Joseph Laycock

[0] Oh, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, welcome, welcome, to armchair expert.

[1] Are you going a Santa for Halloween?

[2] Do you think that was a bit of a Santa?

[3] Absolutely.

[4] I think I was playing out my other spooky voice, and I tried to shift gears.

[5] Okay.

[6] And it was a misfire.

[7] It was a Santa.

[8] Okay.

[9] Save it for December.

[10] Listen, we got to give a warning.

[11] We got to give a spooky alert warning.

[12] A spooky episode alert.

[13] That's what Rob wrote on the introduction.

[14] Warning, spooky episode alert.

[15] That's so funny.

[16] Today we have a very spooky professor of religious studies.

[17] His name is Joseph Laycock, and he is associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University.

[18] He teaches courses on world religions, religion in America, new religious movements, and the intersection of religion and popular culture.

[19] He's got a bunch of fascinating books.

[20] His current one is called The Penguin Book of Exorcisms.

[21] So today we are going to talk about exorcisms.

[22] But he also has a bunch of other really interesting books.

[23] One I want to point out as Dangerous Games because that comes up about...

[24] Dungeons and D .D. Dungeons and D's.

[25] Also spirit possession around the world.

[26] Vampires today, the truth about modern vampirism.

[27] So please enjoy the spooky and fun Joseph Laycock.

[28] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and add free right now.

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[31] As a professor, tardiness must be uniquely frustrating for you.

[32] I'm required to log it by the state, yeah.

[33] For purposes of financial aid.

[34] Are you teaching right now over Zoom?

[35] No, I'm teaching mask to mask.

[36] I wear a mask.

[37] My students wear masks and they're sort of spread out like a chessboard.

[38] So no one can be within six feet of anybody else.

[39] And so far it's worked.

[40] And where is Texas State?

[41] Texas State is in San Marcos.

[42] So if you drive from Austin to San Antonio, we're about halfway there.

[43] Oh my gosh.

[44] You know what?

[45] Does the river float through your campus?

[46] It does.

[47] Yeah, our students love it.

[48] I have floated on a tube through that campus.

[49] Oh, that's cool.

[50] I think I was telling you about that, Monica.

[51] It's like you're on this little river trip on a floating in a tube, and then all of a sudden you're entering a college campus.

[52] Oh, fun.

[53] Yeah.

[54] Yeah, our students all jump in the river when they graduate.

[55] That's a big tradition.

[56] Oh, cool.

[57] I was one time in Rome, and I guess the Trevi fountain has a rich history of that as well.

[58] Like, students from all over Europe will go and jump in the Trevi fountain.

[59] And we were there, like, one in the morning, and all these kids from Spain who had graduated it all jumped in.

[60] It was really awesome.

[61] That was cute.

[62] Yeah.

[63] Okay.

[64] My first curiosity is...

[65] Well, also, this is a Halloween episode.

[66] So we hope it's spooked.

[67] If you have a spooky voice, feel free to use it, I will use mine as often as possible.

[68] But where are you from originally?

[69] I'm from Austin originally.

[70] Oh.

[71] We were just talking about how much you love it.

[72] You probably don't follow Formula One, but the reason we had to wake up so early is to interview a Formula One driver, and he said now that they go to Austin, And this dude lives in Monaco, so the bar is high.

[73] And he said, he wants more than anything to just live in Austin.

[74] I was like, you and me both, brother.

[75] I mean, it's the best place ever.

[76] Yeah, I mean, my wife moved here with me, and she says, I'm not allowed to complain anymore about what Austin was like in the 80s and 90s.

[77] And it's still a great place to live.

[78] So I do need to knock it off.

[79] She has a good point.

[80] What is the only complaint really?

[81] Because I did a movie there 16 years ago, and it was different 16 years ago.

[82] But it was just cheap.

[83] paper is all it was.

[84] Is that the main complaint?

[85] It's just it's crazy expensive now.

[86] I think the biggest complaint is we still call ourselves the live music capital of the world, but if you make a living as a musician, you can't afford to live here anymore.

[87] Ah, okay, that's a fair complaint.

[88] Yeah.

[89] Maybe the city should, you've got a great tax base.

[90] You've got the state capital.

[91] I think you have five colleges there.

[92] You've got a Formula One track.

[93] You know, maybe there's a collective and we supplement musical artists income, the way they did in New York with the lofts and stuff in Soho.

[94] There's projects like that in the works.

[95] I'm not aware that any of them have actually come to fruition, but it's a good idea, and there are folks working on it.

[96] Okay, so my first question is you received a master's from the Harvard Divinity School.

[97] I guess right out of the gates, I'm wondering, what's the difference between religious studies and theology?

[98] Is there a difference?

[99] So theology is training for the ministry to serve a religious community.

[100] Okay.

[101] And they're really concerned with how religion ought to be.

[102] Okay.

[103] So they're concerned with sort of their own values.

[104] And the academic study of religion tries as much as it can to just let go how religions ought to be and just look at what are they actually doing, right?

[105] And I argue that this is important to understand because religion shapes the world.

[106] It shapes politics.

[107] It shapes, you know, military conflicts around the planet.

[108] And it doesn't help to say, well, these guys should really just be nice to each other, right?

[109] why are they doing this?

[110] Like, we have to figure out why they're doing this.

[111] And the Harvard Divinity School is unusual in that it combines both approaches.

[112] Oh, okay.

[113] So there were courses on sort of analyzing religious culture, and then there were courses on, like, how to preach.

[114] You could be in either trajectory, and you are in the more, what is religion in practice?

[115] Exactly.

[116] Yeah, even when you say that, yeah, that brings up one of my pet peeves, is like, yes, well, no, Christianity's about turn the other cheek, and then you just have countless Crusades and you go, okay, that might be what it's about, but we certainly can't ignore this aspect of it.

[117] That's exactly right.

[118] And we just created a new major in religious studies at Texas State, and that's what I was trying to explain, was, you know, if you want to understand a religious conflict, you need to actually study it and study it as it is, not as you wish it would be.

[119] Right.

[120] And you grew up religious.

[121] I watched a video of you talking about your Dungeons and Dragons book, and you had said you grew up religious, yeah?

[122] Yeah, my wife and I are Catholic.

[123] then some people might call us cafeteria Catholics or something, but, you know, we still consider ourselves Catholic.

[124] It still means something to us, and we got married in the Catholic Church.

[125] Okay.

[126] I think that's relevant.

[127] What made you decide, okay, I'm religious, I'm Catholic, and I do want to devote now my college experience to that?

[128] Yeah, you know, honestly, I've thought about this question a lot.

[129] I think it's mostly just that there happened to be good faculty in religious studies.

[130] I think so much is just you bond with a particular instructor and you kind of sign up for for more of their classes but i think that's kind of how i got started with this okay so your newest book is called the penguin book of exorcisms which is you know that i don't think i need any explanation that title really tells you everything i think now is the penguin book part to make it kind of cute and less uh threatening yeah i get a lot of jokes about is these are these exorcisms for penguins or like to drive penguin spirits out of people.

[131] But this is penguin classics, right?

[132] And, you know, you go to a bookstore and they've got whatever, Moby Dick and, you know, Jack London and all these classics.

[133] And they have a series of sort of primary texts like the Penguin Book of Undead, the Penguin Book of Hell, the Penguin Book of Witches.

[134] And these all sell really well.

[135] So they approached me and said, could you do a Penguin Book of Exorcisms?

[136] And so I did.

[137] And so you must have had a prior interest in it because one of the first.

[138] your books, Dangerous Games, is kind of about Dungeons and Dragons and the Moral Panic it created.

[139] So you clearly already have a kind of interest in the pop culture downriver effects of religion, yeah?

[140] Yeah, I mean, my focus as a researcher is on American religion and American Catholicism.

[141] And I had published a work on William Peter Blatties, The Exorcist, and the kind of effect that that had on culture.

[142] And then I was tapped.

[143] to do an encyclopedia called spirit possession around the world.

[144] Oh, okay.

[145] And if you want to learn a lot about a topic, edit an encyclopedia on it.

[146] And my name's on the cover, but most of that book I did not write myself.

[147] I tapped an entire network of anthropologists and historians and other people.

[148] So one thing kind of led to another, and I've gradually become sort of an exorcism person, sort of through no fault of my own.

[149] Yeah.

[150] So right out of the gates, as I read about your work, I think there's a couple shocking polls, from my perspective, that you could tell us about, just kind of the overall belief in demonic possession and or exorcisms in America.

[151] Could you tell us how common this belief is?

[152] Sure.

[153] So the exorcist came out in 1973, and the film, you know, the woman's daughter is possessed by the devil and nobody will believe her, not even the priests will believe her.

[154] And that was probably what would have happened in 1973 in the film.

[155] In 1960s, we did a poll in only about a third of Americans that they believe in a literal devil.

[156] And now that number has, like, doubled, right?

[157] So way more Americans believe in a literal devil than did in 1973.

[158] And I teach a class on demonology and exorcism.

[159] And one thing I'm always pushing my students is what caused this change?

[160] Why does so many more people believe in it?

[161] Because the assumption my students have, and I think a lot of people have, is, well, people believe in demons because they're not technologically advanced.

[162] and they don't understand medicine or mental illness and things like this.

[163] And the evidence just doesn't support that theory, right?

[164] This is the most technologically advanced we've ever been, and we're way more into demons than we were 50 years ago.

[165] So it's got to be something else besides just misunderstanding illnesses and other types of misfortune.

[166] Yeah, it's completely counterintuitive to all the predictions of the early 1900s, right?

[167] You had Freud kind of saying, no, all these would seem like symbols or signs of spirit's possession or just mental illness issues, right?

[168] So he's saying that.

[169] And then you quote, you know, Max Weber, who predicted that over time, science would supersede belief in mysterious forces.

[170] So the common belief over the last, you know, probably I guess since the Enlightenment has been, oh, that we will see a precipitous drop in these beliefs as we understand more and more about our physical world.

[171] Yeah, this is called the secularization narrative.

[172] And it kind of reached its peak in the 1960s right before the Exorcist came out.

[173] There was the famous Time magazine cover that said, is God dead.

[174] And a lot of people still think that this is true.

[175] And that's partly why I had a hard time selling a religious studies major to Texas State.

[176] But I mean, if you just look at our political discourse, clearly religion still is a big deal for a lot of people, arguably more than ever before.

[177] Yeah.

[178] You know, in my liberal bubble, a lot of people want to explain voting for Trump as them being inherently racist or something.

[179] And I guess some percentage is, but I kind of reject that.

[180] And I think it's far more driven by him being the only, quote, religious option in that he's going to execute, say, abortion policy that the church would pick, right?

[181] I feel like that's a much more plausible explanation to me. Right.

[182] I mean, we could we could say a lot about, you know, throwing out a bunch of tear gas and going and standing in front of a church, holding up a Bible.

[183] But the important thing is he did that because he felt this would work.

[184] Right?

[185] If for religion weren't a powerful force, he wouldn't have thought that that would work, and he wouldn't have done it.

[186] Yeah, he would have crossed the street and picked up Catcher in the Rye if, like, secularism was truly taken hold, right?

[187] Or Nietzsche or something.

[188] Exactly.

[189] Can you tell us the history?

[190] I presume most people know that the Old Testament's written a couple thousand years, B .C., and then Jesus comes around, then you have the birth of Catholicism and Christianity.

[191] And I think where it starts getting interesting, right, is the Protestant Reformation, where now there's three options in the Western world, as opposed to just Judaism now and Catholicism.

[192] Is this where a lot of this stuff gets born out of?

[193] So possession and exorcism, as far as we can tell, has always existed.

[194] It's throughout all of recorded history going back to the oldest tablets we found in the Middle East and things like that.

[195] But in the Western religious tradition, if you read the Hebrew Bible, known to Christians as the Old Testament, there isn't really much possession or exorcism or demons.

[196] When people are exhibiting strange behavior, it's usually described as something like an evil spirit of the Lord.

[197] So God is making you act this way for whatever reason.

[198] And you don't really need a devil in the Hebrew Bible because God is so mean to begin with.

[199] Right, telling you to kill your kids and stuff.

[200] Right, right.

[201] So it's only later when there's this idea that God is all powerful and also loves.

[202] us that there has to be something else added to explain all of the evil in the world.

[203] And there's a, we're basically missing a chunk of history between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.

[204] During that time period, you know, there was probably influence of a religion called Zoroastrianism out of Persia that has a god of good and a god of evil.

[205] So a lot of things change in this so -called intertestimental period so that when you read the New Testament, there's demons everywhere.

[206] People are possessed by demons everywhere.

[207] And Jesus is going around and casting out demons.

[208] And there's this idea of Satan rules the earth, right?

[209] That's sort of were temporarily lent up to Satan.

[210] Exactly.

[211] Yeah, Rex Mundi, the Lord of the Earth.

[212] And then Christianity sort of adopts spiritual warfare and exorcism is sort of a major feature of it.

[213] But then, you know, we usually associate exorcism with the dark ages.

[214] The true Middle Ages, we didn't have a lot of witch burnings and things like that.

[215] All of that began after the Protestant Reformation.

[216] And after the Protestant Reformation, you have basically 200 years of religious war because there was no idea of religious freedom.

[217] So each kingdom is sort of duking it out to see if they're going to be Catholic or Protestant.

[218] And that's when suddenly everybody is burning witches, getting possessed by demons, and just sort of exhibiting this incredible paranoia.

[219] That's what's been called the Golden Age of the Demaniac.

[220] And I find this interesting because now we are also going through a period of kind of great social upheaval and uncertainty.

[221] And, you know, people are saying things like Wayfair furniture ships, children for human sacrifice.

[222] Yeah.

[223] So I find that a really interesting connection when we're looking at the history.

[224] I'm so glad you brought that up from knowing what you're suggesting all these parallels are.

[225] It seems quite obvious.

[226] Humanon is quite tied to this.

[227] But just to go back for one second, you just pointed it out, which is pre -Protestant Reformation, you had the Catholic Church having great, great power in a nation -state sense, right?

[228] You had monarchs who had to consult the pope and whatnot.

[229] And then when the Protestant Reformation happens, you start having nation states dropping out of that, which creates all this warfare, right?

[230] And you have kings declaring no, we're going to reject it.

[231] So I guess I would love to just paint a little more thorough picture of the stakes of that.

[232] You know, like what would change for people?

[233] Why was that so threatening?

[234] Right.

[235] So, you know, sociologically speaking, people need to have a reason for why the government is in power.

[236] And in our system, it's because we voted on it, right?

[237] In some sense, we all agreed to this, more or less, right?

[238] But in a pre -democratic society, you know, who died and made you king is a real question, right?

[239] So the answer to that question for much of European history was the Pope, right?

[240] The Pope said it's God's will that I am king of England or I'm king of France and so forth.

[241] And this went on all the way up until Napoleon.

[242] Napoleon was supposed to be crowned by the Pope, and he actually snatched the crown from the Pope's hand and put it on himself.

[243] Was that seen as arrogant and taboo and disrespectful?

[244] Exactly.

[245] It's sort of a legend about Napoleon and what kind of figure he was.

[246] But that was in the 19th century, right?

[247] That was still sort of the order of the day.

[248] So to question the authority of the Catholic Church really throws everything that people have ever taken for granted into chaos.

[249] Yeah.

[250] And in theory, we could say, well, we've got the Church of England, you know, and we're just like the Catholic Church.

[251] You can trust us.

[252] And some people would buy into that and it was okay.

[253] But for other people, this was really apocalyptic, right?

[254] This was really the end of the world.

[255] And it created a certain type of excitement.

[256] And the other way that this intersects with demonic possession is if someone is possessed by demons and they're saying things like, you know, the Catholic Church is the true church or, you know, this treaty that France signed to allow Protestants to stay here, the so -called Huguenots, is part of Satan's demonic plan.

[257] That gives you a kind of leverage, especially if you're trying to get, you know, working class peasants and things like that to your side.

[258] So I think that exorcism, at least when it gets written down, is always a political phenomenon.

[259] Oh, wow.

[260] There's always an angle that's being worked there to kind of get people to see the world one way or another in terms of this battle between good and evil.

[261] And was there anything objective about it?

[262] Was there a criteria by which they labeled someone possessed?

[263] And then was there a set protocol for exercising it?

[264] Were those things universal or were they agreed upon?

[265] Yeah.

[266] So this depends on what period you're asking about.

[267] So if you read the New Testament, Jesus is exercising people and it says, well, they have a spirit of lameness that's making them crippled.

[268] Or they're possessed by a spirit that makes them blonde.

[269] mind.

[270] So these people are not, you know, projectile vomiting and spinning heads and all that.

[271] They just are sick.

[272] Okay.

[273] So possession could be the sort of full on alternate personality, but often it was just a disease of the body, not a disease of the soul.

[274] Okay.

[275] Right.

[276] Then the Catholic Church didn't really care very much about exorcism until the Protestant Reformation.

[277] So we know that before that, if you thought you needed an exorcism, you could go to a priest and they might do a ritual over you, could also go to like a village wise woman and she might splash you with holy water or things like this.

[278] And it was when the Protestants said, this is all magic, right?

[279] You Catholics are doing all these weird rituals that aren't in the Bible.

[280] Then the Catholics had to say, well, okay, I guess we need some rules.

[281] Yeah.

[282] Yeah.

[283] So the so -called ritual Romanum, if you watch a lot of supernatural movies, they always bring out the ritual Romanum in Latin.

[284] Well, that wasn't published until 1641, which is pretty late in the history of the Catholic Church.

[285] So that kind of sets down guidelines for, well, possessed people ought to be able to exhibit certain supernatural abilities, such as knowing things they couldn't possibly know, speaking languages, they never studied.

[286] Other things that get associated with this are supernatural strength, levitation, oh, blasphemous rage, right, which is where they splash holy water on you or something.

[287] And I gave my students one case from Paris, and this woman basically flunked a test.

[288] to see if she was possessed.

[289] So this doctor would do things like he would read to her in Latin from the Aeneid, right?

[290] The Aeneid is a Roman text that has nothing to do with Christianity.

[291] And she begins thrashing around because she doesn't know Latin and thinks this is an exorcism ritual.

[292] Oh, boy.

[293] Okay.

[294] Or, you know, this doctor was saying, well, she, you know, she supposedly levitated.

[295] And some of the priests who watched this said it was a levitation.

[296] but I saw her just kind of lay on her back and butt flop across the church and like she was pretty good at it but it wasn't super natural.

[297] She did the worm.

[298] She did the worm.

[299] Upside down.

[300] Exactly right.

[301] Inverted worm.

[302] So there was an idea that there had to be some kind of evidence, right?

[303] On the other hand, you know, you have cases where especially in the present day, almost anything could be considered a sign of possession.

[304] Well, I was going to say I can imagine a lot of these being grievance driven.

[305] like my kid's an asshole you know my wife's horny for everyone like i just feel like it really lends itself to just grievances being the cause absolutely there's a book called american exorcism by michael cuneo and he goes and studies these deliverance ministries and they say well you might not be fully possessed but you might have a a demon of whatever a demon of doubt or a demon of this or that and one of them literally says well my wife had a demon of willfulness because i told her make me a sandwich and she didn't do it.

[306] Oh my God.

[307] So now the whole church is, you know, dumping buckets of holy water.

[308] This really seems like a really stark example of social control.

[309] Although I bet she really hop to it the next time he was in the mood for a BLT, probably works.

[310] Yeah.

[311] Okay.

[312] So, you know, the flux of these nation states and whether or not they were going to have a real divine claim to authority would create tons of anxiety, even whether you were in support of it or against it, what you would know is probably upheavals around the corner if we don't all agree on this person, good or bad, having the authority.

[313] So that kind of makes sense as an underpinning of this, this insecurity and this anxiety, which fucking eight, can we all right now relate to?

[314] So walk me through the golden age, as you said, the 16th and 17th century because thousands of witches were killed, right?

[315] We don't have the actual number.

[316] I mean, And some of the numbers you can see online are in the millions.

[317] That's probably too high.

[318] Uh -huh.

[319] But you have to remember, historians, we only know about a witch trial if somebody actually recorded it and then put that in an archive, and it survives to this day.

[320] So there were probably lots of people who were killed as witches by an angry mob in a village, and it just leaves no historical record.

[321] But the number is certainly in the hundreds of thousands.

[322] Wow.

[323] And so immediately when I read that, I thought, this phenomenon has to disproportionately victimize women, as all things tend to do or minorities.

[324] So, A, is that the case?

[325] And then B, what is even the male equivalent to a witch?

[326] I don't even know what that is.

[327] Warlock.

[328] Sure.

[329] So there are, you know, warlocks, right?

[330] They can't be killed, can they?

[331] They do the killing.

[332] Yeah, well, if you read the Salem witch trials, they use the word wizard.

[333] And there were some men who were killed in Salem, and there were men who were killed in Salem.

[334] killed in Europe.

[335] But it was overwhelmingly women who were getting accused.

[336] We also know that in all cultures around the world, women are more likely to get possessed.

[337] And there are different theories of why that is.

[338] And one is called basically the social deprivation theory, which is if you are a second class citizen, the only way to get people to take you seriously or to just sort of do something that you couldn't otherwise do is to all you're possessed, right?

[339] Because then you get a free shot.

[340] You can't really be punished for something you did while you were in a state of possession.

[341] Oh.

[342] This is one explanation.

[343] And one way that they could figure out who was a witch is a possessed person says that person is a witch.

[344] I am bewitched and it's this person's fault.

[345] So if you look at Salem, that's what happened.

[346] You have four girls who are bewitched and then they start naming names and that sort of sets off the whole process.

[347] So it's like McCarthyism.

[348] It's just to get out is just throwing anyone else in there.

[349] Exactly.

[350] Well, you know, because the first person that they accused in Salem was, of course, a slave, Tichiba.

[351] Tichiba has less status and privilege than anybody else in the entire village.

[352] And she immediately starts throwing other people under the bus.

[353] And Tichiba survives, right?

[354] We don't know what happened to Tichiba, but basically she was eventually given to another slave owner.

[355] But everyone who said, I'm not a witch was executed.

[356] So if you ever were in a witch hunt, start throwing other people under the bus.

[357] That's the lesson here.

[358] It makes me think of drug enforcement policy, really, which is you're just getting like a, you know, five and dime guy with a bag and hoping he turns on his dealer, who then hopefully turns on his supplier, who then, you know, you just work your way up the chain.

[359] It sounds like it was the same method.

[360] Well, in Salem, that's when they finally began to question what they were doing because they had reports of, well, there's 200 witches now.

[361] Right?

[362] Well, there's only so many people who live in this colony.

[363] Are we going to hang everyone in the whole colony or are we going to start calling BS on some of these stories?

[364] And what were some of the activities that would be evidence of being a witch?

[365] Witches were imagined to engage in these horrible rituals, right, that happened at night where they would do things like eat babies and have sexual orgies with each other and with demons.

[366] And one of my mentors is named David Frankfurter, and he wrote a book called Evil Incarnate.

[367] And in that book, he notices the things that witches were accused of doing, especially eating babies, and having incest are the same things that Christians were accused of doing by the Romans in previous centuries that Christians went on to accuse Jews of doing that people in the 1980s said, you know, daycare providers were doing.

[368] Yeah.

[369] And they're the same things that QAnon accuses their enemies of doing today.

[370] Wow.

[371] Whoa!

[372] Hold on, hold on.

[373] Let's let that simmer for a second.

[374] Way to connect the dots, professor.

[375] Wow.

[376] Wow, wow.

[377] Wow, that was tasty.

[378] Yeah.

[379] Okay.

[380] Okay, sorry.

[381] I just want to really breathe that in.

[382] Yeah.

[383] Yeah.

[384] So we keep getting the same story told over and over again across the centuries.

[385] And one interpretation of this is we're hardwired for this, right?

[386] We're hardwired to think there's bad people out there.

[387] We can't see them, but they're all around us.

[388] And they're doing these horrible, horrible rituals.

[389] And one interpretation and one thing people have noticed is which is, which is, do everything we do backwards.

[390] So, like, we protect babies, which is eat them.

[391] There's a lot of accounts from interrogations where people are made to confess about witches Sabbaths where they say they're like eating poop or they're like kissing the devil on the butt for something like this.

[392] I might be a witch.

[393] Some of them said that's the origin of the phrase kiss my ass goes back to these.

[394] But the idea is we kiss on the face, witches kiss on the ass.

[395] So everything is backwards.

[396] There's even paintings of witches Sabbaths where they appear to be like limboing.

[397] They're like bending backwards before Satan.

[398] And the idea is we bow forward to show respect and witches about backwards.

[399] I'm going to do a drawing of the urine coming out of the toilet into a witch's vagina.

[400] Oh, wow.

[401] You have lots of plan.

[402] This is getting you real excited.

[403] It is.

[404] It is.

[405] Well, that's opposite of how we excrete.

[406] So the idea is that people tell these awful stories during times of social upheaval.

[407] And it's kind of a way of assuring ourselves that we're on the right team, right?

[408] Because our enemy is so awful and they do everything that we do backwards.

[409] So therefore, the things that we're doing must be the right way to do things.

[410] Otherwise, why would we have this horrible enemy out there that we're trying to fight?

[411] To your point, we're very hardwired for in -group, out -group, we're a social animal.

[412] We did for 145 ,000 of the years we've been here have a realistic threat of another group of people coming over and taking people.

[413] So all that hardware is there, and we don't actually have enemies like that anymore.

[414] We don't live in a state of physical insecurity in that way that we did.

[415] And it's almost like our brain's going, but we got to look out for it.

[416] And it's like, well, where is it?

[417] And it's not visible.

[418] It's not the Canadians aren't coming down.

[419] The town next year is not going to kidnap your wife.

[420] So it's almost like you got to find a boogeyman.

[421] We just have too much of our brain telling us that we need to be fearful.

[422] of that.

[423] Yeah, I mean, there's a lot we could say about this, which is you're basically describing evolutionary psychology, right?

[424] We evolved to be wary of strangers and to think of other groups of people as enemies.

[425] There's even a theory that the purpose of religion is that it's not natural for us to live in a group of more than 100 people.

[426] Right.

[427] Right.

[428] And so we need some kind of ideology so that we can have some degree of trust of somebody we've never met before, but they seem like they're one of us, really know.

[429] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

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[446] The other thing it's interesting is in sort of the earliest accounts of demons, and I mean going back to ancient Babylon and things like this, the further back you go, the vaguer it is, are we talking about some sort of supernatural being, or are we talking about other people?

[447] Ah.

[448] Are we talking about like some other tribe of people that we don't like and we describe as demons, and then later on they get built up into sort of literal monsters?

[449] We do that in common day.

[450] like it's not enough to describe ISIS as these fundamentalist militants.

[451] You have to say they're savages or they're monsters or they're evil.

[452] Yeah, I think that's another hiccup in our thinking is that we need an explanation for everything.

[453] And we love to explain things retroactively, right?

[454] Which is never totally true.

[455] And so there's so much behavior that boggles us and scares us that it requires something not human to explain it to us.

[456] us a little bit.

[457] Yeah?

[458] Right.

[459] And so I think the problem is not that people who hold these beliefs or cultures that hold these beliefs don't understand disease or don't understand mental illness, because we have some pretty good accounts of mental illness going back to about 600 BC or so.

[460] But what needs to be explained is why these things happened to you, right?

[461] That's where witchcraft and demonology come in, right?

[462] Because you can't go to a doctor and say, you know, why was my baby born with leukemia.

[463] I mean, they can tell you, well, it's a genetic disorder and this, but they can't say why it happened to you.

[464] You could go to a deliverance minister, though, and they could say things like, well, somebody put a curse on your bloodline or you'll be plagued with a Ouija board in college or whatever, but they're going to give you an answer.

[465] They're not just going to shrug their shoulders.

[466] Right.

[467] They're going to give you, like, causality.

[468] Yeah, like some kind of moral causality.

[469] And we have all these stories that can help bind us together and it serves such a function and then obviously as all good things it has a flip side right yeah so i mean you could view you know witch hunts as a kind of demented way of binding us together or as long as you're not the witch yeah if the only you can stay on the non -witch side you're even that much closer that's right and then the whole group is is that much more closely bound to together and that interpretation does explain why we see this big spike in witch hunting when the normal things that bind to society together begin to weaken, right?

[470] If you look at a map online of witch hunts, you'd expect, like, the really Catholic countries to have lots and launch of witch hunting.

[471] You actually don't, where you see the most is in the countries where you have Catholics and Protestants opposing each other.

[472] Oh, really?

[473] Places like Germany.

[474] So when Germany is having thousands and thousands of witch hunts, Italy and Spain and Ireland, these deeply Catholic countries, are not really having that.

[475] England is having more, though, because there's discussion about what religion is this country going to be.

[476] So that's one way of explaining why we see that pattern.

[477] I mean, in the Salem trials, I have to imagine there was no proof of missing babies, right?

[478] So clearly people would notice their baby was missing, but I'm imagining it's not unlike QAnon, which is like all celebrities are killing all these babies for the endocrine, whatever, yet no one's on the news.

[479] with a missing baby.

[480] There's no missing babies.

[481] Yeah.

[482] So, you know, with Salem, you know, people always say, you know, there was a hallucinogenic fungus in their rye, and that's why all this happened.

[483] There's no evidence for that.

[484] All of these theories fall apart pretty, pretty quickly.

[485] What everybody always overlooks, though, is that recently the colony had had a military defeat by the Native Americans and their French allies, and we're sort of questioning we're supposed to be God's great experiment.

[486] We're supposed to be a city on the hill.

[487] How can we be losing?

[488] Right?

[489] That demands an explanation.

[490] So the evidence there for witchcraft was basically totally subjective.

[491] People were acting strangely or people were saying, well, I saw the specter of so -and -so in my bedroom.

[492] And that was considered sufficient evidence, right?

[493] The debate of the day went around, you know, spectral evidence is not evidence.

[494] Anybody can say I saw somebody in my bedroom last night.

[495] If we're willing to accept that, you know, it's their spirit leaving their body or something like this.

[496] We can't execute people based on this type of evidence.

[497] In some ways, the Puritans are better than we are today because they admitted we made a mistake.

[498] They said we're going to fast.

[499] We're going to have a day of fasting to atone for what we did wrong.

[500] And they eventually paid some money to the victims.

[501] But we had a satanic panic in the 1980s.

[502] And I think most Americans have completely forgotten about it.

[503] Really quick, just so I can button up Salem because I don't know much about it.

[504] And it sounds like you've maybe read what was documented.

[505] Again, no one ever presented as an exhibit of evidence remains of a baby, did they?

[506] No, they were not generally accused of killing babies the way that they were in Europe.

[507] But also in Europe, you know, nobody who wasn't a witch ever claimed to have seen a witch's Sabbath.

[508] All of our testimony of Witch's Sabbath was you find an accused witch, you torture them, and then you basically make them tell you this story about all the horrible things that they did.

[509] Well, and you probably plant it all, just like these interrogations that go awry here.

[510] That's right.

[511] And this is probably why we have this image of witches riding broomsticks.

[512] Oh, because we said, well, where is this Sabbath?

[513] Well, it's in a forest or someplace.

[514] It's really far away.

[515] That's why we've never found any evidence.

[516] Well, how'd this old lady get out there?

[517] Well, she flies on a brickstick, and that's why we problem solved.

[518] It was just a logistical explanation.

[519] Exactly.

[520] Oh, my good.

[521] I mean, it's hard not to, I don't want to laugh too much.

[522] It's hysterical to me, and yet I see the poll that 57 % of people believe in it, so I don't want to offend anyone.

[523] But also, you know, Oh, my God.

[524] They're riding broomsticks, guys, because how else will you explain it?

[525] Talk about confirmation bias.

[526] You know she did this.

[527] So anything you suggest, you'll buy into.

[528] That's exactly right.

[529] Okay, so let's talk about the 80s because this is what I lived through.

[530] How old are you?

[531] I am 40 years old.

[532] Okay.

[533] I'm five years your senior.

[534] And I was eight years old at the height of Rodney James Dio, Black Sabbath posters.

[535] My buddy Trevor Robinson, his older brother, played the drums, and he lived in the basement.

[536] and I'd go down there and I was fucking terrified.

[537] There was upside down crosses everywhere.

[538] There was pentagrams.

[539] And I thought, oh, my God, he worships the devil.

[540] And his parents are cool with it.

[541] And, you know, that was just very prevalent in 1983.

[542] Yeah.

[543] Right now I'm working on a separate project where I'm kind of looking at some of the panic about heavy metal and that sort of stuff in the 80s.

[544] And there's a kind of symbiotic relationship where the Beatles were the first band.

[545] where Christians were saying, this is a communist plot, and it's hypnotizing people with the, with their music and so forth.

[546] And that kind of let bands know, you know, there's a market for this kind of behavior.

[547] And then you see this kind of arms race of, we're going to accuse you of more, and then we're going to double down.

[548] You know, there was some interview with the band Slayer, and someone was saying that they found all these subliminal messages if you play Slayer backwards.

[549] And Slayer was offended because they said, look, we praise Satan in.

[550] the lyrics.

[551] You think it's going to be about Jesus if we play it backwards?

[552] We are trying to freak you out.

[553] I mean, as overt as possible.

[554] No one needs to go digging.

[555] We say we love Satan.

[556] So this exorcist named Bob Larson had a radio show called Talk Back, and he loved to have Slayer on the show and this band named Deacide.

[557] Oh, yeah, I know Deacide, yeah.

[558] And if you listen to it, these people act like they're enemies, but they really aren't, right?

[559] because Bob Larson gets to say, look, I am preaching God's word to these terrible satanic bands.

[560] And the bands get to be like, we freaked out that pastor so bad.

[561] And everybody wins.

[562] Everybody gets exactly what they want.

[563] Without Slayer, Bob Larson doesn't exist.

[564] And without Bob Larson, Slayer can't exist, right?

[565] Yeah, it's very symbiotic.

[566] So, and then in its worst case, I think that people would vaguely know about is the Memphis.

[567] West Memphis 3.

[568] West Memphis 3.

[569] And there was a great documentary called Paradise Lost, right?

[570] and I think it was what the first thing Metallica licensed their music for, but they were solely convicted because of belief of devil -worshipping, yeah?

[571] How did that case unfold?

[572] Yeah, so that was the tail end of the satanic panic that was in 1993.

[573] And earlier asked, well, where are the babies?

[574] Well, in West Memphis, who actually had this horrible murder where three eight -year -olds were abducted and found naked in a swamp, basically, and they had been hog -tied with their own shoelaces.

[575] And so there's a double tragedy here, and that they blame this on the goth kids.

[576] Yeah.

[577] But also, the actual murderer was never brought to justice.

[578] I mean, somebody really did that, and they got away with it.

[579] So they all home in on this guy, Damien Eccles.

[580] Yeah.

[581] Damien Eccles, you know, wore metal t -shirts and was a dropout and had depression.

[582] I think he had been busted once for shoplifting.

[583] The other two of the Westminster Street are kind of collateral damage.

[584] They're really after Damien Eccles, and they're looking for people that they can interrogate who will finger Damien Eccles.

[585] and it was actually a county juvenile officer who immediately after the murder says it's going to be one of these kids and Damien Eccles was on the list and also fancied himself an expert on a cult crime.

[586] And this was a big problem in the 80s was people were paid tax dollars to give these lectures to law enforcement on a cult crime, which in my opinion isn't a thing, right?

[587] Sometimes demented people will commit a murder and they'll leave like a weird symbol or something like that.

[588] But this idea that if police can just learn all the symbols that they can prevent these or figure something out is wrongheaded.

[589] Well, the example I love to give is more killers have publicly been found holding Catcher in the Rye than have been holding pentegrams and we've not launched a campaign to get rid of Catcher in the Rye, or maybe some knucklehead has.

[590] But again, you're trying to retroactively explain something.

[591] There's really nothing to it.

[592] That's right.

[593] On one level, this is all kind of government waste because, you know, the police chiefs have to give so much money to training and they're just sort of picking training courses out of a hat.

[594] Oh, a cult crime.

[595] That sounds good.

[596] I'll give that person $10 ,000.

[597] And then the person usually has no credentials at all, but they sometimes would set up like a fake black altar, you know, and say this is what a satanic altar looks like.

[598] And they would always have these lists of symbols and it would be like, here's a yin yang, you know, this is a really satanic symbol.

[599] And here's the like ACDC logo.

[600] Yeah, yeah.

[601] You know, so this guy was a product of those courses and then they're looking for evidence and then the next thing they do is they get a woman who is in the police office because her employer has accuser of stealing from the till and they basically say we'll let this go if you can seduce Damien Eccles and get him on tape to say that he murdered these people so they put a recorder in her trailer she somehow gets Damien Eccles to come over and the police have brought all these books on like astrology and stuff and like put them all over her house so this is going to get him talking about the occult.

[602] He's going to be so horny when he sees all that occult stuff.

[603] And she says, I want to be a witch.

[604] And he just laughs at her.

[605] And then she says, you know, people in town say that you drink human blood.

[606] And he says, I just use that as a mechanism so people will leave me alone.

[607] Oh, God.

[608] And she says, what's a mechanism?

[609] Oh, my God.

[610] It means leave me the fuck alone, right?

[611] That's why I let these rumors spread.

[612] So the police later lose the tape because there's nothing incriminating on it.

[613] So that gets lost as evidence.

[614] And then they basically teach her to say, I went to a witch's Sabbath with Damian Eccles.

[615] And he bragged about doing this.

[616] And then later, in 2004, this woman said that was a complete fabrication.

[617] The police told me they would take my kids away if I didn't say this.

[618] And she's using very specific terminology.

[619] Like she says it was an S -BAT.

[620] An S -BOT is this term that's sometimes used in WICA to describe certain types of holidays.

[621] And she says, well, the juvenile detention officer taught me the word S -Bot.

[622] I've never heard of an S -Bot before.

[623] That fake story gives them the go -ahead to interrogate Jesse Miss Kelly, who has an IQ of 74, and is a minor.

[624] And they interrogated him for 12 hours.

[625] They told him he failed a lie detector test.

[626] And eventually he just told them whenever they wanted to hear.

[627] And that was the basis of the conviction of these three people.

[628] So it's a really sad story.

[629] We're sadly in possession now of some of these.

[630] I assume you watch the making a murderer thing on Netflix.

[631] Did you see that one?

[632] I haven't watched it yet.

[633] Oh, well, they have footage of them doing the same thing to a kid who's probably under 71 IQ.

[634] And he wants to go home to watch WrestleMania.

[635] That's all he can think about.

[636] And yeah, they just plant all this info for him to regurgitate.

[637] And it's just, that's what pisses me off is like you've got people afraid of witches and spirit possession.

[638] And then you have real things.

[639] that kind of thing.

[640] That's rear and everywhere and cruel and nefarious and evil.

[641] That's going completely passed over because of these other pursuits.

[642] Well, that's the irony is we may have caught the person who did this.

[643] Have we not been so preoccupied with Damien Eccles?

[644] And so these accusations of Satanism and witchcraft, I think they aid and abet the very thing that they are claiming to be fighting against.

[645] So what would be the explanation for this moral satanic panic of the 80s.

[646] What do you think caused it?

[647] So there's a lot of theories about that.

[648] One of them is actually just the economic shift from a one -income family being the norm to a two -income family being the norm.

[649] And that sounds like a weird explanation.

[650] But most of the people being accused of being Satanists were daycare providers, which that's pretty weird.

[651] Like if I said there's a Satanist in your town, you'd probably be like, it's the kid at the gas station or it's the lawyer or whatever.

[652] You store.

[653] Yeah.

[654] Yeah.

[655] So what is it about daycare providers?

[656] And so David Bromley said, I think what was happening is that in the 80s, you had these families and they both got to go to work, which means they got to give the kid to the bus driver and the bus driver takes them to school and then they have karate lessons after school and all these other people are raising your kids.

[657] You don't want them to, but you have to do that.

[658] And so his theory was this idea that there's a conspiracy to like corrupt your children, it wasn't literally true, but it felt true.

[659] It was a sort of metaphor for that kind of frustration.

[660] Yeah, you're fear.

[661] Anytime you're turning your kid over to anyone, you're very fearful, understandably so.

[662] Well, and there's all the difference in the world between the kindergarten teacher hit me today.

[663] And she took me into a secret tunnel and we all drank goat's blood and worship Satan and we met Chuck Norris.

[664] I mean, if you read the kinds of things that were being reported in the McMartin preschool trial, it's amazing that this was taken seriously, but that was another factor was paradoxically.

[665] They said, well, kids never lie.

[666] And then they would say, well, this couldn't be true, but there must be some kind of truth in it because kids never lie.

[667] I don't know the McMartin case.

[668] What happened there?

[669] So the McMartin preschool trial basically began with a woman whose son was about three years old and was at this preschool.

[670] And I think had like blood in his underwear or something like that.

[671] And so she kind of feared the worst.

[672] And so the police, their way of dealing with this was to write a letter to everyone who had ever sent a child to this preschool and say, please ask your child about the following things.

[673] And it's like sodomy, bondage, you know, all of this stuff that you would need a lot of skill to actually seriously ask a child about.

[674] And so sure enough, they get, you know, 300 complaints.

[675] And as they investigate this more, kids are sent to therapists who are trying to help but are doing these extremely leading interviews with puppets and getting kids to report increasingly more bizarre stories and eventually sort of Satanism comes into the mix because everybody is afraid of Satanism.

[676] And eventually there's this claim of, well, there's tunnels underneath the school.

[677] Oh, I got Pizza Gate.

[678] Yeah, exactly.

[679] It was Pizza Gate before Pizza Gate.

[680] So the whole trial lasted seven years before the family was exoner.

[681] It bankrupted them.

[682] It was the most expensive trial in American history to the taxpayers until the OJ trial.

[683] No way.

[684] Where was it at?

[685] This was in California.

[686] Oh.

[687] Feathering our cap, Monica.

[688] It's largely forgotten, right?

[689] Yeah.

[690] So this all happened, and they did eventually get archaeologists to, like, excavate under the preschool, and they didn't really find anything convincing, in my opinion.

[691] But there are still people who insist that this all really happened.

[692] The McMartans were really Satanist.

[693] They were really doing all this stuff.

[694] And they sort of had a slick lawyer who got them off.

[695] So it's quite disturbing and quite dangerous as I think Pizza Gate showed us.

[696] I would argue any citizen that can be triumphant in a seven -year -long court battle most certainly was innocent.

[697] Because the lopsidedness of the funding is off the charts, right?

[698] I mean, they're probably spending 1 ,000 to 1.

[699] Well, and eventually the DA was in this position of we've got to find something.

[700] we've been at this for years, right?

[701] And they were saying, you know, there's got to be somewhere some piece of evidence.

[702] And of course, there never was, right?

[703] They kept expecting we're going to find this big cache of child pornography somewhere or something like this.

[704] And they never, ever did.

[705] Wow.

[706] All right.

[707] So that was the 80s.

[708] And what happened in the 90s and what has happened now?

[709] And what are our explanations?

[710] Well, we have a lot of data that if you go in front of a jury and and you just keep saying the word Satanist over and over again in front of a jury, they're going to convict.

[711] Really?

[712] It's still a very powerful word.

[713] Is that regional or is that, that's across the board?

[714] That's more or less across the board.

[715] You know, some people notice that West Memphis is a town.

[716] It's in the Bible Belt.

[717] It has a high rate of people living in poverty.

[718] It has low rates of education.

[719] And these things correlate very well with belief in the devil.

[720] We know this from big national surveys.

[721] But the data that I saw at least seem to indicate, you know, if you just take a national average, claiming that someone is a Satanist is a very effective strategy to get them convicted of something.

[722] The only difference is that law enforcement and judges are much more skeptical of these kinds of claims than they were in the 80s because they're familiar with the literature and they kind of know people tell stories like this sometimes.

[723] It usually doesn't ever add up to anything.

[724] So for that reason that the panic has diminished a little bit.

[725] What just occurred to me, and I guess is implicit in what you're saying, is that what it answers, obviously, in a criminal trial, is motive, which is always a very hard thing to establish.

[726] And if you're looking at somebody who gained absolutely nothing from these crimes, that's just a cure -all motive, right?

[727] I want to appease this evil force.

[728] And you're like, oh, well, now I understand.

[729] But now that I know this person believes in the devil and wants to appease the devil, now I have motive.

[730] That's right.

[731] And I've, you know, I can't say much about this, but I have been consulted in some murder.

[732] cases where people have claimed satanic involvement.

[733] And that's exactly why it's a popular theory is because it takes motive out of the question, right?

[734] Satanists just kill people for no reason.

[735] Everybody knows that.

[736] Right.

[737] And so if you have, you know, a body that's found in a park or something like this, you don't need to worry about how that body got in a park if you think Satanist did it.

[738] Right.

[739] Okay.

[740] So now, as you pointed out in 1966, time puts on, is God dead?

[741] and at that time there was a kind of low belief in this stuff.

[742] And then in the wake of the popular book and film, The Exorcist, the numbers then skyrocketed.

[743] Yeah, you know, some people talk about the unholy trinity of films, which is Rosemary's Baby, 1968, The Exorcist, 1973, and the Omen, 1976.

[744] Uh -huh.

[745] And sort of these three films kind of form this mythology of kind of hidden cults of Satanus and the Antichrist and Demons.

[746] They kind of shape a lot of modern belief about the devil for a lot of people.

[747] Oh, I still carry around Children of the Corn.

[748] It was one of the few I saw, and it had some satanic underpinnings, I guess.

[749] And I've been to towns in my life where I'm like, it was little children of the corny.

[750] Like, you know, it's in my psyche for sure.

[751] Yeah, and, you know, most of those movies, but especially the Exorcists, you know, they wanted William Friedkin to direct it because he was known for these sort of hyper -realistic movies.

[752] you know, he hired actual priests in that film.

[753] So it is very realistic.

[754] I mean, there's a lot of special effects that maybe don't hold up as well today when I make my students watch The Exorcist.

[755] But despite all of that, it's quite realistic.

[756] And I think it sort of persuaded people of if this happened in real life, this is what it would look like.

[757] Yeah.

[758] And so we know that after that film came out, lots of priests began getting inundated with calls, saying I'm possessed, my kid's possessed, my dog is possessed.

[759] And they said it was never like this before.

[760] This only happened after this movie came out.

[761] So the current Catholic church and the current Pope, tell us what their official stance is on demons in the devil and exorcism.

[762] Because they have a billion followers.

[763] Right.

[764] So if you want a Catholic exorcism, the procedure is a priest has to write a letter to his bishop saying, I really think this person needs an exorcism.

[765] And then they are supposed to sign off on it.

[766] And these rules can be bent.

[767] There are loopholes and things that get used.

[768] But the reason that's the rule is that the bishop basically knows the local situation and sort of how the church is perceived locally.

[769] And so they're the best person to decide is this going to be an embarrassment to the church, right?

[770] Is this going to be something that makes us look like the good guys or is this going to make us look silly?

[771] And for most of American history, Catholics have been a minority.

[772] They've been seen as an immigrant religion, so superstitious immigrants fresh off the boat.

[773] And so in the American church, historically, didn't want to talk about exorcism at all.

[774] And then this movie came out.

[775] And then it was sort of this moment of, wait, you guys like this?

[776] You guys like that we can cast out demons?

[777] But the other thing that happened was by 1973, if the Catholics turned you down, you could go to the Pentecostals.

[778] You could go to the charismatic evangelicals.

[779] There were all these other people who would do an exorcism.

[780] And so the Catholic Church realized, if we don't do this, somebody else will.

[781] And we're going to lose followers.

[782] And so there has been this huge.

[783] revival of exorcism in the Catholic Church, and now there are courses on it that you can go take.

[784] It's always been the rule that every diocese is supposed to have an exorcist.

[785] On staff?

[786] Prior to the, yeah, someone is supposed to be the exorcist.

[787] You're not supposed to know who it is if you call the church and say, hey, who's the exorcist?

[788] They probably won't tell you.

[789] But I think before this film, it was just sort of this weird formality.

[790] There wasn't really an exorcist.

[791] Now it's beginning to be more serious, and it's more likely that they have someone who they've sent off for training.

[792] And Pope Francis has been encouraging this a little bit.

[793] And my theory is that Pope Francis is a pretty progressive Pope on social issues.

[794] And the people who like exorcism tend to be conservative and to not like Pope Francis's leadership.

[795] So by throwing a bone to exorcism, he's kind of helping to keep conservative support for his agenda.

[796] And they can say, well, he seems a little bit too lenient on the gays, but at least he's talking about demons.

[797] Yeah.

[798] So I guess he's okay.

[799] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[800] Well, and I hate to be overly cynical, but I think you could map quite clearly.

[801] The ebbs and flows in their embracing of this concept, it's pretty inconsistent unless you pair it up with the threat of losing followers and stuff.

[802] It just seems pretty unavoidably true that that seems to be the motivation.

[803] more than just a die -hard commitment to exercise all demons from the get.

[804] That's just not how it's worked.

[805] Well, this goes back to the beginning of our conversation, right?

[806] We might think, well, it'll be nice if churches didn't worry about market competition and make their decisions based on that.

[807] But they clearly do, and it's silly to ignore that when that's part of understanding the phenomenon.

[808] Yeah, and then, because you just mentioned that he's as pro -gay as a pope can be, but that was a very common exorcism, right, for these churches.

[809] that offered, well, I forget what they called it.

[810] Would they get the gay out of you, basically?

[811] I forget the...

[812] Pray the gay.

[813] Yeah.

[814] The sort of gay conversion to exorcism appears to be a new phenomenon, right?

[815] And part of what we have to understand historically is, you know, some historians like, you know, Michelle Foucault, is one of these people you have to read in college.

[816] He said there weren't really gay people until psychologists invented them in the 1800s, right?

[817] And that prior to that, if you did...

[818] just like to have sex with men a lot, you were just a sinner, right?

[819] But you weren't a different type of person.

[820] You just need to stop doing this because it's, it's forbidden.

[821] So once there's a concept of, well, some people are gay, then that opens it up to kind of having demonological explanations of, well, why is this person like that?

[822] I had never heard of a gay exorcism until about 2010, and it seemed to mostly be a phenomenon of these deliverance ministries.

[823] And unfortunately it was almost always teenagers who seem to have no choice in whether or not they wanted to be exercised who were being subjected to this.

[824] And so it did seem pretty abusive and questionable.

[825] I've also seen literature with people, you know, going to a psychologist and say, well, I think I have a demon.

[826] And they say, why do you think you have a demon?

[827] And they say, well, because I keep looking at all this gay porn.

[828] And I'm a good, straight Christian family man. And so it must be a demon making me do this.

[829] And the psychologists in the past have written that up as sexual confusion.

[830] So that comes into play as well.

[831] But certainly taking a teenager who can't decide for themselves whether they want to do an exorcism and doing that, I think, is unethical.

[832] I guess that my question is it's something I always try to evaluate with some of our political leaders like, oh, do they really believe that or not?

[833] And I guess that's kind of unknowable, but I am going there a little bit, which is like if we can see that a lot of these things are probably motivated out of retaining followers and or expanding the brand, then you can easily see people doing it without actually believing in it.

[834] And I guess there's probably no way to know.

[835] Is there any metric for us to know?

[836] Like, how sincere are they about this?

[837] When the Catholic Church says, well, let's have a whole department for it and let's have some literature on it and let's have a formal methodology for it, is that sincere or not?

[838] And I guess can you know?

[839] Yeah.

[840] I mean, we did get some interesting data recently from a sociologist who went to an exorcist in Rome and said, here's my files.

[841] I'm going to take the names out.

[842] And you can just, here's all the patients that I've had in the last 10 years.

[843] And it was several thousand people who would come to him saying, I have a demon, I need an exorcism.

[844] Only 5 % of them were actually given an exorcism.

[845] So a lot of them, he would just say you need to see a psychiatrist, right?

[846] Or more often it was things like, you know, you need to stop cheating on your wife.

[847] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[848] You need to go to confession or something like this or you need anger management.

[849] But the ones who did get an exorcism, some of them, it just became a lifestyle.

[850] They would be exercised hundreds of times.

[851] Oh, it's not a one.

[852] Wow.

[853] One and done.

[854] It can be, but that's rare.

[855] You know, the case that the movie The Exorcist was based on, that exorcism lasted like five months.

[856] Oh.

[857] So it's not unusual for this to just be done over and over and over again.

[858] Almost it can become a lifestyle in some cases.

[859] You can easily imagine in an era where they did not understand, say, bipolar condition, that people do have spells of manic episodes and that they would probably return at those times for some exorcism.

[860] And then it would clear up, as would happen anyways.

[861] And so that seems very easy to have.

[862] a spurious conclusion on its success.

[863] Yeah, and one thing that my students concluded is, you know, seeing a therapist once a week is expensive.

[864] But if you can get an exorcism once a week and you feel better emotionally afterwards, you know, that's a much cheaper alternative.

[865] Well, and then you add in a very well -documented placebo effect.

[866] So, yeah, whenever you're dealing with this stuff, it's, you know, it's not empirical.

[867] Well, one of the cases I include in the book is a psychiatrist who was assigned to a Native American reservation up in the northwest.

[868] And this Native American woman brings her teenage daughter and says, you know, my daughter is hallucinating fields of blood and ghosts are attacking her.

[869] And in the 70s, psychiatry was mostly Freudian psychoanalysis.

[870] And so the psychiatrist was like, well, probably what's happening is your daughter's coming of age and you're having sexual jealousy with her.

[871] He has this whole Freudian theory, but he doesn't tell them that.

[872] Yeah.

[873] And he just says, what do you think is going on?

[874] And she says, well, I think that the ancestor, want our daughter to be a shaman, and so the spirits are challenging her to see if she can control them, but we don't want her to be a shaman.

[875] We want her to go to college.

[876] And he says, okay, well, what do you normally do when this is a problem?

[877] I said, well, there is a ritual that we could do.

[878] We could get all the elders and just tell the spirits, you know, thanks, but no thanks.

[879] And the psychiatrist is like, as you're psychiatrist, I think you should go do this ritual.

[880] Uh -huh.

[881] And then it works.

[882] And then he says, you know, I think that their rituals are just their form of psychiatry, and psychiatry is just our form of doing these kinds of rituals.

[883] Psychiatrists are our culture's exorcists.

[884] Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[885] I don't think anyone's got a monopoly on any of this stuff.

[886] Right.

[887] That's the one thing I try to do in the course is get students to kind of overcome this hubris of our ancestors and so -called primitive cultures believe in demons and exorcism, and we don't.

[888] We're enlightened, and we're past that.

[889] It's simply not true.

[890] Well, in this great article you wrote, there is also a YouTube clip attached to it.

[891] And I got to say as someone who's lived in L .A. for 25 years, I've never witnessed anything like this, but there's four or five men performing an exorcism at Starbucks.

[892] That was in Austin.

[893] Again, chocker to me. I wouldn't have expected that.

[894] Yeah, just can you tell us about that?

[895] Yeah.

[896] So I've shown that to my students.

[897] And, you know, most of them in San Marcos, Texas said, well, why is this even a thing?

[898] Like, you could see this in my hometown in central Texas, you know, any, any Friday nights.

[899] Really?

[900] Yeah.

[901] So I think that's how normal it's become in some parts of the country.

[902] So I think the general public is not aware of how big the so -called deliverance ministry has gotten.

[903] You know, another good index of this is look at Paula White, Trump's, you know, personal pastor.

[904] Okay.

[905] And she does these speeches and she sounds like a kind of medieval exorcist, you know.

[906] She's saying things like, we banish all spirits of Jesuits.

[907] All Spirits of Belial.

[908] She's rattling off all these demons to get away from her president.

[909] And this is mainstream politics.

[910] It's right in front of us.

[911] Wow.

[912] Okay.

[913] My favorite thing about the Starbucks clip, I hope people go watch it, is it's not even the exorcism, which is its own racket from my point of view.

[914] There's a woman three feet away from them that is just divided by glass.

[915] She's in the restaurant and they are outside the restaurant.

[916] She is feet away.

[917] She's closer to them than some of the people.

[918] people performing that.

[919] And she's just completely oblivious to the whole thing.

[920] She's like reading some papers.

[921] This is a comedian maybe that my favorite aspect of that video is just how she's totally missing the exorcism.

[922] That's three feet away from her.

[923] Yeah, another thing you can see in that video is so often exorcists, they love lists.

[924] The guy's like spitting into a Starbucks cup and he's saying, you know, all your curses and poisons, all your evil spirits.

[925] So it's like listing things.

[926] And some people have said, you know, lists give us a sense of control.

[927] Like we have imposed order on the world, right?

[928] But it is very telling that across cultures, exorcism always involves, you know, there's seven kinds of demons or there's 13 kinds of demons or whatever the numbers.

[929] I know about all of them, and I'm doing a full expulsion of all of them.

[930] You can see the success of that in modern publishing.

[931] Everything is eight ways to lose weight, six ways to be better parenting.

[932] Like we, oh, well, they must have figured it out because they know exactly how many.

[933] Well, and you feel like it's easy.

[934] Okay, if I do these things, check it's done.

[935] 12 steps of sobriety.

[936] I follow 12 steps.

[937] Like, they figured it out.

[938] 11 wouldn't have worked.

[939] 13 would have been too many.

[940] So has anyone ever talked recently about, I mean, I guess Q and on and the connection to all of this, how the abuse of children is a common factor.

[941] And yet, really, the only evidence we have of an actual.

[942] pedophile ring is within the Catholic Church.

[943] Well, yeah, one of the most profound.

[944] There's certainly a lot of them.

[945] Where it's like, where it's a problem within the institution.

[946] Right.

[947] You know?

[948] Yeah, that's ironic.

[949] It's so ironic.

[950] How do they talk themselves out of that?

[951] I just don't understand how they're reconciling this.

[952] Right.

[953] I mean, so pedophilia and child trafficking is a big problem.

[954] And it's a big problem in the Catholic Church.

[955] It was also, of course, Jeffrey Epstein.

[956] Yes.

[957] I also think, sadly, most large organizations that have access to children handle this the same way that the Catholic Church did.

[958] The Boy Scouts is currently being sued.

[959] I went to an Episcopalian prep school with a dormitory.

[960] Same thing happened.

[961] Priests were molesting kids and they were sent to a different district.

[962] Yeah, the gymnastics, the young Larry Nasser and the young gymnast.

[963] Yeah, that's true.

[964] Yeah.

[965] So it's a real problem, right?

[966] And one theory about what was going on the 80s with daycare providers was they said, this is a weirdly, the 80s was a moment where they acknowledged child abuse was a thing.

[967] Right.

[968] Right.

[969] And it really, part of it was they were doing x -rays of children.

[970] And they kept noticing all these kids have had broken bones.

[971] And they eventually, for a while, they're like, it's some new disease.

[972] And they realize, no, people are really hitting their kids, like really hard.

[973] And so there was an acknowledgement that this is going on, but nobody wanted to say who was doing it, right?

[974] which is the people that we trust.

[975] Yeah.

[976] And also they didn't want to empower the government to go and break up the family.

[977] And so the kind of compromise, this is journalist Debbie Nathan's theory about this year, book called Satan's Silence.

[978] The compromises will admit it's happening but we'll attribute it to this mythological group, these Satanists.

[979] And I think QAnon, it kind of does the same thing.

[980] So, you know, Q &ON has kind of appropriated this hashtag of Save the Children.

[981] Yeah.

[982] And Trump recently said, I don't know about them, but they're very much against pedophilia.

[983] So that's good.

[984] Yeah, as if you can find a lot of pro pedophilia people.

[985] Right.

[986] Exactly.

[987] Yeah, opposing pedophilia is the absolute bare minimum, right, for political discourse.

[988] So, I mean, this is, again, the problem is I think that they are muddying the waters and making it harder to combat the thing that they claim that they care about and they claim that they want to stop.

[989] Well, it's so true.

[990] And we had a great conversation with this New Zealand journalist.

[991] But yeah, as he points out, this movement that Save the Children movement is almost uniformly against journalism.

[992] And if you really look at who has broken up all of the pedophilia rings, it has almost been unanimously journalists.

[993] So there's a great irony there as well.

[994] Right.

[995] Yeah, this sort of slogan of, you know, journalists are the enemy of the people.

[996] I mean, you know, we could also talk about if we want to talk about children being kept in cages, you know, maybe we should talk about, you know, refugees and things like that.

[997] And they say, well, that's fake news.

[998] So it's, it's very, very frustrating.

[999] Yeah, yeah, it is.

[1000] And then I'll just throw it out here because it's Halloween, but I remember learning in an anthro class and it's been substantiated by other experts we've had on.

[1001] And you would know it too is just like, razor blades and candy.

[1002] That has never happened.

[1003] It has happened a few times, but it has been the parents who did it to their children.

[1004] But there's been no, not a single documented case of the.

[1005] crazy neighbor who poisoned kids?

[1006] Well, here's what's interesting about that is in 1974, a guy took out a huge life insurance on his son.

[1007] This was in Houston and fed him a pixie stick filled with strychnine.

[1008] But he did it because he thought everyone believes this urban legend.

[1009] I can get away with it.

[1010] And so the legend created the very event that it was describing.

[1011] And folklore is called this ostension.

[1012] Ostension is when a legend is transmitted by actually doing it.

[1013] Oh.

[1014] Oh, oh, oh, oh.

[1015] Yeah, so it's like a chicken or an egg thing.

[1016] Now people are recreating a myth in real life.

[1017] Exactly.

[1018] The myth wasn't based on a true story.

[1019] The true story was based on the myth.

[1020] Oh, my God.

[1021] We're so fallible, myself included.

[1022] A great example is like watching that Paradise Loss.

[1023] There ended up being three installments, as I recall.

[1024] And one of the installments kind of points the telescope directly at the stepfather of Damien Eccles.

[1025] And I'm like, that's the guy, man. They need to put cuffs on him.

[1026] It's him.

[1027] And then they have a follow -up one years later.

[1028] And it's not him.

[1029] And then they pointed at another person.

[1030] I'm like, fuck, that's the guy.

[1031] You know, we're not good at this.

[1032] You know, and because we're not good at this, we need to be extra vigilant about the legal process, about evidence, about cross -examination, about all these things.

[1033] Like, they are there for a reason because we are so.

[1034] failable.

[1035] Yeah, and this is what I tell my students all the time is critical thinking, if you're doing it right, should hurt, right?

[1036] Actual critical thinking should really make you uncomfortable and should make your head hurt.

[1037] But if critical thinking is making you feel good, that probably means you're doing it wrong, right?

[1038] That probably means you are just engaging in confirmation bias and you are just ignoring anyone who disagrees with you and then patting yourself on the back for, you know, seeing through the fake news.

[1039] You're so right.

[1040] To be presented with proof that confirms what you already thought is not critical thinking.

[1041] Finding out things are counterintuitive and completely opposite of what you assumed is, that's a great way to approach it, is that it probably feels uncomfortable.

[1042] Yeah, because I think all the time people are really engaging in something like anti -intellectualism, right?

[1043] And they say, well, what does Fauci know about disease, really?

[1044] And they're like, I'm a critical thinker.

[1045] I ignore Dr. Fauci about coronavirus.

[1046] Yeah, yeah.

[1047] It can feel like critical thinking, but it isn't.

[1048] Yeah.

[1049] And again, I'm a little empathetic to those people as we just listen to this great rabbit hole podcast.

[1050] I don't know if you've listened to it, but it's so worth your time.

[1051] It's a New York Times one about how people get, I mean, just drawn into more and more militant, fringe, fanatical thinking as the algorithm knows you'll be that much more interested.

[1052] So now there's an actual supercomputer helping us believe this stuff, which is terrifying.

[1053] At least the knucklehead on the corner.

[1054] wearing the dress from the 1400s telling me that I'm going to rot in hell, that guy is visibly nuts.

[1055] You know, I have a good defense against that.

[1056] But the algorithm that's just serving up more and more tasty stuff confirming my suspicions, that's going to be hard to defeat.

[1057] Yeah, and I think people who say I'm a YouTube researcher just don't think about where the information is coming from.

[1058] They don't realize that this is only showing them things that it thinks that they will like to see.

[1059] That it knows.

[1060] It's way smarter than the person himself.

[1061] Yeah.

[1062] Oh, my gosh.

[1063] Well, what a fascinating topic.

[1064] So I guess in summation, it's on the incline.

[1065] Yeah.

[1066] It's increasing these kind of beliefs.

[1067] Yeah, right now, sort of demonological beliefs and the practice of exorcism are increasing around the world.

[1068] Absolutely.

[1069] To me, it seems like there is a really nice correlation between the rise in nationalism and xenophobia.

[1070] that has been present for the last five years that is international with Brexit and then you have the refugee crisis of Syria and people thinking those people were doing things.

[1071] So, I mean, do we think that's the underpinning of this current rise?

[1072] I mean, it's hard to say, but it does seem like there is a connection there.

[1073] And the connection may be that both of these impulses are a response to sort of feeling uncertain about the world.

[1074] I need something to cling to.

[1075] and for some people that could be, you know, America first.

[1076] Let's get rid of the immigrants.

[1077] And for other people, it could be, you know, let's cast out all these demons.

[1078] But they're both sort of ways of solving a kind of psychological problem of feeling uncertain about things.

[1079] You know, when I teach religion classes, I've got students who are atheists and I've got students who just finish watching God's not dead and think I'm there to, like, destroy their faith.

[1080] And what I always try to tell is, I want you guys to all leave with the same basic worldview that you came in with.

[1081] the only thing that's not okay is smugness right we have to be kind of open to learning more about the world if we're smug that's the only thing that that i can't really tolerate in this classroom oh yeah that's great and the antidote to smugness is humility and nearly everything we're talking about is yet unknown whether it's the fear of the people on the right or the fear of us on the left it's all unknown so to be so definitive about these things is to me a lack of humility, something I suffer from greatly as Monica just experienced while teaching me the game spades.

[1082] So I am.

[1083] It was a rough couple hours.

[1084] I'm uniquely susceptible to smugness and a lack of humility.

[1085] So I guess I'm lecturing myself.

[1086] But you're a rad dude.

[1087] I hope to God, Monica and I are floating on some tubes down the San Marcos River and we can throw you a wave.

[1088] Yeah, as you across the commons.

[1089] Well, I want to give a shout out to Kelly Goebel at Texas State because she was so excited when I was going to do this podcast.

[1090] He's a huge fan.

[1091] If you float the river, I'll let her know.

[1092] Okay, so the Penguin Book of Exorcisms, I want everyone to read it.

[1093] Is there an audio version of it?

[1094] There is.

[1095] Yeah.

[1096] And it's actually this really silky baritone voice.

[1097] So I'm really pleased with how it came out.

[1098] It's not my voice reading it.

[1099] Do you have any say in who reads it?

[1100] Did they give you at least like three finalists and ask for your input?

[1101] Yeah, they gave me about six finalists and we thought about it a lot.

[1102] And someone narrated horror novels, but we ended up deciding that we like the kind of Barry White -sounding voice, because it gives a certain grabitas to what I wrote.

[1103] Can I audition for the next one right now?

[1104] I'm going to read, I'm going to read a couple things from your work and just see what do you think, okay?

[1105] Okay.

[1106] The Penguin Book of Exorcisms.

[1107] I loved it.

[1108] I got chills.

[1109] All right, let me hit you with one more.

[1110] Oh, boy.

[1111] Dangerous games.

[1112] I like that one too Well, you can only do like two words at a time Well, I don't know, I haven't written down I didn't need you're pulling up direct quotes from him In fact, the dangerous games has a much longer title But I know it's about Dungeons and Dragons and Moral Panic All right, let me take two, okay, you ready?

[1113] Do you love playing spooky games with the mind Like Dungeons and Dragons And has it induced moral panic Read Dangerous Games That was pretty good Yeah I'm gonna make that my ringtone Definitely will probably get annoying After the first paragraph But maybe I'll just intro You know what I just changed it I'm auditioning to read the title of your book So I will go The Penguin Book of Exorcism by Joseph Laycock And then the other guy will come in The Sustainable Voice and do the heavy lifting Like a remix, yeah I love it A match up.

[1114] Oh, wow.

[1115] All right, well, Joseph, thanks so much for taking time to talk to us.

[1116] This was super fascinating and entertaining.

[1117] So, happy Halloween and many, many well wishes for the book.

[1118] Okay, thanks so much.

[1119] This has been great.

[1120] All right.

[1121] Take care.

[1122] Okay.

[1123] Bye -bye.

[1124] And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Batman.

[1125] Welcome, welcome, welcome to the fact check.

[1126] It's such a spoo -y day.

[1127] Halloween Eve.

[1128] I've never planned so much for Halloween as I did this year.

[1129] Tell everyone what you've done.

[1130] Okay.

[1131] You can't go trick or treat in an L .A. For good reason.

[1132] We can't be spreading this illness everywhere.

[1133] So then my thought was, what can I do?

[1134] So I'm going to put out candy at my house, at your house, and our old house.

[1135] Yep.

[1136] And then I asked two other neighbors if I could just put buckets on their porch.

[1137] Yep.

[1138] And they said, cool.

[1139] and then we're just going to have the few kids in our pod go to those houses and get some candy.

[1140] And I said, that's underwhelming.

[1141] So I have a trailer.

[1142] I have a 14 -foot trailer, open trailer, not enclosed.

[1143] And so I went and got 11 hay bales yesterday.

[1144] And they're in the trailer currently.

[1145] And I'm going to do a hay ride through the neighborhood.

[1146] We'll be all self -contained.

[1147] So cute.

[1148] So it will be our fully self -contained pod on the hay ride.

[1149] Are we all going to just the kids?

[1150] We're all going to.

[1151] Oh, yes.

[1152] There'll be multi.

[1153] I'm going to be giving these rides for hours.

[1154] So the yard will be a party with, I don't mind, I don't even think they're a sponsor anymore, but the teaky fire pit, which I'm obsessed with.

[1155] One of my favorite products they've given us.

[1156] Yeah.

[1157] I ordered a bunch of new pellet bags.

[1158] So I'm going to have a raging bonfire here.

[1159] Yes.

[1160] And then I'm going to have the hayrides going.

[1161] And then I'm also got a little projector you can plug into your phone.

[1162] So I'm going to be broadcasting some spooky movie against the.

[1163] garage here probably oh you are yes and then lawn chairs and then you get in and out of the hayride i'm borrowing eric's tesla because it's electric so you know and i'll have to smell my diesel exhaust on the hayride well yeah i know you really thought of everything i really i think i thought of everything of course on saturday it'll occur to me that i had there i had a blind spot but so are we doing are we starting hallowina like a 10 a yes yes yes yes yes yes yes yes i mean all the real heavy heavy hitting stuff will come around nightfall and and uh and you know we got a full moon on Saturday.

[1164] Yes, it's the sprukey.

[1165] And that's a voice.

[1166] I'm going to get a megaphone.

[1167] And the whole time I'm driving, I'm going to go, I'm going to use the Sonos mobile speaker, and I'm going to play spooky music in the hayride.

[1168] Are you going to do a witch voice?

[1169] I'm going to go, hey, welcome to the hay ride.

[1170] That's good.

[1171] Thank you.

[1172] What are you going to be again?

[1173] I'm not, I'm going to, I'm giving myself a Mohawk.

[1174] And that's going to be okay.

[1175] You see, it's mixed messages because you're going all out, but you're not really doing a costume.

[1176] I don't like doing a costume.

[1177] If I've ever been in a good costume, it's because someone else figured it out for me. I don't know what it is.

[1178] I guess it's like shopping for clothes.

[1179] I just don't like doing it.

[1180] Then do you regret it?

[1181] I don't.

[1182] I don't care.

[1183] Well, here's what happens.

[1184] I feel guilty.

[1185] I'll go over to the Hanson's house and the whole damn families in some themed costume and they all match and they put clearly so much effort into it.

[1186] it.

[1187] And then I'm like, what a asshole.

[1188] You should have raised the bar for these folks.

[1189] Look what they've done.

[1190] But I think since I'm providing so many things, I won't have that guilt.

[1191] Okay.

[1192] I'm like, yeah, I don't have a fucking costume.

[1193] I have a, I have a mohawk and I have a hayride.

[1194] You're in or you're out.

[1195] You're either for me or you're against me. Why don't you at least wear just like some ripped jeans?

[1196] Like be punk.

[1197] You could just go as punk rock.

[1198] I'm going to go as punk rock.

[1199] Yeah.

[1200] Yeah.

[1201] And maybe I'll write like on a torn up t -shirt, Like, F, yeah, down the establishment.

[1202] Ooh, that's relevant because you're going as Damien Eccles.

[1203] Oh, yeah, I was trying to think of who was, you know what I, here's what I thought of that I'd love to do.

[1204] And I know you're not a student of Road Warrior and Mad Max.

[1205] But, all right, the first movie's Mad Max.

[1206] It's in black and white, Australian film.

[1207] Then the next one's Road Warrior.

[1208] That's my favorite of all them.

[1209] There's a bad guy in it with a big mohawk.

[1210] and he wears leather chaps and like a thong There's a moment in the movie Because I got it on Blu -ray, you pause You can see his ball sack That's neither here nor there He's got like straps across his chest All this leather stuff And some weapons and a big mohawk And I thought fuck I should have got some leather chaps Oh wow And I could have been him But it's kind of a it's a kid's party With the kids hayride I'm a little worried about actually The Mohawk fitting in the car When it's time for me to drive That's my more functional concern Oh, it's going to be that high.

[1211] Well, I'm already six, you know, today I feel six three.

[1212] Okay.

[1213] And then the Mohawk, let's see.

[1214] I'm just going to stand it up for it.

[1215] No, I'm not going to stand it.

[1216] You get it.

[1217] It's about to hear.

[1218] No, it's not that high.

[1219] You fucking piece of shit.

[1220] You're a piece of shit.

[1221] Let me take this fucking ponytail and show you how fucking tall this shit is.

[1222] All right, let's see.

[1223] It's high.

[1224] Your neck is so stressed.

[1225] I am not going to fit in a car.

[1226] We could agree with this.

[1227] What would you say this?

[1228] This is like eight inch?

[1229] Um, like, yeah, seven.

[1230] Call it eight.

[1231] That puts me at 6 .11.

[1232] Wow.

[1233] Yeah, my hair's going to be taller than Jess.

[1234] Eat your heart out, Roland.

[1235] Unless Jess wears a Mohawkie wig.

[1236] We don't know what he's going to be.

[1237] He's keeping his costume under tight wraps.

[1238] Yeah.

[1239] I do think he owns platform boots.

[1240] He does custom costumes.

[1241] Well, look, I want to both compliment him because he is amazing costumes.

[1242] and also acknowledge, he recycles a lot of costs.

[1243] A lot of them are groundlings costumes.

[1244] But this one's new, he said.

[1245] Oh, okay.

[1246] Okay, well, then I got to give it up.

[1247] I must give it up.

[1248] This one's new, and he has them custom made because of his large body.

[1249] Oh, yeah, he's enormous.

[1250] He is the bar by which all tall things are measured in our household.

[1251] The girls are always like, is he taller than Jess?

[1252] Or is that higher than Jess?

[1253] So, speaking of red devils.

[1254] Right.

[1255] That's right.

[1256] We were just speaking of red devils.

[1257] We were.

[1258] Jess is a red devil.

[1259] Oh, I guess you're right.

[1260] I guess you're right.

[1261] I'm not what I'm doing, ding, ding, ding.

[1262] By the way, oh, I'm sorry.

[1263] Can I interrupt you?

[1264] Sure.

[1265] The fucking Little Mr. Texas mystery was solved.

[1266] Thank God.

[1267] By armcherrys.

[1268] Yes.

[1269] Shall I read it?

[1270] What a group of investigators.

[1271] There's actually been two folks that reached out with info about Little Mr. Texas.

[1272] Yeah, let me pull this up right now.

[1273] Hello, Daxon, Monica, and Rob.

[1274] I was going to read the same one.

[1275] Can we try to do it in sync?

[1276] Okay.

[1277] I just finished.

[1278] Oh, what?

[1279] We already messed up.

[1280] I was going to start over with Hello, Dax, and Monica, and Rob.

[1281] Okay.

[1282] Okay.

[1283] Hello, Dax and Monica and Rob.

[1284] I just finished listening to the Matthew McConaughey episode.

[1285] Lovely, wonderful time, by the way.

[1286] My interest was piqued by the Little Mr. Texas story.

[1287] I do archival research.

[1288] Uh -oh.

[1289] Uh -oh.

[1290] Take two.

[1291] I do archival research for documents.

[1292] documentaries.

[1293] OJ.

[1294] Made in America.

[1295] The last dance.

[1296] Pause.

[1297] Those are two.

[1298] You're getting so frustrated with me. Is it because you're in a hurry?

[1299] I don't know, maybe.

[1300] Okay.

[1301] I love both of those documentaries.

[1302] Those are literally two of my...

[1303] You know, we can't stop in the middle of the reading to talk about your personal thoughts.

[1304] I just want to commend this person.

[1305] Those are fantastic.

[1306] Well, obviously, because the next line is, I know you're a fan, Dax.

[1307] So I live for this shit.

[1308] I found a San Antonio Express article from September 1977, which mentions McConaughey as a runner -up and drum roll, the winner is a little boy named Lance Hunter.

[1309] Crop, clap.

[1310] Thank you for, oh, I added to you.

[1311] Take three.

[1312] Thanks for your wonderful and weird podcast.

[1313] Okay, how do we say this name?

[1314] This is I -N -E -S.

[1315] Einz.

[1316] ains vye, dry, veer, fump, sex, ziben, al -12, ains, Farag.

[1317] Yes.

[1318] God bless you.

[1319] Thank you for finding this.

[1320] And somebody else has also emailed us, but this was our, that was our first introduction to Lance Hunter.

[1321] And congratulations.

[1322] Congratulations.

[1323] And sincerely, if anyone knows Lance Hunter in Texas, I would love to find out what the experience was like to be crowned such a prestigious title.

[1324] and he believes it did or did not impact his life.

[1325] Agreed.

[1326] Okay.

[1327] If he's even interested, if he's alive.

[1328] Spooky.

[1329] Ooh, he might have succumbed to the curse of little Mr. Texas.

[1330] So, okay, Joseph was awesome.

[1331] Holy shit he was.

[1332] We decided afterwards we want to go audit his class.

[1333] Once we're on our tubing trip down the San Marcos River, we're going to hop out of those tubes, and we're going to put on something a little more appropriate, and then we're going to audit his class.

[1334] There's also a university that has a lazy river in it.

[1335] That's crazy.

[1336] Built in.

[1337] There is?

[1338] Yes, I saw it on something.

[1339] And I thought, God, would anyone get anything?

[1340] Like, I would just be in that lazy river.

[1341] Fuck yeah.

[1342] Well, I guess you could study on it.

[1343] The whole thing about tubing is it was my favorite activity when I drank.

[1344] Because you get an extra tube and you put the cooler in the tube.

[1345] And now you've got this floating bar next to you.

[1346] and everyone gets just shithouse ripped.

[1347] It's fun.

[1348] It's so fun.

[1349] And then the other great part is you can just keep peeing in the water because you're already in water.

[1350] So it's down the hatch, out the snatch.

[1351] I just made that up.

[1352] That's a pretty good saying.

[1353] It should be a T -shirt.

[1354] Down the hatch, out the snatch.

[1355] No?

[1356] I'm not a fan of this.

[1357] That term snatch.

[1358] No one is.

[1359] But when you force to rhyme with hatch, what other options do you have?

[1360] I guess just the one.

[1361] Down the hatch, out the patch.

[1362] I guess if you're forced to rhyme with that.

[1363] hatch as you were.

[1364] Do you like patch?

[1365] Is that one?

[1366] I just made it up.

[1367] It kind of makes sense.

[1368] You go, down the hatch, out the patch.

[1369] You mean like the patch of hair?

[1370] Yeah.

[1371] Yeah.

[1372] No good.

[1373] No, it's better than snatch, I guess.

[1374] What does it mean snatch?

[1375] Where does it come from?

[1376] Why?

[1377] I don't know.

[1378] What does it mean?

[1379] Snatch.

[1380] Is it because it's like a, like a chompy mouth?

[1381] Oh, man, I don't, that's a very ungenerous.

[1382] guess it's or it's not going to be something that is flattering i'm going to go ahead and predict that what have we found out that in the 1800s snatch was what you'd call a prize kitty like the kitty that would win the westminster kitty contest if you found out like it was some synonym for some prized pussy you know what i'm saying yeah it's getting worse i'm trying to build a case where maybe it was somehow flattering at the time i know i know what you're doing it's not working, but I know what you're doing.

[1383] Down the hatch.

[1384] Out the hatch!

[1385] Out the hatch!

[1386] No. What do you mean?

[1387] Oh, no, I can't say hatch twice.

[1388] I really thought I came up with the perfect rhyme.

[1389] Down the hatch, out the hatch.

[1390] God, miss. Down the hatch, out the latch.

[1391] Okay.

[1392] All right.

[1393] So...

[1394] Sorry, one last one.

[1395] Because it's for you.

[1396] Okay.

[1397] Down the hatch, out the natch.

[1398] It's going to squirt out your boobs.

[1399] Okay.

[1400] I don't think you know much.

[1401] about the anatomy.

[1402] Pea doesn't come out of your boobs that I know of.

[1403] I don't know then.

[1404] The pee babies, maybe, but not mine.

[1405] Well, the pee babies definitely suckle from the natch and urine comes out to sustain them.

[1406] Like when you have to breastfeed pee baby, which you'll have to do eventually.

[1407] The baby hasn't eaten anything.

[1408] I think the time is up for breastfeeding on pee baby.

[1409] Oh, you do?

[1410] I mean, it's been a...

[1411] It's been a while.

[1412] She's old.

[1413] But, yeah, I don't know how you're going to lactate or produce so far away from creation.

[1414] We're going to have to hire a wetterner's.

[1415] We're going to have to go to the 1600s and hire a wettener.

[1416] Okay, Joseph.

[1417] I just thought, for one, what, what?

[1418] This new system where you have a notepet.

[1419] You look like a detective.

[1420] You look like you went and interviewed a suspect and got a statement.

[1421] And now you're trying to read it back to your commander.

[1422] I do have this new system.

[1423] This is called Reporter's Notebook.

[1424] Exactly.

[1425] You're like a gumshoe.

[1426] And it's convenient.

[1427] Very convenient.

[1428] Very nimble.

[1429] Very small piece of paper.

[1430] You pull it out anywhere.

[1431] So William Peter Bladdy, he kind of just like glazed over that.

[1432] I didn't know he was the writer and filmmaker of the Exorcist.

[1433] Well, not the filmmaker, but the writer of the book.

[1434] And the screenplay.

[1435] And the screenplay.

[1436] But William Freakin was the director.

[1437] But it said he also wrote and directed the sequel, The Exorcist 3.

[1438] Yeah, which is a piece of shit.

[1439] Okay.

[1440] It's your opinion.

[1441] Well, I don't mean to say it.

[1442] I'm just saying William Freakun was an amazing director.

[1443] I don't, I shouldn't say was.

[1444] I think he's still with us.

[1445] So I thought the relationship to Q and on, the way he like.

[1446] Yes, tied it in that this is the same.

[1447] Yeah, that we're just in this pattern over and over and over again where there's instability.

[1448] And then from that grows this kind of satanic fear, fear of the other.

[1449] Yeah.

[1450] And I'll say, I think this aspect brings us closer to armcheries because a lot of armcherry is right on the comment section that their husbands or wives are so sick of them saying, oh, I heard an armchair blank.

[1451] They're like, okay, enough.

[1452] Similarly, you and I will interview someone like him.

[1453] Yeah.

[1454] And then we, the whole weekend, all we were talking about is all the stuff the guy said.

[1455] Yeah.

[1456] And the parallels between the killing babies with the Salem witch trial and the current QAnon accusation.

[1457] And the daycare, in the 80s.

[1458] And so if you're friends with us, we're annoying as well.

[1459] We just go around going, well, this other guy we interviewed said this.

[1460] That's true.

[1461] Yeah.

[1462] Down the hatch, Briar Pratch.

[1463] So I just also want to say, because we were talking about witches and Salem and the Crucible, that I think Kristen's Broadway debut was the Crucible.

[1464] You're right.

[1465] You're absolutely right.

[1466] I thought people want to know that nugget.

[1467] So if you want to know more about Kristen, watch the Crucible.

[1468] You can't watch it.

[1469] it was a play.

[1470] I bet it's on a movie somewhere.

[1471] Okay.

[1472] Oh, my God.

[1473] So the origin of the phrase kiss my ass.

[1474] Remember, he said there's a theory that it's because, like, witches ate poop and kissed the devil's butt?

[1475] Well, he said they do the opposite of whatever we do.

[1476] So we kiss on the lips, so they kiss on the butt.

[1477] Yeah.

[1478] Yeah, not that they eat poop.

[1479] No, that was part of it.

[1480] Oh, it was?

[1481] Yeah.

[1482] Oh, okay.

[1483] There was rumors that they would eat poop and then also that they kissed on the butt.

[1484] That kiss devil's butt and on the butt.

[1485] Okay.

[1486] You've said butt a lot of times.

[1487] Well, down the hatch.

[1488] Out the butt hole.

[1489] Out the batch.

[1490] Who batch rhymes.

[1491] I like that.

[1492] Down the hatch, make a batch.

[1493] No. That sounds like you're going to poop.

[1494] Out the batch is kind of good because that's where you like have your batch of ovaries for a baby.

[1495] Wow, that's a stretch.

[1496] Is it?

[1497] Yeah.

[1498] Way more than one of the other.

[1499] ones I said that I can't remember.

[1500] Try to remember.

[1501] Okay, okay.

[1502] The patch.

[1503] Yeah.

[1504] Okay, but.

[1505] Oh, here you go again.

[1506] B -U -T -T or B -U -T?

[1507] B -U -T.

[1508] Okay.

[1509] I found out another origin of the phrase kissed my ass.

[1510] A lot of people would assume that it's quite a recent expression, possibly with America as the place of origin.

[1511] However, it's very clear that the phrase was actually used in Hanoverian England.

[1512] There's a cartoon that portrays the politician -characterian.

[1513] Charles Fox kissing the arces of voters in the election of 1784.

[1514] So people are crediting that as well.

[1515] But I will argue that kiss my ass isn't, like, doesn't need much explication.

[1516] It's pretty literal.

[1517] It's just like, it's a great insult.

[1518] If you're going to say kiss the worst part of someone's body, you just say kiss my asshole or kiss my ass.

[1519] These things still have origins.

[1520] I bet, I bet many people, I agree, but like often like, um, you know, Penny Save Dollar.

[1521] They have a real origin, whereas I bet a lot of people are just like, kiss my dick, kiss my ass.

[1522] You know, I think anyone could come to kiss my ass on their own.

[1523] Does that make sense?

[1524] It does, but I don't think they did.

[1525] Okay.

[1526] All right.

[1527] I'm cutting out what you said.

[1528] Okay.

[1529] Okay.

[1530] Oh, you said that Q and on, oh, first of all, whoa, I have to make a big, I'm sorry.

[1531] Well, on your behalf.

[1532] So, Ricky Martin is not married.

[1533] You know what?

[1534] I'm so glad you're bringing this up.

[1535] People were upset.

[1536] I remembered it was Inglacius.

[1537] Enrique Iglesias is married to Anna Kornicova, not Ricky Martin.

[1538] We're so sorry, both Ricky Martin, Anna Kornikova, and Inglacios.

[1539] Dax is so sorry.

[1540] Yeah.

[1541] Yeah, I'm very sorry.

[1542] I feel terrible that I suggested he was.

[1543] was married to one of the most beautiful women of all time.

[1544] Well, it's like, what if someone did a whole fact check and was like, yeah, and, and Zach Graff's wife, Kristen Bell?

[1545] Yeah, I'm okay with that.

[1546] What I fear is I think people want to make some kind of racial assessment of it, that because they're both Latin X that I was being raped.

[1547] Like, I'm just confusing all the Latin X singers.

[1548] Do you think you were?

[1549] No, I don't think so.

[1550] It's okay if you were.

[1551] No, well, first of all, not okay if I were us.

[1552] But I don't think that's what was going on.

[1553] I don't know a ton of Miami singers.

[1554] Yeah.

[1555] And their Latinx aspect had for me nothing to do with it.

[1556] Sure.

[1557] Yeah.

[1558] Living La Vida Loca.

[1559] That's Ricky.

[1560] Upside and inside out.

[1561] Nope.

[1562] So you said that Q and on, they want to kill babies for endocrine whatever.

[1563] Yeah.

[1564] It's not endocrine.

[1565] I know.

[1566] Yep.

[1567] And I keep, I say it often and I need to learn the name.

[1568] of the...

[1569] I'm going to teach you right now.

[1570] Thank you.

[1571] Adrenachrome.

[1572] Adrenachrome.

[1573] Adrenachrome is an easy -to -come -by -chemical compound, usually found as a light pink solution that forms by the oxidation of adrenaline, the stress hormone.

[1574] It is not approved for medical use by the food and drug administration.

[1575] The researchers can buy 25 milligrams of it for just $55, but doctors in other countries prescribe a version of it to treat blood clotting.

[1576] Okay, hold on a second.

[1577] So if you can buy this shit for 55...

[1578] bucks why on earth would people be kidnapping kids to get it oh my god it's even the more you know about it that more preposterous it was already preposterous on the surface but now to know that it's fucking they're slashing prices on adrenochrome there's need no name not even a reason to do it and everyone that's doing it's rich to begin with there's some faulty logic here yeah come on guys okay paradise lost was the first thing metallica licensed its music for oh i got that right you did Okay, you said more killers have publicly been seen holding Catcher in the Rye than have been holding pentagrams.

[1579] I don't know how many killers have been holding pentagrams, but there is some interesting stuff on Catcher in the Rye.

[1580] Can I guess a couple of them?

[1581] Or see if I remember a couple of them?

[1582] John Lennon's assassin.

[1583] Yep.

[1584] Best note event associated with the Catcher in the Rye is arguably Mark David Chapman's shooting of John Lennon.

[1585] I also think the guy who tried to assassinate Ronnie Reagan.

[1586] That's right.

[1587] John Hinkley Jr. John Hinkley, Jr. Also, Robert John Bardot, who murdered Rebecca Schaefer, was carrying the book when he visited Schaefer's apartment in Hollywood on July 18, 18, 1989, and murdered her.

[1588] Okay, yeah, so pretty much those.

[1589] I wrote, the darkest thing I've ever written, and I want to say one of the best things, best short stories I've ever written, I wrote it after reading Catcher in the Rye.

[1590] Oh.

[1591] Yeah.

[1592] Really?

[1593] Yeah.

[1594] What was it about?

[1595] for you about a guy who shot his ceiling to kill the people above him.

[1596] But it starts with him loving this bird in Central Park.

[1597] Maybe Catcher in the Rye is dangerous.

[1598] The bottom line is you cannot outlaw Catcher in the Rye because wackos respond to it in a weird way.

[1599] Like no one would argue to outlaw a book.

[1600] That's why I use that as an example.

[1601] That's an interesting.

[1602] I lean a lot of arguments on that.

[1603] Yeah, but I do think, like, I don't know that I think the bell curve should be a book that you can, well, I mean, I guess you should be able to buy it if you want it.

[1604] Yeah.

[1605] But I don't think it's a good book or a healthy book or a book that people should read.

[1606] Absolutely not.

[1607] Yeah, I just fundamentally don't believe an outlawing book.

[1608] Yeah, I guess I agree.

[1609] You got to take some of the, you know, you got to take the mind comps of the publishing world to get the catchers.

[1610] the rise.

[1611] But it kind of sounds like Catcher in the Rye is a mind comp.

[1612] No, it's not.

[1613] Have you ever read it?

[1614] Yeah, I have.

[1615] I think it's one of the best books ever written.

[1616] It's in my top five books I've ever read.

[1617] But if it makes everyone kill everyone.

[1618] It doesn't make.

[1619] It's made a few people.

[1620] It made you write a killer book.

[1621] I know.

[1622] And it made other people kill.

[1623] Chicken or the egg, though.

[1624] I don't know if I already knew.

[1625] Who knows?

[1626] Who knows?

[1627] But Holden Caulfield, what a character.

[1628] Yeah.

[1629] I've always been obsessed with the name Phoebe afterwards because, you know, his sister, he loved so much.

[1630] Yeah, I love that book.

[1631] The way he's describing how uncomfortable he is on the chair sitting in the dean's office is one of the best bits of writing I've ever read, where I'm like, I'm there.

[1632] I've sat on that same chair.

[1633] I've been that uncomfortable and that's all I can think about while I'm talking to somebody.

[1634] It's just so good.

[1635] It's good.

[1636] Don't read it.

[1637] Okay.

[1638] The McMartin trial, he said, is the most expensive trial to taxpayers until OJ.

[1639] There's a couple things here.

[1640] The case lasted seven years and cost me. 15 million, the longest and most expensive criminal case in the history of the United States legal system, and ultimately resulted in no convictions.

[1641] This doesn't actually say...

[1642] OJ.

[1643] Yeah.

[1644] And then in another article, five court cases that turned out to be the most expensive in U .S. history.

[1645] These are settlements, biggest settlements of all time.

[1646] Going to court can be rather expensive in terms of attorney fees and court costs, but you also have to consider the amount of the settlements.

[1647] Settlements can often be in the millions of dollars, especially for class action lawsuits and other types of commercial litigation.

[1648] So yeah, this is including that.

[1649] 206 billion payable over a period of 25 years was a settlement amount for one of the largest lawsuits ever against a manufacturer.

[1650] In addition to paying the medical expenses for many smokers, a settlement money was also used to establish anti -smoking campaigns.

[1651] Can I guess two more on that list?

[1652] Sure.

[1653] Definitely the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

[1654] That's next.

[1655] B .P. Oil spill.

[1656] Boom.

[1657] Yeah.

[1658] How much?

[1659] That's over $100 billion, if I remember.

[1660] 42 million payout.

[1661] No. The case involving the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and BP oil resulted in a $42 million payout.

[1662] The spill occurred in 2010 and released almost 5 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

[1663] Much of the settlement received in this case was used for the cleanup and restoration of the environment.

[1664] Oh, I thought it was way more than that.

[1665] I was very wrong.

[1666] This one's a ding, ding, ding, ding, relevant, kind of.

[1667] The smartphone patent wars between Apple and Samsung.

[1668] Oh, that's like between me and you.

[1669] Yeah, Samsung -y.

[1670] Patent law and the resulting patent disputes are both complex and extremely costly.

[1671] The case between Apple and Samsung resulted in a $40 billion settlement.

[1672] Between 2011 and 2012, Apple and Samsung battled in court with Apple eventually winning the case.

[1673] Many cases are still being heard in court.

[1674] I wonder if that's a typo.

[1675] BP oil is supposed to be $42 billion?

[1676] I honestly, I think it is.

[1677] I watch a 60 minutes on it and it just...

[1678] The rest of these are billion, so it would make sense.

[1679] Oh, here we go.

[1680] How much to BP BP paid around $63 .4 billion by the end of September to cover cleanup costs and legal fees linked to the largest environmental disaster in U .S. history?

[1681] Okay.

[1682] Well, now I'm getting closer.

[1683] I'd guess $100 billion.

[1684] And I'm still way off, but I'm going to look at this one.

[1685] Five of the most expensive court.

[1686] Yeah, these are all, I mean, these are all crossing over.

[1687] McMartin preschool, $15 million, Wildenstein divorce settlement, $2 .5 billion.

[1688] That was on the other list, too.

[1689] Smartphone patent wars, $40 billion, BP oil spill $42 billion on this other list.

[1690] It's saying that.

[1691] Tobacco.

[1692] Okay, this is the same list on a different reporter.

[1693] That's so weird.

[1694] This one is the right.

[1695] write a B instead of M on BP.

[1696] But all right.

[1697] Well, those are the five that are listed on a few reports.

[1698] Okay.

[1699] What we learn is it's very costly to get into a patent war with Apple.

[1700] Yeah.

[1701] Or to spill a ton of oil in the Gulf.

[1702] And it's hard to make lists.

[1703] Yes.

[1704] That's another thing we learned.

[1705] That's the main thing to learn.

[1706] Yeah, they can get confusing.

[1707] Okay.

[1708] You said the Catholic Church and the Pope has a billion followers.

[1709] 1 .2 billion.

[1710] in Roman Catholics in the world, according to Vatican figures.

[1711] Okay, so those are inflated.

[1712] Maybe.

[1713] I don't know.

[1714] Wouldn't you think they are?

[1715] Maybe.

[1716] I don't know.

[1717] Who cares?

[1718] Yeah.

[1719] I read $1 billion in his article he had written.

[1720] That's why I quoted him.

[1721] You think the point two is the inflated?

[1722] 20 % inflation.

[1723] Wow.

[1724] Yeah.

[1725] Yeah.

[1726] And just lastly.

[1727] To tie things up.

[1728] It's not a ding, ding, ding.

[1729] I just love that he said, and I've thought about it multiple times since, and I'm going to keep thinking about it when he said, critical thinking, if you're doing it right, should hurt.

[1730] I like that a lot.

[1731] Down the hatch out to scratch.

[1732] Ew, that sounds like a scabies vagina.

[1733] I think it sounds like you mean the butt because that's what you would scratch.

[1734] Do you think in general people have an itchy butt, stinky finger?

[1735] That's an old, you know, that one.

[1736] Though who go to bed with itchy butt, wake up with stinky finger.

[1737] You know that one?

[1738] No. Okay.

[1739] That's a proverb.

[1740] Though who go to bed with itchy butt, wake up with stinky finger.

[1741] Though who fart in church, sit in own pew.

[1742] That's so stupid.

[1743] God.

[1744] Okay.

[1745] I just think that if you, let's say this, you ask people to rank the top ten itchiest things on their body.

[1746] This is like the family feud.

[1747] And you go, give me butt hole.

[1748] And it'd go ding, ding, ding.

[1749] And it'd be the first one that came up.

[1750] Like the most Americans said their butt itches.

[1751] I don't think that would be true.

[1752] What would it be?

[1753] Like maybe nose.

[1754] Okay.

[1755] It'd definitely be on the family feud list.

[1756] But I think number one would be butt.

[1757] I don't itch my butt.

[1758] Well, there is an old proverb.

[1759] Okay, bye.

[1760] I love you.

[1761] Happy Halloween, guys.

[1762] Happy.

[1763] Halloween.

[1764] Hollow?

[1765] What is it?

[1766] All Hallows Eve.

[1767] Happy All Halloween.

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