This episode is brought to you by Shopify. With Shopify, 2026 is the year you make it happen. It gives you the tools to build your dream store, online and in person. Plus with marketing built in, it'll help you reach exactly who you need to. Join the millions who've already made the leap, like Jim Shark and all birds, and ring in the new year with Shopify.

Sign up for your £1 per month trial at Shopify.com.uk.

The first degree.

First degree. First degree. First degree. First degree. First degree. First degree. The first degree.

You see it on the news. You get on the paper. You see it on Facebook.

These things are supposed to happen in movies, not in real life.

Welcome to the first degree, the true crime podcast that you might end up on. My name is Jack Vanek. I'm sitting here with Alexis Linkletter. And we have a little bit of a special different type of an episode for you in your main first degree feed. Alexis, give them kind of the rundown of what we're doing today. Right. So we love covering cases that are unfolding in real time. We always

get requests to do it. And previously, we've been putting them on our premium channels because

it didn't necessarily fit just this traditional format that we've stuck to since 2018 now.

But everybody deserves to get the TLDR on these cases that are sweeping the nation.

So we're going to start mixing them into our main feed, sort of at our liberty. If the case

is blowing up, if we think it is a matter of public interest, I think we're just going to do it.

Because, I mean, I think after being consistent for so many years, we've earned the ability to take some liberties with our formats and our structures and the things we want to cover.

It was so funny because before this episode, we're like, do you think that we could do this?

Like, are we allowed?

Are we allowed?

I'm like, well, we are our own bosses.

There are literally no rules.

So, and this is what you guys are asking about.

And I think it's just, it's so fascinating, especially when a case is unfolding in real time because, you know, there's social media posts. There's rumors. There's, you know, people on Reddit. It's just there's a lot of like robustness to it that it doesn't really exist once a case is kind of closed.

So. on Reddit. Like, it's just, there's a lot of, like, robustness to it that doesn't really

exist once a case is kind of closed. So I think it'll just be more of an interesting approach

...