Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 271: Ouija Board Terms of Service (w/ Special Guest: Jack Wagner)

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

Aaron and Tom check in on the results of the Warnock/Walker runoff and an attempted coup of Germany by a descendent of the Kaiser; Tarence and Tom interview Jack Wagner of "Yeah, But Still" about his new show "Otherworld"

Well, what else has been going on? Any monarcal coup d'etat? Anything like that? Well, we got two political developments, I guess. Two returns, I guess. We had our boy Raphael Warnock. Raphael Warlock. Warlock.

Raphael Warnock Raphael Warnock Warnock there's a sports talk radio show let's tell the conservative station everyone but like sometimes I forget to like cut it off after that so I'll just be like driving down the road and I'll just hear like you're the most bat

shit stuff and somebody had pointed that out the other night like it wasn't coast to coast but it was one of those like kind of coast to coast like programs but they're like like Warnock is like suspiciously close to Warlock and like they were trying to like make this like oh like he was like he was like a uh like embedded with the devil type of shit like he was like a like a crypto occultist or something I forget it was like i was like man there's no there's no frontiers these people won't try to get to for their own now man especially give it especially

give the dude is like a pastor or a pastor whatever a minister man but uh but what else man you set me uh you alerted me to the fact that uh what, what's his name, man? Prince what? Out of Germany? Oh, what was it? I don't even know. They still had a monarchy, dog. Prince. I forget. Maybe it was.

Prince Wilhelm. It's probably something. It was either Wilhelm or Heinrich. There's only like two German names. Yeah. German Prince Heinrich VIII, Rus of Gers, was arrested this morning, suspected of planning a coup in Germany with at least 24 other people. Says the plan was to attack the German parliament in Berlin and insert the prince as new head of state, king slash emperor of Germany. Oh, my God. What do you think about that, man?

Because, like, I know that we're living in an age of not just the e-crisis, but like, I mean, the e-crisis is part of it, like futurelessness. So everybody's trying to do the return shit, you know? So, like, I mean, I can't blame the dude for maybe, you know, wanting to, like, snatch back some form of glory, you know?

Here's where I land on it. Where was this energy at from, say, oh, I don't't know 1918 to 1945 i mean like that's what you could have did some lesser evilism you know and let there be a got away with it yeah they get away with that shit but apparently he's a uh somebody say he's a descendant of the kaiser man i have here's the thing about european monarchy i don't get like they're all related to each other yes regardless of country like the english royals are related to the english royals are related to the spanish royals are related to the dutch

whatever yeah yes watch repeat very cursed system i mean bro it's like the worst like uh thanksgiving argument or fight you've ever seen for centuries you know yeah dude you imagine like you're sitting there at a a table and everybody's eating drumsticks and drinking from a chalice you know drinking mead yeah drinking mead and what's the other one uh i don't know and then there's like What's the other one People drink all the time It's weird like that Like barley or some shit Like that

All of Everybody at this table Is horribly disfigured From generations of inbreeding You know what I mean It's just Riddled with syphilis too Well

Here's the thing That always gets me mad about it Right It's like Everybody like makes fun of like Hillbillies being inbred And like that's the joke right It's like everybody like makes fun of like hillbillies being inbred and like that's the joke right it's like oh you fuck your cousins or whatever whatever it's like if you grew up in the 90s the two biggest sex symbols of the 90s were prince

william and prince harry both of which are the products of generations of inbreeding you know what i mean generations of inbreeding that launched empires man yeah did all kinds of unspeakable horror in the world you know so just think about that next time you take it you know you punch down at the he punched out at the uh at the southern at the hillbilly yeah oh man yeah i don't know man i just when i saw that it just uh i mean what a way to go out you know because it's at the end of the year and like the prince of germany trying to start a coup to reinstate i mean what would the united states even do in that situation i feel like most people just let it rock you know well i mean you start like yeah that's the one thing you could do is just let him get mobbed.

You know, just let the regular military just take him out. But like, you know, yeah, I don't know what you do with it about that. Like, I'm sure if you're like some needle dick sitting at the Pentagon, you didn't have that on your bingo card. You know what I mean? Yeah. That's a curveball. And they said he had like... What did they say his numbers were?

What? The number of people he had? He had 3,000 people or 3,000 guns ready to ride for him. With 24 people? God damn, dude. 24? They were going to overthrow...

Yeah, well, he was planning with at least 24 people. That's what I should say. It wasn't the 24 people that were going to overthrow yeah well he was planning with at least 24 people that's what i should say it wasn't the 24 people that were gonna pick up arms but i mean who's gonna pick up arms though okay what do you do in that situation you cart him off to jail i mean like theoretically theoretically i mean is this man gonna get in court and try to like plead some divine right of kings bullshit like some 300 year old like law some shit like that yeah like what happens if the queen like pulls off january 6th you know what i mean oh shit like that because this is kind of a little bit what it was you know what i mean well i mean that's like that's like that would be like moving out of your old

house and then you go back and like you know what i'm saying that you try to like barometer some shit like that you know what i mean that's essentially what she's trying to do she's like nah i'm gonna get back in there oh my god oh my god man yeah man i don't get it i don't get monarchies i mean i guess in the united states we have our own monarchy right i mean not really not literally but like aesthetically you know in the way that people look at like you know or celebrities i guess even better example yeah yeah it's true it's like uh yeah we're we can grandstand all we want about king heinrich ferdinand the seventh of prussia or whatever here but but really and truly we have the same thing it's like and it's also too like and it's it just feels like i don't know if you've been keeping up with

this much any but like like you know the story about like how aoc was like she was like taking amtrak money yeah and then wait wait hold on wait wait she was taking amtrak money. Yeah. Wait, wait, hold on. Wait, wait. She was taking Amtrak money? Yeah, she took like, I forget what it was, like $20,000 in like money from Amtrak or something like that. Like pilfered, like the public coffers from Amtrak? Well, I guess, I don't know if it was like they could do to a reelection or whatever it was. Okay. It's like Amtrak money.

And then like, obviously, you know, famously, she kind of turn coded the rail workers and all this stuff. Yeah. And it's like, I mentioned this to Terrence like on the last show, but it's like, it's just an amazing thing to me. And all this calculus is like these people can't even get a very niche subset of workers seven days of paid sick leave. Absolutely. And yet we're supposed to be excited about or not we're supposed to be excited about i don't know if we're not considering himself part

of the squad or not i don't not nah but he is supposed to be like the one yeah squad adjacent yeah he's like look at he's like looking inside of the squad hangout you know like on the outside with his hands on the window look at it you know what i mean exactly i mean dog it made me think about like because i voted yesterday man and i mean my mom came back so she honestly i wasn't gonna go vote dog but she came back and dragged me to the polls because she was so excited that she came back from ethiopia and uh came back the day before the runoff so she could vote right and drag me to the polls dog and i'm like pissed i'm like a little bit like hungover and shit and when we get there we gotta show our id and yo that pisses me off because in new york you didn't need to show your id you know yeah you just like they ask you to but i don't think it's the law yeah so you don't, you didn't need to show your ID, you know? Yeah. Kentucky, like, they ask you to, but I don't think it's the law.

Yeah. So you don't have to. Well, I'm not sure. They may have changed that at some juncture, but I think I remember just hearing that, like, you didn't have to. Yeah, yeah. They ask you for it anyway. I don't know.

Well, down here, you you have because i went there before when i first moved down here and i didn't have my id and i had to go back home and get it but like what i'm saying is like i go there and vote man and like i just have this bad taste in my mouth look at you and they say well actually mr thorpe we have a couple of missions that you have to complete before we let you vote before we let you vote you gotta go to east agha to some shit yeah i need you hey i need you to go to Little Five Points and get me a bag of jelly beans, all butterscotch flavored. And hop back to your polling station in Lithonia on one leg. We need you to find the roundest, most beautiful peach in all of Georgia and bring it back and then you can vote.

Yeah, and then you can vote. and bring it back and then you can vote. Yeah, and then you can vote. Nah, man. It's like just going in there and thinking like, as you said, this so-called squad, these democratic socialists, whatever they call themselves, and they couldn't even help

this small subset of people. What pisses me off, man, are the excuses. People make excuses for them. They're democrats. You don't have to make any excuses besides like that that's just what it is man well you don't have to be like some sort of high level politics genius to see that alc sort of making her matriculation into like a more mainstream probably more palatable for the average democrat type candidate you know what i mean like that's and that's like that's

her ambition is nothing that should be lost on us i mean i can remember going and watching this uh green new deal movie that like interviewed like these kids from all over the country about like you know what they see their future being all this stuff and they had like alc do a voiceover on it and like it was like you know she was like sort of looking out to the future and one of the things she said was like being the first like i forget what it was uh president of the united states i don't think it was woman president because i think hillary was still kind of in the mix yeah yeah so even even in her even in her imagination of a better world, Hillary still becomes president. Her herself, AOC, becomes president.

Because president. Okay, I know what you're talking about. It was a Green New Deal type of video thing that they had did about like a- I think it might have been a Sunrise Movement video, possibly. I think it was something they put out. But she's in it like- So her ambition has always been there, right? Like she wants to become president of the United States,

which is, you know, whatever. But, like, you know, at a certain point, we had to probably figure that, like, the fix was going to be in and she was going to have to do her, like, quasi-hill turn. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. She was going to have to kiss the ring and pay fealty to the godfather, Nancy Pelosi.

Yeah, that's right. Joe Biden, man. So it seems like Rashida's the only solid one. Ethan Ilya kind of screwed the pooch on this one, right? Yeah, man. Ilhan, too. I mean, Rashida's always been the only cool one, in my opinion, man. Maybe just something about being from, what, Detroit or Michigan?

Part of it is she's never going to be in danger of losing that seat like she'll be oh no as long as she wants to be there oh she can reign she can run for like a thousand years if she wanted to in that seat yeah yeah yeah no question about it so i feel like it's probably like we're grading her on a curve a little bit because she doesn't have to worry about re-election ever you know yeah yeah she's like i'm gonna vote however i want because like i'm still getting re-elected right so she could she could just kind of let her metaphorical nuts hang when she wants to. You know what I mean? But the others, I feel like, are kind of in that plan not to lose kind of shit. Yeah.

It makes you make all kinds of political errors. It makes you a little too conservative. Yeah, man. I mean, I saw Jamal Bowman. I hate that motherfucker, man. He's the corpiest. You hate that motherfucker, man. He's like, he's the corniest. You see that Neil Long post that he had? Oh, where he was like publicly thirsting.

Publicly thirsting. And then had the nerve to be like, oh, everybody, like basically everyone said, yo, you're thirsty as fuck. He was like, oh, I just can't appreciate like Neil Long or something. I'm like, bro, come on. Come on. You can't apologize i can see you dog yeah you just keep it going bro but i'll be like he uh i'll just like just an example of like how removed and detached these people are from regular people like i know you on twitter man you know

using twitter as like a means to speak personally uh to uh not just your constituents but like masses of people i get it but he made this twitter thread about how why they voted the way they did with the railroad thing and it's like dog who's reading this bro like forget the fact that most people are not even on twitter but even the people that you want to try to speak to their minds are already made up you know what i mean yeah from the minute that you made to try to speak to, their minds are already made up. You know what I mean? Yeah. From the minute that you made that vote. This is also kind of one of those zero-sum things.

It's like you're either with it or you're not. You know, there's no, like, no matter how much magical nuance they try to paint there, it's like, do you support the workers or do you not? And this is not like a massive ask either. You know what I mean? So it's, you know, in some ways it's even more egregious. I mean, I saw a lot of people sort of compare, either you know what i mean so it's and you know in some ways it's even more egregious i mean i saw a lot of people sort of compare like what biden's done here with what reagan did in the

80s with air traffic controllers who were federal employees right so like madden is like actively inserting himself in like you know a privately traded kind of thing which is even worse you know in some ways it's like he's actually going the extra mile to bust up any extra strike whereas like reagan it's like for better or worse you know what i mean it's like and obviously it's worse but like the president has like control over federal work exactly for employees we're talking about private yo you're so right man because like he keeps calling himself the bet the most pro-labor president which is like an oxymoron but even that being said is like the best pro you can say best pro-labor presidents like fdr it was like a hands-off approach oftentimes you know what i mean like they just

let workers and capital like kind of like you know what i'm saying like kind of tough it out but this situation you're right like he intervened in a situation where it's like dog you can just for capital yeah for example like over overextended his like reach to intervene for capital it's like he's militantly anti-life yeah oh my god man i don't know that shit is just crazy man i like uh just saw like i was watching the news and saw them like talking about averted a strike you know and this implication that it's like the onus is on the workers yeah you know i mean it's like oh little jimmy is not gonna get his christmas presents you know because like fucking joe over there you know how to be the scraggly fucking railroad worker you know yeah yeah like he wants to be sick days i don't know a friend of mine from california sent me this

article and it was like uh biden signs legislation to prevent railroad strike. I was like, yeah, that's one way to look at it. That's one way to look at it. You know, like he was like doing this great, like this great compromising job. The way it reads is like he did this great compromising job and made all parties happy and not union busted, you know? Exactly, exactly, exactly. Like he was like, what is it, man?

Like King Solomon, I guess guess yo when uh these two people came to him with a child and said we both have ownership over this child he's like all right just cut that shit in half and gave them both yeah that's what they think joe biden did my favorite characterization of solomon in the bible is that uh king King Solomon had a weakness for strange women. Yeah. Who among us, brother? Like crazy fatals? Yeah, who among us, brother?

Who among us, man? Oh, shit. My brother. We got a good show today. We're going to send it over to our interview we did with mr jack wagner of uh yeah but still pod fame and also the new uh potty's got out called other world that me and terrence got to chat him up a little bit about but uh yeah before we send it over there we we wait

what you got for you got anything else for the people out there shit man uh shit i do got something else i kind of want to plug if that's okay uh i keep forgetting to do it but uh i do another podcast everybody loves communism with uh jamie peck and my friend jorge rocha and uh people should check that shit out man we actually did we talked a little bit about it but we actually uh talked to max alvarez and mel buehrer about the railroad strike for like two and a half hours last night man and like look every time i say like hey we're only gonna do an hour you know you know it's always ends up being like a two hour long conversation where i'm like sweating throughout that shit my glass of water is empty like i feel like yo i need a

catheter on me. Unfog your glasses and stuff. Unfog my glasses. It was a really good episode, man. Very angering and a bit inspiring. People check out that podcast. The episode should be out probably next week or some shit. Everybody loves comedy. Check it out.

Check that out. Let's get to the interview. All right. Check it out. Yeah. Check that out. And yeah, let's get to the interview. All right. Boom, boom. Thank you. yeah you yeah you're about to enter um a world of no clear purpose get ready no i mean i'm used to it so uh that's like what i'm used to so don't worry you know jack i was just listening to your show other world which is what we're going to be talking about a little bit today yes and i was just listening to an episode set in Hawaii.

And once again, before we get too far down the road, I'm always the guy that I don't like to get far down any road. I like to take my time. Have y'all seen these stories about there's a volcano currently erupting in Hawaii, right? And there's like rivers of lava. You're thinking about liver king but there's also this phenomenon right now called vog have y'all heard of this no vog huh yeah it's basically i don't know i don't know if it's like sounds like the singer of a Swedish death metal band. Yeah, it's like an indecipherable spelling of the name. He burned a church in 1996

and he was... It's a form of air pollution that results when sulfur dioxide and other gases and particles emitted by an erupting volcano react with oxygen and moisture in the presence of sunlight. And so, it's basically like i guess it's kind of like you're inhaling fire i don't know that's terrible yeah that's what's that what's that i've not heard of that though

what's that doing like uh to your lungs and shit is Is it a bad thing? Is it like smog but volcano, so vog? Yeah, exactly. Okay, okay. I think it's probably good for your lungs because if I have this correct, carbon, sulfur is good for your lungs, right? You wanna breathe as much. Is it what?

That sounds right. I don't know. Why don't you give it a shot and let me know how it goes. Report back. That Hawaii story is crazy, too. I'm hoping to get more from Hawaii eventually. Yeah, it was like a it's almost

like a Twin Peaks thing. It's like he entered some sort of other, it's like a room. It's like a realm. I it's like he entered some sort of other it's like a room is like a realm i don't we i still don't know um what happened to him like not saying that to try to be dramatic or something but um that's like one of these only one of the only episodes where like i don't even really have a guess as to what happened to him. Like I don't even have like a hunch. I mean,

I kind of have like the vaguest hunch of like what type of thing happened to him, but he kind of, yeah, he like kind of disappeared and, or just like kind of like jumped to a different area in time. So let's tee, let's tee this up.

I guess for those that don't know, Mr. Jack Wagner's our guest today. He is the co-host of The Great Yeah But Still, which was, I guess, my first exposure to y'all. What I think was probably one of y'all's Halloween episodes from a few years ago. I think the very first one you and Brandon did,

I think, back in the day. To be very clear, just me. Well you yeah you know brandon is not spooky yeah yeah that's not me taking the credit but it is what was always a rogue venture on my part which is kind of funny that it came to this because like i remember five years ago in the first year of doing yeah but still which is a comedy podcast like saying to him at the end of an episode like oh Halloween's coming up like should we do something and we were like kind of think of ideas I'm like maybe I'll try to find somebody that has a ghost story and so I did a post and got so many replies but I remember just being like dude I'm gonna do this thing basically don like, dude, I'm going to do this thing.

Basically, don't worry about it. I'll do the Halloween week. I got it. And he was like, oh, awesome. Okay. And it's just funny because the rest is history. I haven't stopped. I think Terrence is my Brandon.

I think he, whenever I've dabbled in the spooky stuff, he's just like, oh, yeah, for sure, man. Okay. Yeah, because you have your own spooky, that's you who have the spooky podcast. Yeah, we're kind of rebooting under something else after some other things. We're trying to figure out how to kind of.

No, I mean, no great secret to it. I think kind of, well, I mean, mean again to also set this up jack is also the host of other world which if you're not familiar with it by now you should be and i guess jack you describe it as sort of uh yeah this american life but for for for scary stories and yeah that's kind of and it's kind of almost like the goal to eventually to get there because uh right now it's just me but i think eventually i would love it to be more of like a team interviewing these people but it's all first i think what separates me is it's all first-hand encounters um i'm not like i think a lot of paranormal podcasts are like reddit stories or people

reading stuff or just kind of like talking about concepts you know like lore and things like that but i only interview people that had something happen to them and um i'm gonna try to keep it that way i think it's like a good way to sort of ground it because with like skepticism I don't want to ramble too much and go too deep but you know there's a lot of skeptics out there and you know it's very easy to write stuff off and say you don't believe in it but it's different when it's somebody that definitely had something happen to them you know that they believe so that's something that's harder to take away it's like and i think some people are still kind of struggling with that and i'm sort of still figuring out how to

approach like neil degrasse tyson types in my comments or whatever but like because i you know i i don't put anybody on there that i don't like believe obviously um and that's not the right word like i would not whether or not i believe them is like completely besides the point right like it's it's not none of my concern the the concern is if i think they're lying to me like i would never put anybody on that i think is lying i my concern is if they believe it right right if they believe this is what happened to them because i'm not them like i wasn't there so if they believe it is all that matters to me um i would never put anybody on that's lying or telling a tall tale like i could tell generally with that um that is different so if the person is sincere that's the only thing that matters and also i if if i think that there's an explanation for what happened to them i obviously wouldn't

put them on either like if they're telling me like oh i had black mold like whatever like you know or if i suspect there's an explanation i wouldn't put that on either but it's just um not to go too deep right off the bat but it's just it's interesting i've i think there's an explanation i wouldn't bet that on either but it's just um not to go too deep right off the bat but it's just it's interesting i've i think there's like still some listeners that don't quite know how to properly look at things like this does that make sense yeah totally totally well something me and terrence have talked about even fairly recently on the show when we kind of delve into a little bit of this thing is the idea of like, you know, even if there's not some sort of spiritual cosmic force behind something, right? Like human beings can still like imbue something with their own meaning and then it kind of takes a life of its own from there. with their own meaning and then it kind of takes a life of its own from there like you seem to i mean just from like listen to this you seem to have had some experiences of your own that kind of

preempted a lot of this right like that you that you might not might not have been able to make total sense of a little bit would you talk about that a little bit like my first foray into this was like i was trying to do a documentary about a haunted theater when i was a kid dude is the theater owner like talks to the ghosts like it's a very it's a very old theater and he like has a relationship with them it was weird it was weird for a 15 year old um but he was like do you guys want to try to see him like i'll put you in the theater and like close the doors and stuff so we did that and i remember thinking that i saw something it's kind of besides the point if i did i i even thought i got something on camera it was

like high eight so it was blurry anyway but either way i got really spooked by that and um a weird thing was that when i tried to like export that footage it would always my computer would always crash and it would um if i took out that specific clip it would work fine so that kind of spooked me like as a kid but so i kind of put it aside and then my mom many years later my mom after my parents were divorced like moved to florida and she one of the places she lived in was haunted we learned i mean pretty simple like i would hear somebody in the kitchen at night i found out that we were all hearing somebody in the kitchen at night um and i think we all assumed it was the other person until we finally talked about it

but i would hear somebody in there like making food every single night pretty much but i think i was mostly just distracted by how much i hated my stepdad not by the way not stepdad it was um like her long-term boyfriend i just don't what do you call that yeah it's like like a guy you can't basically common law married by this yeah yeah and we i did get rid of him but it took a long time well that that was worse than the ghost and that kind of seems to be a theme in all these though though. Like, when these things show up, there's like this sort of personal turmoil that's happening in somebody's life, usually. In the moment, if there are skeptics listening to me, like, oh, it was probably one of his family members or whatever. It really wasn't.

And in the moment, like, I really wasn't hearing things like the craziest thing about that is in hearing in the kitchen. It's right outside my room, first of all. And I'm hearing like very specific things going down. You know, if you've ever like overheard a kitchen where you like hear somebody going, you can hear what they're doing. You know, your own kitchen, right? Like, you know, the sounds of your home. So I would hear like I knew exactly what the person was eating. They were opening the Costco hummus from the fridge.

They are doing that. Then they would go, like, open the cookies. Like, obviously not BDS. They were not following BDS. Yeah. Well, the cookies, like, you know, cookie containers are so loud. I remember them, like, ripping open a cookie container and, like, the cookies like, you know, cookie containers are so loud. I remember them like ripping open a cookie container and like opening the drawer, getting forks, things like that. I was hearing very specific things going on in there. It was not random air conditioner noises or that, but that kind of made me interested. And then I think having access to the stories, I mean, I've always liked these stories, but to me, it's just the type of thing that I think so many of these are incredible stories that just get written off because of the nature of what they're about, you know? Or they're treated as completely absurd. But to me, they're very interesting, serious stories.

And I just try to treat them like any other story because to me they are, you know? Yeah. They're just harder to fact check sometimes. That's the tricky part. I want to go back to something you said a minute ago about the Neil deGrasseyson skeptics in the comments like to me something that's interesting and this is what had me thinking about it yesterday i was i just moved to a different

state and i had to get insurance set up through my car and they were like would you be interested in purchasing our good driver discount program you get like a reduction on your premium blah blah blah if you're a good driver and all this and i was like okay i mean maybe like tell me more and they were like well what we'll do is we send you something in the mail a device like an am, if you will, and you put it in your car and it records and surveils every single thing you do, like how fast you drive, if you ever drive over the speed limit, how sharp you take corners, if you buckle your seatbelt and all this. And like more and more that is the reality that we live in, right? like every single thing you do is surveilled by machines by like disembodied objects in our immediate environment and it's very fascinating to me that you have the Neil deGrasse Tyson people who like get very like stuffy and well

actually about this stuff when the very kind of like stem science that they love so much and you know use as evidence that there is nothing metaphysical aims to basically recreate all of the same metaphysical patterns and um you know and and uh interactions experiences of like five or six hundred years ago like constantly being with something that are surveilling you at all times. Maybe having like another consciousness in a room with you that is not human. This is like. Yeah, that's very interesting. I've never thought of it that way.

It's a very strange thing to me where like science now, applied science is mostly aiming towards trying to recreate many... You even see this with like... I guess you saw it when they were trying remote viewing and shit in the 80s and 90s. But the way that they're trying to download consciousness on hard drives and shit like that. It is this very... What is that? Is that not a ghost is that not

i mean it's not human so it's like it just feels like they're trying to recreate a lot of the same magical claims as five or six hundred years ago but they're calling it like they're now like sort of condescending of that yes exactly it's like it's the rationalist uh well empirical this any other so to me like i actually think that one day science will catch up with this and there will be like a merge that happens you know where we have this understanding of all of this stuff um and i actually think that um the most educated people in various scientific fields are open to this because i think eventually depending on your area of study like you eventually hit a wall uh in your research and depending on what it is but a lot of times people hit a wall

and that wall is sort of like okay well i have a hunch this is what's going on but the only way to explain that is if there's something that i would normally consider supernatural and so i've talked to a lot of people that are sort of open to that but it's kind of limited into um just kind of like fun speculation you know i mean i at this point i think it's very funny like to people that like completely write off any of this stuff yeah even the even just like the possibility of it to completely write off all of it is absurd because it's completely all of it's different you know um to write up to completely write off anything is kind of funny yeah especially after what we all just lived through the past three years it's like yeah like really you think that you have it all figured out and honestly i think um

i think that type of person now it comes from like a different place i think that there was this oh like the 2006 era like bill maher yeah religious a reddit r slash atheism gods for dummies yeah like that stuff and i i can't you know i i definitely understand how that happened especially with like all the stuff that was going on at the catholic church westboro baptist church like it was at the time that it made sense for that pushback. And I'm not just talking about religion, but it was this sort of thing where it's like, Oh, if you believe in anything sort of outside of the realm of,

you know, something that can be observed, uh, and studied by current science, I don't really know how to categorize it, but basically you're an idiot if you are open to thinking about these things or thinking that it could possibly happen, which is funny because there's so much that people think that science has figured out, but they really don't. They just named it that's something that i found a lot is that like a lot of people are like oh well you know you're not like that's not happening to you it's just this well it's like well what's that yeah like like sleep sleep paralysis i yeah sleep

paralysis yeah where it's like oh you didn't see that at sleep paralysis by the way i do think that a lot of a lot of sleep related paranormal phenomenon like is just weird dreaming or whatever and i'm but what are dreams like we really we don't know what i know it's are actually i did have but i that kind of gave me a moment or like somebody was like oh well that's just sleep paralysis it's like okay well what's sleep paralysis right right we don't know well we don't know well it is this okay well you just name like all you did was name it that doesn't mean you figured it out like you don't they still haven't figured it out by the way they do have some interesting

theories about sleep paralysis so as if they do figure it out that's awesome but like there's a lot of things that it's it's as much of a leap to just believe in a name and write something off based on it than to believe in a ghost you know like i think people toss around black mold a ton and like dude it's the last three months have changed me in terms of like hating on the skeptic people but it's so fun like i do black mold it's just so funny when like people will hear a story where it's like oh yeah like my like a plate got lifted off off my kitchen table and thrown across the room and shattered like my window and they're like oh black mold black mold or carbon monoxide poison is another one carbon monoxide yeah carbon monoxide like made something float in my house and

break well there's evidence of it. This is an interesting thing because this is an example I brought up with Tom the other day. There was this viral video going around a week or two ago of these cattle in Siberia. Oh, yeah. I saw that. There's probably an explanation for that. There is an explanation. I thought it was cool. There is an explanation.

They have listeria. so they have listeriosis. It's a bacteria. It gets in their brain. It paralyzes half their body. But what I find interesting about that is the fact that they reproduce in their actions under the influence of this bacteria this symbolically profound and powerful shape shape like the circle the perfect circle like how do you i mean like that that to me like okay you could say okay sheep follow each other there there is the rational explanation but that still doesn't really get to me to get to like to explain like what is a circle how do we understand shapes. I guess then you're getting into the platonic,

you're getting into forms and everything. You get into really deep ancient aliens type stuff, and also just these perfect shapes existing in nature. Yeah, shapes and- Even like shells, like the way shells form. Exactly, like spirals and everything. Yeah. I am interested in that.

Even with the sleep paralysis thing, like the universality of certain experiences, like the Hat Man episodes that you bring up, and the insanity that, like, okay, it's one thing to take a ridiculous amount of Benadryl and see this figure, but why does everybody have a similar account of it? Hell, I remember on Halloween. Dude, there are so many it's crazy i was even listening to uh uh ghetto boys mind playing tricks when we

came on the radio it's got a hat man reference in there it's like really ever yeah yeah yeah there's so many um and there's a bunch of different other things connected to happen like dude after that those episodes came out like i was getting flooded um people i knew as well like i was not even reading the emails like people i knew texting me saying they've seen it but and it's you know it's cross cultures but i do think that like the benadryl thing is something else i think the benadryl thing is something else. I think the Benadryl thing is something else. Meth heads see shadow figures too. And then also...

Ambien, I've taken plenty of Ambien. You see some crazy shit. I'm sure you see some crazy stuff. And then also with the hat man, like quite a few people that I knew have told me stories that didn't line up with like a classic hat man thing, but it just sounded like a ghost that was wearing a hat.

And just kind of made me realize, well, pretty much up until World War II, every man would wear a hat. It was, you know, for a long period of time, it was just the cultural norm to wear a hat. Like after that, people took them off, you know, and they started wearing t-shirts and stuff like that. So, you know if you have to think that like most if you believe in ghosts as like the apparition of a dead person um then a lot of them might just be wearing hats you know they have swag like chances are yeah i mean chances are they're wearing just like grandpa might be coming into your room wearing a hat. Yeah, I mean, look, I'm I'm probably what you would describe as a skeptic in the sense that I have never had an experience like this.

Well, after I stopped believing in God, when I believed in God, I felt like I did have experiences like this. And when I stopped that, I stopped. in God, I felt like I did have experiences like this. And when I stopped, then I stopped. But at the same time, I think that in and of itself is a very interesting thing. That you can, I mean, you can, the mind can be a very suggestible thing, right? That's not to say that the experiences themselves are not real. It's just that there are things that are happening with the mind that we don't understand but what drives me crazy is the arrogance in the assumption that we do know like we are at a moment where it's kind of like this sort of teleological thing that like everybody assumes that we have complete because we've mapped the brain out and we've we've understood like all of its

sort of neurological components and everything that we finally know what it is and what it's doing they totally don't have it mapped out though that's a funny thing too like right yeah but but like you'll read something like that in 20 years it's like actually we don't know what if ssri's even oh no i mean they still don't know wait dude they don't even know how tylenol works yeah like so much they don't know why it, they don't even know how Tylenol works. Yeah, like so much. They don't know why it works. They don't know why it works. Which is like, I'm not anti-science, but it's like people. It's interesting.

They stopped. I think if I'm tying it back to the Bill Maher stuff, we've always worshipped something. And I think like at that point it turned into a worship of like institutions and science is what we just kind of pivoted to like this worship of and you kind of i mean you guys are sort of a leftist podcast but like normally right or aside from chit-chatting so we could get a little political but but i mean i'm sure you remember that shift kind of where it was like this neil degrasse tyson mode and then obama came around and there was like this kind of like worship around him you know and i think a lot of people were disappointed that it you know a lot of the

promises weren't delivered but there was like this unification right so we put a lot of faith in institutions and i think in the last couple years we saw how that let us down like on so many levels and um you know i think people are always like blindly following something basically it's just like it just happened to be what they call science and a lot of that is just a leap of faith in and of itself it's um there's just a lot of things we don't know and i'm excited because i don't know some of these stories to me i feel like i'm hearing perhaps some evidence of something that maybe one day will understand if that makes sense because i. Because I'm in no way anti-science. To me, I'm kind of in the field documenting the fringe

that maybe one day we will understand. Because there's a lot of things we don't understand. And I think there's a misconception that we have everything figured out, but we totally don't. What's your favorite type of story of the of the things that i'm sure that like you could kind of put some of these into different buckets but like to you the thing that like actually scares the shit out of you things that i really like a person so confident in that it happened to them like um but they can't quite

they have no explanation to what it is that is the stuff that gets me really excited like the the hawaii thing and like like that one i like still don't know what i really tried to figure out an explanation for it like so many things i just can't um but ones where where I feel like one day maybe we'll understand this like maybe one day we're gonna figure something out and be like oh that's what that's what it was obviously you know that's what it gets me excited right because I see these patterns like like what something's going on to all these people it's not like a small group dude there's so so many people have this stuff and then to hear somebody write it off it's like dude some this happened something

happened to this person like it's not well i feel like people aren't that good of actors yeah like some people too probably like like like this kind of stuff ceased happening to them and they probably don't like you said probably you're just like a little nervous about like probably like this kind of stuff ceased happening to them. And they probably don't, like you said, probably are just like a little nervous about like bringing it back into after they've not like seen it in a while or whatever. The one that stayed with me that still fucks with me was Kareem and the Jen. Because I called up every Muslim friend I know and was like, dog, what do you know about Jen? And then it was like some of them were like, shh, click, don't even, we're not even going to go there.

And then others were like, you know, there's a misconception about Jen, and there's like a more reasoned approach to it. But when Kareem says the words words they live in your house and they can see you but you can't see them i was like ah yeah that was funny i mean it reminded me there was this woman named named gail that my mom was best friends with when i was a kid and lived next door to us and she was into all the occult shit she would like go to fortune tellers all the time she like you know read the tea leaves did tarot ouija all that stuff and she when we were kids she would like gather up all the neighborhood kids and tell us these fucked up stories that would just like fuck with us all the time and one she always told us was

about a witch that lived in her house that she could see from time to time when, like, the power would go out or something would happen and she could see it, you know? But, like, where she could smell her, too. Like, when she would smell, like, burnt hair in her house. And the djinn thing kind of reminded me of that, especially because of the idea in Islam that they're made from, like, fireless smoke or whatever. It's kind of reminded me of that especially because of the idea in islam of that they're made from like fireless smoke or whatever it's kind of reminded me of that a little little that is very spooky and what's funny is that so many dude so many people got scared of the jinn story and like the kareem stuff i mean he was really really fucking around wasn't he he was doing all the wrong things right yeah well it seems like that's a theme, right? Like inviting things in.

Well, and again, I think that that's why I drew that connection earlier because it's like every time you sign up, like right now, I'm sorry to keep drawing these parallels and keep bringing this up, but like right now it's like you've got these spotify festival things going on and like i was like okay maybe i'll maybe i'll do that and i like went to the website and it's like all right well we're gonna need all your data and we're going to need everything about your life and that's all right with you as long as you get your spotify this best thing it's like to me that's kind of a similar thing like i'm not going to invite something like this in to my life like you know it's like a spirit thing it's like don't invite

them in if you don't know no what kind of forces you're dealing with i haven't thought about that but the terms of service fine print is kind of a real world parallel to this oh my god the terms of service fine print is the same thing for summoning spirits. Like read the Terms of Service first. Well, I was bringing all that up to say, like with being open-minded is a lot of episodes are a very serious story or like very serious, like firsthand encounter. But then some things are just like,

this is really nuts. And the person is funny and interesting. And like, I don't expect you to really like believe this but it's entertaining right and i thought that's what the kareem episode was gonna be i was like look dude this guy thinks he got jerked off by a genie um or like what i'm like like i was not gonna do it at first but when i met him in person, I'm like, okay, now it's worth it. Like no matter what he tells me, it's going to be funny or interesting. Like, and I've done a couple episodes like that now where it's like, like the gnomes to believe in gnomes but here are two people that believe in gnomes right that's fun that's entertaining i don't need you to think that a jinn jerked this guy off but he is going through life believing this like to him this is something

that happened to him and that's interesting to me you know um so i i think i just brought that up to talk about like how people listen to things you know because people get so hung up um sometimes on very binary questions right and i think with like this stuff it's best to just sort of listen and you know not be casting judgments the entire time because you're gonna have a very bad time like yeah i really went in putting kareem on there thinking it was going to be like a character piece but it ended up being a very real story also i mean the the gnomes thing with sean and gina kind of start like the the sort of preamble first episode that you did i was like well i mean it's kind of interesting to learn about Romani people and all that kind of stuff and like all that kind of stuff.

And then they were just kind of like, like you could tell he wanted to get at something like, you know what I mean? But he'd never really got down the road with it. And then like when you put out the second episode, it all made sense when, you know, what was he?

Cause some people had a problem with like like what do you think what parts of that um do you feel like he didn't quite get into i'm curious you know like somebody starts telling a story and then they realize maybe the punch line wasn't as interesting that's what i thought at first i thought oh okay well maybe this is not really as interesting as i thought it was going to be but really what it ended up being was he wanted to tell you more but didn't necessarily feel comfortable just yet i yeah i didn't think too much of that because i knew there was a lot that like one he was nervous he thought i was crazy like he's gonna sound crazy two there's like just some stuff that they can't tell me because it's like i'm not in their family like roma secrets you know this is like handed down from generation

to generation that's a funny thing i mean that was a very well-received episode but there were a couple people in the comments like annoyed and i think one category of that person is like the like tarot card like enthusiast type person that wanted more like instructions you know from from gina the ancient wisdom who's literally it's like okay these people have been persecuted for their entire existence this race of people the romani people and like they have an oral history um that's been handed down they're probably one of the most persecuted groups of people hitler tried to exterminate them it's like they hide they pretend they're greek and it's like dude you think this person's just gonna like give out their oral tradition to random people on a

podcast like teach you how to do it no that's all they have and i wasn't gonna ask first of all i don't really care or want to know like the intricacies of like her conversation with a demon you know i'm a little too superstitious for that but i think it was funny i i don't know i'm still kind of figuring out out as I go how to make the best possible episode. But that one was interesting to me. I think some people wanted more of that. And I personally was not surprised that they didn't get into details of like literally what she was saying in her own language to the demon or like how she was doing it or whatever. the demon or like how she was doing it or whatever yeah but i think like there's an expectation for that because people watch too much movies and they're on too many forums where things are

taught to them like as if people have it all figured out like really most people don't have all this figured out you know it goes both ways it's not you know nobody none of us have anything figured out really well yeah it's something that we we kind of touched on from time to time on the show is like even if you look at like you know like the men that stare at goats and the cia's preoccupation with like what was it terence that they do the that you called it a remote view like edgar remote viewing and like how they like are obsessed with edgar casey the kentucky psychic and all this stuff it's like you know

even episodes coming with that oh really oh there we go there we go yeah it's like there's there's definitely something to this and if you take the view that like you know everything's like a government op or whatever which is easy to do and then like and for a good reason you know but like even these people are obsessed with this stuff to some degree you know very much absolutely oh man well guys thanks so much for having me on yeah this was fun jack thanks for coming doing it and i hope i hope i didn't sound too crazy you just caught me in a you caught me in a time where i'm pretty deep in it i've been mostly deep in it so i'll say my plug would be go listen to other world and maybe you'll understand why yeah you definitely go check it out there's great stuff on there dude um

yeah hopefully hopefully i make it through and uh don't go crazy myself i have faith in your mental fortitude okay you can do it all right guys thanks so much for having me thanks man we'll see you next time