Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Christian Seger,
Speaker 1: and we are back for the fourth Creepy Pasta episode
Speaker 1: that we've done together. That's a lot of creepy pastas
Speaker 1: it is. I wasn't sure we were gonna we're gonna
Speaker 1: be able to actually squeeze out a fourth one, and
Speaker 1: yet behold, here it is. And honestly, people have asked
Speaker 1: for this. A lot of people have written in and
Speaker 1: said how much they like the Creepy Pasta episodes that
Speaker 1: we've done. Now I'm trying to recall this because I've
Speaker 1: done this is my third Halloween on the show. We've
Speaker 1: done one for each Halloween. But I think we did
Speaker 1: one off season maybe as well. I think so. I
Speaker 1: think the first one was off season and then we
Speaker 1: came back or maybe the second one something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so we have If you're unfamiliar with Creepy pastas, we
Speaker 1: will set this all up for you. But this is
Speaker 1: uh And by the way, it being the warth doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that you have to go back and listen to
Speaker 1: the other three either. Like they're not at all connected. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is just like a fun kind of halloween ish
Speaker 1: thing that we've been doing on the show for a
Speaker 1: while now. Yeah, and it's a it's actually rounding out
Speaker 1: our our Halloween, our month of our month plus of
Speaker 1: Halloween content because this is airing the Thursday following Halloween
Speaker 1: two thousand seventeen. So if you're sitting there at home
Speaker 1: and you're going, I don't know what a creepy pasta is,
Speaker 1: this is very weird if you keep saying that word. Okay,
Speaker 1: here's the real brief. Visit to it again. Uh. Creepy
Speaker 1: pastas are these viral copy and paste texts that are
Speaker 1: in the form of horror stories. They evolved from the
Speaker 1: term copy pasta, which was essentially when people would copy
Speaker 1: and paste like like made up letters or fiction to
Speaker 1: each other and send them around in chain emails, right.
Speaker 1: Or Another example of just pure copy pops so that
Speaker 1: I've encountered is is on these various question and answer
Speaker 1: websites where someone will say, like this is specific example,
Speaker 1: someone's like, oh, I have to get a prostate exam
Speaker 1: tomorrow at the doctor's office. What's going to happen? Should
Speaker 1: I be concerned, and then somebody drops some ultimately like
Speaker 1: hollacious or scandalous story about what happened to them. And
Speaker 1: then if you take that that copy and you search
Speaker 1: for it, you see, oh, this exists in various places.
Speaker 1: This is just like a grab bag bit of text
Speaker 1: that somebody will distribute as needed to freak people out. Exactly.
Speaker 1: That's kind of the fun of it is that they
Speaker 1: take the shape of urban legends. They appear like things
Speaker 1: that have actually happened. Right, This is sort of fake
Speaker 1: news before fake news, right, people saying this happened to
Speaker 1: me on the Internet and everybody going wait what and
Speaker 1: kind of like circling around back and realizing that it's
Speaker 1: just like for fun. It's like, it's like fake news
Speaker 1: that became self aware, because because now you'll have websites
Speaker 1: where where creepy pasta is curated and even composed and
Speaker 1: shared exclusively with the creepypasta community. Yeah, exactly. And so
Speaker 1: the whole idea here is that they're mimicking these first
Speaker 1: person accounts, and the ones that were usually gravitating towards
Speaker 1: are the ones that appear to be scientific ones. Right.
Speaker 1: We've usually covered ones in the past that claimed to
Speaker 1: be uh scientific laboratory conditions or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: or ones that at least actually have get their roots into,
Speaker 1: you know, cognition or human behavior or I don't know,
Speaker 1: go a little deeper than just a pure jump scare
Speaker 1: and right. Yeah. In fact, you know, I only just
Speaker 1: now remember this. There's a TV show on sci Fi
Speaker 1: that is taking creepy pastas and adapting them into like
Speaker 1: season length television shows. I think they're like five or
Speaker 1: six episodes. I haven't seen it yet. But in fact,
Speaker 1: actually last year you and I were interviewed by Playboy
Speaker 1: magazine because they were looking for somebody who knew sort
Speaker 1: of how to talk about creepy pastas beyond like the
Speaker 1: websites that they're on. And that was fun too, so
Speaker 1: we we had an opportunity to talk about sort of
Speaker 1: just like the mechanics of the creepy pasta. Right now,
Speaker 1: a lot of the pasta, the creepy pasta out there
Speaker 1: is going to be authorless, but you see that changing
Speaker 1: more and more with the you know, actual authors contributing
Speaker 1: their pieces. And then likewise they range and greatly in length.
Speaker 1: I tend to like the short ones, and they also
Speaker 1: range from things that are just kind of like, hey,
Speaker 1: this thing happened, can you believe it? Or sort of
Speaker 1: Wikipedia style entries to things that are more clearly attempts
Speaker 1: at a at at at a narrative structure. So the
Speaker 1: most popular one that those of you out there have
Speaker 1: probably heard of before and you might not even realize, oh,
Speaker 1: that's a creepy pasta is slender Man. And we talked
Speaker 1: a lot about slender Man in the previous episodes, so
Speaker 1: I'm not going to do a lot of deep dive
Speaker 1: onto that here. But really, the genre of creepy pasta
Speaker 1: seems to have hit its peak somewhere around two thousand
Speaker 1: and ten. It's still chucking along. People are still doing them,
Speaker 1: making them. In fact, like when I went to go
Speaker 1: research for this episode, I was shocked at how many
Speaker 1: more there still were, you know, but I think like
Speaker 1: the height of it being covered in other media has
Speaker 1: maybe passed. Yeah. Plus, I I wonder how it's changing
Speaker 1: to a with the rise of fake news and you know,
Speaker 1: intentionally misleading um bits of content that are out there,
Speaker 1: as well as things that are maybe not quite tied
Speaker 1: to an effort to distort the truth, but are just
Speaker 1: tied to get clicks I'm thinking of those. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: will generally be like a series of four or more,
Speaker 1: depending how crappy the website is. Um little thumbnails at
Speaker 1: the bottom of the page, and they generally have like
Speaker 1: a picture of like something kind of mysteriously fleshy, and
Speaker 1: and then some sort of you know, clickbait headline. I think, actually,
Speaker 1: it's it's fair to point out that sometimes in the
Speaker 1: history of stuff to blow your mind, you may have
Speaker 1: seen such a thing at the bottom of our website.
Speaker 1: That's beyond our control, right, but those ads are sort
Speaker 1: of placed there by like powers beyond our own. I
Speaker 1: wonder if there's a potential for a new genre. I
Speaker 1: guess you could call it creep Uh let's see, it's
Speaker 1: it's clickbaits will be creepy bait. I don't know, creepy
Speaker 1: BAITA like that. Yeah, yeah, exactly. You create an entire
Speaker 1: business around churning out creepy baits with like weird little
Speaker 1: thumbnails that would sit on the bottom of sites, and
Speaker 1: people click on them and think they're reading a story
Speaker 1: that's like you won't believe these five celebrities who aren't
Speaker 1: allowed in Hollywood anymore. And then but like it's actually
Speaker 1: a horror story that is a great idea for a business.
Speaker 1: Let's start that, all right. So in this episode we
Speaker 1: have we have each gone out into the wilds of
Speaker 1: creepy pasta and once more brought back a couple of
Speaker 1: topics to tackle tease apart and try and find some
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your own content about. You retrieve too,
Speaker 1: from the wilds I retrieved to. Now you probably want
Speaker 1: to touch on the source for your two creepy pastas. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so our last creepy pasta Creepy Pasta three. If you're
Speaker 1: keeping track, these are like horror movies. The way that
Speaker 1: we're calculating them was all about something called SCP, which
Speaker 1: was brought to our attention by several listeners. The SCP
Speaker 1: foundation is this collection of scientific creepy pastas that's out there,
Speaker 1: and the idea is it's as if there's this warehouse
Speaker 1: of oddities that are collected and contained somewhere, kind of
Speaker 1: like that TV show warehouse. Their teen um and the
Speaker 1: guidelines are basically that the articles should have an interesting idea,
Speaker 1: reasonable containment procedures for the creepy pasta, and a clear
Speaker 1: description with each entry. They operate on a rating system
Speaker 1: so the community actually up votes and down votes based
Speaker 1: on what their favorite ones are. And both of my
Speaker 1: suggestions today come from a listener named Austin who suggested
Speaker 1: a bunch of s cps for us right after Creepy
Speaker 1: pasta three, and they have a bunch. It's it's a
Speaker 1: very fun website to just browse through and click on
Speaker 1: things and see just how how absurd and or legitimately
Speaker 1: creepy each entry is because there's a lot of humor
Speaker 1: on that website. Whichever very much. Yeah, yeah, and uh
Speaker 1: it is You're not wrong, there's like thousands. Now. That
Speaker 1: was the thing that kind of overwhelmed me is I
Speaker 1: was like, how am I gonna do this? But luckily
Speaker 1: Austin pointed out two great ones that I'm gonna work
Speaker 1: with today. So my first is called s E P
Speaker 1: nine six two. That's its designation, but we can call
Speaker 1: it the Tower of Babel for our purpose. And you
Speaker 1: have to stress how Babel is spelled here. Yeah b
Speaker 1: A B B L E. Now, uh, I'm gonna just
Speaker 1: summarize this because I think it would take too much
Speaker 1: time to read the whole thing. But I recommend, like,
Speaker 1: if you're into this idea, just go to Google and
Speaker 1: type in SCP nine six two and the whole thing
Speaker 1: will pull up. Um. But the gist of the Tower
Speaker 1: of Babel in this creepy pasta is that there's this
Speaker 1: large steel tower that has been found by human beings
Speaker 1: and it produces these animal human hybrid servitors that are
Speaker 1: under its control. They basically come out of the bottom
Speaker 1: of this thing and they go within a like a
Speaker 1: short radius of the tower to recover local resources, and
Speaker 1: it's implied that these resources are brought back to the
Speaker 1: tower to help rebuild the tower itself, to do some
Speaker 1: kind of crazy experiments inside of it, and possibly to
Speaker 1: create these servitors as well. Uh. They're described as being
Speaker 1: sort of like likened thrope cyborgs, like they're half animal
Speaker 1: half human, but they've got cybernetic implants kind of and
Speaker 1: they're they also outside of the mining and like gathering materials,
Speaker 1: they also hunt animals, so they'll kill animals and bring
Speaker 1: back their bodies to the tower, but they will not
Speaker 1: harm human beings. Is made very clear that that human
Speaker 1: beings are in some way uh revered by this tower,
Speaker 1: which may be sentient or there may be something inside
Speaker 1: the tower that's sentient. That's sending all this stuff out. Now,
Speaker 1: what do they do with the animals they bring back, Well,
Speaker 1: it's unclear. They maybe make more servitors out of them,
Speaker 1: and that's something I'm going to cover and looking at
Speaker 1: the science here. But also, the tower will occasionally release
Speaker 1: these balloons, and the balloons will have high quality writings
Speaker 1: attached to them, and the writings sometimes go a little crazy,
Speaker 1: like sometimes they're they're like little short stories, sometimes their poems,
Speaker 1: sometimes their rants. And the rants seem to be the
Speaker 1: ones that like give us a glimpse at the actual
Speaker 1: personality of the Tower, and it seems to worship humanity
Speaker 1: and it refers to humanity as the great Ones over
Speaker 1: and over again. Wow, in your description of all of this,
Speaker 1: I am picturing it as an as a Monty Python
Speaker 1: animation by Terry Gilliam. I feel like that's probably the
Speaker 1: purest expression that would be great. Actually, yeah, you know what,
Speaker 1: it makes me think of Brazil a little bit. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the thing that makes the balloons tied into all
Speaker 1: this resource collection is that the balloons are made out
Speaker 1: of the skin of animals that are recovered. So it's
Speaker 1: very strange. Um, now I want to look at two
Speaker 1: things that came out of this for me. The first
Speaker 1: is animal human hybrids, which is a favorite topic of
Speaker 1: ours on the show. We've talked about it before on
Speaker 1: our X Files episode that Joe and I did two
Speaker 1: X Files episodes where we we got into hybrids and chimeras.
Speaker 1: This was two years ago maybe. And then Robert, you
Speaker 1: and I did an episode all about the myth of
Speaker 1: the human z the human Chimpanze hybrid. Yeah, well the
Speaker 1: myth and then the the actual history there and that.
Speaker 1: That was a fun episode and if I remember correctly,
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan's favorite episode. Rogan was thrilled about that episode. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh so, if you haven't heard that, go back and
Speaker 1: listen to it. That's a fun one. That's it's one
Speaker 1: of my favorites. Actually. Uh Now, I want to start
Speaker 1: actually by reading a quote to you. Okay, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I'm not going to tell the audience who this
Speaker 1: quote is from before I go ahead and say it.
Speaker 1: So here we go. A hopeful society has institutions of
Speaker 1: science and medicine that do not cut ethical corners, and
Speaker 1: that recognize the matchless value of every life. Tonight, I
Speaker 1: ask you to pass legislation to prohibit the most egregious
Speaker 1: abuses of medical research, human cloning in all its forms,
Speaker 1: creating or implanting embryos for experiments, creating human animal hybrids,
Speaker 1: and buying, selling, or patenting human embryos. Human life is
Speaker 1: a gift from our creator, and that gift should never
Speaker 1: be discarded, devalued, or put up for sale. So who
Speaker 1: do you think that was? I am getting I'm gonna
Speaker 1: go make a wild guess and say that that was
Speaker 1: Senator Joe squirrel Man because he doesn't want his genetic
Speaker 1: data to be sold. It was actually former President George W.
Speaker 1: Bush from his State of the Union in two thousand six.
Speaker 1: And as some of our listeners know, I have my
Speaker 1: master's degree in presidential rhetoric, and I was watching the
Speaker 1: State of the Union at the time. I love watching
Speaker 1: State of the Unions there. It's kind of a weird,
Speaker 1: like they're my super Bowl basically, And uh, I was
Speaker 1: watching it and I went, wait a minute, Like I
Speaker 1: did like a double take, and I was like, did
Speaker 1: he say human animal hybrids? Like? Has he gone so
Speaker 1: far off the deep end that he thinks like werewolves
Speaker 1: are a thing? You know? I was really like where
Speaker 1: did this come from? You know? And it turns out
Speaker 1: that this was actually an issue at the time, like
Speaker 1: in scientific experimentation that was kind of rearing its head up,
Speaker 1: and so I think Bush like from his ethical standpoint,
Speaker 1: was trying to tackle it. But actually this is when
Speaker 1: I became aware that experiments to create human animal chimeras
Speaker 1: are ineligible for public funding here in the United States.
Speaker 1: So you you cannot the government will not help pay
Speaker 1: for anything that's even semi related to that. Yeah, And now,
Speaker 1: of course it's it's it's worth driving home that that
Speaker 1: the the actual experiments that are not being funded in
Speaker 1: these cases are not experiments to create humans these or
Speaker 1: to create some sort of mutant pig person that will
Speaker 1: you know, labor in the minds. Uh, they're far more
Speaker 1: realistic and applicable UM areas here. Like one of the
Speaker 1: ones that instantly comes to mind, and I believe we've
Speaker 1: discussed this one in the past on the show is
Speaker 1: what if you could use a pig to grow human
Speaker 1: organs within it for organ transplants to humans or any
Speaker 1: other kind of like tissue or organ and growth. If
Speaker 1: you could grow it in an animal or on an animal,
Speaker 1: that would make the whole process easier, right. Yes, in fact,
Speaker 1: that is exactly what I'm going to talk about here
Speaker 1: today because I imagined one of the Towers servitors as
Speaker 1: being pig like, because in the description of the Creepy Pasta,
Speaker 1: it's specifically said that the way that they're sculpted is
Speaker 1: to try to make them look more human even though
Speaker 1: they have animal hybrid features, and it said that like
Speaker 1: if it has a snout, which I immediately thought of
Speaker 1: a pig, that the snout would be like cut off.
Speaker 1: So it's very strange, but so I immediately went to pig,
Speaker 1: and not for any old reason, but pig. Human hybrids
Speaker 1: are a thing that have been being worked on for
Speaker 1: a while, and in fact this year since our Human
Speaker 1: Z episode, actually there's been some further research on this.
Speaker 1: So um just a reminder, I mentioned the Human Z
Speaker 1: episode earlier. Specifically, what we talked about there were something
Speaker 1: that we're called the Red Frankenstein experiments, and the guy
Speaker 1: to look up there is Ilia Ivanovich. Ivanov. He was
Speaker 1: the one who was trying to create a human chimpanzee hybrid.
Speaker 1: We go all into it in that episode, but if
Speaker 1: you want to go and look up on your own
Speaker 1: you know, check out his name. I'll make sure I
Speaker 1: linked to that episode on the landing page for this one,
Speaker 1: as well as all previous Creepy Pasta episodes. Yes, so okay. Obviously,
Speaker 1: outside of George W. Bush's State of the Union speech
Speaker 1: in two thousand and six, there is a lot of
Speaker 1: fear and paranoia around the possibility of animal human hybrid right.
Speaker 1: It just kind of squeaks people out whenever they even
Speaker 1: think of the idea. It makes it upsets people, which
Speaker 1: is probably why it's kind of a common trope and
Speaker 1: horror now in developmental biologists. Stuart Newman was at the
Speaker 1: New York Medical College in Valhalla, and this is together
Speaker 1: with Jeremy Rifkin, who's the president of the Foundation of
Speaker 1: Economic Trends in d C. And they submitted a path
Speaker 1: and for the chimera of a human Z. And they
Speaker 1: made this from embryonic cells of humans and chimpanzees. Uh So,
Speaker 1: Stewart he vowed to secure the patent so he could
Speaker 1: prevent others from ever making a human Z and exploiting it.
Speaker 1: This is how much it freaks people out, Like they
Speaker 1: they actually tried to patent this so they could make
Speaker 1: sure that no one else could ever try to make
Speaker 1: something like this. Uh, and so he was actually denied
Speaker 1: this in two thousand four by the Patent and Trademark Office.
Speaker 1: Why well, it gets back to something that George W.
Speaker 1: Bush was talking about in that speech. It's important to
Speaker 1: remember the U S Patent and Trademark Office actually rejects
Speaker 1: claims of hybrid patents because they would too closely resemble humans.
Speaker 1: And you can't patent humanity. You can sell what you
Speaker 1: can exploit it, but but just no patent, right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it always cracks me up, like when um companies
Speaker 1: refer to like human collateral or like human human resources,
Speaker 1: like they're talking about human beings as if they're objects, right,
Speaker 1: or like like pens that they order from Staples or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if any word or phrase sounds like it should
Speaker 1: come from a pig mutant and a giant power, it's
Speaker 1: human resources along with all those other wonderful words like
Speaker 1: head count reduction and so yeah, exactly right, like the
Speaker 1: basically like the the sanitization of like companies doing quote
Speaker 1: bad things to people. Right. So, actually hybridization is quite
Speaker 1: common in nature, right. We've all heard of zebra variations
Speaker 1: like zebras mixed with any other Equis genus species like
Speaker 1: zoonkies or Hebrews or donkras right. Like, that was a
Speaker 1: huge thing after Napoleon Dynamite, where everybody thought how cute
Speaker 1: it was to combine different names of animals. But that's
Speaker 1: a real thing, uh. In fact, this is when two
Speaker 1: equine species mate, but because they're compatible enough to breathe,
Speaker 1: they can actually mate, but unfortunately their offspring are usually sterile.
Speaker 1: So this is when we get mules instance. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: in the worst cases, for instance, prince to mind African
Speaker 1: and Asian elephants, there have been cases where they have
Speaker 1: bread and captivity and the results are if they do
Speaker 1: produce offspring is generally quite frail and sickly and doesn't Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems to be the case with some of these
Speaker 1: as well. We also see big cat hybrids that are common.
Speaker 1: So you've got tigons, liggers, jag lion, jaggue, pars, the
Speaker 1: all the combinations right in rare cases. Actually, tigons are
Speaker 1: different from other hybrid progeny. They can actually produce babies. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there is a small industry that goes around breeding
Speaker 1: domestic cats with wild relatives to produce like weird exotic hybrids. Right, So, like,
Speaker 1: I've never seen one of these before, but I'm guessing like,
Speaker 1: if you're super rich, you're like, I want to breed
Speaker 1: my tortoise shell cat with a lynx or something, and
Speaker 1: you get you get like this bizarre cat for your house.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, my world is just when you run
Speaker 1: out of cat, then the cat person, you know, the
Speaker 1: cat lady in your social circle. Oh yes, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: they just seem to show up on my doorstep. That's
Speaker 1: how it works for me. Uh Also, bottle knows dolphins
Speaker 1: and false killer whales can breed. These are called hole
Speaker 1: fens holfens uh as, and so that's another hybrid that
Speaker 1: we can note here. Almost all of these are infertile. Subsequently,
Speaker 1: the whole thing, they're doomed to an evolutionary dead end.
Speaker 1: They just they can't continue breeding. There's even some speculation
Speaker 1: that human beings once crossbred with neanderthals, so that's worth
Speaker 1: remembering as well. So, okay, Robert mentioned the pig hybrid
Speaker 1: and the idea of using them for organ transplantation. This
Speaker 1: first came about in two thousand three when Chinese scientists
Speaker 1: at the Shanghai Second Medical University fused human cells with
Speaker 1: rabbit eggs and this was reportedly the first human animal chimera.
Speaker 1: Then in two thousand four, researchers is that the Mayo
Speaker 1: Clinic created pigs with human blood flowing in their bodies.
Speaker 1: And this is the stuff that kind of led to
Speaker 1: that George W. Bush section in the State of the Union. Right,
Speaker 1: these research uh moments popping up, but also stem cell
Speaker 1: research becoming like a lot bigger and more public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it is weird to imagine that, right, to
Speaker 1: think of this pig that has been engineered to have
Speaker 1: human blood in it for the purposes of blood donation,
Speaker 1: and and you know, the the ramifications are not necessarily
Speaker 1: attractive there. I mean, if you're if you're against say
Speaker 1: the eating of animals, the raising of pigs for food,
Speaker 1: then you know, how are you supposed to feel about
Speaker 1: rearing pigs just so you can drain their blood and
Speaker 1: sell it. Yeah, it's a for me, it's an ethical
Speaker 1: thing around along the lines of we were just talking
Speaker 1: about in our Optography episode about the experiment where they're
Speaker 1: running album solution through a dog's eyeball while it was
Speaker 1: still alive to see if optography was real, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that is a setting to me. But I'm also a vegetarian,
Speaker 1: and that's kind of part of it, just my ethical standpoint,
Speaker 1: right Whereas I can totally understand why some people would
Speaker 1: be like and in fact, I've got data here to
Speaker 1: talk about this. Every day, twenty two people die because
Speaker 1: they can't get the organ they need, right, So I
Speaker 1: can completely understand the concept of saying, well, it's actually
Speaker 1: worth it to us to grow these pigs with human
Speaker 1: organs inside of them so that we can harvest those
Speaker 1: organs and save some of those twenty two people every day. Yeah, Ultimately,
Speaker 1: you can look at it as the choice, right, Okay,
Speaker 1: either we're gonna go ahead with with pigs that have
Speaker 1: human blood and human organs, or you guys get more
Speaker 1: organized and more committed to attending blood drives and donating
Speaker 1: your body when you die and having everything set up
Speaker 1: so that that we don't have to rely on the hybrids. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you remember that movie The Island that came out
Speaker 1: a couple of years ago. Oh, Yeah, this was basically
Speaker 1: the premise there, except for it was even more horrifying
Speaker 1: because they were clones of actual people that were raised
Speaker 1: to maturity so that those people would have exact duplicates
Speaker 1: of their organs on hand. Yeah, it's essentially a remake
Speaker 1: of Clona what no, Yeah, parts the Clonus hor or
Speaker 1: is it Clonus the parts are It was then all
Speaker 1: the industry science theater film. It had Peter Graves in it.
Speaker 1: It was. It's not bad. Actually it's very watchable, but
Speaker 1: it's essentially the same plot. Uh, Never let Me Go. Yes, Also,
Speaker 1: that's right, entails a similar plot, but there's a lot
Speaker 1: more intelligence plot. It's a little less um Michael Bay. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's less explosions and Never Let Me Go. I've read
Speaker 1: the book, I've not seen the movie. Yeah, so okay,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Earlier this year in seventeen, scientists announced
Speaker 1: that they had created the first successful animal human hybrid.
Speaker 1: How they merged human cells into pigs. So technically, actually
Speaker 1: what they created was a chimera and not a hybrid,
Speaker 1: but those two terms get conflated, but basically, a chimera
Speaker 1: is an organism that contains cells from two different species.
Speaker 1: The reason why they did it was just what we
Speaker 1: were talking about right there, to help grow donor donor organs.
Speaker 1: So this is an international team. It was led by
Speaker 1: the Salk Institute in California, and they reported their findings
Speaker 1: in the journal Cell. Their research was funded by private donors.
Speaker 1: Why well, I'll remind you the United States will not
Speaker 1: provide any public funding for research like this. So how
Speaker 1: do you make a chimera? Right? If you've got your
Speaker 1: little chemistry set at home and you want to make
Speaker 1: a chimera, you probably can't, but I'll give give you
Speaker 1: a quick description. The first and riskiest way to do
Speaker 1: so is to literally introduce the organs of one animal
Speaker 1: into another. So it would be like that Christian Slater
Speaker 1: movie where he has a monkey heart? What right? What movies?
Speaker 1: I can't remember what that movie is called, but there's
Speaker 1: a movie where, like it's a romantic teen drama and
Speaker 1: he has like a huge scar over his chest and
Speaker 1: he tells everybody that he's got a monkey's heart and
Speaker 1: it's okay, Yeah, I vaguely remember the trailer. He's like
Speaker 1: a bad boy too, right, He's always a bad boy,
Speaker 1: of course. Yeah. But the host's immune system in this case,
Speaker 1: let's let's say it's Christians later will usually reject these
Speaker 1: other animal organs, right, Uh, So that idea seems a
Speaker 1: little far fetched, but the second way to make a
Speaker 1: chimera is to start at the embryonic level and introduce
Speaker 1: one animal cells into the embryo of another and then
Speaker 1: let them grow into a hybrid. So this followed another
Speaker 1: Salk study that was funded and conducted on mice and rats,
Speaker 1: and what they did. They used the genome editing tool Crisper,
Speaker 1: which comes up a lot both on our show but
Speaker 1: also just kind of in science communication in general. It's
Speaker 1: a hot topic right now. With Crisper, they were able
Speaker 1: to delete the genes that mice need to grow certain organs,
Speaker 1: and then they could use those mice as hosts to
Speaker 1: grow healthy pancreatic tissue for rats. Uh. This allowed those
Speaker 1: organs to flourish inside the mice bodies. The next step
Speaker 1: is essentially to inject rats stem cells into pigs. Now,
Speaker 1: they did this, but that failed because those animals have
Speaker 1: different gestation times, so rats and mice are kind of
Speaker 1: closer together. Pigs are surprisingly closer to humans. Actually this
Speaker 1: surprised me, so their organs are a little more similar,
Speaker 1: so that's why they're working with pigs here. They introduced
Speaker 1: three different types of human cells into pigs, and they
Speaker 1: found that with just the right timing, they could get
Speaker 1: those resulting embryos to survive. Once they put these embryos
Speaker 1: in adult pigs, they survived for three to four weeks
Speaker 1: and then the researchers removed them for analysis. So to
Speaker 1: be clear here, there's only actually a low percentage of
Speaker 1: these embryos that survived, and the human tissue within seems
Speaker 1: to grow slower than they expected. So any organs that
Speaker 1: are grown would probably be rejected by humans because they
Speaker 1: have too much pig tissue in them. So the next
Speaker 1: step that this research team is looking to figure out
Speaker 1: is if they can increase the number of human cells
Speaker 1: inside these embryos, and this could take years before they
Speaker 1: get to any kind of point where they're growing functional
Speaker 1: human organs. And in all of this, you have to,
Speaker 1: I guess you have to think, like what's the what's
Speaker 1: the line, like, at what point is there too much
Speaker 1: human in there? At what point are you making some
Speaker 1: sort of a humanoid drone creature that maybe has you know,
Speaker 1: has no brain, that just sits there and grows organs,
Speaker 1: And and how are we supposed to feel about bad? Well? Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there's a lot of ethical implications involved here, and too,
Speaker 1: I really want to point out here too, what they're
Speaker 1: doing is not tantamount to making animal human people like
Speaker 1: you will often see if you google animal human hybrid
Speaker 1: and you see legit articles about this pig study. They
Speaker 1: will use these crazy photos that have either been photoshopped
Speaker 1: or like are some kind of puppets or something that
Speaker 1: are designed to look like horror movie monster half pig,
Speaker 1: half people. Uh. And that's not the case of what's
Speaker 1: going on here. I think a lot about a lot
Speaker 1: of the revulsion that that occurs with this topic is
Speaker 1: it basically comes down into this tie. This this type
Speaker 1: of science forces you to re examine what we are.
Speaker 1: And if you have a if you have a certain
Speaker 1: you know, idea of what a human is and what
Speaker 1: it means to be human that's maybe a little bit
Speaker 1: divorced from like the scientific genetic realities of everything. Uh,
Speaker 1: then yeah, this can be a bit of a shock.
Speaker 1: Whereas the scientists involved would probably just tell you, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: this is what we are, this is what it is
Speaker 1: to be a human, and this is what we've lined
Speaker 1: up to help those humans live longer. I think you
Speaker 1: could end up seeing it too like break off in
Speaker 1: two different ways. Right, they'll be like um, like biological
Speaker 1: conservatives who you know, really want to make like like
Speaker 1: those guys who purposely try to file the patent to
Speaker 1: make sure that nobody could ever make it right. But
Speaker 1: then you would have I guess transhumanists, who are people
Speaker 1: who are like, hey, what could we learn from this science?
Speaker 1: How could we augment our bodies? How could we become
Speaker 1: the next step in evolution? Right? And and really, honestly,
Speaker 1: the first thing there is that they're just looking for
Speaker 1: a way to help people live, you know, when their
Speaker 1: organs are failing. I don't think anybody yet, well, you know,
Speaker 1: I maybe I'm wrong, Maybe the d O D is
Speaker 1: up to this and we just don't know. But I
Speaker 1: don't think anybody's like trying to make werewolf soldiers right
Speaker 1: now or anything you know, to do unpredictable. But okay,
Speaker 1: let's take what we just learned and try to apply
Speaker 1: it to this creepy pasta. Okay, this is remember we're
Speaker 1: talking about SCP nine six two. The way the creepy
Speaker 1: Pasta is written, it's easy to assume that that tower
Speaker 1: is somehow just Frankensteining together human and animal parts. But
Speaker 1: because its message has this reverence towards human and the
Speaker 1: fact that the servitors don't ever attack people, it actually
Speaker 1: makes me think it's doing something else to create these
Speaker 1: like hybrid monsters. It sounds like they are creating or
Speaker 1: the the tower is creating human animal chimeras from embryos,
Speaker 1: and possibly it's using the cells of the animals that
Speaker 1: are brought back inside to it. Right So, but that
Speaker 1: begs the question of where is it getting the human
Speaker 1: cells from? Right So, I don't know quite the answer
Speaker 1: to that, But that's also why this is spooky. You
Speaker 1: don't know what's inside that tower. Everybody, Yeah, Okay, One
Speaker 1: more thing I want to cover real quick is how
Speaker 1: do you think the tower is controlling these servitors? Right?
Speaker 1: Like there's some kind of mind control effect over these
Speaker 1: like half human half animal cyborgs basically right now, we've
Speaker 1: covered many, many, many times on the show before how
Speaker 1: animals can be mind controlled by other animals, usually by parasites. Right, gosh,
Speaker 1: how many do you think? Twenty episodes? Maybe more, probably
Speaker 1: because you have because you have different levels. Right. Anytime
Speaker 1: we're talking about some sort of disease or infectious agent,
Speaker 1: it's gonna come up, and then you're gonna have indo parasites.
Speaker 1: Uh so, this is gonna be gonna be like your
Speaker 1: two main categories. And that's not even getting into like
Speaker 1: the some of the more sci fi ideas of computer
Speaker 1: human brain interfaces or just psychological manipulation. Well, I've got
Speaker 1: all that here, so that's exciting. Yeah. Uh so, some
Speaker 1: of these are examples that have been covered before. Others
Speaker 1: I just want to give you like a grab bag
Speaker 1: in case you've never heard any of our episodes on
Speaker 1: parasite mind control. So parasitic wasp larva. They can control
Speaker 1: caterpillars by releasing octopamine into their systems. Oh yeah, The
Speaker 1: parasitic wasp world is filled with wonderful examples of various
Speaker 1: hosts that are hijacked, not only like bodily but also
Speaker 1: their their behavior is hijacked. Yeah. In fact, the jewel
Speaker 1: wasp is another example. They can control cockroaches. This is nuts.
Speaker 1: They can control cockroaches by stinging their brains and that
Speaker 1: impairs their ability to move, and then they literally guide
Speaker 1: the cockroaches by their antenna back to their nest. The
Speaker 1: wasps nests where the cockroach becomes host to all the
Speaker 1: wasps larvae, so they like ride cockroaches, kind of like
Speaker 1: a moa deep rides a sandworm. Oh wow, that that's incredible.
Speaker 1: I don't think i'd run across the jewel wasp example before.
Speaker 1: There's one with a ladybug. That's amazing because the it
Speaker 1: it's basically alien, except if the host remained alive after
Speaker 1: the emergence of the xenomorph and had to partially raise
Speaker 1: it and look after. This is similar. Yeah, this is similar. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also the protozoan Toxoplasma gandhi. They use rats as
Speaker 1: vehicles to get into cat and testines. This is because
Speaker 1: their ousists can form in inside cat feces. What we've
Speaker 1: talked about this before, but a lot of people probably
Speaker 1: know about this. It causes the rats to lose their
Speaker 1: fear of cat urine, and they may be doing it
Speaker 1: by affecting the neurotransmitters and dopamine levels inside the rat brains. Now,
Speaker 1: because toxoplasma can cross the blood brain barrier inside mammals,
Speaker 1: they can actually infect us human beings, and they've infected
Speaker 1: two billion people worldwide. Three dozen studies have found a
Speaker 1: positive link between toxoplasma infection and human neurological disorders like schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: You ever want to feel extra weird about scooping out
Speaker 1: the litter box, I highly recommend looking into some of
Speaker 1: the research has been to your point, a number of
Speaker 1: studies over the years. There are a lot of great
Speaker 1: articles out there, uh that touch on just to to
Speaker 1: what degree, Uh, this parasite hijacks the brain of its hosts.
Speaker 1: I mean everybody but the cats. Really, the cats remain untouched.
Speaker 1: It's just everything around the cats that end up being manipulated.
Speaker 1: It's funny because after I was doing this research, I
Speaker 1: was like, in the bathroom adjacent to my office has
Speaker 1: one of our cat litter pans in it, and I
Speaker 1: was like, uh, yeah, I need to go clean that.
Speaker 1: But it was like I had to like wrap like
Speaker 1: rags around my face before I did it. Like all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, I was afraid of cleaning the litter box. Uh.
Speaker 1: There's also small crustaceans that are known as gamma rids,
Speaker 1: and these can be infected by a number of different parasites. Apparently,
Speaker 1: like they're just they're awesome hosts for parasites, parasites. So
Speaker 1: you've got trema toads in their brains. Sometimes worms form
Speaker 1: in their body cavities. Each one of these parasite, it's
Speaker 1: just induces different behaviors in these crustaceans. Some make them
Speaker 1: head toward light, others make them head away from deep water.
Speaker 1: And then this is my favorite, slash most horrifying one.
Speaker 1: Robert did an entire video about this one, and if
Speaker 1: it's on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, it
Speaker 1: will make your skin crawl. It's super upsetting. This is
Speaker 1: the hairworm, and hairworms are known to infect frogs, fish, snails,
Speaker 1: and crickets, and in the case of crickets, they need
Speaker 1: to be brought near water so that the hair worms
Speaker 1: larvae can develop. So what they do is these parasites
Speaker 1: make proteins that attract the cricket hosts to light, which
Speaker 1: is usually where the water is at night. So these
Speaker 1: crickets end up basically committing suicide and dive bombing into
Speaker 1: the water, which they normally wouldn't do, so these hair
Speaker 1: worms can reproduce. Yeah, this is I love this particular
Speaker 1: organism um and and really great. Really enjoyed putting that
Speaker 1: video together a while back, but uh, my first encounter
Speaker 1: with it was in a junior high band class. Right,
Speaker 1: you've seen one, Yeah, and I've encount I've encountered one.
Speaker 1: I've encountered one in a puddle once out in the wild.
Speaker 1: But this was in a junior high band room and
Speaker 1: there was a cricket hopping around on the floor, and
Speaker 1: the uh, the student next to me decided that she
Speaker 1: was just gonna stop it, you know, which which I
Speaker 1: don't agree with. Cricket's not hurting anybody. Don't hurt the
Speaker 1: cricket um, you know, folklore and superstitions aside. But she
Speaker 1: she but it served her right because the second she
Speaker 1: stopped that thing, she you know, it's sitting there dead
Speaker 1: and then the horse hair worm starts crawling out of
Speaker 1: the cricket, and it just totally grossed her out. Like
Speaker 1: she just she had to I think she had to
Speaker 1: move to a different chair. Yeah, if you've never seen
Speaker 1: one of these things before, it's like something out of
Speaker 1: a body horror movie. There. They look they literally look
Speaker 1: like hair to us because they're so small. But it's like,
Speaker 1: imagine if like just this tendril punched in through your
Speaker 1: body and bore into you and started driving you around.
Speaker 1: That's kind of what it's like, yeah, yeah, the revulsion
Speaker 1: element aside, the degree to which they manipulate the host
Speaker 1: behavior is just phenomenal. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Definitely go check out that video if you're interested in more.
Speaker 1: But there are a lot of examples, is my point,
Speaker 1: of parasites hijacking their hosts, and they tend to be neurological,
Speaker 1: usually with proteins being expressed inside the brains of the infected.
Speaker 1: So maybe this is a possibility. Maybe there's something going
Speaker 1: on in the tower where they're manipulating the proteins of
Speaker 1: the of the brains of these animal human hybrids that
Speaker 1: they're creating, or maybe it's electronic, and I think this
Speaker 1: is more likely given the description of the creepy pasta. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, in researchers at Harvard University created the first
Speaker 1: non invasive brain to brain interface between a human and
Speaker 1: a rat, and that allowed the human being to control
Speaker 1: the rats tail. The way that this works as a
Speaker 1: human wears an e G device, the mouse is equipped
Speaker 1: with an ultrasound computer to brain interface. And I want
Speaker 1: to make it clear this isn't invasive. None of their
Speaker 1: brains are cut open and with like electrodes inside them
Speaker 1: or anything. You don't have to cut their heads open.
Speaker 1: It works when the human looks at a specific pattern
Speaker 1: on a screen and that pattern triggers the ultrasound beam
Speaker 1: into the rats motor cortex in the region that deals
Speaker 1: with its tail movement. In this study, it had accuracy
Speaker 1: just a human being sitting on the other side of
Speaker 1: the room being able to control when a rat moved
Speaker 1: its tail. This does not mean that we can read
Speaker 1: minds or anything like that. We simply we just don't
Speaker 1: know how thoughts are encoded by neurons in the brain,
Speaker 1: but it does allow us to stimulate a region of
Speaker 1: the brain that is known to create a particular reaction.
Speaker 1: So another example of this comes from Korea. At the
Speaker 1: Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, researchers have developed
Speaker 1: a way to remote controlled turtles. Uh now, this is
Speaker 1: a little bit more what might be going on here
Speaker 1: with this creepy pasta similar to the human mouse interface.
Speaker 1: It guides the turtle through what's called a cyborg system
Speaker 1: where the human sends again e g. Signals by thought
Speaker 1: command and those activate a device that's on the turtle,
Speaker 1: and the device obstructs the turtle's view. They can essentially
Speaker 1: give it three instructions, turn left, turn right, or be idle.
Speaker 1: And what's interesting about this is they use turtles because
Speaker 1: turtles have decent cognitive abilities. They have the ability to
Speaker 1: distinguish different wavelengths of light, and they can recognize a
Speaker 1: light source and move toward it. So they're really more
Speaker 1: predictable than other animals when it comes to their movement patterns. Plus,
Speaker 1: they respond well to mutagen We know that. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Well that's the idea here is like, once you perfect
Speaker 1: the turtle cyborg, then you can perfect the teenage mutant
Speaker 1: ninja turtle cyber step. Yeah exactly, which is essentially what
Speaker 1: SCP nine six two is doing here right the creepy
Speaker 1: pasta space scifically states the following I'm gonna read this
Speaker 1: to you from the description that these servitors are quote
Speaker 1: cybernetically augmented animals. These augmentations usually forced the animals into
Speaker 1: a bipedal gait and are often accompanied by crude cosmetic alterations,
Speaker 1: such as the removal of a snout, with the apparent
Speaker 1: goal of making the servitor appear more human like the
Speaker 1: nervous system of members of SCP nine six two Dash
Speaker 1: one is slave two implanted electrodes which allow them to
Speaker 1: be controlled by a central source, and that is assumed
Speaker 1: to be the tower itself, like that the tower is sentient.
Speaker 1: So this definitely sounds to me like these hybrids are
Speaker 1: augmented with cybernetics that allow a B C I to
Speaker 1: C B I transfer of some kind of remote control
Speaker 1: through implanted electrodes. So what I want to know is this,
Speaker 1: if you captured one of these servitors and then you
Speaker 1: dismantled all the electronics stuff that's like plugged into them,
Speaker 1: what would happen? Like, how would they behave? Would even
Speaker 1: know how to behave? Would they go out into the
Speaker 1: world and fetch a new animal tissue for the construction
Speaker 1: of balloons, or would they possibly turn against the tower
Speaker 1: and start attacking humans. So this is an interesting direction
Speaker 1: to take. I also want to introduce another scary question
Speaker 1: before we take a break and we move on to
Speaker 1: more creepy pastas. So we've established that we are creating hybrids.
Speaker 1: We've also established that there are lots of ways to
Speaker 1: mind control sentient beings. Now, what about if those hybrid
Speaker 1: organs could potentially make human beings more vulnerable to parasitic hijacking. So,
Speaker 1: for instance, if I got a pig human organ put
Speaker 1: in my body because I need a new liver, right,
Speaker 1: but there's something about that organ obviously, the way that
Speaker 1: those organs are harvested, they're all quote unquote human, But
Speaker 1: could they lead to something else that would make me
Speaker 1: more vulnerable to a parasitic mind control thing like a
Speaker 1: wasp or or toxoplasmosis. And then what if the intelligent
Speaker 1: parasites are that you have the ones carrying out this
Speaker 1: whole scheme? Bingo, Yeah, super scary stuff here. I really
Speaker 1: like this tower one, so so thanks again for passing
Speaker 1: this along, Alex. All Right, we're gonna take a quick
Speaker 1: break and we come back more creepy pasta. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. Okay, So the first of the two creepy
Speaker 1: pastas that I turned to. This one is kind of
Speaker 1: pre pasta urban legend in perspects, but it continues to
Speaker 1: resonate through the now established world of creepy pasta. It's
Speaker 1: um and I love too how it's There are elements
Speaker 1: of intentional um manipulation of an audience here as well.
Speaker 1: So this this one is known as polybius and this concerns. Essentially,
Speaker 1: it's like a haunted video game, uh situation. I imagine
Speaker 1: a number of you out there are familiar with this
Speaker 1: one already. I think there's a stuff they don't want
Speaker 1: you to know video about this urban legend. So the
Speaker 1: idea here is that there was a nine one arcade
Speaker 1: game called Polybius, presumably named for the Greek historian who
Speaker 1: championed the importance of historians having a firsthand account of
Speaker 1: what happened. Uh, it's kind of a wink to the
Speaker 1: fact that this is all made up. The version I
Speaker 1: read indicated that you had a few machines that were
Speaker 1: produced by a mysterious German company with a kind of
Speaker 1: fake sounding name and installed in Portland area arcades. This
Speaker 1: they resulted in a host of player symptoms nightmares, hallucinations, migraines,
Speaker 1: addictive behavior, all of this occurring with any individual who
Speaker 1: played the game. And then, uh, and while this is
Speaker 1: going on, there like mysterious men in black coming in
Speaker 1: and checking on the machines, perhaps getting some data out
Speaker 1: of them, and then all of a sudden, the machines
Speaker 1: vanish overnight and people were just left to whisper about
Speaker 1: what was the deal with the Polybia machines. Was it
Speaker 1: part of a government program to test, you know, adolescent minds.
Speaker 1: Was it something more nefarious? Was in an accident than
Speaker 1: then the government got interested in It's a pretty it's
Speaker 1: a pretty cool idea. It's kind of tron but better
Speaker 1: than like the Tron Legacy, uh sequel. Yeah, it And
Speaker 1: as you know, we both love the Tron Legacy sequel.
Speaker 1: We've talked about it on the show before, but this
Speaker 1: sounds like a great hook. Yeah. I mean it also
Speaker 1: reminds one of another film from the tron Ish era,
Speaker 1: that same sort of genre of of let's make a
Speaker 1: film about a crazy video game, and that being The
Speaker 1: Last Starfighter. Yeah, that was exactly what I was thinking.
Speaker 1: Where it's been a long time since I've seen it.
Speaker 1: I loved it as a kid. But the Arcade Machine
Speaker 1: is like a recruitment device for an alien civilization if
Speaker 1: I remember correctly. Like the way it works is if
Speaker 1: you get the highest scorer on there, then this like
Speaker 1: alien armada comes to Earth and recruits you because they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: you are so good at this video game that you're
Speaker 1: actually going to be like an amazing pilot. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: was a fun flick. I may have to check it
Speaker 1: out again some day. But this urban legend led to
Speaker 1: UH concerning Polybius, led to a string of video games
Speaker 1: that adapted the Polybius title, and there was even a
Speaker 1: Simpsons reference. And I believe two thousands six thereabouts now
Speaker 1: investigations into the any reality behind Polybius, it tends to
Speaker 1: point towards two thousand one is the starting point and
Speaker 1: it was probably created by a guy named by the
Speaker 1: name of Kurt Kohler as an intentional effort to drive
Speaker 1: traffic to coin opt dot org. UH. This according to
Speaker 1: Stuart Brown, the man behind the Ahoy video series. You
Speaker 1: looked into it so. I also read where a skeptic
Speaker 1: Brian Dunning believes that the roots of the prepasta pasta
Speaker 1: here probably emerged from distortions of real life complications UH
Speaker 1: surrounding video games. UH. Particularly apparently when Tempest first came out,
Speaker 1: this was the you know, the the Atari game. UH.
Speaker 1: There were some cases of quote un video game related
Speaker 1: illness is associated with it. UH. And then there were
Speaker 1: some accounts of video game related illnesses that popped up
Speaker 1: in the Portland's area around one and in nine two
Speaker 1: we had the first video game known to have coincided
Speaker 1: with the death of a player coincided not you know,
Speaker 1: caused the death, but there was the heart attack death
Speaker 1: of eighteen year old Peter Brukowski in Kalmut City, Illinois.
Speaker 1: This reminds me of something we talked about recently on
Speaker 1: the show. I can't remember what episode it came up in,
Speaker 1: but the Pokemon panic in Japan and how that was
Speaker 1: deemed to be like a moment of mass hysteria. So
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's possibly what the what caused this legend.
Speaker 1: It could be because the other side here is you
Speaker 1: have this technology that's suddenly everywhere and it involves the children.
Speaker 1: You have news accounts of some of these uh you know,
Speaker 1: incidents taking place, and then down the line, it's easy
Speaker 1: to wrap this all up in an attractive urban legend,
Speaker 1: perhaps in the case of Polybia's taking existing urban legends
Speaker 1: and just simply tying them up in a nice boat,
Speaker 1: which is something you see with a lot of actual
Speaker 1: creepy pasta. Because it's easy to see why all of
Speaker 1: this is compelling, right because video games they do enact
Speaker 1: to strange power over the players. In many cases, you know,
Speaker 1: they give us this slow state. Uh, you're you're generally
Speaker 1: dropped into a very limited world of fixed and often
Speaker 1: black and white objectives. And there's sometimes there's even like
Speaker 1: the game itself is telling you what to do. Either
Speaker 1: either you're on the rails or there's some of the
Speaker 1: cases there's a voice in your head telling you this
Speaker 1: is what we're doing, now go do it. Achieve the objective.
Speaker 1: Here's your here's your reward in video game coins. So
Speaker 1: on top of that, of course, I think most of
Speaker 1: us are probably familiar with some of the symptoms that
Speaker 1: occasionally pop up from excessive video game playing or video
Speaker 1: game addiction. So it might be say, strange blisters on
Speaker 1: your on your bum from setting in a odd position,
Speaker 1: and headache, I strain, neck and back pain, digestive problems,
Speaker 1: sweep problems, sadness, drowsiness, even palpitations, and this kind of
Speaker 1: thing happens. I've also seen some of these same symptoms
Speaker 1: line up with just say excessive computer use, uh you know,
Speaker 1: too much time setting at a computer for a for
Speaker 1: a job or um you know. I I've known people
Speaker 1: who ended up like screwing up their back a little
Speaker 1: bit from being in the same position while researching, reading
Speaker 1: a book or something. Yeah, no, this is definitely something. Um.
Speaker 1: So I am a recovering World of Warcraft addict. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I definitely am familiar with all of these
Speaker 1: symptoms because I would like play for like twelve hours
Speaker 1: straight with my friends, like almost all through the night. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it was not good. Those are not good days
Speaker 1: for me. Uh. But But also like sometimes when I'm
Speaker 1: working during the day, for instance, on this episode, I'll
Speaker 1: sit there and I'll just be so into the research
Speaker 1: and typing everything up and reading and reading and typing
Speaker 1: and typing, and I realized I haven't gotten up for
Speaker 1: a while, you know, And so I've actually tried to
Speaker 1: make it a point to get up once an hour
Speaker 1: and go outside and like, you know, let my eyes
Speaker 1: adjust to like natural height for a minute. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't also do you don't want to get those
Speaker 1: research ankles rese that's gonna be Yeah, when you and
Speaker 1: I are old men, they're going to discover like all
Speaker 1: kinds of new ailments of of what happens when you
Speaker 1: sit there and do research for too long. Now. I
Speaker 1: think one of the more fascinating interactions though, between computers
Speaker 1: and computer games and human health is one that seems
Speaker 1: very key to the polybius creepypasta here, and that is
Speaker 1: photosensitive epilepsy. Ah yeah, which is actually also connected to
Speaker 1: that Pokemon example. Yea, I brought up. Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 1: So people with the photosensitive epilepsy, they experience seizures, and seizures,
Speaker 1: of course, can involve you know, uh, muscles tensing up,
Speaker 1: the loss of consciousness, um loostening of the bladder, and
Speaker 1: other other physical conditions, and it can generally be just
Speaker 1: a quite a you know, a stressful and frightening experience.
Speaker 1: But people with photo of sensitive epilepsy, they can experience
Speaker 1: these seizures when exposed to flashing lights or bold contrasting
Speaker 1: visual patterns over exposure to a video game. Um, it's
Speaker 1: a it's a brain disorder that's caused by abnormal electrical
Speaker 1: activity in the brain, perhaps due to irregular neural wiring
Speaker 1: or neurotransmitter imbalance, and it's genetically linked. So about one
Speaker 1: in a hundred U S citizens have epilepsy. Out of those,
Speaker 1: only three to five percent have photosensitive epilepsy. And it's
Speaker 1: also more likely to affect people ages seven through nineteen,
Speaker 1: with males exhibiting a stronger tendency overall, but this meant
Speaker 1: might just be due to the populations in which in
Speaker 1: which they were looking and the time frame in which
Speaker 1: they were looking, in which the males are more likely
Speaker 1: to be playing a bunch of video that I was
Speaker 1: going to say that is like your target demo for well,
Speaker 1: it used to be your target demo for for video games. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure to what extent that has changed, especially
Speaker 1: since I mean used to if you're steering at a
Speaker 1: screen all the time time, you were probably either watching
Speaker 1: TV or playing video games. Obviously, now everyone's looking at
Speaker 1: screens all the time. This is true. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's funny. I think that to myself often, like after
Speaker 1: a full day or research, I'm like, what do I
Speaker 1: want to do? Well, I could sit down and watch TV,
Speaker 1: or I could play a video game while those are
Speaker 1: both looking at a screen. Again, and now even like
Speaker 1: if I want to read comics or read a book,
Speaker 1: it's a different that's another screen of Yeah, I have
Speaker 1: so many screens to look at. That's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I like the Kindle I have because it's it's yes,
Speaker 1: it's screen, but at least it's that it doesn't have
Speaker 1: a glow to it. My kindles the same. Yeah, but occasionally.
Speaker 1: Actually I did this just yesterday. I was like, after
Speaker 1: a long day of just looking at screens, I was like,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna just take a magazine into the bathtub. Perfect,
Speaker 1: perfect way to relax. Alright, So, given the triggers of
Speaker 1: pulsating lights here with the photo photo sensitive epilepsy, it's
Speaker 1: easy to think of it as a just a collision
Speaker 1: between human brains in our modern world of discos and
Speaker 1: video games, right, But the earliest possible case, if this
Speaker 1: goes back to ancient Greece where we have reports of
Speaker 1: an epileptic who would go into seizures, is a potter
Speaker 1: wheel was rotated in front of his eyes. Because you
Speaker 1: don't have to say, have flashing lights, but if you
Speaker 1: have light behind it and you have the pattern occurring,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a pattern of contrasting light. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: But even this you have to point out from an
Speaker 1: evolutionary standpoint, it's still kind of an invention of the
Speaker 1: modern world. We're talking about the wheel here, right, It's
Speaker 1: a It's something certainly we've had for a while, but
Speaker 1: have we haven't had it long enough to really impact
Speaker 1: human evolution. And even you'll find encounters where color can
Speaker 1: stimulate photosensitive epilepsy, generally reds and blues, And these are
Speaker 1: colors that are not the most common in the natural world.
Speaker 1: I mean, aside from the sky, which many argue is
Speaker 1: not truly blue. I mean, how much pure blue do
Speaker 1: you encounter in nature? How much pure red? Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I mean some flowers for sure, But you're right that
Speaker 1: they would be like a lower percentage, Like if you
Speaker 1: were going to do like a color swatch Pellett of
Speaker 1: like your walk through the woods, they would be far
Speaker 1: smaller than all the greens and browns and earth tones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and they would ultimately be easy to avoid and would
Speaker 1: not have an impact on evolutionary biology. But I have
Speaker 1: to point out the same thing goes for a lot
Speaker 1: of the stimuli, specific stimuli that people with photosensitive epilepsy encounter,
Speaker 1: Like in many cases it's something specific enough that they
Speaker 1: can readily avoid it, and then on top of that
Speaker 1: their anti epileptic medications that are taken as well. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then also we mentioned the age range, like as
Speaker 1: people get older, it seems like there are in many
Speaker 1: cases less susceptible to this. However, there is a case
Speaker 1: worth mentioning, and we've I believe we've touched on this
Speaker 1: on the podcast before, and that is the recent case
Speaker 1: of Newsweek senior editor Kurt I Convolved, who was attacked
Speaker 1: on Twitter. The incident here is that another Twitter user
Speaker 1: disagreed with some of Kurt's political tweets and and knowing
Speaker 1: that he has had photosensitive epilepsy, tweeted a flashing gift
Speaker 1: at him, which resulted in a seizure. So it's um,
Speaker 1: it's a it's a revolting case, but illuminating in light
Speaker 1: of everything we've talked about and about these triggers and
Speaker 1: the ramifications of these triggers in an increasingly technological world. Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna have to go back and listen to our
Speaker 1: episode about why is social media making us crazy? And
Speaker 1: then we'll be right back. Yeah, Okay, I listened to it, right.
Speaker 1: Are you ready to move on? Yeah? Yeah. That's basically
Speaker 1: polybius here, the video game that allegedly drives one insane
Speaker 1: or or causes some sort of health problems. But of course,
Speaker 1: we have plenty of examples of video games that can
Speaker 1: cause at least certain members of the population. Uh, various
Speaker 1: health health problems. Isn't Polybius also the name of a
Speaker 1: Michael Shay short story. Oh yeah, I believe it is.
Speaker 1: It's a science fiction that's the name of this sciencefic,
Speaker 1: one of a short fiction collection. Yeah. When I first
Speaker 1: saw this, I thought that's what it was, because you
Speaker 1: let me borrow that book. Um. Cool, that's a neat
Speaker 1: little tie in just for fun for us and maybe
Speaker 1: for other people out there who are Michael Shay fans.
Speaker 1: We're big Michael Shay NERD's here. All right, Well, let's
Speaker 1: let's hit another one. Then before we take a break.
Speaker 1: You have you you have another specimen from the SCP. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is SCP six eight two, also known as the
Speaker 1: Hard to Destroy Reptile and actually linking it to Michael say,
Speaker 1: this seems like the kind of thing Michael Shay would
Speaker 1: come up within his work. It's like it's a straight
Speaker 1: up monster, but is like the scientifically fascinating monster when
Speaker 1: you kind of apply real world biology to it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Michael Shay loved biology. I mean it's evident in his work.
Speaker 1: So many stories involve some sort of unique, uh monster
Speaker 1: biology that's clearly patterned after say parasitic wasps for behavior, spiders, etcetera. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so in this instance, again I'm just summarizing here rather
Speaker 1: than reading you the whole creepy pasta. This is an
Speaker 1: intelligent reptile and it hates all life forms. It goes
Speaker 1: into a rage state anytime it's spoken to, and it
Speaker 1: has the following superpowers. It can regenerate by consuming any
Speaker 1: type of matter, whether inorganic or organic, and its digestion
Speaker 1: seems to be aided by gills that are inside its
Speaker 1: nostrils that can remove any usable matter from a liquid solution.
Speaker 1: So subsequently it can't be killed. It has super high strength, speed,
Speaker 1: and reflexes. I wrote here essentially we're talking about wolverine,
Speaker 1: right like this is this is a classic Hugh Jackman
Speaker 1: logan wolverine type stuff. The lizard here though, it can
Speaker 1: keep moving and speaking even if eight seven percent of
Speaker 1: its body has been destroyed. So this is like this
Speaker 1: fearsome monster and creepy pasta lore. And basically they say,
Speaker 1: like you have to contain this thing in like a
Speaker 1: pool of hydrochloric acid at all times and it'll like
Speaker 1: continually be regenerating, but at least it will be like
Speaker 1: so constantly disabled that you can contain it that way,
Speaker 1: and I love that it's just a rage lizard, that's
Speaker 1: just an enraged lizard that hates you. Man, If you
Speaker 1: actually go to the Creepy Pasta page for this again,
Speaker 1: it's s CP six eight two, there's demonstrations of some
Speaker 1: of the dialogue with this creature that shows just how
Speaker 1: much it hates everything. Uh. Now, of course this made
Speaker 1: me think of reptile regeneration, and so I wanted to
Speaker 1: look into that and see, like, just how possible would
Speaker 1: reptile regeneration be at this level. Okay, so we've all
Speaker 1: heard stories about lizards that regrow limbs or they regrow
Speaker 1: their tails. In fact, regeneration is mostly common in invertebrates
Speaker 1: like worms and insects. Crustaceans and insects can actually spontaneously
Speaker 1: lose and replace their body parts in a process that's
Speaker 1: called auto tommy. But sponges and starfish well, so no,
Speaker 1: they can replace and repair their limbs. Starfish can even
Speaker 1: regenerate into a new animal sometimes, and we've discussed this
Speaker 1: on the show before. Another one of my favorites. We're
Speaker 1: revisiting a lot of greatest hits today, The hydra uh
Speaker 1: is such an amazing little animal. It can tear open
Speaker 1: its own flesh to create these mouths that they then
Speaker 1: shove their prey into before they heal back over their flesh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the footage of this of this phenomenon is wonderful because
Speaker 1: it's it's like something that's it's pure lovecraft, because the
Speaker 1: rip just gets wider and wider until the mouth is
Speaker 1: larger than the hydro west and you feel like it's
Speaker 1: just gonna swallow your soul through this comp s. It's upsetting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I would definitely not want to encounter human sized
Speaker 1: hydro that's for sure. Um mammals we can regenerate a
Speaker 1: little bit like deer. They can regrow their antlers right,
Speaker 1: and sometimes humans can regenerate internal organs like the liver,
Speaker 1: but we mainly we don't regenerate. And the reason why
Speaker 1: is because our wounds are sealed off with thickened mats
Speaker 1: of collagen. The scars ward off infection. But they make
Speaker 1: it really difficult to completely heal because the collagen is
Speaker 1: severing the nerves and those can't penetrate the barrier to reconnect.
Speaker 1: So it seems like biology is one of two ways
Speaker 1: you either get to scar or you get to regenerate. Now, scars,
Speaker 1: when you look at your scars like I've got some
Speaker 1: scars on my hands and stuff, they're essentially just overgrowth
Speaker 1: of our normal fibrous scaffolding, the stuff that supports all
Speaker 1: of our tissues. Right now, all kinds of lizards can regenerate,
Speaker 1: but not all lizards can. Crocodiles and snakes don't seem
Speaker 1: to be able to. And in fact, the photo of
Speaker 1: this scp rage monster lizard, it's essentially a crocodile, that's
Speaker 1: what it looks like. But iguanas, geckos, salamanders, larval frogs,
Speaker 1: and toads, they have all demonstrated the ability to regenerate.
Speaker 1: In many cases, the regrown limb will separate from the muscles,
Speaker 1: the blood supply, and the nerves. The bones they actually
Speaker 1: regrow not as bones but as cartilaginous tubes. Uh. And
Speaker 1: so this isn't instantaneous. It can take, for instance, and
Speaker 1: annul a lizard sixty days just to regenerate a functional tail,
Speaker 1: and the process is stressful because the lizard has to
Speaker 1: use a lot of energy to do this. It can
Speaker 1: even lower their social status, among other lizards, but the
Speaker 1: less stress the lizard deals with, the faster the stump
Speaker 1: will heal. So, you know, wants to go to a
Speaker 1: little quiet place, you know, be in the dark and
Speaker 1: just sit there and regenerate. You know, some lizards can
Speaker 1: only do this once, while other lizards can shed and
Speaker 1: regenerate over and over and over again. Now, interestingly, researchers
Speaker 1: at Arizona State University in furteen were able to pinpoint
Speaker 1: the genes responsible for annual lizard tail regeneration, and of
Speaker 1: the twenty three thousand genes, they narrowed it down to
Speaker 1: three hundred and twenty six that were quote turned on
Speaker 1: during regeneration. While they expected this to be mostly genes
Speaker 1: that were in the tip where the tail was regrowing,
Speaker 1: they actually found that cells dividing, we're all over the lizard,
Speaker 1: including in its muscle, its cartilage, it's spinal cord, and
Speaker 1: its skin. They also found get this, of those three
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty six genes that were responsible for regeneration,
Speaker 1: nearly all of them are present in us in human
Speaker 1: beings as well, So in theory, we should be able
Speaker 1: to do the same thing. So they're hoping their research
Speaker 1: will help find a way to help with birth defects,
Speaker 1: spinal cord injuries, and possibly arthritis. Now, some of these
Speaker 1: genes seemed to be involved in embryonic development and in
Speaker 1: wound healing. The genes involved in regeneration all seemed to
Speaker 1: be part of the w n T pathway. I think
Speaker 1: that's how you pronounce it. It's just wouldn't it's just
Speaker 1: produced like that in the literature that controls stem cells
Speaker 1: in organs like our brain, our hair follicles, and all
Speaker 1: our blood vessels. So researchers they've identified a type of
Speaker 1: cell that's really important for tissue regeneration. That's the satellite cell.
Speaker 1: And these satellite cells are also more common and nole
Speaker 1: a lizards. So all right, let's apply this to our
Speaker 1: reptile monster here. It sounds like as a reptile, it
Speaker 1: probably has the same ability that many lizards that we've
Speaker 1: described have, but this is at a more accelerated rate.
Speaker 1: It probably doesn't scar at all. And based on that
Speaker 1: tween genetic discovery, I would guess maybe this reptile has
Speaker 1: even more genes that quote turn on and allow it
Speaker 1: cells to divide, and maybe it has more satellite cells too.
Speaker 1: But it seems like it would need to consume a lot,
Speaker 1: a lot of energy to keep this up right, So
Speaker 1: what is it eating? And it's said in the Creepy
Speaker 1: pasta that you know it can convert any matter into
Speaker 1: energy essentially, right. Um, it makes me think of this
Speaker 1: Legion of Superheroes character called matter Eater Lad, So maybe
Speaker 1: this is a this is like an evil version of that. Okay,
Speaker 1: what also reminds me, I think there's another stp anentity
Speaker 1: that's like a living thing without any without an orifice.
Speaker 1: So yeah, we talked about that in one of the
Speaker 1: other ones. So like there's the idea, Well, it must
Speaker 1: have like an extra dimensional portion of its body that
Speaker 1: eats in another world. Yeah. Well here I turned to
Speaker 1: just normal digestion and matter conversion to try to figure
Speaker 1: this out. So a brief primer on simply how we
Speaker 1: and most other living things digest. We break down food
Speaker 1: and I'm putting that in quotes because remember, this thing
Speaker 1: can eat organic stuff, but we just break them down
Speaker 1: into smaller substances and then we extract nutrients from them
Speaker 1: that gives us energy to develop. So there's three micronutrients
Speaker 1: for this energy, carbohydrates, proteins, and lipids. We also make
Speaker 1: use of vitamins and materials, and then through chemical old digestion,
Speaker 1: which is after we've chewed our food and our stomach
Speaker 1: has churned it all down. There's enzymes in our bodies
Speaker 1: that break the chemical bonds and change the structure of
Speaker 1: the molecules involved. And the human mechanical process that also
Speaker 1: involves moistening that starts the actual chemical enzyme breakdown. Right,
Speaker 1: our saliva is sort of the beginning of that process.
Speaker 1: So okay, let's turn back to this lizard monster SCP
Speaker 1: Nine six two. It seems that this reptiles digestion is
Speaker 1: aided by turning substance into a liquid. Remember it mentioned
Speaker 1: that it breathes in liquid and then it takes in
Speaker 1: the substances through gills that then distribute the micronutrients around
Speaker 1: to be converted into energy. So what I'm wondering, does
Speaker 1: it choose stuff up and then vomit it back up
Speaker 1: and then snort it down through its gills somehow it's
Speaker 1: turning like if it's eating rocks, it's turning those rocks
Speaker 1: into a liquid somehow, and then it's bringing the liquid
Speaker 1: in through the gills and its nose it's quite confusing.
Speaker 1: Or maybe there's just a little hole in between its
Speaker 1: mouth and its nostrils and that the liquid goes up
Speaker 1: and filters in through the gills that way. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's certainly not that far removed from some of the
Speaker 1: feeding practices of insects. I mean, the famous one being,
Speaker 1: of course, the fly. And then the other thing here
Speaker 1: is how powerful must the acidic enzymes in its digestive
Speaker 1: system be that allow it to break down anything? Right?
Speaker 1: And that makes me think they keep talking about in
Speaker 1: this creepy aposta, oh we hydrochloric acid is the only
Speaker 1: way we can deal with this thing. And I'm thinking, well,
Speaker 1: maybe the hydrochloric acid is breaking down its external body
Speaker 1: parts on the outside, but it's probably got some kind
Speaker 1: of acidic shielding inside its stomach and digestive system. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, much like humans do exactly. Yeah, So this
Speaker 1: thing classic example if you just combine reptile regeneration and
Speaker 1: you kind of accelerate it to fantastic levels, and then
Speaker 1: you consider just how digest it works, which is pretty
Speaker 1: fantastic when you think about it. So, okay, we've hit
Speaker 1: three of them, three creepy pastas. Let's take one more break,
Speaker 1: we'll come back and we'll get our last one in.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. So the final creepy pasta for
Speaker 1: this episode is one known as The Grifter, and I
Speaker 1: want to just give everyone a heads up here in
Speaker 1: this particular portion of the podcast, we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: I mean, we're we're pretty PG show, but this one
Speaker 1: is going to involve enough films a little bit. So
Speaker 1: if you need to check out at this point, we
Speaker 1: respect that. And if you want to come back in
Speaker 1: when you're when the listening audience is more appropriate, you
Speaker 1: may do that as well. Okay, alright, So I keep
Speaker 1: I kept coming back to this one though, because there's
Speaker 1: something kind of pure about it, you know, something something uncut.
Speaker 1: The versions of The Grifter that I kept coming across,
Speaker 1: they don't even have the embellishments of character story. It's
Speaker 1: simply the side you that, hey, there's a video out
Speaker 1: there called The Grifter, and it's sort of a super
Speaker 1: cut of disturbing images that contain, uh, you know, actual
Speaker 1: footage of child deaths and creepy puppets, which seems like
Speaker 1: an object of position because on one hand, child deaths
Speaker 1: are horrible and they should not be filmed, and they
Speaker 1: are filmed, and that's probably suspectus. There was almost certainly
Speaker 1: a crime committed here, right, and creepy. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, creepy puppets are just creepy puppets that are
Speaker 1: just good, wholesome fun. Uh So I don't see why
Speaker 1: I should react to the creepy puppet in the same
Speaker 1: way I'm reacting to a film. Just sounds like a
Speaker 1: like a video goo losh, Yeah, to sort of overwhelm
Speaker 1: your senses. But this was definitely a theme for a while.
Speaker 1: It still is, right, I mean, ring and Ringo obviously
Speaker 1: kicked it off the video drome transmission. Yeah, And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of literary fiction that I've read lately that's
Speaker 1: kind of like meta horror analysis. In fact, Joe Hill
Speaker 1: has one that's like this about like watching horror movies.
Speaker 1: Actually read this book by Jema Files recently called Experimental Film.
Speaker 1: It's it's very similar. The whole kind of thing is
Speaker 1: just like there are these haunted things that you're watching, right, Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's um. It's really interesting because it it seems to emerge.
Speaker 1: The Grifter in particular, seems to emerge from two areas here,
Speaker 1: So the endearing urban myth of the snuff film, and
Speaker 1: of course the ever widening realm of recorded human experience,
Speaker 1: just the fact that there are there, there are films
Speaker 1: of human death. There, There is footage of human death
Speaker 1: out there on the Internet, and you don't even really
Speaker 1: have to look that hard to find it. Hell no,
Speaker 1: I mean, when we were growing up, even before there
Speaker 1: was really an internet, faces of deathless and I'll get
Speaker 1: to faces. Yeah, I saw face as a death when
Speaker 1: I was like, oh god, way too young and like
Speaker 1: a fourteen or fifteen. I don't think I ever saw them,
Speaker 1: but I remember I remember the VHS tapes, which was enough,
Speaker 1: you know, just to see the tapes and maybe if
Speaker 1: I got brave, you know, pick it up and read
Speaker 1: the back of it. Now. But before we get into
Speaker 1: either these areas though, it's of course worth remembering that
Speaker 1: footage of human deaths. Not only do they exists, but
Speaker 1: they've they've been with us for quite a while. Um.
Speaker 1: Among the older examples, you'll find botched performances, most famously
Speaker 1: friends uh Richild's nineteen twelve failed Eiffel Tower parachute jump.
Speaker 1: Uh And that's out there on YouTube as well, but
Speaker 1: you know, basically he was going to test out this
Speaker 1: parachute apparatus. It didn't work, he died, and there's film
Speaker 1: in footage of it. For non human animals, we have
Speaker 1: Thomas Edison's three filmed electrocution of Topsy the Elephant Man.
Speaker 1: You guys have talked about this on the show before,
Speaker 1: didn't you do like a whole episode on Yeah, Joe
Speaker 1: and Robert have another episode that's all about like electricity
Speaker 1: and religiosity. But man Thomas Edison did some really awful
Speaker 1: stuff basically to try to like promote his brand of electricity,
Speaker 1: including electrocuting human beings. Yeah, I mean, but as far
Speaker 1: as just Topsy goes, even though it's not a human
Speaker 1: like that, it's a pretty it's it's a pretty dark history. Now,
Speaker 1: if you follow all of this stuff with numerous assassinations,
Speaker 1: footage of war and violence, various performance or sports sports
Speaker 1: based fatalities, you end up having just quite a well
Speaker 1: of a filmed death. And then of course we eventually
Speaker 1: see filmed murders and suicides that also occur outside the
Speaker 1: confines of war. So as cameras grow more and more ubiquitous,
Speaker 1: the act of capturing life means inevitably capturing death as well.
Speaker 1: And I just mentioned recently on the Optography episode, I've
Speaker 1: got a whole book full of photos from the nineteenth
Speaker 1: century of dead bodies. That was because there was this
Speaker 1: fascination at the time with that would be kind of
Speaker 1: the best way to remember the person. They thought, right
Speaker 1: as like right before they were buried, they would get
Speaker 1: them very well dressed up the corpse and take a
Speaker 1: photo that the family would keep. You know, now, in
Speaker 1: all of this, okay, so we know the footage is
Speaker 1: out there, like some of it's on YouTube, especially the
Speaker 1: historic bits of footage. Other stuff is more buried away
Speaker 1: and darker portions of the web. But there is something
Speaker 1: creepy about just knowing that it's out there, that all
Speaker 1: of this stuff on the Internet is out there and
Speaker 1: it's just a few key strokes away if you are
Speaker 1: willing to glance in its direction. Right now, In all
Speaker 1: these cases though, we're talking about, you know about footage,
Speaker 1: footage of something that happened, or in some cases some
Speaker 1: of the violer examples, Yes it's somebody perpetrating a crime
Speaker 1: and filming it, but they are not exactly snuff films.
Speaker 1: It's there, they're not examples of film that contains an
Speaker 1: actual murder committed as an intentional part of the production
Speaker 1: for profit. It's not a murder stage for commercial purposes,
Speaker 1: which is terrifying and yet somehow believable idea. And it's
Speaker 1: tied directly to this urban legend of the snuff film.
Speaker 1: So what this makes me think of immediately is nine eleven.
Speaker 1: So when nine eleven happened, we've all heard the stories
Speaker 1: about how there were some victims who had to jump
Speaker 1: off of the building. Right, So the jumper is a famous,
Speaker 1: uh famous photograph of the individual jumping out of the
Speaker 1: tower exactly. Now, a lot of that footage did not
Speaker 1: show up in American media, especially after eleven happened, right
Speaker 1: we are media was definitely sanitized at that time. That's
Speaker 1: a whole another episode. But I was actually in Eastern
Speaker 1: Europe a couple of years after that, and I was
Speaker 1: in Krakow in Poland, and there was a gallery and
Speaker 1: it was all photos from nine eleven, including that one,
Speaker 1: you know, and they had blown it up and it
Speaker 1: basically the gallery sort of challenging you to look at
Speaker 1: this moment of horror and real death, but confront it
Speaker 1: in a way that American news media wasn't willing to.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I mean there are times when the photograph
Speaker 1: or film footage of actual human death has certainly been
Speaker 1: a poignant, you know, capture of of what it means
Speaker 1: to of in our modern world. I mean, I could
Speaker 1: we could sit here and list the various you know,
Speaker 1: assassinations or I mean a lot of them. I guess
Speaker 1: they're targeted political assassinations, political murders, big Vietnam footage. More recently,
Speaker 1: there was the it was the the the Russian ambassador
Speaker 1: to Turkey, Is that correct? It was a shot in
Speaker 1: the gallery and there was a journalist there and captured
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and they were they were powerful, award
Speaker 1: winning photographs of this this crime taking place. But again
Speaker 1: very different from they're not snuff films. Yeah, they're not
Speaker 1: designed to entice you. So let me let's get into
Speaker 1: this idea of the snuff film real quick. This is
Speaker 1: probably the only chance on the show we have to
Speaker 1: talk about about the the really interesting history of them.
Speaker 1: And again we're not going to get into explicit details
Speaker 1: of things here, but the term itself emerged in the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventies. Uh. In fact, ninety one, an allegation was
Speaker 1: made in Ed Sanders and the book The Family The
Speaker 1: Story of Charles Manson's Doom Buggy Attack Battalion, that's the
Speaker 1: actual title. Uh, And he charged that the family was
Speaker 1: involved in making films of this nature he called in right, yeah.
Speaker 1: He he charged that they were making quote unquote brutality films,
Speaker 1: and he later referred to these and coined the term
Speaker 1: snuff films. Now all he had to go on here,
Speaker 1: though it was a second hand rumor that he even
Speaker 1: he himself eventually refuted, but it was It was a
Speaker 1: fact that the family had stolen an NBC TV truck
Speaker 1: in the summer of sixty nine and kept one of
Speaker 1: the cameras around, but the film was all recovered in.
Speaker 1: Sanders himself later admitted that no footage of murders or
Speaker 1: of just of dead bodies ever materialized, but the idea
Speaker 1: was out there and uh. And the rise of adult
Speaker 1: cinema with actual scenes of sexual activity and horror cinema
Speaker 1: with an increasingly violent and bloody focus, this seemed to
Speaker 1: make it all the more possible, right, like, what are
Speaker 1: these filmmakers going to do next? And then we had
Speaker 1: one particular film that came along to just sort of
Speaker 1: push this to the next level. And that was the
Speaker 1: night eighteen seventy six film Snuff that was promoted and
Speaker 1: you know, put out there as if it were an
Speaker 1: actual snuff film. So the taglines for this one are,
Speaker 1: and you can look up the posters the picture they
Speaker 1: said could never be shown, the bloodiest thing that has
Speaker 1: ever happened in front of a camera, the film that
Speaker 1: could only be made in South America where life is cheap.
Speaker 1: We just sort of reddid this again recently with that.
Speaker 1: And you and I are not fans, but Eli rothscreen Inferno,
Speaker 1: which came out years ago, and it wasn't They didn't
Speaker 1: market as like this really happened, but there was sort
Speaker 1: of a like this could have really happened because we
Speaker 1: were filming actual tribes in South America that have never
Speaker 1: been filmed before and who knows what they're up to, right, Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: he was specifically playing with the legacy of Cannibal Holocaust,
Speaker 1: which is a film that came out after Snuff. That
Speaker 1: was all that also had this vibe of is it real?
Speaker 1: Is it is this a snuff film? Are these real
Speaker 1: dead bodies? Are real murders? And and it ended up
Speaker 1: being investigated, and of course there was no there's there's
Speaker 1: no fact. Yeah. But but snuff is interesting because in
Speaker 1: reality it was a combination of unreleased nineteen seventy footage.
Speaker 1: This is a movie called Slaughter that was actually the
Speaker 1: work of Michael and ROBERTA. Findlay. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you remember them, but they're a husband and wife exploitation
Speaker 1: duo that also gave us the nineteen seventy four film
Speaker 1: Shriek of the Mutilated, which is essentially a bigfoot film
Speaker 1: that we talked about on Trailer Talk. I don't think
Speaker 1: I was there, though maybe that was just so. It's
Speaker 1: the same couple, uh. Their film the film quality and
Speaker 1: the quality of the acting and production tends to be
Speaker 1: rather low in their work. But really but but but there,
Speaker 1: I think they were deceptively bright, at least enough from
Speaker 1: a marketing standpoint, and I think even to a limited
Speaker 1: extent from a storytelling standpoint. In Shriek of the Mutilate,
Speaker 1: it has a fabulous twist. But Slaughter just this movie
Speaker 1: dealt with a Manson inspired cult, had scenes of bloody death,
Speaker 1: and then when they repackaged it, they just added an
Speaker 1: end ending to it in which the woman seems to
Speaker 1: be murdered by the film crew. So it's kind of
Speaker 1: like a Holy Mountain moment where they break the fourth
Speaker 1: wall and it's like, oh, this was this isn't a
Speaker 1: movie at all, and the filmmakers are the real murderers here.
Speaker 1: So this like one of the things that I like
Speaker 1: about seventies horror cinema is that it was trying new
Speaker 1: things in ways that like a lot of other decades
Speaker 1: of horror cinema seemed to have been a little bit
Speaker 1: more conservative, but this was one of them, right. It
Speaker 1: was like the filmmakers were trying to see how far
Speaker 1: they could push the envelope and how that affected the audience, right.
Speaker 1: And I mean, I think the best example, the one
Speaker 1: that both you and I love, is Texas Chainsaw Massacre,
Speaker 1: which is clearly not real, right, but it's filmed in
Speaker 1: that nineteen seventies way. I wish there was like a
Speaker 1: way to encapsulate this with like the style of actual
Speaker 1: film that it's shot on and how the audio is recorded,
Speaker 1: but it's so organic and analog and raw. It has
Speaker 1: almost kind of a documentary vibe to it. Yet Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it came along at just the right time and
Speaker 1: in the wake of, or in the same time period
Speaker 1: of some of these uh these films that we're discussing
Speaker 1: here now. When Snuff came out, it was almost immediately
Speaker 1: out as a as a hoax, both that year in
Speaker 1: Variety magazine and also due to an L A p
Speaker 1: D investigation. It just simply doesn't hold up to close scrutiny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you you watch it and you realize, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: fake blood, this is this is a horror movie, and
Speaker 1: not a particularly good one, but the reputation stuck with
Speaker 1: Snuff for a long time, and as argued by uh
Speaker 1: Ethene Johnson and Eric Schaefer Uh in uh their piece
Speaker 1: Software Hardcore Snuff as a Crisis in Meaning, which came
Speaker 1: out in the Journal of Film and Video, they said
Speaker 1: that this uh part of this film's success was that
Speaker 1: there was just a lot of genre confusion. It was
Speaker 1: hard to classify it as anything else because it wasn't
Speaker 1: really that explicit, not as explicit as other horror movies
Speaker 1: were coming out at that time. It certainly wasn't pornographic,
Speaker 1: so it didn't have that sheen to it, but it
Speaker 1: just confused people. And then there was this idea that
Speaker 1: it was real. Um, which I think is one of
Speaker 1: the elements with a lot of footage of actual violence
Speaker 1: and actual death, is the disconnect between what these acts
Speaker 1: look like in reality versus what they look like in
Speaker 1: cinematic portrayals. So in a way, by if you're not
Speaker 1: that great of a filmmaker, you don't have a great
Speaker 1: effects team, you're able to perhaps hit that area of
Speaker 1: uncertainty where people are like, oh my goodness, that really
Speaker 1: didn't look like a shooting. Maybe that was a shooting
Speaker 1: because real shootings don't look like movie shootings. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's an interesting point too, and maybe why the seventies
Speaker 1: was such a like culmination of this kind of stuff,
Speaker 1: but also just that like we were getting into a
Speaker 1: phase where effects were getting better, film quality was getting better,
Speaker 1: and then obviously like the production of such kind of
Speaker 1: things was was going into like bigger studio investments, right,
Speaker 1: So all the more money that was put into it
Speaker 1: made it look less real. Yeah, but of course it was.
Speaker 1: It was all it was all production. This also makes
Speaker 1: me think I'm obsessed with the show right now, mind Hunter,
Speaker 1: which is on Netflix. Yeah, this is the yeah, the
Speaker 1: serial killer show. Yeah, it's all about how the FBI
Speaker 1: is in the early seventies, is trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how to come up with like a working behavioral science
Speaker 1: understanding of serial and that period of time was also
Speaker 1: like that, right, like all this stuff, and Manson has
Speaker 1: mentioned right in the first episode of that, where they're
Speaker 1: just trying to understand these horrific psychopathic acts, right, and
Speaker 1: they can't wrap their heads around because they don't want
Speaker 1: a language to you. And I think pop culture was
Speaker 1: trying to do it in this way, while maybe the
Speaker 1: FBI was trying to do it in their own way,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's interesting. One of the things that's
Speaker 1: interesting about why mind Hunter is now from our perspective
Speaker 1: of like forty plus years of police procedurals where we
Speaker 1: all sort of know the nomenclature of serial killers that like,
Speaker 1: when you're watching it, you're like, oh, yeah, it's so obvious,
Speaker 1: but they don't quite get it yet because they're they're
Speaker 1: literally unfamiliar with any of this. Yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: new day, and what was happening seemed to be defying
Speaker 1: typical patterns, typical lack classifications, and you see solving in reality,
Speaker 1: and you saw it in art as well. Yeah. Now
Speaker 1: this of course leads you just this legacy of the
Speaker 1: idea there's snuff films somewhere out there, someone's making snuff films.
Speaker 1: But it's important to note that there there are no
Speaker 1: true snuff films. There are no films in which someone
Speaker 1: is intentionally murdered as part of a commercial exercise. There
Speaker 1: and this has been investigated by journalists, this has been
Speaker 1: investigated by law enforcement agency. I believe it was investigative
Speaker 1: by Nicholas Cage in that movie eight Millimeter, Yes, which
Speaker 1: I remember enjoying back in the day. It as a
Speaker 1: oh it had what's his name? The the European actor
Speaker 1: who played ever seen Oh God, it's it's actually tremendously
Speaker 1: fun because you have Peter stormare one of my favorites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think his name is like something Velvet or something.
Speaker 1: And he's the guy that's making these snuff films and
Speaker 1: he's he's just acting over the top. And at the
Speaker 1: at the end spoiler for eight Millimeter, he he's shot.
Speaker 1: And I remember this because he's like, oh I'm bleeding,
Speaker 1: I'm dying. It's not supposed to happen like this. I
Speaker 1: wanted something more cinematic and then he says machine killed him,
Speaker 1: killed him. All he's talking to this sort of the
Speaker 1: the gimp murder character and the we should just have
Speaker 1: a whole Peter stormayor trailer talk episode. He's the best.
Speaker 1: He's fabulous, Like the movie Constantine. I've Constantine everything except
Speaker 1: for his saying he's only in it for five minutes.
Speaker 1: But my wife and I still to this day will
Speaker 1: quote him as Satan in Constantine. Yeah he's so good, alright,
Speaker 1: so so yeah. Again, there are no snuff films people
Speaker 1: have looked into it, but that. But I think the idea,
Speaker 1: the reason that that the snuff films or even stuff
Speaker 1: like The Grifter, the reason it resonates is because we
Speaker 1: are inclined to glance at the horror to rubber neck
Speaker 1: on the highway and you maybe just clink on some
Speaker 1: sort of suspect link um. And for some people who
Speaker 1: goes further. There's a two thousand twelve Verge article that
Speaker 1: explore the topic of gore fans and and it summarized
Speaker 1: that such individuals share quote, a compulsive curiosity about human
Speaker 1: nature and frailty, and a firm belief that the mainstream
Speaker 1: media does a disservice by censoring quote what's really going on?
Speaker 1: And uh and and I think there's some truth to that,
Speaker 1: because for the most part, we are removed from the
Speaker 1: physical reality of death. We do that through the way
Speaker 1: that we treat the dead and how we compartmentalize them
Speaker 1: within the funeral industry. And like we said earlier, death
Speaker 1: in film and TV is not necessarily something that's gonna
Speaker 1: line up with the real experience of murder and violence
Speaker 1: and death. Man. I know, I know we don't really
Speaker 1: have the opportunity to do this, but I kind of
Speaker 1: want to do like a whole podcast, not just an episode,
Speaker 1: like a podcast series, all about what we've talked about
Speaker 1: it with just this last Creepy Pasta, because I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot to unpack there, like humans, uh, both
Speaker 1: uncomfortable y and fascination with visions of death. It's undeniable,
Speaker 1: all right. So there you have it. A fourth Creepy
Speaker 1: Pasta is now in the books, it's boxed up, ready
Speaker 1: for the vault. And uh and hopefully it'll help everyone
Speaker 1: out there, uh, you know, cap off their their Halloween
Speaker 1: seasonal listening as well. Yeah. And in fact, I think
Speaker 1: this is going to publish actually right after Halloween, so
Speaker 1: we're giving you a special treaty. We went, we went
Speaker 1: one over. Well, it's still ourselves. I feel like that
Speaker 1: week between, you know it encompasses Halloween and All Saints Day.
Speaker 1: It's still Halloween, keeping Thanksgiving weeks weeks out for me,
Speaker 1: what is it a well, pish not that's in a
Speaker 1: may actually, but you know it's the Witches week. Anyways, Hey,
Speaker 1: all of those other creepy Posta episodes that we've been
Speaker 1: mentioning throughout this if you liked this one, you'll probably
Speaker 1: like those two creepy Pasta one, two, and three. They're
Speaker 1: all on stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. They
Speaker 1: will be in the show notes for this episode. But hey,
Speaker 1: this is the website. Everything's on there that we've been
Speaker 1: talking about this episode, the podcast that we've done, all
Speaker 1: those videos, including the horse hair video we talked about,
Speaker 1: and then also Roberts blog posts, which are the hidden
Speaker 1: gem secrets of stuff to blow your mind. If you're
Speaker 1: a real stuff to Blow your Mind fan, you're gonna
Speaker 1: want to check those out. And if you just want
Speaker 1: to get in touch with this directly, if you want
Speaker 1: to chat with us about creepy pastas, recommend creepy pastas,
Speaker 1: or you know your give your thoughts on some of
Speaker 1: the movies we've mentioned here. You can simply email us
Speaker 1: that blow the mind and how stuff works dot com
Speaker 1: for more on this and thousands of other topics. Does
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