The Watch Review

This is my 58th podcast. It is currently ranked number 54. The title of this episode is "'Avengers: Doomsday' Footage, 'Euphoria' S3E2, and 'Margo's Got Money Troubles' Episodes 1-3." It was released April 20th. My biggest worry about this podcast is that there would be some spoilers about Avengers: Doomsday. I am pretty extreme when it comes to trying to avoid spoilers. In the ideal world, I would want to know nothing about the movie going into it. If it is a Marvel movie then I am going to see it so I don't need to see any trailers about it. I don't like watching trailers of movies that I know I am going to see. If one comes on I tune it out. I get annoyed sometimes with spoilers on the episode image shown on the streaming service. No matter how hard I have tried to avoid spoilers, Disney has given me spoilers of characters who will appear in Daredevil: Born Again through their images they show on the streaming service. So I was preparing myself for a new level of spoilage because I wasn't going to be avoiding it this time. I committed to listen to the top 100 podcasts, the newest episode as it came up so I am required to do so. Fortunately, for me all my stress and worry about this turned out to be for no reason and there were no spoilers. They said before Avengers: Doomsday comes out that they are going to rerelease Avengers Endgame with footage that links to Avengers: Doomsday. That does not give away much. I probably would need to know this to watch Avengers Endgame again as I have seen it already. Hopefully, they don't mess anything up. It would be interesting if they put Doctor Doom in it and then Robert Downey Jr. is playing two different characters. I think it will be good. Then they talked about Euphoria. I suppose the only thing that could be better than watching Euphoria is listening to people talk about how they watched Euphoria so I at least got that going for me. One of the hosts criticized the writer for putting commentary in the show about California's zoning laws and how difficult it is to build in California. He says he doesn't agree that all Californians should be worried about it being difficult to build in California. This mindset is super annoying to me. Zoning laws are the number one thing that we can control that can help bring housing prices down. Wherever you go in the country, you have local governments working hard to make sure housing stays expensive as the people who own put restrictions on those who do not. In somewhere like California, local governments consistently put obstacles in the way of building. In Salt Lake County, you have people speaking out against every attempt to put in high density housing in various places. Somewhere like Rigby, Idaho, you have laws requiring at least one acre of land for housing. So from the most urban to the most rural, the government is micromanaging decisions regarding housing that restricts natural decisions people will make with the free market and increases the cost of housing everywhere. Demand cannot keep up with supply when demand keeps being restricted. Then you get this richy rich podcast host talking like he can't even understand why people would want to be able to build houses in California. I did find some of this interesting and some not. Mostly it was just the Marvel stuff which was short. Mostly they were reviewing this boring Euphoria show. I dock this podcast one point for profanity, one point for being a NIMBY, and one point for the uninteresting topic. I give this podcast 2/5.

Conspiracy Theories Review

This is my 57th podcast. It is currently ranked number 67. The episode I listened to was titled, "The Secret Twin Study: Files Sealed until 2065." The episode was released April 15. This was a really interesting story about a study conducted by researchers colluding with an adoption agency. In the study, they separated twins and sent them to different families of different backgrounds. They didn't tell the families that the twins had a twin so they never knew. As part of the agreement to adopt these children the parents were told they were part of a study, the researchers would come visit the house and ask their children questions periodically. But the parents never knew they had twins. Obviously, the study is super immoral as you shouldn't harm people to learn Robot Erasmus style. As the kids grew older several of them learned they had twins. There was a big backlash against the study. The study was never published and it is sealed until 2065. The narrator of the podcast kept asking why the study hasn't been published and why it is sealed but it seems obvious to me that it wasn't released because it was already getting backlash before it was released. It seems the immorality of the study has been exposed and I don't think it goes deeper but more details would continue to get people angry. The narrator kept acting as if there was a deeper conspiracy because that is the theme of the show. I don't think there is a deeper conspiracy because the records can be recovered by the people in the study though it isn't the easiest process. If the researchers were hiding something more nefarious than what has already been exposed they could destroy the records instead of sealing them at Yale. It was an interesting listen. I dock it one point for going too deep on the conspiracy when the story itself was interesting. It was not needed to go deeper than that. I give this 4/5 for being an interesting listen.

Louis Theroux Podcast Review

This is my 56th podcast. I am slow on writing about this after I listened and this podcast is currently out of Spotify's top 100. I listened to an episode titled, "Yorgos Lanthimos discusses working with Emma Sone, suffering for his art, and directing a Bourne movie." The episode was released on April 20. Reading the comments on this podcast a lot of his listeners complained about Theroux interrupting the guest too much. Theroux responded in the comments and said he tries to keep the energy high, unpredictable, and give context to listeners who don't know the guest. He said the podcast would come back in a few months. So I guess he is taking a break, which is maybe why the podcast fell out of the top 100. It was possibly annoying to the guest, but I didn't have a problem with the interruptions because I think it worked with his style of trying to get quick answers and keeping it lively. Yorgos talked about a movie he directed called Dogtooth. I thought it sounded like an interesting story and it was cool hearing how they were able to make it with a low budget. I thought maybe I would watch it but I looked into it a bit and read that there is some pornography in it so I got to skip it. Yorgos talked about how when he directs he does not like to tell the actors what to do too much. He likes them to have their lines and the story but not tell them exactly how to say the lines and not to explain to the actors the motivations of the characters. He says he does this so the actors are free to come up with interpretations of their characters, he believes it can benefit the films by allowing the actors to use their own creativity. He will step in and say for them to do it differently if he thinks it is not good for the film. I thought that was an interesting approach. With Emma Stone he directed a movie titled, "Bugonia." Perhaps I would watch it some day. Theroux asked Yorgos if he liked to watch Marvel movies. I thought this was a funny question to ask a movie snob. Yorgos said if something caught his interest, but then he couldn't think of any Marvel movies he saw. Theroux broadened the topic and asked if he liked any super hero movies. Yorgos said to name some but he hadn't seen any that were named. I was surprised that when they were talking about Marvel movies that neither of them mentioned Emma Stone playing Peter Parker's love interest Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider Man and The Amazing Spider Man 2 considering that they were talking about Emma Stone just before this. Overall, I thought this podcast was an interesting listen. I got to dock it a point for the unnecessary profanity and give it a 4/5.