261 Transcript

AJ June 14, 2025 1

Primary Book:

Mentioned Books: Divided in Death, Apprentice in Death, Born in Death, Seduction in Death, Vengeance in Death, Survivor in Death, Immortal in Death, Glory in Death, Portrait in Death, Origin in Death, Memory in Death, Promises in Death, Thankless in Death, Bonded in Death, Payback in Death, Passions in Death, and Creation in Death

Topics: Medical, Medicine, Medical Rants, and Guest Host

Highlights:

AJ flies solo again (Episode 261) while Tara’s still out with throat issues, and AJ brings in listener Melissa as a guest to keep the train on the tracks.

Main topic: “Medical stuff in In Death—does it actually make sense?”
Melissa reframes a bunch of the series’ medical “wait, WHAT?” moments through the lens of disaster medicine / field medicine, where rules and scope-of-practice get weird fast because people are overwhelmed and resources are limited.

Melissa’s background is the credibility engine: Coast Guard experience, emergency response teaching, EMT/firefighter training, and real-world examples of how medicine changes when you’re in the middle of chaos.

Somerset defense squad episode.
The conversation circles around moments like the tracker removal in Divided, tending injuries during mass-casualty situations, helping during births, etc.—and how later canon (Somerset’s training) makes some earlier “is he even allowed to do that?” moments feel more plausible.

“Tech changes what’s normal” thread:
Healing wands, remote/robotic surgery, telehealth-type scenarios—basically: future medicine makes the line between specialist and generalist blur.

Classic Podcast in Death vibe moments:
Internet wobble (“cattywampus”), “we wing it,” AJ’s real-life tangent about how expensive ambulances are, and some ranty asides about healthcare.

AI rant + wiki reality check:
They talk about ChatGPT getting details wrong even when it “references the wiki,” plus a side tangent into AI video deepfakes and why that’s scarier than “AI can’t remember which book.”

Patreon love + community appreciation:
Melissa talks about the show getting her through grad school, the joy of Briefing Room episodes, swag/trading cards, and the Facebook group being unusually non-terrible for the internet.

Fan profile questions segment (lighter ending):
Favorite book (Bonded), favorite character (Mavis/Trina), gadget wish list (AutoChef/healing wand), Monopoly slander, “hot dog isn’t a sandwich,” shower singing, playlists, etc.

Podcast In Death (00:03.278)
All right, just give me a couple of seconds of silence and I’ll go in.

I also have to psych myself up every time. Hey everyone. Welcome once again to Podcast in Death, the weekly podcast where we discuss the In Death series of books by JD Robb. I am AJ and once again, Tara is not here. She’s still out with her throat problems, but I have heard from her and she anticipates that she will probably be back next week, which is a good thing.

It’s been since, I don’t know, I think the first part of April that Tara has been with us. So, yeah, it’s been a long time, but we’re trying to come up with episodes as we can. Now, last week, I talked to Quincy, as you will all remember. And while I was talking to her, she said, hey, you have to also talk to my friend, Melissa, Melissa, who is also on our Facebook page.

And she said she’s got a really interesting idea for an episode. And if you want, I’ll text her and get her in touch with you. And I said, yeah, let’s do that. So with me today, I have listener Melissa. Hi, Melissa.

Melissa (She/Her) (01:21.79)
Hi, thanks for having me.

Well, thanks for being on. You’re really helping me out. Seriously, because like we were just talking about, I’m all discombobulated and it’s been tough trying to come up with stuff to do while Tara’s out. But, you know, here we are. But yeah, you’re really helping me out and I really appreciate you being on the show. So first of all, this is 261, by the way. I haven’t said that. It’s podcast and death 261. So

You came up with this idea for an episode, kind of briefly explain your idea for the episode and kind of your background, which gives you kind of a foundation for why, you know, you want to do this episode and why you can, why you were, I don’t want to say an expert in this field, but why you wanted to talk about this.

Yeah, so I think like many listeners, first I just want to say, I think coming on and quote helping out is, think any of us would do it. And I just want to emphasize that how much podcasting death has kind of gotten a lot of us through a lot of hard times. And so one of the recent hard times, other than the pandemic, I just finished graduate school.

And, you know, anytime my brain was kind of in this hyper anxiety, it was every week, it was just like having a couple friends visit and be able to do something else, you know, get your brain into a little bit of fun times, right? Just bring other people talking about characters and quote friends in our in-death world. So when the opportunity came up,

I had this idea probably a year ago or a year and a half ago as I was listening to a previous podcast episode. And, um, and I thought, I’m going just need to do a lot more research and go through like all of the podcasting episodes and, and all of that. And then when the need came up, I was like, or we’ll do the research in four days. It’ll be fine. We’ll just, just shove that down.

No.

Yeah, just to let you know, this is how every single one of our episodes start. I say, I’m gonna do a ton of research on this and then like day of I’m like, shit, I didn’t do the research. And so we just wing it most of the time. so, you you’re in good company.

Sounds great. Yeah. So I think the first episode maybe that spurred this was, and I needed your help to remember this one, was reviewing Divided in Death, where Somerset does minor surgery with the implanted tracker. And Jen had some thoughts about it at the time.

Right. Yep. As she always did.

And as she always did about medical things and it just, I understood from her perspective of an in hospital caretaker, know, licensed professional that that would make sense that he shouldn’t be doing that. My background, like Quincy had stated, we, her and I met at the Coast Guard Academy and then I spent seven years in the Coast Guard. I ended up leaving the Academy where she became an officer. went enlisted and I

Right.

Ugh.

ended up actually in this weird corner of the Coast Guard that is combat deployable. And so we do just very different rules, rules of engagement. And…

Hmm.

Yeah, one of my nephews is in the Coast Guard currently.

Nice. so I ended up as a quartermaster and then a boasts and mate, which just drives boats. One navigates ships, one drives boats. And then when I got out, I came back to Oregon. I started teaching. And because of my experience in the Coast Guard, I was able to start a career and technical education program, which is like your shop class, except teaching fire and emergency services.

Okay.

So that started out with my school district asking me to teach a community emergency response team, which is a FEMA program that is intended for the local folks to be activated when their first responders are overwhelmed. And so mass casualty events. And so they do things like triage and a lot of first aid.

Right.

But generally things that are held under the what we call the Goods of Aritan Act, right? So you don’t have to have a license and As long as you’re acting up to your level of training You are allowed to do a bunch of things and then eventually I ended up getting an EMT license and a firefighter one and Working on an ambulance in my spare time while teaching I would be like on the ambulance from 7 p.m. To 7 a.m.

Mm-hmm.

You

no, did it. Okay, sorry. Okay, good, I’m glad. Hopefully we don’t have to cut that out. My internet just decided to go a little cattywampus.

We’re still here. Okay.

Again, I’ll par for the course for a podcast and death episode.

per protocol. And yeah, so then yeah, I’d be on the ambulance from 7pm to 7am and then they would have to relieve me because I’d have to take a shower and go to teach from 8.15 until four and I do that three or four days a week. And so and then in this kind of odd

Mm-hmm.

gray area in the middle, when I was in the Coast Guard and when I was getting out, I got out around 2005, because I’m an older person, a more mature medic, if you will. at that time, there was no crossover, whereas if you had been a medic in the Army or in the Coast Guard, you came home and they were like, hey, thanks, but you have no license, so you’re starting from scratch.

Hahaha

Right. Yeah.

essentially useless. And a couple years after that, they did make a path to transition between those two. But in the meantime, a lot of natural disasters had happened. Hurricane Katrina happened, an earthquake in Haiti happened. And out of that came an organization called Team Rubicon. And what that was from was folks who had

been in combat and had all this medic training where when you are, when you’re in the military, you have, and it very much depends on which service you’re in, but like an army medic, they are trained to essentially an EMT basic level, which within the United States, or at least in Oregon where I’m licensed, to simplify it a lot.

we don’t give any medications except oxygen and maybe sugar packets, sugar gels. And we don’t break the skin for the most part, right? We can help people test their blood sugar, which means we’re not giving injections. And, but so that person then goes on to the battlefield and they’re all their folks have. And so they shift to essentially a decision tree.

protocol like if this then that and they can give lots of medication they can give they can suture they can do whatever is needed to be able to get the person back and evacuate them to a hospital and At the time, you know up until like two or three years ago The the idea was to evacuate them within the golden hour So you’re trying to keep people alive for one hour to get back and as long as you the physician’s assistant that you worked under

Okay.

allowed you to do things, you could do it. It’s suddenly in your scope of practice, even though you are trained up to the level of an EMT basic. so, and so now they’ve kind of shifted to where you might need to keep people alive for like two to three days. So they’re dealing more with, you know, sepsis and in right longer term things, but it just sort of put into perspective for me.

Right.

Okay.

Right, yeah.

the idea of coming out of the urban wars. And now with the last book, we know a lot more about Somerset’s training and starting to look at kind of reframing what really might be outside of his scope of practice. And so in 2005 or around that time, I can’t remember exactly when the earthquake in Haiti happened, but there were a bunch of field medics from different services that separately were feeling like

they couldn’t watch people suffer in Haiti when they had all these skills, but no licenses. And so they self deployed as civilians to Haiti, which I do not recommend that most folks who do disaster medicine or disaster response don’t recommend and also many of them have done it. So they went, they met in the airport.

Right.

You

Right, yeah, okay.

just literally waiting for a flight to Haiti, they were like, hey man, what are you doing? And they all found out that they were trying to do the same thing, go help with the tools that they had. They got to Haiti and the folks who were there said, cool, there’s this hospital out in this rural area, that’s yours. So you have some nurses that are there, whatever supplies are in the closet, that’s all you have. And they looked around and were like, people were giving birth.

Hmm.

people needed limbs removed and none of them were surgeons. Right? And so they had to deal with what they had to deal with right there with the tools that they had, which did not include anesthesia. Yeah. And so they talk about how like there needed to be a better way to both utilize the skills of these returning veterans, but in a way that was a little more within a better structure.

Yeah.

Right. Right.

Yeah. And eventually they came back and founded Team Rubicon and now they have a bunch of structure and a bunch of training. But when you look at again, the urban wars being essentially all of that, right, we have in different books, I can’t remember which one the taker was was in, but you know, people who were going around picking up dead bodies off of this off the road. Creation. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

creation.

That’s very clearly a time when first responders were probably overwhelmed and hospital systems were not operating in such a strict way. yeah, so I wanted to kind of take a look at some of those things and some of the instances that maybe seemed like anomalies or maybe some yonnies or something that.

Yeah.

Right.

wasn’t quite correct and see if we kind of reframe it within that disaster medicine pre-hospital situation that, yeah, maybe it’s not as bizarre. Or maybe it is.

Okay?

Okay, well that all sounds very interesting.

Yeah. So starting with that first one, if you’re okay with that, the other thing is when people say a medic, that’s not an actual defined thing, right? Like you can be an army medic, but that’s really an MOS or like a job description. And then you have them by rank. So you have one that’s, you know,

Right.

Mm-hmm.

and E4 and E5 and E6 all the way up. And at each level, they’re getting a little bit more training and a very little bit more money. And so a lot of times people will say, well, we call 911 and then the medic arrives. And they’re talking about the EMT, but also there’s a paramedic. And even within the United States, there’s an EMT basic and an EMT intermediate. That is the intermediate was intended for

Okay?

Right.

Mm-hmm.

folks who are in rural communities because it’s hard to get paramedics to move out to rural communities. And they were somewhere in the middle. So they could give usually medications that help with stroke that extend that golden hour of for a stroke victim to be able to get them maybe three hours to a higher level of care. And then they sort of added on like, well, then if they’re going to do that, they could also give some medication for cardiac arrest. And then

also give some medication for this other thing. And so their scope of practice just keeps expanding. And yeah, so in this one, they said that, you know, he was a medic and Janet said that was maybe a med tech, which is like an EMT and they don’t do surgery, is right, which is absolutely true.

Right.

Right. Okay. So we should probably set up. we’re talking about divided and we are talking about when, they discovered that Reva had a tracker in her like shoulder or something. And Rorke had this just happened to have this prototype machine that he had been working on in his office that can scan her entire body and find that. And then they said, we better call Somerset to come take that out. Okay.

Yes, thanks.

Right.

Right, and they didn’t want to call anyone else because it was like a code red super secret squirrel, yeah, thing. And so the story I tell myself in my head is that that scanner is like when you get your dog chipped and they check for the chip, right? And you can find where it’s at. So we’re talking about a small incision and probably…

Right. Right.

Right.

he has probably done a lot more suturing and cutting during the urban wars.

Yeah. And we did. So this is only recently. it’s out of the scope of what we had talked about previously on the podcast. But, you know, with the last book, we found out that he actually had gone to medical school. So, so he does have actual medical training above and beyond, you know, the EMT thing.

Right.

Yeah, and…

Exactly. And he was with a team that was autonomous. And so he was probably acting as the only person who was keeping people alive in these, you know, kind of spy situations. Yeah, which I think also expands their scope even further from just their basic level of training. Yeah, because you don’t you don’t have anyone else. That’s what we were

Right.

Right, yeah.

right, that has to. yeah. right. yeah.

Quincy and I were actually laughing the other day because I was on a research cruise and our ship’s medic was an EMT who was also the ship’s captain. And he went to one other class for like a week to become the ship’s doctor based on his EMT training. And that included how to use the satellite system to essentially telehealth a surgeon in to tell him.

Okay. Right.

where to put his hands with the scalpels. And he had had, he told me the story about how he had his next doctor, his next gypsum medic was his first mate. And the first mate was the one who needed his appendix removed and they were like three days offshore from being able to get to a hospital. And so he had to remove the appendix and

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

as an EMT basic with a surgeon on Zoom, telling him how to set up the, like they have an actual surgical suite in on the ship, but by himself because the guy who would be assisting him was on the table. so when you have no one else, you do a lot of, you know, you.

Wow.

Okay.

Right.

you call the zoom doctor and let him let him talk you through it. But yeah, so I think, again, looking back at now we know he has more medical training. And it was probably a small tracker because she hadn’t noticed it. So we’re really looking at like a small incision, a removal and then maybe a couple of sutures, which as long as you can keep the infection down, then, you know, not that not that big of a deal.

Yeah.

Right.

And then we had some other things that had come up with other folks. I’m just going to look through my notes here real quick.

So the healing wand, I think, is one that not that folks had brought up, but I wanted to kind of bring up as that new technology. one of which, I mean, I want it. I want it so bad.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

hahahaha

Yeah, our main thing with that is how would that even work?

Right, what is it exactly doing along the way? Yeah. And what I found is that anytime new technology comes where they find that this technology isn’t gonna hurt someone or that you’re less likely to hurt someone when you use it, they open the scope of practice, right? So that becomes a tool that either people can use under the Good Samaritan Act or then an EMT-BASIC can use it.

But is it? How does it work? Yeah. Yeah.

And if that takes the load off of a higher level of care, they generally will then add something else to that higher level of care, right? So they expand everybody’s scope of practice to accommodate, if you will. And so as we go into talking about, my gosh, why is her name Dr. D’Amato?

Mm-hmm.

what, how can she do all the things? She’s scrubbing in for surgeries. I think we also have to realize that there’s been this level of change within the technology that has allowed a lot of things to fall to essentially a lay responder, right? So they can, and I imagine that also includes surgical technologies. I mean, even now we have robots where we can have a surgeon in another state who

Right.

through the internet does surgery in Oregon, which is crazy. And so if you have someone who maybe isn’t now wouldn’t be an expert that they can in the future would have gotten enough of a background that they don’t really have to be an expert, they can scrub in.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. You know, especially looking 30 years in the future, what we have now and, you know, extrapolate that out to 30 years. It could be, who knows where that technology is going to be. Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, and if that surgeon is even in the room with them, because as long as they have an assistant there and a robot that’s hooked to the internet, that surgeon can be everywhere. So per protocol, my dog is gonna come and breathe heavily in the background, just to be awkward, yeah. So.

Breath. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay, that’s perfectly fine.

Yeah, I had just brought that up as like something that now would probably fall under the Good Samaritan Act as using that healing wand. And then, so one of the challenges I think that came up during the medical rants episode of Podcasting Death was that P.A. Spence doesn’t, P.A.’s don’t do that. And I think you guys, you kind of countered with like, well, Roarke gets who he wants and.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Well, it’s true. It is kind of true.

He doesn’t care what their license is, right? And I totally agree. And I would also say, I think work would be like, well, this is a, we could have a home health aid, but that’s not good enough, right? So I want the home health aid’s boss, and then I want their boss’s boss to make sure that, because it’s Somerset, that’s his dad, the equivalent of his dad. So.

Right. Right.

Yeah, you would want the best.

Yes, then I think there was a comment about EMTs that have to deal with Eve all the time.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s too bad for them.

And it is, it is too bad for them. And also she’s not abnormal for an ambulance response. And most paramedics are trained in that kind of disaster psychology to, I call it talking people into what’s in their best interest because there’s so many, you know, they’re not thinking

I can imagine.

Right.

Correctly often because of whatever they’ve just gone through right there trauma that is is happening some of them may not be making good decisions because their mental status is altered due to shock which is another thing that Jen had brought up which is a altered mental status is a is a symptom of shock And then there’s all these other fears of like the cost of an ambulance ride or the cost of medical care

Right. Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. as a matter of fact, apparently I shouldn’t say apparently because I knew about this when it happened, but a couple of years ago, my younger brother was sick.

Which is real, right?

And, he was living with his son and his son’s girlfriend at the time. Anyway, so he was sick. He’d gone into the bathroom and he come out and he was in the kitchen and he just collapsed and his son didn’t know what to do. So they called an ambulance. And I guess my brother’s insurance didn’t cover that. So he had like a, a $5,000 ambulance bill that he had to pay for. And I think just now paid it off.

and

It can be expensive. And yeah, you can understand when people would go like, no, don’t take me in an ambulance. That’s going to be a couple thousand dollars that I can’t cover.

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s so much so that we, like Uber and Lyft have put out statements requesting that we not call them in lieu of an ambulance. so that’s where the, now I teach CPR for healthcare professionals. And I also, part of that is for labor responders is the heart saver version of CPR and first aid. And

Hahaha

Yeah, yeah, you know.

One section of that is what to do when there’s like a small amputation and in the video they show a kid’s amputated finger Yeah, I mean they don’t specify but they’re like put the limb in a baggie. So it implies that the limb fits in a baggie But it turns out parents are not great drivers when they’re when they also have their kids finger in a baggie, right?

Just a small amputation.

Yeah.

So we have this conversation of like, if you can’t afford the ambulance, Uber and Lyft have requested that you not call them, perhaps get a neighbor who can drive you to the emergency room. But yeah, it’s a real concern. And also, I always recommend to folks that they call the ambulance company and try to work out a payment program because often they’ll be

Yeah.

they’ll reduce the cost of it. If they know that they’re not gonna get anything or they’re gonna get something over time, they will try to work with folks.

Yeah. Or we could just get our fucking act together in this country and give everybody universal healthcare, which would…

Correct. Yeah, that would just be entirely too easy. Yeah. So going through that, the kind of podcast, the rant episode, the next one that Jen had a concern about was concussions. And on this one, 100 % agree with Jen. Concussions are, so with,

Yeah.

Mm

Right.

I have ADHD, if you can’t tell, and therefore have had like 27 careers. So, protocol there. So when I was teaching middle and high school, they asked me if I would be the athletic director at my school. And we didn’t have one. And so in order to provide opportunities for students, I was like, sure, how hard can it be? Little did I know that you were also like an event coordinator and also a customer service rep.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

also a scheduler where I just thought I was a scheduler. But our school, like 10 years before I came on board, was responsible for the law in Oregon, it’s called Max’s law, that requires concussion training for coaches now, for athletic coaches. And prior to that, they were not required to have training. were in that like walk it off. We were in our walk it off era.

That makes sense.

Hahaha

we are no longer in our walk it off era. And so that came at the expense of Max, the student that was injured and he ended up getting multiple concussions in a week and then had permanent damage. so when Jen was saying, you don’t just get up and walk it off and be fine, but also for our public service announcement.

Okay, that’s

Hmm.

Just heal let your concussion heal completely before you go back to work

Yes, but it’s Eve and so… She can’t do that.

It is Eve. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s Eve and she is so much more likely to get a concussion two days later or three days later in the middle of these cases. Yeah, but she’s also the classic of like people so often downplay their symptoms to their doctors. Of course, Eve has never done that.

Yes.

Right.

and because they don’t want to let their team down, right? If they’re not out there, then someone else has to cover shift or Feeny has to step up or someone won’t get to take their vacation, whatever the case might be. And then Jen also had a concern about the use of shock in there. And yes, shock is a circulation problem. So there’s the difference between the like,

Mm-hmm.

bright.

Yeah.

emotionally, I’m shocked and I’m in shock and awe. And the shock you kind of have to determine the way we talk about it on an ambulance is it’s either a pump problem or a pipe problem. So is the pump not pumping correctly? Or is there a break in the pipes? And so what is causing that lack of circulation? And that does lead to disorientation.

Right.

and we call it an altered mental status. sometimes you’ll just ask people questions and instead of giving you correct answers, they’ll just say yes. And so you know that they heard you, they’re not unconscious, but they’re altered in their mental status. you ask them, like, do you know your name? Yes. Do you know what the date is? Yes.

right.

Do know where you are? Yes. And you’re like, well, those are appropriate answers, but they’re not actual answers. Yeah.

Hahaha

Well the good thing for us is that Nora didn’t go in and correct that with this last book.

Yes. Yeah, she’s getting really good at it.

at like sneaking in the little corrections as you know she too is growing.

I think it’s because she listens to this show, but…

We can hope. That’s my headcanon. So on Facebook, Dana had brought up some, responded to the request for assistance. Thank you. That in Apprentice, Somerset helped tend to the injuries outside of Madison Square Gardens after Willow had opened fire after the concert.

hahahaha

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

This to me was like a classic, like self-deployed Team Rubicon kind of situation, right? Somerset just hops in and starts like saving lives and with literally just the shirt on his back, you know, like. And again, with those huge mass casualty events, I think this is sort of exactly what he was trained for because he, the Urban Wars was just a.

Right. Yeah.

multi-year mass casualty event. And usually they define a mass casualty event as where your number of victims outnumbers your responders. Other states may have smaller definitions of that, but in general, that’s what they kind of look at. But a great opportunity for him to hop in and use those skills.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Born in death. Let’s see, he helped prep Mavis and Tandy when they both went into labor before going to the hospital.

Yeah.

Right.

This one I love. Yeah, yeah.

Which seems plausible only, mostly because I imagine that when I’m looking at the timeline, his wife had Marlena during the urban wars. And I don’t know whether it was before or after he joined the 12.

Right.

But I imagine that it was probably in a situation where there wasn’t a lot of access to hospitals or, you know, it’s possible that he could have actually, you know, done that delivery. Like a home delivery. Makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

It makes a lot of sense. I think the it not that losing a child is is ever less traumatic. But if you have delivered your own child and then you lose that child like to be there at the beginning and the end, I can only imagine how that would have added to his his trauma of losing her because he had if he had

Yeah.

literally caught her on the way into the world. Yeah, and I think on that one too is the idea that

Mm-hmm.

I think most medical professionals, but specifically the paramedics that I have worked with are so good at compartmentalizing and being able to take a step back where we never run, even though it’s definitely an emergency, right? We always show up on everyone’s worst day. And the number of the top

Mm-hmm.

Right.

injury cause of firefighters in the US is running. It’s not, you know, it’s not house fires or yeah, things falling on your head or and then for a while it was also the the pole that they had you slide down right so that most firehouses have gotten rid of that as well. It was like too much too much hurry.

Yeah, that sounds correct.

Right, okay.

But it makes sense that everyone else panics and his brain switches into, well, let’s get our jackets and wouldn’t you like to make a phone call and see if your husband or your baby daddy wants to come and meet you there? Yeah. The next one that Dana had brought up was seduction and death when Eve wakes up with a fever and work calls in Somerset.

Right.

Right. Yeah.

And I just re-listened to this one right before we got on. And this is where she kind of, she melts down because he called, she calls him in at her like most vulnerable. She’s in the middle of the case. She has a fever. She’s super pale. And Somerset goes to get some injectable something and also a, a soother or something like that. And she just, like her voice squeaks.

All

she starts crying and Somerset comes in and sends Rorke out and just says, do you know how much he loves you? Like there was, yeah. And.

Yeah.

Right. So, yeah, she needed medical care and to have some sense knocked into her.

Correct. Yeah, to talk her into doing what’s in her best interest, right? Even if it means doing it for someone else because doing it for herself isn’t enough of a reason. And then there, you know, he gives her an injection of something and then she makes a statement of like, she didn’t want to admit that what he had done was already helping.

Right.

Right, yeah.

Because of teeth.

So yes, exactly. But that was the one where she says, he says, do you have any pain? And she says, yeah, there’s a pain in my ass. It’s called Somerset.

Right, he walked into that one. Let’s be honest. Yeah.

He did, yeah. And then vengeance, this one I didn’t get to re-listen to, when she came, when she came to, she was on the sofa with Somerset efficiently treating her arm. And she tells him to get the hell away from me. He says, this thing needs tending, you’re badly injured, but Roarke seems to believe you’ll be more cooperative here than in the health center, which is.

Right.

like the level the threshold is so low, the standards. She’s so bad in the health center that she’s more cooperative with Somerset who she hates, but just took us a laser stream for in that situation. So and they don’t talk about much of I mean, her, you know, her arm is tingling. But they don’t talk about exactly, you know, she cut or I think it was a laser scalpel in that.

Ha ha ha.

Right. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

in that scene.

Did you have a, I think you just had a like a gun or a laser, a taser, whatever they call it.

taser, yeah. Yeah. So it’s hard to know exactly what, you know, what he was doing within his, within his training. But again, maybe the healing wand is, could take care of it.

Yeah.

Yeah, and they probably have one there. Well, they do have one there. Varrock has used it, but he probably just didn’t want to leave her to go get it or whatever.

Dana had brought up in seduction and death. I read through that one, the episode to see what the, you where the rant was. And I think, and then I asked, actually asked Quincy for an assist on this one, cause I wasn’t quite sure, but I think it was the difference. There’s a…

a concern that it’s not called multiple personality disorder anymore. Yeah. And then the fact that during the, when the crimes are committed, that they’re mixing uppers and downers, which correct, don’t, I mean, I don’t do pharmacology at all, but not great, not a great.

yeah, yeah.

Didn’t sound great.

Yeah, it turns out when murderers are using it, it’s probably not a great thing to put together.

Right, yeah.

And let’s see, I think the other one, I went through the medical rants podcast and then the call me Dr. Chaos one where Jen was saying faces can’t do that, faces can’t change. And then, and then reform. And this I think is sort of the same as like Eve getting possessed. We just kind of hit the I believe button for a moment and it’s the fiction. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

Right. Yeah. Sometimes you just gotta say it’s fiction and just move on. It’s hard, though.

Yes, and be okay with it. It is, it’s very hard, especially when so much of the rest of the books and world are so believable, even though they’re in the future. The other thing I keep falling back on is in some interview, they asked Nora, you know, like how she came up with this stuff. And she essentially said, I just started creating a world that

Right. Yeah.

that I would want to be a part of in that year, in the future, which included the licensed companions and the acceptance of, where they’re just sort of like, yeah, well, this person was transgender and they’re going on about their business and doing things and getting married. No one cares, yeah. But they still have criminals and they still have…

Nobody cares.

you know, the drug trade and whatnot, they’re just different, some different drugs. And so I like the idea that, you know, I kind of come to the books with this kind of viewpoint of what was Nora hoping she would see in the medical community, you know, in 2059 or whenever she was starting, you know, whenever we started 2058, 2059.

Right.

in these books.

Healing wand. That’s what she’s hoping to see. Because I don’t think, I mean, I get the impression that not much else is that much different because she doesn’t really go into any of the tech involved in other procedures.

Yes.

Mm-hmm, right, yeah. Yeah, she talks about like the cancer vaccines. We talk a little bit, right?

Yeah. Which might actually be happening right now.

Right, yeah, mean, we have like the, I mean, the HPV vaccine is for the virus of that leads to the cancer, but it’s, you know, it’s the first step toward it. And the research is coming along looking at different causes of cancer and trying to be able to at least do some sort of preventative treatment, even if it’s not considered a vaccine or strictly defined as a vaccine.

Right, right.

You know, we’re 3D printing organs or tissue, human tissue, which is nuts.

Yeah.

And which also is very interesting when you look at like the the book where they’re, you know, Rorke is essentially 3D printing organs. And then there’s the other folks who are harvesting bad organs and trying to regenerate them.

Right, yeah. Yeah.

So and that was sort of like a throwback technology of like, well, they tried to do it, but it started to fail. And so we went this other way and you’re like, well, the other way is already started now, you know, the making new organs, growing new organs.

Right. Mm-hmm.

has been a thing. So on the Facebook group, Maureen Miles-Lee had said, doctors knowing all specialties, so within the medical inconsistencies.

Right, so she’s talking about Nadine. Not Nadine, Louise.

Yes, yeah, Luis D’Amato.

Well, and Dr. Mira too, we’ve talked about Mira doing a variety of things as well.

Yeah, and also she had brought up Mira being able to counsel hundreds of people on top of the police department and doing it during work hours.

Well, I mean, not all in one day, but sure. I depends on how, how often they’re coming in, you know, for, yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead.

you

Yeah.

Mm-hmm. And, go ahead.

When they, you if they have an officer involved shooting that she’s administering all these what seem to be very potent medications and then putting them through technologies that have harvested their memories and then bring them back into like a virtual reality situation. I would like to unsubscribe from that, from that treatment.

bright.

Yeah. Yeah.

Hahaha

Yeah, I’m not one of those people that’s gonna get like Elon Musk’s like implant, whatever he’s working on that brain implant that he’s working on.

I don’t know what it is, but I don’t want anything extra in my brain.

You know, yeah, I even think they have one guy who volunteered for it. I don’t know. It’s some kind of, it’s some kind of implanted chip. And I don’t know what it’s supposed to do for you, but I don’t trust Elon Musk. So there you go.

No, I don’t trust anything that can be altered from the outside of my body. Like I have a hard time with if I needed a pacemaker because they can like Bluetooth and you know hook up to Wi-Fi and report back to the doctor and then they can make edits you know to whatever the settings are and I’m like that is really great because you don’t have to go in internally and make changes to the settings but

Yeah.

Right.

know, people make typos all the time. that just freaks me out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it’s true. And you don’t want somebody like your next door neighbor trying to find a wifi signal and accidentally connecting to your heart or something that would be frightening. So.

Yeah, or the power goes out, the grid goes out, the wrong server reboots, then I reboot. don’t, no thank you.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so far we haven’t had a problem with that. don’t think too much in the, with pacemakers, but you know, I mean, more and more, yeah, like you said, people having the ability to just wirelessly go in and, you know, look at it and make changes and whatnot. that’s, that’s something fairly new.

Mm-hmm. And then, you know, they’ve had hackers kind of take control of hospital systems for the usually for like billing and medical records not with being able to edit settings, right? Yeah, terrifying. Yeah, especially if you kind of go down the rabbit hole of the, you know, current administration not really liking sick people or folks who are chronically ill.

Yeah.

Let’s turn off everybody’s pacemaker. Yeah.

Yeah.

if you just go and turn off people’s pacemakers.

Yeah.

It gets a little scary. So try to keep as many of my own parts running on their own powers as I can, but they’re, it’s just nuts. But yeah, I, again, with the doctors, with all of the specialties, I definitely think that, you know, Nora does a little stretching, but I also going back to that idea that as technology makes things safer,

Agreed.

Yeah.

then you have a lot more things that can be used by the average person. And then you have essentially more difficult problems are showing up at the emergency room because people have used their healing wands to heal their minor broken bones or their hairline fractures. I mean, Eve has had some pretty crazy stuff that they’ve…

Right.

put a healing wand onto or, know, essentially like if you don’t have a tourniquet on it seems like you just healing wand it and you’re good to go. Or like True Heart, you know, when he fell onto the train tracks trying to go after that.

Right.

Yeah.

the suspect, if they had internal, like severe internal damage or severe bleeding, they’re, you know, they’re in surgery. And so it makes sense that you kind of had to be maybe more of a generalist, maybe relying on a lot more technology and getting perhaps, like I said, an assist from someone who’s further, you know, maybe further away or robotic technology.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

It’s, I know we have in Oregon, we have Oregon Health Sciences University and they have one of those robots that you can through wifi, someone can be in another state. And if they’re the specialist, they hop into that robot and do the surgery. And so someone else being able to help with those things seems like it becomes a little more reasonable.

Mm-hmm.

I think that was all of the stuff that was on Facebook. I’m just pulling it up here real quick.

So I remember on that episode, one of the things we also talked about was sprains versus strains.

Mm-hmm.

And Jen had some kind of a rant about it, how they don’t, she doesn’t know the difference between strains and sprains.

Yeah. And I think that that’s true. And also I think 99.5 % of the population also does not know the difference. Correct. Yes. But Nora could do some Googling, but also in my brain, Nora wakes up and like maybe eats food and coffee and then just sits down and her fingers just keep moving for eight hours.

Right. But we don’t need to. But yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, don’t think that’s just in your brain. think that’s how she works. Yeah.

Yeah, and I don’t think it’s on Google. I don’t think she goes to the Google machine in the middle of it. Maybe she does, but.

For some things I think so, but yeah, for something that’s like, does this person have a strain or a sprain? I don’t think she would.

No. Yeah.

one of the other things I remember from that show is her complaining about Eve having, this is in, survivor and Eve had her, shoulder popped out of the socket and was it Somerset put it back? Roarke did. And she was saying, don’t anybody ever do that. Go to the hospital.

I think Roarke puts it back. Yeah.

Yeah, because you can end up tearing a lot of things and Andy did it without any anesthesia, which again, I mean not.

Well, it’s Eve, so she doesn’t need anesthesia.

Right, she wouldn’t want the pressure syringe anyway. let’s see.

Yeah, all the time Dana gave us another list of all of the times that Eve is essentially verbally attacking the medics.

Yeah. And yeah, you don’t do that. But again, it’s Eve, so…

Yeah, don’t even think about using that pressure syringe on me, not even knowing like what is in what’s in the pressure syringe. She just always assumes it’s going to make her wonky.

Yeah.

I was reading something the other day about, they have just come up with a pressure, pressure syringe or it seems like they had something before that was kind of like that, but they have just come up with a, a one that works sounds like a lot like what, it sounds like in the books.

Hmm.

Yeah, I think that.

The thing that I’m thinking of is that they used to have was how they used to give like large scale vaccinations in the military. And that was multiple needles that would kind of pop out and do multiple injections.

Right. Right.

Right. Yeah.

and was also responsible for widespread transmission of diseases in the military because it was the same needles, yeah, over and over again.

They didn’t clean those. Yeah. Yeah. That did not even occur to me until just now, but you’re right. Wow.

Yeah, so they had a lot of like, I think hepatitis C transmitted that way. And it was in the early 80s, so when I was like three.

Yeah. I know my mom had a mark from that on her arm. And I think a couple of my sisters had.

Yeah.

And then, so we also ended up with the mark from, they would, the smallpox vaccine is essentially an individual needle that they would do multiple little pokes at, and then it scabs over and it falls off, and then you have your smallpox scar.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I seem to remember one of my older sisters saying something about being in grade school and this would have been mid to late sixties or early seventies, probably mid to late sixties. and the doctors coming in with a gun and shooting, you know, that. So I don’t, I don’t think I ever experienced that. So I don’t know.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we learned it in like a EMT, like a history of emergency medicine and then some of the history in the military.

Oh, and my daughter’s new spouse, who grew up until she was 10, she lived in Costa Rica. And she said that that’s what they used to to them to give them vaccinations. She said they had the gun. And that was the first time I had heard, so that had to have been late 90s.

I don’t think they weren’t doing that here anymore. So they just shipped all that equipment out to like Costa Rica, places like that and said like, Hey, you know, use this. So.

That’s crazy. You’re right, yeah.

Right, which is so common. I remember being in Malawi when I was on leave one year from the Coast Guard and we went to the USAID office and they were giving out malaria medication and it was all expired. And it was because it couldn’t be used here so they sent it there.

Yeah. Well, is that a huge concern? I mean, obviously it’s a concern, but I because I’ve always heard that at least for over the counter medications, the expiration date does not matter so much. But I’m not sure about vaccinations.

Yeah, think for vaccinations, it depends on what kind it is and how stable it is. And that’s kind of a large problem that we actually, have a virologist at Portland State University that works on stabilizing vaccines because so many of them have to be refrigerated, which requires power, which makes it difficult in countries that don’t have a lot of power. But

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Most I think medications, they definitely lose their efficacy, but they also start to increase the amount of adverse reactions that folks have. And so the family I was staying with, the mother had had an adverse reaction to the malaria treatment that they were giving her and it had caused a not anaphylaxis, but it had caused her to have a

Right.

Mm-hmm.

like boils all over her body. So pretty severe rash when you look at like that opened up her skin to a lot of different infection points that could happen. And you know, when you’re not, you don’t have running water and your your well water is whatever it is, it’s untreated. You know, she

Mmm.

Right, yeah.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

I had brought some Neosporin with me because I kept just a little first aid kit anytime I traveled and I gave her the Neosporin and it helped all of the boils heal. And then I had given her daughter an aspirin for her headache. And then about a week later, they started bringing me sick people because I was able to heal things and that was untrue.

Right.

Okay.

It was far outside of my scope of practice. Which again, you know, like there’s, had a continued education. There’s a podcast called EMT Pro Podcast. And if you, if you listen to it through a certain website, you can get continued education credits for it. And they have one on disaster response where they highlight also one of the

Yeah.

okay.

I think he’s a paramedic and he had self deployed. He also does not suggest self deploying, but he self deployed to Ukraine and ended up kind of trying to transport a bunch of supplies to a specific place. And then, when you don’t have the structure of a larger organization or NGO, then.

Mmm.

they kept wanting him to like, well, can you do this other thing? And can you go further toward the front line? And can you have people bring more stuff? And he eventually was like, no, cannot go further toward the front line. And all I have is what I brought with me, you know, your two like 75 pound bags or whatever the check bag, you know, weight limit is. But then, you know, he talks about how like very quickly it got kind of sketchy with

Yeah.

having to go through checkpoints and then they’re like, hey, we just got this random American back here that actually may not have a visa for anything. We’re not sure because geographic boundaries become a lot more questionable and fluid as you get into these positions. But yeah, it’s very interesting how just, yeah, very quickly your scope of practice becomes larger when people start bringing you sick folks.

Hahaha

They brought me, yeah, it was, kind of sad because they brought me to one woman that because of my mom’s training actually in, in massage therapy and physical therapy, she was a PT assistant for a long time. I knew that the lady had congestive heart failure. but how you explain to people what that is and then what to do about it when you’re not anyone who treats it, you know, was, was hard, but.

Yeah.

the at least people were willing to do some light light massage and try to work, keep her comfortable and whatnot. But yeah, that’s why they, think they always teach disaster relief and disaster psychology at the same time so that caretakers can have some tools to help each other when you’re dealing with that. But.

Right.

Podcast In Death (01:00:07.107)
Yeah.

Melissa (She/Her) (01:00:15.154)
Yeah, so I think the last thing on the Facebook group was that Dana was going through Eve’s rants on the poor paramedics that have to deal with her, essentially always saying, keep that thing away from me and I will not cooperate.

Yeah.

and then threatening them with some sort of bodily harm.

All right, Eve. Come on.

Yeah, Eve. Like in, where is this one? I’m trying to find the book that it’s in. Maybe it is in divided. says you have a concussion, secondary gray burns, contusions, lacerations and you’re shocky. Eve reached up and grabbed him by the collar of his uniform. One of us is going to be shocky ace if you don’t get me a goddamn communicator.

Ha ha ha.

Yeah?

So not the definition of shock, but…

Yeah, no, that’s so was she in shock or was she shocky or was she shocked? Yeah, we don’t know

Yeah, she was just shocked.

I seem to remember, I don’t know what book it was, some EMT was smart and I think gave her a lollipop or something. Kind of calmed her down a little bit. I don’t remember what book that was.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, just a distraction.

I, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had some kind of a, some kind of meds in there. She probably refused him and he’s like, well, how about a lollipop? I mean.

Yeah, let’s see. So the other ones, I did put this into chat GPT and asked it to give me every instance to read every book and go through every instance where Somerset provided medical care. And I’m not sure it’s correct. It’s probably not. Although I did see some of their

Okay

And it’s probably not.

Good.

many times the reference was the wiki which was funny

Yeah, yeah, it’s not, it’s still not always correct when they, even when it references the wiki, you know, it’ll get things wrong. But.

Yeah and each time I had it made me make me a spreadsheet where depending on how I had worded my request it either included the novellas in the book’s number or it did not and so sometimes it would say oh well in book six and then that would be something a little different or book 42 might be book 40 if it was not including the novellas.

Okay.

Right.

So I don’t know if you want to go through any of these. of them, I couldn’t quite figure out when they were talking about in the book.

I mean, we can’t have my phone here and I can if you if you say the book number, I can always look at it.

Okay, it says in Glory and Death, it even gave me a page range, page 150 to 160. It says, Somerset tends to EVE’s injuries post-assault. And then it made notes that it was the first major reveal of his hidden medical competence.

Yeah, see, it’s gonna be hard to find.

if it’s

because I just searched for injury there and nothing came up. So what do you search for after that?

salt

song.

How about we just search for a simmer set?

yeah.

I mean, he’s probably in it way too much.

Mm-hmm.

yeah, and I am a hundred percent Susan Erickson. She reads all the books to me. She’s so great.

Yeah.

Yeah, Susan’s great.

So much so that in college, so I did a master’s of arts in teaching and then just finished a doctorate in microbial ecology. And all of my textbooks I had provided in an audio format for both of those degrees. And it was so hard to have not Susan Erickson reading the books to me because you only have a limited number of voices when you, when you.

Ha ha ha!

Yeah.

like Kurzweil or the natural reader. I can’t use the free one because I need too many pages done, you know they have like different accents that you can have the computer read to you in and sometimes it was just a struggle because I was so spoiled by Susan Erickson.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s hard because, you know, mean, a chat GPT or some, you know, AI language model is not going to know where necessarily to put any kind of emphasis or, know, and a lot of times they’ll get, they’ll pronounce words wrong and, you know, so it just does seem, even if it sounds very, um, lifelike, it’s still, you know,

little things that you’re like, that didn’t sound quite right. So.

Yeah, depending on the software, there were some softwares where it would, I never read anything. It was always read because the spelling is the same, right? You just have to use the context clues. And, and so you would just always, you will have read that book yesterday. So regardless of the journal article, it was reading to me. It was always in the, in the present tense.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, so this has a couple of others. we talked about, I think, Vengeance when she was on the sofa and he treats her. We talked about that one. In Portrait, it says that Somerset cared for an exhausted Eve at Rorke’s estate, which I think is when she cries, maybe. Yeah, maybe. I’m not sure. No.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Portrait? No, was portraits when he had the, that he was, had the cast on his leg.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’ll make shit up.

Yeah, it is not supposed to create new facts. It says in Origin he provides medical assistance after the lab cloning crisis.

I mean.

He does it all the time.

I mean, I-

Yeah, they were in the lab and it blew up, but did it say that he treated them?

because that was at the very end of the book.

don’t think that’s true.

Right. And then they let the clones go, the last couple of clones.

Right.

says in memory and death that he monitors Eve’s mental and physical state of during stress. I feel like he might just that doesn’t sound much like him. I mean he might he’s I think he’s always monitoring her stress but then maybe like picking on her a little bit to add to it so that she’ll go to bed like she’ll be overwhelmed and go to bed.

Right.

Yeah, and it made a note that it was more observant and less hands-on.

Yeah, I don’t see anywhere in here where he.

takes care of them after that happened.

talked about during the births. It said in promises that he administers first aid to a wounded officer at the house.

Yeah, I don’t think that’s correct.

And then in thankless, this is the exact wording from chat.jpt. He provides low key first aid after altercation.

I mean, that’s so vague.

Hahaha

Yeah, and made a note that it was practical competence beyond Butler role.

Yeah, well, it won’t let me pull up thankless, so… for whatever reason. But that doesn’t sound familiar. I could be wrong, though.

Okay.

Yeah, I don’t remember that either. And then in apprentice, have Somerset depicting, depicted as working alongside official medics. And that was during that, the one we talked about. So I think that’s all the instances that we have that were brought up in the Facebook group.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

yeah, I think a lot of those are just made up, but, you know, it’s what it is. Don’t we don’t have a, I’m wondering if we have a, I know we have a page, several pages on the Wiki for, injuries.

Mmm.

but I don’t know if we have anything for summer sets, like all the time summer sets. Maybe that’s something that we should add to the Wiki, just putting it out there for all those people that like to, you know, add to the Wiki all the time the summer set has helped them medically.

the entire scope of practice of Somerset.

Yeah. Well, now, I mean, he’s you have to assume that he’s done a lot of stuff prior to when the book started. But yeah. Yeah, he’s got his little practice or any anytime anybody. Obviously, Louise is going to have treated people all the time. But anytime like Louise Somerset, Dr. Mira. We should probably put it in there.

I don’t know that Injury covers everyone, covers Eve, covers Roar, and think Peabody and McNabb, but I’m not really sure about everyone else.

Yeah, I’m just scrolling down. It’s Eve, Rorke, and Other.

other. That’s very generic, but you know.

Yeah, with references. it has, and then other is by book. So.

which is interesting, it says other injuries in glory. says Nadine was cut up by Morse.

Yes.

He was, she wasn’t like, it wasn’t, she wasn’t cut up like, but he did stick her a little bit in the, the, in the throat, in the neck.

right, right. Yes.

Right. Before or when Eve is there and he’s kind of goading her to.

to get there in time.

Yeah.

Yes, in Immortal Mavis got beaten up by Pandora. So just sort of breaks it down by book after that of people who are not even work.

Right. Right.

which is also interesting. So go ahead.

Did Somerset?

I was going say, did summer set?

Treat Eve. I want to say just recently there was something.

Was it in Payback? She got beat up by that one guy?

And there was something that needed like, like, you know, not necessarily the healing one, but there was a, it must’ve been in bonded because she got shot.

and they had to, you know, treat the wound. They had to, you know, take the dressing off, treat the wound, put the dressing back on. Seems like Somerset did some of that.

Let’s see, Eve’s injuries, if we go through here, bonded in death. While she was chasing Conrad Potter, he pulled out a gun. She felt the impact of the bullet on her shoulder, a light punch, and kept going. Her own weapon in hand, she was still yards away when he planted change tactics.

Does it say shoulder?

I thought it was her side.

Yeah, it says, felt the impact of the bullet on her shoulder. With a wild grin, he aimed. Yeah. Oh, and then he aims at the two women.

yuck. The first time he shot her.

Right.

She flung herself in front of the women. felt the impact along her ribs. Yep. And a quick hot sting as the women shrieking fell on the wet pavement. It was a shallow graze, but painful.

What?

It was a shallow graze, but painful. That’s how it describes it. But I mean, yeah, I mean, it’s a real bullet, especially in that time where they’re not using real bullets most of the time. And…

Yeah, I can imagine.

Right.

Yeah, just a, you know, a near miss, the shallow grave.

But I feel like he did kind of have to deal with it.

That was one thing I found with the…

I had to tell it specifically to go find bonded because it didn’t bring it up in the first view, like the first once over, which means I think it probably didn’t get on-core payback and passions either.

yeah.

Yep. Probably.

because it’s just working on old information.

Yeah.

Yeah, I just think that that’s, that’s one weakness for chat GPT. It just doesn’t really do that kind of thing. you could tell it’s go out and look at a website, but, I feel like a lot of times I still have to double check the information because it might get some stuff wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that’s one of those things where if I had taken the year that I wanted to do research for this, then I would totally would have done all of those box checks. here we are.

You know, it’s fine because we hardly ever, you know, have a 100 % complete show. And no matter how prepared you think you are for a show, like I’ve got the spreadsheets and we’re going to go through everything, every single instance of everything. There’s always going to be at least one thing that somebody is going to bring up. You forgot to mention this, you know? So it’s, yeah, you know, if we don’t mention everything, it’s fine.

You

So, so yeah, is there anything else we need to talk about in terms of injuries or anything else you want to bring up medically speaking?

which is good.

I don’t think so. think that kind of covers it. Just yeah, I think that that’s my hour long rant of I think Nora did better than we give her credit for in many ways.

Ha ha ha

Yeah, yeah, I think so. You know, I mean, she does some research, I guess.

Mm-hmm.

Okay, so anything else that we wanna, I mean, this would be probably a short episode, but that’s okay. I don’t mind that. That means that I have less editing to do. You know?

Right? Yeah, I don’t end up meeting the one hour a little bit less than.

Yeah, it’s very rare that we go the WIP, but sometimes we do. Even Tara and I will do like something where it’s, it hits the hour and we’re like, I think I’m done. Talk about that. So it’s, it’s fine. and I don’t know that I have any podcast business this week. Are you a patron?

Well, I am patron. I have to figure out, think, how to edit also what I learned from last episode. I think I need to update my address in there. And I haven’t figured out how to do that in Patreon, but I will say.

okay.

for folks if they have not become a patron, other than getting the briefing rooms, which is also awesome. I mean, that’s actually the main reason is to get it a little bit early because a lot of times when I was in grad school, you’d be able to release them on Thursdays. And that was my one day where I could kind of do a little reset of my brain from, you know, maybe teaching two classes earlier in the week, and then I’d have one more on a Friday or two labs. Yeah, so a Thursday, could kind of like let my

Ugh.

Right.

brain calm down. And then the briefing rooms are always fun. And then almost third is the the swag. Because when it comes though, it is such a it’s a huge deal when it when it arrives. And then in the meantime, you know, it’s like a daily or a weekly dose of joy in the middle. And then, you know, every once in a while, I end up pulling out my like the shirt that

Mm-hmm.

No.

I’m not someone who puts myself like outfits together. So I grabbed like the shirt that is on top and is clean. And when that’s, know, work industry shirt or something, it’s pretty extra excitement. But highly recommend to folks becoming a patron in my dream world, just with like the amount of, of, like I said, hard times that I feel like have happened since you started the podcast and that the podcast has helped me through.

for it.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

I just, you know, when people say like, I won’t tell people when I win the lottery, but there will be signs. One of those signs will be like a huge, a large patron on the Patreon because the amount of hard times that the podcast has got me through, I think that, you know, you and Tara should just be independently wealthy. Like that is, it has been so helpful to get, I agree. So, but.

Hahaha

I think so too.

It was so funny because Quincy last year was like after we had recorded and she was she was giving me all these like you guys need to be on YouTube you guys need to be on well first of all Tara and I never wanted to be on YouTube because like that means that for a lot of the episodes we have to actually dress and sometimes we’re in our pajamas we don’t you know so we’ve never done YouTube like that you know

Right?

but, yeah, you know, I mean, it’s, it’s nice for the, you know, at the very least the money from Patreon pays the bills and, and that’s always good. So, you know, but, yeah, I mean, you know, it’d be nice to get some more revenue in, but, this is really just a hobby anyway. So this is not kind of how we pay the bills.

It’s a hobby with a tremendous amount of labor involved. Yeah.

It actually, it actually is a tremendous amount of labor. I’ll be honest with you. And I don’t know that I’ve read a book by anybody else since starting this podcast, maybe once or twice, because I’m always reading for the podcast. You know, if I’m not reading an in death book, I’m reading a Nora Roberts book.

Mm-hmm.

And, but yeah, it is, it is a, it’s a lot of work, but it’s a labor of love. mean, we, we all, you know, Tara and I just love doing this show, you know, and, we will be really sad when it finally has to come to an end, which I’m sure inevitably has to. but, we just, we just love doing it. I don’t know what I’ll do with myself if I’m not doing this anymore.

I’ll find something I’m sure, but you know, but I, it’s really nice to hear from people that they appreciate it and that they, that it’s helping them through things and, it’s helped us through things. You know, I’ve said before that, especially the briefing room is like my therapy. Like, you know, I can go into the briefing room and say whatever, whatever’s bothering me or just talk about anything I want to talk about. And, you know, it, it.

Mm-hmm.

That’s what gets me through and the show also. And I will listen to our episodes to, you know, listen to those back, my favorite ones, and it helps me get through. so yeah, it’s really nice to hear that, you know, people appreciate it.

Yeah, definitely. think I found the podcast in like the kind of maybe two or three months in. And then so Quincy got me into the in-depth world and then I got her into the podcast in-depth world. So like a new book had come out. We were both listening to Susan Erickson because that is the way and.

Okay.

Right.

And then I said, yeah, and then I think they’re going to talk about this book on the podcast. And then she wrote back what podcast? And I was like, stop. We all stop. We got to we have to we have to get you into this other this adjacent fandom. So, yeah, it’s been. Something that we’ve been friends for her and I have been friends now for like 25 years, it’s the same 26 years.

Yeah, that’s what she said. That’s great.

It’s nuts, along the way, know, these, the In-Death Books and now Podcasts in Death have just been these like companions to our lives, which has been really great. And then, of course, the increased community and the Facebook group of folks from all over the world, really, that have their own takes on the In-Death Books and then…

Right.

Yeah, one place you can go on Facebook that’s not completely horrible.

Yes, yeah, and you can always get a good spreadsheet.

Yeah, exactly. I think I have your address. At least I hope it’s the correct address. It’s saying Woodland. OK.

Yes. Good. Then I just need to go check the mail, which is also great.

Yeah, I just sent out the last of the patron, the the trading cards, which I have one right here. So I just sent out for our paying members and there were maybe about 35 of those and shouldn’t have taken me so long. But again.

of the trading cards. Yeah. Very cool.

Mm-hmm.

life happened, you know, and so I just got out the last of those this week and then I have to work on getting the next couple going. Next one probably be Peabody and maybe Feeny after that.

Life is happening, yeah.

Nice. And you can’t see, but I have my calendar, which is, if folks haven’t bought the calendar, highly recommend. It is the best. It doesn’t matter if we’re in the middle of the year. I just want the photos or the images forever and ever. Like once the year is done, they will just go on the wall.

awesome. Yeah.

Hahaha

Yeah, this is the cards. I did whole new photos. So my Roarke photo is completely new. And so is my e-photo.

nice.

Very cool.

Yeah, that’s so neat.

So, and yeah, they’re kind of cool. We’ve talked around before little facts on the back and a little, you know, quote and everything. So very cool. So yeah, I think the next one I’m working on is, is Peabody. And then, and then Feeny after that, I’m doing it in chat GPT and, sending Tara the pictures for approval. And sometimes we have to like for McNabb, it took a while.

Cause I would do one, she’d go like, I don’t, and then I would do one and I don’t like it. then, you know, it was so McNabb took us a while to get to a consensus. Pete, there will absolutely be a Brian Kelly. it just depends on the kind of, so Brian Kelly, I have a couple that I’ve done that I don’t know if I’m 100 % happy with, but you know,

Will there be a Brian Kelly?

So the problem with it is that, you know, we don’t really know what Brian Kelly looks like. So we’re just guessing. But the good part about that is that, yeah, yeah. And the good part about that is like, I can do whatever I want. but yeah, I mean, at least podcasts, not podcasting that, chat GPT is good at that kind of thing. which kind of sucks if you’re an artist, but.

Right. We just love him however he is.

So what’s really scary is that, now this, we’re going completely off topic, but Google just came out with a new version of their AI, a couple of, like last week, or two weeks ago, maybe. And it’s, what people are mostly talking about is it’s video capabilities.

And it’s a capability to do like a completely, um, realistic video with people like, you know, that looks exactly like you had just filmed it somewhere. Like you had hired actors and background actors and put it in the, you know. Um, so I’ve been seeing a lot of those on, uh, Tik Tok where people are making like historical figure.

videos, which is great, you know, because it’s funny, right? You see somebody that looks like Abraham Lincoln and he’s like talking about how he’s going to the theater. That’s, that’s all good. But once it gets to the, well, I’m sure we’re here right now where they’re doing like political figures or things like that, then, then it’s going to go into an area that like, it, you know, it’s not going to be.

for any of us not to know that these aren’t actual videos.

Right, that they’re just AI generated.

Yeah, so, yeah, it’s going to be pretty scary, you know, that technology right now it’s like, okay. Well, it’s not great. So I’m okay with that. You know, if it, you’re asking me about details for the in death series and it’s, you know, giving you answers back that are clearly not correct. Then, okay, that’s fine. But as soon as you get to the point where, you know, it’s generating stuff like that, then

we’re going into a territory that’s like, I don’t know what we’re going to do once we get there. But.

Yeah, and we certainly are not ready to even attempt to regulate it when… Yeah.

We’re not. We’re really not. You know. So yeah, I don’t know. It’s kind of a scary world out there right now. So hopefully we get past it and we get a world like Eve and Roarke live in, which seems pretty okay. So anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah, and maybe we don’t have to have the urban wars to get there, it’s probably a little, yeah. But in case that you do, Quincy wrote a book on how to grow food in a small space on a budget, so.

Let’s hope. But.

There’s a book going around that’s, can’t remember what it’s called. I’ve seen it on, on TikTok and a number of times I had seen it advertised. it’s the book of everything. It’s a, it’s a, it’s essentially a survival book of everything. Like a big, it tells you how to do anything you could possibly ever want to do. So, yeah, I mean, books like that, we’re going to need, you know, or an exit plan to go someplace else. I don’t know.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Anyway, yeah, this conversation took a turn. That I necessarily wanted to go. Yeah, edit that out. Anyway, so I don’t know. So our other thing is I forgot to do this with Quincy, but do you want to do the fan questions?

That’s Edit at will.

sure, yeah.

I forgot to do that. you know, I’m sure we’ll have Quincy on again, but in them I can ask her the fan profile questions. But since we’re here.

and they should have been prepared and had it already pulled up.

Alright, so we’re doing the fan profile questions and the first question is of course your favorite in death book.

Yes.

You know, I think that it’s the last one. I think it’s bonded. Yeah. The, yeah, it’s so good. And I think that it, you know, I was, I was in no way a spy. We leave that to Dana. But the idea of working with such a tight knit group that you relied on each other and that you’re, you’re

Yeah? You got bondage really good.

Right.

support of each other runs through decades later. I just loved that.

Mm-hmm.

that thread, you know, just to kind of bring that into people’s consciousness.

Yeah.

Okay, so next question is besides even Roarke, are your who is your favorite in death character?

Um, I think it has to be Mavis. Mavis or Trina.

Mm.

Yeah, Mavis is great.

Yeah. Yeah, I love that she is the kind of wild one that just brings Eve out of her comfort zone by a lot. And when you know when she’s starting to get a little stagnant, she requires Eve to grow. But she’s also the one that when Eve starts to forget

Yeah. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

her greatness, she reminds her, she’s the voice that you should have in your head, not the one that we actually have. yeah, the friend that will, sometimes you have to, I call it channeling my inner Quincy, because when she introduces me to someone, she’s like my highlight reel, right? And then I’m like, well, I mean, it wasn’t…

Right.

I mean, I guess I did do those things, but, and so sometimes you have to like channel your inner best friend to really self promote the way that you should and to remind yourself how great you are. And I think Mavis does a great job of that.

Right. Right. Yeah, she does. okay, so not counting any in-death books, what’s the last book you read?

Gosh, I have to pull up my audible for that one. I have definitely Read books only because I searched for what has Susan Erickson narrated recently So that is that’s a thing that you can just search by narrator Yeah, it’s it’s great I found some really great books because

Okay.

Yeah, I’ve done that.

Apparently she doesn’t narrate bad books. don’t know. I’m trying to find the one. It was a whole series that…

was based on, think the author came on to, on the podcast and I ended up.

I learned about it I think through the podcast, but the like VI Warshowski series.

yeah. Yeah, she hasn’t come on the podcast, but yeah.

Yeah, so that has been, it was one of those. I can’t remember exactly which one.

but I’m making my way through that group.

Okay, so you could say that in the in-depth world, Roarke has a monopoly on several things. When you play Monopoly, what piece do you choose?

my partner owns an escape room and a game store and we do not play Monopoly in our house. Like we do not, we do not play Monopoly in our house ever. We’re not allowed to have Monopoly in the house. And as like a general, there’s four people who live in the house. If someone wanted to bring one in, you could, but, but no, we don’t as a rule.

That is so cool.

We you don’t do I’m sorry.

Huh, ever?

Is it a competitive thing?

It’s just not a real game. Like it’s not a fun game. It’s sort of like the current political climate. It’s just that on a board game. Yeah. but we are more likely to kickstart some other game. I think, we’re pretty big mansions of madness fans right now. So

Okay.

It isn’t fun. You’re right.

I think Tara was talking about that one. That one sounded really interesting. Yeah.

It’s super interesting. And then he just kick started another one that I don’t know the name of it, but we’ve been playing it and it’s pretty good. yeah, so we don’t monopoly in this house as a rule. So unfortunately we would pick none of those because we would throw all of them out in the front yard.

Okay. Okay.

Okay.

That’s fine.

I think mine here recently, my favorite has been, see now I’m blanking on the Ticket to Ride is my favorite.

yeah, yeah. We own that. I’ve played it like one time. That’s the only like the quality problems of someone who owns a game store is that we can play one game a week and four years later we play a game again. So there’s so many, so many games.

Mm-hmm.

Right. Yeah. Okay, so we know from Immortal that Roarke sings in the shower. Do you sing in the shower?

I used to sing in the shower. I think we moved into this house and people can hear you in the living room if you sing in the shower. So I am less likely to sing in the shower, but in my car, 100 % singing along to the radio or to whatever is in my headphones. Yes, absolutely. Which because of like the ADHD, it’s often in my headphones. So then when I’m singing out,

Yeah.

Right. Yeah. Yeah, same.

All that hears me, like I’m just a nutcase just singing into the world. It’s fine. I’m fine with it. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, it is perfectly fine. So what gadget from the in-depth world would you most want to have today?

I think the kind of EMS worker humanitarian would like the healing wand, but the day-to-day person who lacks a lot of energy and spoons to get through the world, get through the day, really wants the auto chef. So.

Yeah, yeah. Same. I mean, I like cooking, but I still would like the auto chef.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it sounds like Somerset stocks it with things. So if I wanted to get crazy, I could cook something swanky and put it in there.

Yeah, if you want to, sure. Yeah. It sounds amazing. What is your most controversial opinion?

But if I don’t, it’ll just make food come out. It’d be great.

Hmm, besides monopoly is not a real game. Yeah, I think, I don’t know if it’s my most controversial opinion, but perhaps right now I also believe that licensed companions should be a thing.

That’s pretty controversial.

You

Yeah, I don’t see any reason why that has to be illegal.

so Roarke has an unusual collection of weapons of war. What unusual collection do you have?

I probably I would say two, one of which I actually both of them I think I share with my my partner. have Lego pirate ships and lightsabers.

Okay.

all kinds of lightsabers not just like a lightsaber. Awesome.

of all kinds of lightsabers. Different sizes, the chopstick lightsabers, we had to get those. Yeah.

Yeah, of course you have to have the chopstick lightsabers. Lightsabers. Have you made your own lightsaber? Like gone to Disneyland or Disney World and made your own?

Right.

I have not, but that’s mostly because the last time that we went, I was in graduate school and then I graduated last June, so not a great time for science funding. And so the bank account didn’t allow, the budget did not allow for the lightsaber building class. They are, they’re so expensive.

Yeah, because they are expensive. anything in Disney is expensive, so.

We also were there with a tremendous number of like seven year olds and I just, couldn’t at that moment, right? was, it’s a lot of, a lot of peopling and Disney, so I just had to be careful.

See?

That’s always at Disney. There’s a lot of people involved.

Yeah, the loop earplugs are a godsend for that.

Yeah, I should try that. I never do. And then I get overwhelmed and then I’m like, you know, exhausted afterwards.

Yeah, they have a new version. Well, I don’t know if it’s new anymore. It’s new like a year and a half ago actually, but where you can adjust them. So you used to have to buy multiple kinds where if you wanted it to like mute a lot of things. So if you’re going to a concert, you had to buy one version. And then if you wanted to help like focus, you had to buy another version. And now they have one that you can kind of switch it on the fly. So you can kind of tune to what you want.

Mm-hmm.

Right, right, right.

Right.

I don’t have those, I got them for a friend. I just have the ones that help you focus, but they live in my backpack so that I can just be like, there’s so much peopling. I would like fewer people. Yeah, just a little bit. And then I can hear the conversations that I really want to participate in.

I was like, tune that out a little bit. Yeah.

Right. Right.

Okay, occasionally, people allow people to stop for food and more often than not, that is some sort of hot dog. Is a hot dog a sandwich?

No.

Hot dog is not a sandwich.

It is not. At best it’s a taco.

Okay. Now I’ll, you know, sure. That sounds good to me. So again, I keep saying I’m going to change this question. How about we do, what are you hopeful for in 2025?

Mm.

It’s just general survival.

I guess what I’m hoping for and what I’m hopeful for are two different things because I don’t know if what I’m hoping for is actually realistic. Yes.

A heart attack. A heart attack for somebody specific.

and that will get cut out probably.

I would hope for…

folks to be less divided.

Yeah, that would be nice.

Yeah, yeah, I think that what the last like five years has taught me is the value of the community that you build and whether it’s small or large, know, some people have the spoons to be like on the school board and their whole community is, you know, thousands of students and their families that are part of it. And for others, it’s, you know, six people that

Yeah.

help each other sow seeds and grow things and get them in the ground and show up for each other when their kids are sick or whatever. But I think that’s been the biggest part is, yeah, just finding community and investing in the community that’s really meaningful and in a meaningful way, because I think there’s so many ways that we are allowed to sort of pretend that we’re.

Right.

that we have community. And so I also think there’s a difference between what I call microdosing community, where you have like, sort of like the Facebook group, right? Like a couple hundred small interactions that when you put them together, become a larger support network, even to the extent that, you know, I came on, I don’t know, maybe a couple weeks ago and.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

And someone had posted like, I haven’t heard from this person in a while, like where are at? And I think in a group that’s focused on a book series, that’s pretty amazing. But to have those micro doses of community and then to really intentionally build community in your real life, that’s what I learned after we were forced to kind of physically not be together for a while.

Right.

Okay, yeah, that’s a good answer.

If Mira’s playlist contains some songs by Mavis Freestone, some people might be surprised. What band or artist would people be most surprised to find in your playlist? So I think the last time we asked this of somebody, said, let’s find the baseline.

So what you normally listen to.

what I normally listen to is pretty all over the place.

Like something, my Pandora is this odd mix of like greatest showman to Hamilton and all of the Disney music, but also some James Taylor and like Jimmy Buffett. So I think the odd ball out would be like,

Mm-hmm.

Right.

So.

recently just getting into some of the newer music from Youngblood.

Okay.

Also, oddly enough, has his latest one is about nurses who took care of his grandparents and when they were when they were sick. So, yeah.

that’s nice.

Okay. Last question is besides podcasts and death, what is your favorite podcast?

dating detectives.

Mmm.

Okay, I don’t know what that one’s about.

That one is about, they’ve coined the term dogfish. So, you know, when they talk about catfishing, like the person puts themselves forward, but the face is is wrong, right? They’ve used someone else’s face. This one, like the face is the same, but the person is different behind the face. They don’t present themselves as their their whole self. So sometimes they’ll have like a second family or something else that they’re lying about.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Okay.

And yeah, so it’s like a comedian and a private investigator that come that run the podcast and they bring on guests that have been dogfished and they talk about that person’s experience and then they’ll kind of debrief it with, they’re pretty careful to not say, you know, like, what could they have done differently? Cause there’s a lot of victim shaming in that, but, but essentially like the

Mm-hmm.

cautionary tale of their big thing is they call it following your femme tuition or your intuition, but because it’s not just for feminine folks, but the idea that we kind of know in our, you know, there’s little red flags that we sometimes ignore and to just empower folks to not ignore those, especially if they’ve been taught throughout their life to be a people pleaser. Sometimes you just got to be awkward and.

Right.

Wait.

That’ll keep you safe, so.

Yeah. Huh, that’s interesting. I just recently found one. Let me see if I can find it. It’s they’ve only got maybe four episodes so far because they just started. But it’s been really interesting so far. It’s it’s called Debt Heads. And it’s basically these two women.

talking about money, essentially, I mean, going through this journey of looking at their relationship with money, and how they’ve, you know, been in debt and out of debt. know, why do you why do we spend money the way we do? Why do we get into debt? You know, stuff like that. They’ve got, I think for

four or five episodes, but the episodes I’ve listened to so far have been just amazing.

Nice, yeah, that’s very interesting. I also like her first standard K, which talks about money from a somewhat female standpoint, but really looking at like cultural expectations, I think more than something that is actually gendered, know, looking at the cost of, you know, like the pink tax and also just the cost of being chronically ill or the cost of transitioning and.

you know, maintaining your body and you know, so I think it’s, it’s very, those are all very interesting to me because I think it’s more than just self control, right? It’s just like,

Yeah.

just like someone’s weight is far more than diet and exercise. When people say that, it me want to throw a punch them now. I’m like, no, thank you. Welcome to perimenopause. This is not how we’re rolling. So yeah, I think it’s really interesting to look at the cultural expectations around money and also the history of, there’s a lot of financial trauma that.

Right?

lives that has been passed down to people that has led to sometimes debt and sometimes just a lack of joy and spending because you have to hold on to everything.

Be

Right. Yeah. Yeah. And for me, in that they haven’t gotten, and I probably can find a, you know, maybe the podcast you’re talking about has an episode on it whatever, but, I find being a being now trying to do freelance, you know, a lot of, like undervaluing, like, and that all goes into like the whole imposter syndrome thing.

How can I charge this person this much money for this job? Which, you know, doesn’t, doesn’t seem like it’s worth that much, you know what saying? And, so there’s a lot of people that have that issue too.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, and I think it’s reiterated by the cultural expectation that female presenting folks will gift their skills and time and product. that was she does cover that in one of the podcasts and her first NRK because a lot of people when she created these tools to help people, they said, well, you why are you charging for and why wouldn’t you give them away because

Mm-hmm.

you know, so many women are struggling with money. And she was like, because I have to model that my time and skills are valuable so that other people will find their time and skills valuable. And also, when have you ever asked a tech bro why he didn’t just give a couple stocks away? Like, what are you talking about?

Exactly.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. You know, it’s so funny because like, and, just, just lately, you probably know that I’ve been like relating everything back to this Karen Reed trial that I’m really obsessed with. And, the, the prosecution and the defense both hired companies.

to come in and do testing on whether or not the accident could have happened in the first place. Like, is it true that she hit him with her car and how can you prove that? What testing can be done to do that? And…

The, the, the prosecution hired this company would have one of the guys, the guy that the main guy for this company, or one of the co-owners of this company on the stand talking about the different things that they did, how they tested. And, the testing that they did, the main test that they did, cause what they’re alleging is that she backed up and hit his John O’Keefe’s arm with the back of her.

car, he hit the tail light, tail light shattered, he’s got scratches all over his arm. So they want to know, they wanted to know like, is this possible? The thing that this company did that the prosecution hired. Well, first of all, I should contrast it this way. The defense hired a company because they found out that the FBI had actually hired this company.

to look into this case before the case even went to trial. So somebody must have gone to the FBI and said like, need to look into this case. They hired this company that does a lot of government contracts.

to look at this thing, you know, and they have all of the like high speed cameras and they’re setting up, you know, crash test dummies and they’re getting, you know, light tail lights. They bought a ton of these tail lights and they had set it up where it’s like crashing into this arm and you can see it from several different angles because they have all of the cameras and it’s in slow motion and they can, you know, they have.

you know, measurements and you can see it took this long. So they had a whole presentation like that, but they came later. The first one that went on was the prosecution’s guy. And the one test that he did was him standing there in the exact clothes that the guy wore, not the clothes, but he bought identical clothes to the guy for no apparent reason, as far as I could tell, except he just wanted to cosplay as this guy.

I’m rich.

and they bought a Lexus to do the tests. And what he did was painted the tail light blue, had somebody back up very slowly while he held his hand out there and kind of rolled into it to just to show like this is where the blue paint went and this is where the marks were so obviously.

And that was the only test. And the internet made fun of this company, like, you know, with the blue paint test and the whole thing. And then we found out that the prosecution paid this company something like $350,000.

And what I loved about it was the woman that I listened to that does the, the live streaming of this is a lawyer or she used to be a lawyer. Now she does this for a living. And, you know, she, today it came up because the other guys were on and were showing all of their mini camera angles and all the different tests that they did and, know, everything.

With actual taillights breaking.

And the actual taillights and they actually got a car that actually, you know, they did several, you know, and they changed the taillight every time and they did it again, different speeds. What does that do to the taillight? And they did all these calculations, all of this stuff. And at a certain point yesterday, I think it was, she stopped the recording. was like, any of you that are out there thinking with your imposter syndrome, thinking I can’t, I’m not good enough to charge money.

for my services can just look at this other, these other people who bought a Lexus and painted a tail light blue and had the guy basically rub his arm up against it to show. And he got $350,000 for this.

Yeah, knowing he was gonna have to testify in court with his methods.

With which he was like up there like, yes, this is the best method to do this. And he was 100 % committed to like, yes, this is, he was this whole chest up there saying like, this is in fact what happened. You know, whereas these other guys did all these other tests and there, and there were two of them that testified and they’re both like, there’s absolutely no way.

With this whole chest.

Hahaha

So, but yeah, she was like, she just gave, she just gave a rant. It was like a 10 minute rant about, you know, people that undervalue themselves and, know, look, just look at this guy, just look at this guy getting $350, you know, to buy this Lexus and paint it blue and so that it can run into his arms so that it could, you know, but I just loved it because she’s so right. Like so many people just say like, Oh, I can’t ask that much money for that, you know, and then you have some.

Yeah.

people like this who are like, I’m absolutely worth that. Look at this work that I’ve done. And it’s just like, you painted a tail light blue and had it rub up against your arm, you know? So it was just so funny to hear her like ranting about that, you know? So, and it was 100 % correct. People need to stop undervaluing them. I can’t say that word now. Undervaluing themselves.

Yes. Yes, absolutely. Yeah, we used to have I in one of my many careers, I worked at a rock climbing gym, and we had a mobile rock wall and they tried to the family that owned the company tried to price it so that it would be available to all income levels. And it sat in the parking lot when it was like $400 for the day. And we would just barely break even even though

So.

Mm-hmm.

It was in Florida and the minimum wage was federal minimum wage at $7 an hour or whatever. And then they said, okay, well, fine. I guess in order to make money on it, we’re gonna have to try the other side. And so they moved it to $1,600 for a day and the day became six hours instead of eight hours and or four hours instead of eight hours. I can’t remember. And we couldn’t keep it in the parking lot. It was all perceived value of that. When it was $400, it was a

Mm-hmm.

It was not worth it, like the money. And at 1600, it was obviously a really cool thing. And I was like.

Yeah.

Yeah, and that’s something too that in the group, the photography group that I have followed and the woman there that owns this photography group, her name is Sue Bryce and she is a kind of cultish figure, but.

She does give a lot of advice about that. And she, and her whole thing was teaching women how to do this photography business, this model that she came up with. And she was like, charge as much as you can because yes, it’s perceived value. They, if you’re saying, I’m, you you $150 for your session.

then people aren’t gonna think it’s worth that much. it’s like, But as soon as people started charging, yeah, $1,600 for a session, $2,000 for a session, they had tons of clients, because it’s perceived value. And she has a podcast as well. And there was a woman that came on there that we talked about. She started out in photography.

And charging, yeah, like $150 for a session and giving like hundreds of photos to people. And she said, she contacted a woman, the woman said she was interested. She wanted to get her two young daughters, they’re both like preteens, photos of them in these nice dresses that she bought them. And the lady’s like, yeah. And she said, but I don’t have much money. So would you take just 50?

And he’s like, I was just starting out. I was like, yeah, I guess I’ll take 50. And then the day of the photo shoot came and she said the woman came in and the dresses she had for the little girls were like, you know, dresses that cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars. And she said, she just felt like so used here. You don’t mind buying these dresses for hundreds of dollars, but couldn’t afford 150 for this whole session and talk me down to 50.

And she said from that point on that she said, I never, I went up to, you know, 1500 and I never looked back because nobody is ever going to, you know, devalue me ever again. know, so it’s a thing.

Yeah, and I feel like you get more people who show up, right? They don’t blow off the appointments and they put that value on it. And so they’re like, well, I can’t afford to miss this. I better go, right? Better be on time.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so yeah, there’s another there’s another avenue that we veered down. Right. So, OK, so I guess that’s it, unless you have anything else medically to talk about.

You just break that out into a briefing room and it’ll be fine.

No, thanks to everyone who added stuff to the Facebook post. Really appreciate it.

Yeah, our people are really good about that. You know, it’s really nice that everybody pitches in and on a podcast idea, it helps out a ton. So, and in saying that, if you are not a member of the Facebook group, please become a member of the Facebook group.

They’re amazing.

you can, if you don’t mind being on Facebook, because it’s a great group. Otherwise, you can contact us on Instagram and on Blue Sky. We’re kind of on TikTok, but not really, but you can still contact us there. You can send us an email at show at podcast and death.com. You can call the number. The number is 205-476-2753 and that spells out 2054 RORC.

Contact us with any of your show ideas or with anything else you want to talk to us about or tell us about and That’s I guess that’s it for this episode of podcasting death. Thanks so much Melissa for being here and for Helping me out even though you’re saying it’s you know You know no problem helping us out, but it’s it really means a lot to me That people would help out

And hopefully everybody, I think it’s a really fascinating subject and hopefully everybody else out there found it interesting as well. And they’ll be forced, we are forcing them to learn something. I hope you were forced to learn something today. So, okay. That’s it for this episode of Podcasts and Deaths. So for Podcasts and Death, this is AJ.

Definitely.

Well, at least they’d be forced to learn something.

You can say this in middle of the city. And, um, that’s it. We’ll see you next week. Hopefully with Tara.

And I’m Melissa.

Looking forward to having Tara back.

Yep. Okay. Thanks everyone.

Okay.

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