Unknown Speaker 9

But I'm telling you something.

That's how you get 50% off.

Thicker than a bowl of oatmeal.

I lived most of my life in fear because my experience of having been assaulted as a kid set me up for being afraid and not trusting in people, places or things. And it wasn't until I was 52 years old that I start talking about it and looking at it.

I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.

My truck was blown up by a 20 pound anti-tank mine.

I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.

My truck was blown up by a 20 pound anti-tank mine.

I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.

My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.

I was kidnapped by a drug cartel.

My truck was blown up by a 20-pound anti-tank mine.

Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone? Was targeting you specifically?

Oh, that is beyond creepy. Do you feel like this drone was targeting you specifically?

Growing up, I would go clothes shopping with my mom and that was like a fun activity to do.

Like attaching myself to an outfit. like a personality you're trying on.

dims on saturdays every year my mom's birthday was during the nordstrom half yearly sale that was like such a girl's day that back to school clothing haul you know like get cute little outfits getting new supplies i loved it the mall provided a neutral space a common ground where each of us could find a reflection of ourselves even when we didn't see it in each other

A lot of people don't talk about the depression debt pipeline, but it was a really, really deep one for me. And so I haven't told any of my high school friends that I'm in credit card debt. I haven't said anything because I know the judgment that's going to come to it. It's not even around my shame. It's around their judgment.

And I don't want to think part of me doesn't want to think that my friends are actually like this. That's part a huge part of it. And then another part of it is I don't want to deal with the judgment that comes with it because I'm judging myself harshly enough already.

I never thought anybody was in credit card debt like me. I was like, I'm the only girl in the world that has ever struggled with debt.

And because I did not trust my parents financially, my brother and I were just kind of left to fend for ourselves for financial education.

During my high school and college years, my family fell into homelessness two times. Like, my parents were in survival mode.

And so getting into the conversation about money, even now there's a lot of shame that comes around talking about finances with my family.

Now, Ms. McKay, if I can take you back to at the house on Fairview. Again, you're sending these text messages and going back to the table and then going back to the window at various times?

And at any point in time, did you see anybody exit from the dark SUV or the black SUV you see in front of the house?

With reference to the investigation at this point, you're talking about his client's phone. Who are you referring to?

When you conducted that search, that was at the defendant's request on scene sometime after 6 a.m. on that day?

Do you recall whether or not that came up as far as the search in Google? Is it something that you typed once or more than once?

And do you recall anything as far as what the search results were or opposed to you?

If you looked out the window or you looked out the storm door at the front door, when you looked out, what, if anything, did you see?

And at the time, were you familiar with either or both of the vehicles of Mr. O'Keefe and or the Fenneman SUV?

Each of these times, you're not just standing at the door or standing at the window staring out the entire time, correct?

In regard to those text messages, did you receive any response from Mr. O'Keefe? I did not.

Oh, yeah. Mr. Elvis, he used to wake me up every night and he'd say, Miss B, I want my peanut butter sandwich now. And then she'd go and talk about how she's like, I always knew he was hungry. I could hear him wrestling. It's like a nicest world.

No, we haven't.

Now, this through line was noticed by our head researcher, Joel, who is himself proudly autistic. It's also probably not going to surprise you when I say that LPN, as a company, is chock full of neurodivergent people, as many people in our employee have been diagnosed as having autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. Wow, I thought we did the blood purity test. Unfortunately, we're all vaccinated.

Yeah. In fact, I'm going to go ahead and take this opportunity to come out myself as neurodivergent. Sure. I'll be it in a different way. See, last fall, my mental disorder was re-diagnosed. And I was told, much to my surprise and bewilderment, that I do not have, nor have I ever had, bipolar disorder.

I spent 20 years treating the wrong condition because one psychiatrist in Lubbock, Texas fucked up way back in 2006. And all my subsequent mental health professionals just took his word for it until my new guy here in L.A. finally questioned the original diagnosis. After a lot of testing, I was correctly diagnosed as having severe ADHD, which can sometimes mimic the symptoms of bipolar disorder.

The wild emotional dysregulation that comes with severe ADHD can cause anxiety and depression. That would be the depressive side, manic depressive, while the hyper-focus aspect of ADHD can be confused for manic behavior. As such, I've totally changed my treatment, transformed my life for the better in ways that I'm fucking still discovering every day.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left, ladies and gentlemen. Before we get too far into bear law, my name is Marcus Parks. I'm here with Henry Zebrowski.

But I do want all my bipolar people out there to know that I see you, I still support you, and I still believe in you. More importantly, though, you should still believe in yourself. Hmm. But when it comes to pyromania, I can say from personal experience that neurodivergent disorders can cause far greater problems than just not being able to focus.

As a lot of children who develop pyromania also tested positive for ADHD.

And that's the thing. ADHD can be severe enough where it is confused with bipolar disorder. I mean, there's a reason why it took 20 years for this diagnosis to get switched over.

Speaking of which, Eddie, I got to talk to you. Our Apple budget at the network is getting out of fucking control.

Now, while ADHD certainly shows up in pyromaniacs, the neurodivergent disorder that occurs most is autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. And that brings us to our first big story today. Let's begin with the Australian pyromaniac, Brendan Sokolak. whose part in the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 resulted in the deaths of 11 people.

And yes, the name appears, the name Brendan Sokolak appears as if it should be pronounced Sokoluk or Sokoluk, whatever. We watched some old news reports and they all say Sokolak. So if you have any complaints about pronunciation, direct them to the past.

Yeah. Now, the Black Saturday bushfires were somewhat similar to what we just went through here in Los Angeles and that it wasn't just one large fire that devastated the region. But unlike our recent troubles in which we had four, sometimes five fires going on all at once, the Australians on Black Saturday had to contend with 400 individual fires.

It is. During these fires, over 1,700 square miles of the Australian state of Victoria burned, resulting in 173 deaths in addition to the destruction of over 3,500 buildings and homes. When the sheer destructive power of all 400 fires were calculated, it was said they gave off the equivalent heat of 500 atomic bombs.

Yes. So much worse. Yeah. And here how it happened was we had two seasons of like like unseasonable rain, which caused all these plants to grow. And then we went back in a drought, which caused all those same plants to die. And that's what caught fire.

Now, when survivors later recalled Black Saturday, they said that after the air turned blood red from the heat, every breath felt like sucking on a hairdryer. And some could even feel their skin melting from the heat, even if they weren't actively being burnt. The flames were hundreds of feet high, moving across the ground within seconds and surrounding everything.

Once the fire reached a house, the windows cracked, fabric burst into flames, the flames would slide underneath doors where they caught clothing and shoes on fire. Those who survived did so by breathing into wet fabric, laying in shallow creeks or ponds. In one case, a family covered themselves in lily pads and pond slime, all while kangaroos tried to survive by laying down in the water with them.

Now, I mean, I find this shit fascinating. Australia is actually made to be set on fire on a near constant basis. That's its ecosystem. Due to the frequent wildfires started by lightning strikes that have been going on for millennia, the fauna of Australia has evolved specifically to not only survive fires, but depend on them.

Some plant species, for example, won't open their seed pods until the plant is set on fire. But since some plants need fire to propagate, they've also evolved to be highly flammable. And it's just Australia's luck that one of their most common plants, the eucalyptus tree, is also one of the most flammable in the world.

They're called gasoline trees.

Yeah. They create dense carpets of flammable material that create the fast-burning and fast-spreading fires that make Australian wildfires so dangerous. The oil of the eucalyptus tree also works as an accelerant once the fire has sparked, creating literal fireballs when the flames reach the trees. The seed pods then open and fall, where they thrive in the freshly burned soil."

But because Australia burns so easily and is in fact a land that is specifically made for burning, Australia has a fairly large arson problem. And when a pyromaniac gets involved, the results can indeed be deadly.

You know cows don't exist in nature? Really? We created cows.

Aurochs. That's not real. Yeah, well, they're extinct now. Oh, really? Yeah, they're extinct. We bred them. I learned this on the Blind Boy podcast. We actually bred aurochs, all the best aurochs, the ones that were most docile, the ones that had the best meat. We bred them into the cows that we have today. Cows as we know them don't exist in nature at all.

That's partly why they're so destructive to the environment.

Back to Australia. Now, Australian arson squad investigators have found that fires in Australia are started mostly in areas of extreme poverty, areas between urban and rural locations, places of high unemployment, and areas with high child abuse and neglect. Here in America, we've seen much the same thing. Some of our worst rashes of arson, say, like how the Bronx burned in 1970s New York.

They were perpetrated in some of our nation's poorest and most disadvantaged areas. The pyromaniac in the New York City fires, by the way, that was David Berkowitz, when he was still calling himself the Phantom of the Bronx.

But concerning the Black Saturday bushfires, the Australian arson squad fanned out to determine how many of those 400 fires were natural and how many were man-made. One of the fires the arson squad focused upon was in central Gippsland, where a man named Brendan Sokolak had called the Australian equivalent of 911 to inform authorities about his local bushfire.

Now, the central Gippsland bushfire was no small event. While it had been just one of 400 fires, it had still killed 11 people. As such, this bushfire was of particular interest to investigators, and they certainly wanted to talk to the man who'd first called it in.

And even harder to prove.

Now, Sokolak had no criminal record, but upon questioning, police immediately found his demeanor to be strange and suspicious, and their suspicion only increased when they began asking around the neighborhood for more information on Brendan.

Sokolak had been seen driving around the area slowly, watching the fires burn on Black Saturday, which didn't really surprise anyone because smoke and flames tended to follow Brendan Sokolak wherever he went.

I mean, if we're going Van Halen, I would say it's more like he caused an eruption. Oh, I see.

Locals also said that Brendan was known to have problems with skulking around town.

But Brendan was indeed the worst type of skulker, as Brendan was a bit of a pedophile.

And I'd say not all skulkers are pedophiles, but all pedophiles are skulkers. I like that. Yeah. Brendan was known to stand and stare at children in public, and would duck and hide when people noticed him.

Welcome to the pyromania episode, ladies and gentlemen.

Brendan also collected junk and broken cars, and would work for hours in his shed dismantling pieces of wreckage, where he would listen very loudly to episodes of Thomas the Tank Engine or Bob the Builder, while making, again, very loud commentary on the shows to no one in particular.

Picnic law. Yeah, picnic law. You know, where to avoid the piss at the park. Yes. Yes, this is our exploration on pyromania.

No, he was not. No, no, no. He was mostly dismantling things for the scrap metal so he could sell the scrap metal. Yes. Now, by the time of the Black Saturday fires in 2009, Brendan Sokolak was 39 years old, single and unemployed on disability pension after losing his job as a groundskeeper at Monash University.

Brendan, like many pyromaniacs, had a hard time keeping a job due to his poor impulse control and behavioral problems. Brendan, however, was reportedly quite good at his job in the sense that he could keep the grounds.

But people found him irritating.

What's that shit? They found him irritating for a myriad of reasons, like Brendan's habit of hiding in the bushes so he could jump out to scare his co-workers like spaghetti.

The bad pranks, however, were not the only reasons why Brendan was fired. He would also follow people and tell them to watch out because he knew where they lived. He would pass notes to women co-workers challenging their boyfriends or spouses to duels. And he would express joy at the pain of others, like when a co-worker's loved one died.

Hell yeah. Fire, fire.

Additionally, Brendan would mow over trash instead of picking it up. He would stuff food in his pockets at work functions. He would hide things in hard-to-reach places to infuriate his co-workers. He would make cat noises at people and would mow over golf balls so they would shoot out at just the right trajectory to hit bystanders.

I know. I know. I mean, there's something funny about the golf balls. There's something funny about challenging your boyfriend to a duel.

No, he would also do shit like when he had to dig holes, he would make sure that he was upwind of his coworkers so the dust would blow in their face. It's just the most infuriating things. He's trying to make people angry. And that's all to say that Brendan was more than a bit of a prick. But Brendan also had skills that kept him on the job. He had a photographic memory of the campus.

He knew exactly where all the pipes and cables were buried underground, and he was quite capable with computers. That's all to say that Brendan Sokolak, like many pyromaniacs, most definitely had autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. Now, that's definitely not to say that all people with ASD are at risk of becoming pyromaniacs, or at risk of becoming destructive in any way.

Yeah.

But there are definite reasons why ASD and other neurodivergent disorders like ADHD are so prevalent amongst this section of the population. As many of you probably already know, ASD is not a simple, straightforward disorder.

ASD manifests itself in a myriad of ways, both positive and negative, like how someone with ASD might be able to draw a perfect map of an area just by walking it, but they might not have the ability to understand tone and inflection when others speak. The problem here is that the symptoms of ASD can be confused with people who are just run-of-the-mill pricks.

And conversely, people with ASD can also be massive dickheads who take pleasure in doing things that hurt or annoy people.

Oh, the best song ever. Now, the simplest definition of pyromania, or at least the one most people probably use when they think of the subject, is the habitual setting of fires as an act of pleasure. But after dipping into the research, we found that the reasons behind pyromania are complicated and varied, although there are some unifying factors.

It's the only place in the world where I can go and people aren't like, Marcus, why don't you have any tact? And it's like, no. In Iceland, nobody has it and nobody cares and everyone's just saying whatever they want to say.

But that's all to say that ASD is not a monolithic diagnosis in which the same principles can be applied to every person. And really, they're just like any other group, with good people, bad people, and everything in between contained therein.

Well, actually, I can answer that question. I mean, when it comes to pyromaniacs, it was very rare, if not nonexistent in our research, to find a pyromaniac with just ASD. Instead, what we found is that amongst pyromaniacs, ASD is almost always paired with childhood abuse or extreme bullying. Statistically, autistic people overall are far more likely to be bullied or abused.

But because of the nature of the disorder, some people with ASD don't understand why they're being bullied. In some cases, when people with ASD don't understand why they're hated, they give people reasons to hate them. And our subject, Brendan Sokolak, is a prime example.

Yeah, you really do. Yeah, yeah. And then they feel great, and you've learned a lot, and you've had a nice day.

Yes. About it. Well, Brendan grew up with poor and limited speech. He'd often skip words and sentences. Even worse, he would regularly shit himself well into his teenage years. His mother put him in a kid's soccer club to help him make fun. friends. It always helps. Always helps. Yeah. When a kid's having a hard time making friends. Throw him right into competitive sports.

According to the DSM-5, pyromania has a fair amount of markers, with the most obvious being the deliberate act of setting a fire on more than one occasion, a fascination or attraction to fire, tension or arousal before the act, and pleasure, gratification, or relief when setting the fire or witnessing the aftermath.

That's usually what kids who have a hard time making friends. Sports is always the best thing for them.

You definitely don't put them right in the middle of all the kids who are most likely to bully others.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, usually the kids on the team really hate you when you're the one that's making them bad. It tends to make things worse.

Yeah. I was bad at football in my senior year. The entire town could barely disguise their contempt for me.

Well, I mean, Brendan, when he was put in soccer, it just meant that kids could kick him without repercussions. Yeah. All while they called him veggie or spastic.

And Brendan's bullying only got worse when he reached high school, when the other kids, in their disgustingly Australian way that we learned about in our Snowtown series, all these kids decided that Brendan was a target for their bodily fluids. Mmm. One fellow teenager smeared Brendan with human feces, while others wiped snot on his clothes, coughed on him, and spat in his hair.

But that's the thing. If you're that rich, you can have a shit room in your house. Yeah.

Eventually, Brendan Sokolak's parents just gave up and pulled him out of school in the 11th grade. The intense bullying he endured, however, left lasting scars that contributed to his pyromania. Because from what Joel found, there is the possibility of creating a monster when extreme bullying and childhood abuse meets ASD.

Additionally, after Brendan was fired from his groundskeeping job, he may have been in the throes of a neurodivergent symptom called rejection sensory dysphoria. in which a person is emotionally or psychically affected to an excessive degree after being left out or told that they aren't allowed in a place where they feel like they belong.

Very much so. Sometimes people with RSD become people pleasers or perfectionists to avoid being excluded or treated badly for fucking up in any way whatsoever. But others, like Brendan, go in the entirely opposite direction by acting out destructively. See, in the months before the Black Saturday bushfire, neighbors noticed that Brendan had been setting larger and larger fires in his yard.

And when a neighbor expressed concern over a gigantic bonfire that Brendan had lit by himself on New Year's Eve, Brendan didn't even acknowledge that the neighbor was talking to him. This all came in the year after Brendan had been fired from his job, which was very much a situation in which Brendan was told he wasn't allowed in a place where he thought he belonged.

Fire. Now, one of the activities that those with ASD and ADHD engage in is something called stimming, which is a physical action that helps the individual deal with sensory overload. For me, I now recognize that chain smoking used to be my main stim. These days, I play with plasticine clay if I'm at home.

I play with coins in my pockets if I'm in public, or I obsessively chew nicotine gum no matter what's going on.

Well, that's the thing. It's actually connected. Yeah, people with ADHD are actually far more likely to be addicted to nicotine. It's the stimulant.

There you go. You're stimming.

For others, though, stimming can be far more harmful, manifesting as hair pulling, skin picking, or in the case of pyromaniacs, starting fires. See, stimming is a way to calm yourself down, and many pyromaniacs describe the act of starting a fire as something that alleviates a buildup of internal tension.

I also loved setting fires when I was a kid and was in fact almost arrested when I was 13 for lighting a dumpster on fire at my brother's track meet on the campus of South Plains College in Leveland, Texas, because I was so incredibly mind-numbingly bored and that boredom was causing anxiety. You're also calling out for attention.

Oh, no, it wasn't about that at all.

Yeah, I loved being left alone. No, no, no. It was, yeah, me and a friend of mine, we were just wandering around. We saw a dumpster and I was like, hey. Why don't we light it on fire? That could be like a lot of fun if we just lit that thing on fire. Let's light that thing on fire. And then we decided to light it on fire and the fire didn't really work out.

And so like we went across the street to this tennis court where there were some tennis balls. We started throwing tennis balls at each other. And then we heard a big boom, which was an aerosol can exploding because the dumpster had very much lit on fire. And then while we were staring at it, that's when we got caught.

I'm very lucky I grew up in like a wet period in West Texas, like where it was raining all the time.

Now, Brendan Sokolak was certainly autistic, but intellectually, Brendan was said to have the mental capacity of an eight-year-old. Brendan, however, was also more clever than he let on, and he could also be extremely manipulative if he wanted to be. See, as I said earlier, Britton was a perfectly capable person, but he was known to play up his disabilities if it suited his needs.

He would froth at the mouth, or he would use a mentally disabled voice so people would underestimate him. He'd also use it to get out of trouble at work. As such, Brendan began playing up his disability very soon after his arrest for one of the Black Saturday bushfires, because I think it may have taken him a bit to remember that the fire he'd started had killed 11 people.

Now, after investigators spoke with his neighbors and discovered Brendan's penchant for fires and skulking, it was decided that there was enough circumstantial evidence to arrest Brendan for starting the fatal bushfire that he himself had called into emergency services.

Now, Brendan didn't get nervous or anxious like most people do when they get arrested, nor did he react when he was read his rights. But outside of his non-reaction, Brendan was reportedly carrying relatively normal conversations with the police who arrested him.

But during his videotaped intake, when Brendan knew people were watching, he suddenly became more disabled by slurring his speech and pretending like he didn't understand what he was being told. Once the camera was off, however, Brendan would drop the slur, stop drooling, and return to the relatively normal way of conversating that he'd engaged in before.

Yeah. Oh, yeah. You know? In the hopes that maybe she'd just go away and forget about it. But guess what?

Eventually, Brendan did take credit for starting the fire, but he maintained that the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding. He said that he'd been smoking a cigarette while driving down a gravel road, and the bumpiness was causing his car to shake.

The ember of his cigarette popped off amidst the bumps, so Brendan, still driving, used a piece of paper to gather up the ember, which he then threw out the window. The paper then ignited, and when Brendan looked in his rear view, he saw the massive bushfire and called emergency services.

Turns out, no, it was just some dickhead with an open fire pit. Yep.

That's the thing. Life's full of near misses until it's not.

Yeah. Now, to me, Brendan's excuse sounds like utter horseshit. But Brendan's lawyer, a woman with the incredibly Australian name of Selina McCrickard, thought differently.

A tanny at law. See, we know that the intellectually disabled and people with mental disorders, they get framed for crimes they didn't commit quite frequently. And they often confess to those crimes because they think if they just admit to it, the cops will leave them alone and they'll be sent home. And the cops actually lie to people and tell them this.

That's what happened with Jesse Miskelly in West Memphis 3. You just tell us what you did and you can go home. And we'll get you out of here. Now, I could be wrong here, but in the many false confession stories I've read, people who falsely confess to crimes usually confess to the crimes instead of trying to make up an excuse like Brendan did.

But Brendan's lawyer, Selina McCrickard, believed that Brendan had been pressured into taking the blame for the brush fire because, admittedly, the only pieces of evidence were his call to emergency services, his reputation as a firebug, and his half-confession to being the Mr. Bean of Australian wildfires.

Yeah, that is nice. I'm not a judge. There was, however, one more piece to this story.

See, as I said earlier, Brendan was the worst kind of skulker. And when police searched his home computer, they found not only lots of photos of firefighters fighting fires.

You think I just saved... You know, there really weren't that many fires.

Two. And the third one. There weren't many pictures of the firefighters fighting fires.

Not really.

They were inside squirting it.

they found copious amounts of child pornography on Brendan's computer.

Not necessarily for pyromania, but for pedophilia, yeah.

Additionally, when investigators looked deeper into Brendan's past, they found that he had been a volunteer firefighter in the late 80s. He had, however, been kicked out for dishonest conduct, meaning he'd started several fires that he and his fellow volunteers would then have to put out. He's job creating.

Yes, but once Brendan's trial came around, it didn't seem like he was all that worried about prison. He would often fake falling asleep, then startle himself awake because he thought it was funny.

And that was in addition to the times he'd take loud sips of water in court and let out an audible after each one.

It is great. It's like... you don't do that I do that at home sometimes for fun oh I know you do it no you've done it in my presence

My hand on that one. Got a story coming up later on that one.

Now it just happens, yeah. Now, Brendan went on the stand himself and repeated his story about starting the fire with a cigarette. But the fire experts, who also testified, said that the blaze in Brendan's neighborhood, the one that killed 11 people, did not start with a cigarette. So either Brendan was lying about how the fire started or had falsely confessed.

But also, I mean, when you do look at his story, technically it wasn't a cigarette that started it. It was a piece of paper that was lit on fire by a cigarette ember. But in the end, I think it was probably the child pornography on Brendan's computer that pushed this whole caper over the edge. No way!

That's, you know, as far as like whether he started the fire or not. It's just, yeah, the child pornography, yes, definitely has an effect. Mm-hmm. But in the end, because of his disabilities, he was given a lenient sentence of 17 years and nine months in a maximum security prison for intellectually disabled prisoners.

He was, however, released just last year after serving only 14 years on the condition that he live at least 80 kilometers from the town where he was convicted of starting a fire that killed 11 people.

Very different. And there's also a massive difference between a pyromaniac and your garden variety arsonist. While many arsonists have antisocial personality disorders, one study found that only a quarter of arsonists qualify as pyromaniacs.

Oh, I think it's very much an impulse-driven crime. Oh, yeah. Now, Brendan Sokolak didn't have his life together at all, but that's not the case for all pyromaniacs. For example, one of the most prolific pyromaniacs in American history held a job in advertising, but began a six-month arson spree while going through a particularly rough divorce.

That man was Paul Keller, who was 27 years old at the time.

Yeah.

You know, like I'm like I'm not a bad. Well, I'm kind of a bad guy, but I'm not a criminal.

So in late 1992 and early 1993, Keller set 76 fires causing $30 million in property damage. This was all in Seattle, Washington. Somewhat of a purist, Keller would only start fires on the outside of buildings without using accelerants. Keller would drive around aimlessly until he would see cardboard or other flammable material near a building.

Then he would say to himself, setting this fire, that's a no-brainer. And he set these fires because people were stupid for leaving the flammable material available.

See, unlike a crooked landlord who's adept at burning down buildings for insurance payouts. That's arson. That's arson. Yeah. Pyromaniacs don't set fire for monetary gain, nor do they do it for sociopolitical ideology, the concealment of criminal activity, to express anger or vengeance, to improve one's living circumstances, or as a result of impaired judgment.

Fires go. Yeah. And Seattle, it's more of a drizzle than a constant rain.

Yeah. Yeah.

And when you say moist. Moist. The portrait that Keller presented to the world was one of a devout Lutheran who loved singing in the choir, loved listening to gospel music. But in private, Keller was an alcoholic pothead who actually burned down several Lutheran churches. Cool. The church burning, however, was not even close to Keller's biggest crime.

On September 22nd, 1992, Paul Keller set a retirement home on fire and killed three little old ladies named Mary, Adeline, and Bertha. After a composite, I mean, it's just the most little old lady names you can get.

After a composite sketch was released of the perpetrator, Keller's own father recognized him and turned him into the police. From what it sounds like, from what you were saying, seems like he was waiting for an excuse.

Yeah. Keller was soon after found guilty of 32 counts of arson and was sentenced to 99 years in prison for his crimes and is eligible for parole in the far-flung year of 2079.

Yeah. I think he was halfway there.

Interestingly, though, neither do most of them do it for sexual purposes.

Which I honestly thought was the main motivation before we got into all this research. Rather, in one study that interviewed 1,100 pyromaniacs, only 5% reported a sexual thrill when starting fires.

Now for our last pyromaniac today. Yay! And this guy fucking terrifies me. We're going to go all the way back to the 1970s when a teenager named Peter Dinsdale terrorized the Yorkshire port town of Hull over the course of six years with fires that killed 26 people. Peter Dinsdale was dealt a bad hand from the beginning.

100%.

It's... Unintentional. Dinsdale was referred to as the freak by his own mother, who sent him to live with his grandmother at the age of three. Now, the children of Yorkshire were no kinder than Dinsdale's mother.

Yeah, this is the land of Fred and Rose West. This is the land of Peter Sutcliffe. It is a... It's a cruel land.

Yeah, Yorkshire is the reason, like, that's the reason why, like, England loses all rights to, like, make fun of America.

Yeah, you have one, too. You have your own little America right in the middle of your country. Now, because of Peter's low self-esteem and quiet demeanor, he quickly earned the nickname of Daft Peter and was bullied mercilessly for his disabilities. But unlike Brendan Sokolak, who waited until his 30s to act out, Peter Dinsdale's pyromania started at a young age.

Before Dinsdale even reached his teenage years, he'd started a fire in a timber yard and had confessed to setting a shopping mall on fire, a fire that caused tens of thousands of dollars in damages. By the time Peter was a teenager, he was bouncing between jobs, working on construction sites, worked at the local pig market. Oink, oink.

And incredibly, he got, I will never fucking understand why people give guys like this jobs as babysitters.

Yeah, of course. Mine was Evil Dead. They didn't know that was my babysitter, but he was. Hey. Now, partly, Peter gained the Daft nickname because he would do things that seemed very odd. Like the time he brought a child home that he was supposed to be babysitting. He told people that the child was his son, even though the child was obviously of a different race.

But some people thought that Peter's daftness may have been an act, something that Dinsdale turned on and off when it suited him, just like Brendan Sokolak did. Reportedly, Dinsdale would tell people that they would never guess what he'd been up to, which to me meant that he was very aware of the power of his pyromania.

It's always going to be starting and not always going to be starting fires, but it's going to be. You'd never guess what I've been getting into. Now, even though Peter Dinsdale wasn't the brightest person in general, he was able to get away with arson and murder for six years for three simple reasons.

Firstly, he only set fires in poor neighborhoods and those fires only killed poor people, which, as we know, results in cursory investigations at best.

But the other side of that coin is that the people in Dinsdale's neighborhood knew that he was at the very least setting fires, even if they didn't know he was setting the deadly ones. But Dinsdale was not reported for the longest time because the locals distrusted and hated the police.

But mostly, Dinsdale evaded capture because he was one of those people who are really good at one thing. And when it comes to arson, Dinsdale knew how to make the fires look accidental, at least at first glance. As such, the only fire he set that was ruled arson at the time was the one that got him caught. It's like Ed with Connect Four. Yeah. I hear you're, like, incredible at Connect Four.

I gotta go to the bathroom real quick. People who develop pyromania usually begin as fire watchers, fans, if you will. And much like a serial killer who gets a job and authority for the power it gives them over other people, pyromaniacs will often get jobs in the firefighting field so they can be closer to fire and so they can see the consequences of their actions. They definitely try. Yeah.

Can't be beat. Easy.

You ever do it for money?

All right. Great. Set it up. All right. Sounds good. Beat Ed at Connect 4 coming 2026. God, that'd be awesome. Now, Dinsdale had always been a truly dangerous individual as his first murder by arson was committed when he was just 12 years old. And it's important to remember that all of the arsons I'm going to talk about, he did before he was the age of 20. He was a teenager during all of this.

It's a young man's game. Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, you don't see any, like, 75-year-old, like, pyromaniacs. New ones. Yeah, new ones, yeah.

Well, in 1973, Dinsdale set fire to a house belonging to a family called the Elleringtons, who had a disabled six-year-old boy who rode the bus to school with Peter. By the time the Elleringtons smelled smoke shortly before 7 a.m., the flames were already too powerful and their child died in his room.

When Dinsdale confessed to the crime after his arrest and was asked for his motivation, he said he'd done it for no real reason at all.

It's unclear. It's actually very unclear with Dinsdale. But he mostly focused on setting fires when people were at home. So I think he loved the fires. And I think he also liked the fact that people died in the fires.

Yeah, but Dinsdale also tended to set fires at homes. And specifically families.

Yeah, that's definitely murder. And as we'll go through it, there's absolute definite murders here.

Yeah, so the ambiguity will disappear soon enough. Great.

Okay. Now, a few months after his first fatal fire, Peter went out one night and spent the evening walking around with a can of his favorite accelerant, paraffin oil, which is a highly flammable substance used in cosmetics.

See, like some pyromaniacs, Peter had a physical feeling associated with his urges, and he claimed that when his fingers began to tingle, that was his sign that the location he'd come upon was the one where setting a fire would give him the most pleasure. It's the sign of diabetes. Tingling fingers. You got to be careful. Tingling toes.

So you're saying if he would have cut off all his fingers, he wouldn't be setting any more fires. Wait a second. Does this come from the hand? The bad hand? I think it just was all of his fingers. But what if all of this came from him? And he didn't have a bad hand. It was just that his arm was like he had to hold it.

Reportedly, about 100 firefighters are convicted of arson every year. But not surprisingly, the governing bodies in charge of tracking the causes of fires nationwide, they intentionally refrain from tracking firefighter arson. Instead, these are treated as so-called isolated incidents.

So you believe that his hand was possessed?

Oh, you mean when you're yelling at, like, other drivers.

Thanks to Jeff Bezos.

Now, as it happened on the night of his second murder by fire, Peter's preteen fingers began to tingle as he walked by the house of a 72-year-old hermit with gangrenous legs named Arthur Smith, who had no relation whatsoever to Peter Dinsdale. Now, are we sure that's not Smythe? I think it's Smith.

Yeah, British Smith. Yeah, it's the Old British Spelling. Not smelling, spelling. Old British Smelling is an entirely different show.

Yep. Even so, Dinsdale climbed in through the window, covered the room where Arthur was sleeping in paraffin oil, and set the old man on fire before leaving through the front door. The investigation, however, deemed a faulty oil heater as the cause of the fatal fire.

About two weeks after the Smith fire, Peter broke into the home of a man named David Brewer and lit his house on fire while Brewer was in the bathroom.

Yeah.

When Brewer returned to his living room, the flames were already large enough to catch his clothes on fire. He ran outside screaming and subsequently died from his burns. But the fire was blamed on Brewer drying his clothes too close to the fireplace.

In this case, however, Brewer and Dinsdale did have a connection. Prior to the fire, Dinsdale, who was just 13 at the time, he had put himself in the middle of an argument between Brewer and a neighborhood boy who kept pet pigeons. For some reason, Peter offered to kill the boy's pigeons by supposed to end the argument.

Yeah.

Yeah. But for this comment, Brewer threatened to punch Dinsdale if he did so. A couple of days later, Dinsdale set the fire that killed Brewer, then strangled the boy's pigeons to death a couple of weeks after that.

Yeah, just killing a bunch of pigeons, strangling the pigeons, yeah. No, it's gonna be a rough afternoon.

Now, Peter Dinsdale settled down on killing people with fire for a while after the Brewer murder. But after staying quiet for a year, Dinsdale's fingers began tingling as he walked by the home of an 82-year-old widow named Elizabeth Rocar.

Peter later admitted that he'd snuck into the widow's house through the cat door and set the old lady's bed on fire while she was sleeping, causing eventual death by smoke inhalation.

Upon discovering that the fire started in the bed, though, investigators chalked up the incident to the widow falling asleep while smoking, despite the fact that the widow's family told them that the widow did not smoke. Smoke.

But since the widow wasn't important enough, no further investigation was done, and Peter was free to continue killing. Like a lot of killers, Dinsdale started off strong, but tried to tamp down his urges after the initial spree. Two and a half years went by without a fatal house fire started by Dinsdale, but eventually the desire won out.

On June 3rd, 1976, Peter, now age 16, snuck into a house where an old lady was babysitting her grandchildren. The woman had just put her infant grandson to bed upstairs when Peter doused the cupboard under the stairs with paraffin oil and set it on fire. The baby was trapped and died in the flames. Now, Peter set another fire about six months later that killed another baby.

But his most murderous fire came just three days after the murder of that second baby, when Densdale set fire to a retirement home. Peter later said that he was riding his bike around Hull while carrying a bottle of paraffin oil, looking specifically for a large house to burn.

He came across Winsley Lodge, the retirement home, where he broke a window, poured oil on the floor, set it on fire, and rode away. Eleven old men burned to death in this fire. But again, arson was not suspected. Instead, the fire was blamed on a plumber who was working with a blowtorch in the boiler room.

This fire, however, is the one that Dinsdale may have just confessed to without actually doing it, as his disabled arm would have made carrying a bottle of paraffin oil while riding his bike quite difficult. But for me, that's a little infantilizing, because disabled people find ways to make it work every single day. Yeah, backpack.

Yeah. You're just looking to make sure that your grandmother is sexually satisfied.

Now, from there, Dinsdale set fire after fire, burning a swath of murderous destruction across the Yorkshire town of Hull. The targets were chosen randomly. Anytime Peter got the tingling in his fingers and all the fires were blamed on anything but arson.

While he certainly started many fires by breaking into homes, Dinsdale also took to squirting paraffin oil through the mail slots before shoving in pieces of paper that he'd lit on fire to ignite the flame. In one case, a mail slot fire resulted in an explosion that killed four people, a mother and her three children.

But the fire was blamed on the kids playing with a container of lighter fluid that had been on a shelf near the front door. These fucking hall cops...

suck yeah like i mean like how many do like oh we just live in the most flammable town ever you know like yeah because there was at one point there was like four within like two months yeah we're like all these people were dying in these horrible fires and it's like well yeah

Yeah. He's he's up there. He's actually one of the most prolific killers in British history.

I mean, it's been how many years now?

Now, the first time arson was ever suspected in a fire started by Peter Dinsdale was when he burned down his 10th house by again using the mail slot. This fire resulted in the deaths of three young siblings by the surname of Hasty, and all of them took about two weeks in the burn unit to die.

But because the hasty fire was a lot more chaotic and couldn't be blamed on anything else other than arson, a detective superintendent named Ronald Sager decided that a full investigation was finally warranted. Now, upon arriving at the scene, D.S. Sager noticed matches near the front door's mail slot, and he smelled the distinctive scent of paraffin oil.

Later, it was discovered that Dinsdale had poured several liters of paraffin oil throughout the hasty house, and had started the fire through the mail slot. You could say that it was hastily set. Correct! You would be very, very correct in that. The light bulb moment, however, came when Sager discovered upon questioning neighbors that the Hastys were not a well-liked family.

The father, Tommy Hasty, was a career petty criminal and the eldest Hasty boy, one of the victims in the fire, 15 years old. He had also begun a life of crime. Almost worse, though, were the two youngest hasty siblings, aged 12 and 8, who were actually kind of little terrorists in the neighborhood. True agents of chaos. They'd throw rocks at old people. They'd piss through mail slots.

They'd shit on doorsteps. They would rob local children of their pocket money.

This is beyond larrikin. I don't know, because larrikin, that's Australian. Larrikins, to me, seem a little more, like larrikins don't throw rocks at old ladies.

Well, yeah, because he started to see like, oh, there's motive here. Like everyone hated the Hasty family. D.S. Sager couldn't find anyone in the neighborhood that didn't have at least like some sort of grudge against at least one member of the family. The mother had even received a threatening letter about a month before the fire written on a piece of cardboard cut from a cereal box.

It read, quote,

But when they analyzed the handwriting in the note, it was sent by a little old lady who lived up the street.

And I know all of our Yorkshire listeners right now are just saying, yep, that's Yorkshire. It's my grandmother. This woman, like everyone else, hated the hasty family, and had shoved the letter into their mailbox herself to save the cost of a stamp.

Yes. Yes. Yes, thank you to all of our LAFD people here in the city who saved us just a couple of months ago. It's just that for when they sneak in your house trying to fuck your wife.

Now, since Arson was suspected, and since the Hastie family were such characters, their triple funeral was a mass media event. In front of the cameras, their mother addressed the neighborhood and shouted, quote, It was one of you bastards!

Yeah. But the road to Peter Dinsdale getting caught for the crime is a bit of a winding one and damn near accidental. See, after six months with no leads, police received an anonymous tip from a man who said he saw three young guys running near the hasty home on the night of the fire. The young men had jumped into a distinctive car, a Rover 2000.

which was identified as being similar to a car that was often seen in the part of Hull where the male sex workers plied their trade. As it turned out, Peter Dinsdale had decided to make a little money by giving handjobs, and he just happened to be in the area when D.S. Sager decided to round up all the male sex workers to see what he could see.

Bruce Lee.

Yeah. And I also think that this points towards Peter Dinsdale being actually a little more clever than he let on because it's difficult to legally change your name.

It's so difficult. Yeah. Now, D.S. Sager was pretty desperate by this point.

I guess so. Now, D.S. Sager was pretty desperate by this point, so his plan was to just bring a bunch of male sex workers and gay kids down to the station, where he'd accuse them of being the arsonist in the hopes that one might confess or give information. I'm sorry.

Yeah, and there's all kinds of people sneaking in your house to try to fuck your wife. It's not just firefighters.

Well, I mean, D.S. Sager didn't even think that Peter Dinsdale, a.k.a. Bruce Lee was even a suspect when he brought him in. But when D.S. Sager accused Dinsdale of being the arsonist just to see what would happen, Dinsdale looked at Sager and simply told him, didn't mean to kill anybody.

Peter went on to say that he had set the fire to get back at the eldest hasty son because he owed Peter money for a handjob.

Yeah. Get the money up front. Up front. Yeah. Peter also said he had a crush on the eldest hasty sister and had been rejected, while all the hasty children had mocked Peter for being educationally subnormal, as the British put it.

Jerking off the brother. That was a secret thing. That was a job.

Now, Peter was sticking to the story that he was only trying to scare the hasties. But when the news broke of Dinsdale's arrest, a local came forward and said she recognized Peter as the teenager who started a fire at her house by squirting paraffin oil through her mail slot. She actually survived. She was pregnant at the time. Sounds like a British euphemism.

It's also business-like.

Every guy's named Tony.

Well, confronted with the accusation that he had squirted paraffin oil through a woman's mail slot. Peter confessed, saying he did it because someone he knew didn't like this woman. And when D.S. Sager pressed Peter further, the floodgates opened, and Peter eventually confessed to 30 fires that killed 26 people. Now, D.S.

Sager was a little skeptical, because most cops are skeptical when someone confesses to the murders of over two dozen people, especially when those murders had never been investigated as murders. So D.S. Sager took Dinsdale out on a tour of Hull. D.S. Sager was quite surprised when Dinsdale was able to direct the car to each and every fire he started.

It's really going up, right?

Really going. As it would later come out, quite a few locals knew that Peter Dinsdale had a habit of starting fires, but their hatred and fear towards the police outweighed their sense of civic duty, and they therefore never reported him until after he was arrested.

Once Peter was put on trial, he pled not guilty to 26 counts of murder, but guilty to 26 counts of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. Now, this made Peter Dinsdale, a.k.a. Bruce Lee, one of the most prolific murderers in British history. But he was soon overshadowed by another Yorkshire monster.

Right around the time Peter Dinsdale put in his plea, another Peter, Peter Sutcliffe, was arrested for the infamous and far more salacious Yorkshire Ripper murders, which pushed Peter Dinsdale off the front page. Dinsdale had double the numbers. He did have double the numbers, but... It wasn't as flashy. That's the thing. His victims were really depressing. Yeah.

He's only gay for men in uniform. Typically, firefighter arsonists are white guys with one of two problems. One, they might have a hero syndrome in which they intentionally create situations in which they can be the savior. Fighter-fighter arsonists, however, can also be in that small percentage of pyromaniacs who get sexual gratification from starting and or containing fires.

He killed a bunch of old ladies and babies and families and old men. He set them on fire. He set them on fire, and it's really disturbing and weird. But with Peter Sutcliffe, you know, he killed mostly... He killed women. Yeah, sex workers. He killed a lot of sex workers. He killed a couple of, like, teenagers that weren't sex workers. But for the most part, yeah, people can...

People are much more comfortable reading about murders when the victims are people they can't imagine, when they can't picture them. When they can say, even subconsciously, they deserved it.

You know what? He was. Now, there was some suspicion around Peter Dinsdale's actual guilt here, as some believed that his intellectual and physical disabilities would have made it impossible for him to be as cat-like as he claimed to be during some of these murders.

I, however, think that Densdale, like certain serial killers, was just very good at exactly one thing, which was starting fatal house fires that didn't look exactly like arson.

These days, it's very, very difficult. It's very, very difficult. Yeah, I mean, we knew how the Palisades fire started before the Palisades fire was even out.

Yeah. Well, additionally, when D.S. Sager was criticized in the media for allegedly manipulating Peter's confessions to fit unsolved arson cases, Sager sued for libel and was able to prove in court that he did nothing of the sort and therefore won his case. As a result, Peter Dinsdale, a.k.a. Bruce Lee, was ultimately put in a mental hospital indefinitely.

Since the mid-80s, however, Dinsdale has been declaring that he is totally innocent of all arsons and all murders. But during correspondence with D.S. Sager after his incarceration, Dinsdale made a sinister statement.

So, while Peter Dinsdale may not have committed all of the murders to which he confessed, it seems fairly certain that he was still one of the most dangerous teenage pyromaniacs to ever exist, and therefore... One of the most dangerous teenagers in British history. And that's saying something.

British teenagers are awful.

Yeah. I love this. Yeah, I mean, that's our short study on pyromaniacs. We're actually working on an episode in which we're going to cover a single pyromaniac in detail. A really insane guy. But yeah, this is just a nice little appetizer for you.

That's wild.

But while most firefighter pyros are men, one of the most consequential in recent history was a woman that was in the firefighting game. In 2002, a Forest Service worker and fire spotter named Terry Barton admitted to intentionally starting a fire at a campground in Colorado solely for the attention.

No, no, absolutely not.

Nope. Nope. Nope. Not. Not. Not, not, not encouraging pyromania in any way whatsoever.

Ambition is fine.

Patreon.com slash Last Podcast on the left is where you can see video episodes of every single podcast we do. You can also watch side stories for free on YouTube. And while you're on the Patreon, you can also catch Last Stream on the left every single Tuesday live at 6 p.m. PSD, 9 p.m. ESD.

And you can interact with us on the chat and you can see a lot of shit that we're not allowed to put on YouTube. You can also follow us on the socials at LP on the left, TikTok and Instagram. And come see us on tour.

It's cool to just be in the building. The stage is awesome. The room's great. And Detroit fans are fucking insane. I bet. Yes.

I'm very excited to be in Detroit. I will say this time, though. If you do take acid before the Detroit show like the guy last time did, remember that there are other people in the room with you and that you are not listening to the podcast alone in your house.

Lastpodcastontheleft.com. Check it out. Come see if we're coming to a town near you or your town.

Yeah, maybe not.

Yeah. Statistically, most people listening, we're not coming to your town.

At any point.

As a consequence, 138,000 acres of land were burned, 113 homes were destroyed, and five firefighters died during what became the largest wildfire in Colorado history. For her part, Terry Barton was sentenced to 18 years in prison, but was released after just six.

Well, the thing is, they always have to say if there's kids involved, I was like, well, I wouldn't because otherwise I wouldn't have little Darlene.

But before we get into the very human pyromaniacs, Henry has requested that we cover one of history's only alleged bovine fire starters.

This, briefly, is the story of the infamous cow owned by Catherine O'Leary, the cow that supposedly started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Now the legend is that Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over a kerosene lantern which set her barn on fire, and that fire spread across Chicago, where it destroyed over 17,000 structures and killed somewhere around 300 people. Records are spotty. The cow, however, may not be at fault here. What the fuck? While the cow very well may have been involved, Chicago was going to burn eventually no matter what.

The weather was hot that October, the area was going through a drought, fire codes were very loosely enforced, and Chicago was a city built almost entirely out of wood.

Yeah. It truly is City of White Soldiers as well. Well, you know, the Windy City, that's actually a myth. Really? The name Windy City comes from their politicians. Oh, because they're blowhards.

And they're blowhards.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, cows are known to do that.

God, no. No, no, the cow burned. Now, the fire did indeed start at the O'Leary's small dairy business, but it's equally likely that the fire began when embers from a chimney settled on a stack of hay. It's also equally likely that the fire was started by a boarder at the O'Leary home, Dennis Pegleg Sullivan. Yeah!

It's a net negative on the world.

who may have accidentally lit the hay on fire with a cigarette while drinking and smoking with his friends in the barn. Luckily for the Irish, the cow story won out, and to this day, it's still widely believed to be the cause of the fire.

You know, and not a single Irishman in the room. No. Rob? Rob? Okunowitz. Oh, Okunowitz.

Okunowitz, I always thought it was like, yeah, Polish, not like Okunowitz. It is.

Now, the female fire watcher who started the Colorado fires, she was a rare bird in the pyromania community. The aforementioned study of 11... Pyromania community.

What meetings are going to be like? The aforementioned study of 1100 pyromaniacs found that most were male and 70% were of below average intelligence. Even Frankenstein's monster knew fire bad.

What about the Bride of Frankenstein?

It's very cute. He's that great. There are, however, some interesting through-lines when it comes to pyromania. While the study of pyromania is not as deep as we'd like it because some in the mental health field refuse to accept it as a diagnosis, what we do see is that a lot of pyromaniacs share two things, childhood abuse and or bullying, along with neurodivergence.

Yeah, man.

They said that if I just committed, I could get all the way to the Mormon apocalypse, and they said, well, what little tree just will be my voice? Ha! He said, they're going to really, they're going to do some tests, some new kind of procedures. I held my voice.

The Supreme Court has ordered the federal government to facilitate the return of a Maryland man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

Hey Spotify, it's Damson Idris here to celebrate Tommy Hilfiger's Apex GP Collection.

Discover Tommy Hilfiger's limited edition Apex GP Collection. Inspired by F1 The Movie. Only in cinemas June 25th.

Yes.

Nein. Nein.

The first Wednesday in February always marks the national signing day for high school players to sign their college-granting aids. Coaches hover over the fax machine, if you can believe it. Somebody still uses fax machines, hoping that the top recruits sign.

Das Geräusch, das Satisfaction.

I was up there carving it from the Washington Post.

He took a wicked shot from Elvis Dumerville.

Was ist mit euch? Das Ding ist aus Papier.

And at this point in time, did anybody know where Jasmine was?

Were investigators and other law enforcement officers in the police department actively looking for her at this pace?

What day was that arrest warrant issued? And do you recall what day it was that Jasmine's body was located on the side of the Tennessee River off of South Creek Road?

I'm not going to go into too much detail, but were you notified when Jasmine's body was located?

Did you report to that area where the suitcase had been found?

And then subsequently, did the medical examiner also arrive at that scene off of Sufferig Road?

And was it after that that you also went to the medical examiner's office for the autopsy?

Based on the location of that photo and those text messages, who were those sent from?

Because that's Jasmine's phone number at the top.

What do we have here?

So is this evidence that you did not find when you were in the apartment on the 28th of November?

Because the bed was saved?

Was he traveling in the correct direction to get to Subway Park?

Hey, hey, what's that you're eating, Dad? All right, my tuna fish sandwich. Tuna?

That's right there.

Get loose.

I ain't.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

True.

Got it, yes.

Yes, yes.

Oh, God. That's kind of what he was saying.

You're not done.

Clean it up, nigga.

Wait, what?

She look good, nigga.

Stop fucking with me.

What's that?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Hello.

Sheesh.

This guy right here. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh. Ooh.

He's first mate of the Millennium Falcon. Yeah, he was on board.

That wasn't some... And by the way, he's the mechanic of the fucking ship. The Kesselring 12 parsecs didn't parsec itself. He fixes the ship.

Gold leader, this is Red 5. Yeah.

That kid's outer is not as big as it looks, you know?

It's ultimately so innocent.

I mean, Peter Cushing is famous.

Who else?

And then...

Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Because he sold Lucasfilm for $4, but he was making money on Star Wars through the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.

slipped into Charles Bronson. I just watched Death Wish. What do you mean, the force?

Oh yeah. She's a character and I adore her.

Not only did Nikki bring it back, but then her comedic gold was solidified with Adam Sandler using her joke as the punchline for his bit.

Our entire life depends on your success. So be successful.

You know, I quit my job to move to L.A. to make sure that you're an actor at seven because you know what you want at seven.

It's tough.

I'm also like, I don't know that exploitation isn't exploitation just because you have an account for your kid making money doing it. Like, you know what I mean? Like, I feel like it's like one of those things where it's like there's a lot of saying where it's like, well, it's a business and like we're preparing our kid because we have an account for them.

But at the same time, it's like free will. Like if I don't if the kid doesn't want to film, does the kid not get to film? Yeah.

Yeah, but seeing even the clip of like where she's trying to get the son to say like how happy he is about being renamed, but then she's screaming at the kids in the background. It's like, if you don't shut up, then it's just like the fact that you could rewatch this editing these videos and be like, I'm not a monster is crazy.

It's the difference between the people who think camping is fun and the people who don't. Like, I don't find anything fun sleeping on the dirt for three nights.

I mean, he also did love all the bugs all over him and, like, touching all the bugs and traitors. He's a boy boy. Have you seen his Instagram? Like, it's, like, some of the things where it's, like, even if you wanted to picture the idea of it's, like, homeboys, like, on a ledge or, like, in between mountains hanging off of, like, a rope and it's just, like.

you can't tell me you want this, you don't want this too. And he was like, no, I'm kind of seeing someone. And then the confirmation was that dinner, but they put it out of order to make, yeah, Vanita look crazy.

That's so dirty.

it also looks weird too because it's like Ben JT after Benita comes to his door the night before goes and has one talk with Madison and like books a flight and leaves so it also kind of like gives the illusion that something might have happened in that hotel room for him to have to leave.

And remember, Sally was like, I am not getting on that fucking boat tomorrow if JT's there. I'm just saying if you're watching a show and your boyfriend has a girl that's interested in him come to the hotel door and then say no cameras and then goes into the door and that's the end of the scene, what does that insinuate? That's true. I would have some questions for sure.

No, Dorit and Sutton have years of conflict to go off of. So I think that's kind of also what Dorit's saying, too, is that it's like, don't force me to go to a place that we can't come back from because if I get there with you and she's not making it any easier. So that's what I'm saying. Neither one of them are really trying to, like, bury the hatchet.

So it's just like if it's one more dig after one more day, one more failed event than like and I've never seen Dorit get as angry as she's gotten this season. So I'm like, I actually am a little interested and scared to see what else could possibly be coming out of Dorit.

Or it could have been like, hey, like, I really want to hear all about this in the van, but we have to, like, get on the road.

Is it possible that he just wants to have his cake and eat it too? That like he doesn't want to get married to the girl, but he does actually really like her and have feelings for her. So he's freaked out about the marriage. So he made it about this thing, but actually would like to date her outside in real life.

And I think he tried to get on a show. He promised his sister he would never take it this far and he never thought he would get that far. Now that he is that far, he's panicking because everyone's like, what the fuck are you doing?

But we're not saying that at all. We're saying that if it was just about the sex or the fact that she hooked up with somebody right before this, nothing that Molly should have been able to say should have made him be like, you know what? Maybe I made a mistake and I should retry this relationship.

But now you just don't have to get married to her in a week.

I don't.

Uh, no, I had a problem with windmill guy, Peter, whichever one that was like super precious about the idea of her, like sleeping with somebody else. And she was like,

Yeah.

Yeah, but that was the only one.

Oh, I can't put myself back there. I did not care about Jed. All I cared about was when she was literally like, how dare you? Jesus loves me no matter if I've slept with somebody or not.

But that's kind of the same thing. He was pretty much like, my wife isn't going to be a promiscuous type person.

This is not like... Thank you, Luke Powell.

I don't know.

I was like, I'm surprised that she didn't go as mental on the Meg and Mason showing up together, too, because I'm like, I feel like that should have been like you did everything to sabotage that relationship and they still ended up together and I end up with no one.

The two first cross paths on stage at the 2003 Oscars when Barry presented Brody with the Best Actor Statue at First Performance in The Pianist. When Brody took to the stage to accept the award, he embraced Barry, kissing her and remarking, I bet they didn't tell you that that was in the gift bag. So he surprised her because he was so excited about winning the award and like laid one on her.

What does that mean? Like phone it up? No. Like Zoom it?

And then Halle repaid the gesture on the carpet.

They always do. They're the worst. The girls with the lamest bachelorette parties. It's like the men get to go to a game and we get pop-up tents for our grown asses to sit in. And wigs and canes. Like, thanks.

Do you remember last season when it was like the weird tent pop-ups in a circle? And it's like, do you expect grown ass women to sleep in those?

Right.

It's like, it's like health insurance. You're not required to have it, but like, it's nice to know that if something were to happen, I'm looking at a copay versus looking at a full price receipt.

It exists.

But it's also Halle Berry.

But like, let's not be delusional that that's not a possibility in the realm of reality.

I do think that it's kind of crazy that she's even being villainized for it because I feel like all of these couples that are planning on moving forward with marriage, you should have a prenup in place because you only have known this person for 30 days.

Yeah, when the cameras go away and it's just the two of us, are you the same person that I fell in love with in the pods? Are you the same person that was in this experiment knowing that you were filmed 24-7?

She was biting her tongue so hard, but she tried.

At the end, it was just more like, yeah, sorry about that. You seem cool.

Okay. I think Monica and Joey and I think Taylor and Daniel. Or no, Virginia and Devin. But I don't think the other two as well.

I'm not sold on Virginia and Devin.

I feel like I have to cut that spoiler alert.

But that could be editing.

I was like, did you not watch Hometowns at Bachelor? I was like, all the things that I was waiting for did not happen.

I don't think they do either.

I don't think Taylor and Daniel will. I do think Monica and Joey will. And I do think Virginia and Devin will.

You think so?

I mean, Sarah's got a lot going against their relationship.

What do you make of the relationship between JT and Vanita, like seeing how it played out on camera versus like in real life?

Kind of going off of that last season, obviously, there was the season premiere. You had said to Craig, like, well, what about your girl cheating on you? Were there rumors just circulating around Charleston about that? Or like, where did that come from?

Guy Pearce? No. Guy Ritchie.

And you're are you super close with Emmy and Will as well? Because your name got brought up last episode with TJ and Emmy having a little confrontation.

With the rumors like flying around about Will for multiple seasons at this point, like what do you make of it as somebody who also has been in a relationship and probably have heard rumors and whatnot outside of it? Do you believe like where there's smoke, there's fire? Or do you think that there's a group of lawyers that are bullying Will and Will?

Well, back to my question. Do you think that there's some, like, do you think that Emmy's doing the right thing by saying no to these rumors? Or do you think Emmy should be addressing the rumors and not getting defensive?

Yeah, he was there. They teased it as Andy Cohen saying, well, Will's not here, so he's not on the show anymore.

Holding him in the back in the locker.

Yep.

Third episode came out last night.

Get on it.

Interesting.

I always, because I give reality TV stars, especially in the Bravo sphere, like so much credit because it's like you do go through such a dramatic summer, maybe three months or whatever. And then you have a year to... Forget about it. Recover. And then all of a sudden it's like airing now. Let's go through your trauma.

But like, how does it feel to prepare for a reunion like that? Because it's like, you know, you're going to be asked questions in a way that's like as if this happened yesterday. But you're like going off of emotions that you're trying to replay by rewatching. Right. Like how does the reunion go down in a sense? Because I feel like it's so passionate, too.

Have you ever skipped episodes or, like, do you fast forward?

It was called Pillows and Beer because Craig makes pillows.

Their last episode was January 6th with Spencer Pratt.

Do we find out at the reunion whether or not JT has left the show officially since he announced it like five months ago? You will.

Sounds like some people needed a storyline.

I believe so.

And I wish we would have some like different type of theme for the photo shoot, too, because it feels very forced where it's like, OK, now we're going to have a photo of you proposing in case we do do this. We already have it. Yeah.

I was going to say, it sounds like great sleep.

Yeah, that's tough.

Zero. Well, it made it easy to figure out who he can't decide between.

That's what I think she's going to win.

No, I'm team Latia.

No, I think... I think Juliana's going to take it.

She really does. Do we think that there was some form of drama with one of the two as to why they would shelf Bachelorette this season? Or do you think it's just timing?

Like this was because of our sleeping arrangement.

Also, I love that there's a tip, not a, I got it. No. Yeah. Not like a, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry, honey.

Like when they did Kasa more?

Yeah. I need, um, like, uh, the girl that was like scallop fingers. Like I need like, like, like sound bites and personalities back that like dressed up as a shark for their first day to show up to paradise being silly. No.

I need something.

I feel like he really got the dad's consent with Juliana. I feel like either way, he gets what he wants. He's going to be a part of a big family.

Do you think he sleeps with anyone?

Luke was talking about his standard for his future wife saying that like she should never have been intimate where I'm like, this is where I'm like for her religion. Let alone that like she's been on this journey with all of these 20 women. I wouldn't be able to get over that either. If he slept with somebody before he came on the show as The Bachelor, I don't give two fucks.

But like, yeah, if you slept with somebody that night before you're going to propose to me, I'm probably going to say no. I mean, Luke Parker got crucified for Luke Parker, the guy who there's Luke Pell and Jed Pell was a different guy.

And I think that's their prerogative. I get it. Yeah.

I wouldn't want the guy that's going to propose to me having slept with two girls the night before.

Happy bachelor party.

Anyways, so this week on Summer House, we have what, Jesse and Lexi kind of talking about their relationship. You have Jesse asking Lexi if, I can't say this seriously with a straight face, but you have Jesse asking Lexi, hey, so next weekend, do you want to share a bed, like share a room together, be roommates? And she's like, no, for sure.

I just want to make sure that we're like on the same page, that like we're like only seeing each other, like working towards that. And then he was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. I think we're moving too fast. Yeah.

That was like kind of one of those like I had to pause it being like the double standard here where you're the one trying to play house for the weekend because you're trying to get laid for the full weekend. The second she's like, just making sure you're not doing it with anybody else.

Okay, we're back.

Then, yeah, pump the brakes. No, I agree with that.

I think it's different contexts.

Okay, so I guess Hannah had done some interview or something stating that the reason why she thinks she got fired from Summer House was because she posted for a competitor of Loverboy. And then Craig obviously signed a deal with Spritz Society. So he's now advertising for a different seltzer.

So he said he's honestly beyond discouraged with Craig, too, that this topic or that this wouldn't be a topic today if it wasn't for him. And about a dozen lies. I can't believe this is where Hannah is at. Three years later, I'm fucking ape shit. So he is just pissed that like two people in her life are now promoting to opposing seltzer companies.

But at the same time, it's like for Paige, she's like, what the That's none of my fucking business. She responds being like, fuck you. What have you ever supported a single thing I've done? Have you ever said anything about my podcast? Have you ever said anything about my book? I drank your drink for seven fucking years. I come to your dumb ass fucking events and I only came here tonight.

So brunch? Yeah, I don't know why he's being so weird. Because you keep saying they served lunch, but they also served lunch.

So someone keeps your wife company while you pretend to be fucking Diplo. She ate. But it's true. It's like Kyle, I guess, has had like a monopoly over the beverage that is being shown on Summer House. And you'll notice that when you look at the mess of the kitchen, it's always going to be lover boy cans that we're toasting with, that we're cheersing with, that are left all over.

So he's for some reason feels like he's entitled to come to Paige because her boyfriend and her best friend are doing other things in their career that she has no responsibility over.

I guess supporting her friends, supporting other business ventures that don't support Kyle.

But even then, she's at the rooftop here for your DJ set that I'm sure she has 500 other things she could be doing right now. I don't know where Kyle got the nerve, but I think Paige handled it absolutely 100% correctly because it really, she's like, message them.

Oh, I mean, it looks like we're about to see that too because the teaser was something where he calls her two-faced and she's like, you calling me fucking two-faced, Kyle? Like coming back down the stairs.

Emeril?

What does that even mean? Two and a half people?

No, when he said it, I was like, and then Kyle's like, no, this is a New Yorker through and through.

It was a brunch.

And he mentioned a swing and he's saying how the sex parties aren't as fun as you think they would be. Where I'm like, I don't know who sold you that they would be fun because that sounds...

I think you have to be a certain caliber of person for somebody to walk up to you and be like, hey, you seem like you would enjoy this.

I don't know anybody that's been to one, but I've definitely seen like blind items about them where it's like you have to have a password.

I don't know. I don't know. And I'm actually very happy that I don't.

Not at all. And as I said, I'm very happy I don't fit the mold of invites for.

I guess so. Come to my dungeon party, like post yourself in a mask and a thong and see what happens. I don't know.

I think he's redeemed himself.

I would love to see him do an interview, though, to be completely honest, because I'm just curious as to like how his brain works post feeling like he's been validated and that people can hear him and listen to him and that his words have meaning.

And Gabby absolutely ate at the roundtable.

Yeah. I'll hire her for my lawyer.

She's like, I'm not saying I'm dumb.

And let me continue. I'm excited. We ended with a cliffhanger.

The way that she said that she thought she saw Dolores kind of give her an eye and shake her head or like saying that she was voting for Danielle. That's why I think she's voting for Danielle. And I think this would also be kind of interesting because didn't she like double cross Danielle on the last show that they were out?

So it's like her thinking that she's siding with like group mentality and still ends up double crossing her would be a good television for me.

Were you considering like, are they going through a tough time financially? It raised a lot of questions.

It's okay. We've got multiple shows where it's Carolina, Caroline, Caroline, and he says them all, all interchangeably.

How do you say it?

Because, I mean, the whole point of like Big Brother is like being manipulative and like trying to get people out. But you're all like living in a house together. I'm like, at least survivor. It's like you're trying to survive and then vote people out.

What's, like, going through your mind, especially your last episode? While everybody's trying to, like, figure out, like, who's getting murdered or, like, who they think traitors are, like, what's going through your mind while you're sitting there, like, knowing that you are a traitor and hearing everybody's theories or guesses and, like... Wait, hold on.

Yeah, like, the last episode specifically, but, like, even just any breakfast in general, like...

How hard was it working on a team of traders that couldn't get on the same page? And that was including Rob and Danielle.

No, I feel that way about fan belt sushi. Like I love going to the sushi places that do that, but I only order from fresh from the kitchen.

Because you did say that during the chess game or something. You were saying how like nobody listens to you.

But it's still good sushi. I just don't want to pick it off because I don't know how many times it's gone around the entire restaurant. What if someone's touched it, opened it, put it back?

The doll challenge, I feel like made him so endearing because he really was trying so hard.

From the chess game. When did you kind of realize that Danielle had? No, you didn't.

I don't know if you realize that Danielle double-crossed you or that you outed yourself with helping Tom with the answer.

Yeah.

You are the pickiest eater.

So were you shocked by Danielle's turning on you at the round table?

Well, we absolutely loved watching you on Traitors, and I think you should stay being authentically yourself. Yes.

Thank you. Well, we're wishing you the best of luck for the reunion, and we're... Come back after. Yeah.

Still need to figure out this Shake Shack in first class of whether or not he gets a plain burger or the sauce on the side.

Okay.

Ops. The ops. I can't.

I started investing my time to get her justice.

Thank you.

You create the situation to where they have no choice but to act on their impulse. And once they act on that impulse, then we call that entrapment. We call it a nudge. A nudge. A nudge.

Sometimes you just gotta give them a quick little, just to see what happens, right?

You put a post out there or you have someone's fake profile say something that triggers, well, we know it's going to trigger them, right? Like, we already know your history. If we're to that point, we already know everything about you. So we're like, oh, this will piss them off. Sometimes you like to fuse and just wait for it to follow.

Nothing like putting out a fake social media thing to, like, really get people mad.

Post fake news. Sometimes it's fake news.