] Speaker B: Why don't we talk of them? [01:17:04] Speaker A: We have indeed. I have a bone to pick with one that I watch and it's outside of our purview, so I won't go too far into it, but for the past like two, three weeks, I watch a lot of ABC7, which is owned by Disney. And so I watched the news on that channel, I watched Good Morning America on that channel, all that kind of stuff. And so they have been absolutely going in on the Devil Wears Prada sequel. And, you know, they've interviewed every single cast member. They've done like little fashion shows. They've done all these different things for weeks and weeks and weeks. So I was like, you know, I saw Devil Wears Prada like When it came out, don't remember being particularly moved by it. It made no impression. People are. But it is. [01:17:53] Speaker B: People I know were straight to the fucking cinema when it came out. [01:17:56] Speaker A: It is absolute. Considered an absolute classic to people. So with all of this, I was like, you know what? I'm gonna watch Devil Wears Prada. And then like, maybe I'll go see Devil Wears Prada too, since it's in the theater. And this is. There is not a single thing I like about that movie. It is irredeemable. It is not funny. It is incredibly mean. The entire movie we're supposed to believe Anne Hathaway is genuinely fat, which is crazy. And there's like even a point in the movie where, like, it's like, she's a size six. Allegedly in this movie, she's not a size six, but she's a size six. And there's a point, a triumphant point in the movie where she's a size four. And like. And this is pos. This is not. Like, this is played positively. Like, this is a big moment for us. We're supposed to be like, yes, she fucking went down to size four. And like, are you kidding me right now? Like this whole movie and then there's no arc. Nobody gets better. Nobody. Nothing changes. They all stay the same at the end of the movie. And that too is a triumph. And I don't. I don't. I don't understand. [01:19:12] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, out of our purview. So not one I'll spend a lot of time on. But being at home with Laura and the kids yesterday, just fucking around, scrolling around, looking for something to watch. For some reason, Owen's eye fell on the. The 90s. Jim Carrey, Vega. Liar. Liar. [01:19:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I saw that on your letterbox. I was like, huh, that's a. That's a weird dress. [01:19:37] Speaker B: It captured his attention. He liked. Oh, that man looks funny. [01:19:40] Speaker A: So he's not. He doesn't know Jim Carrey completely. [01:19:43] Speaker B: Nah, not. Not. [01:19:44] Speaker A: Oh, incredible. [01:19:45] Speaker B: How would he. He's 12. How would he, you know? [01:19:48] Speaker A: Well, this is. Everything that he made in the 90s was made for 12 year olds. Yes, he is the target audience. [01:19:55] Speaker B: Yes. But not, not so much. But not now. I mean, sure, but now he's. I mean, he's the voice of Dr. Robotnik now, isn't he? He's. He's. [01:20:03] Speaker A: Well, yeah, that's right. He is Dr. Robotnik. Yeah. [01:20:08] Speaker B: What a. Let's trickle back to the 90s. I felt like I was. [01:20:14] Speaker A: You have muted yourself. [01:20:15] Speaker B: What? [01:20:17] Speaker A: There you go. You're back. [01:20:18] Speaker B: How did that happen? [01:20:20] Speaker A: I don't know. Maybe a wire came loose. [01:20:22] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe. [01:20:23] Speaker A: All right, go on. [01:20:24] Speaker B: I never got Jim Carrey and I, I always was profoundly irritated by him and his thing always, always just grated, grated on me. And then you go back and revisit this huge film. [01:20:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:20:43] Speaker B: And like you said about Devil Wears Prada, what a mean spirited film. [01:20:47] Speaker A: Right? Yeah. [01:20:48] Speaker B: What a misogynistic, just woman hating movie this is. Every woman is in this movie is either boring or shrew, like. [01:20:58] Speaker A: Right. [01:20:59] Speaker B: Or, you know, deceitful caricatures. It's terrible, it's awful. And amongst all of that, it's. It's just so basic, you know. [01:21:14] Speaker A: Right. [01:21:16] Speaker B: And I'm delighted to find that Owen felt the same way. Nobody enjoyed this movie. [01:21:20] Speaker A: Jim Carrey movies. The only Jim Carrey movie from his comedy era that holds up basically is Dumb and Dumber. And it's because it is exactly that stupid. You know, like there's nothing particularly insulting to anyone in it. You know, it's made off color with its jokes about a blind kid with a dead bird or whatever, but it's not like, like you can't help but laugh. Pretty bird. Like, it's just so ridiculous. [01:21:47] Speaker B: The Pretender joke is absolute classic. It's brilliant. [01:21:50] Speaker A: It is, it's. It's just very dumb. Has good iconic lines. Everything he else he does is so annoying. [01:21:58] Speaker B: Farrell had a heck of a run there, didn't they? [01:22:01] Speaker A: They. Yeah, I never really got the fairies. No, it was not. I think remember they, it. They did a me myself and I read. Yeah. Kingpin. Like none of that stuff. All of it. I was like, yeah, no, and I think maybe it was a little too old for me, but like when Jim Carrey first came out, you know, and he did like Ace Ventura and stuff like that. Like that stuff was squarely for like 10 year olds, which I was, you know, and so I was like, this is really funny. You know, and then it's like the moment I watched it as an adult, I was like, I can't believe, like parents let us watch this. Not because of the offensiveness, but because it's so annoying. [01:22:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:22:44] Speaker A: And everything he made was extremely offensive. So it's like really? Not until you get like Truman show and eternal sunshine and things like that. That. I do love Cable Guy actually. That's, that's because it's like he does play a good sociopath in that. But yeah, once he starts getting serious, then you're like, great, fine, I'm on board. But his shtick Just so annoying. [01:23:12] Speaker B: Yeah. I want to tell you, people liked it. People went for it. [01:23:16] Speaker A: People liked. Yeah, it was, it was a thing. I just. We. Thankfully it clearly has not, like, lived on. If, like, your kid didn't recognize Jim Carrey, it's not a thing that all his friends are watching where there are other things that like, do live on from the 90s. [01:23:34] Speaker B: That is a great point. Now. Yeah, I've got a kind of a point I want to make here. Right. [01:23:38] Speaker A: Okay. [01:23:40] Speaker B: And do you have any other movies that you want to just rip through super quick? [01:23:46] Speaker A: Well, I did watch super quick. [01:23:47] Speaker B: I'm not gonna fucking rush you. This is your. This is our podcast. You take all the time you want. You're on my own. [01:23:54] Speaker A: On your timeline. [01:23:55] Speaker B: You crack on. [01:23:56] Speaker A: No, the only other things that I watched. Well, I did one that you're probably going to talk about too, so we'll. We'll get there. But I have been in a PBS mood and so I was kind of scrolling through and watching things on PBS [01:24:12] Speaker B: just because of my memory. Just remind me what that is. [01:24:15] Speaker A: That's public broadcasting, right? So it's like, you know, publicly funded television, lots of educational things, lots of British costume dramas, things like that. That's where we. That's where we watch them here. And if you subscribe, you get like, some stuff that you normally wouldn't get because it's like free. If you go on YouTube, you can watch a lot of PBS stuff, their documentaries and things like that, but there's like a few things they hold back for you to subscribe. But. So I watched two documentaries, both of which, completely coincidentally, I didn't realize till I had logged them later, had the word bomb in them. One of which, the first one I watched was called Rainbow, which was really interesting. It's about the phenomenon of wet microbursts, which is. It doesn't sound that interesting, but it is really interesting. It's a phenomenon I've actually experienced when I was a kid, which is like this really powerful storm that happens over a very small area and you can kind of watch like this cloud form and then just suddenly like explode onto the land underneath. It can be extremely destructive and especially is a problem that like airlines have to deal with because it can crash a plane in an instant. And these rain bombs have, you know, always been a thing. But obviously with climate change, scientists are seeing more of this phenomenon and they are specifically looking at, in this, this like, mix where it is a. There's also a thing called a dry microburst. And these are sort of mixes of wet and dry microbursts. And they can tell because they can pull hail from these things, and the hail will be half clear and half solid. And this comes from the fact that if it is extremely cold inside of, like, the cloud, the atmosphere where the hail is being processed, then it will be like. It'll. The freezing will be, like, opaque because the air bubbles don't have time to, like, evaporate out of it. Whereas if it's clear, it's because it was warm in the air. So you're getting a mix of warm and cold, extremely cold and extremely warm air in the same storm. And they're like, we don't know why this is happening. And it's happening a whole heck of a lot more. So this Rainbow documentary, it's from the series nova, which probably most Americans are familiar with. It's been on our entire lives. And it's really fascinating to watch and, like, see the impacts of these storms and everything. So if you're into sort of climatological phenomena, Rainbow is a really interesting watch. And then the other one was called Bombshell, and that was about the atomic bombs and about how the United States government managed PR around the atomic bombs to make people feel like they were necessary and good when we dropped them. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it's really fascinating because as a teacher, this is a thing that, like, I faced a lot with students being like, no, we had to. We had to do that. That was a thing that was required or everybody would have died. The whole world would have collapsed if we didn't, you know, kill all those people. So it was really. We managed it, that. That little bit of, like, those people had to die. And it's really sad, but if they hadn't, damage would have been 10 times [01:28:02] Speaker B: more, you know, very similar framing to Iran currently, that. [01:28:08] Speaker A: Right. You know, it's a propaganda technique that has worked for many, many years. And it talks about the ways in which they, like, place stories like, oh, they got a New York Times journalist to come and basically run propaganda out of this to, like, tell the story of the science that was going on the way they wanted it told and things like that, and the very active campaign they took because they were doing something that was a clear evil, and they needed Americans and the world to believe that wasn't the case. And obviously, people still think this to this day. They still think, yeah, it was terrible, but it was necessary. And this goes through how that. Yeah. How that developed. And so it's. It's really fascinating Bombshell also available. I think you have to have passport to watch Bombshell. You don't have pass. Have to have passport to watch the other one. But it is worth your, you know, $5 to get all of the things that are on PBS and support public broadcasting while it's being dismantled. But this is, it's just so fascinating to see those. How intentionally that propaganda was created that is still repeated to this day and that most people, if you ask them in America would. That's what they would say, you know. [01:29:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I do. I do enjoy. I do you. I do enjoy seeing the playbook continue to manifest itself, even though. [01:29:37] Speaker A: Right. I mean, I don't enjoy it because it's frustrating, you know, when you're. I'm. I'm also reading a book called A Fever in the Heartland, which is about the origins of the KKK and how they grew specifically in Indiana. And reading it, it's like, it's just, it's everything that like Stephen Miller and all those people are like constantly saying that gets people riled up about immigrants and Jews and whoever the else. And it's like it's just such a clear and obvious playbook. And he, the, you know, the Grand Dragon is at the top, like just laughing as he like reaps all the benefits and like clearly doesn't believe a word he's saying about anything. You know, he's just like, this is working. It's making me extremely rich. And it's just seeing a playbook that is so obvious and going, how does everyone not see this happening? Is one of the most like, frustrating and like disempowering feelings. [01:30:37] Speaker B: Yeah. My Sleepy Time podcast, the Rest Is History just did a three episode run on the kkk. In it, various incarnations. Deeply fascinating how. [01:30:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:30:54] Speaker B: You know, as a group, the various incarnations of that group. [01:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:31:03] Speaker B: Whilst the same in, you know, in name have. Stop me if I'm wrong, but really clear differences in their size, their scale, their influence. [01:31:15] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. [01:31:17] Speaker B: Yeah. Super interesting stuff. [01:31:20] Speaker A: Now, what were you. You had something you wanted to. [01:31:22] Speaker B: We'll talk about Hoppers super quick. Right. We'll talk about Hoppers first. [01:31:25] Speaker A: That I rewatched as well. Because after you were so enthusiastic about it, I was like, man, I could go for. I could go for Hoppers right about now. [01:31:33] Speaker B: Easily. Easily. As I sit here speaking to you in May. May 3. Easily film of the year so far. [01:31:40] Speaker A: Love it. So good. [01:31:41] Speaker B: I struggle to think how a film could better Hoppers. It's. [01:31:45] Speaker A: I think it's the number one on My letterbox list at the moment, [01:31:51] Speaker B: to the point where I don't really know where to start it. It does so much. There's so much going on in this fucking movie. The most recent Pixar animation. What if we could transmute human consciousness into an avatar of an animal? And what would happen? [01:32:11] Speaker A: Oh, Margaret would have loved this. [01:32:15] Speaker B: Right? It's. It's about so many different things, and you're almost blindsided with how quickly it becomes about something different. [01:32:26] Speaker A: Right? [01:32:27] Speaker B: It's. Yes, of course it's environmental. And of course it's about the bond between the fucking ecosystem that we all inhabit and are destroying. Of course that's what it's about. But then somehow, within, like the space of a minute, within the space of a scene, wait a minute. It's now about geopolitics and fucking the UN and war and Russia. What the fuck? When did that. How does that happen? [01:32:56] Speaker A: Yeah, it's got a lot to say, but it's. [01:33:00] Speaker B: And it says it all almost without you realizing that it's saying that to you. It's not subtle by any means, but you're having such a fucking fun time because it's so funny. You mentioned the pretty bird joke in Dumb and Dumber. Right? Now that is at the expense of the blind. Not cool. [01:33:20] Speaker A: Right? [01:33:21] Speaker B: It's a guilty joke. It's a guilty joke. [01:33:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:33:25] Speaker B: But Hopper's has, on the surface, a kind of a similar joke about kind of hearing impaired, but that, but somehow makes it super wholesome and fine to kind of have a laugh at. [01:33:38] Speaker A: Which one was this? [01:33:39] Speaker B: Mabel spends an entire day trying to get that guy to sign her petition. Oh, and then he just puts his hearing aid in. Sorry. What? Jess. So good. [01:33:48] Speaker A: Yes, that's right. Yep. Milk, eggs, butter. [01:33:52] Speaker B: Yep. It's at the expense of no. 1. It's a situational joke and it's brilliant. But that's by the by. There's such a lot going on with Hoppers. I, I. If I were to sit here and list all the gags that it executes just perfectly and takes you to places that you just don't expect. DreamWorks could never, ever, ever Illumination could never, ever get close to the finesse that Hoppers just confidently executes with just utter finesse. Do you know what I'm saying? Confidence. Yeah, man, I loved it. Fucking loved it. [01:34:39] Speaker A: Yeah. If you haven't watched Hoppers yet, you gotta get on it. [01:34:42] Speaker B: Yeah, please do. [01:34:42] Speaker A: I knew you were gonna love that one. [01:34:44] Speaker B: Oh, how could you not? [01:34:45] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:34:46] Speaker B: It being Pixar in the first kind of 10 minutes. I was thinking. Oh, hang on. Check myself. Hang on. I'm getting attached to this old lady character. Maybe better not. [01:34:56] Speaker A: Yeah, better not. She looks exactly like Kio's mom too. [01:35:01] Speaker B: Oh, is that right? [01:35:01] Speaker A: Like. [01:35:02] Speaker B: Oh. [01:35:03] Speaker A: Oh, no. [01:35:04] Speaker B: Oh, wait, wait, wait. Let's remember what we're watching here. [01:35:07] Speaker A: Yeah. This is a Pixar. Someone has to not survive the first 15 minutes, but then super casually, you [01:35:13] Speaker B: know what I mean? It's five years later, Grandma's dead, and she's just kissing goodbye to a photo. [01:35:17] Speaker A: You don't have to like. [01:35:18] Speaker B: Doesn't dwell on it. [01:35:19] Speaker A: Doesn't up you on it. [01:35:20] Speaker B: No, it doesn't up you and it doesn't cope. Go you. [01:35:22] Speaker A: Yes, right. [01:35:24] Speaker B: That's not what this film is about. No, it's about flying sharks. [01:35:28] Speaker A: And honestly, the way that this. I think it goes along with the very casual and really healthy way this movie addresses death in general. You know, the. The pond rules with sort of playing this. The Squish for laughs. I won't give any further info on what happens there. But, you know, there's a death that happens that's very surprising and it just played off for laughs. And. Yeah, you go from there. And I think that's one of the things that I really liked about this movie too, is that every instance of death is either casual or funny or just a fact of life. And it is never played super tragically like a lot of the other ones are. You know, there's a very circle of life thing going on here. [01:36:14] Speaker B: And don't Pixar do great villains? Don't they do just. Oh, yeah, villains. [01:36:18] Speaker A: Yeah. Dave Franco crushes it when he becomes the. The latter video ladder villain. John Hamm is great throughout. It's just. [01:36:29] Speaker B: Yeah, peak. It's peak. It's absolutely peak. [01:36:32] Speaker A: That's what you want from Pixar. [01:36:35] Speaker B: So from what you want, let's talk about what you don't want. Because there was a DNF on our list this week. Right. Corrigan and I sat down intending to watch. I forgot about a movie called. And this is this. I'm building to a point here. Right. Yeah. A movie called Dust Bunny, which on the surface, wow, what an enticing prospect. Mads Mikkelsen. Ah, Sigourney Weaver. Oh. In a. In a fantasy action horror movie with monsters and fucking choreographed violence. Oh, God, yes. Where do I sign? I'm seated. [01:37:11] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:37:13] Speaker B: However, right. Is. Is this maybe a genre? Do people enjoy this? Fantasy horror movies that take place nowhere, that take place, that are heavily stylized and Designed and don't take place anywhere real that take place in a town or a city that, you know, you think you know, but is so processed. [01:37:43] Speaker A: Right. [01:37:45] Speaker B: That has no, no, no sense of geography or, or place in all felt like it was shot in someone's garage against a green screen. The action is weightless. The violence has no impact. And it's not supposed to. I, I, I dare say, because it's a fantasy movie, you don't want any feel like they're getting killed. Right? [01:38:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:38:09] Speaker B: I don't know. But it has absolutely no attraction for me. It has absolutely. It does. It disengages me completely when I'm seeing even of, you know, we can trace this all the way back to the Matrix and before when the wire work, obviously it's, it's not, it's not meant to take place in the world that, you know, the world that you recognize. But at least choreograph, choreography and wire work has a kind of a physicality to it. [01:38:44] Speaker A: Right? [01:38:44] Speaker B: Yeah, stuff like, you know, your Kung Fu Hustle and All the Way Back Jackie Chan stuff. When he's falling on. A normal human would die from a fall of that. [01:38:55] Speaker A: Right. [01:38:55] Speaker B: You know, but he jumps up and runs off. It's not supposed to be realistic, but this level of unrealism, it might as well be a cartoon. It might as well be animation. And moves that are supposed to look slick and cool and make you go, oh, that's slick and cool. Look at Miles Mikkelsen in his tracksuit doing that move. It does. It doesn't have any of that engagement and that cool factor because it looks fucking just so flimsy and nobody looks like they're even in standing in the same place, let alone having a fight. Look like they're on some stages on opposite sides of the world. [01:39:32] Speaker A: Yeah, you, you compared it to Sucker Punch and that's exactly what it, exactly what it looks like genre. [01:39:38] Speaker B: Is that something people actively enjoy, like hyper realistic fantasy action but with, I [01:39:43] Speaker A: don't know, because people seem to really enjoy Dust Bunny. You know, I'd heard really good things. Or at least, you know, it seems like it's more polarizing now. When it was in theaters, I feel like I was hearing a lot of good things. And then now looking at letterboxd seems a little more polarizing. But I don't know, I don't. Yeah, I mean, it's like watching Quantumania or whatever, you know, it's just like, I don't, yeah, it doesn't work for me. And I was so Glad. Because you. You were like, all right, I'm gonna lock in. Which when Mark says that, that means that, like, we're not gonna chat through it. We're just gonna. [01:40:14] Speaker B: I'm going. Phones down. [01:40:15] Speaker A: Tandem. [01:40:16] Speaker B: I'm going down for this. [01:40:18] Speaker A: It was like, 20 minutes, and I was like, boy, I am hating this. Like, I was considering just going and making dinner. And then you were like, all right, can we. This is awful. Great. Okay, good. [01:40:29] Speaker B: So just to skip with the. The timeline a little bit here, right? Earlier on this evening, Laura and I, in a rare moment of agreement and synchronicity, agreed on a movie to watch. Right. That movie was Apex. [01:40:46] Speaker A: Was it just you two? [01:40:47] Speaker B: It's just two of us. Peter was upstairs playing Rocket League and shouting loudly with his friends. [01:40:52] Speaker A: It's funny because the. When we stopped watching Dust Bunny, I was like, oh. I think I was like. I think Ella said Apex is, like, really gory or whatever. And you immediately were like, oh, that movie. And you were like. Had a reaction like, oh, no. And then I realized that wasn't the movie I meant, which. We'll talk about what I did, but. So it's very funny, because you seemed already to know you did not want to watch that. [01:41:15] Speaker B: Well, look, Laura likes Tara Naggerton, right? [01:41:18] Speaker A: Oh, who doesn't? Nah. [01:41:20] Speaker B: So, anyway, I'll get to my point. And in the opening moments, Eric Banner. What happened to him, by the way? I mean, he's on Netflix, obviously, but he kind of went away for a lot of the longest time. [01:41:39] Speaker A: Yeah, he's certainly not. Yeah, he's not what he had the chance of being for a while there. [01:41:44] Speaker B: Eric Banner and Charlize Theron wake up in their tent, and they're doing that thing that extreme climbers do where they've got their tent kind of, you know, drilled into the side of a rock face. They're on Troll. Troll Cliff face in Norway, and it's incredible. And Charlize Theron sticks her head out the side of the tent, and we see the incredible vista around her, but she isn't there, right? And you can tell she isn't there, right? Because she obviously isn't there. It's too fucking bright and clean. And she's obviously, you know, on a fucking harness and a soundstage, clearly, Right? [01:42:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:42:23] Speaker B: And we go to Australia, and she obviously isn't there either. And it's an action movie, and she's being stalked through the woods by Taron Egerton. And on paper, on the storyboards, you know that the stunts are supposed to look Incredible. On a couple of occasions they do that thing that is a kind of a trope now whereby a character will fall from a great height and the camera will follow this character from the fall all the way down. Ah. And they bump off stuff and they crash off things and they say, plunge into the water. Fucking 80ft below. And the camera will follow them into the water. Oh my God, what an incredible stunt. But in reality that isn't what it is, right? Charlize Theron falls off the edge of a. And then it. It cuts to a CGI model of her, obviously, as CG fucking landscape rushes past you and she plunges into a CG fucking stream. And then actual Charlie Saron pops up. And she has no physical damage to her from this fall at all. She's in a vest, top right. And we just watched her free fall for seven seconds down a cliff face into a rapidly moving stream and she pops out and there's no. She doesn't have a scrape on her arms, like. Right. This isn't. This isn't even a film. This is content. Yeah, right. Let me tell you that now and then. The closest thing I can think of as an analog. Think of something like Wolf Creek, right? Which on. On paper at least. Similar premises of woman being stalked by a fucking Australian roggin. Think of something like Deliverance. Yeah, right. Which is man versus the fucking wilderness. But it's in the wilderness and you feel it. Nothing in this fucking piece of shit fucking screen filler has any fucking connection to the physical world at all. [01:44:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:44:32] Speaker B: It is just content. David lynch would have hated this film. He would have absolutely hated this film. It is. It has nothing to it in the same way as Dust Bunny has nothing to it. No weight, no mass. It doesn't have any physical characteristics at all, right? And I'm so sick of it. [01:44:54] Speaker A: You sound like me two years ago when I just started watching 90s thrillers. Because I was so sick of everything looking like this. It's like, I can't. I can no longer do this. [01:45:06] Speaker B: Is it Kurt Russell? No, it wasn't. [01:45:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:45:09] Speaker B: What was it called? [01:45:09] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:45:10] Speaker B: Breaking Point. [01:45:12] Speaker A: Yes, if I think so. Something like that. [01:45:16] Speaker B: Explosion time. It's all on the road. [01:45:20] Speaker A: Wait, which one are we talking about? The one where they're on, like the husband and wife are like on their, like road trip and break down. Breakdown. Breakdown is what it's called. [01:45:29] Speaker B: Breakdown point. [01:45:30] Speaker A: I was like. Or are we thinking. Because there was also the. The one that has. Not him, but Jeff Bridges. Yeah, Jeff Bridges. Where am I getting Them backwards where he's like the bomb squad guy in Boston and Tommy Lee Jones is from the ira. [01:45:51] Speaker B: Oh, I know. Is that not speed? [01:45:55] Speaker A: No, no, no, no. That's. That's Keanu Reeves and Dennis Hopper. [01:46:01] Speaker B: Dennis Hopper, yeah, that's right. [01:46:03] Speaker A: But anyway, to my point, that's why I was watching that shit. [01:46:07] Speaker B: To my point, I would. I think I might be on the cusp of another one of those fucking phases to watch actual films in an actual place. Which takes us beautifully to Dolly. [01:46:17] Speaker A: Yes. Which we ended up watching after noping out of. [01:46:21] Speaker B: After Dust Bunny. [01:46:22] Speaker A: Dust Bunny. [01:46:24] Speaker B: Was it Ella who recommended Dolly to you? [01:46:26] Speaker A: Yes, it was Ella. [01:46:28] Speaker B: Thank you so much for saving my fucking night. Because what we have here is a very small scale shot on film. [01:46:40] Speaker A: Yep. [01:46:41] Speaker B: Which you told me. Which I had no idea of. Shot on film in a fucking forest and an old house. Maybe four people in it. [01:46:50] Speaker A: Right. [01:46:51] Speaker B: But these are four people who were in the same place at the same time, who were in a fucking woodland, who in an actual building who interacted with and touched one another. And good God, you put it best yourself. The bar is so fucking low that I'm. That you can. The film really stands out and pops when it's in a place. [01:47:15] Speaker A: Yep. Right. Yeah. It is, like, so, like, just a relief watching it and being like, ah, this exists. [01:47:27] Speaker B: This is an actual film that people showed up made. Right. [01:47:32] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:32] Speaker B: And it's scrappy. What a scrappy little fucking film this is. [01:47:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:37] Speaker B: What a scrapper. You got Sean William Scott in it, and it's got gore and it's got gags. [01:47:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:47:43] Speaker B: It's got some cg go here and there. All right, fine. Whatever. Which looked all the more jarring for it kind of. It doesn't juxtapose well with that grainy kind of. [01:47:53] Speaker A: Right, exactly. That's what makes it stand out compared to what it would if it was just a regular digitally shot film. But I ain't mad at it. Their budget is clearly low and they did a lot of practical effects. [01:48:07] Speaker B: Just slavishly in the thrall of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. This film. [01:48:11] Speaker A: Clearly there's a character named Toby. T O B E in it. [01:48:15] Speaker B: Oh, there we go. I didn't realize that. And just the story beats are the same, you know? Our final girl escapes in the car of a stranger while laughing hysterically, takes a plunge through a window. You know what I mean? [01:48:25] Speaker A: Yep. [01:48:25] Speaker B: The beats are identical. But just it. It just felt like I'd watched something. It felt like I'd watched something that people made. You Know, rather than something that was designed just to fill up a fucking screen, rather than something that I watched a movie when I saw Dolly. I didn't just consume content. [01:48:47] Speaker A: Yeah, agreed. Absolutely agree. It was. It was refreshing. So, you know, I. I recommend Dolly. It's like you said, it's a small movie, you know, it's a. Just a little. It is what it is. It's. It is what it says on the box kind of movie. Yeah. [01:49:05] Speaker B: But it's. It's grimy. [01:49:08] Speaker A: Extremely. [01:49:09] Speaker B: Stiffler spends two thirds of the movie with off his face hanging off. Right. [01:49:14] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. [01:49:15] Speaker B: There's a load to recommend and there's. And just gives me such hope and such faith. [01:49:21] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:49:22] Speaker B: To know that people are making films. [01:49:24] Speaker A: Yeah. It's still happening. Someone's out there doing it, you know, And. And as such, I hope someone gives these filmmakers more money to do this a little bigger, you know, so watch it so that they do that. [01:49:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, man. God, Apex, just. And I tell you what, right. It isn't. It isn't even the paucity of creativity visually in that film. Apex, like I said, in the first couple of minutes, Eric Banner and Charlize Theron wake up in their tent. And then a few minutes after that, you know exactly how, oh, this is what, this is gonna happen in this movie then, is it? And then it just happens. It's. It may as well. [01:50:07] Speaker A: By the numbers. [01:50:08] Speaker B: You are about to watch 90 odd minutes of this happening. And this character will then do this, because we've shown you this. [01:50:17] Speaker A: Right. [01:50:17] Speaker B: And it will lead to this. And then we can forget this ever happened. And then all of that proceeds to take place. [01:50:23] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. So that's what we watch this week as we close out. There's one thing I want to address, Mark. Have you. I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. Have you been hearing the hubbub about the missing US scientists that's been going around only superficially. [01:50:48] Speaker B: I do not know the detail here. Is there detail here to know more to the point? [01:50:53] Speaker A: Well, I'm gonna. I'm gonna tell you a little bit about it because the first I heard of it was actually on our Discord. So shout out to our listeners who have their fingers on the pulse. [01:51:02] Speaker B: You should join, by the way, listener, if you're in any way minded. You certainly won't see us much active on Facey or Insta anymore. [01:51:10] Speaker A: No, we've pretty much abandoned both of those things at this point. Point. [01:51:14] Speaker B: So people are good people. Good, good, good people are Joining the Discord more and more and boy, we [01:51:21] Speaker A: had some really good discussion about last week's episode on on the Discord as well, which is great. The past couple of episodes we've had like people writing novels about on our Discord. So you know, you're missing out if you're not. Find it in our past. [01:51:36] Speaker B: The science test, it seems like. [01:51:37] Speaker A: Yeah, seems like it. Yeah. We didn't get any. You know. Eileen didn't correct you. I don't think so. [01:51:43] Speaker B: Eileen called it a banger. And I gotta tell you, I, I had a grin on my face all day for that. Thank you, Eileen. I, I love to please you. [01:51:56] Speaker A: So, yeah, I think it was Andy who posted it, but I do have a habit of mixing up people who post things on our Discord and whatnot. So my apologies. [01:52:04] Speaker B: Always, always, always Very, very well observed and high quality, quality observations and content. Very, very, very good stuff. [01:52:12] Speaker A: But this article was pretty quick to give reasonable explanation. So I honestly didn't understand how big this conspiracy was. But in the time since what is happening on there, happening from. I am going to tell you that. [01:52:24] Speaker B: Okay, okay. [01:52:26] Speaker A: But yeah, this is everywhere and everyone seems to believe that there's shifty going on. Do you know, like if you were to describe what you think has happened, what, what do you know? [01:52:40] Speaker B: Are key figures in the scientific community being disappeared due to their work or their dissenting point of view about the current Middle Eastern conflict? Is that what's happening? [01:52:56] Speaker A: Well, what it's about is very ambiguous, so interesting. Sure, why not the Middle Eastern conflict? But that is up in the air. Basic crux of the conspiracy theory is exactly what he said. 11 high level government scientists have died or gone missing under mysterious circumstances recently. And this has gotten so much attention that now Trump has said that the government is looking into it and it might be some sort of targeted attack, some sort of national security issue around our science community. And I don't think you're going to be surprised when I tell you right out the gate that this thing is debunked really easily. [01:53:36] Speaker B: Well, this, this does happen. IRL scientists and academics and scholars do get erased. [01:53:46] Speaker A: Yeah, but we know about it. It's the thing. The reason that we know that is because we know that, you know, we see it happen. You know, it's usually it's not, they're not really disappeared. They're, you know, either silenced by being taken away from a place, arrested, they're shot, they're. Whatever the case may be when this happens, we know that it has occurred conspiracies as we've discussed normally are not real because they involve a whole bunch of secrecy that simply does not hold up. Yeah, in, in these cases, you know, people would find out about it. And in this case particularly, it is obvious that didn't happen. So one really glaring issue out the gate, not all of these people were scientists that they're talking about and not all of them had any kind of clearance that would put them anywhere near something that would be worth being killed over. Further, there's no commonality in what they were researching. They weren't all on the same project, they didn't work at the same places, anything like that. They're completely disparate areas of the scientific community and labs and schools and things like that in which they worked. Further, these deaths and disappearances have happened over the course of four years. Oh, I see, Four years. Eleven random unconnected missing people over four years out of an entire country's worth of scientists is obviously not worth discussing. [01:55:23] Speaker B: I see. [01:55:24] Speaker A: In fact, science writer, investigator and pseudoscience debunker Mick west wrote on his substat quote, The U.S. top secret cleared aerospace and nuclear workforce is over 700,000 people. Ordinary mortality over 22 months predicts 4,000 deaths, 70 homicides and 180 suicides. The list has 10. The deaths are real, the family's grief is real, but the pattern is not. So let me tell you about some of these folks just to drive it home, you know. There's 61 year old Frank Maywald, who worked at JPL as a technical supervisor on instruments used in spacecraft. He just died. No cause of death was released because there's no reason to think anything was afoot. 61, he's young, but old enough. Died. Natural causes? No, no to do about that. Another JPL scientist, 59 year old Michael David Hicks, whose major contribution was testing whether asteroids can be deflected. Not exactly the kind of research that requires a cover. No, no. Right. Oh no, what if the Russians find out? And again, no cause of death was released because he's just a guy who died. BBC did mention a scientist who meets the description of this guy and it said the coroner's report said he died of arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease. Okay, so that's likely how we lost this guy. And then we get some that do involve foul play or odd circumstances. But again, nothing that points to a conspiracy. For example, MIT professor and nuclear physicist Nuno Loreiro was murdered by a rival scientist in 2025 along with 11 other people before the gunman killed himself too. This was a huge deal. It was not some shady, secretive murder that happened for like undiscernable reasons. It was a horrific mass shooting with a clear motive. We talked about it in the news and things like that to college, you know, students died. It was awful. It was the, the shooting where it turned out that like two of the people who were there had been at the, in the Florida, what was Park Town. [01:57:45] Speaker B: Right. [01:57:47] Speaker A: School shooting as well. So it was like a huge deal, not a secretive thing. It was just two scientists who didn't get along and one of them decided to take a whole bunch of people down with him. There you go. Then there was Caltech astrophysicist Carl Grillmeier, who was also shot and killed. The culprit in this case was a man named Freddy Snyder, who Grillmire did not know, but who seemed to have unrelated issues. He'd previously been arrested for trespassing on Grillmire's property with a gun. And the day of the shooting, he'd also done a carjacking. Grillmire's wife thinks that the incident was a misplaced revenge plot. When Snyder initially crossed his property with the gun, he claimed that he was coyote hunting. So Grillmire pointed him to a nearby ridge where he could go hunt. But because Snyder had also been acting erratically around the rest of the neighborhood, someone had called the cops on him. Grillmire's wife thinks Snyder thought it was him and thus he came back because he had a vendetta against him for getting him put in jail. Easy explanation. Just a guy, mental issues, who showed up and, you know, had this misplaced idea of this guy wronging him, essentially. Then there's 48 year old government contractor Steven Garcia, who is seen leaving his home on foot carrying a handgun. He was a custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus, a manufacturer of the non nuclear parts used in nuclear weapons. A custodian, Come on. And one who it seems clearly was probably not in a good headspace, given the circumstance. You know, when you see a guy leaving on foot from his house with a handgun, either he's going to do something bad to himself or to someone else, realistically. Similarly, there was Anthony Chavez, who was also seen leaving his house on foot. He apparently worked at Los Alamos, though I'm not sure what he did there. He could have been a custodian for all I know, too. But despite several wide searches, reviewing surveillance footage, etc. Chavez was never seen again. Maybe he encountered someone who kidnapped or murdered him, but it's also quite possible he just didn't want to be found. And again, on that note, there was Novartis researcher Jason Thomas, who's reported missing by his wife. Before his body was found floating in a Massachusetts lake. His wife said he'd been distraught over the deaths of both of his parents who had passed within hours of each other, which hit him particularly hard because he was an only child. So he didn't have any siblings to, you know, sort of comfort each other. Exactly that. So very clear cause and effect here. He was just, you know, in a bad headspace after a tragedy. There was Monica Jacinto Reza, an engineer who specialized in burn resistant and high strength metal alloys. In June of last year, she went on a hike. And the details on this are all over the place. Because what's crazy trying to research this is that the conspiracy has spread so far that like the major news sources talk about it like it's happening. [02:01:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:01:00] Speaker A: At this point, like it's real. And the details are just like things they've hoovered up from random places. So, like, each article I read about this had completely different details about what happened. [02:01:12] Speaker B: What in from different sources? [02:01:14] Speaker A: Different sources were just different sources said completely different things happened here. We know she went on a hike. She went either with one or two companions, depends on the article that you read. And it doesn't say who the companions are. But allegedly she was about 30ft behind at least one person with whom she was hiking. That person looked back and saw her smile and wave, but the next time they turned around, she was gone. We've talked about this shit many times. Hiking is a real good way to die. So many people just slip off something and are never seen again. In fact, I literally watched a YouTube video like three weeks ago where a guy listed like five people in the past year who have simply disappeared while hiking, often right after having happily encountered someone else on the trail. There's no mystery here. And if you think about it, like, what's the hypothesis? Yep, she's vaporized. Like, what's supposed to have happened? She was 30ft behind someone and then she's gone. What happened? What is, what do you think occurred? What's the conspiracy here? It makes no sense if you think about it. It's just silliness. [02:02:21] Speaker B: So why then has it taken on such here? [02:02:25] Speaker A: Well, we'll go. Well, it leads to the biggest. One of the conspiracies that it really kind of hinges on, which is the disappearance of William Neil McCasland, a retired Air Force general who's Been connected, of course, to all kinds of UFO shit. [02:02:39] Speaker B: Oh, good. [02:02:42] Speaker A: Though seemingly not really on purpose. In fact, he consulted with Blink Blink 182, notorious extraterrestrial enthusiast Tom DeLonge, on some media project that he was working on about aliens. However, McCasland himself was a skeptic. He wasn't claiming to have secrets about Roswell or Area 51 or any of that kind of stuff that people claimed. And that's sort of what all this hinges on, is like this guy, he knew about the aliens and so they had to off him because of that. So in June of last year, McCaslin left his home and never came back. And again, while we have a sad circumstance, it's an explainable one. When he disappeared, his wife told 91 1, I have some indication that he must have planned not to be found. She said that he had been suffering from insomnia, anxiety and memory loss, and that he had said several times that he didn't want to live with his body deteriorating. In response to the conspiracy, she also clarified that her husband had retired 13 years ago, and it seems quite unlikely that he was taken to extract very dated secrets from him. So there are a few more, all equally easily explained and equally unconnected as all these people are to each other. And these aren't even particularly unusual things to happen to people. There are witnesses to pretty much all of them. Like these guys leaving their houses and stuff like that. Like, people saw them, they didn't. Nobody came and yanked them from their house or anything like that. They walked away and people saw them do it. It's a non story. And every time I open Facebook and see someone speculating on it as if they're being reasonable, I'm like, do we have different Google? Like, what's happening? Yeah, here. Like, we live in hell already. Like, we how. [02:04:29] Speaker B: We don't need that to scratch. How long did you take to pull this one apart, Corrigan? Not particularly. [02:04:33] Speaker A: Right. Like. Like it was immediately one article. Like I went truth of conspiracy theory scientists or whatever, and the first thing that pulled up debunked it. And then I spent another 15 minutes looking up the other things. And the thing that gets me is, you know, one of my mentors in my PhD program, Jennifer Holt, she had a catchphrase. It was consider the source. And at least one student had it tattooed on them. And I think more people need to do that. [02:05:01] Speaker B: I say it to my kids all the time. I say it to them all the time at the dinner table. If they're telling me some Shit. Source, please. [02:05:07] Speaker A: Who told you that? Yep. Cite your sources because where did this all start? Just some Maha grifters substack. That's it. Just some dumb bitch who likes RFK Jr. And Donald Trump posted some nonsense on her sub stack and now it's everywhere and the President is paying attention and CNN is posting about it like it's a real thing and it's not a real thing. [02:05:32] Speaker B: Yeah. [02:05:33] Speaker A: Think about where this is coming from. Like, fuck's sake, Follow the trail. [02:05:38] Speaker B: And you know how fucking dangerous things like this have been in the past. [02:05:41] Speaker A: Like yeah, yeah, like Pizzagate. Right. Like someone shot up a pizza parlor. Right? Yeah. Or exactly that. Like these things have like actual measles [02:05:52] Speaker B: is back because of that. Thank you. [02:05:54] Speaker A: Right. You know, yeah, 100%. We don't know what someone might do because they think this is happening. [02:06:02] Speaker B: And you make such a fantastic point that real fucking people. It's. That's a place where I've spent a lot of my mental time this week is in that space of real people suffering from large scale hastily made decisions. Just in these, the past 48 hours, people I fucking know, good ass people have had material damage to their lives because some of the things that are going on in rooms where people could not give a shit about you or your family or your future, it trickles down and it is not right. [02:06:38] Speaker A: And when it comes down to it, you know, falling for this is one of the ways we let it happen to us. You know, this is how we victimize ourselves. [02:06:47] Speaker B: Yes. [02:06:47] Speaker A: In this nonsense, while all of those things are happening, we're sitting here talking about this. That is not real. That has no basis in reality. And, and if you are at all grounded in reality, you can see, see that that's the case. And boy, like, what a gift to Donald Trump to be able to go up there and be like, I'm looking into those scientists. I know you're all worried when it's. I'm not worried about that. What the fuck are you doing? What the fuck are you really doing right now? We don't need to give this. We don't need to do this for them. Friends, consider the source. Pay attention. [02:07:26] Speaker B: Consider the source. Consider. [02:07:28] Speaker A: Consider the source. [02:07:30] Speaker B: Consider Occam's razor. [02:07:32] Speaker A: You know, Exactly. [02:07:35] Speaker B: If there's a simpler way to explain it, that's usually the explanation. [02:07:39] Speaker A: Yep, true story. So that's where we leave you this fine week. If you are. I know all of you have probably seen it on your Facebook feeds and things like that. So you know, you can point to all these things that I just said. When you're frustrated with the person at the water cooler who insists on talking at you about this, and if you [02:08:00] Speaker B: feel you need a super quick primer on pretty much anything, jump on the joag. Discord. Ask Andy. Ask Eileen. Yes, ask the fucking actual real famous horror author, Lauren Bolger. She'll fucking tell you shit. You know, I mean, she's on Discord all the time. [02:08:17] Speaker A: Yep. [02:08:18] Speaker B: Ask him. One of us. If we don't know, we'll point you in the door in the right direction. Direction. Just think of the source and who it benefits. [02:08:26] Speaker A: And don't fuck the dolphins. [02:08:28] Speaker B: Don't is a very strong word. [02:08:32] Speaker A: How about stay spooky? Can we agree? [02:08:34] Speaker B: Yes, for sure.