Coltan Scrivner (on morbid curiosities)

20:24Yeah. We called this group that because when they walked through the haunt, they were squeezing their fists really tight. They like the fatigue. They're in it for the fatigue afterwards. We asked him, he said, how scary was it? And they're like, oh, it's so scary. And we're like, did you enjoy how scary it was? And they're like, not really. You know, I didn't really enjoy the feeling of fear. But what they enjoyed was the opportunity to challenge their fears. Yeah. Right? The accomplishment of it. Exactly right. And they reported that they felt like they learned something about themselves. Either the limits of their fear or what they were good at dealing with or not good at dealing with.

20:53That was the second group. We thought those two would pop up because we had some ideas from other research that suggested that, yeah, there's a group that likes the adrenaline and a group that doesn't seem to like it. You know, when they do test screenings of films, they show it to 300 people, then they keep behind 30 or 40 people in a focus group, and they kind of ask them more detailed questions. I sat in on the test screening for this movie I was in called Zathura, and there were a lot of moms with kids at this screening, and they were part of the test group. And the moms were regularly complaining that the movie was too scary.

21:25And then upon follow-up question from the guy conducting it, he would say, well, which part was it that was too scary? And she would turn to her kid, and the kid would always say, oh, I like that part where the Zorgon did blank. And the kids always said, I liked it. The parents said it was too scary. They would ever screamed or whatever in the moment. But immediately you find out, like, the kids liked that. Yes, kids are spooky. I think a huge misunderstanding about kids is that they actually love spooky stuff. And parents know this intuitively, right? If you ask them, what kind of games do your kids play when they're pretend playing with others?

21:59It's like a violent game where they're playing a predator-prey chase game, or there's monsters in the game and they're pretending to be monsters, or there's a scary environment, the lights are off, or they're playing under a blanket. Is it gendered? A little bit. I mean, boys are a little more likely to engage in that, but at really young ages, like five to eight, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but from what I've read and what I've seen, boys and girls both kind of like scary play. Going back to this white knuckler thing, there were a group of people who really were afraid, but they still liked horror.

22:27And so the question was, why? Because there are other people who are really afraid and they don't like it. That makes sense. That makes the most sense. Yeah, the big question is, why does someone enjoy not liking it? I think that's me. I do enjoy it, and I get really worked up and scared. Yeah. But I do like it. This book explains you to a T, and in fact, one of his exact examples is something you did, which I got a bang on over reading. Okay, so of the haunted stuff, you walked away with what? More questions or some conclusions? A little of both, which means it's good science, I think. Yeah, yeah.

22:58But real quick, there was also a third group. Oh, a third budget. There was a third group that we didn't expect. This one we called the Dark Copers because they seem to be using scary experiences to deal with difficult emotions or difficult times they were going through in their life. So horror helped them kind of get over their anxiety or their depression or existential questions they had. Wow. In that it interrupted the pattern they were stuck in? That's part of it. But also horror deals in those emotions, right? Horror deals in anxiety. It deals in depression. It deals in threats and danger and awful things that happen.

23:26And I think it just helps to play that out. And you get through it. Like knowing that you've gotten through it maybe feels relieving. Of course. And some of the biochemical explanations come into play there. It's like, I got through this. I didn't enjoy the fear necessarily. But man, overcoming it sure feels good. Yes. It gives you a bit of optimism or hope. Yeah. Which is, oh, I might also be on the other side of these other things. Yeah. Okay, so how do you take that work and then turn it into morbidly curious? Yeah, well, we haven't talked about morbid curiosity that much. Okay, yeah, tell me about it.

23:58So that's just haunted houses. Yeah, this is before I had really done much work on morbid curiosity. I was interested in fear and how we play with it. And that combined with interest in people's interest in violence that I had. I kind of combined those next year or two after that and realized that there were a lot of overlap between them. There was a lot of commonalities between them. So I developed this concept of morbid curiosity. And of course, everyone has heard of this. I didn't come up with the term, right? Everybody kind of knows what it is, which made it all the more shocking that nobody had really done any research on this psychologically.

24:26There were a few studies in the 80s, but nobody had ever followed up on them. And some of the methods were a little outdated. Well, you read ridiculous things all the time on Instagram. It's like people who like serial... That go to sleep and watch serial killer movies are psychopaths. Are psychopaths. There's all these declarations of like, if your partner likes it, and I'm always like, how did we come to this conclusion? I don't think we did. Yeah, exactly. Engagement farming did. Yeah, yeah. So you broke up morbid curiosity into four domains. Yeah, and I did that because that's what the data was telling me was there.

24:59So the way you develop scales like that, you give people lots of questions, kind of like I did with those three horror types. Things that you think tap into this central concept or central theme. And then you see how they're answered similarly between people, and those break out into groups. And so what I found is that, yeah, there seem to be four types of morbid curiosity. So one of those is the minds of dangerous people, which is an interest in understanding people who might be dangerous, but maybe don't signal that they're dangerous. So true crime would be a great example of latching onto that type of morbid curiosity.

25:30There's violence, which is an interest in an act of violence. So this is kind of going back to that study I did where there was a violent action and people were homing in on the actual contact point. UFCs are your best example for this. That's a prime example. And then you have bodily injuries, which is kind of the outcome of violence. or the outcome of a dangerous situation, right? It could be an accident. It doesn't have to be an act of physical violence. This is rubbernecking. That's exactly right. Yeah, you see a car accident, and you're like, oh, fuck, I gotta look. Is there a head hanging out?

25:58I don't want to look, I gotta look. That is what morbid curiosity is. It's this mixed emotional experience of, ah, man, I really kind of want to see it, but I hope it's not there, but if it is, I want to see it. I'm repelled by it and drawn to it at the same time. It's like the polarities of a magnet all at once. It is weird. In the book, I give an example from Plato where he talks about this man who was walking on the city walls, and this was written 2 ,000 years ago, and he gives a perfect example of morbid curiosity in a different culture in a different time. He doesn't call it that. I think Plato's looking at our reason versus our emotions, and that's how he's using this story.

26:29But when I read it, I thought, oh my God, this is morbid curiosity in ancient times. And so he tells the story of this man who's walking along the city walls, and he sees the city executioner, and he sees all of the criminals' bodies who have been executed there. And he can't help but look. He doesn't want to look. He's telling himself, I don't want to look. and then he runs up to the edge. He says he throws his eyes open and he says, there you wretches, gaze upon your glory, talking to his own eyes. Right. His eyes want to see it, but his rational mind doesn't. He's shame-filled. Yes, yeah, yeah.

26:57But perfect example of that experience. It's not that you're hoping people are dead and if they are, I kind of want to see it. I'd also put fail videos into this category. Fail videos. Fail videos. Into the bodily injury. Yeah. Is part of that because we like storytelling so much as humans it's like almost this might be a story. Well, it is. It's a story of what not to do, especially the fail videos. Horror doesn't tell you what to do in a dangerous situation. It tells you what not to do. Or it shows you what not to do. Right. It shows you how people went down. Don't go in the basement. Don't split up.

27:28Don't go to the forest. Don't start making out with a hot girl. A lot of people go down the way. When there's a killer in the woods. Yeah, yeah. It's no time to get frisky. But I think all of them, right, Monica, are your fears of things. So, like, we're all afraid of bending our leg backwards. We're afraid of falling and hitting our head. That could happen to me is the fear. It's a potential in the world we live in. Yeah, we do a show where we talk to listeners and we just did one about the dentist. And Dax was like, we can't do that again. I can't do that prompt again. He has like a fear of his teeth falling out.

27:57And I don't. So that wasn't that hard for me. That's like one of the most common nightmares. Yeah. Teeth falling out. It's so strange. But I would love to know. So yes, I know that is. But I would love to see data pre and post orthodontia. Because my theory is like my teeth are getting twisted and cranked for so long in my life that it made this. But I also had braces for three years. And you don't have that. And I really don't have that. Well, it was probably good for humans in particular to be nervous about their teeth. It's their livelihood. Yeah, it's true. Before, 100 years ago, people's teeth weren't in great shape.

28:30When you pull up our ancestors' bones, teeth are strong and they last a long time. But when you pull them up, man, they look a little rough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, they're using them as tools back then. Instead of hands. So yes, your teeth falling out should be afraid of that. That's normal. Yeah, that's true. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare. Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Audible, for their support. So Audible just dropped their Best of 2025 collection. And I got to say, this is one of those things that actually makes your life easier, Monica. Their editors have been doing the heavy lifting.

29:03We're talking countless hours of listening, heated debates, and the whole thing. They've handpicked the year's top audiobooks, podcasts, and originals across all your favorite genres. And what I love is that they're not just highlighting the giant releases, though those are in there. They've also dug up some real hidden gems, the stuff that might have flown under the radar but totally deserves your attention. I love a good recommendation. My queue is out of control. So anytime there's a curated list like this, I breathe a little easier. Two titles I'm excited about, Sunrise on the Reaping. Anything Hunger Games related is an automatic ad for me.

29:36and Someday Now, which everyone says is incredibly warm and reflective. If you want something solid to close out the year, this is a great place to start. Check out Audible's Best of 2025 and discover why there's more to imagine when you listen. Go to audible.com slash best of 2025.

29:59Okay, so physical violence. Yeah, minds of dangerous people, violence and bodily injuries. And those kind of run from pre-event to the event to post-event, right? That's kind of like a spectrum there of what can happen in a dangerous situation. And then there's the fourth one. And it took me a while to disentangle what this really meant and what it was. The fourth one, I called it paranormal danger to try to encompass a broad range of things. And let me give you some examples of it and then tell you what I think it is. Examples would be anything to do with ghosts or aliens or even deities, ancestors, spirits.

30:29I think what's going on there is people have historically used agentic beings that they can't see to explain misfortunate events. There's a long recorded history of that. There's a lot of good anthropological work on that, witches in particular. And so I think what's happening is that's tapping into dangers that we don't understand. We tend to give those agentic beings, right? We tend to say, oh, well, the ghost made that knock on my house or the witch cursed me, right? And like you say, there's like a trillion variables out there. Exactly. and it's very culturally dependent. It feels at least comforting to narrow it to this somewhat agreed upon.

31:04Because how else are you going to take an action against it, right? If you don't have a thing that you can take an action against, you feel helpless. Yeah. That's a terrible feeling. It's better to guess. In human life, almost everything that happens to us happens to us because someone else did something. Most of the things that happened to us are because we live in communities and for most of our history lived in small, tight-knit communities. The good things and the bad things that happened to us often involved other people. So it makes sense that we would have this bias to kind of think that if a misfortunate thing happened to me, maybe someone else did.

31:34Antipromorphize it a bit. Yes, and maybe they're really powerful because I didn't see them do it. You point out, which I like, is that everyone that has these beliefs or thoughts or curiosities about aliens and ghosts, it's generally negative. It should be just as likely that the aliens arrive and go, hey, here's how you fix global warming and here's unlimited energy. Have fun. They're benevolent and nice. Yeah, and the ghosts are telling you, hey, that stairwell, it's not very safe. Don't walk down. It needs to be fixed. That's what took me out. I don't want to see it happen again. Casper is the exception.

32:02And not a huge hit because of it. Ghostbusters is a much more likely scenario. I think it really illuminates what purpose those things serve simply by the fact that they're almost never positive. Yeah, we use that as a way to just try to explain it and then get a grasp on it. So, okay, here's something that it could be. Now, what can I do about that? That's how we develop rituals around these things and all sorts of crazy beliefs. Okay, so those are the broad strokes of the four categories. So let's talk about minds of the dangerous people, because I think this is the phenomena that you see most covered.

32:36We have a very robust true crime podcast space. Which we've just entered. Yeah, docu-series space. What else would we include in this category? Conspiracy theories. Oh. I mean, that's what a conspiracy is, is someone plotting to harm you. True crime and conspiracies would be the two major media examples. So anecdotally, from my perspective, this is very gendered. Yes, there's the data back that up. So true crime in particular, women tend to not only seek it out more, but enjoy it more and enjoy specific scenes sometimes more than men. Yes. I'm sorry. There's one thing I wanted you to set up before we go through these categories, which is just break down what human modeling is, this gift of human modeling and how we differ from other animals.

33:20So one of the questions I get a lot is, are humans the only morbidly curious creatures, right? to be the only ones that are like that? Is that a unique human trait? And the answer is yes and no. No, we're not the only creatures that are morbidly curious, but yes, we have a very unique flavor of it. So one of the best examples of morbid curiosity in animals would be predator inspection. So prey animals, let's say a gazelle or a zebra, these are really pretty easy examples for people to imagine if you're a zebra or gazelle and you're on the savannah, you're having your brunch, and in the case of a zebra, a lion walks up or a gazelle, a cheetah walks up, what do you do.

33:52I'm imagining if I'm a zebra, I'm going to run away. I don't want to hang out if there's a lion nearby, right? The problem with that is, do either of you have cats at home? No. No, but I've witnessed a lot of cats. You've witnessed a lot of cats. You probably know that cats just sleep most of the time. Yeah, 22 hours a day. 22, and that's true of most cats, including big cats. And so if you run every time that you see a lion, you're going to exhaust caloric resources. You're going to waste time that could have been used towards grazing and actually building those caloric reserves to run when you need to run.

34:19That's exactly what a lion wants you to do is run all the time, right? And the lion has to only hunt when it's hungry because you've seen the Lion King, right? What happens if you hunt something like hyenas are going to come in and try to take it. Lots of other hungry animals are going to come in and try to take that if you don't eat it right away. And then it's going to spoil or vultures are going to come in. Scavengers will come in. So lions and other predators are incentivized to pretty much only hunt when they're hungry, which means prey animals are incentivized to understand when their predators are hunting and when they're hungry, what their motivational states are.

34:47And what you find is that many prey animals will engage in predator inspection. And in particular, those that are adolescents or sub-adults, so they're young and healthy, but don't have a lot of personal experience with a predator. So they have the most benefit and they're at the lowest risk because they're healthy and probably able to get away. And of course, environmental factors influence it. So is the grass really tall or really short? Because if it's really tall, you might get ambushed. If it's really short and maybe you're further away, you feel a little safer, right? Kind of like we feel when we watch a TV show.

35:16That's all great and fine. And predator inspection is pretty commonly observed in many different animals. one of the explanations for it is that prey animals can learn about their predators that way. And you said they'll also observe another member of their species get hunted if they have the opportunity. Yeah, yeah. Because they want to see how that plays out. That makes sense. And learn from that. All of life is one big learning experience, and you've got to take the opportunities you get. And when it comes to dangerous things, in most of nature, there's a lot of danger around, but not a lot of good opportunities to learn about it because it's typically dangerous for you to witness something dangerous.

35:48Yeah, you learn about it while you're getting chased. And that's not a good time. You're going to have really accurate information, but it comes at a pretty high risk, right? Fast forward to humans. We have language, transmissible culture. We tell stories. What does that allow us to do? Well, it allows us to retain almost all of the learning benefit of a situation, but remove virtually all the cost. And we can envision future scenarios that we've never encountered or maybe variations of a scenario. What if this happened in the woods versus the savannah versus the lake? And so stories allow us to very, very cheaply simulate potential situations, in many cases, potentially dangerous situations that might happen to us at some point.

36:27Maybe we heard about a story and then we tell a fictional version of it to amp that up a little bit. It was a wolf. Well, what if the wolf was larger and hairier and it was a werewolf? And so we do these super stimuli where we make them bigger and scarier and more memorable. And we still gain the learning benefits from that. So because we have this ability to create an imaginary scenario, we can kind of practice within it and we feel a little safer. It's comforting, right? Right. So given that that's how our brains work, naturally, if someone produces the content for us or we have actual footage, we're going to be drawn to that because it's better than even the other thing that's been working for us.

37:09And incentivize to create that content as humans too, because it's good for you to pass on dangerous information to people. Again, historically, that would have been people you live next to, your family, your friends, your trading partners. And so there's a bit of an incentive to kind of tell these stories. There's also some evidence that you get a bit of a status boost. I was going to say it's like cultural capital as well. Yes, because you're an important person, right? Because you've experienced this or you have this secret knowledge. And you've survived a thing I'm afraid of. Or you know about it at least.

37:36Maybe you just have some special knowledge that you were given by someone else who survived it or whatever that might be. Yes. So if we look at the broad data of who is raped and murdered in this country, it's very lopsidedly female. Very lopsided, yeah. Murdered, probably not. But there are very different types of people who murder you if you're a man versus a woman. If you're a woman, it's usually someone you know very well or someone you are trying to get to know well. It's much more likely that a man is murdered by a stranger. And in general, mostly women and men are murdered by men. Yes. Men murder almost everybody.

38:07Yeah. Okay, yeah. For the people that are drawn to true crime, and they're really exploring dangerous people, and then there's like details within there. You already hinted at a couple. One of the specific fascinations, and they all seem to have a very similar arc, is they're after the why, or what did the person not notice about the attacker that they should have? That's what they're after, yeah? Yeah, that's the juice. Humans face a really unique problem when it comes to dangerous social members. So lots of social creatures have dangerous conspecifics is what you would call them. So a chimp, for example, there's going to be an alpha chimp who's a jerk, who's going to beat up on you if you try to take the fruit that he wants or the mate that he wants or the space that he wants.

38:49But that alpha chimp is going to be reactively aggressive. He's going to tell you, don't take that in his own way with his fangs and yelling. He's going to tell you in his own way, you should probably not take that or else I'm going to attack you and I'm probably going to win. You'll get a warning. Yeah, the gorilla will stand up and beat his chest. Humans, our ancestors almost certainly did something like that, right? We descended from a common ancestor with chimps. We almost certainly did something like that, but there was a shift. I don't know if you've read any of Richard Wrangham's work. No.

39:16You would love it. Richard Wrangham, he's a biological anthropologist at Harvard. He's done a lot of work on human violence, two books on violence you really like. Oh, yeah, yeah, juicy. He's great. His work is where I got this idea from. He talks about this shift in human evolution where once we developed language, we could now conspire with each other to overthrow a much stronger, dominant jerk who is domineering the group, right? If you don't have a favor among your group, then they can work together. No matter how tough you are, three other members can kill you. No one can have full power.

39:44Exactly. And that shifted the social dynamics of humans a lot. And it did another thing. So Wrangham says we domesticated ourselves basically through that process. We got rid of our reactive tendencies to a degree. Humans are still reactively aggressive, particularly males. Bar fights exist, but they exist far less than if we were chimps. We would not be able to sit in this room together having never met. Something would have happened. Something would have happened. Yeah. You would have made some move I misinterpreted. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It would have been a tense situation, not a fun situation for anybody.

40:10Yeah. So humans are much less reactively aggressive than most other animals and certainly most other social primates. But we developed a new kind of aggression. We developed what's called proactive aggression. So now we can sit back and we can plot and think about when we're going to attack someone and how we can do it when they're unprepared. We make that distinction in our criminal justice system. So if you kill someone out of a crime of passion, right, and you come home and you find your wife in bed with someone else. Your brother. Your brother, especially. You're going to commit a crime of passion, right?

40:42And you're going to get punished for that. You'll go to jail, depending on the state and in circumstances, let's say 10 to 40 years, 10 to 30 years. You'll walk in Kentucky for pride of honor culture. You might walk in Kentucky. In the Southern honor cultures, you might walk. But if you decide that you don't like your wife anymore and you're just going to kill her and you plot that, now it would be first degree murder and you can be put to death in certain states. And we reserve that for premeditated aggression. We intuitively recognize that this premeditated aggression is a problem. And we punish it more harshly because we recognize it's a problem.

41:13And so for millions of years, primates basically signaled to you, I'm reactively aggressive, don't mess with me. And then it was like overnight when we had language, now we have people who can plot and they're not showing us that they are aggressive. That's why you get the, I could never imagine that he would have done this with Dahmer and Bundy and all these charismatic serial killers. And that makes us really curious about them because the only way to learn how you might avoid those people and who they are and how to find out if they're truly dangerous is to hear a story about something that's already happened where they did it.

41:45I mean, we could get into whether or not this is a fool's errand. It could be. Because I don't know that there is the thing. There's probably not the thing. Well, there's not the thing, but there are patterns. There's some things that you can have as red flags. But I mean, look, I'm old enough to have known people have gone to jail for heinous things. And I'm like, fuck, I don't know. I didn't know. And you can go too far. A lot of my work counters a lot of myths that people have about morbid curiosity. One of those is that it could lead you to be violent or all these things. None of that has panned out.

42:16But there are some negative side effects if you only consume true crime at the expense of everything else. and you sit inside your room all day and you don't go outside and touch the grass and go to the supermarket. That's the thing that seems like it's on the table minimally is that you could have a misled belief of the likelihood of this happening to you. The counter to that is just to consume other media with it. Go out into the real world, go to the supermarket. It's an easy fix, right? It's easy to avoid some of those downsides. And the downsides that have historically been associated with being a horror fan or being morbidly curious don't seem to pan out.

42:49It doesn't have anything to do with a lot of bad things in human life. As I was reading this, I was like, oh, I've picked up some of these things. I know now, which I wouldn't have known, you don't ever go to a second location. Like whatever gnarly things happening to you on the sidewalk and they want to put you in a car, it's better to have it out on the sidewalk than to go to a second location. I don't know that because I've been in that situation. I know that from this type of media. As you mentioned, you learn things throughout your life. And interest in things like horror and true crime do decline with age, which makes sense because if you were learning something about it, then you should feel a little less interested, a little less curious about it.

43:27Now, you might find other reasons to enjoy it, maybe because your friends still like it, maybe because you built a community around the horror genre. There are a lot of other reasons why you might still enjoy horror. But that curiosity that drives you from the beginning might have shifted a little bit. This blew my mind. There's two reviews you cite in the book. One is when Saw came out and it became this huge, you know, that franchise made like a billion dollars. I saw it in movie theaters. A film critic called anyone that would watch it a depraved lunatic. But that's not even the craziest one.

43:58I watched it. Remember Siskel and Ebert, Gene Siskel? He saw Friday the 13th and he hated it so much that in his review, he both gave away the ending so no one would go see it. and then he fucking doxed the Paramount chairman, Charles Bloodhorn. And tried to dox, what was her name? Lead actress. Instead, like, send these people. Hate mail. Yes. Why? Isn't that fucking bonkers? So when I first started looking into this, I was looking for what scientists had to say about the psychology of people who like slashers. And what I kept coming across were what film critics had to say. I think it's a film critic's job to hate certain movies, but it's not their job to say something about the psychology of people who like those movies.

44:38That's a very different kind of territory. It made me realize that people have these intuitions and I kind of understand it. Like, oh, you like movies where there's a lot of suffering and people are getting hacked up. I kind of understand the intuition that there might be something wrong with you. I can sympathize with that. But the data doesn't bear it out, right? Yeah, it's not accurate. It's not accurate. Yeah. Okay, let's get into physical violence. Every single boy who went through school had a very plausible threat of getting beat up by another boy. Sure. And so the fact that the UFC is huge, I do think a lot of people judgmentally look at that and go, It's so barbaric and the people who like it are so toxic masculine.

45:13I'm like, no, these are guys who went to bars and were afraid another guy was going to beat the shit out of them. And it's a very living fear to be beat by another man. Yeah. And so watching two people who are some of the best in the world do it, you can learn a lot. You can learn a lot and then get into like there are parameters. We like a little bit of parameters. Yeah. Even the UFC has rules, right? It's the most unbarred fighting, but there are still certain rules. And there's someone there to break it up if someone's about to be killed. and that's what maybe someone might enjoy UFC, but they might not like watching a bar fight on the street.

45:44Or it's a different kind of attention, right? The bar fight on the street might be like, I can't look away, but I don't really want to see it. Whereas the UFC is, I'll pay money to see it. People hate unfair fights. It's also why there's weight classes in the UFC. If we really wanted to be unrestricted, early UFC, it was bananas, right? And why it was so great is to see little guys beat the shit out of huge guys. Yeah, which violates your expectations, makes it more interesting. Okay, well, if he can do it, what is he doing right? Right. I think most sports have an element. I mean, American football is the classic example, right?

46:09It's a violent sport. Now we try to buffer that with padding and helmets, and we try to have people really get injured. But the basic premise of football is to knock other people down. Slam your bodies into each other. Exert your will physically over your opponent. Yes, yes, exactly. Yes. You know, you hear it a lot, especially now, complaints that sports are getting too soft. Basketball maybe is not as rough and tough as it was 20 years ago. They don't fight as much in hockey. you see it in a lot of sports. And when it starts to go away, you hear about it. People don't like it. What about bodily injury and gore?

46:41It's interesting. And it's really broad, I think, because it's really about a couple of things. It's about learning the limits of the human body. So like, well, what happens if a bone pokes through my skin? What do I do? What does that look like? How do you not die in that situation? And what can cause that? Because I can't practice on myself, like how much force does it take to break my bone? But if I see somebody do something that doesn't look like gets a lot of force and then the bone breaks, I should be a little more careful in those situations, right? Yes. Would we put pandemic in this category?

47:08Parts of it can be. For example, there was a big Ebola scare a few years ago. It was interesting because Ebola is not that contagious, unlikely to become what COVID was. But man, is it scary. And it's scary and only in its extreme forms. You get something that looks like a person who's been attacked by a monster bleeding out of the eyes. And these are very rare instances even of Ebola, which is a pretty rare disease, right? But those are memorable. And so you really don't want to get it. Even if Ebola had a lower death rate, it would still be much more frightening because of that. Because bodily injuries, what they do in most cases is they index violence really well.

47:44So if I'm walking through the woods and I come across a body, and the body's got kind of a cut on its neck right here, a small cut, I'm going to be a little worried, but I'm not going to freak out. Now, if I'm walking in the forest and I see someone missing their head, Yeah, ugh. I'm going to freak out, right? Yeah, we got big problems. But why? I think that's an interesting thing. Why do we freak out more? Nature couldn't have done that. Right, it wasn't an accident. It wasn't an accident. And not only that, it takes a lot of force to pull someone's head off or cut it off, right? Whatever did that was probably agentic, probably very strong, probably still close by, very angry.

48:16Deranged, yeah. Very aggressive. So it gives cues to the thing. Didn't eat it. It's doing it for fun. Is it hungry? Yeah. Is this just for fun? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. We make interpretations about the thing that caused the injury. And so bodily injuries track really well and index really well with danger. What data do you have on contagion? Ding, ding, ding. Oh, I love it. Great movie. How many times did you watch that? Did you love it before 2020? It was the first time. I watched it for the first time during COVID and then I watched it like every day. How did you find it? How did you know to find it?

48:46Because it came out in 2011? Yeah, maybe it just popped up on my Netflix. Yeah? I guess. I don't know. The algorithm problem. You think I looked it up? I think you looked it up because I think Contagion was only available on Apple TV or some, at the time, obscure platform. To rent or buy. Okay, so maybe I looked up what are pandemic movies. How many times you watched it? Dozens of times. Oh, yeah. A lot. Every day we get to work and I'd be like, what did you do last night? I watched Contagion again. And I'm talking, that was five minutes a week. It's a great movie. there are a lot of great movies though it has my boyfriend in it yeah a few good men i know i mean of course it was of the moment don't we watch movies to escape the world why would you escape into a world that was basically the world you were living in also to double up on that i had just had a seizure oh a week before shut down and that movie starts with a seizure.

49:47Yes, it does. So there's two things happening that really, I have to watch this every night. Yeah. And I remember I said, it was the first time I watched I was with Kristen, who was there for my seizure. So we were watching it and I was like, did it look like that? I like needed information that I didn't have. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the good news is, I don't know about watching it like 12 times, but you're not alone on watching it for the first time. If you look at Google Trends data and you map the film Contagion. You see a little bump in 2011 when it came out and then it's fairly flat. And then in March of 2020, it shot to the highest point that it had ever been on Google Trends.

50:24And what's interesting is if you superimpose searches for COVID on that or coronavirus on that, you see the same bump in March of 2020. Perfect correlation. That blew me away when I saw that because I knew that Contagion was popular and it was spiking in popularity. And I, of course, was like, well, I think I know why. but I never expected it to be this just perfect superposition. Yeah, you want to know if they get through it. Because we were in it. It was the very beginning. It wasn't like it was the end. Tell us what happens. Yeah, it went from, I think, 200 and something on the Warner Brothers catalog to number two, despite not being on Netflix, which is the most popular platform, right?

51:01I must have bought it. I think you rented it. I'm sure I bought it. You paid for it, yeah. What if you rented it every time you couldn't? You just rented it every time? I'm not going to buy it. There's no way I'm watching it again. I've already rented it six times. And you get the bill from Apple. It's like$200 and it's just contagion. Exactly. Okay. Now, paranormal I want to talk about because you went to Savannah, which people consider Savannah the most haunted city in America. Yeah. Monica spent a lot of time in Savannah. My mom's from Savannah. It's a wonderful city. And I spent a lot of summers there.

51:31Walk us through how it earned that title because there's a bunch of fascinating historical stuff. Savannah's an old city, so Americans automatically think it's haunted because it's more than like 50 years old. More people have died there. over more time. Yes. Way more graveyards than a city its size should, right? And most of them are buried under the foundations of homes now. It had a couple of really nasty yellow fever outbreaks. It was obviously the site of a lot of battles. Half of the squares there are like, well, this battle took place in the Civil War or this war or that war. It's slavery there.

52:01It was a huge slave war. I mean, there's just a lot of dark stuff that happened in Savannah. I went to what's called the Sorrel Weed House, which is this beautiful mansion on one of the squares. and it's famous for being haunted. And I went on a ghost hunt there and overnight when it was, I think like 10 p.m. to 2 a.m. or something like that. I don't believe in ghosts, but I love ghost hunts. I think they're so much fun. I've seen things I can't explain. Ooh. Yeah, talk about the cat toys. Yes, okay. I'm scared already. Yeah, this is gonna get you. Oh no, really? The cat toys actually happened in Eureka Springs where I live.

52:30Oh, geez, I'm sorry, I've conflated. We can talk about that and then we'll go to Savannah. Okay, great. So Eureka Springs where I live, there's a famous haunted hotel there, the Crescent Hotel. I live a quarter of a mile. on the Crescent. And before I moved to Eureka, I went on a ghost hunt there, an overnight ghost hunt. One of the things we did is I was with a group of maybe three or four other paranormal investigators. And some of them were like professional ghost hunters. And they brought these two little clear balls that had a red button on top. And I thought, what kind of sneaky, cool ghost gadget is this?

53:01And they're like, no, we bought these at Dollar General. These are cat toys. Immediately as a scientist, I was like, okay, I'm interested because this is not something you created. It's not something that you can mess. It's just a super simple$1. Now, did you see him pull him out of the package? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was like a fresh out of the package. Okay. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they pulled him out. You push the little red button on top and that's what turns it on. In the case of a cat, when a cat hits it, it lights up, right? Fun toy. So we turn these two balls on, we put them on the bed in this room.

53:30And then we kind of shook the bed to see how much does it take to really set these off. And you kind of had to really shake the bed, like put a lot of pressure on it. And then we step back against the wall. We kind of stomped our feet to see if that would set them off and it didn't. So they were pretty secure there on a big plush down comforter. One of the investigators said, okay, we've heard that this room has a spirit living in it. It's called Michael's Room. Ew! And the story is this Irish stonemason, he was working on the Crescent and he was kind of a ladies' man. He liked to flirt with women as they walked by.

53:56Tell me more. He like leaned over to whistle at a woman and fell. Oh, he got his just reward. Yeah, yeah. Just desserts. Just desserts. Right on a beam that was in that room. Okay, that's a bad way to go. It's a bad way to go. And then he died doing love. I mean, yeah. Cat calling women. Died cat calling. So that's the story of why this room is supposedly haunted and very active. Because he's still kind of a poltergeist. He still likes to kind of mess with people. He's a perv. He's a little bit of a perv. Yeah, and supposedly women get more experiences in that room. I bet they do. And then, you know, it's a whole thing.

54:28So we're in this room. They put the cat balls in the bed, turn them on, and they say, Okay, we've heard this room has a spirit living in it. We'd like to ask you a few questions. There are two balls here. The left one we'll use for yes, the right one we'll use for no. And if you'll just light them up to let us know your answer to our questions. And then this person said, we've heard that there's the spirit of a man named Michael in this room. If that's true, would you please light up the yes ball? And then there was like one beat and the yes ball lit up. It gave me chills, hair on the back of my neck, the whole thing.

54:57And I couldn't explain it because, again, I went in with my science mind. I was like, okay, let's test. What does it take to set this off? This is a very simple toy. It's not a fancy gadget you created that you can control in some other way. We did all the control testing we could. And nothing else happened that night. We were there for hours. Nothing else happened. But the first thing we did happened, and it was unexplainable. So there were more questions than nothing. Nothing. Nothing lit up. We tried other gats. Nothing really happened. You guys weren't hot enough. We weren't. You weren't sexy enough.

55:24Yeah, there weren't enough women in the group. He's like, go get some bras. I'll make this whole room light up. Ew. Ghosts are so weird because if you ask me, do you believe in ghosts? No, I don't. But I am scared of them. Yeah. It's weird. The one I love is I had a professor at UCLA and she did her work in sub-Saharan Africa. And her work was on spells and witchcraft. That's so cool. And she got a spell put on her while she was there. Now, she does not believe in them. And she got insanely sick and she saw the doctor and then went to the bigger city to see a doctor. And they said it's a spell.

56:00Ultimately, she got sent to a tent and a shaman lady removed the spell and she was fine. And she's like, I don't know what to tell you. I'm back in LA. I don't believe in ghosts, but I absolutely had this experience. And my friends, that's the power of culture. I cannot believe in it and be there and get it. I talk about a study in the book. It's one of the few studies where I was like, I wish I had thought of that study. And the short of it was that you imagine you get 100 people, let's say half of them believe in ghosts and half don't. Then you mix them together and you split those into two groups.

56:28So you got 25 and 25, right? So 50 people, 25 believe in ghosts, 25 don't. And then another group, the same thing. Now, in group A, you tell them when they come into the lab to do this study, hey, just so you know, we need to sign this form to let you know that someone died recently in this room. If people were told that there was the possibility of a ghost being in the room, they reacted to strange events during their lab experience in the same way. It didn't matter if they believed in ghosts or not. Their body kind of lit up in the same way. Oh, wow. If there was an inkling that there might be a ghost in the room.

56:59As opposed to if the experiment started and you said, hey, just warning, there was a shoddy electrician that did all the wiring in here. Yeah, that's why the lights are flickering. It's getting fixed in a couple weeks. Yeah. You would think nothing of it. Yeah. They just didn't say anything in the control condition, right? There was no story of a ghost. So the manipulation was a light went off for seven seconds and came back on in the middle of one of their tasks. And it was dark and quiet in the room. They were supposed to be meditating. You would hate that. And if you're just in there, you're like, okay, well, I guess the electrician didn't install this light correctly.

57:26But if you're told we have to sign this death on the premise form, one of the grad students says he saw a ghost, then you're like, oh, why did that light go off, right? So much is framing. And even if your conscious mind is like, I don't believe in ghosts, right? You still, your body feels the same way. The amygdala takes over. It does. I'm nervous about this. It's like, fuck that, we believe in ghosts. We do. Guys, we have to believe in ghosts. We have to take this threat seriously. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

58:04Okay, so Savannah, though. Savannah, Sorrelweed House, famously haunted. Went on a ghost hunt there. I was in the basement of the Sorrelweed House. And it's very dark in the basement. And there were a few things that happened. Like I felt something brush my leg. And I talk about how if I would have been on a historical tour of this house in the middle of the day, and I felt so, I would have been like, oh, it's a cobweb or whatever. But of course, because I was there, my expectation is that it's supposed to be haunted, even if I don't believe in ghosts. And so it kind of gave me chills in a way that it wouldn't have.

58:32And then over in the corner of the basement running along one of the walls a big house There are some posts it kind of makes a hallway on that side And there's a little old wooden chair in the corner looking down the hallway supposedly people See the ghost of an old soldier a civil war soldier Soldier and he's angry. He's like a big tall angry soldier He's always in some kind of uniform. He's got a hat on so I was like well ghosts don't exist I'll go sit in the chair and see what I see right Sit. Okay, great. Yeah, you have to sit in the chair and you like look down the hallway, right? Oh, oh, oh.

59:03So I sit down in the chair and I'm looking down. It's probably like a 25-foot hallway. It's a pretty long hallway. And it's dark. You know, all the other people are on the other side of the room. And I know that they're not in the hallway because there's a bit of a wall there. And I sat there for 20 or 30 seconds just looking, kind of sitting quietly. And then you start to kind of see things. What was that, right? And then you start to see like a little face. No. You start to kind of— And my explanation would be, well, I was hallucinating it. In any case, my body didn't care. It reacted the same way.

59:32And so even though I was sitting there telling myself, I know there's not an angry soldier. Yeah, right, right, right. But do you know? But that's the point. Do I really know? Yeah. Well, this is when you get into, I bring this up a lot. There's a logical truth and there's an emotional truth. And those things sometimes are overlapped and quite often they're just not. And we want to say the emotional one's irrelevant, but it's not irrelevant. No, it's not. And sometimes it's right. It's probably governing more of our decisions than the logical side is. Yeah, and probably making more correct decisions sometimes.

1:00:01Yeah. This is a question that we honestly do not have an answer to. What part? Afterlife, ghosts. Oh, right. We don't know. We really do not know. It's unknowable. So that's where our beliefs can really get very muddy, I think. Sure. Because you can easily be like, well, I guess I was wrong about that. You see enough of these and you're like, okay, maybe I need to shift my worldview a little bit, right? Tell me about the morbid curiosity scale. How does it work? I created this scale because if you study humans, the easiest way to measure a personality trait of some kind or an individual difference is to have a scale.

1:00:31One that's validated against behavioral tasks and you're pretty sure it measures a real thing that you think it's measuring. So, of course, because nobody had really done any work on morbid curiosity, there was no scale. So that was one of the first things I did was try to create this scale. It's 24 questions. Can people go online and take this? Yes, on my website. We're going to take it on the website. What? Did I say the website name? Coltonscribner.com. And then there's the morbid curiosity scale. You can download it if you want to use it in your research. or if you just want to see how you score and how you compare to the average of the studies that I've done at least.

1:00:58Yeah. You can go take it and it'll tell you your overall score and how that compares to the average, but then also the breakdown of each of those domains. Oh, nice, nice, nice. Okay. Well, let's talk about dreams for a second. Sure. I've never studied dreams. And when I wrote the first draft of the book manuscript, I didn't have a chapter on dreams. It was two paragraphs in one of the other chapters, maybe eight or nine. I was seeing these connections with nightmares and I was like, this is interesting. I need to mention it. And I mentioned it briefly. And then my editor came back and was like, you need to say more about this.

1:01:25This is really interesting. And I was like, okay. So I dug more into dream research. And I was like, okay, Camille was right again. She knows more about how to write this book than I do. So I ended up writing a whole chapter on dreams. And the idea is that there's this great theory about why does dreaming exist in the first place? Why do we have the machinery for it? How did we develop the machinery to hallucinate a full experience? And we hallucinate it not just cognitively, but emotionally. our bodies would move if there was not an off switch. Yes, yes, yes. You can snip that connection in other animals and you can see they get up and they sleepwalk, right?

1:02:00Or they act out their dreams. And some people have disorders that cause them to do that. And so not only is the machinery there for you to hallucinate this entire experience that, yes, it's a little weird. Dreams are really weird, right? But they're still cohesive. There's still a story. And not only are you doing that cognitively, but you had to also develop a switch to turn your body off so that you don't get up and do the thing. That, to me, says, okay, this has to have some kind of selection pressure because that is not an accidental... That's a lot of evolution there. That's a lot of engineering.

1:02:30The aliens were really working on it. They were busy. The first question is, why would we have that machinery? And so you need something really compelling to build that or to start to build that. And this guy, I'm going to butcher his name. His last name is Ravansuo, I think, Anton Ravansuo. He's a Finnish neuroscientist and philosopher. He's developed this theory of the threat simulation theory of dreaming. So he thinks that the first dreams were probably nightmares because dreaming about a danger and rehearsing that emotionally, sending the signals to your body that would be relevant in that situation to move your body, rehearsing it cognitively, rehearsing something dangerous would be really valuable.

1:03:06We should add that works. That's the military training. There's a great book on killing. The amount of people that didn't fire their guns in World War I was kind of shocking. And they trained people out of that. If you over and over and over simulate this activity. Well, simulations work. Pilots do simulations. Like you don't want your pilot to be the first time he's ever thought about flying a plane his first flight. Simulations work. We use them all the time. And so, yeah, if you can simulate something while you're sleeping, even better. You don't have to waste time during the day doing it. And you have access to a lot more stuff, weirdly.

1:03:36You do. You do. And you make connections you wouldn't make otherwise. And when you wake up, certainly before we kind of knew what dreams were, you're going to wake up and you're going to tell everyone you know because you don't know why you had that. Did I go to a new world? You know, we don't really know what dreaming is. Did I travel to see my ancestors? And there are cultures that believe that, reasonably so. You know, if I was born a thousand years ago, I'd be terrified of dreams. I wouldn't know what it was, right? Sleeping in general is a little weird. You kind of just die at night. It's so weird.

1:03:58You die at night, you go to another world, and then you come back and you wake up. You're so vulnerable. For so long, too. For so long. 30 your day. And so his premise is that that would have provided a selection pressure to start to shape the cognitive machinery necessary for dreaming. And then once that takes off, you can use dreaming to simulate all sorts of things. But that was kind of the initial push. I thought dreaming was a fascinating example of maybe very early morbid curiosity, like our unconscious morbid curiosity. Now we're thinking about things that could happen to us and we're simulating them in our dreams.

1:04:28Presumably that happened before we started talking about them, before we had language. Because dreaming seems to be very evolutionarily old. We have evidence that cats and rats dream and we're separated by, I cite it in the book, I forget what it is, you know, 50 million or 100 million years or more from them. octopuses who we are hundreds of millions of years separated from. In fact, they have entirely different nervous systems so far back. So it's not conserved from octopuses, but it developed twice. Octopuses are dreaming. So it was so important that our line developed dreaming, but then the octopus line also developed some kind of machinery for dreaming.

1:05:01So that suggests probably there's some selection pressure for that. And octopuses, when they dream, they tend to act out some of those dreams through their color changing. So they'll change colors and do defensive maneuvers. They'll shoot ink sometimes. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. So they'll do things that are defensive in their dreams. Wild. The brunt of this book hopefully will make people feel less guilty about what they enjoy. Do you think it could alleviate some of the fear that parents have when their kids are playing video games? Or just doing anything spooky, yeah. That's one of the most common questions I get is, should I let my kid watch scary movies?

1:05:30Or is there something wrong with them? That comes from a good place. You don't want to let your kid feel afraid. You don't want to see your kid feel anxious. But if you don't let them do that in a playful way when they're young, it's going to be difficult for them to learn how to regulate those feelings later on when they're adults. So when you're a kid, you're a sponge. I mean, you are just soaking up everything in your culture. You're soaking up new skills. Your brain is using more calories when you're a kid than it ever does when you're an adult because it's just processing like crazy. And so if you play with fear, you play with anxiety in these playful settings, whether it's a video game or pretend play with your friends or a scary buck goose bumps or a scary movie that's maybe appropriate for kids but still scares them.

1:06:10They develop those regulation skills because like we talked about at the beginning, you are regulating how afraid you are in order to achieve that sweet spot, even when you're a kid, right? So you're practicing and developing those tools that will be useful later in life. When you did the haunted house stuff, was it very different for people who were in groups versus alone? Nobody goes to a haunted attraction alone. Exactly. Serial killers. Serial killers, yeah. Have you seen someone by themselves? I've done five or six different studies at haunted houses in Denmark and in Detroit and Austin. I don't know that I've ever seen someone come to one alone.

1:06:42Yeah. Like I would never do anything like that alone. It's not because they're too scared either necessarily. It's just not as fun. Yeah. You want to share the experience with somebody. And so one of the things, have you ever been to a haunted attraction? Yes. Okay. Lots of couples go. Yeah. Intimacy. And you can see how your partner responds when they are afraid. So not just how you respond to fear and anxiety, but how do they respond when they're out of their element? Is my husband going to shit his pants? Is he going to push me into the way? How do they respond also with your fear? It is a lot of play.

1:07:14And in a safe way, right? That's the important part. I've had a lot of fights happen. I've had a lot of people break up after a trip to a haunted house. I have a study I haven't published yet where we look at exactly that. Relationship satisfaction after a haunted house. Based on how the men and women in those relationships responded during the haunted house. You're going to find some ugly stuff. No one's going to want to admit what you find. Okay, my two last questions are, you say in the book, I forget the percentage, but over the last 20 years, horror movies have doubled their market share.

1:07:40From about early 1990s is when we have comprehensive data. So it is doubled in market share. Tripled this year. Doubled around COVID. Achieved its highest share ever. I think it was around 12%. I just checked about three or four weeks ago. Horror was at like 17%. And it's the only genre that's really had like an upward spike in the last 10 years or so. All the other genres. Action has had a small one. Almost all the others have had a downward trajectory. Horror has been on the upward trajectory. It's at like 17 % now. Yeah, so how do you explain that? And then part two of this question is, have you considered the increasing need for this stuff as we have all of this architecture to be on high alert for things, to keep ourselves alive?

1:08:21And we live in this insanely safe environment that is very sterile. And without any of the real threats that we've always, We have a big apparatus that has nothing to focus on, basically. Do you think this is a result of that in any way? Yeah. So to answer that question first, yes, I think that's some of it. When you live in a safe world, your mind is saying, well, why is nothing bad happening? Are you unprepared? You might even see certain things tick up, like conspiracy theory. Stuff that is harder to observe, but something must be afoot. And you're hearing, okay, all this bad stuff is happening around the world, but I'm not seeing it where I am.

1:08:53So maybe I'm just unprepared. Maybe other people are plotting against me and they're trying to keep their aggression secret from me. Yes. And then the other question about why is horror on the rise? This is a conclusion that I came to in the past month or two, so I'm still kind of speculating about it. But when COVID became a global pandemic around 2020, a lot of people who had sworn off horror since they were kids, they watched a scary movie when they were a kid, they watched Poltergeist or something, and they're like, I'm never watching a scary movie again. They had this urge to watch something scary, whether it was contagion or even horror.

1:09:24horror had a moment during 2020 and 2021. A lot of people, I think, became horror fans again in 2020 and realized that as adults, they kind of like it and they can handle it a little better. And I think that they've just been watching it more. And because they're watching more, filmmakers are taking note, production companies are taking note, and they're producing more of them. There's more money for horror now. Yeah, it's like a virtuous cycle. That's my speculation about what's gone on is that there is a new crop of horror fans that popped up around 2020. And now four or five years later, we're seeing the consequence of that, which is horror being on just an upward trajectory while everything else is kind of stale.

1:09:59Yeah, okay. And then my last question is, is there any evidence that killers or predators have watched or consumed more morbid media than others? Not more. So do serial killers like movies about killing? Probably. Dahmer famously liked The Exorcist 3, which is a really obscure one. I actually don't know if he liked horror movies, but he loved The Exorcist 3. That was his movie. That was his thing. That was his king. Not generally regarded as the best exorcist. Not even in the top two. I don't think. And I talk about in the book, Dahmer saying that he was morbidly curious. He used the term. He was being interviewed and asked why he went back to look at a body or something.

1:10:31He said, because I was morbidly curious. And he said, in all these movies, it's stories about this stuff, but I actually do it. And then I give the example of the Columbine shooters. They supposedly love the game Doom and they loved Mortal Kombat. This was in the 90s when those were the violent games. And so, of course, in both of those cases, people were like, aha, that's why Dahmer killed and ate people because he liked The Exorcist III. And that's why those kids shot up the school because they played Doom. Yeah. Along with 10 million other kids who didn't shoot up the school. Exactly. Along with every other kid at school.

1:11:02It's not statistically relevant. No. But we want answers. Again, that's an intuitive answer, right? But then you have to ask, well, what about every other kid that plays violent video games? And what about the evidence that shows that it's not related to aggression, which is pretty much all the evidence now? And if you actually look at, this is not work that I've done, but if you look at school shooters, which are almost all boys or men, and you look at whether or not they played violent video games for the ones we have data for, they're actually less likely to have played violent video games than the average teenage boy, right?

1:11:29And that doesn't mean that playing violent video games keeps you from being a school shooter either. It probably just means it has nothing to do with it. They were probably social outcasts in other kinds of ways. They had interests that were different from other boys their age. And they also have all these other things going on besides that. So the question is, does morbid curiosity make you violent or dangerous? No. But if you have all these other things where maybe you lack empathy and you have low levels of disgust sensitivity and you have high levels of psychopathy and you're morbidly curious, maybe then you get a cocktail of things, right?

1:12:01But by itself and even in combination with many other traits, it doesn't seem to be related to any kind of dangerous or psychopathological outcomes. Okay, good. Hopefully that's comforting. Yeah. Morbidly curious. A scientist explains why we can't look away. Colton, this has been very fascinating. This has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming. Yeah, thank you. It was fun. Thank you. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes.

1:12:32Is there a famous Sophia song? Ooh. I can't think of one. I don't think so. Sophia the giraffe. Do you think most... Sophie. That's Sophie. Oops. I know. Do you think most names have songs? Yeah Wow That's cool You've heard your song, right? A little bit of Monica in my life A little I'm not going to sing A little bit of Monica in my life Yeah, Mambo No. 5 Do they sing Monica? Uh-huh Oh, they do Yeah I was thinking of a different song What? You know, it's like Monica, Monica I think I want your number Monica Oh, but Is that not it? I don't think so Well, that's Gloria.

1:13:17But I like that. Well, you were like, damn, this actually sounds like it could be a hit because it was. Sure. Well, I knew it was a hit, but I didn't think it was my name and I was right. I think I know more, but I have to really think on it. Okay. Well, we already know Mambo No. 5. That's pretty good. That's really good. Yeah. That's more than there are Dax songs. I know. Yours is trick. That's okay. That's okay. That's okay. You got a chair. Oh, I just got a weird fun list. You know, I follow this account on Instagram. I really like it. I'm shocked I haven't sent you, forwarded you any. What is it?

1:13:50It's just all data. And it's all global data. Okay. So this one was the universities producing the most billionaires. Oh, that's cool. Isn't that kind of interesting? Yeah, but is it obvious or are there some twists and turns? I mean, it's obvious. What's interesting is this is the world over. Okay. This is every university in the world. Okay. And of the, let's see how long this list is. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 22. And I wonder. No, 21. Are you feeling antsy to read them all? Because like now you know what it's like. No, I more wanted you to guess. Oh, okay. Out of 21, how many are not American?

1:14:34Oh, are not. Okay. Wow. I can't count it loud. I mean, I was going to let you because that was a good clue. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think big world. It's a big, big world, isn't it? China is a huge country. Over a billion people. And oh, God. Okay. Now, what about like undergrad and grad? Because this is tricky because some of these people might have gone to an undergrad in one place and a grad in another. Do you think you're overthinking it? But let me see if it delineates that. I am thinking it through. I guess it would have to mean everything. Their graduate program, their undergraduate program is like the school.

1:15:18How many did the school produce? This is hard because I think most billionaires go to graduate school most. OK. And I think they come. A lot of them come here for graduate school. Sure. So I'm going to say six of them are not American. Great guess. Seven. Okay. Okay. Now what's crazy is how dramatic the difference is, right? So first place, what's your guess? You know. Harvard? Just say it. Harvard. Okay. Harvard has produced 104 billionaires. Third place has produced 38. Wow, yeah. Second place, 69. Great number. Congrats to, I'll give it away, Stanford. I was going to say. Okay, you want to guess three?

1:16:10Yeah, I want to guess. You always get to guess. Yeah. MIT. Great guess. You want to know what number that is? Yeah. That's number five. Okay. So, and what about not Yale? Is that a guess? Oh, my God. You're mean about lists. Oh, am I? I am. I'm fun about them. Okay, I'm sorry. Oh, wait, ask me again. Not Yale. No, no, no, not Yale. Okay. Is, Jesus, okay. Harvard, Stanford, not Yale. What was MIT again? Five? Five. Okay. One above MIT is a shocker. The other one's like, yeah, I guess that makes sense. Is Princeton? No. No, I take it back. I take it back. I'm looking. Caltech. I don't even know if Princeton's.

1:17:01Oh, no, Princeton made the list in the high teens. Is Caltech on there? no oh shit um okay if you tell me the number three is ucla i will be so i won't believe this list okay that'd be great though right under stanford i had of mit is it iit is that on the list at all um there is an india one but it's university of mumbai which could be an iit yeah And that's pretty high up. So the first country to make the list after the U.S. in one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eighth place is University of Mumbai with 22 billionaires. Wow. And I guess that makes them tied with Cornell, which is above them for some reason.

1:17:47Yeah. Okay, you want to hear third? Yeah. Penn. Oh, Wharton. Yep. So they have 38. So again, 104, 69 for Stanford, 38 for University of Pennsylvania. Now, four, I thought was, I was like, really? Can you give me a hint? Oh, fuck. That's what's fun about Liz. Yeah, okay. There were a lot of protests here. Berkeley? No. Oh. More recent than newsworthy. I'll give you a hint. It's in New York. Columbia? Columbia. Really? Can you believe Columbia's four? No disrespect to Columbia graduates. I'm shocked. But I, you know, maybe one of the explanations for that, again, it's going to sound like I'm taking the wind out of Columbia's sail.

1:18:26But you're already in New York and the families that are already rich, people who live in Manhattan are among the richest people in the country. So you're saying they were already probably entered already in a great position. They inherited billionaire status, some of them. Or they started with quite a bit and made it more. I just don't think of Columbia as a money making school. Yeah. It's like all academic. I think of it more create some create. I mean, Callie went there. Yeah. And she is on track to be a billionaire. So it makes sense. So it makes sense. So Columbia is number four. MIT, five with 28 billionaires.

1:19:06Okay. I'm shocked that's not higher. Yale, 24. Okay. Cornell, 22. University of Mumbai, 22. Can't pronounce this university, but it's in China. Okay. 19. Great. To Tsinghua. Okay. NYU. Yeah. 18. USC. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, rich kids go there. So you start with a private school that's a lot of money. Yeah. Yes. That of course. All of these are hard, like expensive schools. It's much more common for someone to go from a millionaire family to a billionaire than I think it is from a welfare family to a billionaire. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. Okay, moving on. USC. Next is University of California, Berkeley, 15.

1:19:49U of M, 15. Tied with Berkeley. Peking University, 14. Moscow State University, 13. Wow. Princeton, 13. University of California, Los Angeles, 12. University of Chicago, 12. Fudun University, 12. Seoul National University, 12. And Zhejiang University, 12. Wow. That was a fun list, right? Yeah. See, you did them all. You didn't do top 10. It's really, you know, lists when you're reading them, you want to keep going. And now you understand. I know. I know. Now you really understand it. I'm going to push back a little bit, though. Your lists are rarely 21. They're often 100. And I am scared of 100.

1:20:38Okay. We'll just see next time you're holding a list that's 100, and we'll see what happens. Okay. We'll see. We'll see. I'll continue to screen grab my favorite post on Instagram. That is really fun. Now, how many universities do we think have produced one billionaire? Like, do we think almost all have? No. Well, there's the whole point of this was they just announced like currently there's 2 ,990 some billionaires worldwide. Okay. So in reality, that's not a ton of billionaires. No. Not a seven billion. Exactly. Like sometimes you think billion is diluted. I do. Like I'll start thinking like, I guess billion means what a million meant to me when I was a kid.

1:21:24Right. Exactly. When you're a kid, you knew someone that was a millionaire. I know. It was like unimaginable. But you just, the news is populated with stories of people becoming billionaires. Yes. I just read like the youngest female billionaire of all time was just crowned. She's like a 27-year-old who created some, I think, marketplace where you can bet on all kinds of weird things, elections. And that's kind of what I discerned from what the article said. Okay. But, yeah, I think she's 27. Yeah, she's younger than Taylor was, I think, the youngest up until then. She really is. I mean, I don't want to shit on this 27-year-old, but it sounds like she's taking from the poor and the vulnerable.

1:22:02So, okay. Listen, I just Googled how many universities in the world. This is annoying because it should be very clear. But it says there are an estimated 25 ,000 to 50 ,000 universities in the world. Well, that is a great quick answer to no, they couldn't have all produced a billionaire. Yeah. I wonder if University of Georgia has produced a billionaire. I'm going to look at it. I bet it has.

1:22:35let's go UGA let's go dogs uh oh for the listener Monica's jaw opened up like it reticulated like a snake about to eat a copybara and then it closed and I'm not sure what that means well the University of Georgia UGA go dogs roll tide take it back roll dogs you're not allowed I know it's so fun has many successful alumni, including celebrities like Ryan Seacrest. That's not true. AI is not right. Oh, he did not go there? His sister went there. Okay, now I'm worried, but I feel really. I'm almost shocked we've never interviewed Seacrest. Wow, it does say he went there. Okay, so AI is correct. I'm shocked too.

1:23:23He's your age. Old? He's 50. Yeah. It's all the more reason to be on the show. that's why I said it. He'd find himself in good company. Oh, but he didn't get a degree. I got two, so. All right. He can have one of mine. Okay. Including celebrities like Ryan Seacrest and Georgia is home to billionaire. Oh, Georgia, the state is home to billionaires. Duh. Like the Kathy family of Chick-fil-A. Did the Koch brothers go there? Are they from Georgia? I don't know. Specific lists of billionaire alumni. I'm conflating Coca-Cola and K-O-C-H. Oh, sure. I understand why. Okay, I don't think we have any. Colonel Sanders go there?

1:24:03What is wrong with you? That was a good joke. No, it wasn't. I don't even get it. Why? Because he's from the South and he's stupid. Doesn't even make sense because he's from Kentucky, clearly. Exactly. Kentucky Fried Chicken. But it was kind of funny. I didn't understand it. Okay. Ryan Seacrest is not a billionaire. No. So seems like maybe we don't have any yet. You have a real task on your hands. Do you think people would be happy for you? Right. No. Okay, that's fair. I don't think any. It's so interesting. Like, I feel like unanimously people hate billionaires. I know. Yet 100 % of people would want a billion dollars.

1:24:43I know. It's like, make up your mind. You can't want something and hate it at the same time. But you can because people are complex. Yeah, we're full of contradictions. You're right. I found one. This is the guy that founded Calendly. Tope. Oh, Tonya. Are you reading from Jay Zing? Are you doing a China? But he graduated from UGA. Oh, that was his name. Yeah. I thought you were talking about product. Oh, me too. What did he make? Calendly founder? Cap Calend. Calend. Calend. I don't know how to say it. I give up. Yeah. What's his name? It's like calendar with an L-Y and no E-R. Oh, my God. Calendar with an L-Y and no E-R.

1:25:25What's his name? Oh, boy. Okay, forget it. I don't believe in this man. Tope Aotona. Okay. Oh, I love this. Oh, look at the zero to hero. Okay, great. Yeah, Tope. You have everything in this picture. Aotona. You did a good job with Aotona, I think. The mastermind behind the scheduling app, Calendly. I don't like the name of that. We didn't need Lee. Hey, just. I love him. He's a wonderful person. Obviously, it was working for people. Do you like it? I think it's great. because you know what? It made him a billion dollars. So it can't, the name can't have been too bad. Absolutely. Now I'm going to ask a very dangerous question.

1:26:06If he were white. Yes, this is a black man. This is a black man. If he were white, would you like the name Calendly? Come on. I don't know because he's not white. One of just two U.S. black tech billionaires. That's amazing. And he went to Georgia. So sad, but yes, amazing. Well, it's sad, But it's cool that he went to Georgia. But he is taking my spot as the first billionaire to come out of that school. Yeah. That's okay. You can root for him. Of course I do. Yeah. Yeah. And what a great name. Actually, this is interesting. Do you think people don't root for him? I do. I think they do. From zero to hero?

1:26:44I think they do. They should. I think we all have, as we should, we have a different appetite for when black folks get a lot of money. I think when black folks floss and they're like showy and have big cars and stuff, we don't care. I agree. When white folks do it, you're like, Jesus Christ, man, get it together. Just calm down. But, yeah, never bothers me if someone's flossing and flexing. I agree. And that changes per ethnicity, which is so weird and funny. Like each human being is just a human being. Yeah. You know? But there are—I mean, there's just struggles that we can't—you know, there's societal struggles that are embedded.

1:27:21and, you know, we know about it all. We know about embedding. We know about all that. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

1:27:39All right. So to be clear, I don't have a billion dollars and I don't want anyone to come after me because I don't have that. Now, this is a ding, ding, ding. They are angry enough at what you got already. I know. And I actually, I think that's frustrating to me. A self-made lady. For sure. Not born into wealth. One generation away from. Object poverty. My dad grew up in a village. Literally in a village. That's a big deal. It is huge. Yeah. Yeah. So people need to get on board. They need to wake up. They need to wake up. Now, woman of color, me. Yeah. Ding, ding, ding. Two things to say about women of color.

1:28:22One thing to say about women of color. This woman of color. Oh, the Pantone. Exactly. I saw that today and I got very excited for you. And I even followed a link to see the color. You did. So that I could be supportive of this. Yeah. And the link had 300 pop-ups and I was never able to see the color. Oh, well, it seems like you're not following me close enough on Instagram. I haven't been on Instagram today. Okay. I posted about it yesterday because, as people may or may not know, I use the Pantone Color of the Year as my phone background. So this is a very exciting day for me when it's revealed, and I have it for the following year.

1:28:57Last year, it was Mocha Mouse. Nope, it was Mocha Moose, but it was really close to mouse, so it was me. Yes. This year is a disappointment. In name or color? In color. It's called Cloud Dancer, and it's white. the color is white. It is. Like, is there wisps of blue in there? I don't like the background they chose. It's so confusing. Well, the background, they're trying to make it better by putting it on a sky, which it is better on a sky because as it is, it's just white. Yeah, I don't know if you're going to be able to have a full white background. You won't be able to see anything. Okay, so this is the issue.

1:29:39So it's a little gray. Okay. It has like a teeny bit of gray. and this really made me go down a mental rabbit hole. Okay. You are going to be able to see because what do you mean? You'd still be able to see. That's that? No, no. This is Mocha Moose. I'm not allowed to put it on early. It's bad luck. Also, like once that white's there, you don't even see your calendar. All that stuff that's white goes away. Well, it's a little gray. Well, we're about to find out. I know. Now, that's the thing that sent me down a rabbit hole. Okay. I was like, fuck this. White? That's going to look. so dumb on this phone.

1:30:16How committed am I to tradition? You're very committed. I'm extremely committed. Me as a person. It's a core tenant of your identity. Yeah. And I was really thinking about that last night. I was like, man, because somebody was like, oh, so are you just not going to do it? And I was like, no, I have to do it. Because it would be bad luck not to? Like maybe. I wouldn't go so far as to. Actually, I don't think I think that. I don't think it would be bad luck, I think I would be like, I think I would just be very sad. Okay. Like that something was ending. You lost something. I lost something. Something that I enjoy a lot and that, and that like makes me happy.

1:30:56You look forward to. I look forward to is no longer a thing, um, is, is a little too much for me. Yeah. So, um, I'm going to have a white background on the phone, but it didn't, I was like, God, at what point, I mean, that's like my controlling nature. At what point could I say like, you know, it's okay. You don't, you can put, it doesn't have to be that. I think it's funny how the mechanism to me seems very related to addiction, which is like, you do this thing one time, it gives you this feeling and you now just have to have that feeling all the time. So it's like whatever first time you did this, you liked how that felt.

1:31:41Yes. And you want to use this mechanism to feel good again and again. Yeah. And I'm not saying like there's anything wrong with that. Yeah. But it does remind me of addiction. Right. So like, but I think most people would say like they have traditions. Yeah. You know? Yes. And so when does it cross over into it being. A superstition. pathological or a superstition or something that's actually not causing joy, causing suffering. Well, I don't have this opinion, but I can imagine this opinion, which is the more traditions you have, the less real estate there is for new discovery. Just in life. If you could imagine, like currently we have like seven holidays or something like that, where we all do kind of the same thing.

1:32:34And that's lovely. Yeah. If you had 364 holidays, that would leave a single day to discover something new or novel. Right. So there's got to be a magic balance. I think it's a balance. I do think there's something really special and beautiful about consistency and commitment. And it's hard to do both of those things in life. So I, it's meaningful to me. But if, yeah, if you make everything a tradition, then it's not special. But I don't think I make everything a tradition, but this is a tradition. And when did it start? Also, how do you get that image on your phone? Do you go to it, zoom in, take a screenshot and then do it?

1:33:20Yes. Okay. Because I have to use the actual thing. There's no way to, like, buy. You probably can. Ugh, fuck that. I'd always spend my money at Calendly. Way rather. It really rolled off your tongue. It's a great name. Yeah, it's a great name. All good names roll off your tongue. That's right. Starbucks. So, I think it was, like, four or five years ago. Okay. You're not that in bed with it. No, I'm not. I'm not, but it does bring me joy. It's like, ooh, it's coming. I know, I know, yeah. Can you just get a phone case that's in that color? Oh, no. See, and then this is where maybe I am too stubborn.

1:33:59It's like, yeah, that's probably a good thing to do. That's a good solve. It's like, oh, I'm still, it's still part of it. But no, I need it to be the background because that's how it is and that's how it's supposed to be. There is a level of rigidity. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I understand. I'm trying to think how rigid I am. What would you assess me out of 10? On tradition? This is a dumb question because it's going to be context dependent. Yeah. As everything is. I actually don't think you are like hyper. Yeah, I'm not like tightly wound. Well, you are. Okay. You go, you go, I don't really think you are.

1:34:37And I go, yeah, I'm not. And you go, well. No, you didn't let me finish my sentence. That's the problem. I was going to say, I don't think you're rigid at traditions. Okay, okay, okay. But I think you have areas in life where you're tightly wound. Yeah, well, you're right. I am a, that's why I'm saying it was a dumb question. Because it's like, on one hand, I am such a creature of habit. I love routines more than anything. Yes. You're very rigid about that. I am. I am. Now, I don't get upset, though, when I don't get to do it. I just do it. And when the times I can't, I'm okay with it. Well, you know, sometimes you're like, oh, and I didn't get to work out today.

1:35:15And, you know, you do. If I go, if I have to miss, like it happens at least once or twice a week where I can't work out because we have two guests and there's just no time. And I roll with that. But, yeah, if it's three days in a row I can't work out, then I'm starting to. But I'm also starting to feel worse. Exactly. I mean, yes, on the scale, no, you're not at 100 of even that, even like the routine. Some people really can't handle any deviation. and then I think on tradition you don't have any so fuck it no I'm kidding I think you like traditions but I don't think you're married to them and I do think I value novelty more than tradition right that's true we're very different in that way me and you are so different you know I love tradition though I love Christmas that's well you love Christmas but you don't have to do the same thing.

1:36:12No, no. In fact, we're switching the whole thing up this year. And last year was a different thing than the year before. Exactly. But I mean, insofar as I want the lights, I want the tree, I want all that stuff. And I want to watch the same movies. You know, I've already gotten through some of the movies. Okay, so that's some of the traditions. Yeah, and I do feel like if it's December 24th. Yeah. And we haven't watched Christmas Vacation. Yeah. I get this feeling like I fucked up. Right. Like it's a real. Yeah, I have that. how'd this happen? Yeah. I'm disappointed in myself. Okay. So this year, your trees were delivered, right?

1:36:47No, this year, Carly went and got three trees. Yes. You guys did not go pick out trees this year. Which is the first time in 12 years of having kids that we didn't go do the thing. Yes. And I, when I, but as you remember from previous trips, it's often a disaster. But that's what's like, that's fun. You're right. And when you said like, oh yeah, Carly got the trees, I, You had a little shiver. I was like, oh, my God. You guys didn't go do that? And not for any other reason than like, isn't that like a tradition? Right, right, right, right. And so for me, I mean, that's pig day. That's Jess and I.

1:37:21We get our tree every year. It's a whole thing. If you were going to miss that, it would. No, I can't miss it. Yes. And I mean. Well, we can just tell people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Peek behind the curtain. Yeah. We have a. There is a bit of a debacle. We had a pod. Not fight. No, just a pod complication. Yeah. A pod drama. We had a pod drama. And I'll say my perspective. Okay, great. If that's okay. Yeah. So, yeah, we have these traditions. We do secret turkey and Thanksgiving with everyone. And it's so special. Yeah, totally. And I feel that everyone thinks that. Yes. And they do. Yeah, absolutely.

1:38:09So, okay, that's great. Now, I have like so many traditions. It was seven or eight over there. During that weekend specifically. It's my favorite weekend of the year. Yeah. And it starts off with Mondsgiving. Yeah. Then it's our Podsgiving. Yeah. So special. Then I have Black Friday tradition with Callie at Brentwood Country Mart. Yeah. Where we get all the sales. Well. So we're all the deals. I've been told by some experts that there's not a lot of deals. I'm an expert in Black Friday. Nobody is. Nobody else is. So we go there and that's like a beautiful fun day I have with Callie. You know, Callie is a family.

1:38:49So it's everyone's like just making decisions to put that aside and make time for one another. Yeah. And then culminating Saturday with Jess, pig day. We go to Home Depot. I don't know if we're allowed to go to Home Depot anymore, but we do. And we are. And we get our tree. And then we give birth to it. Yeah. And I do. And then we put it up. He puts the lights up. And now we're in Christmas. And now we're in Christmas zone. And we're putting up all this stuff. And then we do a special lunch, normally at Houston's. And it's a whole thing. It's a whole day. It's a beautiful day. Yeah. And then this year, understandably, of course, you guys were like, we want to maybe go to Nashville.

1:39:36I sent a text to everybody. Yes. To the whole group that said like, hey. 22-ish people. Well, not the kids included, but they weren't on the text. But anyways. Right. A lot of people. And it said like, we're tossing around the idea of going to Nashville for Thanksgiving. We'll pay for everyone. Very generous. We'll pay for everyone to go. Basically, like, how do people feel about that? Yeah. And.

1:40:15Oh, my.

1:40:23Okay. And then I made a grave error. I responded very quickly I'm also very on top of my phone Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah I responded very quickly I can't go Because I have traditions with Callie and Jess By the way, normally we do our Podsgiving on Thursday On Thanksgiving And I was like, I have traditions with Callie and Jess Friday and Saturday So I can't go but if it works for everyone else, have fun. Go do it. Have fun. And a thumbs up.

1:41:02Okay. Now I'm going to stop outing now from here because I want to talk about just us but like then somebody responded immediately and said, yes, oh my God, this is great. I'm so happy. And I got really sad. die like something like really died inside of me and um it was a very outsized reaction but it was very very i wasn't like i wasn't being dramatic i was feeling core fear was ignited abandonment i'll be alone they'll get my i'm disposable i'm disposable expendable i thought this meant the same thing to everyone as it does everyone else is white i'm brown No, I did not. It wasn't that. It was a little bit of pilgrims and Indians situation.

1:41:52But no, I it was just like, wait, why wouldn't this? Why wouldn't we what? Like it really it was very destabilizing. And then I knew I was like, well, I can't I can't do this where I'm just like so upset on my own and like resentful of everyone because they've done this. Yeah. Because they've decided to go, even though I said you can go, which was my fault. Thumbs up. No, be nicer. I'm being pretty nice, I think. OK. Okay. And then I— I've only added one thing to this story, and it was thumbs up twice. Okay. And then I really couldn't do it, so I responded back. Because then people—other people are chiming in.

1:42:46Uh-huh. And I said, I'm going to be honest. This makes me so sad. Yeah, yeah. And so I'm going to remove myself from the chain. Yeah. And that was a self-protection. That was like, I can't keep seeing these texts come out today. Yeah, that's fine. And then I remember myself from the chain. And then there was then it was a drama because drama. Yeah, there was pod drama because I was very upset. And then people were upset that I was upset, but they still wanted to go on the trip. And then you wanted to cancel the trip and you were mad at me. And well, I wondered when you were going to jump in. Well, I just want to say from my perspective, I sent this text.

1:43:27Yeah. And then I didn't look at that chain. I missed everything. By the time I'm alerted that this pod drama is going on, Kristen has said, oh, no, Monica removed herself from the chain. And I'm like, I don't even know what that means. You're not very tech savvy. As we know. And then so I then kind of go through. Now I'm seeing the whole thing pretty far after it all happened. And then I just wrote, you know what, guys, scrap it. No problem. Let's just we'll go back to. I wasn't on that. Oh, yeah. I sent it to everyone. And I said, well, okay, that's probably not a good idea. So just forget it.

1:44:03And then, yeah, that caused its own thing because people were excited to go. And then you and I had an issue because you're like, no, you have to. And I was like, I'm not going to do anything that prevents you from being with us on Thanksgiving. Well. Well, I was mad at you. You were. You're skipping some steps. Yeah, I was mad at you. You were mad at me. I was mad at you for not being honest the first text. Yes. Because I felt like it ended up trapping the person. I trapped people, which I did do unintentionally. I thought that I was doing the right thing. And then immediately I was like, I also have to be honest.

1:44:43And I owed you an apology and I'll still say I'm sorry, is I was like, that felt like a test. I know. And it really wasn't. That was the part that I was like, I got my own trigger is just like, Like I have certain people in my life, our life, that will test you. And they need to – and I – that's a big one for me. Yeah. So no one was like, well, this was a trap. Like you said, go everyone have fun. Yeah, you got really worked up about that piece. And I was not – I was not trying to do that. I was not trying to test anyone. But you know what I didn't have, which you might have thought I had, which I really didn't have?

1:45:22I had no, no part of me was like, oh, fuck, now we can't go to Nashville. I didn't have that. I was like, okay, cool. I floated the idea. It backfired. Let's just, we'll stick with the normal thing. Right. And then my family will go to Nashville on Friday or whatever. Yeah, I didn't, I didn't, I didn't even. Like I wasn't upset to cancel the idea. But I'm, I would, I understand why that would make you sad and upset. You love it there. You want to go there. You want to spend your holidays there. Also, several members of our pod have never been there. Yes. So I was like, oh, this is great. This will be able to get everyone together.

1:45:57Well, and then that was all, there was also layers. I mean, it's so layered and so complicated. But I, you know, you, then, you know, we record the next day and we're mad at each other. And you, but I, I would, I was never upset with you or Kristen. Right. I mean, this is unfair to everyone else, but I wasn't. I was like, oh, of course, they are just offering up something nice. They're just floating it. I felt so sad when it was like just yeses across the board after I had immediately said I can't go. That was the painful part. It had nothing to do with the trip. The trip, great. Like, of course you guys want to go do that.

1:46:48I would want to go if I didn't have these things. So the problem is then like I come in, you're upset with me because of this entrapment and I am not upset with you. But then I'm like, oh, he's being, he's so mad at me. Yeah, yeah, for being hurt. Yeah, and I'm like, where's the empathy? I'm so sad. I know, I know. We worked it out. We worked it out. And then the solution was we had things even on Wednesday. It was perfect. No problem. It was fucking great. It was perfect. And then we all flew at 7 a.m. Yeah, the rest of the group went and had a wonderful time. It was so fun. It was such a nice three days because as much as I absolutely love summer and you're there, you know I'm on the boat.

1:47:35It's like boat to breakfast, boat to dinner, activity. Yeah, you're moving around. Let's go downtown to Brick Tops. Let's go out to this restaurant. Well, with 22 people, we're not going to a restaurant. Yeah. And it's winters. So it's not warm out. There's no boating to be done. You're not even going to ride the motorcycles that are there. Right. So we just sat in a house for three days. Because. All of us playing games. I'm getting jealous. Oh, sorry. I'll back off the details. I made these choices. But that's awesome. We did Die Hard First Night Christmas movie. Never seen it. A lot of people hadn't seen it.

1:48:09Yeah. And everyone's like, isn't that a Christmas movie? So someone picked Die Hard. And then we did Beverly Hills Cop. Oh. And then we did Scrooged. Nice. So it was like games all day, order food, and then movie at night. Love it. Very cozy. Pool was broke. The hot tub was broke. You know, I was like in, you know. Yeah. You were in a little bit of fixer mode. Sauna worked. So we saunaed. Nice. And we ate fun food and we did a lot of fun stuff. That's awesome. And it was great. And you were missed. It was such a fun time. I'm sad I couldn't be there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm also happy I got to do all the things.

1:48:42On top of the being excluded fear, I would imagine you're also like already Nashville's this thing. It's like I'm changing everything. I'm moving there. I'm quitting. Nashville, Nashville, Nashville. Now Thanksgiving's in Nashville. Like I'm sure on top of the other anxiety about Nashville, it's like now our tradition got moved to Nashville. Yeah. Or was that not in the mix? It was. It's not the Nashville specific piece. It's the everything is changing at a pace I can't currently handle right now. Right, right. And it's too overwhelming for me. But then I had to work through that. Yeah. And I did.

1:49:23And it's okay. And change is okay. And you gave me a huge gift, which it never occurred to me you could do this. So we had a full Thanksgiving on Wednesday. Yeah. But then when we got to Nashville, Hannah, sweet Hannah, most beautiful singer in the world. Yes. She had made a whole other Thanksgiving. So we had two full-blown sit-down, insane meal, eat all day leftovers. I'm like, this should be a double. I know. Should be a double-day holiday. And then we all flew home on Southwest on Sunday, one of the busiest travel days of the year. Yeah, very busy. And somehow it shook out where almost all 21 of us ended up in a middle seat.

1:50:01Oh, my. Wow. I, as you know, got sick. Yeah, you were sick. Kristen got sick. Lincoln got sick. Oh, yeah. Those packed flights, man. Yeah. Like when you walk on your side, okay, I'm going to feel like shit probably for three days. Yeah. That'll happen. That'll happen. Anyway, okay. So that was Thanksgiving. That was our pod drama. Pod drama. The second thing I wanted to say, it was ding, ding, ding to Columbia because Callie went to Columbia, as I already said, and someone she went to Columbia with was at this event I was at last night, this Alison Roman book event. Yes. That was very— Were you like the host or MC or something?

1:50:39No, I was not. Kate Berlant was the moderator, I guess we'll say. Sure. Yeah. Master of Ceremony. Yeah. Motorcycle Club. And it was so fun. She's hysterical. Kate Berlant is so funny. Yes. And so is Allison. That was the comedy show we were going to when I saw the cock. Whoa, that's a ding ding. That's wild. It is. Anyway, so that was so fun. And then we went to a, they had rented out this little like bar restaurant thing after. And it was just really lovely. But, okay, I had to check my laptop. Ooh, I wouldn't have done that. I had like a real, like, I don't know what to do. That's my life. It really felt like I was like giving a child.

1:51:31Yeah. And then during the talk, I was like thinking about it. And I was like, what if something happens to it or someone else checked their laptop and they get switched? I don't let my kids touch my laptop. I don't let Kristen touch my laptop. It's like everything I've written is on there. I know. No one's allowed to fucking touch that. I was very scared. But for Allison, I did it. Yeah, I was even in a situation where I brought my laptop. Oh, I was going to go to Zancou and do a little research with my laptop. It's a weird place to set up shop. Like you're always at a nice place. Yeah. And our Zancou is really something.

1:52:05It's like a bus stop. Yeah. Why would you pick that? Because I was in the mood for Zancou. They do chicken, right? They got a Tarna. Fuck, it's so good. It's really good. But I had brought my laptop and then I was like, once I got there and I looked at the terminal. Sure. I was like, I don't want to eat. I'm just going to get takeout. Yeah. And then I got out of the car and I was going to have my computer in the car. And I was like, going to be able to see my car. Like I walked halfway. I was like, I keep my eye on the car the entire time. No, I don't even feel comfortable. I got to hold my laptop while I'm in.

1:52:37So I went back to the car, grabbed my laptop and held it like a blankie. And then I did do my stuff in there and it was great. Oh, you did? Yes. You pivoted it? Okay. I did. Wow. I was in there for like three hours. Wow. Anyway, that was great. Buy Allison's book, Something From Nothing. It's really good. And I hope Max doesn't listen to this, but Callie was like, I'm buying her book for Max for Christmas. Oh, sorry, maybe. And then I said, you know what? I had already said that on my verbal gift guide on the fact check. So you're a poser. Yeah. Okay. That's what I said to her. Okay. I used Callie as a resource.

1:53:11I know, for the Netflix thing? No. Oh, really? Interesting. I used someone as a resource too. Okay. It wasn't Callie. TBD. Okay. Backies. Do you think Colton Scrivener sounds like a character name in something? Mm-hmm. I do. I don't know what genre, like Old West movie or something. Oh, to me, it's like, um, like Detective. Detective Colton Scrivener. Could he be a detective in the Old West? Sure. Like at the O.K. Corral or one of those towns? We can combine. Okay. Definitely. Okay. You said Casper wasn't successful. The Friendly Ghost? Yeah. Oh. Casper's financial performance has varied. Oh, the films.

1:54:02With the mattress company. Oh, Casper Mattresses. Casper the movie. Make. Casper, 1995. Made over$287 million at the worldwide box office. Okay, that's pretty good. More than any movie I've ever been in made. $102.7 million domestically and$187.6 million internationally. Pretty good. Pretty good. They didn't make a sequel, though, but that's pretty good for$95. That's also like pre-everything-needed-a-sequel. Yeah, perhaps. Now, how long do cats sleep? 12 to 16 hours. Okay. And if you're a male lion, 21 hours. Ah. How long? It's crazy that male lions are so jacked because they don't do anything but sleep and be ripped.

1:54:5818 to 20. Yeah. 18 to 20 hours. They have to conserve energy for activities like hunting, mating, and defending their territory. But they don't even hunt. Well. They haven't made. You know they don't hunt. Really? No. Their manes are too big, so they can't hide. So literally the women do all the hunting, and then you stroll over as the male, and you eat the hell out of the thing first up. Yeah. Yeah, it says the females do all the really hard work killing the majority of prey. Yes. The only time they're needed is when the hyenas surround the carcass, and then they'll go kill a bunch of hyenas.

1:55:29And when you need them, you need them. So they do deliver. They can fucking mow through hyenas. I've seen some incredible fights where, like, one male lion takes out nine hyenas. They're so strong. That's all they do. And then they fight other males that roam in trying to take over the pride. But then they just sleep, fuck, and then eat the food that they didn't catch. Wow. Pretty good racket. How come I'm not a lion? Well, because you're a human. Well. Yeah. Mostly. No, I mean in the game of like what's our animal. Why am I not a lion? You think you're like a lioness? Well, I mean I want to be and no one's picking that.

1:56:10No, I'm not a male lion because I think I kill. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So I just wonder like why no one ever thought of me is that I also have a very long mane. which makes you a male lion, though. That's maybe why you're not a lion. It sounds like a good racket to me. I know. Although I don't like sleep. I wouldn't want to sleep 21 hours a day. I don't want to miss everything. I love sleeping. I have FOMO too much. What if something fun happens on the Serengeti? You won't care because you're sleeping. Like one of my buddies killed a bunch of hyenas. I was like, fuck, I would love to have seen that.

1:56:44Yeah, that's why you're not one. No, I'm a lioness. I'm a female lion. You're a female lion. I'm a male lion? I guess. It's either or. But I need to be out and about and hunting. No one wants, no one thinks I'm a male or female lion. They think I'm a chinchilla with no bones. Floating rib cage. I just, it's like, it's so offensive. Or no rib cage. I can't remember. Ew. It's like, why are they so squishy? That's because they're made for cuddling. Ew. You don't want to be made for cuddling? They're not. They're made for, like, ew. For killing? Speaking of, okay, so many people I have run into who listen to Armchair Anonymous.

1:57:27Every Armchair brings up the rat story. In the water bottle. Really struck a nerve, understandably. People cannot get over the rat in the water bottle. And now I, so I have that. Tea kettle? Tea kettle, electric tea kettle. I have that very one that's next to us in my house. and it's been acting a little funny. Okay. And like sometimes it's like spilling and then the water, it seems strange. And I got it in my head that there's a rat in the stem. Oh, Monica, the stem is like a quarter inch thick. I know, but I think the rat is able to get in there. Maybe an octopus could be in there, but not a rat.

1:58:10I mean, a chinchilla could if it can disable its ribs. It still has its jawbones and stuff. It's limited. I think there's a rat in the stem. I really do. You really do? Yeah, I like try to stick this like straw in there to see. You're crazy sometimes. That's madness. You can't look at that stem and convince yourself there's a rat inside. That's just look at the stem. Ah, it's in there. You can't put straw in that stem. That's what we thought. How did the racket in that water bottle? But it got in and then. She left some part out of that story. She had the lid off for a while. Yeah, she probably had the lid off.

1:58:48But still, that's still a small. The fact that she was drinking out of it for a while is insane. I feel like I would definitely be able to taste. She said she had like. Fucking rat hair on her teeth. Come on. She had rats. I hate to judge our arm cherries. No, no, we're not judging her. That was a great story. But also it taught me a lesson that rats can get in tiny spaces. And they're in the stem of my tea kettle. You should be way more worried about getting a 28-inch butane tank up your butt. That also happened in Armchair Anonymous. But are you worried about that? No, because I have control over that.

1:59:28And physics has control over a rat in that stem. So leave it to physics. I tried to stick this little like very tiny brush thing in there. And it did feel like it was hitting something. Yeah, the sides of the super narrow tube. Anyway, I just. So you're going to throw it away and get a new one? I think. Are you going to keep it in a Ziploc bag so you know that a rat can't get in it? I should put a bag on top. Okay. But that's ugly, so I can't. A rat can get through a bag, too. But you would see it. Yeah, you'd be able to tell. Yeah, it couldn't reseal a Ziploc bag once it got inside. Yeah. If you saw that the Ziploc was unsealed, you'd know you had a rat in there.

2:00:10Unsealed or bites. Not apart, yeah. Okay. Okay, did the Saw franchise make a billion dollars? Yes. 1.1 billion worldwide. Worldwide. Is Ebola rare? Yeah. Mm. It's considered rare.

2:00:37Not even yes. This is in the U.S. as of the latest information, just FYI. So that's good news currently. Okay. Is Savannah considered the most haunted city in the United States? Yes. Widely considered the most haunted city in America due to its long history of tragedy, such as fires, epidemics, and battles, which have left behind many unsettled spirits. Other cities frequently mentioned include New Orleans and Austin. Oh, I've not had any ghost activity on my trips to Austin. Also Salem, Massachusetts, obviously. That makes sense. But yeah, on all these sites, Savannah. So do you think you got some of your fear complex by spending so much time in your childhood in Savannah?

2:01:22No, because I didn't know that then. You weren't aware of the apparitions and spirits? Yeah. What if your grandparents had any run-ins? Are Indians big ghost folks or no? No. They're like reincarnation, which is great. Yeah. It's positive. It's not. Yeah. You don't linger. You just come back as a squirrel. Well, I liked this at my aunt's memorial during the remation. There's so much emphasis on this is, it's just this physical body that's gone now. This husk. But that's all it is. Yeah, exactly. It's just a vessel. Like the spirit is still here. Thriving. Yeah. But is it here or is it elsewhere?

2:02:09I just don't know. Yeah, it's too exact. I'm not sure where it goes. It's not a science. Yeah. Okay, real quick. I think we can do it quick. We're going to take a test. Oh, fun. The morbid curiosity test. This is on Colton's website. Okay. I'm going to ask you, okay? Okay. If a head transplant was possible, I would want to watch the procedure. Now we got the same situation. Strongly disagree, disagree, somewhat disagree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree. Agree. Okay. I think the supernatural is an interesting topic. Disagree. If I lived in medieval Europe, I would be interested in attending a public execution.

2:02:52Yeah, agree. I am curious. I wouldn't want to, but I would want to. Right. I am curious about crime and enjoy reading detailed news accounts about murders and other violent crimes. Sure, agree. Yeah, that's fun. That's funny, though, because you don't like it when your mom calls in and is like, this person's dead. I don't like it because I don't like what feels like my obligation, which is to express a bunch of sympathy over someone I'm just learning was even alive. That's my issue. It's like, why are you telling me this? I don't even know this person. Am I supposed to join you in? She just wants to feel like she wants to talk about it because it's upsetting for her.

2:03:31She just has something fun to report. Well, I think she knows. Older women love reporting these illnesses and these deaths. Everyone's mom I know does this. Does your mom not do this? It's a very mom thing. Yeah, not really. Once you pass 65 as a mom, you're going to start keeping your ear to the street about anyone who's got any kind of disease. But I think it's like it's a— You heard Mary's son. I'm like, no, I don't even know who Mary is. So, no, I don't know Mary's son. My mom does that for sure. She does. Yeah. I think it's pretty universal. But I think it's because she's, it's like, it's like gossip.

2:04:04It's sort of that same, like it's spreading information in an attempt to like help. Sure. But, you know, also maybe your mom is freaked. Your mom, when she hears Mary's son is dealing with something upsetting, like it's upsetting to her. It might not be upsetting to you. That is the assumption I should make. And I wish I were a better person. what I really think is she hears it and she's like, oh my God, I can't wait to tell everyone. No. I think that's what really is. That's how my mom says it, I feel like, too. Yeah, I mean, your mom's just not doing it, right? I think your mom's not doing it to you.

2:04:40If you ask Kristen right now, her mom does the same thing. Like half the calls are about people she's never heard of that have a sickness. It's a bizarre activity. If I just called you and was like, hey, did you hear a guy in Bangladesh lost his arm today? I would be like, I'd be like, oh my God. Like I would hear that and say like, that's horrible. And I would think that you were telling me because you thought it was horrible and you wanted to share it. My mom thinks it's horrible. Yeah. For sure. But I think she's also so horny to spread all the information as quickly as she can. Okay. Speaking as the only woman in this room, I think it's more like this makes me feel unsettled.

2:05:19and like I need to share that feeling so I don't feel so alone in this unsettled. I think there's probably a great evolutionary explanation. I think it was probably women's job in whatever capacity to be monitoring the health of everyone and reporting on it and pooling resources. And I think that was the domain. Yeah, but that's how I feel. If I hear something horrible happened, I'm like, I do want to tell people, but it's not like, because guys have a story. It's like this horrible, horrible things happen. It's hard for me. It's upsetting and you want to share in that. Yeah, and I want, I guess I kind of am looking for like comfort and that the world isn't, or I don't know.

2:06:06I'm unsettled. And I think a guy's first thought is like, I'm not telling anyone that. Like, oh, so-and-so's got gangrene. I think like they wouldn't want anyone to know. and no one's going to enjoy hearing that. I just have a completely different instinct, which is almost like don't tell anyone. Yeah, that's weird. I mean, that to me. Yeah, it's different. It's different. It's different. But I just think you could give some benefit of the doubt that it's not like, oh my God, I got a story to tell as opposed to like, I really don't like this about life. Okay, but let me be very specific. I'm not judgmental of that instinct because I think all the things we're supposed to do the mechanism that motivates us to do it is a reward.

2:06:51I think both things are true. I think it's serving a purpose. Clearly it did historically that these moms would be spreading this information. And I think they get a dopamine hit from the sharing of it, which is how the body encourages them to continue that practice. So it's like, I'm not judgmental of it, but I do think there is a horniness. I don't know that that's fair. Okay, let's keep going. Okay. I would be curious to see how an autopsy is performed. I have in the past been curious and I've watched one, so I would have to say I agree. I don't ever want to see one again. Agree or strongly?

2:07:24Just agree. I would be interested in attending or watching a video of an exorcism. Disagree. If I lived in ancient Rome, I would be interested in attending a gladiatorial fight. Strongly agree. I would be interested in watching a documentary on motives behind real murders. Agree. I'm interested in seeing how limb amputation works. What's the middle one on that one? There's somewhat disagree, disagree, strongly agree, somewhat agree, agree, strongly agree. Somewhat agree. Okay. I find the occult interesting. Agree. If I saw a street fight break out and knew I could not intervene, I would try to watch it.

2:08:00Yeah, strongly agree. My favorite part of a crime show is learning about why the killer did what he did. Yeah, agree. I would like to see how bodies are prepared for funerals. Agree. A documentary on voodoo would interest me. Disagree. I would be curious enough to watch Duel if I lived in the Wild West. Yeah, strongly agree. I would be interested in watching an interview with an imprisoned serial killer talking about his crimes. Agree. I think the preservation of bodies, like in taxidermy or mummification, is interesting. Agree. I am curious how a Ouija board works. Strongly disagree. I prefer violent movies and TV shows to be uncensored.

2:08:36Agree. Being a criminal profiler who studies the personality of murderers would be an interesting job. The middle one. Somewhat? Yeah, somewhat. Somewhat agree. Okay. I am curious what the deadliest toxin in the world would do to the body. Agree. I think witchcraft would be an interesting topic to learn about. Disagree. I am curious what a bottle looked like. I already know. I'm curious what a battle looked like in the Middle Ages. Oh, strongly agree. I'm curious about the minds of violent people. Agree. Okay. Here are your scores. One is the minimum score and six is the maximum score. 4.7. Well, it's multiple things.

2:09:14So your overall morbid curiosity score is 4.42. Okay. Okay. Your paranormal score, 2.33. Yeah. Your minds of dangerous people score, 4.83. Your body violation bodily injury score, 4.83. Your violence score, 5.67. Wish I would have got six. Ah. Then I think you cheated. I didn't cheat. I'm just kidding. I know you like violence. Yeah. All right. Well, that's cool. So you're. Let me ask you something, though. When you say you like violence, are you turning your nose up to it compared to serial killer interest? No. Do you think some are worse than others? Well, I think, I don't think worse or better.

2:10:03Okay. I think they're different, though. They're modeling out different. Yeah. They're modeling out different fears. Yeah. So I have a huge fear of being in a physical violent situation with another man. So I'm always going to be interested. But you're also, you have a fear of it, but you're also like, you're kind of attracted to it. Yeah. Yeah. Like most things I'm afraid of, the motorcycle, speed, drugs. But you've started fights. I mean, first of all, yes. Like in junior high, I just straight up started some fights. As an adult, I don't, I would say I haven't started fights. I just have such a clear category.

2:10:44I've seen guys walk into the bar and they want to fight. They're there to fight. Right. I've not ever walked into the bar because I want to fight. I walk into the bar, I see some behavior I don't like. Right. The sheriff in me tells me, oh, I've got to protect everyone from this energy everyone hates. Right. And then I end up in a fight with that person. Yeah. And I think some people could read that as starting a fight as opposed to leaving. Sure, but I wouldn't abandon the people that I thought were being put out by this energy. This happened perfectly on New Year's Eve one year. Everyone was in town for a car show, and we went out to Dell's, this bar that Scotty and I went and sang karaoke at all the time.

2:11:23It's like 1 a.m. on New Year's Eve. These guys walk in. They weren't at the bar all night. They just came in. They shoved two different guys just randomly immediately on their way to the bar. then one bumped into me aggressively and I turned around and said something and then Scotty noticed that was going on and saw he had a friend so he kind of got by the friend and then the friend just immediately swang at Scotty so like those dudes just they rolled in they were like gangbanger dudes they rolled in to beat someone up yeah and um in that situation in that bar I think oh Scotty and I are best suited to deal with these two people of all the people that are at this bar.

2:12:05The other two guys that got shoved just got like shoved to the ground, couldn't do anything about it. But what about just like the bouncer? There's no bouncer at Dell's. It's just a bar with people. I mean, sure, by the time the police got called, two people would have been punched in the nose and they would have been gone. Yeah. So I've seen enough of those situations living in bars for a decade that, yeah, in those situations, I'm like, okay, well, I'll be the guy. Yeah. These two are fighting somebody in this bar. I guess it's also the type of bar maybe. Sure. It's not like a fancy. But not even fancy.

2:12:37Like I'm thinking of like the college bars. Like they're rough and tumble. Uh-huh. And no one in my group was like fighting or looking for fights. Yeah, yeah. Or being like vigilant about the fights. Yeah. There might have been more fights where I came from. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like definitely the bar we drank at in Detroit, there was a few fights a week. Every Saturday night there was a fight at the bar. Yeah. I guess that's all been part of it, right? Like your bars are ones where there are fights. Those are the ones you're picking. For sure. We're all victims of our childhood. So it's like it's all, yeah, the bars I drank at, probably the vast majority of people at them, their parents were divorced.

2:13:32They grew up like I did. That's why for whatever reason that bar appealed to them. Right. That's the kind of bar they got taken to as a kid. Like it all makes sense. It's just like, yeah, we are all similar and we find each other. Yeah. And then the people who went to country clubs, they're at a country club drinking. And most people don't fight at the country club. I doubt it. Well, they have different kinds of fights, I guess. Sure. Yeah. And I'd rather just throw down than the other version. Yeah. Well, four point something. I already forgot. 5.6 violence. Yeah. All right. All right. Love you.

2:14:07Love you.

2:14:40Thank you.