Serial Talk: Why Am I Still Talking About Serial?

So I've been asked to make a podcast episode about the 2014 podcast Serial, that covers the case of the Murder of Hae Min Lee. To start, this isn't a podcast about who did it. Adnan did it. I'm pretty well convinced, like the jury, that there is more than reasonable evidence that it was him.

Instead these podcast episodes are going to be a deep dive into Serial, and Sarah Koenig, and how the podcast itself creates doubt for the listener where there really shouldn't be any. I wanted to make the videos I made to point out that even if someone says they are objective, that they claim neutrality, their actions can still be wildly biased. And, more specifically, that if you fail to be neutral in your reporting, but claim neutrality, there should be at least some accountability.

Ultimately the story of Serial is the death of a young girl. All the entertainment derived from that act still has consequences against those most hurt by this murder. 

I will do an episode by episode breakdown if there's interest in it.

Transcript

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Welcome to Hey Smiling Strange. Uh before we begin, this is gonna be a podcast where I kind of discuss why I care about serial at the podcast 14 years later. It is not gonna be a breakdown of you know why I think Adnan is guilty. I just think he's guilty. Uh I talk about it a little bit, but like if you really want to know the the facts of the case, there are other podcasts. This is gonna be a podcast very much about the podcast serial, uh where I talk about like my fascination with Sarah Koenig and the serial staff and why they present information the way they do, why this podcast was made, and what fascinates it from people that are kind of frustrated by it, which is me. Anyway, uh the intro song coming up is a song called Slime by the band How Strange It Is. They've been nice enough to give us their music for free. And this podcast is brought to you by Clubhouse Fantasy Sports. That's Clubhouse with a K. It is a new fantasy sports app that I'm building. The reason that I make all these reels, by the way, is a very like bizarre strategy to try to get enough attention online that I can get people to play a fantasy football game that is built for people that don't really like fantasy football, that don't watch a lot of football, that just want to be in a group chat with their friends where they trade players back and forth. It's built off of the principles of Mario Kart, where the better you are, the harder the game is, and the worse you are, the easier the game is. So you don't really have to be that good to have a good time and have some fun. Uh, I've been working on it for a while. I'm just trying to find people to sign up. So if you are interested, specifically if you're interested because you've never played fantasy football before and you think it might be kind of fun, I'd love to get you signed up for it. Whatever. Check out Clubhouse, K-L-U-B-H-O-U-S-E.fun F-U-N. Uh-huh. And there'll be more stuff to sign up for later. But um, anyway, uh the podcast is called Hey Smiling Strange. It's coming on now. Have a good one. It always feels weird to say my last name on a podcast. I feel like somebody can track me down, but it'd be so easy to track me down. I'm pretty sure on Instagram I have my full name. Anyway, Kyle Ross, uh, aka Smiling Strange, aka Costco, if you ever play Settlers of Gaetana, calliness.io, free pitch for them. Um, and is a podcast where I try to talk usually with people that I find that are interesting. Sometimes by myself, I'm just trying to figure out different ways to make this thing entertaining to me, because I have enjoyed making podcasts. I enjoy the fact that some people enjoy listening to me talking. I enjoy saying the word enjoy as much as I just did in the last couple of seconds. Uh but this podcast, if you are a follower of mine on Instagram, uh, this might not make a ton of sense why I'm doing this. Uh if you follow me on TikTok, this also might not make a lot of sense because I'm going to be talking about the podcast serial from 2014. Uh that is a very long time ago in podcast terms. Uh, but it was honestly one of the biggest podcasts at the time. This was really like the first big podcast. If you weren't there for it, you don't really understand. For most people, this podcast was the first time anyone had heard of a podcast. They had no idea that these things existed. And then all of a sudden, in the span of a couple weeks, it seemed like everybody was very invested in the case that was being presented by this podcast serial done by Sarah Koenig. Uh, and what I have learned is not technically an NPR studio, uh, because you know, this American Life isn't actually NPR, it's just like affiliated with them, something like that. I don't really care. Uh, for everyone that gave me crap about that on uh TikTok, I kind of used NPR to just mean things that are on NPR. And I heard this podcast on NPR the first time because I was listening to this American Life. Because I used to listen to podcasts before serial, so I was like one of the chosen few that knew it existed beforehand. Uh and then pa then serial came out, and I remember I got my brother to start listening to it, eventually got my mom to stop or start listening to it, and everybody was really into this for a very, you know, for a couple of weeks trying to figure out who did it. Was it Adnan? Was it Jay? If you do not know the podcast serial, if you do not know the case of Adnan Sayed, uh just one best thing you can do is go look it up because I am not here to really litigate the entirety of the podcast, uh, or in the entirety of the case. I think other people have done a better job of that. I think if you want to hear the defenses side, go check out Rabia's podcast undisclosed. If you want to hear the prosecution side, go listen to the prosecutors. They have a 14-part series that makes the case that he was guilty. You can even listen to Serial, which might make sense uh to do before you listen to this podcast about serial. But anyway, why am I talking about this? Well, my real strategy, my TikTok strategy, my video strategy has always been I just kind of walk around until I have something to say, and then I'll make a little video about it. And I made a video about uh Serial the other day, because it just there's something that has been sticking in my craw for a long time. I I'll come out and say it. I think Adnan did it. I think it's pretty conclusive that Adnan did it. Not the least of which is because every time this has gone to court, they've concluded that he did it. Like that is, you know, evidence to me that he did it. But it just from listening to the uh the podcast serial, I had concluded by the end of it that I'm I'm fairly confident he had done it. And nothing has changed that in the last 10 years, right? And what has always bothered me about this is that the way that the case is presented, especially in serial, is that she even says, either Adnan or Jay is lying. Jay is one of the big key pieces here in this case because he's the one that led the police to uh Heyman Lee's car. Hey is the victim in this case. She is the one that tragically died. She was murdered, right? And her car was disappeared. Nobody could find it in the police station for weeks. Uh they eventually found Jay, and then Jay uh led them to the actual car, and that's kind of what broke the case open. That's what creates the case against Adnan Sayed, right? Not to relitigate any of it, but I believe in the case presented against Adnan. I believe that he's guilty for a variety of reasons. But what I wanted to talk about in that reel was that Sarah Koenig points the finger at ambiguity. She hides behind this kind of objective third-party observer that she says, you know, I am presenting this as just the facts, this is just all the information I can have. I'm just a reporter. At the end of the the podcast, she she, you know, even by her own mission, kind of weasels out and says, like, well, I I can't come I can't tell you if he did it or not, but I will tell you that it's like it's kind of it's kind of up in the air. I just I can't know. I can't absolutely know. But here's the thing is that that's kind of fine to say you don't know, but the way that the podcast is set up, the way that this case is set up, either Adnan is guilty or Jay is guilty, right? And Jay, if he's innocent, you gotta think of it from his perspective. He is an innocent kid that was caught up in a murder when he was 20 years old with this high school kid Adnan, and 20 years later, a wildly popular radio show now casts suspicion on whether or not he knew more than he let on. So even though he's been cleared of this thing, and imagine all of the stuff that has to go into clearing your name uh from the cops. He's a I mean, he is a black drug dealer in Baltimore in 1999, and the cops did not want to arrest him for this murder. That takes a lot. That just takes a lot to get to that point. Anyway, he got cleared of that. He goes to the court system, he goes through, you know, he gets through the court thing, and then they put him on uh what's it called? Not parole or you know, that thing where if you do anything wrong, you get in trouble. I forget the name of it. I I'm losing my mind. Anyway, gets through all that, he's cleared. Twenty years later, uh, this random NPR reporter creates a wildly successful podcast, and now millions of people are roughly convinced that you knew more than was on. Like if you look at the comment section of any of my videos, people will say, This J guy is super sus. He's a sus he's a sus guy, he's did he definitely did something wrong. You know, I don't care if Adnan did it or not, but this J guy is sus. And to me, I view that as bad. I view that as something that like somebody needs to be accountable for. That because if he actually did what he said, and again, the courts have repeatedly said what he said in his testimony is the way that this thing went down. So by the letter of the law, he is he has you know done everything that you know he said he's gonna do. The he's been held to account for his actions that day by the letter of the law, right? But now all of a sudden he has to go through a second trial 20 years later in the court of public opinion. And the woman that brought this attention to him, Sarah Caning and the entire cast of Serial, but Sarah Kaning, it's it is clearly her show. Uh what bothered me is she's never held uh account for that. She's never no one's actually sat it down and been like, hey, do you feel bad about what you did to Jay? That you brought up these allegations again, that you may have cost him uh, you know, he probably lost sleep over this. He's probably gotten threats over this thing. This has probably been trying for him in a way that, you know, most people don't ever have to experience. On top of that, you have to go with the family of Heyman Lee, who now, you know, again, 20 years later, they're reliving what has to be the single worst thing any parent, any family can go through. Their daughter was murdered when she was a teenager. And now they're coming back and there's this radio show that is, you know, saying objectively, well, there's there's more to the case than, you know, what the courts, you know, determined, or something like that. This is my theory, though. It's like, alright, if if you think that Adnan is innocent, say you're innocent when you're making that show, and then I I'm fine with you going all in on this and making the show and doing that if you're like, yeah, I think he didn't do it, and I think he's an innocent man, and I just want to bring attention to this thing, because I think that's best for all of the parties involved. If you think that Adnan didn't do it, say that Jay did it. Because that again, it's really the only logical conclusion. Or at the very least, tell Heyman Lee's family, like, I'm doing this because I think they got the wrong killer. I'm trying to get justice for your daughter, right? That I can live with. If she thinks that Adnan did do it, don't make the podcast. If you really think that Adnan had actually done it and you think he might be the murderer, uh, I do think it's it's kind of, you know, morally wrong to make this podcast and bring this case back to light and shed light on something that has already been resolved. Uh the the thing, but like in either of those two cases, you say that he did it, you say he didn't do it. I can I can live with that because you stand behind your decision. You say I'm taking a side in this. The way that Sarah Koenig did this bothered me and has bothered me for 10 years. Where and when I say Sarah Koenig, I mean the entire serial staff, but Sarah Koenig is the face of this. Sarah Kenning lays it out as though she is objective. She's a third-party neutral observer who's just trying to collect all the facts. But when you listen to the podcast, it is incredibly obvious that at every single turn where she has a chance to editorialize, she leans in the defense of Adnon. From the very first episode, she's setting this up not as uh, you know, really it's almost as if it's not a story about a murder whatsoever. But the entire first episode does not center around Hey, the victim, at all. So you don't really think about like what would happen if this was your daughter. You are centered around Adnan and this idea of there's an hour of time that cannot be accounted for that uh she's trying to get to the bottom of that time, and so she asks a bunch of normal people, Hey, do you remember what happened six weeks ago? Right? In that presentation at the very beginning, she asks three people, Do you remember where you were three weeks ago? The first two say, No, I have no idea what I was doing six weeks ago, and it's played for laughs. It's like, oh look, these kids, they don't they this guy thought he was at school, he wasn't at school. The third kid does remember where he was six weeks ago because he saved up money to go to a nightclub, and she points out uh that you know, on a day where where something big happens, this is known, like any day where there's high emotions, you're more likely to remember it. But then we treat the rest of the podcast as though, again, this was just a normal day for Adnan. He claims I don't remember what I did at that specific time, he just has no memory of it, even though he has very specific memories of other things, and he just is pleading with Sarah Koenig, and you hear him plead with Sarah Koenig, that uh, you know, it's almost impossible to remember something like that. But again, this is the first time where this kind of pops up in this podcast and pops up time and time again. It's not a normal day for Adnan, you know? It might sound like a normal day because the way it's presented in serial episode one, but that is the day the police called Adnan while he was high and asked if they he knew anything about her disappearance. So that would heighten your emotions, right? Like that is a day where uh if if somebody called me to tell me that my ex-girlfriend was missing, I would probably remember that day. That's all. And I'm I'm not talking about like what do you remember six weeks later, but it's like they asked him what he was doing that day. He said he didn't really know. He didn't he told the cops, uh, you know, uh he didn't tell the cops anything, I guess, at that time. But like again, it it it sets up this situation where Sarah Canning presents information under the assumption that like this is like a normal kid, it's a normal day, it's a normal teenager or whatever, but like it can never be normal because hanging in the background of everything that happens during episode one of this podcast is the dead girl. That hey is dead, that hey is actually dead, you know. Everything that he's saying when he's talking about, you know, going and checking his emails, he's going and checking his emails on a day that his uh, you know, high school ex-girlfriend died. It brings to light like a lot of the stuff that she does in this podcast. She talks about his character, about him sneaking around and uh, you know, lying about smoking or having sex and doing normal teenager things. It's like that is true, but you can't remove that from the idea that like you can't remove that from the the reality that this is a kid whose high school girlfriend was found strangled in a car, right? So it's like yes, asking anybody to put abnormal suspicion on a high school kid smoking pot, that makes sense. But I do put heightened suspicion on a high school kid whose girlfriend was found strangled in the woods, right? That was found strang because think again, guys, strangulation. Think of what it takes to strangle somebody without any other major injuries. Could a stranger actually walk up to a girl in her car and strangle her? Like, she has no suspicion that this guy's getting in the vehicle, no suspicion that he gets close enough that he can put his hands around her neck. That is an intimate crime. If you look at the history of strangulations, like the one that was found, almost you know, I've I've throwing a random statistic, but they say it's like 90-95% of all these things are domestic violence just because it's such an intimate crime. If you actually wanted to strangle a stranger, they would fight you. You'd have to sneak up on them, you know? Probably be from the back. But the way the strangulation was done, it was done from the front. So, you know, it just that has to color everything that happens after that. All of these little lies, all of these stories about him sneaking around his parents, even something as simple as like, he was an EMT, right? He's a 17-year-old who's an EMT. And Sarah Kenig, uh first off, Robbia points out, he's like, oh, he was working as a volunteer EMT. That was a lie by Robbia to make him look better. Sarah Kenig calls about calls her out on that and says, Well, he actually lied about his age. He said he was 18 to work as an EMT. My thoughts on that too, like, goes a step further, because I, again, I'm not a jury, I'm just a guy. My stuff thoughts on that go a step further where it's like, alright, what kind of kid works as an EMT? That's a tough fucking job, man. I know people who've done EMT stuff, they've seen some stuff, and it just comes off as creep. That's like not a that's not a point in the story that I think is like definitive, but it is something that could be presented as a lot creepier, and it's chosen to be presented as like, oh, shucks, this guy's just kind of doing this thing. Uh what really kills me is that she hand waves away motive for Adnan without presenting most of the evidence that was used to kind of create this narrative of uh Adnan, you know, having a crime of passion. It is premeditated, but like this girl broke her broke his heart. Uh she kind of discounts letters that are written. She reads a journal entry from Hay that goes right up to the point where the next sentence says, and his possessiveness, talking about Adnan being, you know, distraught over the breakup. And Hey basically says, like, I don't know why he's taking it so hard, but he's got to learn to move on. And then she starts talking about this possessiveness, but uh Sarah talks about this up until the phrase about the possessiveness, and then later on says, like, oh, I just don't see any evidence for this kid uh having, you know, what's it called? Uh having the having committed the actual crime itself. And it's just it's stuff like that. So what I'm getting at here is that my interest in this case is not the case itself. I actually find it kind of boring. I think that the prosecutors do a very, very good job of this. I think honestly, all you really need to hear is uh Dana Shivy, at the very end of episode 12, she lays out this theory of like the unluckiest kid that ever lived. And it's basically like if Adon is innocent, man is he unlucky that he lent his car to an acquaintance of his who's not really that good of a friend, who is later on going to uh rat him out for the murder and knows where the the and knows where Hayes car is and doesn't have any evidence that like he did it himself, you know, like think of how easy it would be to if Jay had done it, think of it easy it would have been for them to nab Jay in that situation. But like how unlucky that is, how unlucky it is that the the Nisha call was just a butt dial. Well, Jay had his phone as opposed to, you know, the story that everyone tells that Jay called Nisha after the murder to just chat for a little bit or whatever. It's like it's all these coincidences that keep coming up over and over and over again. And I actually talk about this in one of my reels. I talk about the idea of the coincidence theorist. Sarah Koenig is a coincidence theorist, which I view as the antithesis of the conspiracy theorist. Conspiracy theorists, they see connections where there aren't connections. The uh coincidence theorists, they sever connections that clearly exist. And that's what Sarah Koenig does time and time again. She will take a piece of evidence, right, that it exists in the case, and she will sever it from all other pieces of evidence. And then we'll dig into that one piece of evidence until she can find some doubt, some room that this was not actually the story that Jay told. And then that individual piece, the Nisha calls a great example, right? They find in episode 12 that AT ⁇ T will charge for calls that go over 30 seconds, even if it's the phone just ringing. And she goes, see, there's a chance that it might have just been a butt dial. And the way that I look at that, it's like if you were to flip a hundred, uh, if you told me that you flipped a hundred heads in a row, I could break down each individual coin flip and go, yeah, that one's just a 50-50 probability. So this one makes sense. The totality of it, the 100 in a row, I would go, I think there's something wrong with your coin, man. Or the way that you counted it. Something is something's up here, because that's just so statistically improbable. But Sarah Kaning is the person who is just looking at each individual thing, creating an amount of doubt there, and just tossing a lot of it aside. It's it's the reason that she's not able to find motive when the state was so easy to find motive. You know, the the actual prosecution found motive and was able to convince the jury of it, but ad uh, but Sarah Kaning's not able to because she takes each individual piece of motive and goes, Well, what's the what's the interpretation of this that leaves room for doubt that this is actually malicious? And that's what I mean by like she doesn't factor in the dead girl. You know? Again, it's like to do that, you kind of have to that would would be so think of how much more effective that would be if she wasn't dead, she was just missing. It's like then each individual piece, you're like, oh yeah, you know, I can let that go. But the fact that she was dead, the way that she was found dead, all of a sudden all these things to excuse each and every one of them as ah, it couldn't have been that bad that his parents came to the dance and broke them apart and yelled at hey and embarrassed him in front of all of his friends because he came home that night and laughed to his friends that it was no big deal, as though there's never been a high school boy in the history of the world that has tried to pretend to his friends that he's not embarrassed by saying it was no big deal, especially a guy that was called by his brother a very convincing liar that lies all the time. His brother said that to the police that Adnon is a very convincing liar and lies all the time. You don't hear that in serial, by the way, even after she says, you know, this case is gonna come down to is Jay lying or is Adnan lying? You never then like if you the next piece of information you heard was well, also, by the way, as we go forward, remember that her uh Adnon's brother said, My brother is a very convincing liar and he lies all the time. That just doesn't come up in serious. That is not important information, but the Nisha call potentially being a butt dial, trying to find some wiggle room that this could possibly be a butt dial, that was worth an entire episode. Like, this is what I mean. It's like what fascinates me about serial is not the case. What fascinates me is why did Sarah Kaney make the decisions that she made? Why did she go out time and time again and find ways to create doubt where other people didn't really care that much about the doubt? They didn't think it was that much doubt. She presents it as having doubt. Why does she seem to have a bend on this? Why is she pushing this story as something where it's like, you know, why does she decide to editorialize and say, I don't I personally don't buy the narrative for motive? Why is that coming up at all? She doesn't really do that with any other thing. She never says that about anything that's pro J, you know, or pro or anti Adnan. Uh and for Actually, actually, like apologizes to Adnan on air when they're talking to each other, and that has always gotten me because it's I I think the biggest thing, and this is a reel that I made that got relatively popular because it's been hanging in my head since I first finished the episode. Because it ends, not the episode, the series back in 2014. When the series ends, uh when the series ends, Adnan, or she she has nothing. It ends with a dud. It's a wet fart of an ending. And she even admits that she's like she's gonna cop out. She's gonna say, I actually don't know anything. We have no real piece of evidence. The story's not really going anywhere, but isn't it interesting, guys? Isn't that fucking it wasn't this whole thing so interesting that it happened? And it's this wet fart of an ending, and nobody really liked it. And it doesn't really satisfy anybody, right? The thing that gets me though is like it didn't why did it have to end that way? Well, because it started eight weeks ago, uh, even though like she researched this for a year, guys. This is the this is one of the questions I want somebody to ask is like, why did you start releasing the episodes when you did? Why did you feel the need, Sarah, to now start releasing episodes after a year of research if you didn't have a conclusion, if you didn't know what was going to happen? And my theory has been this for years. My theory is that Rabia came to her at a time when she was probably looking to start her own show because she has been in radio for years, she's like 45 years old at this point, been working on this American life, on other people's shows forever, but she's not Iraglass, she's just a reporter, nobody cares, you know? Uh and she needs like she wants something that is a crown achievement on her career, maybe it'll advance her career, or at least just be something she can hang her hat on. And this woman Arabia comes, hey, I've got a guy that is in jail right now, and he is in jail because there is this alibi, the Asia alibi, that was ignored by the defense. So at the very least, that's a mistrial. You can bring the alibi to the attention of the court, and then you'll get this guy free. And that's where I think she came up with the idea for serial. Like, why is this one story told week by week? Well, because I think she thought we will get this appeals process started on this ironclad alibi evidence, and then each week you'll see how me, the reporter, uh, uses new information along with this attorney to release an innocent man from prison. Isn't that like a fascinating story? And it absolutely would have been a fascinating story. And Rabia sold her on that. And then she also sets him up to talk sets her up to talk to Adot. She says, Oh, yeah, you got you gotta meet this guy. He's completely innocent. Think of like, think of how wild it is that they're accusing this man of murder. Think of what you think a murder is. They're they're manipulative, they're sociopathic, they're mean and scary and angry. They you know they say this line over and over again. Uh, what are the odds that you're actually gonna run into the charming sociopath, right? And then she meets Adnan, and he's nothing like a murderer would be on TV. He's he is charming. He has, by Sarah Kenning's own description, big calf eyes. She talks about him like he's a fucking puppy. Um, which I that line uh weirded me out when I heard it the first time. It only gets worse when you imagine yourself as Hayes family listening to this reporter describe the murderer of their daughter as having big cow eyes as being cute and adorable and the homecoming king, and he led prayers at a mosque, and he's just such a normal guy. Guys, don't you hear how a normal guy he is? It's like that's the person that murdered your daughter. Uh that would bother that would bother me so much. I I can't get over it. Uh but also that point that Rabia brings up, that the defense brings up, that the Innocence Project brings up. What are the odds of finding the sociopathic chart the charming sociopath? It's infantis it's infinit uh infinitismally small. I do not know if I'm saying that right. Uh incredibly, incredibly small. I'm gonna porky pig that one. Uh it's incredibly, incredibly small that you're gonna find the charming sociopath, right? On the general population, if you just grab anybody at random, what are the odds they're gonna be a charming sociopath? Okay, let's narrow down that sample size from every single person that's alive right now to every single person who uh had a girlfriend that was found strangled and buried in the woods in high school. Of all the people whose girlfriend was strangled and buried in the woods, what what are the odds that that guy is uh is a so charming sociopath, right? I feel he's a lot higher. I just this is what I mean by framing. They throw these statements out there, and it's like, what are the odds of this thing happening? It's like, well, that's not actually what we're testing right now. We're testing Adnan is first and foremost at the court because his girlfriend was found strangled. His ex-girlfriend was found strangled. And domestic violence cases show this is the common thing. If a girl is found murdered, the first thing you ask is who, you know, who's the domestic partner that would have a motive to do this? Ex, the current one, or something like that, just because, you know, that's the nature of that's something you have to deal with as a woman, right? Like you have to deal with the fact that if you break up with a guy and he's loses it, there's a f there's a stand-up comedian joke. It's like girls gone wild are a couple girls, you know, flashing the camera or something like that. Uh there's no men going wild, because men will murder women when they go wild. That's what men go wild is, is that they're just gonna stalk and murder the girls. And that's the reality. If you're a woman living in the world, you gotta deal with that stuff. Uh, but I'm not uh apparently I'm not like supposed to bring that prejudice into this case. Uh and I wouldn't if there was any reason to kind of cast a little bit of doubt on Adnan, other than these kind of weird technicalities, you know? Uh, which is ultimately, right, getting back to the the point I'm talking about, like why did she release this now? It's the Asia Alibi. I think Sarah Koenig had the Asia Alibi in hand and she thought she had a story. She could see the bright shining future of this brilliant idea for a podcast where every single week we watch as the Asia Alibi goes from a letter in her hand into the freedom for an innocent man. But it turns out the Asia Alibi is nothing. And you know why it's nothing? Because it's fucking dropped by the end of the series. The series doesn't even hold on to the Asia Alibi for more than like one or two episodes. That first episode is entirely, entirely, entirely about the Asia Alibi. It is about why, how hard is it to account for one hour of time? Why is that the focus of this murder investigation? Because she has an alibi for that hour. Because she's gonna like fit that puzzle piece in after creating the situation where it's like the entire case rests on this one hour, and I have this puzzle piece that's gonna fit in there. But the Asia alibi is fucking bunk. And you know why it's bunk? Because she wrote it, she handed it in. There's two Asia letters, and I learned this in the prosecution uh the prosecutor's podcast. There's two letters from this, and there's a backstory. Uh the first letter is Asia writing to Adnan in jail, and it is her saying, like, hey, can you tell me if you're innocent? If you're I think I might have seen you. If you're innocent, tell me and I'll go to bat for you. Uh there is a letter dated as the next day that says, I am sure of your innocence. And the prosecutors podcast, which if you check that out, and I know they're biased, like we can talk about bias later, but uh the prosecutor's podcast talks that makes a pretty compelling case that this second letter was clearly just written by Adnan and sent to Asia to sign off on, which he does. Okay, so you know, we don't know it was him, but they make a pretty compelling case, whatever. I the reason that I think the reason I even bring that up, that it might be Adnan writing this letter, the reason that I bring up that the Asia letter is total bunk is that the next part makes absolutely no sense if she actually has the alibi and she actually wants to stick by that alibi. Because the next thing she does is she calls the prosecution to tell the prosecution that she was compelled to write the letter on behalf of the family putting pressure on her, and she asks to retract the alibi. That is what happened in the court case. And Christina Gutierrez, who knew about her, knew about this case or whatever, uh she didn't want to bring it to the state because she interviewed her. She didn't feel like it was gonna hold up, she didn't feel like this girl was gonna hold up to scrutiny, that the alibi wasn't gonna hold up scrutiny. This thing was not ignored, it was fully vetted. People looked into it. All of episode one is about how this thing was ignored, and they never bring up once that this girl called the prosecution to tell them I was coerced into writing it. And eventually she retracts that. You know? Uh she retracts that after I think it's after serial, the podcast, like starts picking up steam or something. I I don't remember exactly what the timeline is, but that is kind of why Rabia is bringing it up now, is that she's back on it. So it's like she submitted it, she retracted it, and now it's back on the table. Now she wants to bring it back. Now that it's back on the table, she wants to bring it back. And so it's not this piece of evidence that was ignored for all these years, it's this piece of evidence that was asked to be expunged. And that's why it falls apart. It falls apart completely and utterly, immediately, even though the entire first episode is set up on this. So this is what I think happens is that uh Sarah Koenig, she's looking for this next step in her career. Rabia comes to her with what looks like the perfect case, and you see how Rabia presents information. Sarah Koenig is ultimately her biggest sin on this, a wildly naive person that she is incapable of assuming that Rabia might have strings to pull here. And like, real quick on Rabia, I do not fault Rabia at all for any of the stuff that she's doing. This is her job. She is on the defense of Adnan. She's working on behalf of her personal familial interests in Adnan's case, her personal beliefs that Adnan is innocent. Rabia comes out old time and time again and says, I am trying to get him out of prison. And I'm fine with that. You stand on business, you do you. That's a good defense attorney. If I had a defense attorney, even if I guilt even if I was guilty, I would want somebody that is literally driving around in a car with the evidence of my case for 18 years. That is an amazing, that's like an amazing ad for Rabia, as like you can get her on her side. You you're getting this person that is never gonna quit on you. So cool. Thumbs up. She's uh she's honest, but I think wrong. So whatever. Or if she's dishonest, she's honest about his dishonesty because she's admitting this bias. Sarah Koenig, again, the it's the playing of the neutrality to it that allows her to get used by somebody like Rabia who presents this information to her, fits it in with this idea of what Sarah wants to do with her next step in her career, and then introduces her, sets Adnan Adnan up on a plate for Adnan to just charm the pants out of Sarah. And I am not gonna be one to comment on the idea that Sarah Kenig like caught feelings for uh Adnan. I don't have enough information on that. I will say some of the interactions she has with him on camera, or not camera, on you know, recording, are weird. They are uncomfortable. The the the cow eyes, the fact that like whenever she presents information that might look bad for Adnan, she sounds uh apologetic, like aggressively apologetic to Adnan about this thing. And we can go into if I make another one of these, I I'd love to go into it, like break down exactly why I where I see Adnan lying, where I see Adnan manipulating her. Because I think what ends up happening is that Adnan recognizes that she's got this story, she's pot committed on this serial podcast thing, which Rabia and Adnan let Saracading believe, like, oh yeah, you're being totally neutral, you're just reporting on all the facts, it's all good. You're you're totally doing the NPR thing, like you're the journalist here, you're not being used on behalf of our defense at all. You're just reporting a story as it is. But they also recognize that there's nobody from the prosecution talking to her. She can't get Jay to talk to her, she can't get Hayes' family to talk to her, she can't get the prosecution itself to talk to her. So she's just got Adnan. Adnan is the only voice in her ear, and that is why so many episodes end with Adnan just talking. Because Adnan recognizes once he recognizes, subconsciously or consciously, whatever it is, once he recognizes that, he recognizes that if he needs Sarah to do something, he just has to pull back. Because if he walks away, there's no story. And you mix all that together with that first episode, which is wildly compelling. Sarah is good at making radio, she's just naive and got played, but you know, mix that all together with this episode, and now you have this phenomena, and now it's just way too fucking big for everybody involved. Now it's this thing that millions of people are fascinated by, and you're stuck in the situation where you gotta put out a new episode every single week. You can't just go, alright, this didn't happen. This clearly didn't happen, dude. Uh and the only person that's talking to her is Adnan. So she's gotta keep talking to Adnan, keep going back to Adnan, and it just it's why the show gets so weak later on. The arguments get weaker and weaker and weaker, but I think subconsciously she has to hold on to this idea that, you know, I have to kind of she whether consciously or subconsciously, she recognizes that she has to create doubt or the show dies. The second it becomes obvious, in the way that it was obvious, by the way, to the jury. Remember, this was a six-week trial with a two-hour deliberation, right? That is the you know, jury equivalent of going into the room, slamming the guilty button, and walking out. Those people did not have any doubts. The movie Twelve Angry Men is longer than their deliberation. The movie that was scripted. You know, this is not you know, this is not I just don't think it's a very I think it's a pretty open and shut case. So again, like I've said a million times, the interesting part of serial is trying to figure out what the fuck is going on here. Why does this woman why does this woman keep making choices that seem to be on behalf of the defense of Adnan, or to at least create plausible doubt on behalf of Adnon, while ignoring the family of Heyman Lee, while ignoring the consequences that had happened to Jay and Jay's life and the amount of people online that think he is a guilty man walking free. Uh he has got to live with that for the rest of his life. Uh I've just been trying to figure out like how that was caused. This is my theory of the case. My theory of the case is that she thought the Asia alibi was gonna get him free, and she went all in on it, and then it got way bigger than she had any control over. And if she I think she got to a point where she would either have to recognize that she'd made a massive mistake and bail out on the entire project, or just keep convincing yourself that you're doing the right thing, that there is some doubt there, that this needs to be worked, just one more angle, this needs to be worked, and then we're gonna crack the case open. And I think the evidence you can see of this is Dana, her executive assistant, whatever her name is, producer. But the two quotes from Dana that I always go to is like very, very, very, very telling. The first one is actually something my brother pointed out. It is the meme quote about the crab shack, where Sarah's going on and on and on about some aspect of the case that is really just baffling. She's turning it over in her head, she's fascinated by whatever this minutia is. And Dana just goes, Oh, there's a shrimp sale at the crab shack. And if you've ever been in a situation like that where somebody you're talking to is really wildly, wildly passionate about something that you just don't care about at all, uh, you'll do stuff like that. You'll just try to change the subject. It's just like it's a way to tell them, hey man, calm down. You're saying nonsense without embarrassing them. And that's what I hear with the uh the shrimp sale at the crab shack. And obviously, Sayer doesn't recognize that that's what's happening. And then obviously, episode 12, the Mr. Spock speech about the unluckiest man that ever lived. All she just lays out the case over and over. It's the first time in the entire podcast you basically hear, hey man, yeah, each individual coin flip could come up heads, but a hundred heads in a row is so unlikely. It's basically impossible. And Dana says it, and she says it with this resignation of like it feels to me very much like Dana saying, Sarah, listen, I've been trying to get you here. I I there's no uh outside of me just saying you're completely wrong about this, the best I can do is just lay it out and just hope you can make that last little connection on your own to save a little bit of face. And she just doesn't do it. Sarah just goes, Oh, that crazy Dana, and then immediately goes to an interview with Adnan. And uh, you know, I ultimately my fascination with the serial of the podcast is a deep dive into you know the dynamics of Sarah Canning and the kind of person that she represents, this highly academic person that appears very intellectual, very smart, uh, just getting absolutely worked over by people who didn't graduate from high school just because she lacks street smarts. She's just a naive person. That the naiveness of this kind of academic type, this sort of grad school PhD type, they tend to be, you know, in my experience, a lot of them are very naive because they've just been in school forever and they've been around this group of people that have just existed in a bubble. And she's outside of the bubble getting worked left and right, and she gets worked, and that's what's fascinating to watch in this podcast. And then the other part of it is like, you know, is she actively rooting for this guy for other reasons? Is there something else going on there? Is she is she a 45-year-old woman who's looking at this 30-year-old guy and think he's charming? Did he charm her? I don't know that much on that part. I will just say it's a theory that has been brought up a lot, and there are some parts that make it hard to fully There's a lot more evidence that Sarah Koenig had something going on for Adnan than that Jay murdered hey. I will say that much. You guys can make it that what you will. Uh and finally, why even talk about this, right? Ultimately, it's kind of like it's nothing. It happened ten years ago, nothing matters whatsoever. But I cannot get rid of this itch in the back of my head that she made millions of dollars off of this. She made a ton of money, she made a career off of this. And what this did for her, it benefited her. For Adnan, it benefited him. For Rabia, it benefited him. For Hayes' family, the family of the murdered girl. I can't imagine it being anything but devastation. For Jay, the guy who risked everything by going to the cops and trying to tell the truth. Who I view as something of the hero of the story, even though, you know, he had an isn't his involvement in it, but I understand why he was involved in the way that he was. I believe him when he said he was just trying to protect his grandmother, he's trying to protect his girlfriend, uh, that he was caught up in a situation he at 20 years old wasn't ready to handle. Uh I believe him. I believe he's the hero of the story. His life has been ruined by this podcast in a way that, you know, anyone can understand. His life at the very least has been made significantly, significantly worse. Uh and that fact, the fact that Hayes' family and Jay's fan Jay's life, their lives were made worse by this podcast, and Sarah doesn't have the courage, the dignity, she doesn't feel the compulsion to stand up on the platform she created and go, either I do genuinely think Adnan is innocent, and that's why I made this podcast, and I I don't care about those consequences because ultimately I'm in the right here. That's what Arabia says, right? Which is why I respect that shit. Or she goes, I got it wrong. He's guilty. I think he's guilty. And the way that I presented that information cast doubt on these people, and I need to find some way to rectify this with the family of Hey, with Jay. Until she does that, I it's just it honestly fucking disgusts me, man. Because I just I hate a lack of accountability on stuff like this. I want to be accountable. If I ever do something like this, I hope I'm accountable. And God knows you always get what you ask for, so this is that'll be horrible. But anyway, that's what I want to say about this. If you guys like this podcast, if you like me doing this, I will do an episode by episode breakdown of serial the podcast, and I'll I'll point to individual things that I'm like, hey, this is, you know, this is how Adnan manipulates things. This is a situation where Sarah Cadig is editorializing, but in such a way that it creates room for plausible deniability that she's editorializing. If you guys want to see that, let me know. Love to do it. This has been a lot of fun. Uh, I am genuinely trying to get my mother to come and give me a phone call that I can record on this because she's the one that got me to really see that Adon was guilty, because uh my mom grew up on the wrong side of the tracks a little bit, and she is able to see the stuff that the worlds of Sarah Koenig is unable to see because of whatever naive barriers that they have. Uh uh, you know, whatever. It's it's it it works. It works for her. I think also she cracks me up when she talks about this because she is adamant. She is adamant. Anyway, um, I don't know. Thank you all for listening. There'll be more. Uh, not every podcast is gonna be about true crime. I unfortunately only know about this. This is the only true crime thing I've ever done. If there is some true crime stuff you want my opinion on, send it to me and I'll look into it. I'll try to get to it because I'm just trying to figure out ways to be entertaining online. Uh anyway, thank you for watching all my stuff. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Uh, the song at the intro and outro is called uh it's called Slime. It's called Slime by how strange it is. And uh yeah, please check out uh I have a fantasy football app that's built for casual fans, people that just want to play with their friends for fun. It's built off the idea of Mario Kart. It's supposed to be for people that don't really watch a lot of football, or like, you know, we play with my friends who all have kids and families and stuff like that. They they're busy. I just wanted to make a game that was more fun. Uh it's called Clubhouse Fantasy Sports, spelled with a K. Uh, check out Clubhouse K-L-U-P-H-O-U-S-E. Fun F-U-N. Go check that out. Uh, there'll be more than that. Anyway, thank you very much.