Lore - REMASTERED – Episode 46: Dark Conclusions

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

REMINDER: Lore "Remastered" are BONUS episodes, not reruns. Each episode has been freshly recorded from the original script, scored with Chad's music, and given a brand new bonus story at the end...for no other reason than to give you a fresh take on an old classic. Only episodes 1-50 will be remastered. Thanks! ———————————— Behind every vampire is a hunter looking to stop them, and this remastered classic episode takes us deep inside that mythology. Fresh narration and music, plus a brand new bonus story at the end! Researched, written, and produced by Aaron Mahnke, with music by Chad Lawson, with additional help from GennaRose Nethercott and Harry Marks. ———————— Lore Resources:  Episode Music: lorepodcast.com/music  Episode Sources: lorepodcast.com/sources  More shows from Grim & Mild: www.grimandmild.com ———————— This episode of Lore was sponsored by: Stamps: Get a 4-week trial, free postage, and a digital scale at Stamps.com/LORE. Thanks to Stamps.com for sponsoring the show! Rocket Money: Stop throwing your money away. Cancel unwanted subscriptions and manage your expenses the easy way, by going to RocketMoney.com/LORE. BetterHelp: Lore is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at BetterHelp.com/LORE, and get on your way to being your best self. To advertise on our podcast, please reach out to [e-mail], or visit our listing here.

For almost as long as we've had motion pictures, we've also had vampire stories. And rightly so, the tale of Dracula is a story of fear and suspense, and it's been told over and over again over the last century. Theater productions, early black and white films, and every successive film since the 1930s has proven that our love of the story of Dracula is just as undying as the monster himself. One of the results of this obsession with Dracula is that we often ignore or forget the other major players in that story. Mina Murray is a powerful heroic woman who spends the bulk of the story fighting to destroy Dracula rather than wallowing in self-pity.

Quincy Morris sacrifices himself to defeat the monster, and Jonathan Harker, Mina's eventual husband, strikes one of the killing blows. The novel is full of characters, but all seem to fade into the shadow cast by the vampire lord himself. All, that is, except for Abraham Van Helsing. Over the decades, his character has received a good amount of attention from fans of the book, and honestly, how can you blame them? He was intelligent, brave, and skilled in his craft, and in a lot of ways, Van Helsing represented something that we all aspire to be. It's a side effect of growing up with stories of creatures who want to hurt us.

If there really is something living under the bed, or in the closet, or in that dark, damp corner of the basement, then shouldn't someone care enough to protect us? If these creatures are the antagonists of our nightmares, then surely there are also protagonists, the heroes, the champions, those brave souls who are tasked with fighting back. Van Helsing was a fictional construct, of course, but his character echoes an ancient, widespread belief that can be found in some form or another within many folktales. It seems that, no matter what the monster might be, there are always those who fight them, and amazingly, those hunters still walk among us.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore. Some of the earliest folktales involving hunters of the supernatural can be found in Bulgaria and nearby countries. After five centuries of occupation by the Ottoman Empire, the Turks were finally pushed out of Bulgaria in the 1890s. During those first few years of freedom, the country's rich folklore and traditions were gathered up and recorded for the first time, and right at the center of these records were tales of the vampire. Tales with such power that people today still believe them and follow their prescriptions, such as the ritual exhumation of suspected vampires. It's a belief that runs deep,

mostly because of intense fear and superstition. To many, though, vampires were real, and they needed to be hunted down. As a result, there were people in these ancient Bulgarian communities called Sabotnik who could detect vampires. They were called upon when a village suspected a vampire was hunting and harming them. Once the grave of a suspect was dug up and the body exposed, the Sabotnik would determine whether or not the corpse was really a vampire. If it was, they were also responsible for destroying it. This was a power each Sabotnik inherited at birth, according to the stories. You just had to be lucky enough to be born either on one of the days between Christmas and January

6, a time known to ancient Catholics as the unclean days, or on a Saturday, which sounds pretty random to me, but hey, whatever. Another group of vampire hunters was known as the Vampirzia. These were more akin to the modern version of Van Helsing that we know today. Destined to hunt vampires from birth, they traveled the land armed with weapons and tools looking for battle, and they did all of this while following prescribed methods, like hunting on Saturdays and leading the vampires into graveyards where they were somehow weaker. And these Vampirzia were heroes, often earning a good living from the gifts and donations of fearful villagers. There are even records of the provincial capital of Tarnovo,

actually employing a number of them full-time and sending them out to investigate and hunt when reports of vampires popped up. Honestly, you could film this stuff and pass it off as an underworld sequel, but it happened, and to me, that's what makes it so much more compelling. The idea of hunting wasn't isolated to Bulgaria, though, or even limited to the concept of the vampire. Contemporary to these Vampirzia tales were stories that highlighted another dangerous creature, one that walked right among us, the witch. And yes, we all already know that there was hysteria and persecution. Yes, there were hangings and burnings, and other superstition fueled acts of violence, but at the center of much of it, there were hunters.

In 1486, a German Dominican friar named Heinrich Kramer wrote a book that he called the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of the Witches. Kramer was more than a friar, though. He'd served for years as an inquisitor with orders from Pope Innocent VIII. After his retirement, he wrote what he believed to be the gold standard for understanding and identifying witches. The Catholic Church condemned the book just three years after it was published, but by then it was too late. The Malleus Maleficarum acted like an accelerant, thanks in part to Gutenberg's printing press, and it spread across Europe where it fueled the flames of religious hysteria and social unrest. The book was used for centuries to teach others

about witches, where they came from, how to detect them, and what to do when you found one. And this was the world Matthew Hopkins was born into in 1620 England. He was the son of a Puritan minister, and was raised to fear the devil and lash out at what he saw as heresy. By the age of just 24, Hopkins had set up shop in Sussex under the title of Witchfinder General and began a short but devastating career in the discovery and conviction of witches. In the 350 years that spanned the early 1400s to the late 1700s, it's estimated that less than 500 people in total were executed for witchcraft in all of England. That's less than two executions per year, right? During their short two-year operation, though, Hopkins and his team were

responsible for 300 of those deaths. This is the man who invented the swimming test for witchcraft that most people have heard about. The accused would be tied to a chair and tossed into a pond or a lake, and then Hopkins would wait to see if they floated. If they did, they were a witch and would be killed. If they sunk? Well, they still died, but with a clear name. It doesn't make sense to us, I know, but in the 1640s, Hopkins could do no wrong. People trusted him. His book, The Discovery of Witches, went on to fuel witch trials in the American colonies in the late 1600s, and some of his interrogation methods were even used in Salem, Massachusetts. Don't get me wrong, the man was a monster, but he also clearly left his mark as a witch hunter.

One last thing. According to the Bulgarian folklore surrounding vampire hunters, there was one big risk for those in the profession. Anyone who served as a sabbatnik or a vampircia were the most at risk of becoming a vampire themselves. Even in England, Hopkins didn't die a hero. Instead, he was viewed as a monster and a boogeyman. Rather than going down in history as some sort of heroic hunter, he inherited his own evil reputation. Because sometimes, whether the creature is a thing of our own invention or simply the focus of a personal obsession, the hunter is always at risk of becoming the very thing they pursue. In 1968, Paramount released Rosemary's Baby based on the hit novel from a year before. 1973

saw the release of the original Exorcist, followed by The Omen in 1976. There was a satanic craze sweeping through America, a mixture of fear and fascination, and Hollywood wanted to capitalize on it. But it's often overlooked that that craze was preceded by an earlier wave of fear, way across the Atlantic, in England. During the late 1960s, everywhere parents looked, they saw danger and darkness. Reports of kidnappings and drug use led to panic, and as a result, it took on the flavor of a witch hunt. And that's ironic, because one of the recurring tropes and stories that portrayed Satanists as monsters was the idea that they kill infants. And that's an idea that was born centuries before in the pages of none other than

the Malleus Maleficarum. For many, that connection was more than a coincidence. They saw conspiracy. And as we know, fear has a way of clouding our perceptions. So when London locals began to notice graffiti and vandalism inside the historic Highgate Cemetery, they jumped to dark conclusions. Now, Highgate is an old cemetery, 200 years old, in fact. It was popular for the first century, but then tastes changed and war broke out. During World War II, most of the men who served as groundskeepers and caretakers in the cemetery were called into military service, leaving the place unattended. Later on, German bombs left parts of the graveyard damaged and exposed. And over the following decades, trees and brush began to overtake the property.

After that, young people and vandals began to spend more time inside the cemetery, and reports circulated of occult symbols, open graves, and bodies that had been moved for unknown reasons. Obsessed with the dangers of Satanism, the public began to do what the public has always been very good at doing. They lashed out. In early 1969, a group emerged that promised to help. They called themselves the British Occult Society, and their aim was to investigate the unusual events and vandalism taking place in the cemetery. Unlike a lot of the general public, this group was even brave enough to enter the overgrown graveyard and explore it with hopes of finding answers. According to the two men at the center of the group, Sean Manchester and David

Ferrant, what they found confirmed earlier reports, and they also listened to others in the neighborhood who had stories of their own to share, which is where they first encountered the rumors of something, maybe a person, or maybe something else, that prowled the graveyard at night. The stories described it as a tall, dark figure that could paralyze those who encountered it. Ferrant was intrigued, and so on December 21st of 1969, he camped out in the cemetery overnight. It was the winter solstice. He was a paranormal investigator. It all sort of lined up in his mind at least, and according to him, the night was a huge success. The way he described it, at some point during the hours between dusk and dawn, Ferrant witnessed a person that stood over

seven feet tall. This figure apparently had eyes that glowed brightly, but when Ferrant looked away for a moment, it vanished. He wrote to the local paper and asked if others had seen the same figure. Amazingly, for about two months, letters flooded in from others who described similar experiences. About the same time, though, Ferrant's partner, Sean Manchester, left the group to start his own, and made further discoveries. His findings, though, were more bloody. He believed the stories of a mysterious dark figure, but he also found numerous animals in the cemetery that had been drained of blood. Upon inspection, he reported that each of them had small holes in their neck. When the local papers asked him if he had a theory,

he told them he did. The figure, according to Manchester, was clearly a vampire. And not just any vampire, this was what he called a king vampire, brought over from Wallachia in the 1700s by a curious noble, and then buried on the estate that eventually became Highgate. All of the satanic activity, according to him, was the work of local occultists trying to resurrect this creature. So Manchester offered to hunt it down and exercise it. He acknowledged that the law made it a bit difficult to go around plunging wooden stakes into corpses, but he had already done it twice before. According to him, he was willing to put his life on the line to track down and destroy the king vampire. Few people bought it. They did

believe that something was going on inside the cemetery, though, so the police began to patrol the area, watching for anything out of the ordinary. Over the next few months, they chased a number of vandals out of the graveyard, but none of them turned out to be anything more than teenagers pretending to be vampire hunters, just out looking for a thrill. And then, on August 1st of 1970, something happened that changed all of that. That night, police were called to Highgate Cemetery and directed to one particular crypt that was deep inside the property. When they arrived, they found the tomb door standing wide open, and inside, stretched out on the cold stone floor, was a body. Not particularly odd,

given the location, but it was the condition of the body that alarmed them. It had been charred beyond recognition and then decapitated. The police went public with the discovery and admitted that this, of all the things they'd found in Highgate so far, could actually be the work of occultists. And that was all the public needed. The papers filled with headlines, people couldn't help but jump to conclusions, and both Shaw Manchester and David Ferrant were right in the middle of it, examining the clues and trying to make sense of it all.

They weren't on the same side anymore, though. Each man had started to adopt his own unique methods of investigation, some of which were a bit unorthodox. Two weeks after the burned body was discovered, Ferrant was discovered by police to be wandering the cemetery at night. When they arrested him for trespassing, he was found to be carrying a large crucifix and a sharp wooden stake. His group didn't stop, though. They began to camp overnight in the graveyard on a more regular basis, finding more unusual clues, all of which pointed, to them at least, to the work of a group bent on resurrecting the King Vampire. One night, Ferrant took a reporter from the evening news into Highgate with him,

and together they discovered a crypt with an eerie scene. The body had been removed from the coffin inside the building and placed in the center of a large pentagram that had been drawn on the stone floor. Ferrant and his group also claimed to find bodies with voodoo dolls, bodies with missing heads, skulls placed in odd locations, and symbols that hinted at rituals from previous nights. All of it, they said, pointed to a dark evil that needed to be stopped. Their efforts, as risky as they seemed, were aimed at doing just that. Months later, Ferrant was arrested a second time, and this time his girlfriend joined him. The police apparently thought the couple was transporting marijuana, but it turned out to

be a plastic bag of chamomile of all things. They claimed that it was an ingredient in one of their rituals. According to them, they had found a crypt that showed signs of a recent black magic ceremony, and so their group had gone there to cleanse it. Once they had all gathered inside the tomb, they stood in a circle around the perimeter of the room, reading passages from the Bible along with spells they claimed had been lifted from ancient books of magic. Some of the women in the group even stripped to dance naked in the center of the room. They were symbols of purity, according to Ferrant. Manchester publicly disapproved. He preferred to conduct his exorcisms in broad daylight,

which allowed him to be safer, and, as some critics pointed out, also made it more likely that there would be an audience around to watch him. But that didn't mean that his rituals were any less entertaining. At one point, Manchester claimed that he was led to a tomb by a young woman possessed by a demonic spirit named Lucia. Inside the tomb, he claimed, was an ancient coffin with no name plates. He had opened the coffin and was about to plunge a wooden stake into the corpse when another member of his group stopped him. Instead, Manchester simply sprinkled the body with holy water and cloves of garlic. According to witnesses, as he did this, loud rhythmic booms could be heard,

growing louder the deeper into the ritual they went. Events in Highgate seemed to end shortly after January of 1974. On the 12th of that month, local police were called to inspect the car of a local resident parked near the cemetery. Inside, they found an embalmed corpse seated at the wheel. Its head removed and nowhere to be found. Ferrant was interviewed as a suspect, but in the end, it turned out to be a prank put on by a group of local teenagers. One of them had actually taken the head home and kept it on his mantle until it began to smell, that is. Over the past few decades, Manchester has found a way to make a career out of his adventures in Highgates and has become known as a vampire expert appearing in many

television documentaries on the subject. He has written two books, one about the Highgate Vampire and another, a handbook for would-be hunters. David Ferrant experienced less success in the wake of the events. He was arrested in 1974 for vandalizing property within the cemetery. He denied any involvement, of course, but the police were hungry for a real suspect after nearly five years of activity. He was sentenced to four years in prison, but was paroled after just two when it was determined that his rights had been violated. He went back to heading up the British Occult Society, where he still works today. Newspapers at the time featured photos of him with his vampire hunting tools.

He was referred to as the graveyard ghoul by one local paper and another called him a wicked witch. In a book written by Manchester in 1991, he refers to Ferrant as a wayward witch who dabbled in the black arts. It seems that in the eyes of some, at least, David Ferrant suffered a fate similar to Matthew Hopkins. Rather than succeeding, the young man became the very thing that he was hunting. When this episode first published, it was Halloween. It's one of my favorite times of the year. It's one of the few moments when we stop and acknowledge the shadows, the mystery, and the unknown, because life without mystery is stale and flat, and days like Halloween helped to

add texture to our lives. On Halloween, millions of children are going to dress up and walk through their neighborhoods. They've each got a favorite creature, something they want to become for this one night of the year when it's expected and normal, and they'll do all of this like hunters on a mission. Interestingly, the teens who live near Highgate still creep into the graveyard every year. Each Halloween, they find a way inside, gather together, and go on their unique vampire hunts. And that's no easy task these days. The cemetery has been cleaned up, locked up, and opened to the public only for paid guided tours. Still, the youth of the area manage to celebrate Halloween there each and every year.

Twenty years before the events in Highgate Cemetery, though, there was another gathering of youth farther north, in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Glasgow is a port city that straddles the river Clyde and is the second largest in the country. South of the river, just north of the M74, is a neighborhood known as the Gorbles. It's an area of the city that has a rough history. The industrialization and overpopulation of the late 1800s led to the construction of tenement slums throughout the first half of the 20th century. It's gone through some attempted redevelopment, but in the 1950s, it was probably at its lowest point. One night in September of 1954, a police constable named Alex Deeprose was called to

investigate a disturbance at the southern necropolis, a burial ground as old as Highgate and just as textured and creepy in its own way. When the officer got to the cemetery, he found that some of the neighborhood children had gathered there. Hundreds of children, in fact, ranging in ages from 4 to 14, and they were armed. Deeprose managed to gather them all together and lead them out of the graveyard, but the following night, they were back. Each of the children carried something dangerous with them, knives, sticks, metal bars. Some even brought dogs along, and Deeprose wanted to know why. Some of the children told him that two local boys had been killed, and they had come to the graveyard for revenge. The constable didn't know of any murders

in the area, but then again, there was a lot that went on in the gobbles that went unreported. But he was concerned about the gatherings, and so he spoke to some of the parents. Understandably, they were concerned. Some were worried about the safety of their children. Some were concerned about the stories and what it said about their fascination with violence and danger. But despite the concern, hundreds more arrived at the cemetery the very next night. Constable Deeprose returned to disperse them again, but he also wanted to know what it was they were hunting, who killed these two mysterious boys, and why did they think that they could find the suspect there in this particular graveyard? The killer, he was told, was a vampire, a vampire

that stood over seven feet tall, with sharp teeth and glowing eyes. Vampires, what would our world be like without them? They're a perennial favorite in popular culture, and one of the most famous monsters in folklore. Would it be bad taste to say the vampires are in our blood? But not all tales of blood-drinking monsters have that bronze-stoker color palette and je ne sais quoi. Some actually come from more unlikely corners, and we've dug one up to share with you. Stick around through this brief sponsor break to hear all about it. This episode of lore was sponsored by Stamps.com. Folks, I don't want to alarm you, but it's already March. 2023 is well underway,

so don't wait any longer to level up your small business and set your year up for success. Get ahead of the competition by using Stamps.com to mail and ship. For 25 years, Stamps.com has been indispensable for over one million businesses. Get access to the USPS and UPS shipping services that you need to run your business right from your computer any time, day, or night. No lines, no traffic, no waiting. And if you sell products online, Stamps.com seamlessly connects with every major marketplace and shopping cart. Set your business up for success when you get started with Stamps.com today. Sign up at the promo code LORE for a special offer that includes a four-week trial plus free postage and a free digital scale. No long-term commitments or contracts.

Just go to Stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the page, and enter the code LORE, that's Stamps.com. Offer code LORE. This episode was also sponsored by Rocket Money. Did you know that the average person has around 12 paid subscriptions? Let that sink in. So if you think that you're only subscribed to a handful of services, you might want to double check that. With Rocket Money, you can quickly identify and cancel all of your unwanted subscriptions. Rocket Money, formerly known as Truebill, is a personal finance app that finds and cancels your unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps you lower your bills all in one place. Simply find the subscription that you don't want and press cancel, and Rocket Money will cancel it

for you no long hold times with customer service or tedious emailing back and forth. Over three million people have used Rocket Money, saving the average person up to $720 a year. For me, it was an annual subscription to an app that I never ended up using and a digital comic book membership. Finding those meant that I was able to save some cash. Stop throwing your money away, cancel unwanted subscriptions, and manage your expenses the easy way by going to rocketmoney.com slash lore. That's rocketmoney.com slash lore rocketmoney.com slash lore. And finally, this show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Getting to know yourself can be a lifelong process, especially because we're always growing and changing. One of the things that I've discovered

about myself over the years is that I am a verbal processor. I don't do well sitting by myself thinking through challenges. It's so much more effective for me to talk to an actual person and find a path forward through real conversation. And I think all of us need to learn a little bit more about ourselves. Therapy is all about deepening your self-awareness and understanding, because sometimes we don't know what we want or why we react the way we do until we talk things through. I know firsthand how therapy can empower you to be the best version of yourself. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Just fill out a brief questionnaire to get matched

with a licensed therapist and switch therapists at any time for no additional charge. Discover your potential with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash lore today to get 10% off your first month. Vampires and vampire hunters are two sides of the same coin, good versus evil, dark versus light. In popular culture, vampire hunters are often described as altruistic crusaders immune to the temptations of the devil. But the truth is often more complicated than fiction, and every now and then, the dark tends to bleed into the light. Pope Innocent VIII was a pious man who had commanded the likes of Heinrich Kramer, author of the Malleus Maleficarum, the book I mentioned earlier in the episode.

But unlike his papal name, he was anything but innocent. Born in 1432 in Genoa, Italy, Innocent's true name was Giovanni Battista Saebo, a man of Greek descent and the son of Erano Saebo, the viceroy of Naples. Earlier in life, Giovanni had become a priest and advisor to Cardinal Calendrini, the half-brother of Pope Nicholas V. And he may have been a devoutly religious man, but he was also not naive. From a very young age, he knew how to play the political game and focused his ambition toward the highest Catholic seat in the land, that of Pope. For years, Saebo operated in the shadows, along with Cardinal Giuliano Della Rivera, who orchestrated everything. Della Rivera visited with several of his fellow Cardinals

in the night, promising them land, goods, and most importantly, power, as long as they voted for Saebo to become the next pope. And those backroom dealings worked. In August of 1484, Giovanni Battista Saebo was elected the new pope. Dubbed Pope Innocent VIII, his name was almost ironic in its attribution, seeing as how he was involved in numerous moral, ethical, and financial scandals. For one, he participated in slavery, with a moral justification that slaves could eventually be converted to Catholicism. He was also a warmonger, funding various religious conflicts that wiped out the papal treasury.

To make up his losses, Innocent would invent new political and religious posts, and then sell them to who could afford to fill them. Like I said, he was anything but innocent. On top of his political machinations, the pope was a staunch opponent of witches and witchcraft. He was known to dispatch inquisitors to Germany to put people on trial for witchcraft, and in 1484, did so under a papal bull called Sumas de Siderantes affectibus, a Latin phrase that basically means to desire with supreme passion. This edict had been written in direct support of Heinrich Kramer's request for backup in his job of hunting witches. It outlined several important points. First, that witches did in fact

exist. It also gave full permission to the Inquisition for, and this is a quote, correcting, imprisoning, punishing, and chastising anyone accused. Any local authorities who tried to interfere with the Inquisition's work were threatened with excommunication from the church. By 1492, though, innocence, vim, and vigor was all but gone. He had become gravely ill and emaciated. One witness, Philippo Valori, described him as an inert mass of flesh incapable of assimilating any nourishment but a few drops of milk from a young woman's breast. Oh, you see, back then, lactating women were sent to the pope to provide him with nourishment. Obviously, a gross abuse of power. But legend has it that breast milk wasn't the only liquid that passed

his lips. He also drank other things to maintain his grip on what little life he had left. Italian historian and lawyer Stefano Infissura wrote in his diaries that pope innocent also ingested human blood. According to the tales, the pope's condition had grown so bleak that he suffered a stroke and then slipped into a coma. Desperate to wake him and renew his vitality, his doctors decided the best course of action would be to feed him the blood of a child. Three 10-year-old boys were given one gold coin each in exchange for their blood, which was then fed to the unconscious pope. Sadly, all three of the boys died from the procedure, and so did the sick pope. So why did the doctors do it? Well, the idea of vampirism was commonly

talked about even back then, and it was possible that they believed drinking blood, especially the youthful blood of a child, would grant eternal life, or at least a restoration of what had been lost. But perhaps the most important question of all is, did this actually happen? Well, the pope did indeed die in a sad and pitiful fashion, but the story about his vampiric attempt at revitalization is likely a later invention. In fact, the truth might actually be even darker, and it has to do with the fact that Infissura's diary entries highlighted the Jewish heritage of innocence physician. His story may have helped spread the horrific and false conspiracy of blood libel, or the belief that Jewish people killed young Christian boys and harvested their

blood for dark religious rituals. It was, of course, just an absurd rumor, but one that damaged how Jewish people were perceived for centuries to come. Regardless of what you do believe, the story does one thing very well. It proves that the most terrifying monsters aren't the ones that fly at night and want to suck our blood. They're the ones who use belief to oppress others. This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with additional help from Jenna Rose Nethercot and Harry Marks, and music by Chad Lawson. Lore is much more than just a podcast. There is a book series available in bookstores and online,

and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video. Check them both out if you want more Lore in your life. Information about both of those things can be found over at lorpodcast.com. And you can also follow this show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Just search for Lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button. And when you do, say hi. I like it when people say hi. And as always, thanks for listening.