Episode 88: Crossing the Line

This is the story of the one.

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Learn more at AARP.org/slash skills.

In 2001, a team of archaeologists found something that didn't quite seem to make sense.

They'd been working for 13 years, studying the remains of two ancient roundhouses near the village of Klahallen in the Outer Hebrides, a chain of islands off the northwestern tip of Scotland.

And it had been a lot of what you might expect for a settlement dating back to 1300 BCE.

Except for what they found beneath those two houses.

It was a pair of bodies, one man, one woman.

who'd been there for thousands of years.

Both skeletons showed evidence that they'd once been preserved in a peat bog.

Long ago, it seems, the people of this settlement placed their dead in the bog for about a year and then pulled them back out.

It was enough to preserve the skin and hair, but also leave the bones intact, which the acidic water usually dissolved.

It took these researchers another eight years to notice something else incredible about these bodies.

They weren't the remains of two people.

Added up between the two graves, there were body parts from six individual humans.

Body parts that had been preserved for a reason.

And when the pieces fell into place, no pun intended, it painted a grim picture.

The people of this ancient settlement had stitched body parts together to form new humans, humans which were preserved in the bog and then put on display in their homes.

And while we have no idea how long the bodies spent among the living before they were finally buried beneath the houses, The bigger question is why?

What purpose did these macabre art projects projects actually serve?

The most compelling theory to date suggests that it might have been about something any of us could relate to.

Companionship.

Keeping the bodies of their ancestors in the house could possibly have offered them peace and comfort, despite how morbid it seems to us today.

They were a reminder to the living that they weren't alone.

that they were connected to something bigger.

And that's a powerful idea.

Even today, thousands of years after these bodies were assembled, we still fight off isolation.

We flock to social media and game nights, to concerts and sporting events, partly out of a need to feel connected to each other.

People have always struggled with loneliness, often going to great lengths to fight it.

The trouble is, however tempting it might be, some lines aren't meant to be crossed.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is Lore.

It was a fairly simple recipe, but it wasn't one that you're going to find on the Food Network, trust me.

The ingredients wouldn't make it out of the writer's room, let alone past the sensors, but they tell us a powerful story.

All you need is a handful of human bones, some sperm, some blood, and maybe some fragments of skin or hair.

Then you just knead it all like bread dough, and then give it time to rise.

It's a recipe for something the ancient alchemists referred to as the homunculus, an artificial human being.

While we tend to think of alchemists as those early fringe scientists who were obsessed with finding the Philosopher's Stone, which would empower them to turn base metals into gold, the homunculus was their lesser-known pet project.

We can trace the roots of this idea back to the 16th century Swiss physician who went by the name of Paracelsus.

He is credited with being the first person to put the term homunculus to paper, setting off two centuries of story and speculation.

By 1775, the folklore had taken on a life of its own, so to speak.

That was the year Count Johann von Kofstein was rumored to have created a whole gathering of homunculi, 10 to be exact, which he kept in large glass jars.

These captive humanoid creatures were said to have the ability to predict the future, which von Kofstein used to his benefit.

An older bit of folklore involves a creature known as the Mandragora, which could be grown.

All you had to do was plant a mandrake root in a fresh grave and then water it regularly with cow's milk that had been used to drown three bats.

After a month, you'd be able to harvest your little person and carry it with you.

And yes, that's where the screaming mandrake plants of the Harry Potter books actually come from.

Even earlier than Paracelsus, though, we have the Jewish legend of the golem.

In most tales, a golem is a humanoid creature that's been crafted out of clay, usually by a rabbi.

The word golem has a lot of nuanced meaning, but it essentially boils down to unformed or raw.

The idea was that a golem was a raw human, incomplete and lesser than its creator, and they came with a magical key.

The core legend revolves around words of power, the source of their strength and life.

When a golem was created, its master would place the Hebrew word for truth on its head, either by writing it on the forehead or in an amulet, or on a scroll shoved into the mouth.

The creature would serve its master without question, all the while growing a little bit larger each day.

And when it was no longer needed, the master would would erase a part of the word or remove the amulet or scroll, which acted like an off switch.

The most famous golem story is about Rabbi Judah Loh, one of the most significant Jewish scholars of all time.

He lived and worked in Prague during the latter part of the 16th century, and it's during that time that these events were supposed to have taken place.

By the 1590s, Rabbi Lowe would have been an old man.

His children had all grown up and moved on, leaving him and his wife alone to handle all of their daily chores.

So according to the legend, he crafted a golem to help with those tasks.

He built it out of wood and clay and placed the magical scroll inside the creature's mouth.

And it was helpful for a while.

The golem chopped wood for him.

It carried water from the well to his house.

It was even seen outside by others where it swept the street.

Every Sabbath, though, Rabbi Lo would remove the scroll and give the golem the same day of rest that he and his Jewish community were required to observe.

The problem came many months later on one of those sacred Sabbath days when the rabbi forgot to remove the scroll.

Furious that it was not able to rest as others around it did so, the golem was said to have erupted in anger.

It tore down Rabbi Lowe's home and the houses of others around it.

The monstrous creature even pulled fully grown trees out of the ground.

Imagine the incredible Hulk from the Avengers movies, and I think you'll get the idea.

It was bad.

When Rabbi Lowe was alerted to his mistake, he rushed home.

Somehow, the legend is unclear exactly how, though, he managed to approach the golem and rip the scroll out of its mouth.

In an instant, the creature froze stiff, and then crumbled into a pile of dry clay.

If there was one lesson hidden within the story, it was probably about the importance of honoring the Sabbath.

But on another level, it might serve as a hint about the power and responsibility that comes with creating life.

We might want companionship, but sometimes it comes at a cost.

Today, scholars view this story as nothing more than an apocryphal addition to Rabbi Lowe's life that was invented in the 19th century.

But it illustrates an important lesson.

Powerful people, whether they were an alchemist or a rabbi, were assumed to have the ability to create life.

The folklore was deep enough and strong enough that it just had to be true.

By the 18th century though, the Age of Enlightenment began to wash away the old stories of magic and replace them with reason and science.

The idea that a word of power written on a scroll could ever act like a source for life quickly became tired and foolish.

But that didn't mean people had given up on figuring out what force did create life.

In fact, the scientific method offered them better tools for solving that riddle.

What they discovered though, was not what they expected.

Yes, it revealed new truths about the world they lived in and helped them better understand how all the parts work together, but it also uncovered something else.

Something darker and much more frightening.

And we still fear it today.

It was the perfect moment to test out his hypothesis.

He could see the storm clouds approaching off in the distance and knew that they would bring the final ingredient he needed.

And so everything had been arranged and prepared for the test, which included a handful of dead frogs that had been cut open to reveal their internal organs.

Each of the frogs had been pierced by a metal rod, which was then hung from an iron rack.

I have this image in my head of a skeletal wireframe Christmas tree with a dozen or so dead frogs hanging around around it like ornaments.

I'm sure it was a lot more scientific than that, but you get the idea.

This was the setup he needed to find answers to his questions.

Luigi had been born in Italy in 1737 and graduated from the University of Bologna in 1759 with a degree in medicine.

He went on to spend the better part of three decades searching for the key to life.

His theory was that there was some sort of fluid that could be found inside the bodies of every living thing.

Think of it like the force from Star Wars, only physical and biological, like the sap inside of a tree.

When the storm arrived, lightning filled the sky.

As it did, the bodies of the hanging frogs began to twitch as if their muscles had come back to life.

For Luigi Galvani, it was the proof he'd been looking for.

This force, which he called animal electricity, powered our bodies.

And even after death, if enough of that electricity was applied to the dead, it would return to life.

Except, well, it wasn't the only idea on the block.

Luigi had a competitor, another Italian named Alessandro Volta, who believed that the frogs' movements were the result of a different thing entirely.

A movement Galvani observed wasn't the re-energized life force inside the dead frogs.

It was purely an external force, and the twitching legs were just a side effect, like leaves moving in an invisible breeze.

The debate between the two men carried on for years, but in the end, Volta was proven right.

He would go on to invent the first electrical battery, known as the voltaic pile.

But Galvani's idea of a life force never really went away.

16 years after that rooftop frog experiment, Galvani's nephew, Giovanni Aldini, took the ideas of both Volta and his uncle and blended them into something new and terrifying.

George Foster was a murderer who had killed his wife and daughter in 1802.

On January 17th of that following year, Foster was hanged for his crimes.

His body was left on the gallows for an hour, which was required by law to guarantee the job had been done well.

When he was finally cut down though, he was handed over to Aldini for an experiment.

Foster's body was placed in the middle of a room.

and various officials and medical experts gathered around.

When they were ready, wires from a battery similar to Volta's were connected to the corpse, and then Aldini flipped the switch.

The results horrified the audience.

Foster sat up, muscles twitching as his body bent forward.

His jaw alternated between clenched and slack, and one of his eyes even opened wide.

He wasn't alone either.

Just about everyone else in the room probably did the same thing, with mouths hanging wide open in astonishment.

It was as if the dead murderer had been brought back to life by the power of electricity.

But no, that's not what had happened.

The moment Aldini turned off the current, Foster's corpse flopped back down on the table, as dead as before.

If the power of the electric battery had accomplished anything, those results went away the moment the power was cut off.

The experiment revealed a lot of things to the men in the room, but the secret to life wasn't one of them.

It did leave its mark on the scientific community, though.

Aldini would go on to succeed his uncle Luigi's place on the faculty at Bologna in 1798 and an entire branch of biochemistry would begin to grow around the work he and others had pioneered.

It would be written about, discussed, and taken further, which is how a young student at Oxford University encountered the entire field of study.

According to historians, this student had thrown himself into almost every subject with abandon.

Whether it was poetry and mythology or medicine and chemistry, he dove into all of it, and at some point he encountered the world of bioelectricity.

It didn't take long before he too was enamored with the idea that a human body might be brought back to life with electrical current.

He never tested it out himself though.

In 1812 he began corresponding with a novelist and philosopher named William Godwin who invited this student to come visit his home and family.

It wasn't long though before this young man ran off to Europe and took two of Godwin's teenage daughters with him, Claire and Mary.

Two years later, Mary became the young man's wife.

Perhaps inspired by the subject matter that had originally brought her husband and her own father together, Mary began to craft a story that would eventually be published in 1818.

The subtitle of the novel was A Callback to the Greek god who had stolen fire from Zeus and then crafted humanity out of clay.

Her husband, by the way, was Percy Byss Shelley, who became one of the major English Romantic poets.

Most of the world, however, simply remembers him as the husband of Mary Shelley, who arguably invented the genre of science fiction when she published her novel Frankenstein.

It's a name that instantly evokes the image of an artificial man built from body parts harvested from corpses and then brought to life with electricity.

But history contains another story about our desire for companionship and that longing we feel when someone we love passes out of reach into death.

A story that dips into our ancient desire to set ourselves up as God, of what evil deeds our loneliness can drive us to do.

It's a tale of the dark, cracked mirror that sits at the center of the human existence.

And I want to give you a glimpse of it.

But be prepared, you won't like what you see.

A generation or two after Percy Shelley was discovering the joys of history, chemistry, and poetry, another young man was equally obsessed.

Born in the German city of Dresden in 1877, Georg was known to fill his family's manor house with experiments of his own.

He had an entire room there devoted solely to high-voltage electricity, but also spent time constructing other contraptions, like boats and hot air balloons.

Georg was a maker, it seems.

After time at university, he traveled east, first heading to India before sailing south to Australia.

All the while, he continued to exhibit that unique skill for building and making.

Some historians suggest that Georg came from money, and his unusual spending habits and lifestyle certainly seem to confirm that.

He apparently picked up supplies in Australia and then purchased property on one of the South Seas islands with an intent of exploring more of the world of electrical science.

He married in 1920 and over the following four years, the couple had two children.

Sometime around 1926, he decided to immigrate to the United States following his sister's example from a few years prior.

After sailing to Cuba that February, he boarded another ship bound for Florida and rejoined his sister there in the town of Zephyr Hills.

Georg's wife and children arrived a year later, but they wouldn't stay together long.

Sometime in 1927, Georg moved south to the tip of Florida, but he left his family behind with his sister.

He may have intended for them to join him there eventually, but they never did.

Actually, by this point, Georg was calling himself Carl, which was actually his middle name.

Why, we have no clue, but it seemed that Carl was trying to start fresh and build a new life in this new country.

For him, that fresh start would begin in Key West.

Once there, he lied his way into a job at the local hospital, telling them that he was a doctor.

Without proof, though, he was forced to take the less prestigious role of operating room janitor, cleaning up the blood and tissue left in the room after surgical procedures.

Carl was persistent though, and over time he managed to work his way up to the hospital's radiation lab, where he took a job as an x-ray technician.

Fake it till you make it, right?

Now, something that's important to remember is that the late 1920s sat right in the middle of a decades-long span of tuberculosis outbreaks in the United States.

In 1900, it's estimated that more than 80% of the population had been exposed to the disease, and it quickly became the leading cause of death in the country.

Entire hospital wings, and sometimes whole buildings, were devoted to the detection and treatment of tuberculosis, and one of the main tools used for diagnosis was x-ray.

Which is how Carl met Elena in 1930.

She and her husband arrived at the hospital that April after her family doctor suspected she'd come down with tuberculosis.

The x-ray confirmed the diagnosis, and it was Carl who had to deliver that horrible news.

He had an idea, though, and wanted to talk with them further about it.

There was something special about Elena, and Carl wanted to do everything possible to help her survive.

To hear his ideas, the family invited him to their home for dinner.

Once there, surrounded by Elena's parents and sisters, Carl presented his idea.

What if he were to treat her with further x-rays?

He would perform those services for free, of course, and if it helped, he would also obtain medication from the hospital.

He was offering to steal, basically, and he was doing so because he had become infatuated with Elena.

The family agreed to this offer.

Not because of his affections toward Elena, but because without the free treatment, she had no chance of surviving.

For the next few months, Carl came to their home regularly to provide treatment and in the process became close with the entire family.

In fact, later that year, when Elena's sister Florinda got married, the family invited Carl to the wedding.

Things were smooth and friendly.

Then Elena's husband Louise moved to Miami.

Some think it was because he saw no progress in his wife's recovery and feared for his own safety, but we can't be sure.

What is clear, though, is that Carl saw this as his opportunity to make his next move.

Shortly before her birthday in 1930, he took Elena aside and confessed his love for her.

But it backfired horribly.

Elena was still married and she declared as much to him.

She had no feelings for the older man and while she was thankful for his help, she wanted nothing more than friendship.

Carl was deaf to reason though.

He was obsessed and no wasn't an option.

Soon enough, he proposed marriage, which Elena politely declined.

After a whole series of proposals that spanned the next few weeks, Elena's family got involved to try and stop Carl's aggressive, abusive behavior.

In the end, two things happened as a result of this obsession.

First, Elena stopped receiving her treatments in an effort to avoid seeing Carl.

And second, her entire family agreed that they needed to cut Carl out of their life.

So, without telling him, the family packed up and moved to a new house somewhere else in town.

When Carl arrived at their door later that week, only to find the house empty, he was enraged and heartbroken in the twisted way that only an unstable stalker could manage.

But it didn't defeat him.

He was stubborn and driven by a deep, unhealthy obsession.

He knew that it would take time and effort, sure, but he would track the family down.

No one, he believed, could keep Elena out of his reach.

Not even the hands of death.

It took him weeks.

He drove through Key West every night, slowly scanning the open windows for familiar faces.

He must have been utterly systematic in the process, too, mapping out the town and marking off where he'd looked and where he hadn't.

If that sounds obsessive, then you're catching on.

Carl Tanzler was an obsessed man, broken in a way that now threatened the safety of an entire family.

When he finally found them, he approached the house and knocked.

When the door opened, he forced himself inside.

Later, Carl would confess in his memoirs that, if anybody had tried to stop me, I would have used violence.

But thankfully, it didn't come to that.

Elena's family recognized that they were dealing with a madman and they chose to use flattery to pacify him.

They welcomed him in, gave him gifts, and agreed to allow Elena to resume care.

Elena wasn't in good health though.

Skipping her treatments in an effort to hide from Carl had allowed the disease to take root and weaken her.

Carl brought new ideas to the table, stealing other medications from the hospital and even using electroshock therapy on her to fight back.

The battle, however, would not be won.

On October 25th of 1931, Elena passed away.

Carl was devastated in his own twisted, inappropriate way.

But while the death of Elena should have been the turning point that set him free from his obsession, it did the opposite.

Soon after her death, he somehow managed to get her parents to allow him to move into their home.

Worse yet, he asked to live in Elena's old room.

Honestly, if he was trying to be the biggest creep in the world, he was an absolute overachiever.

It continued to get worse, though.

He offered to pay for a luxurious above-ground mausoleum for Elena, and her family agreed to move her body into it.

Weeks later, after they moved out to get away from him, Carl actually bought the house.

And all the while, he would spend each evening sitting outside her tomb, talking to her and singing songs of love.

He eventually began to hear her speaking and singing back.

It wasn't real, of course, but that didn't matter to Carl.

To him, it was proof of her love toward him.

Which is why he did what he did next.

One late night in April of 1933, two years to the month after first meeting Elena, mind you, Carl walked into the cemetery pulling a cart behind him.

Somehow he managed to open her tomb and then took Elena's body out and placed it into the cart.

Then, he quietly pulled it home.

Carl placed Elena's corpse in his own bed, and he probably felt as if his world was finally complete.

He had her all to himself.

They were together at last.

But the laws of nature had other plans.

Over the days and weeks that followed, the process of decomposition began to play out like a silent horror film.

Carl's beloved was literally falling apart.

So he rebuilt her.

Having access to the hospital was a huge help in that project.

He brought home disinfectants and preserving agents with the hope of stalling the decay, but it was an uphill battle, and soon there were bigger worries.

Her body had begun to lose its shape, so he opened her chest and belly and stuffed rags inside to shore her up and keep her form.

Later, as her skin began to rot, Carl dipped strips of silk in a mixture of wax and plaster and used them to repair the damaged locations, including her face.

He replaced her eyes with glass replicas and even used her own hair to make a wig for the corpse.

And when the connective tissue began to give way inside her body, Carl was said to have used wire to rejoin her limbs, like a carpenter stringing together a puppet.

He was slowly building a companion for himself, a friend.

who would never leave.

He was the alchemist of old, building another being from the pieces of the dead, and he was also insane, failing to perceive the world around him or his own behavior in a normal way.

Carl Tanzler might have believed he was driven by love, but he was nothing more than a stalker with no regard for the natural boundaries that hold society together.

Despite that, Despite his unusual behavior, his continual theft from the hospital, and his odd social life, Carl managed to keep Elena for himself for seven years.

During those seven years, though, rumors began to spread.

We don't know how, really.

Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue in conversation with a neighbor.

Maybe it was a random glance through a gap in the curtains.

However it happened, word got out, and eventually that word spread to Elena's sister, Florinda.

In October of 1940, Florinda knocked on the front door of her former home and forced herself inside.

She found her sister's corpse laid out in a wedding dress on Carl's bed and immediately fled to notify the authorities.

Carl Tanzler was arrested, Elena's body was recovered, and the entire community was stunned.

After a psychiatrist found Tanzler to be mentally fit to stand trial, he was charged with what basically amounted to grave robbing.

Sadly, though, the statute of limitations on the crime had expired before he was even arrested, and he was set free.

Elena, though, fared better.

After being examined by the authorities, she was given a second funeral.

Nearly 7,000 people turned out to view her body, after which it was returned to the cemetery she'd been stolen from.

This time, though, they kept the location of her grave a secret, unmarked and hidden away from the public.

If there was a perfect punishment for Carl Tanzler, this was it.

He would never see Elena again.

Throughout history, people have gone to great lengths to satisfy their desire for companionship.

The notion of domesticated animals who live with us is thousands of years old and speaks to our tendency to seek community and interaction with other living beings, even if they aren't human.

The mythology of most cultures almost always seems to have stories of constructed beings.

Humans crafted from clay is a common feature from the Greeks and Egyptians to the Native Americans and the Incas, and we in turn have imitated these stories, crafting things of our own.

But some have gone too far.

Sometimes it was just bizarre, like German alchemist Hennek Brand, who stored dozens of buckets of his own urine in his basement so he could boil it down in an attempt to make gold.

Others like him would place human tissue inside a melon and then insert it into a horse's womb, all in an effort to grow an artificial being.

They crossed the line, no doubt about it, but more from a weird sort of medieval ignorance than anything else.

Carl Tanzler, though, seems to have joyfully stepped over that line and then reached back to brush it out of existence.

He was a madman who couldn't take no for an answer and refused to see death as the end.

His legacy today is a sad story of violation and misogyny, one that led to the harassment of an innocent woman and the desecration of her corpse.

He would fade away over the following decade.

He returned to Zephyr Hills and bought a home near his estranged wife, who ended up supporting him financially.

He wrote his memoirs and had them published in in the Pulp magazine Fantastic Adventures and eventually became a U.S.

citizen.

He died alone on July 3rd of 1952, his body laying on the floor for three weeks before it was finally discovered.

I don't know what his cause of death was, but I have no doubt that he died thinking about his time with Elena.

How do I know that?

Well, when the authorities came to remove his body, they discovered something else there.

It It was a handmade, life-size replica of a woman, with a face that, for some reason, had been left completely blank and featureless.

After finding a container high up on a shelf, though, they finally understood why.

Inside the box was a death mask, crafted of plaster and wax.

with every detail you might expect from a cast taken from the face of a corpse.

It was a morbid replica of the one person Carl Tanzler couldn't seem to live without.

Elena.

Our fascination with using science to create life, or to bring our loved ones back from the dead, isn't a product of modern science fiction or even the work of Mary Shelley's seminal novel.

Experiments had taken place for decades before, leading some to believe it was possible.

One story involves one of the founding fathers of America and some highly unusual ideas.

Stick around after this short break to hear more about it.

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Dr.

William Thornton trained as a physician and an architect before leaving Europe for the newly formed United States.

He practiced medicine while also taking on engineering projects that interested him.

In 1789, he designed an expansion for the Library Company in Philadelphia, and then the U.S.

Capitol building in 1792.

In the process, he made a lot of friends.

One of those friends was former President General George Washington.

According to one historian, Thornton considered Washington to be one of the best friends he'd ever known, which would explain why the physician set out immediately after learning of Washington's sudden illness in December of 1799.

The former president had spent time out in the cold winter rain and developed a severe infection in his throat, one that eventually led to difficulty breathing and swallowing.

The physicians who attended him leaned on their limited knowledge and suggested bloodletting as the best solution.

When that failed to work, one of the doctors suggested a new technique known as a tracheotomy, but the others refused to let it happen.

This was probably the surgical procedure on William Thornton's mind as he rode to to Mount Vernon in the middle of December.

When he arrived though, he was too late.

His friend had already passed away.

Interestingly though, Thornton didn't give up hope.

Instead, he proposed a new plan of action to the physicians who had attended to Washington.

Thornton had extensively studied the fields of sleep and resuscitation and had read many examples of people who had returned to life after apparently dying.

He proposed they apply warmth, air, and blood to the dead president in an effort to restore his life.

The warmth would come from a bath and warm blankets, followed by vigorous rubbing of the corpse's limbs.

The air would come from the tracheotomy that had been suggested earlier, in order to fill his lungs with clean air.

And the blood...

Well, Thornton proposed giving Washington's body a transfusion of fresh sheep's blood.

Unsurprisingly, all three of the other physicians refused to even consider it, and Washington's widow, Martha, also declined.

Even if it were possible, they suggested, it was just too unnatural.

The man had died, and luring his soul back into his body would be more punishment than salvation.

In the end, Thornton left frustrated and sad.

It's hard to blame him, really.

All of us long for companionship.

and the siren song of technology and science has long pulled us in unusual directions.

The sheep's blood blood transfusions of the 1790s would give way to the electricity of the early 19th century.

Each hypothesis would have its day and then give way to the next.

Even today, modern advancements in the medical field have given some people a fresh taste of that same hope.

Cryogenics, stem cell therapy, even brain transplants, all of them feel like echoes of Thornton and Galvani with hints of Frankenstein around the edges.

No matter what path we try, though, these experiments have always led us to the same conclusion.

It's a painful lesson about ourselves, our limits, and our insatiable thirst for more.

Life is rare and fleeting, and when it's gone, there's nothing we can do.

This episode of lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research assistance by Carl Nellis and music by Chad Lawson.

If you're new around here, this is my friendly reminder that lore is a lot more than just bi-weekly audio stories.

There is an ongoing book series from Penguin Random House, a television show available on Amazon Prime, a membership site with extra episodes, and so much more.

And you can learn about everything over in one place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

You can also follow the show on social media.

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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.

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