Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - Jason Hehir and 'Murder in Boston: Roots, Rampage, and Reckoning'
Episode Date: January 2, 2024Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay are joined by filmmaker Jason Hehir to discuss the new docuseries ‘Murder in Boston’ (1:25), explain Boston’s history of racial strife (13:24), and the city's recko...ning with its past (24:18). Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Jason Hehir Producers: Donnie Beacham Jr. and Ashleigh Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
Discussion (0)
We have one of the world's greatest filmmakers showing us on Highland.
You guys have all consumed his content over a long career of making documentary films, making films.
Jason, how long you've been at?
In the business, 25 years, but making films of my own probably since like 06.
06, wow.
Wow, wow.
You probably know him if you're a casual Johnny Cummel lately to the career of Jason Hire.
from The Last Dance, which took the entire culture by storm, the whole world by storm,
and has fostered some interesting relationships that haven't even yet settled.
Still some reverberation from that documentary.
And we appreciate everything that you gave us during COVID.
But his latest for a murder in Boston, excuse me, murder in Boston,
is a fascinating, wild, and just ridiculous,
a ridiculously important ride into injustice, social inequality,
all based around one happening in Boston.
We have the director of that joining us today.
Jason, how are you doing, man?
Thank you for joining us on higher learning.
I'm great, Ben. Thanks for having me.
Okay.
Let's talk about this.
Let's talk about murder in Boston.
Let's talk about, because we talked a little bit about this,
and you gave me the rundown about it.
We'll get some breaking news about the documentary itself,
which is fantastic.
It's why we make art.
That's a tease for the audience to come back a little bit later.
But you told me, we spoke some weeks ago,
and you told me that with this story,
what you wanted to do was put a social justice narrative
into a true crime story.
story. Most of the time when we talk about true crime, it kind of exists for the sake of itself.
But with this, why don't you tell people what your documentary is about and why it was important
for you to talk about an issue that's been so on the forefront of American culture in the last couple
of years? Yeah. So the documentary is about an infamous murder case that occurred in Boston
in October of 1989, a white couple, Chuck and Carol Stewart.
were in Boston from the suburbs that night at a birthing class at Brigham of Women's Hospital,
right on the border of the Mission Hill neighborhood in Boston,
which was one of the more dangerous neighborhoods in Boston at the time.
And there's this infamous phone call that he made.
He had a car phone.
This is pre-sail phones back then.
So he had a car phone.
He calls the cops 911 and says, I've been shot.
My wife's been shot.
He said, I don't know where we are.
So for 13 minutes, they kept him on the line.
and they eventually found his location, which was in the corner of the Mission Hill projects.
And according to him, a black man had carjacked them, pointed a gun at his head, told them to drive, drove them to a remote location or pointed them to a remote location, shot his wife Carol in the head, killing her almost instantly, shot him in the gut, blowing out half of his intestines, took their belongings and ran into the projects.
So there was a manhunt in Boston
for the better part of 10 weeks
to find the 5-10 to 6-foot thin
black man with a raspy voice
and an Adidas track suit with a black Adidas track suit
with a red stripe.
And they eventually got who they thought was their man
in a guy named Willie Bennett,
who was a career criminal from the Mission Hill area.
And Chuck eventually made it out of the hospital,
fought for his life,
made it out of the hospital after about eight weeks
looked at a police lineup,
picked Willie out of that lineup,
and Willie was about to be indicted for the murder of Carol Stewart
and her unborn son, Christopher,
when Chuck then jumped off the Toven Bridge
and killed himself because his brother had gone to the police
the night before and said it was all a hoax.
There never was a black man.
Chuck did this. He orchestrated it. I helped.
And so that is the dark,
chapter in a fraught racial history.
Let's put it euphemistically in Boston.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Certainly at my lifetime.
And I had always wondered, you know, I'm from Boston.
I'm proud to be from there.
Ben, you know that I'm a Celtics, Celtics, Red Sox, Bruins,
Patriots fan.
Yes.
But I'm ambivalent and conflicted.
I love you even so.
That's the time we are.
But I've always been conflicted and a little bit ashamed
when I go to other places, especially if I'm talking to black people and say where I'm from,
because we have that history and that reputation.
So I've always been curious as to how we earn that reputation, whether it's still valid,
what we've done to ameliorate that, if anything at all.
And more specifically, why I believed this lie.
I, along with the rest of the city of Boston, no one really questioned whether or not Chuck was telling the truth.
Even I remember being in school, I was an eighth grade at the time.
And the teachers, the morning that he jumped, the news started to spread, the Chuck Stewart had killed himself.
And the teachers, I remember them saying, like this poor man, he couldn't take it anymore.
The grief was just so overwhelmed.
One of the reporters, Jack Harper, who's in the documentary, he said that when they were at the docks that day and they were fishing Chuck's body out of the water, he was asking, is this grief or guilt?
Like, they still didn't know.
There were editors in the Boston Globe newsroom.
who said before we fan out and cover this thing,
we have to decide or uncover if this is grief or guilt.
So to this day, if you watch the doc to this day,
some of the white people in power who were around back then still believe
that Willie had something to do with this.
They can't seem to wrap their head around the fact that this wasn't anything
but a monstrous act by a white man who knew that he could tell this one little lie
and turn the entire city upside down and divert attention from himself
and focus attention on this neighborhood that was otherwise innocent.
Which is incredible that there's still people still maintaining
or holding on to the same story that was initially your narrative
that was initially pushed out there.
I am from Texas.
I'd never heard of this until I watched your documentary.
But I always knew that there was this stigma,
surrounding Boston and that it was not great for black people.
But I never knew why.
I didn't know the history of it.
And I'm wondering for you was it important because the way the documentary,
obviously the documentary covers everything,
but it focuses more on the history of racism in Boston.
And it talks about the neighborhood and the people involved more than it talks about
the stewards.
Was that intentional on your part?
yes, if you could just explain that.
Yes, it was.
I don't care about Chuck Stewart.
I don't care why he killed his wife.
I don't care to examine the reasons why he grew into this monstrous human being.
You know, early on, we had a whole scene where we went to Revere and we showed what Revere was,
because Revere doesn't have the greatest reputation as one of the suburbs in Boston that is the most racist.
Revere comes up when you have that discussion.
So initially I was thinking like, all right, I want to show people the kind of news he was consuming
and the kind of culture he was growing up in to give him the idea to do this.
But it didn't take a genius to do.
He's not some diabolical genius.
He's not a criminal mastermind.
He's a guy who grew up in Boston and knew if you pointed the black guy, all attention
that the spotlight's going to go on the black guy.
So I don't care about him.
He's disgusting.
There are a lot of disappointing, let's say, figures.
in this story.
And after disgusting, some of the police,
the way they handle this and the way that they still maintain,
that really had something to do with it, I find disgusting.
But Chuck was the most disgusting.
What I cared about, the reason why I wanted to tell the story
was to help the Mission Hill community
and the Bennett family specifically to express the pain
that had gone unexpressed properly for 34 years.
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The documentary is a murder in Boston documentary series.
Roots, Rampage and Reckoning.
It's on HBO.
If I didn't mention that, HBO,
it's just the home of the great documentary.
It really is.
You know what I mean?
It really is.
We're talking about this a little while ago.
Like, growing up, HBO
had a chokehold on me.
Not just with some of the bigger docs,
but the American, the American undercover
series, all that stuff.
You remember that? You remember it. I know you liked it.
Yeah. That's like a, this is
a pinch me moment for me because I grew up
consuming all that. We're from
same generation. I grew up watching stuff. So to see us get a doc on that Monday night documentary
slot that HBO has always had, that's a really cool thing. I worked at HBO sports for seven years
in the beginning of my career. But it was always, it was always kind of annexed out from like the
quote-to-quote real HBO where they were doing sopranos and Oz and things like that.
And they, it's the best working relationship I've had with any executives at any network so far.
We've had a lot of...
Some tough ones, but the HBO one,
they immediately got it.
We took this out.
This was right in the wake of the last dance.
So, nothing was really going on still.
Everybody was in lockdown.
I vividly remember sitting in a freezing cold.
It was a really cold October night.
I was outside my apartment in New York,
and I was talking to some other distributors about the story.
And we almost went to another platform,
which I won't say who that was.
But they wanted to lean in more to the tawdry aspects.
Rachel, you asked to...
about like Chuck Stewart,
they wanted to know more
about the Stewart family,
kind of the tropey stuff
that a lot of true crime does,
which is romanticizing the couple,
not that Carol Stewart
and her family
don't deserve sympathy,
but it's always, you know,
demonizing the murderer,
praising that's the wrong word,
but making the victim look
as sympathetic as possible,
and not really kind of peeling off
that other layer.
Some do it, but there's such a glut of it now that I don't think that all of them do it.
This one, this was right in the wake.
If you remember, I should say to wrap that thought up, HBO immediately got it.
When I said I wanted to tell the story from the perspective of the black community in Boston
and specifically the Bennett's, they immediately got it, that this is not the reasons why Chuck did this.
And if there was another woman and if he wanted insurance money, that's a footnote in my mind.
And they agreed.
So that's why we went with them and we were better for it.
But when we had that discussion, this was right in the wake of the last dance.
The last dance had come out in April and May of 2020.
And nothing was going on.
It's almost four years ago now, but the world was still stopped down that fall.
I think we had another wave coming in New York, so everything was shutting down.
That's why I was sitting outside in the freezing cold having this meeting that I'd otherwise be having a place like this.
and they said
I was having meetings
where people saying
other other stories
that you want to tell
because up until that point
I've largely done
just sports stuff
and this was right in the wake
of George Floyd
and that summer of 2020
all of that stuff
was fresh in everybody's mind
and I remember watching
all of that unfold
the protests and everything
that summer and thinking
like there's nothing
that epitomizes
the discussion
we're having nationally
right now, like this Stewart case.
Which is how I organized, how I and other white people who consider themselves liberal, progressive, not racist, how we organize the world and believes what was being told to us by news outlets.
Remember, there weren't many.
There's no Reddit threads back then.
There's no Twitter.
There's no TikTok.
There's no conspiracy theorists that are amplified.
You get three networks at home, three affiliates, NBC, ABC, ABC.
CBS and two newspapers, the Globe and the Herald.
And that was my entire, that's how we all consume the information we consumed.
And what they said was the truth.
That's it.
So every single one of those outlets I've just mentioned were beating the drum of like the search for this, the hunt is on for the killer.
And how is Chuck doing in the hospital?
And oh, the baby Christopher died 17 days after the murder.
And that was a really sad thing.
And, you know, hindsight is 2020.
but it's just you wonder like how
could we not have said like
it's always the husband
you know it's always the spouse always
the partner
so I was really interested in kind of looking in the mirror
and having
frankly white people in Boston
look in a mirror and and
try to unpack why we
believed what we believed
on
it's interesting the response
to the documentary
um
from people
people that I know that are from Boston.
The case is
very famous.
I've never heard of it, but the case is very famous.
There was some fear.
There was some fear
of dragging
the city, which is trying to turn the page
on its
racial reputation
or the culture
of Boston through that
again. The fear
almost for some outweighed, hey, this is a very important time in the city's history and a
microcosm for racial injustice writ large. And we need to talk about this. It was a painful.
It was I wonder what's going to happen type thing. You know what I mean? Did you wrestle with that?
Did you wrestle with at any point, this is over, this is done? Should I be doing this?
I got a lot of
gentle nudging and advice
from people saying
why would you want to reopen that wound?
Yeah.
And it's funny, I was talking to
interviewing Tito Jackson who appears in the documentary
who was a city council or former city councilor
in Boston and now works in the mayor's office,
grew up at Mission Hill,
was around the same age as me,
but he was being strip searched
and thrown against walls
and thrown against cop cars
searching for the killer.
He's a 13-year-old.
kid. So he had
anecdotal memories
of what went on. But I said
to him exactly what we just are
discussing here. I said that a lot of people have said to me
why would you want to reopen
that wound? And he said, well, I would say that the people
who said that to you, for a lot of us, that wound
is never closed.
In order to heal a wound that's been
festering for 34 years like that,
you have to dig
all the pus and the gunk out
of it. You have to disinfect that wound
before it could even start to heal.
and that's what you're doing with this documentary now.
It's a painful process, but it's necessary
in order to sew up that wound and let it start to heal.
You have to revisit it.
And I think that it's one of the mistakes
microcosmically in Boston we've made
is not addressing our past,
but also nationally too.
These stories need to be told.
And even if, you know, we'll get to it a little later on,
but Mayor Wu did make an apology yesterday,
the mayor of Boston.
And some of the criticism from the other side of the aisle is, well, she wasn't even around.
She's from Chicago.
She was minus four years old.
It doesn't matter.
What matters, even for people who weren't alive in Boston, they need to be educated about this.
This is your city.
This is your history.
So appreciate what happened.
It doesn't mean you're guilty.
It doesn't mean that we're admonishing anybody.
It's just appreciate what happened.
And more importantly, appreciate the humanity and the pain of the people who suffered.
That's what's the most.
important is to acknowledge them as human beings. And they were wronged. It doesn't mean,
it doesn't take anything away from you to say, oh, I'm sorry that that happened to you.
Why do you think that's so hard? Books and college courses have been taught about them.
Boston especially is provincial and proud of its Irish Catholic, Roman Catholic heritage.
and there's a different level of otherness in Boston
between blacks and whites.
I'm trying to choose my words carefully
because this is so,
it's such a flammable subject, you know?
But I think there's a lot of deep-seated generational pride
and deep-seated generational ideas about others in Boston,
where you look at a neighborhood and you say a white couple was shot,
it's difficult for people of a certain age to wrap their head around.
To this day, difficult for people to wrap their head around.
Well, Black person must have had something to do with it.
Willie Don, who's the in our documentary, his theory, which we didn't really have time to parse,
is that Chuck must have known Willie Bennett.
Willie Bennett must have been Chuck's drug dealer.
And so Chuck must have, in the course of their drug dealings, asked Willie Bennett to do this.
There's no evidence that Chuck has.
had a drug problem. In fact,
anecdotally, his friends say he wasn't even that much of a
drinker.
There's no evidence there. I think there was one misdemeanor
charge that Willie Bennett was picked up on
for drugs. I mean, let's be clear
about this too. Willie Bennett's no angel.
Right. He's got a
long rap sheet and
his offenses were violent.
But those
are irrelevant in this case.
What we
are examining in this case is not just what
he was put through being
thrown in jail and called a child killer and a lady killer and ended up spending
12 years in jail on another case that they just happened to be holding him for while they
were gathering evidence to indict him for this case.
And that case was weak at best.
And they never would have picked him up on that unless they were just looking for an excuse
to know where he was.
Billy Dunn in our documentary says, we just needed to make sure he wasn't going to flee to
Canada.
He says that's part of the process.
The most galling soundbite in the entire series to me
is that it's part of the process.
Well, the process is horribly flawed
if that's part of the process.
This man for 12 years,
whether he was an angel or not,
was taken away from his family,
had his freedom taken from him.
And as we demonstrated in the doc,
this is generational.
And the ripple effect lasts to this day.
So to see what happened yesterday,
it's a great start, and we'll get to that, I guess.
It's a great start, but it's not a solution.
I hope it's just the beginning.
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I was going to ask you, and knowing that the police officers that were involved with this in 1989 still were on the force all the way through, seeing that Detective Dunn still talk about it as if somehow Willie Bennett was the person that was involved or that the police didn't do.
anything wrong is more of his take on it. It makes me think, and me being from, not from Boston,
still knowing that there's this perception of Boston. Has Boston changed? Is there's still this
perception of black people being a certain way? Is the relationship still strain between black people
and the police in Boston? I know that the apology came yesterday, which is wild after almost 35 years,
but has anything changed?
It's generational.
And that's a very simple way to put it.
We could discuss this for four hours if you guys have the time.
But you can imagine the demographic that still feels that way.
I think that Dunn is the, he's the extreme example.
And I regret that we couldn't compel more of those retired cops who were actively involved in this case to participate in this doc.
because I didn't want for Billy Dunn to be the avatar,
the representative for all of the Boston police,
because he's the worst of the worst.
Right.
But there are still people like,
if you go to his Facebook page
and you see the filth that he is spewing
on a daily basis politically,
and it's racially tinged.
And the people who are liking this and commenting on,
and if you go to their pages,
a lot of them are retired cops.
And when you talk to some people of that age in Boston who aren't at least overtly racist,
they still kind of wink and nudge.
They call Billy Dunn the legend because he calls himself that.
He was, if you guys remember, Rachel, I know if you're a sports fan band, I know you are.
Back when the Red Sox were good about 20 years ago,
Papalban was the reliever and there was this big fat cop who used to fist bump him
every time he came out of the bullpen.
That's done.
Oh, no.
So he was celebrating, he sang the national anthem at Fenway Park three months before this murder happened.
Oh my gosh.
He was celebrated in Boston.
He was one of the, like, he was, there was pride around Billy Dunn and people, you know, admired him.
Why?
You'd have to go back and ask those people.
But to answer your question, I think that it's dying out, that those attitudes are dying,
off. And if you go to, you know, back when this happened in 89, if you went from South Boston
into Matapan or Dorchester, certain parts of Dorchester, Roxbury, Mission Hill, you would know
if you were in Rosendale or Jamaica Plan, you could tell just by the way the buildings look and the
demographics of the people, the skin tone of the people, you knew what neighborhood you were in.
Those edges are softening in Boston now, for better or worse. And, and, you know,
It's mostly gentrification, but we interviewed Dard Adams and Howard Bryant in an apartment that was in South Boston.
And both of them said, this is a neighborhood.
I was not allowed to come to for fear of my city when I was a kid.
And now we're being interviewed in this.
And it's over a yoga studio and a coffee shop.
Yeah.
So a lot of the edges are blurring in the city.
And also you have the people in power reflect the diversity of the city far more than they did 34 years ago.
We've had two black police communities.
missioners in the last 10 years. One of them, Michael Cox, was at the podium yesterday and gave
a formal apology on behalf of the Boston police to the Bennett family into Mission Hill.
And we have our first elected non-Irish, non-Italian, non-male mayor, Mayor Michelle Wu.
So the city has slowly been changing for the better. And as long as there's, you know, President
Obama used to talk about politics being an oil tanker.
And you can only turn it that much at one time.
And then you have to hand off somebody else.
So I do feel that that oil tanker is turning,
but it's still not nearly as turned as some of the other major cities
because we had such a long way to go.
These are generations of damage was done.
But I am optimistic that Boston is turning a corner.
I'll just have you know that Jonathan Papelbaum was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
So you're welcome for that.
what we keep talking around
something I want to mention
is that because of this documentary
because of
and once again
the documentary is murder in Boston
oh my writing is terrible
race
rapids
it's the roots of the problem
so one the rampage searching for the killer
in episode two
and then the Reckoning once we've realized what happened in episode three.
Murder in Boston, Roots Rampage and Reckoning that's on HBO right now.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, on behalf of the Boston Police Department, like you said,
apologized to the family of the man who was wrongly accused here.
Jason, your work brought about in at least an acknowledgement.
And we'll see where this goes.
An acknowledgement of a wrong that have been festering.
for a generation, for more than a generation in Boston.
That just happened.
What was it like for you to see that come about?
I should mention that the Globe partnered with us on this too.
So the Boston Globe did a huge eight-part print series.
It was wonderfully written.
And then they also have a podcast called Murder in Boston,
which is complimentary to our documentary.
So we got to partner with them.
And they're the reigning Pulitzer Prize winners for investigative journalists.
So they were part of this too.
But it was surreal to see that.
I never thought.
I'm like, I'm cynical because I've lived in that city and good and bad.
I've heard it all and seen it all.
So I never thought that they would get a formal public apology the way they did yesterday.
What I thought they would do, the best case scenario was that they would call the Bennett family
and a couple of representatives of the Mission Hill community to City Hall and have a
luncheon maybe and say, hey, listen, we want to acknowledge your pain. And they would parse their
words somehow and, you know, maybe take a picture and it would be on page 19 of the paper the
next day. I thought that until 72 hours ago. I had heard they were going to do this thing on
the 20th because quite frankly, I would have like to, I would have stood in the back because
this is not my day. It's their day. But I would have liked just to be there for this. Because
you do sports documentaries, what's the most impact that?
can have. You entertain people
and maybe people have a different opinion of
Scotty Pippin than...
It had an impact.
It had a huge impact.
This is a different kind of impact.
And so for all of us to have worked
on this film and gotten to
know the people
involved.
This wasn't as expected
the Bennett family
and Derek Jackson, who was a
key character in this,
who was a friend of Joey's
Joey Bennett at the time.
This wasn't a thing where we just called them up
and said, meet us at this place and we're going to ask you questions.
Like, this was repeated visits to them long before cameras rolled
because I'm a white kid or white guy, 47 years old,
but I was a white kid at the time from Newton, Massachusetts,
which might be the whitest place on her.
So when they hear that this guy is going to be the one telling their story,
I understand that there's going to be skepticism.
Right.
So it took, it took,
work and it should have taken work for them to trust me that I was going to tell this story
responsibly and that they could be safe in saying what they wanted to say and I was going to
use it the right way and as we told the story. So it was, I just thought back to that that night,
that cold night in October when I was talking to the HBO executives and thinking like
that was over three years ago and now here we are. I thought, again, even when they told me on
Monday that they were going to do this on Wednesday.
I thought, oh, they'll do, like,
it's going to be in a room behind closed doors,
and they'll give them a private apology,
and then they'll put out a press release and say that,
hey, we apologize and let's move on from this.
Because Merit Wu, this is a,
this is a ballsy political move.
Like, she, there's a, there's still,
you can imagine the left and the right in Boston.
There's a lot of infighting.
She is under heavy fire recently.
I don't know if you don't know,
Boston politics probably that well, but she had a meeting, a dinner, an annual dinner of,
it's, sorry, I'm trying to phrase it right, but it's elected people of color.
And everybody was, everybody was black at the table and people went nuts. I saw it.
Elections of color, it was called. Now, the important context there. So obviously anyone
against her is going to say, oh, who named that? Elections of color. I don't know. That's why I was
trying to choose my words carefully.
We understand now.
But this came.
So the reaction was, oh,
it's okay.
The racist mayor Wu.
No whites allowed, Mayor Wu, blah, blah, blah.
She's having this dinner.
And now she's only doing this to cover up for that.
First of all, this was planned long ago.
When they saw advanced copies of this documentary,
it was brought to their attention.
I'm sure they saw the Globe talk to them too.
So this was way before that firestorm happened.
By the way, this, I guess I say it right, electives of color dinner, what's happening
for the last 10 years?
This predated her.
She was, this was on her agenda.
It was like, oh, I got to go to this thing.
It got emailed to everyone.
And then it was explained like, okay, if you're elected of non-color, you can't come to
this.
My point is this.
It was a gutsy move on her part.
And I admire her for doing this.
that she doubled down and said,
you know, she said, I am sorry.
On behalf of the city of Boston,
I am sorry for the pain that you went through.
This was full-throated,
like 100% all-in apology
and acknowledgement of wrongdoing,
which was tremendous for me.
And then I said, up until even the morning of,
I said, well, the cops aren't going to come to this
because then there's election seasons and all that.
Michael Cox,
black commissioner of the Boston police.
He was the second one to speak,
got up there and apologized on behalf of the Boston police
and said that this was racist.
I was floored and tremendously happy,
not just for the benefits,
but for the city.
I'm proud of the city.
That doesn't happen too often,
especially in this context,
but I'm proud of Boston right now for that.
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Once again, it's on HBO.
I'm murder in Boston,
roots, rampage, and reckoning.
You guys, you got to go check.
Check out.
Check out all this man's work.
It's,
you're looking at the reason right now that Larsa Pippin and what?
I told Jason already.
He just had to.
Pippin,
Jordan love affair is it's because of Jason.
It wouldn't have happened if not for Jason.
He's a documentary filmmaker.
He's a brilliant artist and he's a connector of souls.
Jason, before I let you go,
I got to tell you one,
I got to tell you one dollar.
documentary you have to do. I know everybody tells you this. I know it's, but it's one you have to do.
It's called the slide.
Okay. You have to do a documentary about that slide in Boston.
That's how it starts, Jason. That's how you start.
No, you do the audio and that guy.
That poor guy,
my favorite part of that was
his, oh shit, when he landed on the
Oh shit.
But they had to close that slide van.
I know.
That's why I'm serious.
I want like a 20 minute doc short.
So many people were trying to recreate
that slide and prove that they can do it the right way,
that they close the slide.
It's ironically police tape around that slide now.
The kids of Boston are being robbed of one of the best slides of these.
Because that got, that's the funniest video of you.
And it's because of the police.
It is.
I mean, that back for out of him.
I mean, he was just trying to have fun.
This was a lot more innocuous than 34 years ago.
But that's how far we've come is that now we're criticizing people coming down slides.
So that's a good thing.
All right.
You guys can watch.
And all three parts of the dock are on HBO right now.
You guys can watch them.
You guys should watch them.
And in addition to being something.
something that is, you know, lofty and very important.
It's also incredibly well made and very entertaining.
Yeah.
Jason, thank you for joining us on higher learning.
And, you know, hopefully we'll have you back when you got something else cooking.
I know you got always got a dock in the works.
Hopefully we'll have you back.
When you and I go to Angola, we'll come back and we'll tell Rachel and everybody else about it because I want to do that story.
You want to do Angola?
There's a whole.
Yeah.
Wow.
It's a whole thing.
A very specific,
brilliant, brilliant, brilliant idea.
And I hope we can bring it to life.
We will bring it to life.
And then we'll come back and happy.
We're going to end the universe right now.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do this.
We're going to do this dot.
All right, man.
Thank you for joining us, brother.
Always good to talk to you.
Thanks for having me.
See you guys.
Thank you.
