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Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

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Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is episode 191, our last episode of 2022. I am one of your hosts, Celestia Ward, and with me is…

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BR: Ben Radford here,

Pascual Romero: And Pascual Romero.

CW: Hey, everybody. We’re wrapping up the year Have you had a good year in general?

PR: Yeah, I think it’s been a pretty decent one.

CW: Yeah, well told I thought we’d start this this episode off with you know, instead of a sway So, you know, so what are you skeptical of, you know? We could maybe think about what we might be skeptical of in Love in 2023. I mean, what’s it look like out there in terms of like, do you think there’s going to be more Bigfoot sightings or will you get any more photos of dead animals sent to you, Ben? Or what’s going on?

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BR: Yes, as the perpetual mangy dog recipient of the last for the last 10 years or so. Yeah, all that’s going to continue. I mean, you know, it’s the it’s the unsinkable rubber duck syndrome, right, where no matter how much it’s debunked, people will still be seeing them. So I think that’s probably going to keep going on its own. And I predict that psychic detectives will continue to fail spectacularly in their search for missing people, unfortunately.

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CW: Yeah, it’s hard to feel small when you’re commenting on very weighty things like the death of a child. You know, you don’t just get their shoe color wrong. You get major things wrong. So I have a child related prediction. That’s that’s a little bit more flippant than than murdered children. And this kind of stems from just, you know, one of the perks about my job is over the holiday season, as just happened, I get to work many, many holiday parties, and you get to chat for five minutes at a time with many, many people from many walks of life. And one of the people I was drawing was telling me about how, oh, she’s got all her holiday shopping done. All of her teenagers wanted Crocs. And I said, what? Apparently, unbeknownst to me, for the past, like, two years, Crocs have been surging in popularity. And they’re like the IT shoe. Teenagers love them. And so my prediction based on that, I’ve got a little hunch here that in 2023, we might see a, like a rainbow bracelet-esque panic about croc jibbeitz. You guys know what jibbeitz are?

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BR: Yes, I do. In fact, I happen to know this from my time in the Caribbean. A gibbet, it is a part of a sailing ship.

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CW: No, no, no, no, no.

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PR: The front sail, right?

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CW: Gibbets, I think they’re J-I-B-B-E-I-T-Z. They’re these little plastic thingamadoodles that some mom invented and then sold to Crocs for a huge amount of money. But they’re basically little doohickeys that you can buy for like a dollar and stick into your crock holes.

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Stick this into your crock hole, buddy!

BR: It’s sort of like bling, basically.

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CW: It’s crock bling, yeah, but they’re very colorful. There’s many, you know, very different styles. You can get one that looks like an emoji, you can get one that looks like Mario, or…

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BR: Basically, updated Pogs.

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You kind of, but you wear them. You can put them in your shoes, and they’re very visible, and they’re colorful, and they’re cheap, and they’re plastic, and I’m like, aha, there’s going to be gruesome parents. Now, I already looked, I did a scan and I couldn’t find anything on the internet telling me that this panic was already in full swing. But I’m betting you.

BR: I suspect you’re probably right. I’m betting you parents are going to start thinking that, oh, my son, you know, my daughter came home with a pink heart jibbet in her crock. And that means she’s telling all the boys through her signaling that she’ll do this sexual act and that sexual act and there’ll be jibbetz parties. That’s just my out-on-a-limb prediction for 2023.

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Keep your eyes out for gibbets parties panics.

BR: But look, but not fair, don’t intentionally create one just to make Celeste you’re happy.

CW: Unless you invite me!

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I’ll go to an adult jibbit party. Oh, but what else? What else is on you guys’ radar? Pascual, do you have any interesting predictions?

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PR: Yeah, I think my probably relatively grounded prediction or first prediction is the AI freakout will have died out by 2023. I think we’ve already seen it declining a little bit. You know, the way social media has been kind of coming hard at AI for a little bit, probably going to die out. People are going to forget about it. I, whether that is to the benefit or dismay of, of artists is still yet to be determined, but, um, people just tend to not stick to those kinds of causes for very long, but I think that in the end, it’s, these little, uh, gimmicky, uh, apps that people are installing on their phones and stuff, people are gonna realize that they don’t pose any real threat to commercial art. And maybe with some luck, we’ll still continue to see real artists making money doing art in the commercial space, but I think the fact that the public is probably not gonna be super into these things, like we are with every app, all those Reface apps and all those things, you know, they go through a couple of months of popularity and they always die out.

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CW: I’m going to augment your prediction there and say that AI art is going to become the new, cheaper crowdsourcing, and I think it will be less exploitative because of that. I mean, everybody I know in the art field complains about the whole crowdsourcing scam where you throw something out and say, our company, such and such brand is looking for a brand new look, I come up with an idea for a mascot or a campaign or this or that. And if you win, we’ll give you $500. Well, what they do is they get like 800 respondents from these hopeful students or, you know, working artists who live in Indonesia and have time to just take a chance on all of this. And they might not even award the prize money. They might just say, well, nobody really turned in anything that was… you know, and see our little fine print here, we don’t have to pick one of y’all, but then they take ideas from everybody. And they piece it together, and they have an artist that they’ve hired piece it together. So instead of wasting a bunch of people’s time, if you can just throw in some, you know, keywords to AI and get like 20 different ideas and see what you like from it and pick and choose and then have an artist put it together, then, hey, we’ve just replaced a crappy model with a robot. And I’m OK with that.

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PR: Yeah, and I think that’s part of my prediction is that a lot of this is going to be mostly impacting the most exploitative ends of the spectrum. being commissioned, is being done through, you know, countries that have an extremely lopsided exchange rate with Western countries. And you know, I can pay a guy to edit a film for like $50 out in like Eastern Europe somewhere. And so the reality is, is that this is already a problem. And if it, if AI kind of fills that gap, yes, it does still affect a certain segment of the market, but I think that for the most part, it’s really only appealing to people who were planning on screwing artists anyway. So, you know.

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CW: It’s a good way to put it.

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PR: How do you want to be screwed? Do you want to be screwed by cheap labor overseas or would you like to be screwed by robots? So.

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PR: Yeah, exactly. So, I want to be an optimist about this and I just I feel like the art will survive and we’ll take our licks. And this next year, I think the general public will at least have largely forgotten about making profile pictures out of AI.

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CW: Now, I know next year is going to be happening with Alex Jones in 2023?

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PR: My prediction on that is either he starts a cult or…

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CW: You mean another one?

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PR: Well, I mean, he has to like literally start a religion if he ever wants to make money again because everything’s just, you know, he’s lost. At this point, he’s, you know, we’ve mentioned it in the previous episode. There is really no coming back from where he’s at and I just I feel like he’s the kind of guy that would probably start a cult and move to Central America or something. We can hope.

CW: Ben what do you think?

BR: I’m a bit less cynical than Pasquale. I think he’s probably gonna sort of follow the follow the path of people like Bill O’Reilly and Miley Yiannopoulos and just sort of fade into obscurity. I mean he’ll still have his you know he’ll still have his audience and his hardcore people that listen to him. But I think that the 2023 will finally, thankfully, see his influence greatly diminished.

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CW: I have a feeling he might stroke out or have a heart attack and die. Not to be dire or Cassandra about it, but the guy’s had a year and he does not look healthy. I say this as an overweight…

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BR: Can you imagine the conspiracy theories when that happens? I mean, like, okay, well, yeah, but what really killed Alex Jones? Was it Hillary Clinton in the Study with the candlestick?

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CW: All three of us tend to lose a pound or two, but there’s just something… Have you ever looked at two overweight people and you’re like, oh, that’s a healthy, robust, overweight person. And oh, my God, that person, their neck is swallowing them and they’re going to die soon. You know, Alex is that unhealthy, ruddy, complexioned, just, you know, self-strangulating type of body type that, and head and neck type where it’s like, you can just kind of feel the high blood pressure coming off of him.

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PR: Yeah, his body just looks entirely inflamed.

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CW: Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, or maybe he’ll lose all the weight and start eating a lot of kale and buy a robe and some slippers and become a cult leader like you said. Anything could happen.

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PR: I mean, he’s only 48, believe it or not.

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CW: No! Oh my God!

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PR: He’s not as old as he looks.

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CW: Oh, he’s my, oh, now I’m like, why isn’t he dead already if he’s only 48 and he looks like that? I thought he was pushing 60. I seriously did.

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PR: Yeah, he’s a rough 48.

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CW: OK, now here’s a lateral move from predictions. We’re going to go from predictions to questions. Ben, you threw out a little thing on the Squaring the Strange podcast discussion group to see if there were any questions people had for this last episode. We might entertain some questions from audience members. What have you got?

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BR: So we got a couple responses, they can sort of be condensed into into one, so I’ll just go ahead and read that for our benefit as well as listeners.

CW: Thank you Aaron and Robin for contributing the questions.

0:11:50
BR: Yes. The question was, have there been any cases, claims, or other elements of woo that bypassed your skeptical radar and got to you, even for a brief period, before you found they weren’t true? And if so, how did you find out whatever it was wasn’t true? Just wondering if our usual stalwart skeptics, that’s us, weren’t so stalwart at some point in their lives. So basically this is one of those confess that you were wrong things.

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CW: Oh gosh, I could do that like five times every week here.

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BR: Right, how much time do we have? Do you guys wanna start or should I start?

CW: Go for it, Ben, you’ve probably got the most interesting ones.

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BR: Oh, I’m probably wrong the most. That’s that’s really what you’re trying to get at.

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But yes, there were there were three cases. I mean, there’s lots of cases I can think of, but just three off the top of my head. One, I remember very clearly was in 2008. I was skeptical that there was a male pregnancy. You guys remember that case?

CW: Was this a transgender male?

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BR: Yes. Thomas Keady.

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And he was on on he was actually interviewed on Oprah. I didn’t make a public statement, this can’t be true. I just, I don’t think that’s true. And I was wrong.

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CW: In all fairness, it had all been primed by the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie to recognize anything like that as fiction.

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BR: Right, clearly, yes.

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So that was, I was like, all right, that’s fine. I mean, again, I never went public and said, you know, I stick my creation on this. I just was probably like, well, you know, let me see how this shakes out. And it shook out and it was a real thing. Another example was the case of a psychic named Pam Ragland. And this is actually a case I wrote about for, I think it was live science.com. This is what happened in 2013, and there was a California boy, 11-year-old, that was killed. The boy’s name was Terry Smith, Jr. And a California psychic by the name of Pam Ragland claimed to have solved the case. And of course, my radar was like, whoa, hold on here. I was skeptical that, and I remain skeptical, and there’s some nuances to the story. I won’t go too deep into it. But basically, when I first heard that this alleged psychic detective or psychic, Ragland, had found the missing kid’s body, I was like, nope, I don’t believe that. I’m skeptical. And again, this was not without cause. As it turns out, I was kind of wrong. Ragland had in fact, and I wrote about this in my book, Big If True. I think that’s one of the cases in there. I was wrong. It turns out that Ragland actually had gone to the property and even though she herself didn’t actually find the boy’s remains, she was part of a group that went to do that. So that part of it I was wrong about. However, the explanation for how she went to that place is actually much more mundane. She had a vision because she was hearing, she like many people, many psychics were hearing about the story and she said, I have a vision of where this kid is. And she knew from coverage where the house was. So in other words, the boy was found on his own property or the property of his parents. So it’s not like he was found in some place unexpected. He was found where you might expect a body to be buried. And sure enough, they were right about that. So, again, that’s a case of where I was wrongly skeptical that she had found the body. She had found the body, but it was not through any psychic powers. Another example that jumps to mind was the Bubba Wallace case. You guys remember that in 2020?

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CW: Bubba Wallace rings a bell. Yeah.

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BR: So Bubba Wallace was a NASCAR driver, is a NASCAR driver. In June 2020, he had found a noose hanging in the garage at the Talladega track. And I, like many people, perhaps most people, assumed that it was a hate crime, and that in fact he probably was being victimized by a hate crime. He was, I think, either one of the only or the only African-American NASCAR drivers, and he’d gotten flack for that. And so I, again, I didn’t dig deeply into it, but I assumed it was true, like many or most people did. And later on, it turned out that the FBI investigated, and they did a pretty thorough investigation. They found out that, in fact, it was not a noose. It was just a cord that had been wrapped up that could be interpreted as a noose, and it had actually been there since October 2019. So it had no connection to Wallace or racism or anything else. But again, that’s a case of where my initial assumption was wrong, like like it was for many people.

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CW: Well, I think your examples are not to cast aspersions, but fairly mundane. You were never taken in by like a crop circle that had to be aliens or or a sound that had to be a ghost or something like that.

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BR: No, although, I mean, I understand what you’re saying, but I mean, the other aspect here is that usually I’m pretty open-minded until I sort of stake something on it. So I, you know, I, it’s rare that I go public with, and not, it’s not a matter of me hiding anything, I just, I usually wait until I see a fair amount of evidence before I make a decision on it, either publicly or privately. So my de facto process is waiting to get more information and that usually results in me selecting the right alternative explanation.

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CW: As far as examples out of my own life, there was an urban legend I fully believed and this And this was fairly recently. This was like maybe 10 years ago on the Carnival Circuit on I was working at the State Fair, Texas and names are a thing that caricature artists make fun of because we hear them all the time behind us. We deal with a lot of children. We see all the names like Nevaeh, you know heaven spelled backwards We see all the the cute kitsch names are like tattoos. There’s like weird ones that come into fashion for a while and then you’ll have like a bunch of kids. The most recent joke was, you know, I had to draw Hayden and Kayden and Brayden and Jayden and Raiden and, and all the other siblings, you know, those, those are still very popular names, anything that ends in EN. And the, we are close cousins with the t shirt and like, like ball cap airbrushers, the guys who airbrush the names on t-shirts and ball caps. And one of them told a friend of mine who told me, or that’s how it was passed along to me, that there was a woman, you know, there’s a lot of backwater people that come to the State Fair of Texas. There’s a lot of very learned cosmopolitan people, but there’s also, there’s a wide variety of humanity that you see there. And apparently she had named her child Cephalus, which was spelled exactly like syphilis.

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And wanted it, you know, airbrushed on a t-shirt. And then, you know, they got into a conversation

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about, yeah, when I named my kid, I didn’t know it was spelled that way and blah, blah, blah. And I heard this and I swallowed…

BR: She She didn’t know

0:19:10
Sophilis was spelled what the hell’s I even mean?

CW: Well, she was unaware…

0:19:13
She was unaware that she was right she was having a sexually transmitted infection as the name of her child that that okay. I heard okay now this of course to any You know folklorist will be like, oh, it’s the Limangelo and Arangelo story. Like they’re, you know, racist in its roots, you know, claiming that these, you know, backwater, you know, African-Americans are naming their children crazy things, you know. I mean, cephalis could go either way, but probably African-American, one would assume, with the inflection. And I believed it at the time. And somebody on Facebook, I don’t even remember who was like, that never happened. You’re falling into a racist trope. They may have said it a bit more rudely than that.

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BR: Probably being Facebook, probably.

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CW: But, you know, I, you know, in what I learned since then, some ten years ago, I was like, yeah, that was probably totally bullshit, even though it came from somebody who came from somebody. And I knew both people. It wasn’t like my cousin’s hairdresser. It was this guy, Chris, who works at all the same fairs that I worked at. And then I also heard directly, this is 20 years ago. I heard from this was actually an African-American artist, a black artist. Ralph had worked with us, and we always wrote the name of the kid above the picture. And he’s like, oh, God, Celeste, I had to draw this little girl and the mom was like, oh man, and I asked what the girl’s name is and she goes, Vagina. And he gave it the accent like that and I’m like, oh God Ralph, tell me. He’s like, yeah, she spelled it V with a little A with a big G-I-N-A. I had to write vagina above this little girl’s head and I’m like, no. And this was first person. It was told to me first person. And now I’m like, he must have been funnin me. That’s couldn’t have been right. It couldn’t have been right. It was he was he was messing with me. And if I ever run into Ralph again, I will ask him if he remembers if he was messing with us or not. I’ve seen some weird crap on the road and doing caricatures and with names, especially so That is an area that I have considered myself to be naive about in the past, but I can’t say I’ve ever been like, oh, I think that’s a ghost or Loch Ness monster is real, but…

BR: Well, that reminds me. Let me can I add one one other quick one? so I was skeptical and remember this very clearly this only happened a couple years ago.

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I was skeptical that people could fall, not people could, but that it was a common thing to fall asleep in a dentist chair. I think I even posted on Facebook, I’m like, because I just, I’ve never done that. Being at a dentist is a painful, stressful, irritating, non-sleep inducing circumstance. I mean, again, I didn’t believe that it could never happen, just narcolepsy, but I just assumed it was so rare as to be not a thing. Well, Brian Dunning of Skeptoid corrected me, and he said, excuse me, sir, again, probably not so polite terminology, he says he falls asleep, or he knew people who had. So I posted this on Facebook, and people are like, yeah, it’s this thing. It’s people, people are known to fall asleep. And so at that point I started asking my dentists and I would go into the dentist and it’s like, how often do people fall asleep in the chair? And one hygienist said, yeah, it happens a couple of times a month. And this is not a bustling LA, you know, thousands of patients. This is a relatively small, I would just, anyway, I was wrong. I stand corrected.

0:23:13
Apparently, falling asleep in a dentist’s chair is a thing.

BR: You’re saying your mistake there was you were too skeptical.

BR: Yes!

CW: Okathat will no Pascual I’m dying to hear yours and then we can wrap up and head to the main topic But surely living in Santa Fe you you you surely believed in some sort of vortexes or something at some point.

0:23:31
PR: Well, you know, most of that missed me, and I think it’s probably largely in part to my parents being scholars and generally fairly skeptical people. But I will say that one that I think is kind of a serious one is the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the H1N1 pandemic. I was not cynical about it like a lot of these anti-maskers were, but I was very much skeptical about it the whole time. I thought, well, it doesn’t seem like it’s really killing that many people. It’s it doesn’t seem like it’s a lot more serious than the flu. And, you know, doesn’t happen a lot because the flu does kill a lot of people every year. But I was, I guess skeptical is not the right word, but I was doubtful that it was very dangerous. Skeptical is not the right word, but I was doubtful that it was very dangerous. And I wasn’t really being told that it was very dangerous by people around me. Most people, I don’t know how it was where you guys were. I was out in L.A. at the time and nobody really seemed to pay much attention to it. We didn’t have masks. You didn’t see people taking, you know, I mean, I’m sure, you know, medical facilities and retirement homes may have taken better precautions, but in general, it didn’t really seem like such a big deal to most people.

0:25:21
CW: After the COVID thing, I think all of us are kind of rethinking how we have looked at previous epidemics.

0:25:27
And pandemics like, like, boy, we were naive and stupid. You know, I still the biggest regret I have with this podcast is we did an episode early on in early 2020, and I’m like, wow, listening, I listened again, and it was like, we really downplayed, we were like, oh yeah, people are getting worried about this coronavirus, because that’s what we called it back then, it wasn’t COVID yet. And you know, that’s still, you know, mainly in China, and your odds of getting it here are so small, and you really should be getting your flu shot and worrying about that, blah, blah, blah. And then we were locked down within a month.

0:26:01
PR: Yeah, and I think that that’s really what just kind of made me think back and I’m like you know the H1N1 did kill almost I think close to 300,000 people worldwide which is not a small number and and that’s something that I look back on and you know, I think about you know I that we really didn’t think much of it. So it doesn’t surprise me how a lot of people did treat COVID. However, you know, knowing what we know now, it’s silly to be cavalier about this stuff, but yeah, I mean, really, I think that was one of my, kind of in hindsight, it’s very eyeopening to be like, look, I was a very skeptical person at that time. Um, and I was the same person you really hear on the show now, but it really didn’t seem like a big deal. And, you know, and to put the last bit of irony to it is I actually did contract H1N1 towards the end of the outbreak, which was not something like COVID where almost everyone ended up getting it eventually, but I did get it and it was horrible. It was far worse than what I experienced with COVID. Granted, I did take medicine for COVID, Paxilivid, but yeah, the H1N1 was a brutal flu, and I felt it for about six weeks. It actually got in the way of me recording an album, and it was awful. And frankly, my view changed at that point for sure. But I definitely in hindsight kind of regret being maybe a little cynical about it.

0:27:44
CW: Well, there’s there’s no way to to drive it home more than you getting personally affected like that.

0:27:51
BR: Yeah. There was one other thing. And maybe you guys remember for the the Forrest Fenn case, I haven’t listened to the shows. I’d have to go back, but I think one or more of us expressed some skepticism that the whole thing was a hoax. It later turned out, of course, that it wasn’t a hoax.

CW: Yeah, whether or not he actually hid anything, yeah.

0:28:12
BR: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

0:28:13
PR: Yeah, I know that, I don’t know how much I voiced it on the episode, but I definitely did have my doubts. And yeah, I’d have to listen back to the show, but I can’t imagine I didn’t mention something about it because I wasn’t the biggest fan of the guy either.

CW: Well, isn’t there some news about that, Ben?

0:28:27
BR: Yeah, just that Fenn’s treasure was eventually found. I believe, speaking of documentaries, I’m certain that sooner or later there will be a documentary on the Forest Fenn treasure finding because one guy found it and there was actually a lawsuit because of course there was. But yeah, I think recently, as I recall, the bulk of what Fenn actually left and people were looking for, and in some cases dying for, I think it was auctioned off for around a million dollars. So that was the update.

CW: A million dollars ain’t nothing to sneeze at.

PR: That’s true. Definitely not worth dying for, though.

0:29:02
CW: Well, yeah. Well, I hope that answers your questions adequately, we kind of scoured our brains. And while none of us have ever believed we’ve been kidnapped by aliens or haunted by a ghost or reincarnated or any of the other things we’ve looked into, we certainly have moments where we’re like, Oh, I was wrong about that thing. So without further ado, we can go into our main topic, which is various movies and documentaries, which we might be wrong about, but we’re probably right.

BR: We thought that for the main segment here, we would look at some films and documentaries of the past year that we all liked or hated in some cases. And for those who are maybe looking to fill some nights when they’re of course not listening to

0:29:54
Squaring the Strange or Archives, maybe get some ideas.

CW: Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of people with free time over the holiday break here. And I know I used it for some popcorn television watching. So Ben, why don’t you start us off? You’re probably the number one movie buff among the three of us?

BR: Yeah, well, one of the first films I saw this year, which I was really sort of struck me was 3000 Years of Longing. Did you guys see that?

0:30:36
CW: Oh, yeah, I think we touched on it a little bit on the on the podcast earlier, but wow, that was so beautiful.

0:30:43
BR: Yeah, I actually saw it in Columbia while I was traveling. And it was it was super cool. I’m a big fan of George Miller, who did one of my favorite all-time films, The Road Warrior, and in fact, the Mad Max trilogy. He also did Babe, Pig in the City and the sequel. Miller is just all over the place, and I love his work. It’s sort of fairy tale-esque and heroic and has all these elements. In this particular case, and I won’t give too many spoilers away, but basically, the But basically the film stars Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton. And Elba plays a genie or a djinn, which of course, long-time listeners will know something

0:31:24
about djinn from our previous episode on it.

CW: Yes, I believe when I went and bought the ticket, I put my money down and said, please give me one ticket to the giant naked Idris Elba movie.

BR: And they said, we know the one you’re talking about, man.

CW: They make him a very sultry genie. And there’s a vague touch of siren there because you kind of see he’s got like scales on his legs in some of the scenes. And then he talks about Queen Sheba. Was it Queen Sheba?

0:31:51
BR: Yes, the Queen of Sheba.

CW: Being a part genie. And she didn’t have scales. She had like fur on her legs, like a fawn or a satyr or something. And very just so beautiful. It’s a garden for the eyes.

0:32:05
BR: And I mean, as a folklorist, I really love two things. One was actually having a folklorist be a central character, which is not very common. As a folklorist, there were a couple lines of dialogue, which I winced at, but I won’t dwell on that. But it was just cool to see a djinn that sort of was more authentic or true to the original. Of course, you know, for a lot of American audiences, they go to, you know, Aladdin’s genie and things like that. But this was a much more nuanced, really interesting version of the djinn that, of course, goes back to Arabian Nights. It was just, it’s just visually lush. The storytelling is beautiful, twisty, and well-acted. And the CGI was organic insofar as CGI can be organic. It wasn’t really sort of flashy or I just loved everything about this film.

0:32:57
CW: I particularly actually thought of you when I the main character Tilda Swinton kept kind of fighting with herself going, but you’re a trickster figure, but I can’t believe you because you’re a genies are trickster figures.

0:33:08
And that phrase trickster figure came up so often. And Pascual, didn’t we have a short discussion about this while Ben was away? And we talked about whether or not we believed or at least I know I have a theory. The director meant that you should interpret it as none of this really happened the way, like directly the way that it appears to like it’s all in her head. Kind of a little bit Brazil-ish.

PR: Yeah, we did kind of briefly chat about that. And I saw it and I thought that I really kind of picked that up too a little bit. And I think, but it’s good that it’s meant to be kind of an open-ended question. So I do like that it ends on a very, not really to spoil the ending, but just it ends in a way that kind of makes you feel like it, you know, it wraps up, but it also kind of leaves you wondering.

0:34:04
CW: Yeah, Ben, did you get any of the ambiguity that Pascual and I picked up on in there?

0:34:09
BR: I did, yeah. And that’s really what sort of makes it especially intriguing, I think. I mean, I certainly can’t speak for other people. I certainly appreciate films that are, leave some ambiguity and room for interpretation. It’s much more interesting than films that are just sort of ham-handed and, you know, well, this is it. There you go.

0:34:30
CW: Yeah. Well, yeah, there were parallels I thought I picked up on between Tilda and each of the three characters she described in the stories.

0:34:38
BR: Yeah, just a well-scripted film. Again, I had a couple issues with a couple of lines of dialogue, but in terms of the structure, I was just really impressed. And George Miller wrote the screenplay along with another person, Auguste L’Gore. So he’s in it all the way. And just I’m just glad it’s one of those films like to me, I would liken it to the film Moulin Rouge that could have gone bad in many ways. And I think just all the pieces just were in in sync and it just popped out something that was really remarkable.

CW: Seconded.

BR: So I’ll hit on a couple documentaries a little bit later, but the second film I wanted to touch on was one I saw much more recently, I think it was on Netflix. It was titled The Wonder. The film is set in the Irish Midlands in the 1860s, and it stars a female skeptic who happens to be a nurse, and she’s called into this sort of rural Irish village to investigate a case of Inedia, that is a girl that claims to have not eaten in weeks.

0:35:46
CW: Inedia, I’ve never heard it called that.

0:35:49
So it has nothing to do with being a, what are those sun drinkers called?

0:35:53
BR: No, it’s very similar. You’re talking about the…

CW: Brevarians.

0:36:00
BR: Yeah, so actually, it wasn’t just weeks, it was months. And so in this case, this nurse is called in, I think, from London and sent to this rural village in Ireland. And she is supposed to investigate or sort of watch. Her mission is a bit vague, but basically she’s supposed to be there along with another person, a nun, to figure out, well, what’s going on here? Is this, is this young girl, uh, is she faking? Is she genuinely, you know, is there, is there a miracle going on? Uh, again, no, no spoilers, but it’s, uh, again, it’s, uh, it appears on Netflix. I had just sort of, I had read a passing review of it in the New York Times. That sort of caught my eye. Cause I was looking to, you know, investigations and miracles and Inedia and was like, yeah, let me check this out. I was like, wow, this is actually interesting. The other thing that really was interesting to me was sort of the different layers of who knows what, for example, is the girl faking and does she know she’s faking? And are other people in on it if she is faking? And if she’s not faking, how would one go about proving a miracle, certainly in 1860s rural Ireland. So there’s there’s lots of lots of interesting parallels to modern investigations and skepticism.

0:37:19
CW: Oh, and the whole historical overlay probably makes it that more, you know, I like period dramas. So, you know, I might go in for this, too.

0:37:27
BR: There you go.

0:37:29
PR: So yeah, I think, you know, I’ll just run through some I liked. We don’t have to go too deep into it. First one, Everything Everywhere All at Once.

0:37:37
CW: Oh, that was good.

0:37:39
PR: That was a lovely film. I really enjoyed it quite a bit.

0:37:42
CW: You know, anything with Michelle Yeoh. I mean, right now there’s like a prequel to The Witcher that’s out. And I was like, oh, this, I don’t know if I really want to invest the time and watch it. Oh, there’s Michelle Yeoh. I’ll be watching this, watching all of this.

0:37:56
PR: She does always improve the quality of anything she’s in. So it’s wonderful. But But Everything Everywhere is just an absurd film in every way. And and it just speaks to everything I like in films, where it’s just like fun and fast paced and really funny, but also just very, very absurd. And I loved it. I thought it was wonderful and really speaks to my sensibilities when it comes to humor.

0:38:23
CW: Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of absurdity that goes on. And also some really heartwarming family stuff. Anybody who has a family, either a parent or a child or a husband or a wife, you’ll get something out of this.

PR: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I was in the case,

0:38:39
BR: I mean, I liked it basically up until the third act. I thought it sort of went off the rails. And the standard for going off the rails for this film, it goes off the rails in the first 20 seconds. But it’s just the whole, I mean, again, I enjoyed it, I would recommend it, but I thought the last third needed to be tightened up, and it just got repetitious.

0:39:08
CW: See, we don’t always agree on everything here at Squaring the Strange.

0:39:12
PR: And one that I just watched just the other day, but after watching it once, it became one of my favorite movies I’ve seen this year, is Glass Onion, the Knives Out sequel.

0:39:26
CW: Oh, I haven’t watched the original Knives Out yet, and I didn’t want to watch the Onion one until I’d watched the first one. Both of them are on my list, but it’s a very long list.

0:39:36
BR: I saw the first one. It was good. Lots of knives.

0:39:39
CW: So, Pascual, did you see the first one?

0:39:41
PR: Yeah, I did see the first one. I also really loved the first one. I think I probably like it even a little more than Glass Onion, but Glass Onion is sort of its own story. So the good news is they do kind of exist independently of each other, but knowing Daniel Craig’s character is certainly worth seeing it in order because his character is really well written and sort of what he establishes in Knives Out carries over. It’s a murder mystery movie, both of them are, and this one actually centers around an eccentric billionaire tech guru, basically, very much kind of an amalgamation of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg and sort of a murder mystery party that he throws that Daniel Craig’s character, Detective Benoit, ends up being invited to. And it’s just a really fun movie, a really funny movie.

CW: His name is Detective Benoit.

PR: Yeah that’s his. Let’s see. I’m trying to remember his first name.

CW: Me and my high school friends used to have these murder mystery parties that you’d buy a little box and it would contain everything. And they’d have these names that would end up being these really awful puns. Yeah. And I can’t help but wonder if

0:41:04
he has like a last surname of balls or something.

PR: No no it’s it’s Benoit Blanc. So, okay.

0:41:18
PR: But a really fun movie, highly recommend it. Not, you know, I don’t,

0:41:26
frankly, it’s better if I just don’t go too into detail about it. But if you like a good murder mystery, very old school style, kind of in the vein of like Clue. So, you know, just, just real fun. And I greatly enjoyed it. And I’m glad that they plan on making a third one actually.

CW: So, that sounds like a fun trilogy in the making.

0:41:53
I, at this point, I actually think Benoit Blanc is my favorite Daniel Craig character. He makes James Bond look sloppy.

0:42:01
CW: Well, that’s a recommendation.

0:42:06
PR: And then last, I really, I just recently watched the Guillermo del Toro version of Pinocchio that came out recently.

0:42:15
CW: Oh man, you guys are picking up. See, I didn’t actually narrow down like one film that I really loved, but I didn’t have to, cause you guys are hitting all of them. Pinocchio, oh God, I didn’t expect it to make me cry.

0:42:28
PR: Yeah, it’s a lovely film, beautifully done in stop motion. The story was great. It follows the familiar story of Pinocchio, but changes the stakes quite a bit. I really like the direction they went to make it feel a little less like a fairy tale and a little more about a story about relationships and love and growth. And I just thought it was beautifully done. A really, really great film. The kids loved it.

0:42:59
And I love it.

CW: It was warts and all. And God, I read one review that said, you know, have you watched the original Pinocchio but thought it needed a bit more grit and fascism and historical accuracy and bombs and it’s like alcoholism. I mean, you know, Disney just glossed over that whole period of Geppetto’s life where he was a raging alcoholic.

0:43:22
And yet Del Toro is not shy about including children in his work that die. So if you have a thing about watching a movie with dead kids, yeah, the dead kids make an appearance in in this version of Pinocchio and Ewan McGregor’s Jiminy Cricket or what was his name? It wasn’t Jiminy, it was like Silas P. Cricket or something?

0:43:47
PR: His middle initial was J, so I assume it was, I can’t remember his first name though.

0:43:51
CW: But yeah, it was something else J. Cricket and he was so great. Oh, Ewan did such a great job as a little cricket. The little autobiography writing cricket who traveled the world and lived in the tree that became Pinocchio.

0:44:06
BR: And neither one of you has mentioned perhaps one of the best characters in the entire film. I assume that you know what it is and you’re just waiting for me to bring it up. So I will mention the evil monkey. Since no one else will.

0:44:18
CW: Yeah, the monkey was and the monkey you don’t hear the monkey talking. He kind of mumbles sometimes and he does speak through other puppets. You see the other puppets speak to Pinocchio and the only one controlling the puppets is the monkey. So I’m like, the monkey can talk, but then you don’t actually ever see the monkey talking.

BR: It’s quite clever.

CW: And the movie does have a happy ending if you hit stop and walk away and never go back to it at the right time.

0:44:54
PR: Yeah, yeah, if you just stop it at about three minutes in it’s really a great story about a father and his son.

0:45:01
CW: But yeah, well, I guess every movie has a happy ending if you stop it at the right time, but

BR: Fair enough.

CW: But yeah, Pinocchio really does have a lot of like ups and downs and ups and downs and ups and downs and sideways. And it’s wow, if you are familiar with the original, you’ll get a lot out of this. Even if you’re not, you’ll get a lot out of it.

0:45:23
BR: And as Pascual mentioned, just from a technical perspective, I mean, again, this is stop motion, which as listeners probably know, is incredibly labor intensive.

0:45:33
There’s actually a half-hour documentary on the making of Pinocchio, also on Netflix, which I recommend. It’s just fascinating to sort of see just the behind the scenes and some of the voice actors and just how much went into, you know, you see one scene that, you know, that lasts, you know, 15 seconds and someone’s like, yeah, that took a year and a half, like what?

0:45:55
CW: And we have this gigantic, you know, Pinocchio head that we made for when we have to have closeups with the cricket and then we have this teeny tiny Pinocchio that’s like the size of a grain of rice for when we have the overhead shot, you know, and it’s like, wow. And Tilda Swinton, also in this movie, she plays sort of the guardian of the rabbit poker, the poker playing rabbit filled underworld. One of them was Tilda was Cate Blanchett.

PR: I believe Tilda was the main kind of the boss of the of the angels so to speak Yeah, the very syncs like appearance.

CW: Yeah. Yeah, and yeah She so yeah, she makes an appearance in this and in the other movie in the three thousand years of longing

0:46:41
BR: I will just confess that I often confuse Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett, even though I love them both dearly.

CW: I Don’t think they’ll mind. I they’re not gonna hold it against you because they don’t know who you are.

0:47:00
PR: I figured before I wrapped up the stuff I liked, I know I said that was my last one, but I did want to mention the documentary Goodnight Oppy, which is the story about Opportunity, the Mars rover that launched in 2003, and they expected it to only operate for 90 Mars days, and it explored Mars for nearly 15 years. I highly recommend that. It was produced by my friend Stephen Neely, an old friend of mine from LA, and it is a charming documentary about this little plucky robot making his way around Mars.

0:47:37
CW: Oh, I’d accuse you of cronyism, but I’ve heard you talk about other stuff like, oh, yeah, I know somebody who worked on that, but it was a real stinker. You wouldn’t be recommending this unless it was good. Where can we find it again? And how long is it?

0:47:50
PR: I believe it’s on Amazon Prime Video. It was released in theaters, but I suspect it’s probably no longer in theaters. But it is on Prime Video currently, and I highly recommend it. It’s a very, very charming and informative, cool, you know, movie about a robot on Mars. I mean, who can’t like that in our world, at least?

0:48:13
CW: Yeah, I mean, this past, you know, year has been monumental for NASA accomplishments as Artemis, you know, prepares to take people to the moon again, and James Webb, you know, unfurled and is showing us amazing things. So that’s just the right timing for a feel good, you know, NASA movie about accomplishments. Now, is it standard like movie length or is this like a documentary short?

0:48:36
PR: No, it’s standard movie length. I think it’s probably somewhere in the ballpark of 90 minutes. But yeah, just a great, great, great movie to sit down to with some popcorn, you know, no, nice, nice, easy watch.

0:48:52
CW: Well, going from an easy watch to not easy watching, I have something to share with everybody that is not a film I loved or a series I loved. It’s a docu-series on Netflix. People probably know what I’m warming up to here. And that is Ancient Apocalypse.

0:49:12
It dropped on Netflix on November 10th, and believe it or not, it shot up to the second most popular title on Netflix after it was out for about a week. It starts out pretty straightforward with clips of the narrator and host, Graham Hancock, who is a pseudo-archaeologist, but they’re very open about, like right at the beginning they’re showing news footage of him being referred to as now people think you’re a pseudo archaeologist and you know Then Joe Rogan has him on to the show and it’s like wow, there’s your credentials like summed up in like 10 seconds right there! Richard Saunders touched on this in his show with Eugenie Scott just recently and they weren’t able to get through that many episodes I suffered through about four episodes and it was long enough to make me kind of grateful that this docuseries exists. And I’ll tell you why. It could be a very powerful teaching tool. It’s perfect for schools. There’s no curse words or anything like that. Not that I recall anyway. And you could you could turn it into a bingo game. Or if you’re teaching adults, it could be a drinking game. Okay, how many times does Graham Hancock refer to academia or archaeologists as being closed-minded or set in their ways or full of hubris? I mean, it’s just out and out character assassination throughout the series. It could have had a subtitle, Archaeologists are dumb. And that would have been…

BR: According to a person who is not an archaeologist. Not an archaeologist.

0:50:52
CW: And he says, like, I’m not an archaeologist, I’m a journalist who likes archaeology. And it’s like, well, you don’t like journalism either because you aren’t checking anything out and sourcing anything properly and double check, you know, looking crap up that would be relevant, you know, relevant here. But, well, I will say it has nice art. There’s some very nice, like, illustrated animatics that have been put together to show various creation myths across the world and, you know, how different, not so much creation myths, I guess I should say, folklore about wisdom bringers like Prometheus and, you know, other figures that come from the East and build a great tower or show people how to farm. Well, all of this, you know, he attacks the folklore. I shouldn’t say attacks. He elevates the folklore and says, this can’t all be a coincidence. It has to be related to a real thing. Like these similar urban legends must have, you know, a real thing that they’re all, you know, sourcing. But yeah, it goes on and on and on. And, you know, Episode one is about a flood. There was a flood. And then episode two is just more about, you know, the similarities and how he’s very contradictory. In one breath, he will say, people believe that, that humans were primitive 10,000 years ago, and archaeologists will have you believe that, you know, people were simple, and they barely know how to do anything yet they created these amazing structures blah blah blah and then like 30 seconds later He’ll be like now – how did these farmers suddenly know how to do this?

0:52:34
How could these farmers possibly put together this this wall of heavy stones and well, dude, you just… You’re doing exactly what you accuse other people of doing you’re you’re saying these people were dumb and primitive, and so they had to have some smart wise person slash alien slash white European guys show them how or Atlantean as I’ll get to. So anyway, as you might recall there was a bunch of blowback from real archaeologists about this. They wrote an open letter to Netflix saying saying, please put this in your fiction category. This is ridiculous. However, the blowback, I think, really just helped drive it up to the number two spot. I think the publicity that resulted, if you watch any of this series, it’s clear that he is banking on, yes, archaeologists will hate what I have to say. And so when archaeologists hated what he has to say, he can be pretty much sat back and said, see I told you. Then, yeah, he tweeted out, let me read this real quick. He tweeted out on November 25th, archaeologists and their friends in the media are spitting nails about my ancient apocalypse series on Netflix and want me cancelled. So if that sounded like a tiny bit of a dog whistle saying the media wants to cancel you.

0:54:05
Yeah, I picked up on that, too. But yeah, there are some disturbing, you know, veins of white supremacy that kind of free float throughout. He doesn’t actually ever come out and say these were white Europeans, but he’s drawing on some similar veins of thought that were once publicized by a congressman named Ignatius Donnelly, if you guys remember that name?

0:54:31
BR: Yep.

CW: The guy big on Atlantis, big on Atlantis and big on like, yes, these indigenous peoples are primitive and they could never have gotten anywhere if it weren’t for, you know, fair skinned auburn haired people who helped them learn how to do everything that civilization requires. So, yeah, so getting back to like the actual meat of the show, um, there, there, Clara Peller would not like this show. There’s no beef. There’s, there’s nothing. It’s just sandwiched between these buns of dramatic music and shots of like panoramic shots of this guy, Graham Hancock, looking off into the ocean or looking in a field or looking at the site of an archaeological dig and just looking really perplexed and constipated.

BR: That’s what they call B-Roll, as Pascual knows, and I could just imagine the second unit on this like, okay, our job is to follow you around for two weeks, looking over your as you stare pensively at things.

0:55:38
CW: And I would love to have Brian Dunning’s opinion on this, because as you know, his film Science Friction is coming out. And there I am not familiar with the quote unquote experts that Graham Hancock trotted out for the cameras, but there were like five or six that I saw in the series of episodes. And OK, they had credentials after their name and they worked for various, you know, society or historical or, you know, museum. And he would ask them a question, he’d be like, so people from the Ice Age couldn’t possibly have known how to do this, right? Or he’d say some leading question. And then you’d see the look, you’d see a shot of the expert and then they’d show a shot of somebody’s feet and then the window and it’s like There’s some editing going on here! Why why not just have a continuous cut of what did the guy say when you asked him that question because I fully believe you edited out whatever he said I got the very strong sense that some of his experts didn’t give him the answers he wanted to so there’s some creative editing going on.

0:56:50
So there’s some creative editing going on. So and most of the dialogue, most of what the narrator actually says, you think he has all these this amazing evidence to purport that that mainstream academia is ignoring like willfully ignoring. Well, he doesn’t mention much of it at all. He mentioned some ideas and some hypotheticals. And what if this happened and what if it was actually that? There’s a lot of what ifs, but most of it is just dogging on archaeologists. Like a great amount of the time spent on the show is just talking about how this would just make archaeologists’ heads explode if they consider this, so they’ll never consider this. It’s like, all sizzle, no steak.

0:57:37
One other parallel, as a person who’s, you know, looked into blob squatches and everything, I couldn’t help but see a parallel here between what they were using. They were using a lot of ground penetrating radar to kind of look down into like mounds and sites of like ancient pyramids and everything, you know, because pyramids are everywhere. And of course, that’s obviously somebody had to teach them how to make pyramids. No, people know how to stack blocks. I mean, and people know how to move heavy things. Again, this guy really needs to listen to our episode about the Coral Castle. And it might change his whole outlook.

BR: Or not.

0:58:13
CW: Or not.

0:58:14
But the ground penetrating radar that they used, and I was trying to like, wince my eyes and like see, okay, what exactly does that say? Because they’d show, they didn’t go into like what the radar found, but they’re like, and here there is clear evidence of a cavity underneath the such and such. And it’s just like these colors, it’s like a topographical map and there’s like a little blue blob indicating there’s some kind of less dense stuff or a cavity.

0:58:42
BR: Celestia, come on, it’s a different color. That’s all you need to know. Move on.

CW: Underneath this giant pyramid, like near Jakarta. And I’m like, okay, that kind of looks like a blob under there. But I mean, maybe it’s water, maybe it’s, you know, I don’t have the information to know what that is. I just see a little blob. And then from that, they go to, so here we have three distinct chambers, probably connected by a tunnel. And then they overlay, they take a picture of like the footage drone footage of the actual pyramid mound thing and they’ve overlaid this like shiny blue architectural rendering of like a giant three-chambered thing with like connectors how did you get that from that?

0:59:29
Imagine if you saw like a blob squatch picture and they’re like – Clearly there’s a creature and they’re like they overlay a picture of like an anatomically perfect drawing of like a bigfoot in the woods. That’s what they’re jumping to. And some of the write-ups I read from actual archaeologists said that that type of equipment is notoriously inaccurate, and it can’t really tell you what you think, what they think it can tell you. It tells you there might be something of a different density down there. It doesn’t tell you there’s a cavity with three chambers and it’s perfectly rectangular and there’s wainscoting and trim. It can’t tell you any of that. So with the amount of times I found myself laughing out loud and chuckling at this and imagining myself drinking a shot of alcohol each time he makes fun of archaeologists, I found myself enjoying this by episode three. Another thing he said, again, he says so many things unironically that I just found hilarious. He’s like, well, archaeologists have got it all wrong about, you know, civilization and how it progresses. It’s not some straight linear progression from simple to advanced like evolution. And I’m like, what?

1:00:45
PR: Well, we know what team he’s on.

1:00:49
CW: And earlier, like on the first episode, he said he was complaining not just about archaeologists, but science. He said, science is too, you know, dug its heels in and it’s too dogmatic. Science needs to learn how to change its opinions when it’s presented with new evidence. And I’m like, Oh, really? Is that what it is?

BR: Oh, thank you.

1:01:16
PR: You use the definition of science to criticize science.

1:01:20
CW: Yes.

BR: Bless his heart.

1:01:22
CW: And yes, there was a very good write up by an archaeologist named Flint Dibble. I love that name.

PR: That is a great name.

CW: Flint Dibble. I got to meet I got to get him to meet Kenny Biddle. It can be Dibble and Biddle. But he wrote up he you know, he was good at identifying the things that bothered me about this, because although it had funny moments in just how awful it was, it really kind of creeped me out in how much it was just trying to make viewers hate and distrust any sort of academics, expert people with expertise, people who’ve worked in a field for a long time, you know, people who know what they’re talking about. people who have worked in a field for a long time, you know, people who know what they’re talking about. So I’ll leave you guys with a quote from Professor Dibble here. Netflix labels Ancient Apocalypse a docuseries. IMDB calls it a documentary. It’s neither. It’s an eight part conspiracy theory that weaponizes dramatic rhetoric against scholars. Yeah. So that’s that’s basically in a nutshell what I thought of Ancient Apocalypse. And he doesn’t really trot out the Atlantis part of it until like episode four or five. So he’s real vague about it. And then suddenly the word Atlantis shows up after you’re halfway into it.

1:02:42
BR: Don’t lead with that because you’re going to lose people. They’re going to recognize the bullshit right away. So, bury the lead.

1:02:49
CW: So yes, if you want to dabble in the vaguely white supremacist, outdated, Atlantean, not quite ancient alien, misrepresentations, Rosetta Stone too, that should be another drinking thing. Every time they say, this thing right here is like the Rosetta Stone. No, it’s not. It’s probably not. Anyway, I could go on and I won’t. I will yield the floor to another person with a different documentary. Who’s up?

BR: Yes, going from super sketchy documentaries to pretty good ones, actually. I’ll just touch on a few that I saw in the past few months, which I thought were sort of interesting.

1:03:25
I have to say that the streaming services really turned into a bit of a boon for me. As you guys know, I’m a big, not just film fan, but also documentary fan. And I think especially with the advent of streaming services and also COVID and people leaving the theaters, one of the silver linings has been just an outburst of documentaries. Most of which are good. Of course, some are bad, but it’s just stuff that I, if you’re a documentary lover, the last few, the past few years have been sort of a cornucopia of, of good. So one of them that I saw recently was from a series called Untold. The title of this one was The Girlfriend Who Didn’t Exist. Do you guys remember the Manti Teo story?

1:04:18
PR: Yeah.

1:04:19
CW: I… refresh my memory.

1:04:20
BR: It was a weird story. So basically this happened in 2012 and because this is right up my alley, I remember just being, just being fascinated. I don’t watch much football. I’m not a huge sports fan in any event, so I don’t really follow, certainly, college football, which is what this story was about. But the twist here was that there was a guy named Mante Teo, and he’s a football player, and he was drafted to Notre Dame. While there, he was making a name for himself and going big. He mentioned, I think around September 11th actually, that his grandmother had just died and also his girlfriend had just died. This made it more than just a sports story. There are lots of sports stories, the win one for the Gipper. There are all sorts of sports tropes. This transcended that because it was not just about sports, it was about a guy who had sort of overcome adversity and you know how could he go out there and play so well, you know, with the tragedy weighing on him of not just his grandmother but his girlfriend dying basically in the previous day. And so that really sort of propelled it into another category. So it got this national, international attention. And it later turned out, I’m skipping a bunch of stuff here, to avoid spoilers and if people want to watch it, but basically it turned out that in fact, his girlfriend didn’t exist.

1:05:41
CW: I don’t think you’re spoiling anything that the title didn’t give away.

BR: Well, I’m leaving a lot out. That’s why that’s what I was that’s what I was referring to. So then the question was, well, why would he make this up? And again, I’d heard about this. And Pascual, what do you remember about the story?

PR: I don’t remember a lot about it other than the part about him fabricating that story, but that’s all I recall about it.

1:06:09
BR: Yeah, and that’s a lot he recalled as well. Again, this is from 2012, so it’s one of those sort of weird blips on the radar that happened, you know, a decade or more ago that’s being revisited. A lot of stuff from the 90s and aughts are coming out. And so, but what I found really interesting about it was it really dug much more deeply into the whole backstory, which I certainly didn’t know. And even though I’d followed the case pretty closely, all sorts of stuff came out. So it turned out that, in fact, he was not in on the hoax. He was catfished. And this was long before catfishing was a thing, really. And what had happened was that he had been contacted by a guy named Rania, who later transitioned to being a woman at the time he was a man, and he had started up this conversation with him under the name of Linne Kukua. And Teo, being a gregarious guy and also from Hawaii, they were both Polynesian, and he sort of struck up this ongoing text-only relationship. And at the time that the whole scandal broke, this woman, he thought, Lanai was in California and he was, as I mentioned, Notre Dame, so they had never actually met in person. But they went back and forth and they exchanged texts and some messages and there were even some phone calls where voices were faked and things like that. Anyway, the whole thing actually exploded when a reporter for Deadspin clued into it. And the goal was not to embarrass Manti Teo or to cause this huge scandal. These two reporters were basically just trying to show that ESPN hadn’t done due diligence in fact-checking the story. And that’s where the whole thing sort of blew up and it turned into this, all these really interesting sort of social media tendrils. For example, one aspect was people were saying, well, why would he fake this? Was it just for attention? Well, he genuinely thought that this woman had died and his grandmother demonstrably died. So, it wasn’t that he was faking anything. He just didn’t know how to process it. He thought that was actually going on. So anyway, there are all sorts of fascinating stories. So, if people are interested in hearing more about the backstory and the fact that I didn’t know that Teo was Mormon. There was also sort of a culture clash, not only being Hawaiian going to Notre Dame, but also being Mormon going to a Catholic university and different levels to it. So that was that was interesting.

1:08:42
CW: That does sound like it has multiple prongs there with the fish out of water, possible fabrication, fraud, social media, rumor mongering. That’s, wow, there’s a lot there.

1:08:54
BR: Yeah, and I think it’s like two or three episodes. It’s not a very long one, but it’s worth a watch. And then the other one that I’ll briefly touch on is a curious documentary called My Old School. Either of you hear about this one?

1:09:10
BR: Both of these are available on Netflix. So My Old School, it stars Alan Cumming as a guy, I’m trying to think how to frame this, as a guy named, who went by the name Brandon Lee, who went to an academy in Scotland. And this was a huge scandal in Scotland back in 1994, 95. It’s largely unknown in the US, but at the time it was very big. And the scandal was that it turned out that Brandon Lee and yes, that that is the name of Bruce Lee’s son.

CW: I didn’t have a joke to make so I kept my mouth shut.

1:09:44
BR: A different Brandon Lee. Yeah, okay. So again, he was a student at this academy in Scotland.

1:09:49
It later turned out he was 32 years old.

CW: Oh, damn.

BR: And he was posing as a basically fifth year student.

CW: And he was, this is a, he was a male. He was a guy.

BR: Yes. Yes.

CW: I have heard of I can’t think of individual cases, but I know I’ve even seen, you know, fictionalized accounts based on real cases where a 30 something year old woman will pass herself off as a teenage boy.

1:10:18
BR: Yes, in fact theres a semi-famous case that I happen to know a fair amount about. I recently thought of it because she appears in a Tom Waits song of all things. There was a woman, I’m not making up the name, Birdie Jo Hoax. Birdie Jo Hoax pretended to be a young teenage boy who was being abused and needed shelter. She was actually a 20-something or I think a 30-something year old woman who was pretending to be a boy and she and her twin sister, I’m not making this up, her twin sister also named Hoax. Both did these, they have this, someday there’s going to be a documentary on the Hoax sisters, I swear, it’ll be fascinating, I’ll be first in line. But anyway, yeah, there’s a tradition of that, of people pretending to be young kids of either gender. In this case, it was this guy, Brandon Lee. So here we have, so the film, it’s structured around an actual audio interview with the guy that claimed to be Brandon Lee. So you’re hearing his actual voice, but Alan Cumming is lip syncing basically as an actor to tell the story.

1:11:34
CW: That is an interesting way to do a documentary because it is really bridging the divide there.

1:11:40
BR: Yeah. And so as it turned out, the filmmaker was actually one of his schoolmates. And so it sort of goes back and interviews his schoolmates. Again, this happened some 20 years ago, saying, you know, what did you think of this? You know, this. He seemed older than he came off as. And it’s interesting from a skeptical point of view, because you sort of have different people hearing different stories about him. And this sort of like comparing, well, what did you hear about that? That’s not what I heard. I heard this and different memories. And one of the twists, and I’ll just give one of the twists, is that this guy who went by the name Brandon Lee, he had actually been to that same school 20 years earlier.

CW: Oh, he was literally reliving his school days.

BR: He went back to he has some of the same teachers. And he fooled them. Anyway, there’s lots of twists and turns. I’ve only given one away, but it’s a it’s a fascinating doc story and well acted. And there’s animation and there’s there’s lots of little twists to it. It’s called My Old School.

1:12:47
CW: Why am I picturing that old Steve Buscemi meme of like, hello, fellow kids, you know? I mean, tell me they went into the fact that I’m sure other kids were like, this guy’s a narc, you know?

1:12:58
BR: Well, see, again, what they’re saying is that, I mean, all the kids that were interviewed, again, this is sort of them remembering from 20 years earlier, was that, you know, they thought he seemed a little bit old and he could drive, which none of them could do, but he had this elaborate backstory. He’d been in Canada and he traveled a lot and his mother was, I think, an opera singer. So he had this whole fabulous backstory and he was already kind of exotic anyway. And so he’s like, hey, fellow kids.

1:13:38
CW: But he pulled it off.

1:13:41
BR: Yeah, he pulled it off. And there is a sort of it doesn’t shy away from a sort of a squeaky thing, because at one point he actually he was in a school play, which you would think if you’re trying to not be detected, you might not want to appear on stage. But at one point he kisses a girl who was presumably his own age, but in fact he was, you know, 15 years old or whatever. So there’s a little bit of a squeaky thing. Anyway, what I haven’t told you is his motivation, and I’m gonna leave that as a mystery in case you watch it.

CW: Okay, all right.

PR: And finally I thought I’d circle back and mention a dud that I found. Now, this one is another docuseries on Netflix, kind of a mini-series, I think it was three or four episodes.

CW: Boy Netflix sure can turn them out, can’t they?

PR: Yeah, I think, yeah, as much as, you know, Netflix puts out some great stuff, but, you know, I think the quality control is a little lacking when it comes to documentaries. There are great ones, and then there are just pieces like this that are, you know, really just not very well vetted, I guess.

1:14:52
But this series Meltdown, it’s a documentary about the 1979 incident at Three Mile Island, which was a, was, still is, an operating nuclear power plant. And they had a slight issue, I guess you’d say. The incident wasn’t a full meltdown, as the title might imply, but really it was that there was some radiation leaked when a valve got stuck in a series of human errors as we’ve seen in a couple of incidents in history, more notably Chernobyl. But this one actually was a fairly minor incident in the grand scheme. You know, spoiler, nobody died. Nobody even got sick as far as we know.

1:15:43
But this series will have you think otherwise.

CW: So they’re inventing some casualties.

PR: Yeah, and even worse, the whole thing just starts out on the wrong foot. So full disclosure, I watched the first episode and got so irritated at the constant fear-mongering in it that I just had to watch a synopsis to finish it because I just really was, it was irritating. I mean, the whole thing is basically just anti-nuclear power, you know, just really not well done. I mean, I take that back. It is actually well done. It’s a great-looking documentary, but it’s just very poorly researched and full of scare tactics about, you know, the real-life threats of nuclear power.

1:16:32
CW: Did you happen to research who funded the movie? Were there any interests in it that came from maybe Exxon or other energy companies?

1:16:42
PR: You know, I didn’t look that deep into it, but that would not surprise me, based on how well the documentary does the job of avoiding the conversation of, okay, if not nuclear, then what? You know, and just to kind of go through this real quick, the big thing is that they kind of start with this idea of like, what does a meltdown mean? And there’s a woman who asks the question, like, does it blow up? Like, what does that mean? The documentary doesn’t answer that, honestly. It just uses these open-ended questions and then never answers them. Does it blow up? Well, no it doesn’t. They don’t blow up in a nuclear explosion. Nuclear energy for power plants is not harnessed in the same way that atomic bombs work. Bombs rely on a bunch of materials in particular configurations that just aren’t present in a nuclear weapon with a nuclear material itself, and the radioactive material is not placed in a way that allows for an uncontrolled chain reaction like you’re trying to incite with a nuclear weapon. For instance, Chernobyl, yes, there was an explosion there. That was a heat explosion, not a nuclear explosion. That failure was also just a perfect storm of mistakes made by humans. It was also largely something you could blame on the then government out there, which not to say I have a lot of faith in the current government. But and it goes on to go into these statements like this incident was minutes away from hundreds of thousands of people dying and it could have taken out Philly and New York City. It was on the verge of an apocalypse. And these are all quotes from the documentary.

1:18:26
CW: Now what is it about the word apocalypse and crap on Netflix that doesn’t make any sense?

1:18:31
PR: I know and it really it boggles my mind because worst case scenario Three Mile Island would have not even come close to that. It wouldn’t have even come close to Chernobyl. The people presenting these statements were lawyers, not scientists. I don’t know what their stake was in making those statements, but you always have to wonder when a lawyer’s talking about a workplace incident. So…

CW: Yeah, you don’t even know if they believe what they’re saying. Yeah, exactly. They could be strategic.

PR: Yeah. Yep. Yep. So while this was the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history, its small radioactive releases had no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public around Three Mile Island. The incident was caused by a loss of coolant due to a stuck valve that was opened and stuck due to human error. There were several other errors that occurred along with it that complicated it, but the big thing is that that they don’t say in the documentary is that the Three Mile Island incident actually happened less than a couple weeks after the release of The China Syndrome, which is a film about a nuclear meltdown that shows very realistic depictions of operations in the nuclear power plant. Also I think a couple Oscar nominations. I mean, so it was a very popular film and it just happened to come out just in time for this to happen. And it seems that most of the worry about it really came from that film because literally the event could have happened and no one would have even noticed.

CW: So it like fed off of each other there, yeah.

PR: Exactly, exactly. And there are a lot of other things claimed by the series, like that cancer rates have risen. There was an actual scientific study of 31,000 individuals over 20 years that found that radioactivity in the area had no impact on mortality rates. Yes, there were rises in cancer that were pretty much consistent with everywhere. In fact, about 40% of humans will receive a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. And that’s not to be scary. That’s that we’re living longer. So a lot of cancer is kind of an inevitability the longer we live.

1:20:55
CW: So yes, we’re outgrowing our genetic blueprints.

1:20:58
PR: Exactly.

1:20:59
CW: We’re outliving our genetic blueprints. And that’s what happens.

1:21:03
BR: For more on that People might check out the book, uh, the, the Emperor of All Maladies. Excellent book on cancer.

CW: Cancer is sort of a whipping boy for a lot of conspiracies and fear mongering, whether it’s or the organic food industry or, you know, the nuclear energy fear mongering or, you know, even 5G, you know, pick anything out of a hat and fear mongers will go right to the big C word there.

PR: Yeah and Dr. Talbot who studied those individuals over 20 years, she actually said in an interview that I saw a clip of that it’s important to note that these rates are happening because that’s important from a public health standpoint. But it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t find the direct connection, because, again, cancer rates going up along with life expectancy are expected. So, you know, so far it doesn’t seem to be the case of Three Mile Island, just seems to be a case of humans experiencing something that happens with time.

1:22:12
CW: Yeah, that’s like, you know, Americans are developing far more gray hairs than we used to. If you look at a general sample of how many Americans there are and how many have gray hair, it’s skyrocketed. There’s something that’s graying people’s hair unnaturally.

1:22:28
PR: Exactly. I think it’s documentaries like this, actually.

CW: Well, with that, everybody, enjoy the rest of your holiday. If you have a few more days off before you have to get back to the grind, watch some goofy TV. Don’t take it seriously. Or watch something serious and take it seriously. I don’t care. You’re an adult. Do what you want.

1:22:49
PR: Yeah. So, uh, thanks for taking this ride with us through, through the things we’ve enjoyed and not, maybe not enjoyed so much this year. And, uh, hopefully, uh, you have a safe and happy new year. And I look forward to, uh, continuing our parasocial relationship with you through this podcast. Uh, we love you all, uh, shout out to the Facebook group as well. Uh, you guys are all great. Thank you so much.

1:23:15
BR: Pascual has said it for me. That’s exactly it. If I could, I would just go back and I would just read a transcript of what he just said in my own voice. But I think I’ll go with that.

1:23:26
Okay, everybody.

1:23:27
Have a good one. Take care. All right, see ya.

1:23:30
We would like to extend heartfelt thanks to our top-tier sponsor-level patrons, Amy Frusciaro-Kelly,

1:23:32
Dr. Angela Matkey, Elizabeth Leggett, and Laura Ellis.

1:23:37
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