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Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is.
Matt, my name is Noah. They call me Ben.
We're joined with our super producer Paul, Mission Control decand most importantly, you are you. You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know one of our favorite times of the week.
Folks.
We always say you are the most important part of the show. When we say that, because it's true and we love hearing from you, which is why every week we like to take a break. We like to share your reports from your fellow conspiracy realists. We got a lot of react to our episode on ghost kitchens, which was pretty fun. We're going to get some reactions to
our EVP episode. We're gonna get We're gonna have some letters from home shout outs at the end, and before we do any of that, there is a letter that I think stood out to all of us about something strange occurring in Utah.
Yeah, something rotten in Utah. Well, maybe not rotten, but a little unusual. Let's just say I'm gonna jump right into us. This is an email that came to us from Mama Dino, seemingly quite shrewd listener. Some very fun caveats here in this email starting off longtime listener and most of the time I like you guys most.
Of the time.
Well, these are, by the way, my favorite parts of this letter.
Well, figot, I was wondering if you guys have heard of all the carbon monoxide poisonings happening in southern Utah this last month. I first started hearing about them when my cousin, who lives in Severe maybe Severe I think it's spelled Severe County, his heater went out, which you would think is normal every once in a while. But just a week later, a Latter Day Saints church building in Monroe poisoned nearly fifty people from their faulty heating system.
Monroe is a small town, so surrounding cities and counties had to send out multiple ambulances to transfer all patients to the hospitals, and then they provided a link. This is true such a small town or area that they didn't have enough ambulances in their own Cash of emergency responders, so they had to know outsources from surrounding counties. I live in Cedar City, which is one and a half hours away from Monroe. My husband is a police officer with Cedar CITYPDS, so I hear a lot about what
goes on. He says that he has gone to more carbon monoxide calls than usual, and we are only in January. Then on Friday, the nineteenth of this year, Canyonview Middle School had to be evacuated for carbon monoxide poisoning. This is the text that was sent out from the school district. And I don't know about you, Matt, but I get these from my kids' school all the time. Like the formatting of them is very familiar. ISCD Alert parents, guardians,
and staff. We understand your concerns about the carbon monoxide contamination. The building has been monitored and cleared multiple times by the Cedar City Fire Department and Dominion Energy. Kind of a sinister name for an energy company.
If you have you tell has got a lot of companies with sinister names.
Clear it would seem so yeah.
A cause has not been identified today Sunday, January twenty first, a National Guard has met team has been called in jeez and is currently thoroughly testing the building. We will communicate more information to you this afternoon once that investigation is complete. Update just stated that the middle school will be remote for Monday and Tuesday. Still waiting to see what they do next. I just feel like this is a lot of coincidences of carbon monoxide poisonings so close
together within different cities. Thanks for the podcast that keeps me saying is a stay at home mom, and sometimes y'all help me fall asleep.
Sincerely, Mama Diina.
Sometimes it's great to hear from you too, Mama de They really I'm just kidding. Thank you so much for writing to us. You're onto something I.
Think, well, yeah, you know, and it does sound I think maybe too. When you're dealing with sort of isolated parts of the country like this and smaller parts of the country where a religion or a way of life perhaps you know that is unfamiliar to too many, perhaps you know is very dominant, You know that the Latter Day Saints, and then you hear about things like this happening, your mind goes.
To conspiratorial places pretty.
Quickly, as though this is some sort of I don't know, backlash or perhaps there's someone that has a beef against the church, you know, or against members of the community perhaps, Like we obviously have no details tying any of these occurrences together. And you could also just chalk up to downright poverty, you know, or lower income perhaps in some of these areas where people can't afford to maintain their heating systems, or there are things that go undone because
of lack of funds. And I'm just conjecturing here. I am not sure saying that this is a necessarily a poverty stricken part of the country. I'm just saying it could be part of the reasoning. And I'm wondering what you guys think.
Well, I'm looking at that NBC News article discussing the church where fifty four people were there at the church and they had to you know, get help or whatever for carbon monoxide poisoning. The official, i guess blame falls on a heating system. Same with the school, and so you know, everybody uses them. We talked about that couple that died pretty recently, but that was that wasn't.
There was no carbon monoxide.
It wasn't about carbon monoxide. It was about just the heating system.
Without having the governor or regulatory safety measures working exactly.
The thermostat was busted, and it basically just like didn't know how hot.
It was getting.
I do think when it gets into cold temperatures and these systems are working over time, there is a higher chance to have a problem right or a small leap.
Absolutely, I'm sorry I should have mentioned that firstly, and that maybe you know that combined with perhaps lack of maintenance, could account for such a pattern.
I think inclement weather and lack of maintenance are are our most plausible culprits at this point, just because that makes the most sense. You know, we know that lack of maintenance is what has led to the lack of maintenance regulation led to stuff going wrong Boeing, it wasn't act.
It wasn't you know, a nefarious, purposeful conspiracy. And it's also very easy to miss that kind of maintenance because those sorts of systems in general are ones that people don't like to think about a lot until they break well, yeah, you know, like people who own cars but don't like cars.
Yeah, And it could be tremendously expensive to keep that stuff up, and especially if you've got other bills that you need to worry about. It's probably not a priority. Oh it's working. I'm not going to think about my heating system because it's working right now.
Because I have other more immediate problems. And also, you know, shout out to we have a lot of the LDS conspiracy realist in the crowd. We have a lot of listeners from Utah. Some of our friends and colleagues live in Utah. Shout out to the Casual Preppers podcast. Interesting to see, Oh I missed. Yeah, Oh they're great guys.
Well, I see what you can.
Will hang out with them later, I'm sure, I hope.
So, so this is a thing that I'm imagining, especially right now. If you're looking around, you are seeing a lot of stories about it. Paul Mission Control Decad just wrote in our chat just a few days ago there's an apartment building near him that had to get evacuated because of a report of carbon monoxide leak of some sort of game.
So it may not be just a Utah thing.
Nice, It's a cold snap all around the damn country right now.
I mean people are dying.
Downtown Atlanta high Rise had to be evacuated last week. A Texas bakery there were several people who were hospitalized. At Yale University, fourteen people were hospitalized last week due to all due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Literally, all you have to do is search for carbon monoxide poisoning and not also type utah.
Yeah, it's a very good point, and I'm sorry this is not carbon monoxide related, but it just relates to how brutally cold things have been, you know, of late in Edwardsville, Illinois, the first Baptist church in Edwardsville is being fined seven hundred fifty dollars a day for sheltering the homeless or the unhoused from the bitter, bitter cold that we as we know can actually kill people.
You know.
There's that other story, Matt about the folks that froze to death outside that house party, you know. Yeah, And it seems that this Edwardsville situation and is due to the fact that the church did not apply for the proper permit, which just seems cruel and unusual to me.
But again, not carbon monoxi.
Early.
I'm just showing how crazy the temperatures have been lately. It's almost as though the climate is changing.
There's another very similar case in Ohio, where an Ohio pastor has been charged for sheltering homeless people in this
terrible weather, and that that goes to zoning laws. And if you go into the forums just reporting on those two incidents, or definitely in the Ohio one, which I'm more familiar with, then you'll see you'll see accusations that are unfortunately not uncommon in small towns, arguing that the pastor, Chris of El got on the wrong side of a relationship with local law enforcement, and so that they're pushing unnecessarily for something what's it called malicious compliance of some sort.
It's pretty harmless.
I don't think you should criminalize being unhoused, and that's something that parts of the US seem to be trending toward. But then again, if you house somebody and you don't have the maintenance on your heating system, they get carbon monoxide and then you're at fault for that's.
A good yeah.
I mean, you know, there's a liability to consider, but still, you know, at the end of the day, we should be able to help our struggling members of our communities.
I was thinking about that the other day. Goes. I didn't know about the San Diego flooding until like a video popped up in my Instagram.
I learned nothing about it. Guys.
Yeah, it's it was pretty historic. It was intense. It's insane, and I maybe I'm completely wrong here, but I'm reading that it has a lot to do with an infrastructure problem. Like a lot of the cities that end up experiencing catastrophic flooding, it's just stuff wasn't quite up to snuff and what it needed to be to protect, you know, portions of the city that are closest to the ocean or to a river from flooding. It's terrifying really.
It's also in that case they had a a lot of those things have like a window of tolerance or a margin of error, and from my understanding, things really went wrong when they were hit with repeated storms consecutively. I think it was three, which is it's tough to plan for that.
But it just made me think of on house people, right, and like, what do you do when the city where you live outside in it just begins flooding in that manner, it's terrifying.
One good thing we can say, and Mo Anddino, perhaps you will agree with this. One good thing we can say is that access to information allows people to be more aware of stories that would normally or quite possibly not be reported outside of their local community. So it does enable us to have a better high level picture of these patterns being described, like CO two poisoning across the US, like the little war on the unhoused. And he said it already. Old people don't always like when
we mentioned it. But it's real climate change, exaggerating, exaggerating weather patterns escalating. I should say, I don't know if this hit you guys part of town here in our fair metropolis of Atlanta. But I was out on one of my porches, just writing some stuff, and it was a warm day, right, kind of overcast, but the weather seemed nice. And then, as if a heavenly switch was flipped, the sky opened up and there was a deluge. Yesterday, Yeah, yesterday.
Nola and I live relatively close to one another, so usually we're affected by similar weather patterns. I'm just interested if it hit you guys too, Yeah, I did, for sure.
I mean, I've got to get rid of this thing.
I've got to couch in my back driveway that is sitting in about three inches of water. There's a bit of a depression kind of area in my driveway. But it's also a bit like seventy two seventy three degrees lately going down from you know, brutal cold, and I'm sure we've got more cold snaps ahead of us, but it's just really unpredictable and kinda just a little bit unsettling, wouldn't you say?
Yeah?
And Ben, I drove through that storm. Everything seemed fine and just to overcast, and then I'm heading towards the city and holy mackerel, it was some of the creepiest lightning that I've experienced.
Amazing photographs, Guys.
Isn't it crazy when you're on the highway or something and you can literally see the line of demarcation a lotther like sheet of weather. Change begins and it's like you're going into a portal. Man, It's It's wild.
One of my favorite parts of the Great American interior, especially when you get in that really flat land, you know, Kansas and Brass kind of country and you can see you can see the rain happening. But when that switch flipped again, just mine in my own business, I was like, this is warm outside, you know, it's overcast, so the sun's not going to get to me. I'll just I'll
just write some stuff. And then I hear thunder and then in the distance, ten minutes later, I hear like thunder a little bit closer, and right after that thunder boom, the bottom drops out. It was as if the sky tried to try to sneak out a fart, And yeah, it just we've all played that game, folks.
Danger always win.
But like, what can be done though, in terms of this this maintenance thing, Unfortunately the burden is on the consumer, it seems, right, And if you cannot if you're a private household or a private property, and you're not beholden to the rules of a public space or a business, then there's not really anyone enforcing maintenance on your systems, right. I don't know if that's the answer. I don't know if there should be. I don't know. I navigate that.
It's just a weird thing, especially in apartment complexes where if like in your unit, there's often a locked door that has like the heating or the water heater, you know, some system that you can't get to that only maintenance is allowed to come into and mess with. But if you've got one of those locked doors. I would highly recommend you go on whateverever you order things online or head to your home depot and get like a twenty dollars carbon monoxide little thing you plug into the wall.
It's a detector. It's twenty bucks. You put it near wherever that system is, just in case, because often apartment complex will have some kind of built in systems for fire and carbon monoxide. But dang, I don't know. I guess I have trust issues, but.
Everybody should have trust issues. While you're at your local home supply store, get a fire extinguisher or like, already have one. Yeah, keep that thing on you. It's good to have their fun.
I just got one for by my bed, like literally, just in case. I don't know. I had this dream about waking up in a fire in my house while my son is here and my only fire extinguisher is being pretty far away from me, and then like the panic of that moment plus trying to get my son and I to safety, plus being able to put a fire out, and I was like, you're gonna sit right here from now on, pal.
Be more paranoid. Get one in your car too, Yeah, you should have your car.
That's that's been one O one right.
Yourself, just for like other people.
Yeah, also true.
Wouldn't you need a specialized one that would be more for vehicle fires or oil fires or something or maybe not something?
Yeah, I mean something's better than nothing. But yeah, get one of the little Get one of the little guys, you know what I mean, not like the final form industrial oxygen cylinder looking thing from a hospital.
But just one of the little small ones.
Yeah, exactly.
But it's just the same stuff.
It's the same halon. You can get like a three pack for two hundred and twenty dollars.
On the internet.
You guys want to go in on it, absolutely, it's reasonable.
Can't put a price on personal safety.
We're very fun at parties for sure.
Well, thank you Mamadino for this this tip, and I think I feel pretty confident we're barking up the right tree as to you know, this is really just kind of more of a weather thing than it is some sort of plot against the Latter Day Saints. But let's take a quick break a hero Worth Moore sponsor and then come back with some more listener mail.
We're back drinking a cucumber lime Celsius, and I still I can't decide how I feel about cucumber drinks.
It's okay, it's it's a choice.
It's a freshness too, you know what, It's good like aqua fresca. Have you ever been to a really good Mexican place a little bit of cucumber in with like an aqua fresca, lime aid or something.
It can really be nice, all.
Right, it's adding something different to it. But I don't know that I like.
I don't like eating a cucumber, but I do like a cucumber vibe every now and again.
You know who hates cucumbers?
Cats?
Yes?
Yeah, oh, I take it back to One great use of cucumber is to make setsky sauce. You know, you scoop out the guts and squeeze out the water, and a bunch of garlic and yogurt.
Boys, and a cucumber is involved somehow.
Cucumber Okay, I know, you squeeze out the you basically scoop out the seeds, You peel it, and then you grate it and that gives the satsiki this really nice fresh kind of vibe, super good great food.
And thus concludes the cucumber section of this listener mail episodes.
Sorry, everybody stop writing about take some cucumbers from the day, guys.
I love it.
If you want if you want advice for good cucumber uh cucumber adjacent recipes, just write to us. I gotcha.
Also not sponsored by Celsius, but we would so be into that. Here we go. We've got several messages, guys of people with personal experience with ghost kitchens. So let's start out by hearing from Blake.
Hey, guys, this is Blake Move. You guys were just putting out a call for people that work for delivery acts, and I worked for Postmates in the past. I worked for a Lift for quite a while, but now currently for fun, I do door dash on the side. And you guys were talking about ghost kitchens. I hate them because you show up it's Biscuits Cafe and you're picking up for some other restaurant and you have no like. It's awful because most of them won't have a sticker
saying oh this is Brito Town. Also here you'll just google the address and it comes up as another restaurant.
I hate it.
I'm a really fast driver. I'm a fast delivery guy. But I just hate having to stop and like google something and figure it out. But yeah, a lot of places do that. Anyway, I'm at work, I gotta go.
Here's Blake with a report. Gotta go. That was awesome, Blake, thank you so much for giving us that information. I love biscuits cafe. Is that a thing I want to eat at biscuits cafe.
Biscuits is just a great word to put in the title of any restaurant, you know, because it's so evocative of the smell and the texture and the taste. I also, I feel like we do have a delivery app episode on the way. We've been hearing some great stuff from our fellow listeners and got to tell you, man, you are not the first person who said I don't care for ghost kitchens because they can also be real. Apparently some of them can be very difficult to find.
Yeah, yeah, I get it.
They're not necessarily always made for pickup drivers from delivery apps. Like the parking can be tough, and then the clock is always counting against you when you're when you're working in those professions.
Oh, very true. I was gonna shout out this company and my friend I went to high school and his name's Nick. He makes biscuits in New York City. I cannot remember the name of it. Sorry, Nick, if you're out there listening, I haven't spoken with him in years.
He used to date my sister.
Oh, I remember this story. Also, I have a pitch for you, Matt. What if we just as Since we don't remember the name of his place right now, why don't we just gift him with a nickname. Let's call Nicky biscuits.
Oh that's a good.
Okay, that's it. That's it.
Why do they call them nicky biscuits? You pray you never learned the answer.
That's awesome.
But hey, let's get those stickers up on those ghost kitchens. Everybody. If you're a proprietor of a kitchen that is also a ghost, put up a sticker. Hey, so let's go to our next person here. Grumpy Texan has had a little experience here that I think will shock all of us.
I guess Grumpy Texan here been listening for a little while. First time caller anyway, Yeah, I was listening to all the show on the ghost kitchens, and funny enough, that same exact situation happened to my colleague while we were working in New York pretty much the same name. He said, past Walls is who he ordered from, except the differences. His pizza actually came in a Chuck E Cheese box.
We were two Texan guys that were working in New York City staying in the Bronx, and we wanted some genuine pizza and that's what he got. So anyway, thanks love the show, guys, but he.
Got Charles entertained for sure, chocolate chips on the Chuck E cheese plate.
You guys, but.
It's just horrible. I know. I know that feeling like the first couple of times I traveled to New York and it's like, man, I need to find some pizza. I keep hearing about this pizza and then you'd go to a raise and it's not the right one and you're just like, oh, that was kind of subpar.
Yeah, I got to tell you, man, New York has such an amazing food culture. I've always felt like, if you are just looking for good, regular, non fancy pizza, go to the place it looks like a money laundry operation, you know what I mean, Because and sure, I mean, maybe don't open with that when you talk with them, but just like be in the know about that and
be aware that you should probably have cash. And yeah, there is that bait and switch though, especially because so many people are using for convenience or sometimes for necessity, are using delivery apps, and what you're typically looking for in those apps, especially if you're in a new city or a city in which you don't live, then you're looking for the kind of food you want more often than you're looking for a specific restaurant by name, right,
so exactly, so then you you say, Okay, this pizza looks good or based on the pictures from this place I've never heard of, right, and they capitalized. And I'm really happy we did the Ghost Kitchens episode. I think we were fair about it.
Oh, I think so too. Mission Control. We're gonna keep shouting you out this episode. He brought up a place that he recently ordered from somewhere in New York City called Wonder Wonder. It's a really interesting concept to me. It feels like it's exactly what we described in the Cloud Kitchen ghost Kitchen thing, where it appears to be brick and mortar stores that are maybe one huge kitchen and if you order from here from this one location, when there are a bunch of locations actually, so a
bunch of these all over the place. You can get food from like a dozen different seemingly high end restaurants that's all cooked there in that one place.
But like they're really leaning into it and presenting it as a feature not a bug, you know, whereas some of the I think the weirdness in our reporting on the ghost kitchen phenomenon is folks being a little bit shady about it, you know, as in the case with this pizza box from you know, Chuck E Cheese. But like, I think it's smart if done correctly. But Paul did
point out he felt that the food was good. Weirdly, though, two of the franchises that are contained within this wonder that Paul went to are two Atlanta based companies, which I did not know that either of these existed in New York. Ones called Fred's Meat and Bread, which is really really good like Phillies and Burghers, and the other one is Chaipani, which is kind of up plussed up Indian food.
But Paul said it was good.
But the idea, though I believe, is that it's one cook you know, or a group of cooks doing all the food for all the places. So there could be consistencies, you know, if you're having to know two large of a menu. But there are certain types of restaurants that would be more suited for this type of treatment, places that don't have mass of menus.
Sure right, yeah, so it could be done well. It could be done well.
And we're not vilifying these things at all. We just we believe that people should be to the point about deception. We believe that transparency is key with this kind of stuff. And these are hard working chefs, they are making good food. It is, as we spend so much time exploring in that episode, restaurants are an incredibly tough business. It is cutthroat, is brutal. But also, you know, one thing we didn't mention is something that I imagine common in many Western
cities is the pop up kitchen. Right. That's kind of like a ghost kitchen, because you have a brand that goes to a restaurant that may not They may just want to give somebody a chance right to pitch their stuff, and so you'll go to your typical whatever the You'll go to your typical nikky biscuits and then you'll find that tonight instead of their usual dinner menu, there's the two hands pop up, and that is not seen as misleading or anything, because again people are being transparent about
it and it's a cool way to try new things. But but yeah, I I I don't know, man. I think ghost kitchens are gonna continue. I think they're gonna I think this trend is gonna escalate. What do you think?
Yes, I mean this feels like the future to me. I guys, I made a terrible mistake. Oh no, my friend Nick does not make biscuits in New York. He makes them in Los Angeles.
Okay, Nicky biscuits still holds, I think.
So, hey, man, better than ever, dude, no harm, no foul and other expressions.
Yeah, you could look him up. His name's Nick Westbrook. Amazing actor. Again, I haven't talked to him a long time. Hopefully he's still an awesome person because he was when I knew him. All Right, there, he goes, sorry that. Hey, we've got one more message you guys. Yeah, this is from I'm gonna call him Fi guy, pretty fly for a FI guy. Here we go and play.
Hi, I'm a public health inspector in Canada, and I've just been listening to your episode on ghost kitchens, and I think you're assuming, well, it seems that you're assuming that a lot of the ghost kitchens out there are inspected and that we even know about them, And in
a lot of cases we don't. These places will pop up, they'll have four or five kitchens running out of them, and we won't know until an inspector goes out and takes a look at an area, finds one of these restaurants and sees that suddenly, this pizza place has a bunch of Mister Best Burger boxes in it. So now you've got a person that works in a pizza place cooking your burger. And that's the best case scenario that
we catch them. It could be just a garage out in the middle of nowhere, a food truck parked in the field. God knows what they've got for equipment, God knows what they've got for training. Did I know how to cook a burger?
You know?
Are they cooking it wrong? I don't know. I know in the States you can buy a raw burger, can't do it here in Canada. I think you need to talk to someone in the health field and find out what kind of conditions a lot of these places operate in. Set that backing up rat's roads, improper cooking techniques, not available refrigerators, It's it's a mess. Ghost kitchens are a nightmare for us. We've had an application here someone who wants to operate with twelve places operating out of a
place besides just a small garage. So love the show. I can't wait to hear what more you're going to do our best?
Thanks, ooh ooh, dog with a ball, Matt, you got to me, sir, I think we I think that is an excellent point.
We got.
We got to dive in. I didn't know it was so easy, but I guess you could do it pretty off the book, so huh.
Yeah, oh, I guess you can. What he described, though, sounded a lot like Wonder a very small location in New York City, because we know that space is at a very very much a pre They're in New York City and all boroughs and all the places, and they are They've got a ton of locations that Wonder place, and they're running of at least a dozen kitchens out of there. So I mean it sounds like something that
would potentially be above board in the United States. At least it changes things when you got a whole different, you know, set of regulations you're working on in Canada and in other countries. So we need to go international with this thing.
I'm in okay, so Papua New Guinea in Canada, and then I get and then I guess we'll add a third for rule of three. But but that is that is disturbing too, because just thinking through this, you guys, all right, you position a ghost kitchen. So your main your main platforms of business are going to be delivery apps.
Delivery apps, do they require documentation of like health code and then you know your score like here in the UNIP so I don't know how it works in Canada, but you know here in the US, any restaurant you go to is supposed to have their little worksheet with their health score displayed somewhere, and that's always fun to read while you're waiting for the takeout.
Do you guys have a minimum score like that will cause you to not walk out if you see it.
I'm like eighty five. Eighty five is okay?
That seems I know, maybe that seems like I got real low standards.
But you got to you got to read the thing. If you read the thing, they didn't tell you why. Yeah, like they get a perfect score. Oh but they also have rats and you go, well bye.
Man.
If you know anything from watching like Kitchen Nightmare type shows, Uh, oftentimes people will get a bad score because of something silly that they're just missed, that wasn't necessarily an egregious you know, oversight or systematic problem. And then oftentimes they will fix it even if you know, sometimes it don't even make the news, like beloved restaurant fails health inspection, and then.
They can make it right. Or might it's a really good point then.
Yeah, agreed, Or it could be it could be a problem that is beyond their control, like it's something under the onus of the owner of the building and they're leasing the space. That can happen. But then also to answer question, I'm not going to name names, but there's a for a long time there's been a couple pretty famous restaurants in an area of our town called Buford Highway, and they're legit and they're amazing. And there's one that I went to regularly even when the score was eighty three.
Oh no, okay, me too.
Yeah, I stand by eighty five.
I would, you know, if it was a place I loved, I would, I would go as low as eighty three.
Well, one of my favorite Bangladeshi restaurants that's out there, and it's not the one maybe we're all thinking about the one that shut down that was my favorite.
It's not Panahr. It was so good, it was so good.
Josh Clark, I'm sorry, man, I'm sorry we even brought it up. If you hear this in the ether somehow on the streets, bro. But there's another one there that is still one of It's one of my favorite places to get food from, and it regularly has a low score. I watched staff members come out into the dining room area and shuck eggs. Just watched them doing it out there.
Yeah, I think one shucks corn.
Eggs.
These are special.
Cigarette dangling in the staying wife guys.
Sometimes that's a badge of honor, sign of quality, you know, greasy spoon, you know that kind of.
I am a friend of Chinatown's across the country.
Man.
Yeah, if I if, I especially if I see and this is such profiling. If I see an older dude who is clearly over it and looks like kind of bored with whatever he's doing, and the apron or like the clothing is kind of dirty and stained, I feel like it's legit. I'm like, you know what, but forget a menu. I'm gonna ask the guy what I should have.
Man, this cigarette dangling an inch of ash niggers, you know, falls into the ragou.
You know, seasoning there it is.
I also feel like we should mention first, Yes, we need to look at the health code stuff in future episode. But I agree with the point about reading reading the details of the health inspection report because it's possible that someplace has a high score. But then, like you said, they have something egregious. You know, it's like two unidentified feet in the two unidentified severed feet in walking cooler? Ninety three?
Can you get a ninety three with that kind of offense?
You didn't see the thing that was some meme maybe it was on Reddit or four chan, but some like subway employee uh took a picture of them standing in like one of those two pan things of lettuce, and I was like, this is the lettuce you're eating?
A movie.
It was Burger King, but you know the the eagle eyed Internet swarm immediately identified exactly which Burger King this was and got the guy promptly fired.
Oh, no good, no.
Good at all.
Well that's all today on Ghost Kitchens. Thank you, Blake, Grumpy Texan and public Health inspector Guy. We will be right back with more messages from you.
And we have returned. This one is going to be a bit of a round up, folks, a bit of a compilation at the end, because there's a lot of cool things we want to get to and as always, it's a wonderful problem to have. We can't get to everyone, so we're just going to have to keep doing this show, which is awesome. First, Matt, you brought this to my mind. We want to thank our pals Josh and Chuck. A little while back, Josh reached out to me and said
he was working started asking me questions about Esperanto. For anybody who knows Josh, one of the cool things is, like many of us, how stuff works. People will just sort of, well, we'll just come to each other and then maybe not with a lot of context, start asking really specific questions of scientific stuff or scientific nature anyway, So shout out Josh and Chuck. They just did a banger of an episode on how Esperanto works for all the word nerds out there, and they gave us some
nice shout outs. So appreciate you, guys, and good luck to everybody who is learning esperanto. Just figure would we would say that? And also aren't they on tour again right now?
Maybe they should be.
They always are doing little one off things here and there. Great thing to catch if they come to your town.
Yes, yeah, good, good thing to catch when they come through your town. Perfectly said. We have another another letter I want to read in part from someone responding to our episode on electronic voice phenomenon ghost in the Machine. This is from George, who says, who talks about some of the stuff that they learned in the course of ghost hunting and investigations. Also, thank you to everybody who wrote in about ghost hunting and your experience with it.
He says, the following one group had rules around collecting audio recordings. I don't recall all of them, but these came to mind, and this I think hits directly on our conversation about methodology right in the science of this, so first quote, we would make sure to dangle our recorders from our wrist with straps and not move around while recording. This would ensure we weren't introducing sounds with subconscious movements of our hands or creating sounds with movement
of air. So it's kind of similar to like the wich aboard argument, right it is.
I would just say they make these things called tripods that you can attach equipment. Sorry, just me, in my mind, dangling from a risk is precarious, that's all.
Yeah.
Can I just give a little shout out to a product that I believe made its debut on one of those shark tank type shows and I was hooked into it by an Instagram ad. And it's a very flexible tripod. I think it's called like the squid or something like that. It's a very flexible tripod that has like little suction cups on it and you can stick it to a wall, stick it anywhere, or wrap the little leggies around different you know things to mount it in different ways, and
it's really really really cool. It's called tentacle, that's what it's called.
Sorry. Also eldritche Vibes.
Yes and the job Gorilla pod that we like to use in video production.
For very similar to that. It has suction cups, you guys, suction cups.
And so there's another slight issue which I think we're all aware of here, which is if you've ever done the pendulum experiment, it's a great way to see how unconscious, small muscle movement can be altered by your thought alone. The experiment is very simple. You can play along at home.
You hold some weighted object by a string, something pendulum esque, and then you as it's stankling, you start thinking about it going up and down right like back and forth, or moving in a circle, and as you think about what path you want it to take, it will do that because your hand is subconsciously moving.
It really is interesting too, the idea of think about this as hard as you can, and like, you know, you could maybe make the jump that you're moving it with your mind, but you kind of are, because your mind is sending signals to your hand that you're not even aware of that are causing it to change direction, but you're not exactly sending, you know, psychic beams into the string.
Everybody has the power of mind over matter. In the vast majority of proven cases. I'll go ahead and say in all of the proven cases, it just turns out the matter that your mind controls is your body.
Right, bro, Think about if you stand on one foot and you're balancing on one foot, are you consciously telling your body how to balance and like which micro movements to make to maintain balance or.
Does the pro preception just kick in right? Like how can you how can you close your eyes and touch your nose without looking? It's pro preception, right, It's the reason some people puke when they play games like Mirror's Edge. Is that the one the park Woor game?
Yeah, the first person running across buildings.
Yeah, some people don't don't find VR comfortable either, Right, And you guys put on the VR headsets and like walked by, you know, a precipice or a cliff in the game.
Matt introduced me to it one time when he came over.
He used the first one that I knew that had the newer edition of the Oculus Rift of the time. And there's this game called Plant Game where it's like, you know, graphics that are of the level of like the Sims from the nineties, but you go up in this elevator, and then the whole game is to walk out on this plank and your mind just accepts what is being presented because it is so immersive. And the first time I tried to do it, I literally couldn't do it. I'm in my living room. I know I'm
in my living room. I feel the carboner on my feet, but I couldn't force myself to do it. I have since done it, and it's still you know, God, the mind is a very fascinating thing the way it just has to It has the ability to.
Just convince you something is real, even if you know it's not.
You have to push against your instincts there, and there's a very good reason that your mind will say no, that is one hundred foot drop and you're like, no, I'm in my living room. They're like yeah, but just in case we're trying to stay alive here you guys.
Oh man, I'm so sorry. I don't want to interject another tangent here. In the news recently, there was a murder case that had to do with something I'd never heard of before. Cannabis induced psychosis.
Oh you that the other day?
Yeah, marijuana madness.
Yeah, but it was used in a case, and the woman who was accused of stabbing your boyfriend a hundred times got probation for that because she smoked weed and was experiencing this thing. We got to talk about that at some point she.
Got she got found successful of having an amazing lawyer.
It's in the library. Yeah, it's trigger, it's not.
It's not as for anybody you got to have pre existing like right, trigger schizophrenia essentially.
But it's just stuff that's happening in that closed room, right, And we're just like, what, Okay.
It's happening in the mind. And then uh, let's go back to this because I do want to for anybody who's interested in pursuing EVAP, I think it'll be helpful to get a sense of how people apply rigor to this, to this search. So we talked at length about the idea of trying to reduce subconscious movements of hands or movement of air. George continues. We would always pair off so that there were at least two sets of eyes and ears for any session. If we heard sounds, we
would identify them allowed for the recorder. The process was to ask a question, wait a few minutes, then ask another question. This was because ostensibly it could take time for responses to occur. We'd also keep recordings to This is interesting. This is kind of counterintuitive to me. They said we would keep recordings down to ten to fifteen minutes or so, largely because reviewing the data takes about as long as it takes to record it in the
first place. So they're not I don't know what you guys think, but I I guess I had just lazily imagined. I haven't done EVP research, but I had just lazily imagined that you would set a recorder in an empty room overnight or something like that, and then try to party.
That you did. Matt, wasn't it in your old house?
No, I actually kept it over night. I completely agree with this part, because you do. Again, if you're reviewing a piece of tape and it's say ten minutes right, you're listening back to that tape after you've recorded it in real time, trying to notice if there's anything maybe then enhancing it, turning up the gain or something. Listening back to that full ten minutes again making a change the way with audio is being filtered to enhance something else.
Listening back to that ten minutes, it could take forever. I think that's probably a smart move.
Okay, yeah, that makes sense, especially considering like how deep you want to go into analysis, You're going to spend a lot a lot of time with those minutes. And then adds this that I definitely appreciate this point. We acted and spoke in a respectful manner at all times, so for example, we would not actively enrage a ghost just to get a response out of them. And what I'm doing, my friend, that makes you so much better than so many of those ghost hunting shows where they're like,
come on, broh, come on, if you're here, hit a cabinet. Brouh. I'm tho scared.
Yeah, I feel like that's the only way to go. You just you've got to get in their grill, you know.
I feel like that establishes living People don't want to hang out with you. Much of.
This is why you have no friends and have a failing ghost hunting show.
Oh boy on, oh gosh. Yeah uh, but you know, it's a it's a tough gig. And in their defense, the producers have a lot to do with how people are portrayed in reality shows, So we don't know oh, no question. We don't know how they're getting set up.
Sorry, Zach, we act yeah, you know, funny story, not to derail really quickly.
Just Paul will know about this. He and I worked on a.
Pilot or a sizzle for a reality show, uh with the unfortunate name of the Underground Runway. It was about like some Buckhead, which is like a kind of suburb here in Atlanta, of like fancy moms that we're looking to set up a side business of a of a clothing line in their basement.
Underground Runway.
You didn't really vet that one through, but man, we saw some stuff where the producer was just.
Feeding lines to you know, the talent quote unquote. It was nothing, was real. It was all manufacturer Silverado.
Remember that poll, He says, ha ha, yep. It's also I remember hearing this story too. There's also a good point that our pal raises in the CVP letter. George says, we were doing this because we wanted to collect data in as uniform and scientifical way as we could. While we did try to adhere to our rules, I don't think we could call any of our data scientific, nor
do I think that any ghost hunter can shots fired. George, consider that scientific data has criteria requires controlled experimental circumstances, minimizing variables. Then consider how difficult it is to create tests with regular humans. Then add in the fact that ghost hunters are attempting to generate responses from what amounts to invisible humans, so they don't know if the humans are there to test. And this is where he introduces a phrase. I think it's cool word of the day
Portmanteau anec data like anecdote, but data. I hope. I wish you could see the faces there, George. I think we're all in love with this term. He says with ghost hunting, annec data gives us the preponderance of evidence we need to know in order to decide whether something is worth pursuing. So I think that's a very fair and even minded way to go about it. And I don't know, guys, should we have done that ghost hunting show years back?
Which one?
Which one? Yeah, that's a that's a good question. We would get these We would get these questions from different companies and they would say, hey, you guys want to do a ghost hunting show with us?
The show we should have done was called Silverado, that's the one we should have done.
That, that's what we should have done, and what the malundon silver mines. Yep, yeah, all right, so we'll we'll show this up here. We've got a couple of things we'll just call letters from Home. In response to our classic episode on Superpowers, this was Superpowers Part two. We talked about ring finger mobility, and we got a lot of people just flexen, literally flexing on us. So shout
out to Amir who says ring finger and mobility. I wasn't aware this was something most people can't do, and I don't think any of us can do it right Where you move your ring finger independently? Oh you can do it down, but can you do it up?
No?
I can't.
I can't do anything with it. Sorry, guys, really this if I do my doing it, I do it. Never mind, I'm doing it. Are I boarding on? Inappropriates pinky though?
Isn't it?
Oh ring finger? Sorry? Oh no, it's it's stuck. It's frozen ring finger. Ring finger is completely immobile.
We also we also hear from the part of my pronunciation here the Wayne Garoa kid who says hello from Wayne Garua o tioa iologized that spelling is a O T E A R O A and says the following, I have good finger control? Am I a superhero? And this one also came attached with a picture of the person actually doing this, So there's evidence maybe we're behind the curve, because everyone who wrote in about this ring finger stuff seemed surprised that other people can't do it.
I guess it's like rolling your tongue or the taste of cilantro right, one of those little genetic works we all get.
I think so. I think so wing Grello, by the way, is New Zealand, New Zealand.
I can't do it with my other hand. I'm sorry. I'm doing the.
Livelong progress, which is the blessing the coining when you do it with both hands. And then we heard from a lot of people recently on the Ai Harlan stuff the family is suing really ye and shout out to a frame who a framed, a long time contributor, fellow conspiracy realist. And I think your recent correspondence kind of sums up what a lot of people have told us after hearing that story quote, I don't like Ai Carlin.
I first heard him when I was nine with my dad and his seven words of words I used to help with my chronic stutter. His content means a lot to me. I'm glad you guys don't like Ai Carlin too, agreed.
Bro, I cutely agree.
There there was a sort of a little tone death as a bit of satire.
You know, we missed a part of that that we should have discussed, guys, And I didn't hear it until after, and I was more curious. But Ben, you said you'd listened to the whole thing, and I was like, oh man, maybe I need to listen to this thing. There's a section in there where Ai Carlin says, in the future, it will just be us. It will be the AI versions of all your favorite comedians and actors, and they're going to replace all the newscasters, cause who's better at
telling you what's going on than comedians. And he's like, there will be twenty four hour, three hundred and sixty five day year feeds of comedians talking about current events, what's happening, and doing it through the specific lens and just basically Ai Carlin paints a picture of proliferation and kind of a dystopia, but also an interesting concept.
Yeah, but I don't think I remember that, and it is it is interesting. It is, to be honest, it is the kind of thing Carlin would plausibly bring up very alive to do us at. This is true.
If that happened, guys, we would always know what Ja Rule is thinking.
Thank God about ghost kitchens. I tried to. I texted him, He's like, I can't talk. I'm doing EVP stuff.
Yes, definably knows where he was.
I just want to add to I've been seeing lately on various Instagram accounts and such that I follow these very riskque AI renderings of Taylor Swift kind of like almost in the style of key art for like Grand Theft Auto games, as like a sex worker kind of you know, exotic dancer kind of situation, like wearing you know, g strings and fish nets and being fondled and stuff, pretty pretty raunchy stuff. I immediately was like, this is odd, and I showed it to my girlfriend, who immediately.
Said, Taylor's not gonna like that.
And sure enough, the very next day, maybe even the same day, it was saying Taylor Swift pursuing legal action against creators of these AI renderings of.
Her gonna be tough to do it because it's just a creepy escalation of those those dudes who would photoshop celebrities faces and stuff.
And these are very stylized. No one is looking at this and believing that that is Taylor Swift. They basically look like cartoons, like, you know, like kind of photo realistic hyperstyle. I really think the grand theft auto key art is a decent analogy, but I do wonder if she does find traction, that will certainly set a precedent, as she is one of the most visible, powerful and wealthy women or people in general in entertainment, So a lot of potential there for what could set some presidents.
But honestly, don't think that she's going to be able to, you know, prevent people, for she's a public figure.
You know.
Well, it is kind of like fan art too, right in a.
Way technically, and also the law is there. The law is a very tough time with this. The legislation hasn't caught up with the innovation here yet and may not because it's decentralized. I want to emphasize that thing I mentioned earlier. If it's not familiar to anybody. The Streissand effect very real on the Internet that is named after
I think Barbara Streisand had some unflattering picture. Oh no, it's a photo of her house that she didn't want out there, and she said, hey, Internet, don't put that anywhere. And so the Internet, being decentralized and full of smart alex put it everywhere. So it's unfortunately sometimes it's throwing gas on the fire you mean to extinguish. And I think that's worth exploring all of this and more in a future episode. For now, let's call it a day.
Thank you to Blake, Grumpy Texan, pretty fly for a Fi guy, mam Medino, George and all our fellow conspiracy realists who took the time to join the show. Write us some letters from home. We hope this message finds you well in a mid grand adventure. Join us for the next listener mail program. We try to make it pretty easy to find us.
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