NUSKA
“Darkness will always give you an opportunity to create your own light.”– Iain Thomas
Formerly Practical Growth with E.B. Johnson...NUSKA is a light in the darkness. A place where we can all come together to remember the human thread that unites us. Art. History. Mythology. Oddities. If it's interesting, if it's human, you'll find it here.
Welcome to NUSKA. Positive dissociation.
NUSKA
Pilgrims, POTS, And Peculiar Fixations
What if the Salem witch trials weren’t about piety at all, but booze, power, and old grudges dressed up as holiness?
This week, it's a special interests episode! We're talking the Salem Witch Trials, Frankenstein, POTS, and those two hair-plugs-attached-to-veneers that Donald Trump calls his sons.
It’s all part of one through-line: special interests are not a distraction. They’re a way to decode how fear, status, and desire shape law, health, and art...and how we can push back with better stories and better tools.
If this exploration sparked you, follow the show, share it with a friend who loves deep dives, and leave a review telling us which rabbit hole we should tackle next.
Love the podcast? Leave a 5* review on Apple Podcasts. Or, join us on Patreon for early access to new episodes, bonus content, and more.
Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to Newska. It is me, E B, and I am here with Connie.
SPEAKER_04:Hi.
SPEAKER_00:And we have a very fun episode today. True to form. We're going kind of fast and loose a little bit with things today, but this is not one of those kind of casual, relaxed episodes. Instead, this is a special interests episode, special interest episode, which will be no surprise to those who follow us because if you're following me or Connie for any reason, you're probably just as neuroflavorful as we are. So today we're going to be talking about all the things we've been hyper-fixated on, that we've been reading about, that we've been falling down the rabbit hole for, and hopefully kind of maybe spark some of that with you guys.
SPEAKER_04:Because when you're late diagnosed like us, everything becomes a special interest. Everything is a whole bar like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I was just I was talking to a friend the other day, and she she was talking about like, oh yeah, if we had endless money, we would just be in school and just collecting letters, just alphabet letters, for no point, no purpose, no hope to do anything, just like get finding the most random niche.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, no, I definitely I had to like let my oldest child know that like if she didn't exist, I would literally spend 14 hours a day like painting with something.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, absolutely. I would be in some like weird, dusty, moldy library, just like reading some obscure Latin text or something wild. But we don't have time for that today. So we're gonna be talking about random special interests. And I figured what better place to start than the Puritans? The Puritans, yeah, pilgrims. It is November, which means it's almost Thanksgiving time in America. I think that's actually maybe next week. I think it's what the third or fourth Thursday of the month or something.
SPEAKER_03:Like turkey.
SPEAKER_00:I don't like how it's do you not? I am more of a ham person myself, personally, but yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I figured it'd be good to talk about the Puritans. I've been working on something, and so I've had to do a deep dive into the Salem witch trials, and through that I've been reading these books about the Salem Witch Trials, and a big one that I'm making my way through at the moment is called The Witches, Salem, 1692, a history by Stacy Schiff, and it has completely and totally altered my mind when it comes to the pilgrims and the Puritans. Because the way that I was kind of taught all through school, like even through college, because they they still make you take this like propaganda American history in college. But it you you imagine them as being like these austere, very serious, very sober people in their black kind of black and white costumes and their big buckles, and they don't laugh and they don't do anything completely different. Completely different. First of all, they did wear nice clothes. Some of them, like they had rules about who could wear silk and who couldn't wear silk and who could wear what types of furs and who couldn't, and it was all based on who what family you were born into and how much money you had and like your job in society and stuff.
SPEAKER_04:The classic buckle and the like big tall hat type of deal.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, they they all they talk a lot. The devil, when they talk about seeing the devil, the devil is always a black man in a tall hat, a tall Swedish hat. So I don't think the pilgrims actually wore tall hats because every time they talk about the devil, they they put a tall hat on the devil and it's associated with being Swedish, which to them was also the devil because they were not English, so they were the devil.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Oh no, they they thought they thought the Pope was the Antichrist. They thought they thought anything, yeah, they thought the Indians were were Catholics, they thought the Native Americans were Catholics and were aligned with the French, who were also Catholics at the time, to work for the Pope who was the Antichrist who was trying to hunt them to the ends of the earth. They thought that I don't think they knew that the indigenous people came from there. I think they thought that they sprouted out of the ground.
SPEAKER_04:This is like mega but pilgrim times.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, 100%. It has changed so long. It is insane. It is insane. I was reading about one of the trials last night, and they actually accused this minister, Reverend Burroughs, George Burroughs, who was famous, famous, famous because he had gone and lived out on the frontier, which was Maine at the time, which was kind of part of Massachusetts. And he was this little guy, but he was like crazy strong, and he had rescued all these people, and he would like kick in doors during like raids to save women and children, and he like single-handedly lifted this huge musket that only two men were supposed to be able to lift, and he had shot it and saved all these people. And so he was he became really wealthy, and he was just this like rugged, well-known minister, and everyone was jealous of him. So the men in Salem got their daughters to accuse him, and he was on trial, and he's Harvard educated, he's been around the block. I mean, this man has survived Native American raids and all this other crazy stuff, and and being jailed by the previous governor and the king, and he's in there and he's like, right, I am not a witch. Like, this is insane. I'm a minister in your church. This is absolutely wild. And they basically tell him, Well, if you refuse to confess, we know you're a witch. So you need to confess. But he's like, But if I confess, I'm lying to you. And they're like, Well, but if you don't confess, we know you're a witch. So there was literally no way to win. You couldn't win. Like, if you got accused, you could you could confess. That's crazy. It is literally MAGA. It's fucking nuts. And here's here's the clincher for me, right? Most of the act, most of the convictions were based on spectral evidence. So these children, they were literal children, would come into the courtroom and start falling over, and they would bite themselves under the benches and then go, look, they bit me, they bit me, and they would stick pins in themselves and say that the person on the stand was sticking pins in them. And they would say, I see their ghost flying around. And people would say, Yeah, I was sleeping in my house last night, and and Goody Proctor's ghost came and sat on my chest. It was all this like spectral evidence, is what they essentially called it. And I'm like, that's crazy because these stories, these people sound so convinced when they're telling just these crazy stories of things that they've supposedly seen. Turns out the Puritans were the biggest drunks in the world at the time. Like the biggest drunks. The papers in London wrote about them saying, Holy crap, have you seen the way the pilgrims drank? That's insane. No one drinks like that. They're hypocrites. Like constantly. Yeah, London. London was shocked by because they ordered something, I don't remember the number. It's in this book, The Witches, but they ordered something like two to three times the hard liquors and ales that anyone in London was drinking at the time. Anyone in England would have been drinking, which was like watered down ale and beer, and the Puritans were like, nope, make it hard. And they would drink all day long.
SPEAKER_04:They were drinking huge amounts of them there.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And like they were struggling in a lot of areas to even like not die of dysentery.
SPEAKER_00:So like for them to Yeah, but they had they had they had non-alcoholic stuff because remember, by this point, almond milk was a popular thing that people in England had been drinking for hundreds of years by this point, which also blew my mind. I don't think people know that. That that came from another book, like Medieval England. They there was a lot of non-alcoholic options they could have had that they knew about, or low alcohol, very low alcohol, and they they didn't want that. They wanted hard ale, they drank tons of brandy and wines, like really like stuff today that wouldn't be legal to sell on the shelf because it would be like the bootleg stuff that you get from somewhere, like that would blind you, basically. So if your trial was later in the day, you were fucked. You wanted to try to get if you got accused of witchcraft during this, you wanted your trial to be at the start of the day because you had the most luck of the the crowd listening, of the judges being sober, of the children still being sober because the children were also drinking alcohol during this time, the little girls that were falling over and saying, I see Goody Proctor with the devil and all that kind of stuff. Everybody was drunk. And when you put that in context, you start to understand why they were hanging roosters. Like a rooster got convicted at one point, and they hung a rooster and they hung a dog and like all kinds of weird stuff. It's like, yeah, they were hallucinatorily drunk, they were stumbling home in the dark, which this the place is eerie.
SPEAKER_04:I was still stuck on that whole like people went blind from alcohol.
SPEAKER_00:Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Like bathtub gin.
SPEAKER_04:But like, how does that even happen?
SPEAKER_00:Oh, yeah, they these people were like brain damaged from the alcohol that they would drink. There was also apparently tons of head injuries because they would fight each other all the time and fall off stuff.
SPEAKER_04:My one of my like favorite all-time special interest facts about eyeballs, though, because like does that mean that like it broke the synapse that helps your body stop you from making it?
SPEAKER_00:They probably had like a stroke or something. Yeah, they probably had like a stroke. Oh my god, that's crazy. Yeah, so that it was just it was they some of the trials were done in a tavern. The interrogations were done in a tavern so that they could drink while they were doing it, and people could come in and drink and watch the interrogations and watch these children flail around on the floor and be like, She's a witch, she's a witch, she's a witch. Absolutely crazy. It is the most batshit nonsense ever. And if you there was a couple people who would come out, you cannot listen, you cannot start hanging people because children, drunk children, are telling you that there are devils hanging off the rafter beams. There are clearly no devils hanging off the rafter beams. This is nuts. But what was really sinister, sinister, sinister beneath it is that these people, all these families, all these pilgrims living in this like Puritan community, good, upright Christians, they all hated each other. They were all freaking hypocrites and drunks. And so the minute that this happened, there was like a handful of men that essentially used their wives and children and their horrific, nasty behaviors to target enemies. And it was noted over and over and over again. There were witnesses that heard the parents telling their daughters, like, all right, you need to fall over and you need to name this person and you need to say this and this and this. There were witnesses that heard the parents telling their children to do this to target their enemies in the communities.
SPEAKER_03:Consistent power grabs always.
SPEAKER_00:Some of it wasn't even a power grab. Some of it they just wanted to see members of that family die. Period. They didn't gain anything else from it other than they wanted to kill that family. There was Rebecca Nurse got arrested, and that's kind of like the like the worst of the worst of the worst. She was like a 71-year-old great-grandmother. She had had something like seven, eight, ten children, and the the last one had basically, I what I think from the description had broken her hip. So had left her very disabled. And so she was in a bed. She could barely hear. It was hard for her to speak. She couldn't walk. She was very, very frail. She was obviously on her last legs. She said, I think her skin must have been very, very thin as well, because when they were looking for witches' marks, they said, Do you have any witch's marks? And she said, just the old the skin of an old woman. So she was probably quite like dinged up, you know how the skin can get thin and it was easy for them to get injured. This poor frail woman, she was devout, she went to church all the time. She had delivered multiple children in the village, like she had prayed for people in the village, she had been one of the oldest members of the village. She gets accused of witchcraft, and everybody's shocked. There's huge petitions to get her out. They put her in prison, they convict her, they put this 71-year-old woman in an airless dungeon of a prison and shackle her to a wall with eight-pound shackles because they believed you couldn't allow a witch to sit or lie down because then she would be able to do the magic. And this poor old woman is rotting in the cell and she's confused. She doesn't understand why she's there because she cannot even conceive of this. Her husband, who's the same age as her, this old man, just starts rallying around the community and he gets this huge petition going. He goes all the way to the governor. He gets her a reprieve. They put her on trial anyway. They convict her. Well, the first time they don't. They say not guilty. And then a guy in the court who hated her husband, just hated her husband and her brothers, wasn't going to gain anything from it, basically attacks the jury and is like, that is ridiculous. You need to go back and you need to get the right verdict. And the jury turns around and is like, okay, we'll do it again, and then comes back with a guilty verdict, convicts her. Governor reprieves her. People, this family that hates her throws a fit again, and the governor says, actually, you know what? Just go ahead and hang her. The 71-year-old saint in the community. Like it was just, it was absolutely insane. And the whole point of it, the whole point of it was that 20 years earlier, she had been distantly involved in a lawsuit with the family over some land and it had been settled. And they they just hated her for it. They hated her for it because they had rightfully lost out on land that they had tried to steal. So they just wanted her dead. They had sat there for 20 years just wanting her dead, and they got the opportunity and they did it. And it was openly acknowledged, like in the community, that this was not a witch. There was no way Rebecca Nurse could have been a witch. There was no way, and they hung her anyway. Absolutely horrific. And her family had to sneak the body away after dark and go and bury her because they wouldn't allow her to be buried in a churchyard and a whole thing. The whole thing's disgusting.
SPEAKER_04:It's the most intense level of pity.
SPEAKER_00:Any woman, any woman who there was so many women who were like back talkers and smart asses and very, very independent, because it's the frontier. You gotta be a hard ass. Some of these women had survived Native American raids, which again, I'm not saying the Native Americans were wrong, right? Because I would sink the Mayflower tomorrow if I got the chance. Yeah. At all. But these women were were horrifically traumatized, some of them, that because of things that they had seen and survived. And so they were terrified all the time. And some of these women became like really independent, really rough, really rough-mouthed, really alcoholic, drunk in the tavern all the time. You didn't want to cross them in the row because they would fist fight you. Like hardcore women. Those women all got scooped up, basically, and done. Their daughters. What was really freaking crazy is that they were also arresting infants. They would take infants off of the mothers and arrest them and go and put them in the jail cell. Infant children, little bitty, they had they put a five-year-old on the stand. They put a seven-year-old on the stand who didn't even know how old she was, but she was definitely certain she was a witch. Like her family obviously said, like, you gotta confess or they're gonna kill you. So you go up there and you tell this story about being a witch, but she didn't even know how old she was. They said, How old are you? And she says, Well, I believe that I'm five, but my uncle says that I'll be eight next year. Like just horrific. Putting children on the stands in front of people, interrogating them in taverns. And these are just drunk, malicious, stupid men. And like they I they they were stupid at the time.
SPEAKER_04:They can be treated as adults and tried like adults and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. So very much the lead-in too for that as well.
SPEAKER_00:It's just awful. And they would they put these children in the prisons. The obviously the infants died. So I think it was Martha Carrier had had like a six-month-old baby or a seven-month-old baby when she was arrested. And so they said, Well, you're a witch, so the baby's a witch, so you're both gonna be arrested, and just threw them in this disgusting, disgusting, fetid prison and in in chains, and obviously the the baby died because she couldn't nurse it because she was half-stared and freezing, and they didn't let them have any clothes or anything. Like what you got arrested in is what you stayed in for months, for months and months and months in this prison until you got your court date. And it was absolutely looked on with horror and shock by anyone who was outside of the community. And what was interesting at this time is the Quakers spoke out against it. The Puritans hated the Quakers, they thought they were literally Satanist devil worshipers because the Quakers were hardcore anti-slavery and wanted equality and like let their women vote. So the pilgrims were like, You're the devil, you're the devil, and the Quakers like, Well, you're nuts, you're literally crazy, and you're talking about spookies in the air. And it's like 1692, grow up, grow up. It was this big contentious battle, but everybody knew they were nuts. Everybody knew they were nuts. The Anglican Church was there at the time, which is the Church of England. They were like, You guys are fucking nuts, but they were trying to keep the peace and trying to hold on to the land because the King of England wanted it.
SPEAKER_04:Because they literally used to call autistic children changelings.
SPEAKER_00:So, like there, yeah, yeah. And some of these I actually feel really bad because I think the it all started with Reverend Paris, who is a narcissistic, mediocre, aristocratic piece of shit. You want to talk about Baron Trump? Reverend Paris was Baron Trump, just just a failed, mediocre piece of shit who had because of what he was born into, had just like been handed things his whole life and it failed at every single one of them. Actually, it's like all of Donald Trump's sons. But he his daughter is the one that kicked it off.
SPEAKER_02:I had no idea. I just thought he had that little blonde lady as a daughter. That's all I know.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, he's got like three moron sons who could probably can't even fucking spell their name in crayons. They're they're oh my god. You look at them and they're you're like, you're those are huge car salesmen.
SPEAKER_04:I don't even know about them. I just know that he's got like a a blonde daughter that like has a name that sounds like it should be from a diff from from definitely not America.
SPEAKER_00:So like, yeah, he's got Ivanka, and then there's Tiffany that they hide because she's such a dumpster fire. And then Eric and Dingleberry, I don't remember the other one's name, Eric and David or Eric and Shitface, and then Baron, who he's had with Melania. All of the kids, you're like, wow. None of them are good looking. Not a goddamn one of them. And they've all had work done. And they they they are not you could tell books were not a priority in the home. Yeah. Yeah. You can you can you can tell that no one was like, do well in school. That's important because they're all very important.
SPEAKER_03:They didn't have like they had a very like crusty bleach demon for a nanny.
SPEAKER_00:And they all turned out just like her. All of them, crusty bleach demons, and the sons are just they're turkey teeth with hair plugs attached, essentially, and that's that's it. That's it. That's all they are. Just like the just like the Puritans. They they were basically just Reverend Parrish was exactly like that. He was born into a rich family in Barbados who had a big plantation, a sugar plantation with a ton of slaves, and his dad died, and he got left the sugar plantation, and he fucked it and ran it into the ground, so he had to sell all the slaves, and then he tried to start a shipping business, I think, in Boston, and then that failed. And so he tried to be a school teacher, and then he fucked that up. So he's like, you know what I'm gonna do? You know where they can't get rid of me? The church. So he went and joined the Puritans and became a minister for the Puritans in Salem and they hated him. Salem hated him from day one. He was a piece of shit. He wanted way more money. He's like, I want you to pay me a bunch of money, and also I want you to give me my firewood for free because I need to keep my house warm that you're also providing me. And so they were like, right, okay, we'll provide you the firewood. And he said, No, no, you need to bring the firewood cut and ready to my door every week. Every week it needs to be delivered to so he this guy was just a piece of shit. His daughter was the one that started everything, and it Betty Paris, and it started with her like collapsing in bed and having these fits, like eyes rolling back, flailing. Sounds to me like seizures, just run-of-the-mill seizures.
SPEAKER_04:My brain's like, so seizures for religious people is devils, right?
SPEAKER_00:Exactly, exactly. And so what I think happens, what I'm certainly including in the project I'm working on, is that he, this narcissist, this mediocre entitled narcissistic failure aristocrat, is living in the middle of nowhere, and he's about to fail the last thing that he's got that gives him a sense of status in society. If he loses this, he he and his wife are nothing. They may have to go to England or something. He sees his daughter now collapsing into fits, and he knows people are going to point the finger and be like, oh God, what is going on in that house? So I think he very quickly made it, oh, I'm being attacked because I'm such a noble man of God, and the devil is trying to attack me because I'm trying to teach God to you, and he's he's attacking my poor innocent child, and then it just spiraled from there. Just spiraled from there because that makes him like the hero, and he's like, I'm here to vanquish the devil, and I'll start with the battle in my house. Just a predictable narcissist, man. I'm such a victim. Admit that you that you had a kid who is very sick and fucked up, or claim that you're now a knight in shining armor who's battling the devil. Well, we know what your Christian nationalist man would choose in America right now. Uh it's the devil. It's nuts. It was absolutely nuts. And then you're like, oh, well, they were also all drunk. So you've got aggressive, stupid, mean, narcissistic cult followers running running the state, and they're drunk all day long for years at a time. It it was a recipe for disaster. I'm surprised they didn't just start running door to door and just slicing each other. Honestly, it would have been easier. No, it's that social thing though, right?
SPEAKER_04:Like it's that social, like that that like that network. You have to play these weird social games. And if you let your mask uh slip, then like you're you're gonna lose like the game, whatever the game is.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and that's this it was a game. It was absolutely a game, and you can also what's crazy is seeing, and this is why I'm like mean and stupid is genetic, right? Because that's what I consider psychopaths. I consider them mean and stupid. I know they can be cunning, but ultimately it's a stupid game being a psychopath, right? It doesn't benefit in the long run, it's fucked, it's not it's not a good thing.
SPEAKER_03:So it is like accurate to stupid and mean every time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, and it it's the children. What is so scary about it is seeing these children who are like, fuck yes, let's nail these bitches. And who some of them would just start making up stuff that their parents didn't tell them, like right there in the courtroom. They would just turn and be like, that one did it, hang her. And people would do it. It's like absolutely crazy. They would bite their tongues to the point that they could spit out blood and all this other kind of stuff, and they would there was a touch test that had to be done once they were in the courtroom because they believed the the idiots believed, the stupid ones who happened to be the judge and the jury of the case, right? Who were high they were heavily criticized by people in their own community and the people outside the community, like in Boston, who were not Puritans. But there was a touch test. So when the accused got on the stand, the girls would then be brought up to the stand. And it was believed that if the girl touched the witch and she recovered, that meant that the person on the stand was definitely a witch because all her evil powers had been absorbed back into her. So all these crazy little children had to do was walk, like they would be flailing, and then they'd walk up to the stand, touch the witch, and then go, Oh, I'm okay now. And just like drop back to their seats. And the judges would go, See, you're a witch because she's fine now. And she after she touched you. And the people on the stands would be like, That's nuts. That's she's lying. That's crazy. And they'd be like, No, we saw it. She's okay now. We saw it. Something to do. Oh my god. It's the stupidest thing. And I hate I now am and I am no longer on that. Well, you know, it's the context of the times, and this is what was normal in the times. Not really, not really. They believed in witches, but they not like this. Not like this.
SPEAKER_04:I can't remember the fancy word for it. This is me coming in with my little side special interest, like finding like specific things, right? That thing where it's like when it people are group theory, group, group think theory, yeah. Don't seek outside understanding often on the things that you are learning or like you are cultivating within your group of friends, or whatever it may be. If you're not seeking that outside understanding, essentially you get stuck in this spiral loop and it gets worse and worse and worse. And it can be you and that's where you get these like little pockets of MAGA. This is why they're still like sundown towns in America, because they're pilots of people that have essentially got this group think that like reinforces their ideas every single time they turn to the person next to them. That's why that's exactly what happens. Indoctrinating people because you go there every week, you shake everyone's hands, you you do the whole like peace be with you, you're always reinforced by the people around you in the church. And so, of course, Puritans get to that point where like everyone's reinforcing everything, and so like the hysteria just gets worse and worse and worse. Then you've got alcoholism, so any kind of like like outside thoughts are just being suppressed by the booze at any any turn because oh my god, I can't think away from this because if I think away from this, I'm gonna get told that I'm a witch and then that then I'm fucked, you know? Absolutely. Like the fear of it of of reaching outside of it would have been a lot for them too.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it it it's it's so it's it's it's very, very fucked. I highly recommend this book again, The Witches, Salem 1692, a history by Stacy Schiff. There is also a very hefty tone that I've been working through. Hang on here, I'm gonna have to move the camera. The Salem Witch Trials, a day by day chronicle by Marilyn K. Roach. And that is literally oh, can you scream? We may have lost the microphone there for a second. By Marilyn K. Roach, and it is brilliant, and it is literally Marilyn went to where all these primary sources are kept, which is not just in Salem, it's all over the place now, and she literally compiled day by day what happened in the Salem Witch trials. So if you are that interested to actually see the breakdown, it's like 795 pages or something like that. And it's literally every day she can find, she tells you what happened, even down to Reverend So-and-so just had a had a talk today with himself. Some of it's quite brief, but it's very, very good. It's very, very twisted, and it will change your perspectives also like on things like Tichuba, who was absolutely a slave, and she was absolutely in a compromise position and had horrible things happen to her, but then also seemed to very much relish the opportunity to then dull that out, even on people who didn't deserve it. I I have no some of the some of the fingers she pointed, I'm like, yeah, girl, get 'em. Get 'em. But then it it goes a little bit, it goes a little bit too far, but very, very fascinating, and it's so reminiscent of America right now. You can tell that this was only seven or eight people ago. Oh yeah, oh yeah. No, I I I bet I know whose granddad that was. Hundred percent. Like as I read this, I'm like, I think I know what family that is.
SPEAKER_04:It's so accurate though. Like it was only like two or three mums ago that that sort of stuff was happening, you know, like it's so just yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's it's absolutely, it's absolutely nuts, and it's completely changed my perspectives. Like I said, if you you follow me on TikTok, you've probably seen the video of me ranting about the Mayflower and how I would sink it if I could go back in time to a historical event.
SPEAKER_04:This is where I'm like, well, actually, there's like of course all of these people that's kind of fucked because like there was no rules against alcohol during pregnancy. It was encouraged back then. And we know now that fetal alcohol syndrome can even be caused by drinking whilst breastfeeding. So like baby's not even inside you anymore. And if there's alcohol in your system and you're breastfeeding your child, it can affect the development of your child's brain. And so like you can imagine that like these women are drinking their whole fucking pregnancy. Oh yeah. And then like wet nursing, so you is was like huge. So like you know, it didn't matter who was feeding the baby, uh they're all fucking drunk.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, the sound of it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. 100%. Yeah, so it's uh there were a couple people that escaped, which I also thought was pretty cool. There was like a ship captain and his wife, they They were out at sea and then they heard about the accusations, so they came back to Salem because they're like, Well, that's ludicrous. We're we're rich and away at sea, leave us alone. And so they came back to just kind of like swat stuff away and they ended up getting arrested. And then a rich minister ended up helping them escape. And so they like sailed away and escaped that. And there was another husband and wife that also tried to escape. And what was shitty about it, they did they did manage to escape. It was this husband and wife. This minister came to them, and this minister was like, This whole thing's wrong. This is unbelievably wrong. I cannot allow you guys to die. I can at least get the two of you out. And the husband was like, I'm not gonna go. Okay, just kidding. I'll go. I'm gonna go. And he was gonna leave his wife in the prison. He was gonna leave her there. And the minister was like, You're taking her. Either you take her or I'll take her, and I'll get caught and killed. So if that's what you want, that's what will happen. But I I'm you're not leaving your wife here. And the guy eventually took his wife with him and then complained because it costs like 50 quid, 50 pounds to basically keep themselves hidden for the next three months until the wave was over. But yeah, there were some people that did escape, which I thought apparently that wasn't hard. You could just like lift the roof and just leave in some cases. So I don't know why more people didn't do that. I guess they thought they weren't gonna die. And they did. I think there was like 17 people that ended up getting hung, but there was hundreds of people accused and jailed. And what's interesting and very similar to today's American prison system is a lot of men made a lot of money out of this because when you were in jail, you then got charged for everything, for every single thing, every scrap of bread. You got like a daily charge for being there, you got charged for water, you got charged for any like clothes that they might incidentally give you, even if it was off a dead body. And there was a lot of people who stayed in prison after the witch trials because they couldn't afford to pay their bill to get out for like the seven months that they had been kept in prison because it was hundreds of pounds by that point. Beginning of America's prison system and the money. It's literally the same. It's literally the same. Oh, and they also had the belief that if you were economically successful, if you had money, that meant that you were favored by God. So you were better than anybody who had less money than you, and you should be given more power. And the more money you had, the less questions should be asked of you.
SPEAKER_04:So classism and classes like that, like basically comes from a bunch of drunkard assholes that wanted to like play pretty Yep.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. And then at the when this was going on, England was going through the Enlightenment. So they had people like John Locke, which is what the American Constitution was based on, was the teachings of John Locke, which is on all men are created equal. Like that idea comes from John Locke. So you had the Enlightenment happening in England, and they were starting to look at the king going, I don't know if we need you that much, versus in puritanical England, you had, well, we are the aristocrats now, and and we're gonna take over this country and make it horrible. And it's lit it's basically the system that exists now. It's that's why the book's been so infuriating to read, I think, because it's essentially American now. Nothing changes. We gotta we gotta water down that gene pool, man. We gotta water down this puritanical gene pool. We gotta get rid of these wasps because they have destroyed Oh man.
SPEAKER_04:I I had to ask AB what it was the other night. A white Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, white Anglo-Saxon Protestant. So yeah, that's one of my big special interests.
SPEAKER_04:So this is I'm gonna straight in with my special interest already, like so. Essentially, when you like a lot of the common like things with people with pots is they will keep their feet up instinctively, you'll pull them to your chest, you'll have them underneath your body, essentially create a compression point on your legs because a lot of the time with pots, it's the inability for your body to vaso constrict in your legs. So, like when a person stands up, the brain's like, Oh, okay, we're standing up. Trying to pump blood a little bit faster, and then after that happens, your muscles will contract and constrict the vascular parts and push the blood up so that it's not too hard for your heart to like do the thing and pump the blood around so that you don't faint, right? But with people with pots, you don't have that vasoconstriction as much, and so your adrenal glands are just like, oh fuck, okay, gotta pump the heart even harder. And then next thing you know, you're seeing stars and falling over it. Not every pot person does. I get dizzy, and that's the thing, you shouldn't get dizzy standing up, first of all. That's not a normal fucking thing. Yeah, like I'm in the class of POTS of like I will literally pass out if I stand up for too like too quickly. When they tested me, they had me lay down for like 10 minutes and they like stood me up super quick, and I like had to hold on. I was like, oh my god, everything's black. Oh my god, I see stuff.
SPEAKER_00:If I stand up too quickly, or if I'm like bent over doing something for too long, or it's like like squatting and bent over doing something, and then I stand up too fast. It's like it also used to be like that every time I got out of the shower.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. And see, that's that's another part of it too, is that when we have a shower, that the warmth from the shower dilates the blood vessels to the skin and like put pushes draws the blood away from your heart as well. And so I always tell people with pots when you end your shower, just turn it like as cold as you can handle it and like put that like wick chill your legs basically so that it enacts basically so that when you get out of the shower, you're not like literally like, oh my god, I'm gonna show you.
SPEAKER_00:I do that for my hair, and I've actually been feeling I was gonna say I haven't I haven't had that in a while. The fainting when I like the feeling like faint when I get out of the shower, but for a long time now I've been blasting, I blast my hair at the end with cold water. I like stand in the cold water of the shower for like 10 or 15 seconds.
SPEAKER_03:So that's probably why yeah, instinctively giving yourself accommodations.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, damn it.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and so like a lot of people don't realize like adrenaline in your body needs salt to do its thing. Like there's a whole like thing that happens. I don't know, like the it it draws the salt from your blood, and that's why a lot of people with pots will end up like needing to ingest about a ton of salt. So like a sprinkle of salt in their water, extra salt in their food, like that person that's actually love salty stuff.
SPEAKER_00:I'm obsessed with salty stuff, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And that's because your body's craving that extra salt to replace what's being taken from your adrenaline extra glands.
SPEAKER_00:So yeah, it all makes sense.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, and then especially with like alostanolose people and like hypermobile alostanolos and all the other things, because we have that stretchy collagen, that's why that vasoconstriction doesn't always happen in our legs. It's why we need like compression socks and stuff, because that collagen is is wonky, it's not going to constrict in the way that it's meant to. So yeah.
SPEAKER_00:This is why we needed a special interest episode. This is it, this is why. So we could learn, so we could learn things.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, like my like I was trying to say before, like one of my favorite facts is that like if your body recognizes that your eyes are a thing, like if your immune system's like, oh, what's that? It can make you go blind, and it's like not, it's not you could it could be just one eye that recognizes, which is so messed up to me.
SPEAKER_00:Like, I'm I'm thinking that that's there was someone in my comments on Instagram, I think it was the other day, my my I would waste the Puritans video, and they were like, I'd go back further, I'd go back to the primordial stew and shoot anything that comes out of it and just kick it right back into the water. I was like, you know what? You're right. You're right. That is where we should start. We should start all the way at the beginning and make sure human consciousness does not.
SPEAKER_04:We're like literal blood oceans, like our bodies are like literal donut sleeve blood oceans.
SPEAKER_02:Gross is humans.
SPEAKER_04:We're a sleeve, right? We got a hole that ends in another hole and it's connected the whole way through. So that's a sleeve, right? It's like one of them little like jiggly sleeve things that you used to get as a kid. They have like the funny stuff on the inside. Yeah. And essentially our our adrenaline glands and like our body, like it it takes away salt or uses up the salt, but like we have to keep a certain amount of salt in our body.
SPEAKER_00:Oh my god, we're just a tropical fish tank. We're just a fucking we're just a fucking tropical fish tank. It's out that's absurd. No wonder. I've I don't know if you I had to maintain a couple of salt tanks and when I worked at a pet shop. They suck. They're so hard, it's so hard to do, is so much work for so little effort, and you can really only have so much because you gotta consider the entirety of the ecosystem, and you also have to be a chemist. So no wonder being a human sucks because we're just a salt water tank.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, yeah. We're just we're just we're just a salty blood ocean.
SPEAKER_00:I read something the other day that was like, you're a ghost riding a skeleton hurdling on a rock through empty space. So just calm down, it's not that serious. Do whatever you want, kind of a thing.
SPEAKER_03:That is an that is a very accurate, very accurate.
SPEAKER_00:Or it's like you're a ghost operating a skeleton riding a rock that's hurtling through endless space, so just do whatever you want.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Which is true. Maybe Men in Black was trying to tell us something.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, I mean, like all I can think of is that like last scene where the like that the chick is like shutting the thing, and it's like she's like crying and it starts raining and it's like all interconnected. And I'm like, oh of course the alien lady can control the weather, but we're stuck here just dealing with it.
unknown:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Man, a special interest, I will say, another special interest I've got at the moment is the new Frankenstein movie. Have you seen it yet? No, I have not. I highly recommend it. Minus the fact Jacob Alordi's in it. I just ignore that. I'm pretty sure Jacob Alordi was one of the ones that after October 7th was handing out, like, or maybe that was the Noah guy, but Jacob Alordi I think had some pretty nasty stuff to say after October 7th, if I'm not mistaken. Remember his name being tossed around as saying some pretty shitty stuff. So I took a little bit of pleasure in watching him get his ass beat as the as Frankenstein's monster for that, and then the rest of the time I just pretended it was someone else and not him. But other than that, it's like a masterpiece, and it's very, very Guillermo del Toro stayed very, very true to the book, which is very much an allegory for the patriarchy and God, and like you can very much apply it to pro-life and all of that kind of stuff. It's it's dark. It's dark and it's sad, just like the book, just like the book. But it's really, really powerful because they did really show Victor Frankenstein, who is you know always supposed to be lauded as this brilliant scientist. Now they show him as like an egomaniacal, obsessive piece of shit, which I thought was really, really, really, really good.
SPEAKER_04:You've got to be that type of person to wanna like re-animate a corpse.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. And he does this whole he's like grandstanding at the beginning, he's like, Life, we have the power of life, it's the greatest gift that we can give. We can take it take like take death away from people and give them the gift of life, and then he creates it and he locks it in a dungeon and just beats the hell out of it because it's not what he expects or intends it to be. I'm like, wow, that's the narcissistic parent. I think unfortunately, I have learned that if he didn't, a lot of the women watching it did because there's like fan cam edits of Jacob Alordi as the monster, which doesn't look good. He doesn't look good as the monster, he definitely looks dead, he definitely looks like a corpse. And people are like, Oh my god, I just this is so sexy, and I want to be like, I want you on a list, I want to make sure you're never around a morgue.
SPEAKER_04:Of like kink that's like mon into monsters, right? I can understand that.
SPEAKER_00:Yes, I get I get that the like fantasies and stuff, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:But fantasizing over a dead human being, it's a he very much looks like a sewn-up corpse.
SPEAKER_00:He very much does not look like green-headed bolts in the neck, Frankenstein. He does not look like that, he very much looks like a sewn, like strips of dead flesh sewn together, is what he looks like. That's some Ed game shit, right? Yeah, and it's not even like a zombie either, which I would also I could almost uh almost understand in the monster category, you know, like Tina from Bob's burgers. So I could like almost understand that he doesn't look like a zombie. He literally looks like cold flesh stripped, like because it's all done in strips that has been stripped together off of a pale blood-drained corpse. And then also, Jacob Alordi looks like the alien, like he's built like the alien from Romulus, that alien Romulus, you know, that really, really, really, really tall, crazy looking guy. That's there's like this big alien and alien Romulus. I'll have to try to show you a picture. Jacob Alordi looks to be naturally built that way. And it's not a comfort. It it looks like the coffee aliens. He looks like a like a seven-foot-tall version of the coffee aliens from Men in Black that hang out in the in the coffee room. He's built like Taylor Swift, honestly.
SPEAKER_04:It's not wouldn't Frankenstein almost be like a version of Lurt from the Adams family? Like OG? Yes.
SPEAKER_00:And it this this this is, you know who would have been a great Frankenstein's monster for the build? Keith Ledger. Because this guy is just too skinny. This this Jacob Alordi guy, he just looks like a weird a like stick stick monster.
SPEAKER_04:I just saw the preview for the Ed Game thing that just came out.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And I'm like, why did they put like one of those pretty boy actors? Why do they keep putting pretty boy actors in these roles that are essentially of like I don't want to be like I don't I don't know the right words, but like of like the creep at nature.
SPEAKER_00:I'll show you the face as well, because it's it doesn't, it's not like a monster, it's like a corpse. I mean that I guess I mean maybe kind of with the hair, but it's still it's like it's definitely like dead flesh. I see the they're just romanticizing corpses, and then I start thinking about that last podcast necrophilia episode. I don't trust it.
SPEAKER_01:Necrophilia will literally give you a disease that you get rid of. And you will die from what like and the only the like you can't you can only get that disease from sleeping with a corpse. So getting tested and having that done will also get you put in jail.
SPEAKER_04:Oh god, that's so gross. That's so gross, that's so gross.
SPEAKER_00:Uh uh, I can't believe the statistics on that. Have you listened to that episode, that necrophilia episode? No, I don't think so. Oh, I'll have to send it to you because they go through some statistics. It's a very under-researched necrophilia. This is now become like another, it's not it's like when I heard the episode I had to go through and I had to even like write some stuff about it because it was crazy. Uh, there's like 10 different kinds of necrophilia, but there's a overwhelming number of necrophiles who basically get jobs as paramedics. Yeah, I think they I think they do call him like one of the types of necrophiles because there's there's different like levels of it. Some of them aren't even sexual. It's about some of them, some of them it's not so much sexual, some of them it's about eating it, some of them it's just about like the possession of it. There's there's div there's different ones. There's like 10 different kinds of necrophysics. Like Jeffrey Dama, how he would like so he was like the cannibalistic, whatever they call that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But then there's also like I think they talk about Des, I can't remember his last name, but the serial killer, he was a Scottish man in England, who was a serial killer in like the 70s, and he had uh he had tried to put a bunch of the bodies, he had cut them up and tried to like flush them, put them down the drain, and the drains got clogged, and that's how he got caught. And then when they went in the apartment, I think he had one body, maybe two, but he would just keep the body until it was just mo like liquid mush that he had to dispose of, and it I think he would like sleep in the bed next to it and stuff until it got too mushy, but essentially it was not about eating it. I don't even think he had sex with them. Maybe he did, but it was about like the possession of the corpse itself. So there's like all these different tiers to it. But in that episode on last podcast on the left, they talk about the statistics of like patient transport, people who do patient transport at hospitals because then they get left alone with the body to take the bodies down to the morgue, ambulance drivers, paramedics, obviously, people who work in actual morgues, but there was like unexpected ones. There's jobs, any anywhere where a dead body might be, these people go and find that job so they get access to these bodies on like a shocking level, and no one wants to talk about it or anything, so people look the other way. But it's it's women, men, women go into these morgues, will break in, use penis pumps, like all kinds of crazy stuff. Crazy, crazy stuff. Yeah, it's wild.
SPEAKER_04:It's like I'm just gonna chime in with the fact that like like morticians usually are women now because men are just like despicable.
SPEAKER_00:And that may actually not make anything better. It may make things better for women for the female bodies, you know? Yeah, but it may actually not be making things better for the male bodies because those women might, you know. So because the if you listen to that episode, they go in, there's a very famous case of a woman. I think she was in California, maybe she was in England, but I'm pretty sure she was in California. I think she basically got away with it because in court she was like, Well, you don't have a law in the book that says I can't do this, kind of thing, and they had to write a law afterward. It was like in the 70s, she was going into these morgues with penis pumps and just like yeah, yeah, that's what she claimed. I don't really yeah, unbelievable. And she was like, she was she was really, really happy about it. Apparently, some of these people as well, they go to the funerals of the people afterwards. Yeah, they go and meet the families and go to the funerals with these people. There's some of them like that's how they like get off on it, is like being with the body and then following it, then watching it get yeah, it's it's mind-blowing, and there's just not a lot again. No one wants to research it because it's horrific and gross and disgusting, but it is also fascinating.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, no, I'm I'm fascinated. Like, I want to ask questions, but my brain is like, how do I even ask a question about that though?
SPEAKER_00:Like it's a great I've listened to that episode a couple times. I'll send it to you. Highly anyone else listening, I highly recommend you check that out. It's last podcast on the left, Necrophilia. Mind-blowing stuff. They give you some book recommendations and stuff in there. I've read some of the research, but yeah, there's different kinds, it goes to all different levels of things. There's also the like like husbands whose wives die and they can't get like allow themselves to let go. So they end up like keeping the wife in the bed until she mummifies over 20 years. There's like that kind of thing, and he's not doing anything to her, but he just like cannot imagine her being buried in a box away from him. Like that kind of thing. So, like I said, there's like 10 different kinds of necrophilia. Yeah, yeah. Like that's uh don't know how you fix that. No idea how you fix that. Uh, because there would be other stuff. That's that that'd be a good story. I think maybe Stephen King's already done that story, didn't he? In that Gerald's game when the husband dies. Well, she didn't want to keep the body, I guess. That's a gr that's a fucked up book.
SPEAKER_04:I'm not a fan of Stephen King, so I've never really liked it.
SPEAKER_00:I don't like him as a person, but his writing man, his his actual like his style of writing. I'm not even talking about the stories and the content because sometimes that is just crazy. Like the haunted lampshade. But his actual I love reading his stuff to study his style of writing because it is fucking art. Like what whatever we think about him, his writing is next level, and he does he's a prolific writer. He's written more than anybody, I think. I think he's even written more than Voltaire. It's it's it's an insane amount.
SPEAKER_04:It's I can't even Oh, you were gonna tell me about the Voltaire thing? Because I don't know much about that.
SPEAKER_00:Voltaire. So Voltaire was I went through this whole like philosophy hy a super hyper focus interest years ago, like a decade ago, and just fell down the rabbit hole reading all these philosophers. And I really fell in love with Voltaire. Not all of Voltaire, because as every other man at the time, he had some questionable opinions and behaviors sometimes about things. But yeah, Voltaire was a 17th century, sixth, eighteenth century, 18th century French philosopher and writer and poet and playwright and all-around bad boy. I mean, he was a bad boy. Uh, he was born to a rich family. His dad was a lawyer and was also had like a spot in the treasury and the government. His mom, though, she came from the lowest rank of nobility, so she was basically looked at as a peasant. So the house seems to have been quite uncomfortable in that respect, where I think his mom was probably very much treated like you're lucky to be here. So keep your mouth shut and do what the fuck you're told, kind of thing. And it seems that Voltaire, who was the youngest of five, so we know how that's gonna turn out.
SPEAKER_04:Um, what's the beat? Like the bloodline of the the rich people was getting a bit janky and they needed someone outside.
SPEAKER_00:Yep. Well, they he was his real name was Arrowet. It was um, what was it? Like something Michelle Arrowet and Michelle George, maybe Arrowet. Anyway, he they called him Zozo. He was quite close to his mother, and I think you can kind of tell that from the way he just like loves women, and not even really in a womanizing way. He falls in love over and over and over and over again. It always gets him in trouble. Anyway, he he grows up, he hates his father, he hates what his father stands for. He grows up to hate the aristocracy. His dad tries to force him to follow in his footsteps, gets Voltaire a couple of jobs. Every job Voltaire goes on, he just he just he just skives everything off. He just sits there and writes all day until he gets fired. He writes poems until they fire him because he refuses to do any work. And he turns into a teenager. His dad goes, right, it's time for you to be serious. I'm sending you to France. I got you a job helping like the ambassador to from France to, I think, Belgium or something like that. So 19-year-old Voltaire goes off to Belgium and he immediately starts an affair basically with this radical 19-year-old, I think she was 19, she might have been 20, Protestant refugee who had been kicked out of France because she was this considered to be this radical heretic that was like sharing books and writings and was trying to convert people to the Protestant religion. And so 19-year-olds Voltaire gets in a relationship with her and that blows up. She gets kicked out of the country, he gets sent back to France in disgrace, and everyone thinks like this is this is it, this humiliation is gonna teach Voltaire a lesson. Opposite, opposite. He went, Oh, fuck you for taking her away from me. And he gets even worse. So he starts writing about the government. He calls the king a pedophile and an incestuous monster. He's like, he the king is fucking his daughter. All these people are gross pedophiles and abusers. So he gets put in jail. He gets put in prison in the Bastille for like 11 months or something for writing all this stuff about the government. And that's when he changed his name to Voltaire because he didn't want to be associated with his father and the family name anymore because he he hated what it stood for. Then he gets out, and people are like, okay, this will be it now. This is gonna be it. He's written a play in prison, he's gonna be a playwright, everything's gonna calm down, he'll just be a broke playwright, and that'll be it. Not at all. He immediately basically gets into a fight with this like pompous nobleman, is the son of this really grand house. And Voltaire calls him a bunch of names and basically insults him and makes him look stupid in front of a bunch of people. So the nobleman hires his buddies to go beat Voltaire up, and he's like, that'll be the end of it. Now Voltaire's gonna learn his lesson. Literally, as soon as the guy's beating Voltaire up, step away from him, he jumps up, pulls out his sword, is like, I'm gonna kill you. I want a duel right now, you disgraceful piece of shit, to this French nobleman. And at that time, a duel was a legal thing. And it was the the nobleman freaks out, runs to his daddy, and gets gets Voltaire put in prison again and then exiled. And Voltaire is just raging, just raging, raging, raging pissed. He eventually comes back to Paris. He's written all this like seditious anti-government stuff. His books aren't even allowed in Paris, so he starts getting them printed outside of Paris, brings them into Paris himself and starts selling them to people with all these news writing. Yeah, and then he also ran a lottery scam once he got into Paris. They were doing these lotteries in these poor districts, and he and his he had a mathematician friend that went, the winnings are less than the cost of the tickets, so let's just go buy all the tickets from the people and we'll just keep winning the lottery and we'll take all the money from the crown. And that's what they did, and the they they legally were allowed to do it. And the crown was like, You keep winning, Voltaire, you can't keep winning. And he would just every time he would go and buy up all the tickets, and then he would take the winnings. He did it over and over and over again, and then he would like start businesses from the lottery money that he was essentially scamming off of the government.
SPEAKER_02:Just like that lady who's like to fuck corpses. We're just utilizing the money to have a female.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it was it's absolutely crazy. At one point, even though he was really, really famous, he falls in love with this female writer. She's an Enlightenment writer, Emile de Chateulet, I think her name was. Chatelet. She was a noblewoman, writing, prolific writer, wrote all this stuff, fan of the Enlightenment, women's rights, uh, doesn't want to be with the Catholic Church, all that kind of stuff. Voltaire falls in love with her, but the problem is she's married, right? Can't happen, right? Wrong. Voltaire moves into her home with her and her husband, where they are openly lovers and everybody knows about it. And the husband just plays like, yeah, that's that's fine. That's fine.
SPEAKER_04:I mean, like OG bisexual, no, not bisexuality, OG polyamory.
SPEAKER_00:Or he was a cuck. He might have been a cuck, maybe.
SPEAKER_04:I don't know what.
SPEAKER_00:Something like that.
SPEAKER_04:There's a lot of there's a surprisingly large amount of cucks out there.
SPEAKER_00:But I think I don't remember how many years their their relationship lasted several years, but then it ended because she fell in love with some handsome new nobleman that she came across, that Emily Duchatelet.
SPEAKER_04:That's for sure. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:The French court at this time was in this, these are the libertines, you know, who were just getting it on. Like it was nuts. Absolutely nuts at this time, the way they were sleeping around. Yeah, it was it was they think the hippies thought that they were doing free love in the 60s. You go to 18th century France if you want to see what free love is. I mean, Jesus. But she breaks it off with Voltaire, she goes off with a new lover, she gets pregnant by that lover, and as soon as she's pregnant, the lover abandons her and is like, absolutely not, I want nothing to do with this. So she gets left pregnant. Yeah, she's got her husband and she's still friends with Voltaire, and Voltaire says, All right, we're gonna f I'm gonna fix this for you. Voltaire helps her trick her husband into believing that the child is his. They gets her back in there with her husband, gets the husband to sleep with her again, and then they pretend that the child is the husband's so that the husband will take her back and they'll just be a happy family with this baby together. Then she dies in child, and apparently it like destroyed Voltaire. It was like one of the great tragedies of his life. So all of that scamming the husband, and then she died in childbirth. Oh shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yep, yep, yep. But yeah, his life was just crazy. His his whole he also had a relationship with his niece.
SPEAKER_04:And that's where I'm like them, motherfuckers cooked.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, but he was anti-slavery and he was anti-Catholic church, so that's good. I did read some things that said church, but insistus is like a line. But that's okay. It is a bit weird because it was I it seems to look like it was when he was old, so he was probably like in his it was at like at the end of his life, because he died in 1778, and I think they found letters that he had written to her in like 1770, and he was born in 1694, so it was getting quite old, and she was also old because I think she was basically like a similar age to him, because she was the oldest daughter of his oldest sister, who was like nine years older than him. So it seemed to have been like a weird end-of-life thing with both of them, and she there was tons of letters written, and he wrote them in Italian because he didn't want anybody knowing what he was saying, and he was definitely digging it on his niece, and she eventually moved in with him as his companion and like the manager of his home. Just gonna go look after my uncle Koff Kough choke choke, who's been writing me letters for years asking me to get in it, you know. So that that I don't love, that's very weird. Yeah, I I read something that said that he wrote disparaging things about black people. I did not find those, but there was also stuff that showed he was very anti slavery. So it 18th century, I'm sure he was gross and a prick, but it's very much just this kind of like, I'll do what I want when I want. He drank 40 cups of coffee a day. Ras Buton was a piece of shit, but it's a good story. Oh, it is a good story. I love Ras Buton's story. You know, it's so weird about him. He was awful and he molested. Children, but also he didn't want Jews being killed and he didn't want World War One to happen. He tried to stop World War One. So it's just like, damn, you know, complex.
SPEAKER_04:Twice a day.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But he definitely molested those little girls. Yeah, he Rasputin, I I always gotta tell I people need to know this. Rasputin, I know we love him from Anastasia, right? Fun, fun villain on Anastasia, but that man for sure molested the the Duchesses, the little Tsarinas. Yeah. 100%. Because he taught that masturbation would cure women of stuff. And so he would go around and masturbate women to cure them when they were upset. So he yeah, he was doing that to the girls for sure.
SPEAKER_04:So yeah, because we we all know vibrators were a medical piece of equipment at some point in time.
SPEAKER_00:So I hate man. They're fucking pilgrims. You can see the Puritan all over them. All over them. But yeah, so that's that's another that's I've just babbled about my special point.
SPEAKER_04:This is what pe this is what the episode's for, right? Letting people understand that like a special interest, it's really important that you get a chance to verbalize that because if you especially if you're diverse and you're listening to this, to be able to verbalize your special interests without being interrupted and having someone egg you on in a really healthy way, you actually get to process all of the information that you've been like piling into your brain, and it doesn't become like this stressful thing that you feel like you have to add into conversations with every human being around you. Because that's what can happen. You end up like I know for myself, like when I get into a special interest, I cannot help but shove it into any conversation, and I will literally try my best to talk about my special interest, and I'll wait for like the perfect time and I'll wait till there's like a oh oh that relates to my special interest, and then boom, that's me. I'm done. Let me talk about my stuff. And it doesn't matter if the conversation had literally nothing to do with anything. I'm I'm done. Like you're done, your ears are going to be hurting after I've finished. So it's so important for people to have that opportunity to go, this is what I've been learning about. Like, here are all the things that I know, let me babble about it because it's like actually really therapeutic for neurodiverse people.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, well, you actually at least have like helpful hyperfixations, like you when you were sitting here telling me about pots and EDS and all that kind of stuff. And mine's like, here's some Jeopardy history facts you'll never use. Here you go. Here you go. You're like, here's how your body works and how to make your life better. And I'm like, Did you know the Puritan's drink?
SPEAKER_04:That comes from finally dealing with like a lifetime of trauma, though. And like that, that's it's not that I fucking should I would never have known any of these things if I didn't start to deal with a trauma in my life. Like fair enough.
SPEAKER_03:Fair enough.
SPEAKER_04:I know way too much about the body and like the brain because I was like, oh, my brain is broken. Oh, how do brains get broken? And then then that that sent me spirals revered and then you know, clocked that one of my kids is is high support needs autistic and was like, oh, wait a minute, but I actually like vibe with my kids more than I vibe with most people. Hold up, like let me just check this here. So the reason why I know so much and and and have so much understanding, and then there's also like I was pulled into the crunchy pipeline through my like teens and stuff like that, and so I have this like like double-sided wealth of knowledge where like I've seen how the pipelines can like pull people into the most despicable ways of learning, and so now I'm so keen to learn things in such true detail that like that's why I know that your immune system will blind you if it figures out that you have eyeballs because like I had to know, I had to know apparently too much about all the things, you know.
SPEAKER_00:You gotta make the connection, you gotta link the links, you just gotta follow where the chain leads.
SPEAKER_04:You know, like my kid the other day was like, Mom, can you just tell me some facts? And like the first one that popped out of my brain was like, Oh, you know, blind people don't experience schizophrenia because we're not sure why, but that's starting to figure out that schizophrenia might be associated with the relationship between the eyes and the brain.
SPEAKER_00:There's a relationship between your eyes and your brain, and I was like, Oh my god, be careful, she's gonna end up being a neurologist, and you're gonna have a kid in school for 20 years.
SPEAKER_04:No, it's still in that stage where it's like I want to be a singer, I want to be an actor, and I'm like, all right.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She can act in one of my shows one day, maybe.
SPEAKER_04:Well, that's the thing, like, she's she actually she got a good singing voice, like, she's been commended by quite a few people like in my life that are like she's pretty good.
SPEAKER_00:And I'm like, All right, Brittany Spears, let's go get on the road.
SPEAKER_04:Like, but like she'll come to me and she'll be like, Mom, I know that it's probably misogyny and patriarchy, but why is this boy behaving like this? And I'll have to like she'll like tell me what's what's happening, and I'll be like, okay, so this is probably what's happening, and this is why this, this, and this. And yes, you were right, it's probably misogyny and patriarchy. But good clock, well done.
SPEAKER_00:Very clever, very smart. People people underestimate how smart kids are, man. We I think a lot of things that they got wrong in the medieval times, right? A lot, a lot of things they got wrong. But one thing I think they definitely got right, especially in like Tudor England, is when they started the way they educated children, with they would just like they they treated the intelligence of children like the intelligence of adults, and they knew that children's brains were sponges, and that they would just soak up anything you gave them with any kind of regularity. And there was that's why you had Elizabeth I who could speak like eight languages and write in like five of them, and she could she could compose music and play multiple instruments, and she had all these memorized dances and memorized his histories, like entire books that she had memorized of history and all this kind of stuff.
SPEAKER_04:Kids are so no, they they truly are, and like I've always been a big like if my kid asks me a question, I will answer it like fully, completely until like she's like, Okay, mum, I get it.
SPEAKER_00:You know, and if I don't know, turn it back on them, turn the why back around.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, like you wanna you wanna ask why? Are you sure? Like a lot of the time I'm like, Do you want on the answer? Or do you want me to explain to you properly? And she's like, damn it, I want the full explanation.
unknown:Stop punching.
SPEAKER_00:There was an episode of last podcast I was listening to like a few days ago, and there was they were talking about context, and I don't remember what it was, but whatever story they were telling, Marcus is like, All right, time for the context. And he went back like 300 years, and Henry and Ed are like, God, and Marcus, like, no, no, you need the context now. You need the context to understand how we get to this point. I was like, Yes, yes, yes, but the context.
SPEAKER_04:They're like, Oh, this makes so much sense. And he's like, Yeah, that's why you need the context.
SPEAKER_00:It it adds up. There's a point, there's a purpose. Yeah, no, I get it. I I'd I I would info dump as well.
SPEAKER_04:That's what I just think that's what I like. It does end up being is like an info dump. I'm like, do you want me to put like two here off, or do you want me to just like send you on your way?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, if my like if I had a kid and they were like, Mom, what happened to Anne Boleyn? I'd be like, Well, you really have to go back to the Wars of the Roses. So, what you want to do is you want to look at about 1436 primarily. Now, what we got here is the Plantagenets. I'd be like, wait, wait, what? She died in 1536. I know, but the hundred years before that is very, very crucial so that you understand the throne of England and the inheritance and what was going on between the families. It's crucial that you understand that. Oh, it's it's it's difficult, I think, sometimes because I do feel like go between feeling like my brain's a sponge and a Rolodex, like those old Rolodexes from the 90s that had phones that you would keep like phone numbers in, you know. They would be so lovely. That's what I feel like mine is, because I'll see a date. Like if I'm just out and about and I'll just randomly see a date somewhere, and my brain goes like 1496. Like it, it's I it's and but it's not it's not good enough to like be on a game show, it's not powerful enough to be like on a game show, it's not rain man powerful enough, which is so frustrating.
SPEAKER_04:It's one of those ones where it's like when you're not in control of it, your brain's like, here, you've just seen this one tiny little insignificant reference. Oh my god. It's gonna send your brain on a spiral for the next four hours. But if I put you in front of 20 people and it's a pub quiz and you have to think of the thing on the spot and you actually have to make your brain do it, never nothing in there. Not in the thing, nothing.
SPEAKER_00:I dress as Julia Styles in 10 Things I Hate About You for Halloween, and someone when I walked in immediately came up to me and quoted one of the most popular lines in it, and my brain went totally blank. A movie that I've read the script for probably 400 freaking times, I've probably watched it 400 times, I've got every single line of hers memorized. Am I that transparent? I want you, I need you, oh baby, oh baby. Couldn't think of any lines. They came up, said the line to me completely blank, totally blank, totally blank. Like, what is this? What is the use?
SPEAKER_04:Brain says no dopamine, no dopamine.
SPEAKER_00:Unbelievable, unbelievable, useless meat in there, just like a watered-down Jeopardy brain. Unbelievable. But yeah, special interest. You guys are lucky I didn't get into the volcano book. I God. I checked that book out 50 times.
SPEAKER_04:Don't don't even don't start with natural history stuff. Like, but tell me more.
SPEAKER_00:I uh I won't go into the all the volcano stuff because I got obsessed with Pompeii and how people could be flash melted like that.
SPEAKER_04:And anyway, one of my favorite things that I've ever learned is the the the entire layer of sediment that can be seen all over the world in rock because of the the pyroclassic flows from like the volcanoes and stuff. Yeah, from from like the when the dinosaurs was like gone from the big asteroid. There's like a layer of sediment that is like across the world. You can see it. It's everywhere.
SPEAKER_00:It would have settled out of the atmosphere. It's unbelievable. I don't think people, yeah. No, that was part of what blew my mind about Pompeii is like the levels, how you could see like the timing of how the volcano exploded because of the levels of you could see like the rock level, the ash level, the pyroclastic flow level, and all that kind of stuff. But there was my my mom I'm I think my mom did know because I wasn't allowed to see when I got my assessment for the gifted program. I was never allowed to see those documents, so I I suspect they probably knew, but there was a volcano book that I checked out from the library, it was the eyewitness series that do all like the nature books with all the pictures and stuff for kids. And I checked that book out. I kid you not, it was like 36 or 40 times. And by the time I got to that, the librarian, I remember going to check it out the last time, and the librarian said, just keep it. You can just have it. You can just have this book. You check it out constantly, you can just have the book. And that's when people Because I just stare at the pictures. I would and I'd seen everything, they're not big books, they're for kids. But no, I checked it out constantly. I think I think I was still in high school, probably checking that bad boy out, like just nuts, absolutely nuts.
SPEAKER_04:But the the visual visual, so like when an autistic person is learning something, there's uh a very much a big need for a visual reference, and like it's really easy for us to access information in our brain when we have a visual reference. So, like for you to check that out so much, you knew all the things, you knew what the book said, you you learned all the things. So having that visual reference helped your brain solidify the information you'd been learning and also like inspect what what you've learned, like in a way that, like, you know, because you're not gonna be able to, you're not physically gonna be able to go to Pompeii at that age and and like see the devastation, but certainly seeing photos of it will help your brain quantify because like visual learning is really important with like autistic and ADHD brains, especially. It's it's a it's a part of kinetic learning, which is like the doing learning side of things where you have to physically participate in the learning, like you know, like you can't take verbal instructions, but like if someone physically showed you, you'll never forget how to do it kind of thing. And so being able to have that visual reference gives your brain a way to go, oh, okay, this, this, and this, and that's why that connects because this, this, and this kind of thing.
SPEAKER_00:There you go again with a way more useful special interest.
SPEAKER_04:No, I honestly I'm like, no, I like your special interest more because it's like I didn't get the the privilege, definitely privilege to the education. I didn't get the privilege to like do the education thing. Like, I think like because of my ADHD and the level of trauma and the masking that I had to go through, I never got to lean into being a nerd. And I want to be and wanted to be a nerd so badly, but I also was so shunned out in so many social situations that there was almost this PDA of like, no, I have to figure out how to do this social thing. I have to. If I don't, I'll never survive, you know, that sort of thing.
SPEAKER_00:I totally understand that. Yeah, I went through it.
SPEAKER_04:And if I take the like the nerdier route, the more educational route, I probably would have gone to like university and like you know, gone to like higher way higher education, but like I'm over here like 30 years old and like finally doing all of the learning by myself on my own.
SPEAKER_00:Better late than ever doesn't matter when you do it. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_04:And I'm 100% like a we don't ever stop learning. You never ever stop learning. You never stop until you always always something to to learn. That's it.
SPEAKER_00:I think that's kind of the beauty of having special interests, these hyperfixation special interests is that it is pr it is a privilege as well to be able to like for even for me to sit here and be able to like hammer through these books the way I do, like that is in a way, like I think a privilege, because there are some people that just can't do that. You know what I mean? So I do I do kind of look at I should be more grateful for the sponge. I just wish it would make me more money. I wish I could just dump this knowledge.
SPEAKER_04:Some people don't get like not so it's not about like being famous, but some people don't find their niche that makes them the thing, the like the life that they want to have until they're in like their 40s or 50s.
SPEAKER_00:I don't want to be famous at all. I would my ideal job would be something that gives me a ton of money and no one knows I exist. That would be can you imagine? Yeah, wouldn't that be a sweet spot? You didn't have to talk to anybody all day, you got a ton of money, you got to just work away at a thing, and no one knew it was even you. That's my dream. That's my dream.
SPEAKER_03:Oh yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So if anybody's looking for a ghostwriter, let me know. Let me know.
SPEAKER_04:She's amazing. The ideas that come out of her fucking head. She messages me sometimes, and I'm like, why are you asking for my opinion on this bar like you got it?
SPEAKER_00:What do you think about a Victorian circus in 1888 when Jack the Rippers is terrorizing London? She's like, Yeah, yeah, that's where did you where what is what's how do okay, yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So everybody's like, how to do a Victorian circus? Yeah, okay. All right. Didn't weren't you just writing about the Dust Bowl yesterday? Yeah, yeah, I finished that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I literally told Dan I was working, I'm working on a project about the I'm working on like five different things at the moment, but one of them was the Dust Bowl, and I wrote it over the weekend, and I literally told him about it in the morning. I was like, What do you think about this idea? And he goes, Yeah, that could be pretty good. And then by the time he came down that evening, I was like, Oh, it's done. I already wrote the first draft. And he was like, What? I was like, Yeah, it's about 10,000 words, 65 pages, finished it. Finished the first draft already. I've got the whole thing. Here's character, da da da da da da da da da da da and just started like railing through because he was like, Tell me what's it about, and it was so complicated, I ended up talking at him for like 40 minutes. He's like, Do you did okay? All right, all right, okay, all right, okay.
SPEAKER_04:And this is what happens when autistic people get left to their actual joy.
SPEAKER_00:That's it. That's it. Ripped through it, wrote two, wrote two things, two big things in a in a week. So hyper focus, hyper fixation, special interests. They make like this as long as you're like taking food breaks and piss breaks.
SPEAKER_04:Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I did. Yeah, I did. I did I was not I ate at the end of the day because it was basically just like it took me about eight hours to outline it and then just write it. So I I ate at the end of the day. I had some I had coffee, coffee, coffee. If it's good enough for Voltaire, it's good enough for me. And then I ate at the end of the day. So that's fine.
SPEAKER_04:Coffee is the dopamine, food is the reward.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. But yeah, do you have do you want to talk about any do you have any other special interests you want to hit for today?
SPEAKER_04:Um, none that I can think of. I'm sort of like I'm just still like I can't absorbing the horror of the Puritans. They're in the necromancy, okay? My brain is still like, I'm listening.
SPEAKER_00:I'm gonna send you that episode. It's only one episode. It's it it's not a relaxed fit, but it is just a single episode. I did it have Ed in it? It might have had Ed. I think it might be an Ed episode, actually. I love Amber. I love all of them.
SPEAKER_04:I just my brain is like. Oh, we should have talked about Amber.
SPEAKER_00:We'll have to do we'll have to cover Amber in in the next episode or something.
SPEAKER_04:Yeah, no, that's but that's me. Like that would be me fully like assessing someone for autism and NEXC.
SPEAKER_00:If anybody knows Amber Nelson, let her know. We would love to get her on the podcast. We would we would we would love we would love Connie might be starstruck, but I wouldn't be able to function. You hear that, Amber? You gotta come on here and make Connie's dream come true. We'll stun her into into babbling silence. It will be fantastic.
SPEAKER_04:I'll give her a green card. I'll marry her.
SPEAKER_00:So she can live. Just so she can escape the horrors of America. Yes. Fair enough. She might be up for it. You never know. You never know. You never know. All right. Well, that is today's special episode. Hopefully, you got loaded with lots of facts you didn't have before. I'm sure some of you listening probably do have these facts. But yeah, that is it. If you would like to follow us and support us, you can do so on Patreon, help us grow this podcast. You can also follow us on Instagram and TikTok and all that good stuff. Connie, do you do you want to do you want to be followed anywhere or are you just like leave me alone? Just enough is enough.
SPEAKER_04:Well, I mean, I don't really post very many places, but if anyone wants to like find me, Rainbow's Moon Moon Rainbow Moon Rainbow's Moon Themes, something or other. I don't know, you'll find me.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. You get you can find her through my page at The Real E. B. Johnson on on everything. You can probably hunt her down through by friends. Uh so yeah, make sure you follow us, give us a listen, and thank you so much for all of your support, and we will talk to you next week. Bye-bye.
