534 - Think About the Simulation - My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:17):
Hello, and welcome to my favorite murder.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
That's Georgia Hardstar.

Speaker 1 (00:21):
That's Karen Kilgara.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
No pointing, Oh yeah, sorry, that's against the one I
was the only one to pointing is rude point?

Speaker 1 (00:28):
Don't you ever stop do it? How are you? I'm good.

Speaker 2 (00:34):
I'm grateful to have the job of podcasting today.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
Same yep, why specifically today.

Speaker 2 (00:40):
I don't know. It's just a really nice life.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
It's Vince and I were talking about how it's all
democracy is going to be over soon, so like, how
do we celebrate what we have now?

Speaker 2 (00:51):
That's right for me.

Speaker 3 (00:52):
I tell my therapists that when I'm really bummed, I
think about if I took a time machine back to
today because the apocalypse has happened, I'm going to look
at everything and be like, wow, I was so lucky, Yes,
to have these things, and to be able to talk
to these people and to do these.

Speaker 1 (01:08):
We have a hot dog phone, to.

Speaker 3 (01:10):
Have freedom, to have a hot dog phone. So just
pretend you're from the.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
Future, yes, which is a dark terrible place or not
or not?

Speaker 2 (01:18):
Or a rule of six with that dark terrible place
and five other options. Okay, got to do five other
options every time? Okay, my therapist does it like this, though,
she puts her hand up and then goes, this is dark.
This is dark.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Terrible times.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
It also could be neutral times.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:35):
It could be very bright and shiny times exactly the same.
It could be like we're all working at Macy's all
the time.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, weird but doable.

Speaker 3 (01:43):
I could have a desk job. See b Richard Ellis Investors,
you could go moment please so quickly, ceev Richard Ellis Investors.
I can't pay my rent. One moment please.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Now there's your podcast. I mean you've always worked in
the voice area.

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Clearly that was your early training.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Yeah, and mine was reading aloud in sixth grade, which
was my favorite.

Speaker 1 (02:04):
Thing to do.

Speaker 3 (02:04):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
You love to be called on because they would just
go up and down the road. There's no way. We
haven't talked about this, but I would just I would
go pick out the paragraph that.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Would be mine. Practice, practice, not too much, not too little.
So you didn't know, you didn't listen to what not
a word? You knew what was that was none of
my business. I was on that my.

Speaker 2 (02:23):
Paragraphs, that's why.

Speaker 3 (02:25):
That's yeah, and you killed it every time. I was
very proud of my reading skills.

Speaker 2 (02:30):
Oh yeah, it's nice and smooth, no trips.

Speaker 3 (02:32):
Yeah, Janet, for every every bad thing she did, she
fucking she'd tell you to read real good the basics.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
She covered those basics. Three hots and a cot and
a book that you could actually read for yourself.

Speaker 1 (02:48):
Belated birthday, Happy birthday.

Speaker 3 (02:50):
I just I just plopped a fucking little gift wrapped
gift in front of Karen for her birthday.

Speaker 2 (02:57):
I will tell you listener, it's heavy, it's wrapped in gorgeous.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
So you I saw it. It's from Etsy. I it is.

Speaker 2 (03:08):
A diet coke ash tray. Ladies and gentlemen. It is
hue so beautiful. It looks like handpainted. But then underneath some.

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Clear read the maker on the back.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Oh, the maker is where w are your snacks?

Speaker 3 (03:22):
And so she has You can get that in like
mine would obviously be. It's a potato chip with crumb
fresh and caviar on it.

Speaker 1 (03:29):
Oh, you can get hot dog, you can get.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Mine would obviously be who are you?

Speaker 1 (03:35):
Who are you? Orange County? That is caviar is like
my like favorite.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Mine would obviously be a gold bar cottage cheek.

Speaker 1 (03:47):
I don't know why it's just like so.

Speaker 2 (03:50):
But it's basically looking at something that makes your mouth
immediately water or makes your thing though.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
That's my jam, that's your identity. So diet coke, a
can of diet coke. I saw that.

Speaker 3 (04:00):
I was like, I have to get up for caring.
It could be a catch all. You don't have to
ash and you don't have to take up smoking.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Oh, but I have to. Now that you've given me this,
you've required it, and I'm going to go right back
to the capris. They're thin.

Speaker 1 (04:10):
Oh sure, they're easy to smoke.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Yeah, ladies and gentlemen, look up nineteen eighty eight Caprice cigarettes. Oh,
thank you so much. That's a perfect gift.

Speaker 1 (04:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Now I have a gift for you that I realized
the last time we talked about birthday gift giving. You
were like, it's not my birthday yet, but I was like, oh,
just we're going to give each other a gift at
the same I like.

Speaker 3 (04:29):
An in between things because our birthdays are like almost
a month apart.

Speaker 2 (04:32):
Yeah, so yeah, a month and a decade, a month
and a decade, yeah, wow, almost exactly ten years apart.

Speaker 1 (04:39):
We're generation apart. Wow.

Speaker 2 (04:41):
I think that's the hook of this podcast, right, no
one's caught on.

Speaker 1 (04:44):
That's true.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
It's like old and young.

Speaker 1 (04:47):
You know.

Speaker 3 (04:47):
What I was thinking about too, is like the fact
that we started this podcast when we barely knew each other,
so we were getting to know each other at the
same time the audience was getting Yeah, got to know
us that way. If we had already known everything about each.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
Other, it would all be facade.

Speaker 1 (05:02):
Yeah, So I think that's the secret sauce. So I
hate that term.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
Well should we call it the Thousand Island dressing of
our souls?

Speaker 1 (05:10):
I agree?

Speaker 2 (05:11):
And I also think that we kind of knew it,
but we also didn't know it. I think we both
had that like we're grabbing hands and jumping off this cliff,
which other people wouldn't have done totally. And I think
so there was a feeling of that just discovering this now,
but the feeling of that of like, she's up for
this whatever, this.

Speaker 1 (05:30):
Thing is just up for it. Yeah, I'm game.

Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah, thank god, thank god.

Speaker 1 (05:35):
And that's this podcast. Well, thanks for listening, goodbye.

Speaker 2 (05:38):
This is our way of saying we quicked done.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
We both walk out.

Speaker 4 (05:43):
That's it.

Speaker 1 (05:44):
Fade to black.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
Also, just point out that it has been ten years,
but the last time we recorded our episode was almost
two hours long.

Speaker 3 (05:51):
I know.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
So the idea when people are like, aren't you going
to run out of stuff? It's like you would think
we would.

Speaker 3 (05:56):
Today I'm doing this story that like means so ten
years and I'm finally doing this story that means so
much to me. It's not like I found the story
and like, yes, another one. It's like they can still
be so important and meaningful and shit, Unfortunately, there's just
a never ending.

Speaker 2 (06:10):
Yes, there's bad hooray of this parade of humans.

Speaker 1 (06:14):
That's right, that's the name of the episode. Oh, that's right.

Speaker 3 (06:18):
I wanted to ask everyone if they know that we
name every episode after some ridiculous thing we say in
the episode, and that's like obvious to everyone, but I
was like, what if they don't know that? So, like,
you got to find the moment we say the dumb
ass thing that we name the episode. It's like a
little east eg Yeah, and then everyone knows.

Speaker 2 (06:38):
And then if you figure it out, we'll send you
an easter egg in the mail from this last Easter.
They don't they smell really bad, but but that's your gift. Yeah,
you know, when we plan this show. There's all kinds
of futuristic, technical, Easter egg type thinking that we put
into it.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
Totally. We love Easter Eggs. We're like a video game. Yeah, so,
I mean, this is a simulation. How could it not be.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
I'll tell you the thing that the physicist said. Okay,
when I worked on the Time Travel show and somebody asked,
that was the first question we asked, and he said,
it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 (07:13):
Come on, that's not what I was expecting.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Because if it's a simulation, it's so good we don't
know or we're just catching on. But if it's a
good enough simulation that we don't know, then that idea
that like I'm stuck in the back rooms or whatever
people get online about and weird in their head. It's like,
it's better. It's better than that. Go to the beach
and then think about the simulation.

Speaker 1 (07:36):
Okay, go now, okay, oh oh okay, oh oh oh shit.
Okay a second. Well, first, fucking New MFM animated.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
Oh my god, that's right.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
I haven't watched it yet. Of you, neither of us.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Have seen this, and so we thought it'd be fun
to show you at the same time as we are
seeing it. For the first time ourselves.

Speaker 3 (07:55):
Our friend Nick Terry, by his own free will, Yeah,
makes these incredible animations based on some dumb fucking thing
that we've said. This is Starnada many f seventy eight.
It's called Drama meine. Let's if you're not watching it
on Netflix.

Speaker 2 (08:09):
Please do or go look it up, and now we're
going to watch it for the first time right here.
It was summer of two thousand and five and I
was eight years old when we took a family vacation
to Yosemite and San Francisco. While in San fran we
got a boat tour that took us past Alcatraz and
to some other island close by.

Speaker 1 (08:29):
What is that, Marin.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
I don't remember there being a two island stop for
the Alcadras tour, but I haven't been there.

Speaker 1 (08:35):
Alcatraz too.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
It's smaller and hipper, and there's a disco. There's an
amazing night life on Alcatrazdo Okay. My dad was really
nervous that I was going to get seasick, so he
gave me three dramamine and we bordered the boat.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:52):
It turns out that the serving size of dramamine for
an eight year old is half a pill. So I
was knocked the fuck out, Ellia, my dad happens to
be a fireman. Yeah, and it says he's retired. Now,
this is so classic. So he walked around the island
Alcatraz with my sleeping eight year old body thrown over
his shoulder in a fireman's carry. So can I just

(09:14):
stop here.

Speaker 1 (09:15):
To tell you this?

Speaker 2 (09:15):
And this is the most dad life thing I will
ever tell you, which is that at night when we
were little, my dad, you could do the fireman's carry,
You could do sack of potatoes, or you could ride
a horse to bed. Those are the three ways we
got carried to bed.

Speaker 1 (09:31):
You gotta pick which one.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
Yeah, that's so cute. So fireman's you're just bent over
his shoulder, sack potatoes, he's holding you buy rings.

Speaker 1 (09:39):
In your mind. Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (09:42):
But then the horse You got on back and put
your hand over his mouth to feed the horse, and
he ran down the hallway and threw you on the bed.

Speaker 1 (09:50):
Can you do it? Can I have that? I love?

Speaker 2 (09:52):
That might be the greatest privilege.

Speaker 1 (09:55):
Yeah, having a firefighter dad, Oh my god.

Speaker 2 (09:58):
So that's I think this one gets me as actually,
because he just basically like every fireman's like, we're just
going to solve this problem, okay. So he would occasionally
stop and wake me up to eat ice cold drink
water with my eyes closed. My mom and brother took
normal pictures and occasionally included me weekend of Bernie a picture.
Oh my god, Oh my god, it's the best picture too.

(10:21):
The only thing that I actually remember about that day
is waking up on a park bench next to a
dog wearing sunglasses.

Speaker 1 (10:28):
Oh she's awakening. Oh god, she woke up.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
At the end of all that.

Speaker 4 (10:32):
Was like, hey, scene, Wow, what a joyful thing.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
I completely forgot that we knew what that little girl
looked like. That's why the headband was so funny.

Speaker 1 (10:50):
To me.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
It looked we have an actual photo of her. Well,
that was from Lizzie originally Lizzie. I hope this is
bringing you so much joy. You now have a character
in the Nick Harry MFM animated universe.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
Based off of you as a child, like the real
photo of you. God, yeah, so special. I love it
so much, so good. That was so funny. I was
wondering if your dad was gonna throw me over her
shoulder that would have been raped.

Speaker 1 (11:12):
Oh that's right to give you what you want, because
I was like, can I do it? And Jim's like, no.

Speaker 2 (11:17):
I only have this one thing, which is the funny
interpretation as I saw it, you rode the horse like
kind of like a monkey on his back, so he
had your legs.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
In his arms.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
Okay, it wasn't because if you ran down a hallway
on your dad's shoulders, I think it's not a lamb
into the Georgia. But not to criticize after the fact.

Speaker 1 (11:37):
Sure that was a joy? Sure can we edit? Could
I get that? Edit it? My first round of notes?

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Have this to say? No, Nick Terry, No, we love
you so much, Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (11:46):
What a joy? So good?

Speaker 2 (11:49):
Okay, should we do network?

Speaker 1 (11:50):
Yes, Highlight Podcast Network. It's the fucking best.

Speaker 3 (11:53):
Only cool people like you wouldn't even believe it, so
it's called exactly right media.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
Here are some highlights and one of the podcast that
is on this network is called The Knife. We Love It.
Hannah and Pasha continue their unbelievable story of Paul Franzak,
who is kidnapped from a Chicago hospital as a newborn
in nineteen sixty four. In this episode, as he digs
deeper into his identity, he uncovers secrets that completely rewrite

(12:18):
the story of his life.

Speaker 1 (12:19):
So wild Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:21):
And then over on this podcast will Kill You, Aaron
and Aaron just keep bringing it. How do they even
think of these things? This time they tackle motion sickness.

Speaker 2 (12:29):
Just to go along with that MFM animator Right, tell
me everything from boats to planes to the world's grossest
historical cures.

Speaker 3 (12:35):
Yes, they break down why our brains and bodies completely
betray us and me while traveling.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Because you take three pills instead of half.

Speaker 2 (12:44):
And on this week's That's Messed Up, Karen Lisa recap
episode eighteen from season seven of Law and Order Resview
entitled Venom, and their special guest this week is Joe
Graffi SI.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
Plus over on Ghosted Roz is joined by drag queen
and comedian Juno Birch.

Speaker 2 (13:01):
And then just really Quick Over in the merch corner,
the fan favorite married joggers Fuck you, I'm married or
officially back just in time for wedding seasons.

Speaker 3 (13:09):
Right, grab a pair for yourself, your partner, or your
favorite legally bound murdering no at exactly rightstore dot com
and don't forget you can watch brand new episodes of
my favorite Murder and Buried Bones every week on freakin' Netflix.

Speaker 1 (13:23):
Here we are. Have you seen yourself?

Speaker 3 (13:24):
Have you like been scrolling and just suddenly there's your
face or there's last podcast on the Lift Faces.

Speaker 2 (13:30):
I came home to my own face because while I
was away, my dog sitter put on the podcast video
for the dogs, Oh my God, right, to see if
it would help dogs it.

Speaker 3 (13:41):
We put on reggae because we heard that dogs like
chill out reggae. Yeah, but I should put my own
fucking voice on all theough Cookie lopspins more than me,
so we should put on his podcast.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah that's right. She's gonna be like this bitch is
still here? Where's my reggae? What to do? Tell Bob Marley?

Speaker 2 (13:59):
Okay your first?

Speaker 1 (14:00):
I was first?

Speaker 3 (14:00):
And wow, okay, so I've been studying up until, like
while I put my makeup on, to the minute that
I left the house. When we were in high school,
we spent a day or two in history class learning
about Vietnam, right.

Speaker 1 (14:15):
Like, yes, the basics, sure breezed over it, moved on
for their lives.

Speaker 3 (14:19):
This isn't It sounds like a brag, but it's not
so I was really into the band Dead Kennedy's, and
because of that, they sing about a lot of historical stuff.
So I was really into that van and then I
would go look up the things they were singing about,
and one of those things pot exactly. I literally was like, Mom,
what's poll pot? Yeap turns out and the song is
called Holiday in Cambodia, So I learned a bunch about it.

(14:40):
I was really into Vietnam. I read the book The
Killing Fields, watched the movie, and.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Through the Dead Kennedy's music, basically they kind of like
made you go, what is this about?

Speaker 1 (14:49):
Why would they be singing exactly that?

Speaker 3 (14:51):
I mean, they also have a song about them who
was shot in San Francisco, Oh, Harvey Milk, Like they
just you learn about shit you wouldn't know. So pullpot Cambodia.
Let's start here. Okay, It's a Sunday in late February
nineteen ninety six, and we're in Los Angeles' Chinatown. It's
about eight forty five PM, and residents here something that

(15:14):
sounds like firecrackers then make a horrifying discovery in the
garage of a small apartment building. Neighbors find the body
of a beloved fixture in Los Angeles's Cambodian community and
in the Cambodian community worldwide. He had been shot getting
out of his car and what police will ultimately decide
was a robbery gone wrong, but this will remain up

(15:35):
for debate. The reason for this is that the man
who had been killed had been a vocal critic of
Cambodia's government and a survivor of the genocidal Pullpot regime.
And just to give you some numbers, that led to
the deaths of an estimated one point five to three
million people, which was a quarter.

Speaker 1 (15:52):
Of the country's population. Wow.

Speaker 3 (15:54):
This man had been a doctor, a forced laborer, a refugee,
a community advocate, and in a surprise turn, an Oscar
winning actor. In fact, he was the first person of
Asian heritage to win the award.

Speaker 1 (16:08):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (16:08):
May is AAPI Heritage month, and this is the story
the amazing life, brave actions and tragic death of Hang Noir.

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
The main source for the story is a documentary called
The Killing Fields of Doctor Hang s Nore fucking can't
recommend it enough. It tells you so much information. Also,
you should watch The Killing Fields. It's incredible. He plays
the Cambodian journalist, right, and you know what I'm talking about,
like the main character basically.

Speaker 1 (16:34):
So the rest of the sources.

Speaker 3 (16:35):
Can be found in the show notes. I've been wanting
to do this story for so long, but I just
wanted to make sure I did it right. And I
really want to thank Ali Elkin, my researcher, for doing
such an incredible job of putting this together for me.
Nice Hang Noor is born into a reasonably well to
do family in Cambodia. His father has several agricultural businesses,
owning both rice fields and lumber yards. He's born in

(16:57):
nineteen forty and his family lives in the country side,
so they are just living this traditional life that their
families have for generations in the agricultural business. They're not
really far out from Panampen, the capital city, but their
life is just kind of a peaceful, everyday life. For
all of Hag's life, there is some degree of political
unrest in Cambodia, and all of it is stirred up

(17:20):
to varying extents by Western colonialism. So he's born under
French colonial rule in a land that is still called
at the time French Indo China, which also includes modern
day Laos and Vietnam, and throughout his childhood there's a
gorilla effort to overthrow the French colonizers. Hag's family at
times is caught up in the middle of this. His

(17:41):
parents had been kidnapped for ransom by corrupt members of
both sides of this conflict on multiple occasions.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
So that's what everyday life is like.

Speaker 2 (17:50):
Multiple kidnapping, yes, horrifing.

Speaker 3 (17:52):
Part of the reason for this is that Hag's father
is ethnically Chinese and his mother is part of the
Cambodian ethnic majority, which is the Kumayr, so they are
each victimized in turn for different reasons. But this is
ultimately a low level inconvenience in comparison to what happens
later in Cambodia's history. As a teenager, Hag moves to
PanAm Penn to try to shelter from all this unrest

(18:14):
in the countryside. He's very, very smart, like top of
his class. He eventually goes to medical school and while
he's there he meets a fellow student named Hoy and
she's training to become a teacher and they fall in love.
This is so truncated. Yeah, the documentary is incredible. Hang
becomes a gynocologist, and in this time period, Cambodia becomes
independent and under the leadership of a monarch who then

(18:37):
becomes an elected leader. And at the same time, in
the late sixties and early seventies, the Vietnam War begins
and eventually the United States conducts a brutal bombing campaign
on parts of Cambodia along the border with Vietnam. And
so Ali added this famous quote in the research from
Anthony Bourdain that says, quote, once you've been to Cambodia,

(19:00):
you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death
with your bare hands. You will never again be able
to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating,
murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie
Rose or attending some black tie affair for a new
glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did to Cambodia,

(19:22):
the fruits of his genius for statesmanship, and you will
never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at
the Hague next to Melosovich.

Speaker 1 (19:30):
End quote. As in fucking War crimes.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
Everybody knows this already, but I just want to say
it again, the loss of a mind and a spirit
like Anthony Bourdain, where he is a speaker of truth
to power in that way. There's not enough guys like
that anymore, where they're like no, fuck you and the
Truth times twenty.

Speaker 1 (19:49):
Yeah, like this might hurt my career.

Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, but I'm actually Pallas, this is actually yes, exactly,
this is what we're supposed to be doing here totally.
Why are we pretending that this isn't discussed exactly? So
thank you to Ali for including that.

Speaker 3 (20:03):
So with this in the background in nineteen seventy, when
Hayng is thirty years old and a practicing physician, and
he just has this like kind of normal life. He's
got friends, he's got family, he's got this girlfriend he loves,
he's a doctor. He has this mentality that everything is
fine and the warring is going to come to a truce,
and like so many people, just pretends like it's not

(20:26):
going to affect him and doesn't pay attention to it
at all. At this place, this is when Cambodia's government
is overthrown in a coup. So Cambodia's prime minister is
a man named Noro Dum Sianak, and he had originally
been appointed king by the French and then led Cambodia
to independence and abdicated his position. Then was elected by

(20:48):
an overwhelming majority, so people seem pretty happy with this,
But then he goes out of town and there is
a coup that is orchestrated by two government officials who
are his opponents, and they only had support from a
small minority of Cambodian elites, but some believe they were
aided by the Americans, probably true. So these officials take over.

(21:10):
They allow the Americans to invade the southern border with
Vietnam to force out North Vietnamese fighters, and the influx
of American money into Cambodia ushers in a time of
prosperity for some, including Hang's father, who buys a second
lumber mill. But in the countryside, poor and more rural
Cambodians are coalescing their support around Sianak, now in exile

(21:33):
in China, who has always been He'd always been beloved.
People believed that he was appointed by God or that
he was a god and behind this unlikely ally to
the countryside and poorer Cambodians is the leader of Cambodia's
communist party Polpot.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
Here we are here, we are okay.

Speaker 3 (21:50):
This group becomes the Kumer Rouge. They are actually ethnically
Kumer and then Rouge I think means red, right, so
red is communists.

Speaker 1 (21:59):
Hey.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
So in nineteen seventy five, the Khmer Rouge, under the
leadership of Polepot but with the encouragement of Sianak, marches
into PanAm Pen and deposes the new government.

Speaker 1 (22:11):
They take over.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
The regular Cambodians who are there are kind of rejoicing,
thinking that finally the Kumar Rouge are going to bring
some kind of peace and normality, and quickly learn that's
not true. It's a big part of the movie The
Killing Fields.

Speaker 1 (22:25):
Right.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
So, the Kumer Rouge launch a new ultra authoritarian communist
regime that they nickname Year zero, like shit is over.
Everything you thought you knew done gone. The idea is
that the country is starting from scratch and educated people
and professionals are specifically targeted to be killed or imprisoned.

(22:46):
So it basically comes this ultra ultra communist country and lifestyle.
All private property is outlawed, every aspect of life is
dictated by the pullpot regime.

Speaker 1 (22:56):
There's no such thing as private property. There's no money.

Speaker 3 (22:59):
You can't even have your own cooking utensils and make
yourself food. You have to eat in the big groups
because everyone is equal. You can't wear glasses. Husbands and
wives are separated, children are separated. It's just becomes this prism. Yeah,
there's no money, there are no clocks or calendars. Citizens
are just assigned to labor details and non Khmers especially

(23:23):
become forced laborers, so they're all sent out of the
big cities back into the countryside to work. When Ali
wrote note to Georgia, it feels important to mention that
this vision of communism is often used as a reason
why we shouldn't have any kind of socialized systems like healthcare.
But this is authoritarianism, and whenever it's ideology is communist

(23:43):
or fascist, it can result in similar violence and wiping
out of civil liberties.

Speaker 1 (23:48):
Yeah, so thank you Ali for noting that.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, you put authoritarianism on really anything, right, and it
turns into the exact same thing.

Speaker 3 (23:56):
So when all of this have begun, as I said,
Hang is a doctor at that moment that everything gets changed.
He is operating on a patient when the Khmer rouge
storm the clinic that he's in. One operative holds a
gun to his head and asks him if he is
the attending physician, which he is, but as I said,
and he educated professionals are wiped out, so he lies

(24:19):
and says the attending had just stepped out of the room,
essentially posing as a lower level clinic staffer, which saves
his life. He can't tell anyone he's a doctor. He's
then caught up in a force evacuation from phenomen Pen
and is separated from his girlfriend Hooi and his family
separated from everyone, so Hang lies about being a doctor.
Since educated people are automatically just being killed, Hang, like

(24:43):
most other people, is assigned to an agricultural labor detail
in which he is required to push.

Speaker 1 (24:48):
A plow through fields. That is a job that livestock would.

Speaker 3 (24:52):
Have primarily done, and they just put people on the
oxen cart to push through the fields.

Speaker 1 (24:58):
They turned the whole country in to slave labor. Slave labor. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (25:02):
During this period, between one point five and three million
people are killed in Cambodia through execution, starvation, and disease.
Hanging is tortured on multiple occasions, usually for stealing food
because he's starving. On one occasion, he's tied to a
tree overnight and he's bitten all over his body by
red ants. And on another occasion, he and multiple other

(25:22):
force laborers are put on crucifixes with their bare feet
over smoldering fires, and he watches as a pregnant woman
who is being punished the same way die while this
is happening. And in the documentary he is interviewed in
the States about what happened, what was that was like,
and he gets into some really gory details in front
of this audience and it's just horrible. But it's so

(25:45):
incredible that he is brave enough to tell the awful
things that they did.

Speaker 2 (25:48):
To people when they're being punished like this, What was
the justification?

Speaker 1 (25:52):
Do you know?

Speaker 2 (25:53):
Like, what was the point of putting those people up
on crucifixes?

Speaker 3 (25:56):
Well, they stole food. This is your punishment. But this
is awesome. So a lesson of everybody, everyone that this
is what happens because everyone is equal, they get the
same amount of food. If you're stealing food, you think
you're better than the government, you think you know more.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
You're punished crucifixion.

Speaker 3 (26:12):
Yeah, Hang eventually does reunite with Hoy, who becomes pregnant.
There's already not enough food to sustain someone who isn't pregnant,
and Hoi begins to starve. When she's seven months along,
she goes into early labor, and obviously there's no way
to get her any kind of medical attention, and there's
no medicine, there's no equipment.

Speaker 1 (26:33):
And here's the thing.

Speaker 3 (26:34):
Hang is a trained gynecologist, and he could have operated
attempted to save her, though he has no safe tools
or medicine, but the operation would likely kill her. He
knew that she was going to die either way. If
he attempted to save her, he would out himself as
a doctor, so he couldn't do anything. And Hoi dies

(26:58):
in his arms, and the baby dies too. After Hoy dies,
Hang actively tries to get killed.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
He just does a fucking I mean, the guilt, the
horror of that, Like when you're in a survival situation
like that and you're just having to make these calls
that are beyond and.

Speaker 3 (27:14):
I feel like there's so many people, Like when we
learn about Vietnam and Cambodia, it's like that's what their
lives were like always, they were used to it, and
I think people need to remember that that's not the case,
like that it's the exact same thing, is if that
sorted happened to us right now, like the horror that
if you saw a pregnant woman being tortured is it's
not like you've been seeing that since you're a child.

(27:34):
You're used to it, which I think is sometimes the
justification in people's minds that it's like not as bad somehow.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
I feel like anytime that is what's coming out of
your mouth.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Right, that's what?

Speaker 2 (27:44):
Yeah, yeah, Toulate, what are you talking about?

Speaker 1 (27:46):
What are you talking about? That?

Speaker 2 (27:47):
And also just the oppression, that level of extreme and
just like oppression as far as the eye can see,
is such a hopeless, horrible situation.

Speaker 1 (27:56):
To be in.

Speaker 3 (27:56):
I really don't think I would try to survive. I
really don't think I would. I mean, I've thought about
it so many times with like you know, the Holocaust too,
It's like I don't think i'd be walking.

Speaker 1 (28:05):
I think i'd be Well, you say that, right, that's true.

Speaker 2 (28:08):
You say that, But then remember the guy that basically
ran away from the Nazis and had to keep running
for like four months or something like. That's a human
survival instinct. That's what you do. And if you can
get away, you do get away, and then you keep
going and then you build from there, and then you
get used to being scared, and then you help other
people that are scared. And I mean that's what every

(28:29):
immigrant story really is.

Speaker 1 (28:31):
Seriously, you don't let them win.

Speaker 2 (28:32):
Yeah, you go through the real shit and then you
come back and help other people go through shit. Right,
that's very, very dismissive of an experience. I'm two generations
away from yeah, and have no idea in terms of
what you are talking about. It is like, it's unbelievable.

Speaker 1 (28:49):
You know it is.

Speaker 3 (28:49):
This is going to sound so corny, but like generational trauma, right,
we all know that's a thing that's passed down, But
the fact that we're alive means there was also generational
like hutzpah, Yeah, meaning as they were traumatized, they stayed
alive and kept living and lived long enough to fall
in love and have children. And that's why we're alive.

(29:09):
So we have generational trauma for sure, Yeah, but we
also have whatever the fuck it was the chritzbah that
kept them alive and.

Speaker 2 (29:17):
A perfect source of real gratitude.

Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, for every day so Hoy dies and Hang is
over life. He steals food at every opportunity, just trying
to get killed, essentially, but somehow he makes it until
nineteen seventy eight when the Vietnamese invade Cambodia. This sets
off a decade of warfare between the Kumar Rouge and
the Vietnamese. Now that there's the chaos of fighting to

(29:41):
distract the Kumer Rouge, Hang has an opportunity to escape
with a large group. He travels to the Thailand border.
Out of the two hundred people that escape with his group,
only seventeen people make it alive across the Thai border.
The only living relative or person he knows at that
point is his young niece named Sofia, and they escape together.

(30:03):
Once in Bangkok, Hang works as a volunteer doctor at
a refugee camp. So despite all of these fucking horrors
that he's gone through, all this PTSD, he still becomes
He could just doesn't have to do anything but survive,
but instead he volunteers to be a doctor at this
refugee camp.

Speaker 2 (30:18):
I bet you there's a part of him that was
just like, I finally get to.

Speaker 1 (30:21):
Be a doctor, what I'm made for.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
My skills, and like, actually do something about this horror
that I'm surrounded by.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
Totally, Hang takes the only thing he has is a
photo of Hoy, and when he escapes, he has it
professionally colorized and puts it into a custom gold locket
wears that around his neck so she can be close
to his heart at all times. And then he and
his young niece, Sofia move to the United States. So
Hang and Sofia, who's a teenager, now settle in Los

(30:52):
Angeles in nineteen eighty, almost their entire family, in addition
to Hoy had been killed by the Kumer Rouge. He
trained to take his board so that he can practice
medicine and works as a volunteer with refugees. So right
around this time, and this is just he could have
lived the rest of his life out like that, but
for some reason, fate intervened and this Banana's thing happens

(31:14):
to him. Right around the same time, director Ronald Joffey
is preparing to make the film The Killing Fields. It's
based on the true accounts of two journalists, one a
Cambodian named derth Pran and one an American named Sidney Shanberg,
and they had written the book The Killing Fields. And
so the casting director, Pat Golden is working really hard

(31:34):
to find the perfect person to play diff and hasn't
had any luck. So she somehow finagls her way into
a Cambodian wedding in order.

Speaker 1 (31:44):
To scout for her actor brilliant.

Speaker 3 (31:47):
Uh huh, And this is where she discovers Hang and
he is just seems like a really charming, happy person.
He's smiling and laughing a lot despite everything that happened
to him. He's very outgoing and gregarious. He says when
he was a kid, he was hyperactive, and he's just
really likable, and so something about him catches her eye.
It had never crossed Haang's mind to be an actor

(32:09):
in Cambodia at the time, actors are not particularly well
paid or respected. But he decides to go on an
audition and just have a good time with it. He's like,
here's a weird opportunity to have in my life.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Let's do it. And there's a video of his audition and.

Speaker 2 (32:23):
A man is a survivor of concentration camp. Right, He's
just like.

Speaker 3 (32:27):
Sure, yes, and he blows everyone away with his raw emotion.
And when you watch the documentary and you watch this audition,
you completely get it and you see that what he
did is just took himself back to his actual pain
and the actual things he experienced of the story that
he is telling in this movie. It wasn't a hard

(32:47):
stretch for him. Yeah, and he's able to do it.
And so he's cast in the movie along with Sam
Waterston our Law and Order.

Speaker 2 (32:54):
You know, the greatest man, the greatest actor ever to live,
the greatest man ever to live.

Speaker 1 (32:58):
Here's a photo of them from the Killing Fields. Look
at a young Samwise. I often, I know, damn.

Speaker 3 (33:06):
Ma, it's such an incredible movie, Like I get Full
Metal Jacket, but this is the movie that you should watch.

Speaker 2 (33:11):
Also, just looking at his face. He had to go
to a reenactment of a thing he actually lived through.

Speaker 3 (33:17):
Totally, and he just said he channeled it the whole time.
And also he was telling them what it was really
like the whole time.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (33:23):
On set, Hang has that same access to all his
very real emotions and experiences, and he's able to consult
with the actors who hadn't had direct experiences with the
Kumaer Rouge. When the movie comes out in nineteen eighty four,
it bears the brutal truth of the Kumaer Rouge regime
to the world, and Hang is considered a front runner
for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar and you know who

(33:46):
he beat for Best Supporting Actor, somebody like Robert Duval
John Malkovich.

Speaker 1 (33:52):
Oh, she was also in this movie.

Speaker 3 (33:54):
Oh but John Malkovich like one of the greatest trained
actors of all time, and he went. And so that
year's Oscars are held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, which
is downtown, and Hang and Sophia live in Chinatown, so
they're like able to see where they're.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Thinking, walk home, change their clothes.

Speaker 3 (34:13):
They are not in Beverly fucking Hills or Brentwood, Yes,
so they vastly underestimate how long it's going to take
them to get there in oscar traffic because they're like,
it's five minutes away, it won't take us long. They
just barely make it on time. And they didn't realize
that the Supporting Actor Award is the first presented award
that night, So when they're announcing the nominees, they have
to put a photo of him up because he's not

(34:34):
even in his seat yet, like they can't pand.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
His seat literally that late.

Speaker 3 (34:38):
And as he's walking in, his name gets called and
he walks straight in and up to the fucking podium
and gives like the speech will make you cry.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
It's so beautiful.

Speaker 3 (34:47):
Here's a photo of him winning. Oh, it's just such
a beautiful moment. You can tell he's so tumbled by
this opportunity to show what happened to his people.

Speaker 2 (34:58):
Yeah, and it's such a representative of like the Oscars
is the world kind of right, and so then it's
like underworld's good.

Speaker 1 (35:05):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:06):
And he brought his niece along. I think she was
fifteen at the time, and she was a tomboy and
he said to her, you need to get a dress,
and she's like, I don't want.

Speaker 1 (35:13):
To do this. She goes. Anyways, she's in the documentary.

Speaker 3 (35:17):
So in his acceptance speech, he says, quote, this is unbelievable,
but so is my entire life. I wish to thank
all members of the Motion Picture Academy for this great honor.
I think David Putnam, Roland Joffe for giving me this
chance to act for the first time in The Killing Fields.
And I share this award to my friend Sam Watterson,
Dith Pran, Sydney Shamberg, and also Pat Golden, the casting

(35:37):
lady who found me for this role. And I think
Warner Brothers for helping me tell the story to the world,
let the world know what happened in my country. And
I thank God Buddha that tonight I'm even here, I'm
not giving it what it deserves.

Speaker 2 (35:50):
Well, you're not supposed to do it, That's okay, I
feel that, Oh no, But I mean just everything about
that is such a especially back then when it was
like the time of our tours. And I mean I
remember seeing The Killing Fields on Siskel and Ebert on
the weekend because of course my parents always watched that,
where I was like, oh, that's heavy.

Speaker 1 (36:09):
I don't think I could watch that whatever.

Speaker 2 (36:11):
I'm always like yeah, And that took over the zeitgeist
essentially that year, and everyone paid attention totally.

Speaker 3 (36:18):
I mean, there were so many incredible movies coming out
at the time, so the fact that it broke through
was really says a lot.

Speaker 1 (36:23):
About all of it.

Speaker 2 (36:25):
Go to hell, John Malkovich, and that's our message this podcast.

Speaker 1 (36:30):
There's a me message. Oh my god, Johnood, we love you.

Speaker 3 (36:34):
He's not here. He's not here, so mad. Yeah, but
our friend was going to tell him. I'm sure they're
from Paul. He's got to be friends with the fucking.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
Those powerful character actors that know each other.

Speaker 1 (36:45):
Yeah, they must come on.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
Okay, So Hayk gets more roles, but he also really
dedicates himself to telling the world what happened in his country.
He uses his famed get the message and goes on
a lot of like talk shows. At this point in
the late eighties and through the nineties, no one from
the Khmer Rouge has been punished, and their predecessors continue
to hold power in the Cambodian government, though the extreme
and genocidal policies have been walked back a bit. Polpot

(37:10):
goes into hiding. Hank testifies before Congress about his experiences
and is an extremely outspoken critic of the Cambodian government
and one speaking engagement. He notes the brutality portrayed in
the Killing Fields, then saying, quote, the killing fields isn't
bad enough, suffering enough, bloody enough end quote. He does
this work prolifically through the first half of the nineties,

(37:33):
he's actively speaking out against the current Cambodian government, which
again has vestiges of the old Kumer Rouge. In the
wake of the fall of Western Communism, Cambodia is in
a period of transition with some unrest, though nothing like
what he had seen, and Sianok is still influential and
somehow evades blame for the Kumer Rouge, even though he

(37:56):
had lent.

Speaker 1 (37:57):
His support to it.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
So this brings us back to the night that Hang
is killed outside his Los Angeles apartment building in nineteen
ninety six, and this is like I remember hearing about
this and it's just he's what the things he survived
that will never understand and he comes to it's just
like I remember feeling shame that we did this to

(38:19):
him after what he survived, Like our country, my city
did this to him, you know. So Hang had been
shot and he's found lying next to his car with
his Rolex watch missing, but there's twenty nine hundred dollars
in cash undisturbed in his car, and the immedia impression
in the news and among Hang's neighbors is that he

(38:39):
had been targeted by allies of the Cambodian government because
of his outspoken criticism. They immediately knew he was trying
to be silenced. Other people raise the possibility that organized
crime could be involved, since Hang had several business interests
in Cambodia, including his family lumber yard.

Speaker 1 (38:55):
Which he still had. So it's a surprise to.

Speaker 3 (38:57):
Everyone when three young men, all Asian American and all
affiliated with a gang are charged with Hang's murder. All
three men maintained that they had been about a mile
away at the time of Hag's death.

Speaker 1 (39:09):
At trial, prosecutors.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Say that the men had demanded Hang's locket with the
picture of Hoy in it, that he still wore, and
that he had refused to give it up, and this
is why they killed him. That was the prosecution's story.
People take issue with its argument because Hans's pockets were
thought to have been undisturbed and there's twenty nine hundred
dollars left in his car. All three men are found

(39:31):
guilty on April eighteenth, nineteen ninety eight, the same day
Pole Pot dies in exile in the jungle on the
Thai Cambodian border.

Speaker 1 (39:40):
Wow Yeah. After Hang's death, Dith Pran, the journalist upon
whose story The Killing Fields is based, says quote, he's
like a twin with me.

Speaker 3 (39:48):
He's my co messenger and right now I'm alone.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
End quote.

Speaker 3 (39:52):
There are no trials from members of the Khmer Rouge
until the early twenty tens, when the UN holds them
alongside the chem Bodian government. Three high ranking officials are
sentenced to life in prison. During one of these trials,
the official says that Hang Nor's murder had been ordered
by the Kumer Rouge as retribution for his speaking out

(40:14):
against the regime. An organization called the Innocent Center has
taken up the case of one of the three men
who had been convicted of his murder. After the release
of The Killing Fields, hang had said quote, if I
die from now on, okay, this film will go on
for a hundred years.

Speaker 1 (40:31):
And that is the story of the.

Speaker 3 (40:33):
Life and legend of Cambodian American truth teller and hero
Hang Nor.

Speaker 1 (40:38):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (40:39):
I know, I almost did it at our LA live show,
but I was like, it's too heavy.

Speaker 2 (40:45):
It's so heavy, I mean, but it's incredible. It's like
that's what makes it like all of that, and then
you walk straight into the oscars and win. What a
life beyond.

Speaker 3 (40:55):
I mean, what an incredible life, and what a strong
and what.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
A great example for Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage month.

Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yes, I mean it is though it is.

Speaker 2 (41:09):
That's a great example of someone who's been through an
absolute governmental nightmare, basically the fabric of reality falling apart
around him, trying to just dying and losing everything, dying,
being murdered, being murdered, and then being an immigrant where
he just builds and builds and builds and builds and

(41:30):
then comes back to do something about.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
It, totally doesn't just move on with his life. Incredible. Yeah,
So hang Nor.

Speaker 2 (41:40):
Well, we are going to take a left turn. Please,
I don't want to surprise you. But this is also
based on the Dead Kennedy song. That's not true at all,
and it's actually maybe the complete other end of the spectrum.
This story is the main story. If you were a
kid in the nineties and in elementary school a teacher

(42:00):
read you a book about a family of pioneers.

Speaker 1 (42:03):
Christiane bears close.

Speaker 2 (42:06):
It's called Apples to Oregon by a writer named Deborah Hopkinson,
and it follows an eighteen hundred's Midwestern family in their
westward journey, and it is loosely based on the life
of a successful horticulturalist who's also known as the Johnny
apple Seed of the West. Oh yeah, there's the story
of his life. After all his pioneering days were over

(42:26):
and his fruit trees were planted, he went into a
different branch of life. He attempted to start what's been
described as a doomed Quaker sex cult. Oh dear, this
is the story of horticulturalist Henderson Llewelling. Okay, are you ready?

Speaker 1 (42:43):
I'm so ready, Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Main sources used for today's story are reporting by Finn J. D.
John from the Offbeat Oregon website, writing by Heather Arn't
Anderson from Portland Monthly, and archival editions of the Iowa
Journal of History and the Sacramento b your favorite newspaper.
And the rest of the sources are in our show notes.

(43:04):
So Henderson Lewelling's story begins in eighteen oh nine when
he is born to a Quaker family in North Carolina.
So this is one of those eighteen hundred stories that
there's spotty reporting on some stuff. It's back far enough
that it's like we're pretty sure that he blank blanklink.
There's a lot of that kind of storytelling historic. It's

(43:25):
very prehistoric in that it is like pioneer era life, right.
Not a lot of when you're out on the prairie
fighting for your life. Not a lot of diary keeping,
not a lot of daily there's not a lot of journaling.

Speaker 1 (43:38):
A lot of sources to find the truth.

Speaker 2 (43:41):
We needed more scrap booking back then.

Speaker 1 (43:43):
Definitely we're blogging.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Oh my god, just ofvlogging on a nice stone outside
of town, down by the river.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (43:51):
So, when Henderson is in his teens, he and his
family and many other Southern Quakers moved to Indiana, likely
influenced by the Quaker community growing opposition to slavery, so
they wanted to get out of the South. And when
they moved to Indiana, Henderson's father opens a nursery and
he and his brothers help run. It's the family business.

(44:11):
He helps run it. He will later marry another Carolina
born Quaker, her name is Elizabeth Presnell, and when he's
in his twenties, Henderson opens his own nursery. So this
is a story for Janet. Oh my god, my mom
in love with this. She loves horticultures, such a horticulture
in the eighteen thirties. When Henderson is in his thirties

(44:32):
because he was born around eighteen hundred, he moves west
again to eastern Iowa. So this is after the Blackhawk War,
and the federal government had forcibly removed both the Sock
and the Fox tribes from their land, and now they
were actively encouraging white settlers to come and basically settle
that land by selling it to them for next to nothing.

(44:55):
So the Llewellings benefit from that and they settle in Salem,
Iowa again. Henderson opens a nursery. He offers high quality
seedlings and grafted trees. So I know you know this
because your Danet's daughter. But grafting is when you take
the roots from a strong tree and you attach them
to the shoot or a bud from another tree so

(45:18):
that the produce is really good fruit. Your Frankensteining fruit trees.
Essentially got it. It's what you did all summer, every summer.
So as more settlers arrive in Salem, virtually all of
them become Henderson's customers, because this is basically like they're
settling this land and planting it, and he brilliantly or
you know whether or not it was intentional. He's in

(45:39):
this business that is always needed, like, no matter what,
there's a demand for basically being able to grow your
own food. So Henderson's grafted trees reliably generate so many cherries, apples, pears,
plums and peaches that, per one source quote, the local
market could not absorb the yield.

Speaker 1 (45:58):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (45:59):
So he's making it possible for everybody to live large.
So his business is a massive success, and he and
Elizabeth take this prosperity and they invest it into their home,
but not in the way that you would think, not
the usual pioneer luxuries red velvet curtains and soap. Instead,
they build trapdoors and hiding places and then offer it

(46:20):
as a stop on the underground railroad.

Speaker 1 (46:22):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
Because they are Quakers. Today that house is on the
National Register of Historical Places. The problem is that when
Lee Wellings Church learns that they are doing this for
the people searching for freedom that way, they do not
approve of it. Very Joel Osteen of them. So Henderson
decides that he's going to leave that church and start

(46:45):
his own church that is more full throated in its
condemnation of slavery. So at some point in the eighteen forties,
he opens the doors to his new place called Anti
Slavery Friends.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
That's what he names his church.

Speaker 2 (46:58):
Straightforward, just like with the banner right over the front door,
people will come, and they did so. Now he has
a successful business, he has a happy family, and he
has the glowing respect of his community.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
But he wants more, as they always do, so he
literally guys, guys, stop it.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
They can't help it, especially if they read pamphlets, which
was the vlogging of the pioneer days. So Henderson reads
some pamphlets about the Lewis and Clark expedition that went
from eighteen oh four to eighteen oh six. I say,
as if I knew that, and he finds it all
very romantic, the adventure and the discovery. More importantly, he

(47:36):
learns that despite the fact that the Pacific Northwest has
very fertile land, it doesn't have a variety of high
quality fruit trees growing there. So instead of settling into
the life that he's built in Iowa, he starts thinking
about starting it all over again in the Pacific Northwest.
No one can understand why he would want to give
up everything and start over in an unfamiliar place for

(47:59):
a third time. But to me, there's his trauma right there.
He now needs to keep on doing. Yeah, that's how
he's in control. But Henderson will tell a friend quote,
it makes no difference how much a man has around him.
If he is not satisfied, he will go off and
leave it. So in April of eighteen forty seven, thirty
nine year old Henderson and his wife and their eight children,

(48:20):
along with several other pioneering islands, set out in a
wagon train for the two thousand mile journey to Oregon.

Speaker 1 (48:27):
It's too many, and it's just a good things.

Speaker 3 (48:31):
It's just someone's pregnant and like just having the worst
time of her life.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
Keep going.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
And it's hot or it's cold, or it's middle You've
always got a bonad on always. So the Llewelling party
consists of four wagons total, but Henderson has filled one
of those wagons with seven hundred saplings and grafted trees
so he can start his new nursery in Oregon. Author
Heather Aren't Anderson writes, quote, it was an insane plan

(48:59):
with little chance of success. Everyone mocked him for it.
He did it anyway, those mockers. So the blue Willing
family makes the brutal westward journey across the Missouri River
over the Rocky Mountains. So they've got their pioneer wagon.
Some of these trees are stretching out of the Pioneer
wagging like four feet. It's so clunky and so bad

(49:21):
for that kind of travel. It requires constant upkeep. It's
also filled with soil, like the trees are planted in
back of the wagon, so it's incredibly heavy. There's genuine
concern that Henderson's oxen are going to give out under
this wagon's weight. Members of the wagon train repeatedly suggest
that he ditches nursery wagon.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
No, no, it's the whole point.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
It's the whole point. But else they're just like, come on,
come on, there's trees everywhere, which you have to admit.
It'd be like bringing a big wagon a dirt and
just be like, we have to bring this good dirt.
Is the dirt, This is the Iowa dirt. Henderson is committed,
and seven months, very long months after leaving Iowa and
no November of eighteen forty seven, the Llewellings finally arrive

(50:04):
in oregons will Lammett Valley. Against all odds, the trees
and saplings make it too.

Speaker 1 (50:09):
I've been there. It's so gorgeous, so beautiful.

Speaker 2 (50:12):
Yeah, that's where all the good stuff is.

Speaker 1 (50:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:14):
So they settle just south of Portland. Henderson immediately gets
to work clearing his property of the large fir trees
that are on it so that he can lay out
his nursery, which will end up being another huge success
and it will be the first grafted tree nursery on
the Pacific Coast. It seems like I'm really being an
arborist or something, and it's just part of this story

(50:36):
because I'm going to pretend like I am just super
into trees. Just pretend like that's always been my personality
all the way up until this point.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
Definitely, you're a tree in influencer. Yeah, everyone knows that.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
That's when you find out that I've been dating a
guy that's really into trees, and then suddenly I am too.

Speaker 1 (50:51):
That's so hot. Just a big tree guy, a lumberjack,
just so sort of a I don't.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
Know, landscaper of some kind. But point of all of
this is this man had a career. He also had
a very strong spiritual life. He was living in his
very settled ways in many ways, but then in eighteen
fifty one, his thirty five year old wife, Elizabeth, the
mother of his now ten children, dies of complications during

(51:17):
her eleventh pregnancy. So some speculate that this loss changes him,
with one Luwelling family historian writing quote, his life sort
of fell apart, and he was adrift without an anchor,
seeking for something to fill that void and never finding
it end quote. So Henderson Lewelling is grieving, but he
is also in the most prosperous era of his life,

(51:39):
producing and selling sought after trees that help build up
Portland's settler economy. But of course he wants more, and
that's when he learns it. Down in California's mining towns,
there's such a huge demand for reliable, high quality fruit
trees that people will pay one eighteen fifties dollars for
an apple tree seedling, but essentially today's seedlings in today's

(52:01):
twenty twenty six money costs ten dollars. Oh wow, So
that's how blowing, you know. It's just basically the seller's
market in the California mining towns. So Henderson is now
in his mid forties. He sells his Oregon business to
a family member, and he heads south in eighteen fifty four,
he winds up in the Bay Area and establishes a
major nursery that he names Fruitvale, in property that has

(52:24):
since been absorbed into the city of Oakland. You know
the Fruitvale Station, which is the infamous train station where
the shooting took place. So Fruitvale was a big part
of the city of Oakland's kind of establishment, and Henderson
is in the center of it, cultivating hundreds of thousands
of fruit trees, apricots, grapes, apples, cherries, all to be
planted throughout California. One write up notes, quote again, Henderson

(52:48):
was a no small measure responsible for the beginning of
the great fruit industry of another Pacific Coast state, an
industry which has brought more wealth to California than all
the gold the state has produced.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
I grew up in Orange County. I was aware of
it as a young child.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
I mean everywhere. And it's kind of funny because then
when you fly up to the Pacific Northwest, like one
of the first things you hear about are like the
Marion Berris or the you know, like all of that
and farmland that's in the Willammette Valley totally so once
he gets to California, though, Henderson kind of starts going
through a reinvention. He's perfectly middle aged, he's a widower,

(53:27):
he's been working his ass off all his life, and
he's been a Quaker. But now he's crossing paths with
radical thinkers, including people who are in his own Quaker community,
but that are now experimenting with new belief systems like
the utopian movement, which was the idea that a perfect
society could exist, or the free love movement, which posits

(53:50):
that marriage is oppressive and sexist and that sexual norms
should be looser, or the alternative health movements like vegetarianism,
where people fall for both health reasons and moral reasons,
or they moralized it. And of course it's the eighteen fifties,
so you got to have spiritualism, I was wondering. Yeah, yeah,

(54:10):
it's right in there, the belief that the living can
contact the debt. So there's a ton of overlap in
all these ideas. They're all zeitgeisty, particularly in the Bay Area,
which even then had a reputation for being open minded.
So it's easy to see why Llewelling finds all of
this to be appealing as a fierce abolitionist, the idea
of liberating people from unjust institutions is important to him,

(54:34):
and then the idea of personal liberation as a central
tenant in the free love movement. He's also kind of
a single guy out there, like, hey, what about what
if this was cool to the average pioneer. Vegetarianism might
seem weird, but it's a long held Quaker tradition, so
it's not weird to him. And of course Henderson would
embrace spiritualism while coping with the death of his wife,

(54:57):
and that is kind of the gateway to the broader
idea of utopia, where society and the self are things
that can be harmonized brought into harmony. But at that point,
this is where things go very far away from the
Johnny Appleseed kind of folk hero stuff and into stranger terrain.
Because now it's the late eighteen fifties, Henderson's in his

(55:18):
late forties. He either starts this group or he links
up with this San Francisco based group called the Harmonial Brotherhood,
and there are sources that say he started it, but
it isn't totally clear. But basically, there's no intricate day
and day out details of the Harmonial Brotherhood. But what
we do know is it's made up of about twenty people, men, women,

(55:40):
and children, and many of them come from Quaker backgrounds,
and now they subscribe to a blend of spiritualist, utopian
and free love beliefs just like him, fun right and plums.
So in the pursuit of personal quote harmony, they follow
strict vegetarian diet, they swear off caffeine, and they favor

(56:00):
spiritualism adjacent treatments of the day, like hydropathy, which is
basically baths, wraps, cold plunges.

Speaker 3 (56:08):
Honestly, it sounds way better than some of the movements
and religious fucking evangelicals from back then.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
Hell yes, it sounds like goop.

Speaker 1 (56:18):
I mean, am I wrong?

Speaker 2 (56:20):
Or they're definitely right about a lot of it and
kind of right headed about a lot of it.

Speaker 1 (56:26):
But what usually happens, you know, Jim Jones comes along.

Speaker 2 (56:30):
There's always someone with transition lenses is going to fucking
ruin your utopia. So the Brotherhood's hydropathy practitioner is a
man who is either a spiritualist preacher or a blacksmith,
depending on who you're reading, and he also was once
a circus performer, so he can do it all.

Speaker 1 (56:49):
Definitely.

Speaker 2 (56:50):
The one thing he's not trained as is a formal
medical physician, and yet he is referred to as doctor
Tyler or doctor T. And he's the one that the
water treatments are all coming from Doctor T. Okay, So
there's an idea that doctor T kind of started this
group because he's got all the treatments and the things
that he's as. They're spiritual together. He's the one that's like,

(57:11):
but I can actually lay some hands on and make
some changes.

Speaker 1 (57:14):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (57:14):
So the Brotherhood shares a dream of men and women
living as equals in a state of excellent physical and
spiritual health in a free love utopia, entering and exiting
relationships at will or as Heather aren't. Anderson, the writer
puts it quote an individual's rights to bang anyone they fancy.
She wrote that, yeah, because essentially that's what they're doing.

Speaker 1 (57:36):
Yeah, and doesn't sound like the worst life I've ever
heard on this podcast.

Speaker 2 (57:40):
No. And also at this time there were other US
based religious groups doing exactly the same thing. It's possible
that they heard about the Oneida community in upstate New York,
which was established in the eighteen forties and remained as
a utopian, freelove Christian sect for decades, famously manufacturing the
kitchen where you might have in your home.

Speaker 1 (58:00):
Right now, fucking right. You covered that right?

Speaker 2 (58:03):
No, actually I didn't, because Maren then writes note to
Karen Oneida could be fun to someday cover. Oh my god,
doing it dips. Okay, But as progressive as a place
like San Francisco can be, it's not remote or rural
upstate New York. And so the Brotherhood's values are far
too radical for the average.

Speaker 1 (58:21):
Joe down on Market Street.

Speaker 2 (58:23):
They realize that to live out their utopian vision, they're
going to have to go somewhere more isolated, no prying eyes,
where they can build their new society and peace. It's weird,
it is. It is like a footprint, like a blueprint
for Jim Jones.

Speaker 1 (58:35):
It follows the trajectory of a cult. Yeah yeah.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
And so this is where Henderson steps up and steps in.
He's the richest member of this brotherhood, and of course
he's willing to sink all of his fruit Tree money
into this cause. If you think about all the risks
he's taken He's completed multiple cross country trips and reinvented
himself like three times, so and it's always worked. Why
would he not think he could do this? So he

(59:01):
sells the bulk of his California business and pours his
money into a big schooner. He buys the boat himself,
and then he buys a fifty thousand acre sparsely populated
volcanic island off of Honduras, oh called Tiger Island.

Speaker 1 (59:16):
This is so jim, This is so yeah. People's downfall, Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
A lot of people are caught off guard by Henderson's
deep entanglement with the Harmonial Brotherhood, none more than his
new wife Mary, who's been kept out of the loop
on this whole Honduras Utopia plan from the beginning. She
is not invited. Oh so she's not in it and
she's not inviting. Yeah. Really, So, when she learns that

(59:44):
her husband is about to abandon her, knowing that she
will be left destitute, she tries to have him committed,
and that actually is phrased very like it's one to
the other. But there's also the chance she has been
living with this man who's increasingly wearing transition lenses inside
the house, and so she knows maybe something needs to
be done right.

Speaker 1 (01:00:03):
It might not just be because it might fee legit.

Speaker 2 (01:00:06):
Yeah exactly, she might not just be covering your ass.

Speaker 1 (01:00:09):
But we'll never know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:10):
And the thing is, the courts agree with her, and
the police are dispatched to go find him, but Henderson
is two steps ahead of everybody. He's gone into hiding
until October eighth, eighteen fifty nine, when the Harmonial Brotherhood
schooner sets stail out of San Francisco with nine male members,
five female ones, and six or seven children on board.

(01:00:31):
Good Bye bye, guys. But Henderson's not on board. He's
actually watching the schooner from shore, and once it sails
into the bay and then passes the place that the
Golden gate Bridge wants will be, he waits to see
if any boats come up and try to arrest anybody
on it. Once he sees that that doesn't happen, he
gets onto a smaller boat and under the cover of

(01:00:53):
midnight and moonlight, boards the schooner undetected.

Speaker 1 (01:00:57):
Out in the open ocean. Smart move.

Speaker 2 (01:01:00):
It's pretty cool or incredibly paranoid. So now they're sailing
for Honduras. The boats crewed by hired sailors, not members
of the Harmonial Brotherhood, and those sailors quickly realize this
is going to be a weird ride, and they will
later give statements. They're the reasons that we know what
is happening on this trip, and so their statements to

(01:01:20):
reporters shape what we know.

Speaker 1 (01:01:22):
Essentially.

Speaker 2 (01:01:22):
For example, living conditions on board are physically miserable, with
passengers eventually being quote more or less covered with vermin.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
Good.

Speaker 2 (01:01:31):
Maybe they didn't know how to stock the ship or
pack vegetables. They had so many vegetables. Yeah, Also, tensions
over food escalate very quickly because they're vegetarian. It's a
tough reality at sea. Their onboard diet consists mostly of
quote coarse flour apparently ground up with chaff, straw and all,
and very much resembling cattle feed. Chaff is that outer

(01:01:55):
husk that you sometimes get stuck in your teeth if.

Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
You eatal oh oatly Oh yeah ye the Odie parsh.

Speaker 2 (01:02:01):
Basically, they are starving on this ship. So then when
they stop at ports along the way, some members get
caught quote dietary cheating.

Speaker 1 (01:02:10):
Oh shit, give me that bacon exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:02:13):
Buying salted pork and game meat, because that's exactly what
I know for it's likely.

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
You get a big hunk of beef jerky, chew on
it for mil to night and just chewing on it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
The people who do this are caught red handed, and
then heated arguments break out among the brethren because not
only are you hoarding food, but it's against your beliefs.

Speaker 1 (01:02:32):
Yeah, and it's not hot.

Speaker 2 (01:02:34):
So the biggest rift on the ship about food is
known as the egg Boar, and it starts in Wahawka, Mexico,
when a merchant swindles both Doctor T and Henderson. His
colon involves eight chicken eggs. Basically, Henderson sees him with
the eggs, he runs up and says, I'll take all
of them. The seller sells him the eight eggs and

(01:02:54):
takes his money, and then Henderson runs away to go
get a container to put the eggs in. And while
he's away, Doctor T walks up and says, I want
all eight of those eggs, and the guy's like, sounds good.

Speaker 1 (01:03:03):
Bad communication, No communication.

Speaker 2 (01:03:05):
No communication. He sells them a second time and then
disappears when Henderson comes back with his handful of straw
or whatever it is that he found to carry the
eggs in, he sees Doctor T holding them and they
start fighting over which one of them actually owns these eggs.
We've all been there, sure, the Great egg War. But

(01:03:26):
with these guys, they can't just work it up. They
can't go like, ah, we both were scared swindled. This
is what it's like, you know, out on the open seas. Instead,
they resent each other for days, culminating in an all
hands meeting on the ship.

Speaker 1 (01:03:41):
They're little bitches, both of them.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
Yeah, And it's like everybody's fighting and it's ruining the
crews for the rest of us.

Speaker 1 (01:03:47):
It's really the vibe. The vibes are off.

Speaker 2 (01:03:50):
The vibes are so off. So they have a staff
meeting and all hands meeting on the Lido deck and
Henderson tells the group God wants him.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
To have the eggs. Oh settled. Who knew, dude?

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
They ever say that on Real Housewives? God wants me
to have the eggs. So this fight is over. But
apparently this works. Henderson winds up with the eggs, and
the only reason we believe it is because at this
same meeting, Doctor T vows to get revenge over eggs
over eggs. They haven't even landed on the island yet,

(01:04:20):
and things.

Speaker 1 (01:04:20):
Are that bad.

Speaker 2 (01:04:21):
So clearly the two vegetarian free love alpha males are
vying for control over the schooner and the spirit of
the group itself as they do as they seem to
always want to do. Doctor t is a blacksmith. Henderson
is a rich pioneer who will win. Lay your bets,
good luck players. It takes them several months to finally

(01:04:43):
arrive at Tiger Island. So several more months of that
life and that strife I have bars. So when the
schooner's crew is finally cut loose, they run to the reporters,
describing the journey as a free love Hell.

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
No such thing. You think those words wouldn't go together.

Speaker 3 (01:05:02):
But hey, and on a boat, and these are sailors.
It's the first swingers cruise.

Speaker 2 (01:05:07):
Oh and these sailors are just like the weight staff.
They're forced to stand by in the rented community.

Speaker 3 (01:05:15):
They know all the gossip because like they're just like
in the background of everything.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Yeah, oh my god.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Just not into it. They keep walking into the supply galley.
Everyone's fucking back there. Sorry, don't let your kids listen
to this episode, and they also document the hypocrisy among
the supposedly sexually liberated group members, mentioning a specific incident
in another port in Mexico where a male member of
the Brotherhood happens to end up at the same stream

(01:05:43):
where the female members are skinny dipping or bathing. I mean,
they have been on a boat for months, and Doctor
T shows up and becomes so irate that this other
man has just seen his wife naked that he quote
threatened to break every bone in his body unquote, so chill.
So the blacksmith turned water doctor seems like maybe not

(01:06:05):
always okay, or he's like me where when his blood
sugar gets low, he threatens to kill it.

Speaker 1 (01:06:10):
Which is the whole time they're starting.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
They can't have any sugar, okay. So now California papers
are running sneering articles on this harmonious brotherhood utopian journey.
They're clocking all of it. Meanwhile, on Tiger Island, the
gang is in rough shape. They're exhausted and they're depleted.
They just arrived. Now they have to build the infrastructure
needed to start like their little society. But immediately and

(01:06:37):
very sadly, something like malaria or yellow fever sweeps through
the camp and the terrible reality sets in for the
group that Doctor T's hydropathy treatments are no match for
real disease. One of the articles covering this will document
the death of a Brotherhood member identified only as Missus C,
which is so sad if you think Richie Cunningham's mother

(01:06:59):
dying this way, and they write quote, they took Missus
C while raging with the fever, wrapped her in a
wet blanket till she perspired profusely, and then threw cold
water over her. The speedy result was her death.

Speaker 1 (01:07:13):
And what a fuck shitty way to go.

Speaker 2 (01:07:16):
Horrible after months eating the worst oatmeal of all time.

Speaker 1 (01:07:22):
What was it all for? For real?

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
Just to dive far away from home. Two members of
the Harmonial Brotherhood died shortly after arriving at Tiger Islands
the sea and another as many as eight get sick,
including Henderson himself, but they recover. But there's only twenty
people on this ship, so morale is extraordinarily low. And
make matters worse, the egg related rift between Henderson and

(01:07:45):
Doctor T has not ended.

Speaker 1 (01:07:47):
Guys, let it go.

Speaker 2 (01:07:48):
We can't eggs eggs, precious eggs. Doctor T actually breaks
away from the main group with a few loyalists on
his side, and starts a rival utopian society. Me and
my two friends are out.

Speaker 1 (01:08:02):
Of here on the other side of the island with
our eggs.

Speaker 2 (01:08:04):
Literally they go, they move to another side of the island.
They don't get me eggs. So soon after doctor T
gets sick and dies himself. Oh so you can't. There's
no room to just be busting off and being mad
about eggs. The point is not the eggs.

Speaker 3 (01:08:19):
God has other plans for you when you're chief and
about eggs.

Speaker 1 (01:08:23):
Amen.

Speaker 2 (01:08:24):
Okay, so from here the information is spotty because, as
I told you, no one's keeping diaries. There are no
scrap books from Tiger Islands.

Speaker 1 (01:08:32):
Was like, I want to write down stuff. Well, and
this is actually dying.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
Yes, this is I got weird and high over eating
too many vegetables and like having sex whenever I wanted,
which seemed impossible. And now I'm in Honduras and I
don't know what's going on.

Speaker 3 (01:08:47):
Maybe my wife was right to put me in a
mental institution.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
Oops, maybe my water treatments don't actually work. This is
a musical Okay, it only took eight months for the
Harmonial Brotherhood's Free Love experiment on Tiger Island to implode.

Speaker 1 (01:09:04):
That's a long freaking time. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:09:09):
What we know for sure is that in July of
eighteen sixty, Henderson Lewelling commissions a crew to sail his
schooner back to California. After this, when the group gets back,
they disband for good.

Speaker 1 (01:09:19):
They seem to.

Speaker 2 (01:09:21):
The entire saga is extremely humiliating for all parties involved
because they went out, you know, of course, guns a
blazing of like, we're out of here. We are going
to We're going to figure it out.

Speaker 1 (01:09:32):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (01:09:32):
Things are going to be so much better at our
new life. And this is always what I bring up
in my argument against vegetarianism. Bring the bacon, Bring the bacon.
It's the old saying, bring the bacon, you won't fight
so much about the eggs.

Speaker 3 (01:09:45):
Also the yeah, because put your protein difference between the
fucking eggs and the bacon.

Speaker 1 (01:09:49):
Really it's a focus.

Speaker 2 (01:09:52):
It's the lens through which it's so humiliating that Henderson
Lewelling lives the rest of his life under a pseudonym.
Oh of his family meanwhile carry on his horticultural mantle
and continue producing popular crops on the Pacific Coast. His
brother Seth is particularly successful, becoming famous for cultivating the

(01:10:12):
bing cherry in the eighteen seventies.

Speaker 1 (01:10:15):
Yeah love that guy.

Speaker 2 (01:10:16):
Seth actually changes the spelling of his last name to
Lleuwelling L E W E.

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
L L I to get away from the like damn So.

Speaker 2 (01:10:25):
In eighteen seventy eight, while clearing land with a control
burn for a new nursery in San Jose, California, Henderson
Lewelling dies of a heart attack at the age of
sixty nine. So he was starting it all over yet
again in San Jose. This is a hard part to hear.
He's reportedly found quote partially roasted, with his clothes, beard,

(01:10:46):
and the land around him still smoldering.

Speaker 1 (01:10:49):
So he got caught on fire and had a heart
attack and died.

Speaker 2 (01:10:52):
He was control burning, had a heart attack, dropped to
the ground.

Speaker 1 (01:10:57):
Oh, and we're live control burn. I couldn't get away
from them.

Speaker 2 (01:11:01):
Hopefully he died, but let's say he died.

Speaker 1 (01:11:03):
Before their control burn. Oh God.

Speaker 2 (01:11:06):
In nineteen twenty nine, while musing on a sprout from
one of Henderson's Oregon cherry trees. A writer named O. A.
Garretson notes quote that this little cherry sprout originating at Salem, Iowa,
should withstand the risks of transportation across the continent, and
the hazards of frequent transplanting, and still live a towering
monument to commemorate the energy and enterprise of a Salem

(01:11:28):
pioneer is to the writer, a fact stranger than fiction.
And that's the story of the so called father of
the Pacific fruit industry and Dirty Bird Henderson Llewelling. Oh,
I didn't show you any fucking pictures.

Speaker 1 (01:11:44):
It was so that you had the images and the words.
I didn't need it. I have it all in my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
I want to see some of them. Here's the book
we were talking about.

Speaker 1 (01:11:53):
I think I read that as a kid.

Speaker 2 (01:11:55):
It seems so innocent. We'll just get ready, Okay, there.

Speaker 1 (01:12:01):
Is there is. There's a neck beard. Neckard.

Speaker 2 (01:12:05):
This is crazy.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
This is the season of Neckbeard's on my favorite murder.

Speaker 2 (01:12:09):
I guess this was like the Benson Boone mustache is today.
This neckbeard was in eighteen fifty.

Speaker 1 (01:12:15):
Because you look fine without it. What are you doing?
She's like you put some sheep's.

Speaker 2 (01:12:19):
Wool it's kind of quakery. I mean, this seems to
be the trend of the time.

Speaker 1 (01:12:24):
Okay. What else we got is that the schooner No
I was paturing like a yacht.

Speaker 2 (01:12:29):
That's Tiger Island.

Speaker 3 (01:12:30):
Great, Okay, there's the schooner.

Speaker 1 (01:12:33):
Yeah, that's more what I thought.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
Still, it's not big and you can only have like
really crunchy oatmeal rough. Okay, so not even big enough
for people to If the sailors from this boat are
complaining about a free love situation, that weird them out.
It's everywhere they were witnessing it front, back and center. Whoops. Okay,

(01:12:58):
oh that's Lammett Valley at value. I know the willam
at value when I'm looking at it.

Speaker 1 (01:13:02):
All right, Well that was great. Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
Yeah those are all these experiences you can have in life.

Speaker 3 (01:13:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:13:09):
I could go so many different ways.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
That's all we want people to remember, right, yesha, please
stop forgetting the variety of.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
Life and enjoy yours because.

Speaker 2 (01:13:19):
Life is like a bing cherry. Yeah, it's expensive, stay sexy,
I don't get.

Speaker 1 (01:13:26):
Goodbye, Elvis, do you want to cookie? This has been
an exactly right production.

Speaker 3 (01:13:38):
Our senior producer is Molly Smith, and our associate producer
is Tessa Hughes.

Speaker 2 (01:13:42):
Our editor is Aristotle Ascevedo.

Speaker 1 (01:13:44):
This episode was mixed by Leona Squalacci.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
Our researchers are Mary McGlashan and Ali Elkin.

Speaker 1 (01:13:49):
Email your hometowns to My Favorite Murder at gmail dot.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Com and follow the show on Instagram at my Favorite Murder.

Speaker 3 (01:13:54):
Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple
Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 (01:13:59):
And now you can watch My Favorite Murder on Netflix.

Speaker 1 (01:14:02):
And when you're there, hit the double thumbs up and
the remind Me buttons. That's the best way you can
support our show. Goodbye,

All Episodes

534 - Think About the Simulation

Episode Transcript

Hosts And Creators

Georgia Hardstark

Karen Kilgariff

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}534 - Think About the Simulation