The Daily Zeitgeist - Icon #10 Sherlock Holmes: ACAB Includes Sherlock

Episode Date: February 16, 2026

In this episode, Miles and Jack are joined by writer/comedian Andrew Ti to discuss the 7% solution god: Sherlock Holmes! They'll explore his creation, his toxic fanbase, his less-than-great influence on modern policing and much more!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers. Most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina-2026 winner Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bob, hi, Matt.

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that are our icon. We use these icons to create meaning, to build identity, to find the perfect way to end the phrase no shit, to learn that sometimes the hat has the flap in the front, sometimes it has the flap in the back, but it takes a real genius to be like, hey, porcée no los dos.

Hey, baby. Flapp in the front and the back. That's right, we're talking about Sherlock Holmes, with apologies to Captain America, the first superhero, and still to this day probably the most iconic. I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co-host, Mr. Miles Graham.

Oh, boy, Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock. For whatever reason, my strongest depiction idea of Sherlock Holmes is a Basset Hound. He's got Basset Hound to anything. You know what I mean? Because I feel like there was a picture of a Basset Hound dressed as Sherlock Holmes

that I've never shaken from my brain. This feels like a poster I would have saw a doctor's office. It's McGruff, right? Isn't that, is it McGruff? Oh, fuck. Oh, yeah. It wasn't McGruff rocking. Wasn't there a McGruff with a Sherlock hat, though? A deer stalker, I think. Yeah, I think McGruff did wear a deer stalker. Yeah. Which a bassetound can stalk some dears. It all works out. Maybe not. It's my Bar and Stain Bears or something. Is it worse to know deer stalker or know that a fedora is really a trillby? It's the same energy.

I understand it's both. I think deer stalker, I think that's all right. I'm going to allow that. one being like, it's not a fedora, it's a trillby. That sucks. In a very special way. What it is is I'm not wearing a fedora. Actually, what I'm wearing is a trillie. Thank you.

There is a story, the hound of Baskervilles, as Brian the editor pointed out. In our third seat, one of our very favorite guests, a hilarious and brilliant producer and TV writer. You know him from the Yosus This Racist Podcast, the new Starter Trek podcast. It's Andrew T. Andrew.

What's up? What's up, guys? That's not it. That picture is not it. There are plenty of pictures of dogs. Sorry, Super Producer, Catherine, put a picture in the... I know exactly what you're talking about. Yeah. No, a basset hound is Sherlock Holmes. I think a basset hound somehow and also has become just Sherlock Holmes dog for some reason. I don't know why, but...

Yeah, because they're low to the ground and they keep it real. of has Basset hound eyes, too. He kind of has those eyes. They love smoking cocaine. They do. And that's the, that's why they call it a pea dog. He did it the sophisticated way. He did a 4% solution, I think it is, or seven percent solution of cocaine that he injected into his arm and was just like, I find this very invigorating. The idea is just rushed to my brain. Like a like a, like, a loving depiction of how to inject cocaine, right? If I recall kind of vaguely, it's like, pages of like, and then. The books hit right as cocaine was becoming like this wonder drug. So it wasn't illegal. Like, you could just go to the pharmacy and be like, give me the solution.

Upon the carry, another eight ball. Yeah. My good man. Just just a small note on your intro, and this is a self-serving note. I do think you mean the first superhero in the West. In the West. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I should definitely say that. West. I want to get right into it because there's a lot to cover. I think we generally know the same shit about Sherlock, Deerstalker, big old pipe, skinny jeans, slick back hair, deductive reasoning. But with the help of our researcher, J.M. McNabb on the ones and twos on this one.

I think we got some good shit. So this is going to be the fourth fictional icon we've covered in this series. probably, I'd say the second most iconic behind Santa. A weird iconic hat can really do a lot for you, I will say. Like Santa got the hat, Sherlock got the hat.

That is, but Santa took a very long, weird time landing on his current form and popularity. I'd say the same is kind of true of Miss Piggy. I mean, she took years and was like sort of a background character for a number of years. Erkel probably holds our record for fictional or not fictional, the, the fastest overnight impact.

Like, he showed up as a background character and the next day, kids were, like, dressing as him in the mall. Sherlock first arrived in novels in 1887 and 1890 that were, like, called Penny Dreadfuls. They were, you know, dime store paperbacks. That's what that means? Yeah, that's what Penny Dreadfuls were. They were well received, but when his short stories hit in 1891, it was, it was like Bieber going on Ellen

it was just like fucking people went bunkers for this shit because like being part of a Penny Dreadful is like guesting on a track you're like that's like one of it's like a short story collection or right his short is a Penny Dreadful

I thought it was a roller derby person that I do I think it was just like a paperback knowledge so the short stories appeared in the Strand which was a a magazine that had just a bunch of stories in it. And like when they came out, like when a new Sherlock would drop,

they would have to change the library hours because people would just be fucking flooding them. Also like Harry Potter drop day kind of shit. Yes, Harry Potter drop day. But like every time just a short story appeared in a magazine, the circulation for this magazine went crazy. the thing that is truly there's a bunch of stuff that's really

weird about Sherlock's iconography but one thing that is just like overall wild he's not gone away like this is our oldest icon besides Santa but like if you're even just like looking at Santa in his current

form Sherlock in his current form actually goes back further than Santa and he's been he is the most portrayed fictional human in film history. He's been in 254 films. He's neck and neck with Dracula

for the most depicted character of all time. Dracula's got him, barely edges him out at 272. Dracula gets put in all kinds of shit that he doesn't belong in. Right. You can just say John Hamm in a comedy where you're like John Ham's in this comedy too. Yeah, I know. Robin Hood, you would think.

But no, Robin Hood. Sherlock has everybody except Drack. And we're going to talk about Sherlock and Dracula because they're linked in kind of a weird way. But right from the start, there's this weird form of fandom where it's almost like fandom mixed with like Talmudic scholarship on Sherlock, which if you've read the stories, it's kind of, like they're very just basic page turnery, you know, like they're not these like deep texts. They're kind of fun, shallow page turners. but people start writing stories about Sherlock. People, like, publish interviews with Sherlock Holmes. People are publishing biographies of Sherlock Holmes.

And it's, like, continued down to this day. Like, a 2008 poll found that 58% of British people believe Sherlock Holmes was a real guy. Like, their Sherlock truthers. His motherfuckers took over the planet. Yeah. And they believed in. Santa. Yeah.

So there was like a mixture at the time of people who actually believed he existed. And then there were people who were like ironically believing that he existed. And he got some lucky breaks. I'm talking about him like he's a real person for the purposes of this podcast because I am a Sherlock Truther. But like one of, so there was this 1891 story in the journal, the speaker called the story. It was my evening with Sherlock Holmes. and it was an interview with Holmes and Conan Doyle that was written by an anonymous writer

and the writer actually ended up being J.M. Barry, the guy who would go on to write Peter Pan. So, like, there were good writers who were, like, there were really, like, eventually accomplished writers buying in hard and, like, sort of propelling his image and this character on in a way that, you know, probably benefited him quite a bit. Arthur Conan Doyle and his publishers received letters from people looking for him.

Arthur Conan Doyle was like immediately like gifting the curse. He was like, what the fuck? He had reportedly despaired that people thought his fictional character was real. People would ask, people would be like, hey, could you put me in touch with Sherlock, bro? I think my wife's cheating. I think my wife's cheating on me with Sherlock Holmes, dude. You think he can't help me? Is it because?

So I want to talk about this. Yeah. He gave him like a real-ass address, right? He gave him a real address. That is one of the theories that he gave him a real address that actually didn't exist for like a decade or so. It was like the numbers didn't go up that high, but eventually they got that high. And so, and when that became a real, like an actual real address, it was just,

flooded with mail. I remember... I was like having 867-3-309 as your phone number. Randomly, just the one of the few times I went to,

I've been to London like as a kid, I just walked by whatever, three, two, one Baker Street or whatever the fuck it is. And I was like,

oh yeah. Sherlock's house. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this is where I want to talk about the idea of Sherlock as superhero. And like,

he, I think he embodies, this superpower that's maybe the most intriguing superpower because it seems like it could actually exist, which is the ability to use logic and reason to know a definitive truth about something or about everything in his case. And like he can look at your coat sleeves and know what you do for a living. And then from that can solve the mystery of like, who stole your wallet. And, you know, like a superhero who can fly is intriguing, but most sane people don't believe

they can actually fly, but with Sherlockian deductive reasoning, which he doesn't actually deduce things. We'll talk more about that later, but it's almost like the saner you are, the more you want to believe that sane rationality can defeat the chaos of reality. Yeah.

And then it's, I also think like that like appeals to everybody's, you know, idea of like themselves and like, I could probably figure this shit out. But it also, I mean, it's kind of the entire promise of literature and writing, which was just kind of becoming democratically available at this time, like to be able to use words and thinking to make sense of the world

and like tell a singular truth. And so that then, like the J.M. Berry thing, there's also like so many famous fans who, like T.S. Eliot, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, are all like part of this Sherlock Holmes Society, which was just like a group of weird little guys who would like hang out and study what they call. They called Sherlock Holmes's stories,

The Sacred Texts, which is what, again, if you read these things, it's wild. Can I ask a question? I haven't probably read an actual Sherlock Holmes book for probably closer to decades now. Does he do the thing that the Benedict Cumberbatch one does, which is like walk through the, deduction steps.

Yes. He does. Yeah. He does it. Yeah. So the structure is really ingenious where he first solves a little mystery, where like the person comes in and he's like, oh, I see you've lost your pocket watch and that you're, you know, I can tell that you're a typist and you're left-handed and near-sighted.

And they're like, what the fuck? And he'll explain how he got there real quick. And that is actually based on Sir Arthur Conan. Doyle was a doctor who studied under this guy who could kind of, he like taught this class in medical school where he was just like, what would kind of cold read people and be like, this is how I know this guy's an alcoholic. Like he came in, his nose is bright red. Gin blossom face.

Yeah, Jim Blossom's face. He's drinking now. Literally one of the things. And then I saw the bottle peek. out of his pocket. Like, damn, Sherlock. Damn. No shit.

Yeah. But I think that's a little bit like, you know, the other way of looking at this is like, you know, your barry wises and Joe Rogans of today. It's a thing that makes dumb people think they're smart. Exactly. Like, oh my God, I could. Yeah. I could fucking be psychic essentially.

So this is the big problem with Sherlock Holmes. Like that, so just going back to like the superpower analogy, when Superman first came out, there was this rash of children jumping off their roofs, like, for after, like,

seeing Superman. Uh, and I think the same thing has happened on a massive scale with Sherlock Holmes, but the problem is that, uh, the people who believed that they could do the superpower were cops. And like, we have just a whole century of cops who thought they could like use deductive

reasoning to solve crimes and could not. Yeah. So just back to the like kind of border between like this guy being a real person and not a real person. First of all, like, do we have an example of that anywhere else other than like, you know, Santa where that's the whole game? But like, is there another fictional character where people like 60% of people in 2008, like years after is still like, I believe, man. I still believe in it. Just Jesus Christ? Yeah.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. I mean, not like not religious. That guy's good numbers. Yeah, yeah. Brian, the editor, points to Bigfoot, which is another, like, but that one is explicitly, that's the point of that character is like that they're hiding him from you.

Yeah. So, I mean, so there's like the people who like kind of. What's that? Like someone, like someone from like one of those tall tales, like Paul Bunyan. Baco's Bill. Yeah. It's kind of like that. Yeah.

But nothing like sure. Washington. Am I right? I mean, there probably is some version of like George Washington cherry tree shit or like. Yeah, right. The sanitized versions,

the highly sanitized versions. Paul Revere is a good one from Brian the editor. So at the, there's like at the street level like the people who are just like, God damn, I need to find out where this watch went. Let me. right to Sherlock Home. But then Sherlock Home,

I kind of like that. And then there's more ironic believers like the people, the, you know, T.S. Eliot and stuff, they would call it the game, which was they would like all get together and treat Holmes as a historical character whose exploits were chronicled

by his trusty companion, Dr. John Watson. And they would be like, this is, you know, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was actually Watson. and, you know, they came up with all these theories that they didn't actually believe in, but they, like, had fun doing it. I read an account of, like, one of these meetings where, like, it was just an excuse for, like, people to get drunk together and, like, being weird creeps.

Like, well, they didn't have YouTube yet. They played a game called Sardines, which was just hide and seek, but when you find the person who's hiding, you have to hide with them. Right. And then, like, soon, there's only one person seeking and there's, like, 30 people in one closet. And they were like, they, they seem to really enjoy it, especially when women were involved. Oh, Jesus Christ. But so the whole treating him like a real person begins with this Oxford Divinity Professor, Ronald Knox, who analyzed and scrutinized the home stories as if they were real, which is interesting that it was a divinity professor.

Because, again, the way fans interact with this character has more in common with, like, the study of biblical literature up to that point than, you know, how people reacted with fiction. His satire was intended as a way to satirize the modern scrutiny of the Old Testament by German scholars like Albert Schweitzer, which while that was the intent, it became a massive movement,

not because people liked how hard it owned Albert Schweitzer, but because they, you know, they wanted to believe like Molder and Scully. I'm going to throw this out there. I don't think satire has ever worked even once. Let's just throw that out there.

It was just like, damn, dog, that would be so tight. Yeah. Oh, look at me being crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, there's the Sherlock Holmes Society in England or America,

and then the other version is the Baker Street of Regulars. And again, like T.S. Eliot, the author of The Wasteland, I just want to stop down and read, right? Like, this is somebody who's like writing famous epic poems. Yeah. And he is devoted. to like these books that are like bordering on like young adult. He's like the guy that like as soon as they allowed it in I think it was in the UK,

he like wrote down his actual religion was like the force or whatever the fuck. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. He's happy. But yeah, I just, I went back and read through a couple of the most famous stories. And they're just like very effective page turners, which again, like I just, I do find that to be one of the most interesting contradictions. They're like fun, but what the fuck?

Like, what the fuck people? That's the mystery I kind of want to solve here. I mean, it's just because comparatively, like, the kinds of stories that were coming out at the time, we're just not doing anything like this. Yeah. I definitely think that that's what there's one that's called, like, the Society of Redhead Men or something like that.

And it's this, like, very odd mystery where this guy, like, gets a job where they're just like, you're redheaded. So you come to this room. and you copy down the Encyclopedia Britannica and then we pay you a really good wage. You just have to be there for four hours a day. And it's just like immediate, if you've like seen any mysteries

or read any mysteries, you're immediately like, oh, well, they're doing that to get him out of the place where he is because they're like either robbing him or they have something. I'm like, that's exactly what it is.

But it's just they invented, it wasn't a new trick. What was the, what was the? like they were the best to add it. And everything else has been like kind of built on top of that. So like the thing we talk about was the Flynn effect where like culture gets built on top of culture. So like John Belushi is not that funny to me because I have, I grew up on Farley,

which was like the metabolized version of that. Like I feel like there's there's some of that. But like he's still so fucking famous. What were the other Penny Dreadfuls? They were like Tarzan and like. that kind of shit. Yeah. There's, I mean, yeah.

And there were other mysteries, too. Like, and kind of ones from better writers. Like, Edgar Allan Poe wrote one before him with this guy, Duppen. And, yeah. Just terrible. See August Doopin. I think this is just the evidence that you got to inject cocaine because smoking lot of, that's no. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Was Poet was doing opium or whatever? Come on. out of here. Just hammered at all times, I feel like, was kind of... I'm nodding off reading your fucking shit, dude. I want to start farting when I'm reading at Sherlock Holmes, Penny Dreadful. So Sherlock has one of the earlier, or maybe the earliest version of the toxic fandom that we

experienced today. So Arthur Conan Doyle secretly hated Holmes, resented the fact that he was so popular because he considered himself a more serious-minded writer of historical. fiction and like that shit didn't sell as well and like he was like this is taking over my life and so he decided to kill off homes in 1893 like a few years after like this whole craze starts in the short story the final problem because he felt that his literary reputation was at stake. London is said to have experienced its sunniest winter in 1892 thanks to the London fog being temporarily blown away by the wind created by the sheer number of vigorous jackoff hand motions from

people hearing Boyle worry about his literary reputation. But it is, it's also an interesting like story, his writing of it in that like he could write this shit in his sleep. He would like write these stories in a day and then like, you know, spend the summer straining over this like historical fiction. And I do think that's like an interesting kind of insight into the creative process that like, you know, some things that just like come naturally to you and you're just like, well, uh, that clearly sucks. And it's like, no, that's like, you hear this a lot of music where people write their hits like as a joke, you know, they're like, yeah, this is, this is the dumbest version of what this record company's asking for from us. And then it's like,

oh, that ended up being our number one hit. Right. The tub something phenomenon. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Weasers' Green album. Eleanor by the Turtles. Stuck in the middle with you was those guys making fun of Bob Dylan. I mean,

you kind of have to imagine anyone who's ever written a Law and Order episode is a little like, yeah, I don't know if this is my best word. Writing it with one hand while making the jack off hand motion with the other.

But it's also like people love fucking law and order. It's great. Yeah, exactly. You know, copaganda side. Yeah. So at the end of this Sherlock Holmes story, the final problem, Sherlock Holmes falls to his death while battling Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland. Pretty definitive.

Like it's like, oh, yeah, he's dead. He's dead big time. It did not go over well. There was a huge public backlash. 20,000 people canceled their subscription to the Strand magazine. people formed Let's Keep Homes Alive Clubs

when he was killed off in the story newspapers including the Boston Post published obituaries for him according to Wikipedia the strongly negative

response from readers was unlike any previous public reaction to a fictional event and it doesn't say citation needed next to that so that's a fact

brother but people wore black armbands to mourn him allegedly. And yeah, like previous to this, people just accepted

what happened in books, but this time because there was this weird relationship with him where they wanted him to be real. Everyone like fucking freaked out, demanded he come back, kind of anticipating the Snyder cut bros, kind of anticipating the controversy

around the first design of Sonic that looked like total shit. Change the teeth. Yeah. But this was more of a sonic situation in that they were right and the creators caved and made the right decision. And after years of public pressure, he wrote another home-centric book, The Hounds of Baskervilles. Oh, that was the cut.

I think that's the only one I've read. That's the comeback. Right. And it was, he was still not willing to like bring him back from the dead. So he just made it a prequel. Oh. which he didn't just put a little trampoline at the bottom of the right of the ball. Yet.

Yet. But he writes him back into this story. He was like writing it as a non-home story and then needed a strong protagonist and was like, what if I put Sherlock Holmes in this? People are like, yeah, man. Fuck yeah. And then he was like, okay, you owe me twice as much money. they were like, sure.

Great. Like, honestly, whatever you want. There's, like, so many instances of him writing these books where he's like, and I'm going to ask for this insane amount of money. And, like, obviously they're not going to give me that. And, like, by the time, like, he sits down from sending the letter off, like, they're like, here's the money. Just, like, give us the fucking book.

He's kind of getting hosed, like, in the early days because he doesn't realize, like, how fucking popular it is. Because he doesn't want to because he doesn't want it to be, like, as popular. Right. Sounds like a man in need of an agent. See? I know, right? We're going to get to a literary agent at this time in a second,

but he is eventually convinced to bring Holmes back to life for good by an American publisher who offered him $45,000 for a new batch of stories. And he was like, okay. All right. Yeah, great. I love that. Yeah. In like the 1900, Jesus Christ.

He, yeah, he survived the battle with Moria, and pretended to be dead for like eight years for some reason. Do you, is there any like, um, like theorizing or speculation on, I mean, because were there like arch nemesies in the same way? I feel like maybe that's, that feels like sort of modern in that. Yeah, the Moriarty thing. Yeah. Cause like, yeah, there's like these characters.

There's a. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know who Tarzan was fighting. But not like a guy. Seems like you want this episode to be about Tarzan and. Yeah. I'm sorry. Or who the fuck was Conan?

Conan the Barbarian was just generally like fighting. Yeah. I'm just saying like, like, like does Mori already scan for you guys? Like I knew, I knew him from the Benedict Cumberbatch one. Yeah.

But I didn't really know him before that. It wasn't like a Lex Luther, the Joker thing where it's like the... I think it's supposed to be. Yeah, I think it, and probably with a bunch of people who are more familiar with Sherlock Holmes

it is. But yeah. For me, it's just like, it does feel like there's, you know, the books are written in a smart way where the stories are written in a smart way where it's like, and this is, of course, the second most dangerous man in London. And like it's, they're not like spending a lot of time on the lore. He's just telling you. Like, this is, of course, this is something I've been pursuing for decades. Incidentally, the plot for the story where he comes back from life was written by Gene Lecky, who was a young woman that Conan Doyle was having an affair with. his wife was dying of tuberculosis.

Oh, what a modern story. That's the most London shit I've ever heard. He had a wife's called a tuberculosis in it. So, right? Was she, was she like an aspiring writing novelist or something? This also sounds so Hollywood too. I know. It's like, yeah, my assistant, like, I was having this dude is having a fair

with his assistant and actually gave her a spot in the writer's room. He's a showrunner. He eventually did the right thing and married her. So, you know. It's the right thing. And divorced his dying wife. It does feel like, like, I mean, right, that's, that's the, the way people have, um, dealt with this malaise in contemporary times is just hiring people to write the book you don't

want to write and continue to collect the lion's share the money. Right. Which is the move. Yeah. Yeah. For him, it was like, he just like wrote them fast and begrudgingly. And people were like, you're a king, you're the king, man. You're a king, man.

I'm up for the new season of Sherlock Penny Dreadfuls. Yeah. Exactly. Hey, guess what, Gene? You know something about me? I fucked the way I write fast and what was the way he said? Begrudgingly. Begrudgingly.

Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in a lick Lamouba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale.

In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almermata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King's senior and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die. In 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind. Listen to the A-building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What do you do in the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, is where culture, meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss that changes you, purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down,

faith when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the I-HeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yen.

And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina-26 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hey, Bob, hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie.

Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you?

I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We covered the Doopin thing. it is, uh, Dupin was the Edgar Allan Poe character who, um, that name, smoked a pipe and was followed around by his roommate who also narrates the story. So there's kind of a lot of him in there. And you can tell that Arthur Conan Doyle knew it

because this is a quote from the very first Sherlock Holmes novel. Watson says, it's simple enough as you explain it. I said, smiling, you remind me of Edgar Allan Poe's dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside. side of stories. Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. No doubt you think that you are complimenting me and comparing me to Dupin, he observed. Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very

inferior fellow. That trick of his, of breaking in on his friend's thoughts with a apropos remark after a quarter of an hour silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt, but he was by no means such a phenomenon

as Po appeared to imagine. Oh, oh, break out the blunderbuss. I know. Shot fire. Hold on. Yeah. Three minute reload time.

He did later acknowledge that he owed Poe a debt and was like, yeah, I guess I'm really rich now so I can admit that I ripped him off. Bagraoul and Poe was a great writer and the master of all. The other inspiration was this

medical professor, Dr. Joseph Bell, who Holmes' observational style was pulled straight from him who trained himself to identify accents of patients and studied people's hands because calluses or other marks could help him determine their occupation. Other clues included suntans and whether or not a man removed his hat at the doctor's

approach. He called this The Method. And Doyle saw this while being like a mediocre medical student and his assistant. I mean, I guess. It's impressive, I guess, to them, right? But for us, I'm like, that's only because there was like 15 fucking jobs back. Right. Yeah, yeah.

And you'd be like, are you a drunk? you a blacksmith? Do you, are you running from your dead? Are you a gambler? You know, are you a doctor? Like, how drunk was a W-2 profession. I can tell that this guy's the town drunk, because he's wearing a barrel, ringing a bell, and screaming incomprehensible nonsense.

Yeah, so I will say that these are the, other than his cocaine use, my favorite parts of Sherlock Calm stories are his cold reading of people because you just like, you know, he's just like, I can tell you rode your bike here, by the way, the rubber is pushed forward on the soles of your shoes, which is like impossible, but like you get the immediate, you know, one of them that I remember is like you're a laborer. I can tell by the way your right hand is bigger than your left from like working the muscles in it, which I could propose another explanation for that. But in the stories, I read, it actually like that. part doesn't come.

Gooners. I can tell you're a gooners, sir. A North London gooner. Hey, London is red. But like the cold reading doesn't often come that much in, like the cases are like

plotted in a way that's like kind of, I guess the plotting of the cases is the thing that like so much of the rest of mystery fiction has been built on top of, but. Right. It's like the procedural structure kind of nailed. It's like, you go in,

you're introduced to the case, you investigate, there's one red herring, there's a twist, and then you're off to the races to the end. And it's like, yeah, cool. Yeah, yeah. And it's like the cold read is proven right immediately, so you don't really have time to, like, think that much about it. The person's just like,

by God, he's right. How did you know that? There's the barrel that you're wearing, sir. You're actively pissing the barrel that you're wearing. It's, uh, Also, it's hard not to mention that there's an unproven yet pervasive internet rumor that Dr. Bell, the original Sherlock Holmes, or the doctor that Sherlock Holmes was based on, there's a persistent rumor that he was related to Glenn Bell, founder of Taco Bell. Yeah.

No fucking way. It's a rumor that we weren't able to substantiate, but I can't not bring it up. For the conspiracy theorist, what's the tenuous connection that they even used to? They got the same last name, Miles. Oh, it's purely just that. It's not even like that. Can't argue with that. Somebody went to America, maybe.

Glenn William Bell was a direct descendant of Joseph Bell, a medical genius who lived in the early 1800s and is remembered as the inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous character, Sherlock Holmes. That came from, I remember the inland empire on Facebook. Yeah. Hell, yeah. This has got to be the basis for like a TV show called like the Guacamole Mysteries. Right, right.

Right, right. It has to be in contemporary times, someone wakes up with the memories of both the founder of Taco Bell and Sherlock Holmes. I mean, hey, you're the writer, man. Oh, yeah. We're all the writer today. Yeah. All right, let's get to his cocaine use. Oh, okay.

Thank God. We don't want to spend 25 minutes on, don't, I remember they spent a lot of time talking about his violin strings now that we're talking about it, right? Yeah, he did play the violin. A lot of violin talk. I feel like we're ranking the most iconic parts of his. them, it is the deer stalker, the pipe, and then magnifying glass, then violin. Violin only because they didn't want us, the versions that we were given, they really didn't want us to concentrate on the cocaine.

But the cocaine, my page count is awfully high. Cocaine should be between hat and pipe. In my opinion, that should be there. That should be number one on the list. To Sherlock, it was probably cocaine number one. Yeah. And he's like, oh, shit. Yeah.

And in my hat, let me get my other shit on that. So, you're right first. It's in the second Holmes novel, the sign of four, the detective tells Watson that he enjoys a 7% solution because he finds it so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind and he offers some cocaine to Watson. Oh, shit. He finds him with a needle in his arm. He's like, fuck, bro.

He's, uh, Watson's not into it. Oh, it's just cocaine. Okay, that's fine. Oh. Exactly. Oh, seven percent. Oh, well, then. and shit. Let me tie off as well, Mr. Holmes.

Yeah, exactly. It's like the equivalent of a Marlboro light. It's like merely a 7% solution of cocaine. But this was, so it started as like a miracle drug because they didn't have anesthetic that wouldn't put you to sleep in a way that you might not wake up from at the time. And so they're like, this one is good because the person stays awake. Holy shit, actually, they seem like wide awake. Whoa, easy, easy. And so at this time, they weren't just thrown in stories.

There's an 1896 recipe for homemade cold cure that consisted of ground coffee, menthol, powdered sugar, and cocaine. I can't have that much sugar, man. Come on. Yeah. That's easy. It's like when I do a bump, eat a powdered donut, have a coffee, smoke a fucking menthol. Yeah. same thing. Just never stop shitting, I guess.

He eventually kicks the cocaine habit. You don't see it in the original stories, but like... Is there an intervention? Episode? Well, like, Watson's kind of a fucking bummer, and he's like immediately like,

that stuff will kill you, man. Oh, fuck off, Watson. Get the fuck out of here. Yeah. So what you're, what I'm hearing is there's a gap in the canon for Sherlock is rehab, the most annoying person in rehab. Actually, that's been written.

Every possible part of his life has been fleshed out. There's a 1976 film The 7% Solution based on the novel of the same name. In It Holmes gets a little help from Sigmund Freud in getting off of cocaine. Can't stop.

These motherfuckers cannot stop talking and thinking about Sherlock Holmes. It's so, what, like, they have a fucking little church that is just, like, putting pressure, like, it's like the Scientology approach where they have, like, all these famous writers and thinkers who are just spending time thinking about Sherlock Holmes and, like, whether he was a real guy or not. The 7% solution sounds like some story about, like, Reinhardt, Hydrick getting hooked on co. I know.

What the fuck. But, uh, the other thing that I thought was notable from these stories is, like, he's just, It is kind of law and orderish in that he's just like grabbing shit from the headlines, like from around the world. So like cocaine is one of those things because it's just like this thing that everybody's doing or trying or taking out. There's a lot of stories about like the wars, like the evils of empire coming home to ruse. Like people who are injured in foreign wars or like get like fucked up in foreign wars.

The KKK makes an appearance in one. Which side? Yeah, I was going to say. They're the bad guys. So it's actually funny because... He's fiddling with them with a hoda. He treats them like Hydra. Like they have their own like super power essentially where like they keep killing people in the story.

The four orange pips. People keep like dying mysteriously and the KKK is able to like always make it look like an accident. And then like at the end he's like chasing them trying to get them in London. And then like their boat is seen shipwrecked at sea. And it's like the KKK. they have an amazing superpower of like being able to make deaths look like accidents. All these people of color committed suicide. Yeah.

By hanging. Like what the fuck are they even trying to say? You just need a hook, I guess, but yeah, yeah, yeah. That's sort of the opposite of the KKK thing. Yeah, he's just pulling shit from the headlines and just putting them into these like very broad, like good versus evil. So he's like, KKK is this evil. organization and whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And get back

to the cocaine jokes, man. I think I think the KKK for a long time benefited from people just being like, well, fuck, man, they are like so evil and like scary looking. And that like when you look at the actual documents of the time, they're just like the biggest group of like bumbling, dip shit, like tripping over their own dicks out of a sense of inferiority. That's every fascist of all time. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

The fact that we keep getting conquered by them is sort of on us. It is pretty frustrating. His first novel was about Mormonism, like the Mormon, like that he didn't really know what he was doing it. And the first novel, it's called a study in Scarlet, which is a great title. But the book is just like one half Sherlock Holmes mystery. And then the second half, he just like flashes back to the crime happening in Utah. And like Brigham Young just like is a character. who like comes in.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So this is fanfix straight up. This is just like, okay, okay, who do we got? Who's in the news? Yeah, yeah. It's like kind of news fanfic. So, I mean, maybe that's also what contributed to people thinking he was real as though, like,

he was throwing in details of reality in a way that might have. But it's also, it's just law and order, too, just ripped from the headlines. Well, it's law and order free, like, people suing you. Yeah, yeah, but more in the sense of like, that's a thing where people people are like, I, I kind of, this, this is happening sort of ambiently in the culture right now. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. So all the law and order cast probably enough people believe they're real people. That's true. Yeah. Yeah, right. Be like, I want him. Yeah. I want him as a lawyer.

I like, who the fuck is Mariska Hargette? What the fuck? Did you just say to me? But, uh, speaking of ambiently in the culture, just a couple details of like what was going on in the literary world of this time. So after this first. book, which kind of sucks, is like half flashback to Utah, a place he's

never been clearly, like, just written about this church that he, like, doesn't understand at all. Um, he's invited to this dinner with a publisher and it's him and Oscar Wilde and like a couple other writers. And they're like, hey, we, we found this like loophole. We're due to like publishing rights, like, we want to start

publishing novels as like magazines as basically the penny dreadful thing. Um, and so they both get assigned a novel and Doyle turns around the second Sherlock Holmes book, the first good one, the one where it's introduced that he does cocaine, and Oscar Wilde turns around the picture of Dorian Gray. Wow. Yeah. From the same dinner.

Damn. It feels like there's just something in the water at this time and it was cholera. It's cocaine. Yeah, it's like cocaine. It's cholera and cocaine. But I want to circle back to the Dracula thing because, again, these are the two. fictional characters that have been portrayed the most in the history of like film like what you know american film but like these characters uh that are as far as i'm concerned old they're old as

yeah yeah so there's this book homes to sherlock terrible name but uh it's a good book where it's just tells the story about the creation of sherlock homes like by all the different people involved uh like publishers illustrators conan doyle uh there's like like an illustrator who gives us the cap. There's an actor who gives us the pipe. A play years later gives us elementary, my dear Watson. But there's this moment around the time that Doyle is like trying to keep Sherlock dead, where he is writing to this other author's manager.

And they like mentioned that this manager is also like trying to get his own literary career off the ground and had just published a book. And that manager's name is fucking Brom Stoker. And the book he had just written was Dracula. So, like, they, and Conan Doyle's like, oh, by the way, I read your book. Fucking Rips, good job. Pretty good. But, like, that made me, like, realize how weird it is that, like,

these two characters who go on to be the most popular and successful fictional characters of the 20th century are invented at the same time, like, in the same place, basically, like, coming out of the same scene. Which wouldn't be that weird if they were, like, similar. But, like, they couldn't be more different from each other. Like, one creates, like, horror and, like, is, like, just their whole existence. There's both a bunch of honkeys I don't care about. Thank you.

I didn't even know Bram Stoker was Irish. I was like, who's this? Yeah. I guess a fucking name. Abraham Stoker was his name. Yeah. I guess it's probably not a coincidence that cocaine was legal these days. Yeah.

Cocaine was just made legal. And all of a sudden they were like, holy shit. I'm loving these fucking stories, dude. The one guy where the party never ends, Dracula? Yeah. I mean, the idea that, like, he wrote a novel in however quick amount of time is like, okay. Yeah. Cokes out.

Editor didn't have a lot of power. But there's this theory of history called, like, the axial age that points out that basically like Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, all the famous. philosopher, like Plato and Homer and like all these people and then like a bunch of the prophets in the Old Testament all existed in the same century. Like they just on in different parts of the world. But it was basically like all these people who like created these forms of thinking like we're all operating at the same time essentially in like different places. And it's just like I don't know. I think because.

Because of the way we understand history, we like think of it as like individual characters operating, you know, because we like understand things through story. And so we view it as like interweaving stories. But like I feel like there's also, it's like harder to research and even like speculate about because of the shape of like our brains and how we like understand things through stories. But like there's something to an understanding of things as like that. That was just the firmament of the time. Yeah, yeah. Or it could just be like, you know, presumably the ratio of good brains doesn't change that much on earth. But, I mean, it could just be like they were, they preceded like an era of stability and prosperity within which time their stories were lionized and perpetuated.

Yeah. Whereas, you know, Buddha 0.0 just died in a ditch. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That's like it's, we, we tend to, like, prefer the great man theory of history, but it's like a lot of times it's just like a certain confluence of like time and history and like culture dreaming up these things because the moment is right. Like human culture has been baked to the point where this is a thing that they're ready to happen. Like, I call it characters come out of the oven because we also need that because the alternative is thinking that the universe is, is random and that's too scary. So you need it to be, these men were great because their actions made a difference in their fate. Yeah. So we believe that Edison, we believe Edison invented the light bulb because even, and like, ignore the fact that like three people invented the light bulb

at the same time in different places around the world. And, you know, because we just want it to be a thing that we have control over. Elon Musk is the most le epic bacon person who's ever existed. Yeah. We just need to believe that. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. All right. I want to get to Sherlock Holmes' influence on criminology and how we understand crime because it's not so good. His greatest contribution.

Is this maybe his most potent contribution in a way? Could be. So, first of all, like, they advertised his first novel as something detectives should all read. Right. And people also, like, when they tell the story of this, a lot of the times, they'll overstate like how much, like I think English crime fighting was very much in the dark ages. And like, again, he's jumping on things that are like new in that world, like fingerprints and stuff like that. But just to be clear, the first forensic manual titled The Washing Away of Wrongs was published in China in 1247.

And in Germany in 1507, there was a requirement to present and preserve medical evidence in murder cases. It was just like they were just kind of getting around to it in England. Five decades before Holmes debuted, the first English guideline, the King's College Manual Principles of Forensic Medicine were published in 1844, but he, like, it wasn't widely known or popular. So he was just, again, good at seeing what was happening in the world and weaving it into a compelling story where it was like very basic, good versus evil, truth versus chaos.

Well, it's also, I mean, like the same reason a lot of copagam, is, and medical dramas are popular, is that it's very comforting to people to think that these people are both smart and good and right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And like, injustice prevails on some level. Yeah.

And otherwise, you couldn't deal with society if you didn't think that. Yeah. J.M. pointed out that, like, like, a lot of the things that we think of as evidence have, like, been already disproven. Um, there's this, uh, criminology journal in the 80s. that wrote an article called Sherlock Holmes started it all about like the, like celebrating forensics. And then goes on to describe how a suspect's tooth marks were as valid as a fingerprint.

And in 2010's Sherlock Centric Elementary episode, he's testing for bite marks and implying that there's as good as DNA evidence. Bite marks are wholly, wholly subjective. Well, Sherlock did start it all in that modern policing is entirely based off of, like, pseudoscience. That's post hoc reasoning for whatever they want to decide. So they did this test where they discovered that bites produced 23 entirely different marks, each one bearing little resemblance to the rest when they did like tried used 23, they did 23 bites with the same mouth.

And then they had they also like asked somebody to identify bite marks. from the same thing. And of the 100 cases, they examined the analysis reached unanimous agreement on four. Four of a hundred. Great hit rate. Yeah, yeah.

Four percent accuracy. People should lose their freedom over that. Yes. By market is still being used today. And so it's like we talk about the CSI bias where like shows are like, well, you know, it bleeds into like how juries think about things.

They're like, there should be this sort of evidence. And that sort of evidence is exactly right. And I feel like that whole idea of we can definitively prove things with these tactics kind of starts with Sherlock Holmes. I will just, just a couple of the methods that he uses in his stories. He was a believer in physiognomy, which used facial structure to assess character and mental capacity.

Hell yeah. Phrenology. Yeah. the discredited racist pseudoscience involving cranial measurements that was used as a justification for slavery. In the adventure of the blue carbuncle, again, this is the guy that

fucking T.S. Eliot was like, let us go study the sacred text. Holmes observes that a man must be highly intellectual because he wears a big hat. I have no doubt that I'm very stupid, but I must confess that I am unable to follow you. For example, how did you deduce that this man was an intellectual?

For answer, Holmes clapped that. hat upon his head. It came right over the forehead and settled upon the bridge of his nose. It is a question of cubic capacity. A man with so large a brain must have something in it. Swish. Swish. Can't argue with that logic. Barry Bonds was a genius. I mean, he just literally sounds like a cop today. Yeah, exactly. Yes. Like, that's just so smug and so certain but using pseudoscience. I want to get to my favorite example in a second here, but just other methods he used. He solved cases using graphology,

which is the debunked belief that handwriting can determine age, gender, health, and even nationality. Well, I might, I'm not, I feel like a lot of Japanese boomers have the same way they write English, I gotta say. Yeah, I was that my mom and her sisters

all write exactly the same. Of an education system. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the product of an education system. Yeah, you can kind of tell. Because I'm like, man, every, it's funny, man, of there's Japanese people of a certain age.

They have the exact same handwriting. My handwriting and my dad's headwriting is so different because, you know, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Not to say that they'd be like, or they'd be like, this guy's from Michigan. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that old Michigan chicken scratchy's got.

At one point, he's able to solve the case after concluding that two sets of handwriting were made by blood relative. Yeah, hell yeah. He's like, these people are related. Hell yeah. That's so funny because I remember in junior high copy.

the way my friend wrote because I thought it looked cooler too. It's so funny how those things like when I used to do, rather than dot my eyes, you draw circles. I mean, it has like a the grain of truth is you are taught to write and so if you have similar writing as someone, there's something was in common at some point.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But to be like, this is a 41 year old blackenese man. It's, yeah. Nearly a quarter of the 2,6001 people who have been exonerated since 1989 were wrongfully convicted based on false or misleading forensic evidence like bite marks. He also, just another kind of example of his deductive reasoning,

is that he explores the theory that the moods of dogs could be passed down by the moods of owners. So that's, again. So I do just want to stop here and talk about the detective Giuliano Milini from the Amanda Knox documentary. Have you guys seen the Amanda Knox documentary? No. his existence makes me very suspicious

that the history of crime and punishment is just littered with complete idiots ruining the lives of innocent people because they read Sherlock Holmes and believed it a little too hard. So he's the main guy who's like driving the prosecution of Amanda Knox. At one point he deduces that the killer

must have been a woman because the body is covered by a blanket and only a woman would have covered the body because I guess like her delicate nature would prevent her from wanting to look at what she'd just done. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, I remember at the time being like, that sort of bullshit sounds familiar.

And then later in the documentary, they show this, like, B-roll of him. And he's, like, wearing a hunting jacket, smoking this big Sherlock Holmes pipe. And I was like, ah, yes, yes, of course. But I just, I feel like the past 150 years. And it's not, like, just Sherlock Holmes, obviously. like he gave rise to a lot of detective fiction.

And even the story structure where it's like he discovered a incredible, like a thing that would be impossible for him to know. And then he explains exactly how he did it. Right. Like I think the thing that's seductive about Sherlock Holmes is the thing that is seducing these dipshits. Yeah. Well, it's also like it's dipshits who gravitate towards law enforcement who are extra

dipshitty. Yes. And like this makes them feel like they can do a thing. which is, you know, the whole thesis, I guess, of what we've been talking about. But it's just like, yeah. Like a real, an actual smart person, if Sherlock Holmes were actually smart, you know, you pepper this with, well, I suspect this. I don't know for sure, but like, it's the true wisdom.

That's like, yeah. Right. And then he passed out. He just ends up becoming like a pickup artist for cops. Yeah. It does have pickup artist energy. The way he can just fucking A to B. to see crime solved dude

oh imp dude and he's on a pipe fuck you and the hat he's a fucking pickup artist too and like people would consult people would consult Arthur Conan Doyle on real crimes like the police would occasionally be like well sir you are obviously

our greatest mind should be noted that he later became a major proponent of spiritualism and he was famously taken in by the cotton glee fairies hoax where it was like somebody just did it's like a double exposure

yeah yeah double exposure he fucking believed he made the place so he went to the strand the place that published the Sherlock Holmes things and was like I demand that you publish these photos he's like the recognition of their existence

will jolt the material 20th century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud and will make it an admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life. See, this is the building on culture thing, because at least he knew to keep his mouth shut about trans people more than

the pervasive culture, I suppose. Yeah, yeah. At least this was the hill that he died on that he was wrong about. Yeah. There's a fucking real, man. There's a real man. Ghosts are real, man. They're out here. He, like, spiritualism is the thing.

Thank you. Super producer, Catherine, just put the photograph in the chat. Yeah. It's pretty pretty convincing to. I'm shocked. You'd put your parent in a home if they fucking sent you this picture honestly. Now he'd be like, oh, come on.

Well, it is like such a cute little art project, but it is crazy to be like, this is real on, I guess, Victorian Facebook. His family like went on to really dive into the spiritualism. Like that was the main legacy. Like his kids lived their lives, like, taking orders from his ghost via medium. So, like, they would, like, all go to a medium and be like, father, what should we do?

Like, he'd tell them, like, whether they should have surgery or not, like, when to get married. And then, like, one of them was, like, marrying, like, a Kardashian of the time. And she was, like, it was crazy. Like, his wife just was obviously just telling them whatever she wanted. She was like, your father. said via the medium that you actually can't have that money to buy a race. God. Yeah. Yeah. But his sons were just like rich fuck boys.

Hell yeah. Good. Stupid asses, all of them. I mean, I think obviously the pervasive lesson in all of this is money poisons your brain so quickly. Yeah, right? Like generational wealth is bad. Gassed up on your own shit like that. Yeah. Yes. But yeah. So just the idea that they all wanted to believe in is deduct. right, which is a deductively valid argument is one in which it can't be the case that the premises are true and the conclusion false. And Sherlock would use a combination of induction and abduction and then infer truths and make logical guesses. But this has subsequently been dubbed the Holmesian fallacy, which is a logical error of basing a conclusion on the belief that you have eliminated all other possibilities. but everybody is said.

Hey, this goes back to one of my first times on, but this is just a variant of the Gish Gallup. Just say enough bullshit that people can't really follow or it takes too long to debunk and then you're not. He is gilloping his way into literary history in every one of these stories. He's just as well he's in, of course.

Sherlock, this was a hate crime. This person was lynched. Node was a suicide. This person was very mad at Christianity. as they burnt this cross on their own lawn. Unbelievable. Unbelievable the things that you see, Watson. But yeah, the explanation,

the human being doesn't exist who could eliminate all possible alternatives. I'd say this is especially true of Holmes who was weirdly specific in his knowledge. I think scientists would call him spectrumy today, but for... I think a scientific term, term. But there's a part of one of the stories where Watson is like, well, of course,

the earth revolves around the sun. And he's like, not only did I not know that. I'm also going to immediately forget it because that information doesn't help me solve my crimes. Oh, yes. He was just like, oh, I only care about the things that help this plot specifically for the next 200 pages. Yeah, I kind of remember that vibe. They did that briefly in the Cumberbatch one. There's like something he doesn't know and the whole thing is it is very like phrenology-esque. It's like there's just limited capacity of this dome, you know. I can't. I have to delete some megabytes.

Big hat. Big thinking. Big thinking. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. There's this one example in one of the, like I only read, reread three, but like they're just full of so much bullshit. There's one part where he's like, well, it's as obvious to me is the fact that your window is on the right side of your room, Watson.

And Watson's like, what, what? And he's like, well, of course, I knew like basically because you're the direction that you face when you shave must be this way and because of the direction of the sun at this time of year. And Watson's like,

God damn, man, you're so smart. But that would, like, it doesn't even make, if you think about it for a second, like you also have to know what direction his sink his face, like what direction he's facing? Like, no, no, you don't. No, I don't see.

Don't start picking up. It's just smart sounding bullshit. It's fucking crazy. But I feel like in the same way, we always talk about how like easy it was to lie in the pre-internet age. Like you go back even fucking a century from there and you're out here being like, oh yeah, dude, I can tell your fucking bathrooms, cut the thing over here. They're like, oh my God, this guy's so confidently saying this bullshit.

Yeah. Yet we don't collectively have the savvy to immediately identify it. He's just like a very impressive con man. Yeah. Well, or I mean, it's just like these books happen to capture the times he was right. Sure. Exactly. Okay.

That's the Sherlock we don't have. Is the 99, like, thousand times when he does this and people are like, nah. Uh-uh. I don't think so, man. Yeah. That actually sounds like bullshit to me. Are you okay, man? You're like track marks all on your arm.

It's everything all right. Yeah. I do. Sorry. I'm only. I'm down to 7% now. So, yeah, I'm weaning myself on it. I think that's the highest amount you're allowed to have.

Yeah, I'm down to it. Well, all right. I'm going to do 6.8 later. So I'll be right. If you boil it a little bit before you do it. Yeah, it's a little bit. One thing that I do think, you know, if we think of like an icon's kind of reputation being a thing that kind of comes down through like sort of a cultural,

natural selection, one thing that I think was. probably beneficial is that right as he's being published, the Jack the Ripper crimes are happening. And so people are... Yeah, they want a superhero. Yeah, they want a superhero. It's one of the most famous unsolved crimes is happening. So it's like creating the need for Sherlock Holmes in reality.

Right. So like, you know, just all the things that, you know, he gets designed and then redesigned and then redesigned. and made like more and more iconic. He has the most famous unsolved crime of maybe the century happen as he's becoming popular. And so he has like,

and then he has like whatever weird ingredients were in the firmament of like making culture ready for timeless icons. Yeah. People just watch to, I was actually thinking about, because I think my, probably not my,

I don't know if he's my favorite, but my most like watched Sherlock Holmes very, variant is House. Yes. And if you think about House, really the fiction there is imagine your insurance

approving four doctors working on your face for the time. Just fucking imagine that. Four doctors all the time. Right. That's all they're thinking about. And rather than cocaine, it was opioids, right? For Dr. House.

Yeah, that's right. He did have a pill problem, which was appropriate to his time, you know? But Dr. like the pitch for House was like, but what if Sherlock Holmes was a doctor? Which it's like, well, the original Sherlock Holmes was a doctor.

That's actually where the idea came from. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also, you're just talking about medical diagnoses right now. Yeah. Whoa, dude, what if he was like a doctor and detective? Yeah, that's kind of the gig, man. He's figuring out what's wrong with people. Pretty good.

There have been like a bunch of crossovers with like weird. Sherlock Holmes in Dallas where somebody wrote a book in which Sherlock Holmes was there to solve the JFK assassination. It was JFK assassination. A great example of the false notion that like you know, you look at a thing and you can figure out. It's like actually they

so many people, everyone has looked at this thing and has gotten worse at understanding what has happened. I feel like the umbrella man would have really thrown Sherlock for a loop. The guy like opened an umbrella on a sunny day in Dallas right before

he got his head blown off. And I knew he must have been from an upper latitude, perhaps Russian in nature due to his need for shade from the intense sun. It's fucking Dracula, dog. He would have died, bro. Dracula. And then he's also crossed over with Batman, which I will say, Batman is the other side of the coin, like proving how hard it is to write this sort of shit. Because Batman is always like the world's greatest detective. and I've never once seen in a movie or like in a comic book or anything

didn't do a good job like yeah it really feels like a self-ascribed nickname the world's great detective you know self-proclaimed you got your girl killed bro oh fuck shit god damn it well not again he also mostly is like well I'm a billionaire and I built this thing that just tells me the answer, right, right. Yeah. You know, most of the time. That's right.

And then we, of course, come to sexuality and erotica, which people have launched. So he is kind of asexual throughout the stories and in most of the iterations. But some people were detecting some sexual chemistry between him and Watson. So there was a 1971 paperback. So J.M. McNabb went to, our writer researcher, went to this room at the Toronto Public Library that is like the Sherlock Holmes room. And it has, it's like set up to look like Sherlock's study. And it just has like all like just a room full of the sort of like literature that we're talking about, not just Sherlock Holmes stories, but like stories about Sherlock Holmes. And he found this one. The sexual adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Where else are you going to find sentences like my own. erection was threatening to rend the rugged tweed of my breeches. Yeah.

Lend the rugged tweet of my breeches. It was actually credited to Jay Watson, but it was actually written by prolific erotic novelist Larry Townsend. But queer Holmes Watson fanfic took off with the Benedict Cumberbatch BBC Sherlock show. Oh, sure. Oh, after that.

Okay. Yeah, yeah. Benedict Cumberbatch said it's always like one of them is tired one comes back from work the other's horny a lump appears in his trousers and then they're at it it's usually me getting it I'm biting Watson's dog tags

he felt like he was like trying to make it sound dismissive and then like kind of got carried away yeah he's whispering my ear I'm whining that he's always leaving dishes in the sink that he's not washing it's I forgot that Benedict Cumberbatch, one really leans into Watson's war

stuff. Yeah. Well, so the original Watson was like a war injured like former soldier who had just returned from Afghanistan to show how much things that changed. Yeah. Right, because that's what they do in the show is he still gets injured in Afghanistan. Yeah,

yeah. But I think that's a good place to leave it, guys. Sherlock Holmes. Dude, I want to party with this guy. Seems like a good time. I can't. I will say. No. It's like that Fiona Apple story about like this is why you realize that.

Hang on with Clinton, Tarantino. Yeah, this is why you need to stop doing cocaine. This is what you sound like. Yeah. I just want to see the guy shoot up cocaine and be like, let's go fucking solve a crime. I'm like, what the fuck? Check it out. I can tell from the way you're standing.

I like this guy's fucking nuts, dude. Let me video this shit. Yeah. He's like taking apart and putting back together these yards. He's just like, half the time he's jacking off in that study. I don't know what the fuck is doing in there. I will say, I do think

a part of the appeal is like how fucking cozy that study looks though. Like, it looks so nice in there with that fire and like, it just, it has a nice little look about it. And the cocaine. Cocaine feels warm. Marvelling at the, marvelling at the

superpowers of the KKK. Yes, exactly. How do they do it? Watch it. Damn, they're good. Andrew T. Thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you, follow you? I don't know, man. Don't follow me. To deuce how to find me.

Yes. Give them your name. Andrew T. on social media, but we've been enjoying this show Starter Trek on suboptimal pods.com. Yeah, it's really fun. We've been watching Star Trek episodes. My co-host, Tony Newsome. There's a writer on Starfleet Academy.

So, and actor. and she was in lower-dex. You get it. The funniest. That was a bad way of explaining who she is. Anyway. So we never brought up the fact that you're related to Sherlock Holmes. Well, I'm related to the Chinese Sherlock Holmes.

Yeah. That's the only, the only T-Sash-D in Chinese literary history is basically Chinese Sherlock Holmes, Judge D. And he is very, he's similar methods. Tong Dynasty. Well, yeah, his whole thing is he does all the deduction shit, but because he is like an imperial magistrate most of the plots end with and then I had the suspect tortured and he confessed

so more of a modern American yeah more accurate to real policing yeah yeah so NYPD yes that's right there it is miles where can people find you at Miles of Gray you know do you know the other shows

but check out in footy and I talk about soccer there which is also English like Charlotte Holmes and like Michael Carrick. Yeah, Michael Carrick, yeah, mate. He took the free points on us, yeah, bro. I'm going to be right back to tell you the stuff that I forgot to mention in this conversation. The notebook dumb. I'll be back in a minute. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm in Malmilaic Lamouba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking point.

Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia at Martin's Almermata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people would die. In 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should, and it will blow your mind.

Listen to the A building on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you do in the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks, and we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff, identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore, loss

that changes you, purpose when success isn't enough, peace when your mind won't slow down, fake when it's complicated. Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Bowen-Yen. And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys' Five Rings podcast in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina 2026 winner Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Boen, hi, Matt.

Hey Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences from our hearts to your ears. Listen to two guys, five rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What if mind control is real? If you can control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?

When you look at your car, you're going to be. become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka neurolinguistic programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology.

Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a new age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all, NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to mind games on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

All right. That was our conversation with Andrew T. about Sherlock Holmes on the spectrum off his ass on cocaine. Thanks to Miles and Andrew and to our researcher J.M. McNabb. This is the

No, no, no, no, no book dump where I talk about the things that I forgot to mention or wished I had more time to talk about. One thing that I wish I had more time to talk about is the Axial Age. That idea that I mentioned that is implied by the Axial Age, I guess,

that big developments in history are driven, not by individual men, but by these large movements that happen because the time has just come, you know? Zykeist is ready for that invention or artistic movement or philosophical idea. The book where Carl Jaspers introduces this idea is called the origin and goal of history.

Like world history is just this one movement working toward a singular goal, even though it feels completely disconnected. That's at least the thesis or a helpful way, he thinks, for looking at history, the world history. We're all working towards one goal in various places without realizing it.

There's a similar idea in Vonnegut's the Siren of Titan. But in that case, the goal is like being beamed into our head or some shit. I forget exactly. But anyways, the other place that that idea had occurred to me, and when I first started reading about the Axial Age again, was doing the research for the Maryland Mom Row episode. And I was like thinking about the fact that all these mysterious deaths happened in the U.S. in the 1960s while doing the Maryland Monroe episode. Like, she has this mysterious death, then

the Kennedys, then Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X. I think I'm getting these out of order. Elvis John Lennon. It's just this rash of young, beautiful, important people dying violently or mysteriously

that, I don't know, in that case, it could just be the CIA killing a bunch of people that they were scared of. But, yeah, I don't know. In this case, I do think it was interesting because I was researching already and kept seeing this idea that like Sherlock Holmes and Dracula are neck and neck and way out in front as the two fictional characters that have been depicted the most in the history of film. And they were invented by two guys in the same year in the same area, the same town. And invented before film has even been invented. And then they go on to dominate 20th century.

cinema. Just weird, interesting. One more historical anecdote for the notebook dump that I wanted to hit. So I wanted to make sure I wasn't being unfair to the legacy of Sherlock. I had some anecdotal stuff about cops thinking they could Sherlock their way into solving crimes, which is always dangerous because cops are often the most confident about the stuff they're wrong about. They're strong and wrong, and you generally can't tell them shit. But I didn't have like a direct link between Sherlock and modern cop. So I asked JM McNabb, a researcher, to see what he could find. First of all, he did great work on this doc.

And second of all, he did come back with first that article on forensics that I think I mentioned in the conversation that starts like, I think the article starts. Sherlock started at all and then goes into like how bite analysis and stuff like that is infallible. Turns out very fallible, highly subjective, terrible form of evidence. And then he came back with this story that I'm about to tell you about Sherlock and Conan Doyle being sort of spiritual ancestors to what is essentially the main bad guy in our iconograph series. so far, the FBI. I feel like across all the different stories, the FBI

keeps coming up. They hated and fucked with everyone from Einstein to Maryland Monroe as soon as those people had a progressive idea essentially. So anyways, here's the story, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, when he wasn't begrudgingly

writing absolute classics of the mystery genre, was out in the world, hanging out with other famous people and chasing ghosts and fairies, but hanging out with other famous people. And at some point he meets this famous, uh,

self-promoting private detective, William J. Burns. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle falls for Burns's bullshit hook line and sinker. So Burns is a former member of the Secret Service who left the Secret Service to start his own detective. agency made a name for himself after being hired to solve the 1910 Los Angeles Times bombing, which was bombed due to the editor's anti-union agenda. Burns solved that case via blatantly illegal means, kidnapping one conspirator and keeping him

in a Chicago house for a week in order to extract a confession without having to, quote, waste time in fighting habeas corpus proceedings. And then he tracks down the other suspects to Indiana and brings them to California without any legal authority. And Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, presumably buying into whatever smart police work, he's retconned onto that story instead of just being like, yeah, so I kidnapped them and, like, scared them until they told me what I wanted to hear. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is like, wow, this is America's Sherlock Holmes. Burns is also brought in to work on the Wall Street bombing of 1920.

doesn't solve that. But what he does is aggressively hype the fact that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called him the American Sherlock Holmes, just aggressively self-mythologizing his own abilities, writing true crime stories based on his cases for detective magazines,

starring in a silent movie about one case called the $5 million counterfeiting plot, which included a cameo from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself. he eventually becomes the head of the Bureau of Investigation in 1921, which is soon to be the FBI. So he is like the proto J. Edgar Hoover. Unfortunately for him, he is forced to resign in disgrace in 1924 due to his role in the Teapot Dome scandal, which was just basically the Harding administration selling naval reserves to private oil companies.

but Burns literally had his agents following Democrats who tried to stop them, reading their mail, listening to their phone calls in order to try and dig up potential ammunition for smear campaign. So, yeah, basically, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle co-signed a guy who was essentially the proto, Jay Edgar Hoover, who went on to be the main antagonist of many of the lives that we've been covering in our iconogram. series. By the way, speaking of Conan Doyle befriending problematic American detectives, he also met William Pinkerton and was so impressed with him that he turned to the final Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, into a pro-Pinkerton anti-union story inspired by their infiltration of the Molly Maguars. So not on the best side of history, but very entertaining. That's going to be

it for Sherlock, cool character, indirectly. responsible for a lot of bad shit. If I missed anything on this or any other icons that you think is interesting, by all means, let me know in the Discord or on Twitter. And I'll mention it in these notebook dumps in the future. Up next, we have an icon who is no friend to the police. Hell, he once pulled up from the logo and shot two of them for harassing a black man. Next week, Miles, Molly Lambert and I take a look at Tupac Shakur.

It's a very long one, a lot of great shit in there. So hopefully you tune back in for that one. I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I enjoyed researching it. And I'll talk you all next week. Bye, bye. 1969 Malcolm and Martin are gone America is in crisis

and at Morehouse College the students make their move These students including a young Samuel L. Jackson locked up the members of the board of trustees including Martin Luther King's senior It's the true story of protests and rebellion in black American history

that you'll never forget I'm Hans Charles I'm in A-Mulba Listen to the A building on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the last couple years,

didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by black people because of what happened in Alabama? This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks black history and culture with comedy, clarity, and conversations that shake the status quo.

The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019 and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hair styles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B, from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, is where culture meets the soul. Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers. Most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to if you can hear me on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Bowen-Yin.

And I'm Matt Rogers. During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan Quartina 2020s, we've been joined by some of our friends. Hi, Bowen, hi, Matt, hi, Matt. Hey, Elmo. Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen. Hi, Cookie. Hi. Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experience,

from our hearts to your ears. Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.