Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from house Stop
Speaker 1: works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Christian Sager and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: our regular host Robert Lamb is out on vacation this week.
Speaker 1: So this is Baby's first solo flight. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: our first time the two of us since we joined
Speaker 1: the show early in the two of us doing an
Speaker 1: episode without Robert, and we knew this was coming up
Speaker 1: because it was a scheduled vacation. We also knew that
Speaker 1: The X Files is coming back on January. This isn't
Speaker 1: a commercial. I didn't get paid by Fox to do
Speaker 1: this January. I think it's a Sunday Joe and I
Speaker 1: are crazy X Files fans. We basically talked about the
Speaker 1: X Files. I would say at least once a day
Speaker 1: with each other. Yeah, we've referenced in on the show
Speaker 1: a decent amount of times too. And I think that's
Speaker 1: been basically because pretty much since we took over as
Speaker 1: as hosts on the show. I think we've both been
Speaker 1: going back through the back catalog of of the X
Speaker 1: Files on Netflix. My wife Rachel and I have been
Speaker 1: watching them and it has been so much fun. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm the same. I've been rewatching them along with comal
Speaker 1: Non Johnny's podcast, The X Files Files, uh and just
Speaker 1: loving every second of it. But um so, this is
Speaker 1: our two part X Files extravaganza where we're going to
Speaker 1: talk about the science of the X Files. Really kind
Speaker 1: of the perfect angle for stuff to blow your mind, right,
Speaker 1: because it's weird, it's interesting, it's sort of about the
Speaker 1: strangeness of reality, and and it hits all of our
Speaker 1: big themes here. I'd i'd say what we do on
Speaker 1: this show is science the bizarre and big questions and mysteries,
Speaker 1: and that's sort of what the show is all about,
Speaker 1: though within with an admittedly conspiratorial kind of angle. If
Speaker 1: you're not familiar with The X Files, we hope you'll
Speaker 1: still be able to enjoy this episode anyway. So just
Speaker 1: to give a brief set up of what the show is,
Speaker 1: there are two FBI agents named Molder and Scully. Molder
Speaker 1: is David Duchovny. Scully is Gillian Anderson Jillian or Gillian Jillian.
Speaker 1: I think it depends because uh, you know, she's she's
Speaker 1: I believe, like half British or something like that, So
Speaker 1: maybe it's Gillian when she's on The Fall and Jillian
Speaker 1: when she's on Hannibal. I'll just have to call her Scully.
Speaker 1: So Molder and Scully are are investigating paranormal phenomena for
Speaker 1: the FBI. And Moulder is a true believer. He believes
Speaker 1: in whatever you could believe in. He believes in its
Speaker 1: psychic powers, alien abductions, pyrokinesis, whatever it is. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: on board. And Scully is a skeptic. She's a scientific skeptic,
Speaker 1: and she always wants to come up with an explanation
Speaker 1: of phenomena based on what we actually know about science,
Speaker 1: rather than referring to unproven phenomena that are just sort
Speaker 1: of speculative, like alien abductions, and is usually trying to
Speaker 1: find some kind of empirical way to figure out what happened,
Speaker 1: and whereas Moulder just goes with these hunches. And let's
Speaker 1: be honest here, like nine times out of ten, mulders
Speaker 1: hunch is current. It's more than nine times out of ten,
Speaker 1: it's every single time we were we were struggling to
Speaker 1: think of an episode where the skeptical viewpoint turns out
Speaker 1: to be correct. It never does, you, I think there's
Speaker 1: a couple and the Scullies character. Along the way. As
Speaker 1: she has exposed somewhere and more of this stuff, she
Speaker 1: becomes less of a skeptic and more of like she's
Speaker 1: willing to believe as long as there's quantifiable evidence available
Speaker 1: to her, well as one should be. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: sort of the spirit of skepticism. It's not that you
Speaker 1: should never believe, but you shouldn't believe until until you've
Speaker 1: got a good reason to. That reminds me at my
Speaker 1: desktop here at work on my laptop that I'm reading
Speaker 1: off of now, it's that picture of Scully, and it says,
Speaker 1: our lady of skepticism. She is. She is a wonderful
Speaker 1: patron saint and a good guiding light for us on
Speaker 1: this show. Because while, as we've said on the show
Speaker 1: The X Files, it's pretty much always the paranoia a
Speaker 1: mole or the aliens or whatever that turns out to
Speaker 1: be true, what we do on stuff to blow your
Speaker 1: mind is often look at strange phenomenon and try to
Speaker 1: understand what a scientific explanation for that phenomena is or
Speaker 1: could be. Yeah, I think if Scully was born like
Speaker 1: twenty you know, years later, she would have been a
Speaker 1: great podcast host rather than at the I Agent, she
Speaker 1: probably would have found herself working at How Stuff Works.
Speaker 1: She's very she's very taciturn um. So we should mention
Speaker 1: at the top here that we have one primary resource, uh,
Speaker 1: that we're using on these episodes, and we we'd like
Speaker 1: to give a shout out to that, especially that we're
Speaker 1: gonna bring in some other sources to but our but
Speaker 1: our best resource on this was a book by Gene
Speaker 1: Cavelos called The Science of the X Files. It was
Speaker 1: published in Gene Cavelos is an astrophysicist and mathematician now
Speaker 1: a science and science fiction writer. And I was, I've
Speaker 1: been enjoying this book. It's great, isn't it. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a well researched book. One thing about it though, is
Speaker 1: that it was written in nine and playing of science
Speaker 1: has changed since then. So we'll also be trying to
Speaker 1: update and incorporate new sources to go along with some
Speaker 1: of the leads that she established in this book, which
Speaker 1: by a large the double check whether the facts that
Speaker 1: she said in nine were either still accurate or maybe
Speaker 1: there had been some new scientific discoveries since then. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And there was another book there there were two books
Speaker 1: that were published in the nineties about the science of
Speaker 1: the X Files. It was such a popular show, then
Speaker 1: it makes sense. The other one is called The Real
Speaker 1: Science of the X Files Microbes, Meteorites and Mutants. And
Speaker 1: unfortunately we couldn't get a hold of a copy of this,
Speaker 1: and you know, I stupidly was like, oh, yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: just download one of these to my Kindle or something
Speaker 1: like that. Note they're not available on Kindle. They're out
Speaker 1: of print. But luckily the local library here and we
Speaker 1: we live in while I live Indicatur, Georgia, you're in
Speaker 1: Atlanta now, uh, but it had a copy, so I
Speaker 1: was able to reserve it and we've been sharing it
Speaker 1: and it's you know, I gotta say, not only is
Speaker 1: it great for these episodes that we're going to do
Speaker 1: about the science of the X Files, but there are
Speaker 1: topics in there that she just kind of casually brings
Speaker 1: up that I'm like, oh, this is great fodder for
Speaker 1: future episodes of stuff to blow your mind. So I
Speaker 1: think we're marked that for later. Yeah, this is a
Speaker 1: rich resource for us. Well, I think we should actually
Speaker 1: get into some of the topics. Some of these, uh,
Speaker 1: some of these episodes of the X Files and what
Speaker 1: we can say about the science behind them or the
Speaker 1: not so scientific concepts behind them. Uh and and at
Speaker 1: least find some kind of foothold in the real world.
Speaker 1: So if we're going to start, we've got to start
Speaker 1: with what is probably the most recognized monster of the
Speaker 1: week for the X Files, and that is, of course,
Speaker 1: the Flukeman. If you have never seen the Flukeman, pause
Speaker 1: this right now. Yeah, going google Flukeman and look at
Speaker 1: a picture of this monster. I love this monster design.
Speaker 1: It looks to me, I've said this before, like a
Speaker 1: toilet paper mummy that gotten wet and has lipstick on.
Speaker 1: So it's got this occurring open mouth with red lips,
Speaker 1: creepy eyes, and then this kind of like melted white exterior. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I posted a photo of Flukeman to our Facebook page
Speaker 1: yesterday as sort of a hint as to what we're
Speaker 1: going to be working on this week, and there are
Speaker 1: a lot of people who engaged with it and either
Speaker 1: got really excited about because they recognized it from the
Speaker 1: X Files or they condemned us to tell because they
Speaker 1: were just yeah, yeah, So the premise of Flukeman, the
Speaker 1: episode that Flukeman appears in is called The Host and
Speaker 1: I believe it's right at the beginning of the second season. Um,
Speaker 1: and so we're gonna try not to spoil the show,
Speaker 1: but also the show is like twenty years old at
Speaker 1: this point. You know, we're gonna basically describe to you
Speaker 1: the premise of these episodes pretty quickly and then dive
Speaker 1: into the science of of of how they work. Right, So,
Speaker 1: the premise of the Host the Host episode is that
Speaker 1: there's a creature that arrives in the United States. I
Speaker 1: believe it comes over on a Russian oiled hanker. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: or it's or maybe it's a freight or it's our
Speaker 1: ship crossing the the ocean. It comes from a Russian ship,
Speaker 1: and it is believed to be coming from Chernobyl. I
Speaker 1: believe it's always like either toxic, like a combination of
Speaker 1: like sewage and like radioactive waste from Chernobyl in this
Speaker 1: ship or something. Why are they bringing that across the ocean.
Speaker 1: They're probably just going to dump it in the ocean, man, right,
Speaker 1: they want to dump it off the coast of New Jersey. Well,
Speaker 1: sure enough they do. And or well, actually it begins
Speaker 1: with this guy gets dragged into the sludge because the
Speaker 1: flukeman is in there, right. But then there seems to
Speaker 1: be a phenomenon emerging after this of something going on
Speaker 1: in the New Jersey sewers, right right. Yeah, So there's
Speaker 1: basically this creature that's crawling around in there. It's emerging,
Speaker 1: and it's either feeding on humans or it's biting them
Speaker 1: and infecting them with their parasitic young. And there's this
Speaker 1: infamous scene from it where there's a guy who was
Speaker 1: bitten by it, uh and and he's in the shower
Speaker 1: and he just starts coughing up flukeworms and it's so disgusting.
Speaker 1: I mean even now, like I rewatched it recently and
Speaker 1: it's pretty disgusting. I can't believe that they got away
Speaker 1: with it at the time. Eventually, the implication is that
Speaker 1: this is some sort of strange mutant hybrid of it's
Speaker 1: like a fluke and a human somewhere in between. Somehow
Speaker 1: the radio activity affected the regular flukeworm flatworm, which is
Speaker 1: also known as a trematode. Uh. These are basically parasites
Speaker 1: that feed off hosts. They're real things, and they usually
Speaker 1: attached themselves to our well in human cases to our
Speaker 1: internal organs, but you can find them occasionally attached to
Speaker 1: your exterior as well. So there's a human liver fluke right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's called Clinarcus senensis, and this is one of the
Speaker 1: ones that Cavellos mainly focuses on in her examination of flukeman.
Speaker 1: But this is a flatworm that wants to get inside
Speaker 1: your body and make a comfortable little nest in your liver.
Speaker 1: It's real and it is, you know, as with many
Speaker 1: of the parasites that we've covered on stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind over the years. Yeah. It's goal is to
Speaker 1: go through a reproductive cycle and a life cycle within
Speaker 1: a host, right, hence the title the host um. So
Speaker 1: this particular flukeworm, it only becomes an adult once it
Speaker 1: gets inside a human being and is in our bile
Speaker 1: duct or another. Not just a human being, Yeah, any mammal.
Speaker 1: And the way that they get in us is by
Speaker 1: eating fish, by us eating us eating, So the mammal
Speaker 1: eats the fish that carries the fluke. The fluke gets
Speaker 1: in you and says I've done it. I've made it.
Speaker 1: Time to mature, right, time to become a man, become
Speaker 1: a fluke man, and Basically, what they do is that
Speaker 1: once they're inside a mammal, they eat the tissue and
Speaker 1: the blood close to your liver um. So this is
Speaker 1: another common X Files theme, is it? Livers are tasty?
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, we'll talk about that again later. So the
Speaker 1: fluke real flukes, release their larva into your bile duct
Speaker 1: and their hermaphrodites uh so they have both male and
Speaker 1: female sex organs. And these larva leave mammal bodies through
Speaker 1: feces and then a snail comes comes along and eats
Speaker 1: the feces, so the larva gets inside the snail. And
Speaker 1: then if the snail is eaten by a fish or
Speaker 1: you know, some other kind of marine animal, uh, then
Speaker 1: it is infested with these larva which subsequently end up
Speaker 1: inside of us or a bear or dog or whatever.
Speaker 1: The complicated life cycle. Yeah, and it's man. Parasites are amazing,
Speaker 1: I know, like the Robert has gushed a lot about
Speaker 1: them on the show, but I agree with them, Like
Speaker 1: they have such specialized life systems that they've evolved into
Speaker 1: to to uh connect with very particular kinds of hosts too,
Speaker 1: And yeah, yeah that's nice. Um. So here's the thing.
Speaker 1: When they get inside these fish. They're inside these cysts
Speaker 1: that they formed that are like protective. I guess bubbles
Speaker 1: is a good way to describe them. Right, So what
Speaker 1: happens if you turn that fish into some sushi, Well,
Speaker 1: if you eat raw fish, then that cyst is inside
Speaker 1: your body and it emerges and turns into its adult
Speaker 1: form of the flukeworm. So one of the things that
Speaker 1: Cavelos notes that we we should probably mention is that
Speaker 1: the title fluke Man that's given to this creature probably
Speaker 1: is not accurate because this creature would have both male
Speaker 1: and female organs, right right, it's a Misnow, it's not
Speaker 1: really a flukeman. It's a fluke person. But you know,
Speaker 1: here's some nerdy X Files knowledge for you. Uh my
Speaker 1: favorite and I think your favorite to X Files writer,
Speaker 1: Darren Morgan was the guy wearing the costume as this
Speaker 1: fluke creature. So he was the West toilet paper mommy
Speaker 1: with lipstick. Yeah, he had the fruit punch mouth there,
Speaker 1: I think, h I think he. You know, maybe that's
Speaker 1: why they called it a fluke man because there was
Speaker 1: a man in it. But if I remember that costume correctly,
Speaker 1: it's not like there were human reproductive organs or anything
Speaker 1: like that, not that you could see. Yeah, so all right,
Speaker 1: the fluke larva though, would not be coughed up like
Speaker 1: they were in this episode. Right. So, fluke larva primarily
Speaker 1: exit our bodies through the digestive track and the feces.
Speaker 1: They're usually not coughed up. And this is a common
Speaker 1: thing for lots of types of parasites that get in
Speaker 1: your body. They reproduced by by making you, so a
Speaker 1: lot of them cause diarrhea and stuff to be expelled
Speaker 1: in your feces deliberately, or they just get out kind
Speaker 1: of passively that way, hopefully to get into water supply
Speaker 1: or to be eaten by some creature that will eat
Speaker 1: your feces to make it to the next stage in
Speaker 1: their life cycle. And this is a common theme of
Speaker 1: the parasites and the X Files too. We're going to
Speaker 1: talk about ice later and that is also how that
Speaker 1: particular creature exit your body. But yeah, even in real
Speaker 1: life with lung flukes, which are attached to your lungs,
Speaker 1: you cough up their eggs if you have them in you,
Speaker 1: but you re swallow them so they passed down through
Speaker 1: your digestive tract. It's not like you're spitting up these
Speaker 1: fluke eggs and then they hatch everywhere, right, because then
Speaker 1: how would the snails get to them. I have to
Speaker 1: imagine it would be an evolutionary disadvantage for a parasite
Speaker 1: to exit the body coughing up huge mature worms, because
Speaker 1: it seems like that'd be so alarming other creatures would
Speaker 1: immediately want to get away from that creature. From New Hope,
Speaker 1: it works great for TV, right, like these bloody flukes
Speaker 1: in the shower, But it does parasitism is a stealth
Speaker 1: game exactly. Yeah, and so Cavellos also notes, you know, yes,
Speaker 1: radiation does produce mutations, but probably not as dramatic a
Speaker 1: change is what we see with the fluke man. Well,
Speaker 1: this is a common thing we see in science fiction.
Speaker 1: Is sort of a very loose understanding of the idea
Speaker 1: of how radiation causes mutations and organisms like radiation can
Speaker 1: encourage the mutation, right, especially like in your germ cells.
Speaker 1: If you're exposed to more radiation, you might give birth
Speaker 1: to children that have more mutations than average. But generally,
Speaker 1: like if you're hanging out near the near the reactor
Speaker 1: wreckage in Chernobyl, that's not gonna that's not gonna make
Speaker 1: you into a different kind of animal. It's probably just
Speaker 1: gonna kill you, right, Yeah, you're more likely to get sick,
Speaker 1: have cellular degeneration or deterioration, or just die. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so okay, Flukeman. Actually, you know, Robert wrote about Flukeman
Speaker 1: years ago for Stuff to Blow your Mind. If you
Speaker 1: go to the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
Speaker 1: there's a great Monster of the Week piece that he
Speaker 1: wrote about Flukeman and flukes in general. So if you're
Speaker 1: you're interested in more about this, go check that out.
Speaker 1: And we also dug up a little bit of information,
Speaker 1: uh that apparently in two thousand nine and two thousand
Speaker 1: and ten, well after this book was written, in after
Speaker 1: the X Files was over US, flukewarm infections increased significantly.
Speaker 1: And there's a really weird reason why. It's because people
Speaker 1: were taking a lot more river cruise trips, you know
Speaker 1: those ones where you like, you get on those um
Speaker 1: what do they call them those kinds of boats, not
Speaker 1: quite river boat maybe paddle boats, paddle boats, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of. Uh, and they started a paddle boat
Speaker 1: with that wouldn't be a cruise boat. Steamboats, I'm sure
Speaker 1: it's a boat boat anyway, it's a pite on these boats. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're designed specifically for you to join a sect luxurious
Speaker 1: parasite cruise. They were feeding people raw crawfish, and uh,
Speaker 1: you know, basically these raw crawfish were infected with the
Speaker 1: fluke larva like we've been talking about um. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: in the previous forty years before that, there had only
Speaker 1: been seven cases of flukeworm infection in North America, but
Speaker 1: just in two thousand nine and two thousand and ten
Speaker 1: there were nine because of this particular thing. So I'd
Speaker 1: like to think in the last five years that these
Speaker 1: riverbrook boats have stopped giving people raw crawfish and growing
Speaker 1: potential flukeman's inside of them, one would hope so well.
Speaker 1: Of course, The Host is not the only episode of
Speaker 1: the X Files to feature parasites. Parasites are a really
Speaker 1: common theme, especially on these Monster of the Week episodes,
Speaker 1: because I mean, it's it's fertile ground to uh to mine,
Speaker 1: I would say for the sort of mixing metaphors is
Speaker 1: a fertile ground. Mind fertile ground anyway, It's a good
Speaker 1: place to look if you want some ideas for weird
Speaker 1: ways that animals, especially mutations or aliens or something could
Speaker 1: take advantage of the human body in ways that make
Speaker 1: a squirm. Yeah. And so another one of these episodes
Speaker 1: that addresses parasitism in a particularly gross yet maybe scientifically
Speaker 1: interesting way is called f Emasculata. Yeah, and they're more
Speaker 1: focusing on something that there's a differentiation here that we
Speaker 1: will call out in a minute. They're parasitoids, not necessarily parasites.
Speaker 1: But the premise of this episode is that I don't
Speaker 1: even remember where it was, maybe South America or something.
Speaker 1: It will wear the bug orginally came from. There's some
Speaker 1: kind of bug. It's like a beetle, and it carries
Speaker 1: a disease that has one of these parasitoids. And yeah,
Speaker 1: they're in a prison. Somebody mails a leg of bore
Speaker 1: I think, to a prisoner that's in and this leg
Speaker 1: of bore is infected with this parasitoid. Uh. And so
Speaker 1: subsequently these two prisoners get infected as well, but they
Speaker 1: just happened to escape the prison. And so the episode
Speaker 1: is basically Molder and Scully chasing these guys across the
Speaker 1: United States to make sure that they don't spread this plague. Okay, now,
Speaker 1: what kind of infection is this is it is? It? Does?
Speaker 1: It kind of outwardly resemble a bacterial infection or something.
Speaker 1: It's super gross. The attacks the human immune system, causing
Speaker 1: pustules to form on your skin nice and and that
Speaker 1: leads to death within thirty six hours. But the way
Speaker 1: that it spreads is the pustules erupt So these the
Speaker 1: gooey pustules pop stuff everyone people, which subsequently get more
Speaker 1: larva on the people. Yeah. Um, so, first of all,
Speaker 1: this episode presents the idea that this is an undiscovered
Speaker 1: species that nobody has ever heard of before. Uh, and
Speaker 1: you know, I believe that, they say, you know, that's
Speaker 1: why we were totally unprepared for this as a potential
Speaker 1: health problem. Yeah, it's that is a hundred percent possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are tons of species that we don't know exists. Yeah,
Speaker 1: at the time when this book was written in there
Speaker 1: were somewhere between one point five and a hundred million.
Speaker 1: That's how like vague it is. They don't know undiscovered
Speaker 1: species Usually there's small things like ants or beetles like
Speaker 1: that in this case, right, but the rainforest in particular
Speaker 1: is home to an incredibly diverse set of species. So
Speaker 1: that's why it's particularly difficult for us to catalog all
Speaker 1: of them. And I know there have always been scientists
Speaker 1: trying to update the estimate. You know what, what's the number?
Speaker 1: We suspect to someday be able to find numbers of
Speaker 1: species on the Earth that are unknown. So it seems
Speaker 1: that the most recent estimate that I could find, at
Speaker 1: least came in twenty eleven. There was a study that
Speaker 1: estimated that Earth has almost eight point eight million species
Speaker 1: in total, and we've only discovered about a quarter of
Speaker 1: that eight point eight million. Uh So like there, I
Speaker 1: think their estimate was something like one point nine million
Speaker 1: have been found. But then this is the funny part,
Speaker 1: right The study says, well, we could be off by
Speaker 1: about one point three million species, uh and that this
Speaker 1: number could anywhere be anywhere between seven point five million
Speaker 1: and ten point one million total species. So it's you know,
Speaker 1: again like super vague abroad reach. But yes, it's possible
Speaker 1: that there's a bug out there somewhere in South America
Speaker 1: that we don't know about, right, Well, I mean that's
Speaker 1: certain that there are bugs we don't know about. The
Speaker 1: question is like, could we discover something that really surprises
Speaker 1: us and I think that that's plausible. Yeah, we could absolutely. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there's about two hundred and fifty thousand or somewhere
Speaker 1: between two hundred fifty five hundred thousand species of parasitoids. Um.
Speaker 1: The example that they gave in the book was the
Speaker 1: scuttle fly. That's kind of one of the more well
Speaker 1: known ones. It lays its eggs in the head of
Speaker 1: a fire ant, uh and when that hatches, it kills
Speaker 1: the ant. And then that's not enough. It uses the
Speaker 1: ant's head as a little cocoon, so a safe place
Speaker 1: for it to mature in like a like a cradle
Speaker 1: ant head cradle. And yeah, we know about wasp parasitoids
Speaker 1: that can take over ants. They can take over spiders
Speaker 1: and all kinds of other insects and they either end
Speaker 1: up like draining their their life from within, or they
Speaker 1: take their their resources, or sometimes they even you know,
Speaker 1: we've talked about like a zombie type insects before on
Speaker 1: the show. They'll they'll take over these animals, sorry, these
Speaker 1: insects and force them to defend the parasitoid. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not pretty. So almost all of these parasitoids are what
Speaker 1: we understand as arthur pods right, uh, and these they
Speaker 1: sometimes use other arthropods as their hosts, which is even
Speaker 1: that's like imagine if a like a little person climbed
Speaker 1: inside of you and was the parasite inside of you.
Speaker 1: If yeah, like a like a like a tiny little
Speaker 1: humanoid with arms and legs just climbed down your throat
Speaker 1: and was the parasitoid inside you and then maybe burst
Speaker 1: out a week later. Why isn't that an episode of
Speaker 1: The X Files. Well, I haven't written it yet, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but so yeah, so we've got you know, they're not
Speaker 1: necessarily all adapted from a million physiology. This is what
Speaker 1: we were talking about earlier about how these things are
Speaker 1: so fascinating, right because they're adapted very specifically for the
Speaker 1: species that they live in conjunction with. Okay, so, but
Speaker 1: this parasite, in particular, the F masculata, and I think
Speaker 1: F that stands for like a genus name, So that's
Speaker 1: like would imagine the name of the species. Here we're
Speaker 1: dealing with. What does Cavela say about about it in
Speaker 1: the end? Is it is it similar to anything in reality? Yes?
Speaker 1: So she says that it's similar to the blow fly,
Speaker 1: which is another parasitoid that we're you know, somewhat familiar with. Uh.
Speaker 1: They don't actually kill their hosts. They burrow into wounds.
Speaker 1: These are blowflies. They burrow into wounds and their larva
Speaker 1: eat dead flesh. But did the wounds explode, Not to
Speaker 1: my knowledge, but I believe with blowflies, like, aren't blow
Speaker 1: flies the type of larva that we're used to clean
Speaker 1: out wounds during Like I think it was like World
Speaker 1: War One or World War two, Like you could you
Speaker 1: could put their larva in an open wound and it
Speaker 1: would clean out the necrotic flesh that was there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And obviously you wouldn't want to leave it there because
Speaker 1: then they would hatch. But they but they were used
Speaker 1: actually for that function. Yeah, I mean maggot therapy is
Speaker 1: a is a type of therapy that has been used
Speaker 1: and I think in some cases still is used. They
Speaker 1: eat the necrotic flesh and they leave the healthy flesh alone.
Speaker 1: So Cavellos makes a distinction though, and I think that
Speaker 1: this is a good one that m ski a lot
Speaker 1: of isn't necessarily just the beetle, right, and it it's
Speaker 1: two beings. It's the beetle and then it's a parasite
Speaker 1: virus that exists in the beetle and that grows inside
Speaker 1: the human body, suppressing the immune system and causing these
Speaker 1: wounds which the bugs subsequently lays its eggs inside. So
Speaker 1: she thinks that it's like a two parter here, that
Speaker 1: there's more going on, and that scullion molder don't quite
Speaker 1: have the biology right um, and that the virus needs
Speaker 1: to bug needs the bugs to spread in the same
Speaker 1: way that the bugs would need the virus to reproduce.
Speaker 1: So in that way, it could be kind of like
Speaker 1: a like a composite organism. Like right, if you look
Speaker 1: at a lichen you know about like lichen or you know,
Speaker 1: there are really two different organisms that have combined so
Speaker 1: closely together that they've formed a sort of super organism.
Speaker 1: Lichen Is is made of algae and then also made
Speaker 1: of fungus, and they they've just become so depending on
Speaker 1: one another that they're now like a single organism. Well,
Speaker 1: that's a great segue into our next X Files Monster
Speaker 1: of the Week, which is another parasite of a kind,
Speaker 1: but it's a fungus parasite in particular, this fungus lives
Speaker 1: in volcanoes. Yeah, so that would make it probably some
Speaker 1: kind of extreme of file. Right. So we're talking about
Speaker 1: the episode Firewalker, which is it's I don't know, it's
Speaker 1: not one of my favorite ones, but the science is
Speaker 1: kind of interesting in it, and it had guest stars
Speaker 1: Bradley Whitford, which I really enjoyed. He's like the crazed
Speaker 1: scientist who's left over from this mad exploration to the volcano.
Speaker 1: So Bradley Whitford is the guy from the West Wing
Speaker 1: who would do all those cute walking talks. Yes, that's him,
Speaker 1: that's him. He was also on that other Aaron Sarkin
Speaker 1: show was a Studio sixty on the Sunset Strip. I
Speaker 1: don't know, I never saw it was a studio with
Speaker 1: a number. I just don't remember the number. I'm I'm
Speaker 1: annoyed by the cute walking talks. But I did like
Speaker 1: him in Cavin in the Woods. Oh yeah, he's great
Speaker 1: in that. Yeah. So the idea here is that he's
Speaker 1: a scientist with another group of scientists that are studying
Speaker 1: a volcano. They have a like robot called Firewalker that
Speaker 1: they send into the volcano to do like examinations. The
Speaker 1: robot gets these fungal spores on it and then it
Speaker 1: comes back and infects everybody, and the fungal spores grow
Speaker 1: inside the lungs of these people and then burst outward,
Speaker 1: releasing more spores infecting more people. We're kind of seeing
Speaker 1: a theme, yeah, the bursting. Okay, so the idea of
Speaker 1: an organism that lives under extremely high heat conditions is
Speaker 1: kind of strange because heat is one of the ways
Speaker 1: that we think of as being most dependable to kill
Speaker 1: off any organisms we don't want on sure. Yeah, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: you know, you want to sterilize silverware or surgical instruments
Speaker 1: or something like that, you heat it up, and we
Speaker 1: typically think, well, nothing's going to survive, but that's not true. Uh,
Speaker 1: and hopefully there aren't any extreme of files on our
Speaker 1: surgical instruments. But yeah, Scully says something to that effect
Speaker 1: in the episode. She's like, well, nothing can survive inside
Speaker 1: of volcano. This is her skepticism, nothing can survive inside
Speaker 1: of volcano. But you know, Cavello's points out extremophiles could, uh,
Speaker 1: they grow best actually in these extreme conditions, right. So, well,
Speaker 1: the kinds that are adapted to really temperature exactly, and
Speaker 1: those are called thermophiles. We know about kinds that live
Speaker 1: near underwater volcanic events or next to pools of boiling water.
Speaker 1: And yeah, some even lived inside volcanoes. Are never heard
Speaker 1: of that before. Yeah, this is what you know, she
Speaker 1: mentions in there, and uh so, okay, here's the thing. Though,
Speaker 1: the heat range established in that episode of the Firewalker
Speaker 1: Robot is a hundred and forty three to three hundred degrees. Now,
Speaker 1: I do feel pretty certain that no organism, no matter what,
Speaker 1: could survive three hundred degrees. Yeah, And this is where
Speaker 1: Cavellos kind of works around this is that she hypothesizes
Speaker 1: that it might not actually be an extreme a file
Speaker 1: this particular fungus and she but she's got an answer.
Speaker 1: She's got kind of like before with the idea that
Speaker 1: uh fm esculata is two beings instead of one being.
Speaker 1: She's got an interesting hypothesis that contradicts what Scully comes
Speaker 1: up with. Um. She says that it's unlikely that it
Speaker 1: would be a fungus in particular, right because they the
Speaker 1: fungus wouldn't be able to survive. But perhaps that is
Speaker 1: the spore of a fungus that doesn't live in the
Speaker 1: volcano but near the volcano, and the scores were blown
Speaker 1: along to where the firewalker was maybe exiting the volcano. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I mean that makes it easier to Yeah, so maybe
Speaker 1: it's not an extreme a file necessarily, but they just
Speaker 1: kind of blew onto this robot or whatever. But um,
Speaker 1: it opens up a possibility. Well but wait, hold on,
Speaker 1: if you can say that, it's like, you know, oh well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, what if these aliens didn't really come
Speaker 1: from space come from space? They came from can to death. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's true, and that, you know, we get
Speaker 1: to the Canadian aliens in season seven of the X Files.
Speaker 1: But no, I agree with you. You're right, it's a
Speaker 1: little weird. But I like that where she's going with
Speaker 1: this because it opens up the possibility of talking about Um.
Speaker 1: One of the problems with these extremely files is that like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they can exist in these extreme environments, but then they
Speaker 1: wouldn't necessarily also be able to exist, for instance, in
Speaker 1: the human lung. Right, So I did a little bit
Speaker 1: of looking up here to see, you know what, what's
Speaker 1: the possibility here of these fungus spores blowing around on
Speaker 1: a volcano. And sure enough, there have been fungal spores
Speaker 1: that have been discovered on the volcanic desert of Mount
Speaker 1: Fuji and Japan, so not inside it, but like, you know,
Speaker 1: the outside volcanic area around it. So Okay, it's theoretical
Speaker 1: that theoretically possible that one of these fungus has a
Speaker 1: spore it gets blown up, uh maybe to the lip
Speaker 1: or top of the volcano where Firewalker robot is roaming
Speaker 1: around the and then gets on it there. Well, I
Speaker 1: believe I remember in the show was going around in
Speaker 1: these caves, these like hot caves that were lava tubes.
Speaker 1: I guess, oh, yeah, on the volcano, so that might
Speaker 1: be a different kind of environment too. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think we've you know, established probably not possible for it
Speaker 1: to exist in a volcano. But you know, she's come
Speaker 1: up with her best possible answer as to how this
Speaker 1: fungus could have ended up this, especially this unknown fungus, right,
Speaker 1: how it could have ended up on this robot. I mean,
Speaker 1: what is it? What does it live on? If it's
Speaker 1: in a kind of dark, super hot environment. Well, most
Speaker 1: thermophiles consume sulfur of some kind or another, and they
Speaker 1: say in the episode of Firewalker that this thing eats
Speaker 1: hydrogen sulfide um So it's interesting though, because if the
Speaker 1: fungus fed off sulfur, how would it still grow inside
Speaker 1: human lungs? Right, Like, we don't have a ton of
Speaker 1: sulfur in our lungs. But Cavellos again finds an answer
Speaker 1: for that. She says, well, actually, and some of the
Speaker 1: amino acids in our body, there are sulfides in there,
Speaker 1: so maybe it would be like somehow pulling the sulfides
Speaker 1: out of the amino acids. The problem with that, though,
Speaker 1: is that within a moist lung environment, if the fungus
Speaker 1: was producing sulfur dioxide, that would turn into sulfuric acid
Speaker 1: inside our lungs, which would you know, pretty much kill
Speaker 1: its human host. So Firewalker not so great at the
Speaker 1: at the adapting spectacularly to exist with its host, right,
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like it's it's been really thought through as well.
Speaker 1: Maybe I'd be curious to see who the different writers
Speaker 1: were on these parasite episodes and how much research they did. So.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's really unique about the Firewalker life form.
Speaker 1: I know that the robots called Firewalker, but I guess
Speaker 1: we're calling this creature Firewalker as well, right, is that
Speaker 1: they say in the episode that it's silicon based, silicone
Speaker 1: based rather than carbon based, So almost all life as
Speaker 1: we understand its carbon based. I think all life we
Speaker 1: know about on Earth is carbon based. I mean, scientists
Speaker 1: have talked about astrobiology for a while, has talked about, well,
Speaker 1: could there be life forms on another planet that are
Speaker 1: based on a different kind of atomic structure than that
Speaker 1: on Earth? Because you know, we all are, right, we
Speaker 1: all have DNA, you know, or even even viruses that
Speaker 1: you know don't have all of the characteristics we would
Speaker 1: think of as as being life necessarily still are carbon based,
Speaker 1: and silicon is this proposed atom. It's like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe silicon based molecules could be the basis for some
Speaker 1: other kind of biochemistry that's different than the biochemistry and
Speaker 1: life on Earth. And I've read some criticisms of that.
Speaker 1: I think some people I think that's very implausible. I mean,
Speaker 1: you never really know for sure. Well, there's the classic
Speaker 1: Star Trek episode where they meet the silicon based alien Horta.
Speaker 1: I've never seen. That's basically empirical science. Yeah, I haven't
Speaker 1: seen it either, but it came up when I was
Speaker 1: researching the possibility of silicon life forms. So Yeah, you're right.
Speaker 1: Carbon is the most conducive form for life, right because
Speaker 1: it can easily form bonds with other atoms, it's flexible,
Speaker 1: it can form thousands of different compounds. Those can be
Speaker 1: broken down, and they can facilitate different processes within an organism. Right. Silicon, however,
Speaker 1: is called it's known as tetravalent, so the bonds it
Speaker 1: creates are either too strong to be broken down or
Speaker 1: too weak to hold together for these particular processes, so
Speaker 1: they don't form compounds with what's called handedness. Uh. And
Speaker 1: the the analogy that Cavelos uses here, which I like, uh,
Speaker 1: is that you think of a right hand trying to
Speaker 1: wear a left handed glove. That's basically what it's like
Speaker 1: with silicon trying to attach itself in a particular way
Speaker 1: with enzymes in order to facilitate life. Uh. I mean yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's another good point about the matching nous. I mean,
Speaker 1: would a silicon based life form, even if it could exist,
Speaker 1: could it possibly parasitize a carbon based life form? And
Speaker 1: would the carbon based life form even have the kinds
Speaker 1: of molecules available silicon based life form would need for
Speaker 1: its metabolism and and much like how they're you know, speculating, Well,
Speaker 1: if you have this sulfur dioxide creating thing in your lungs,
Speaker 1: it would just make sulfuric acid. Also, the the products
Speaker 1: that would be emitted from these silicon life forms wouldn't
Speaker 1: necessarily work out, right. So, well, this is a thing
Speaker 1: that comes through in a lot of these sci fi
Speaker 1: scenarios about parasites is that typically parasites don't want to
Speaker 1: kill their hosts. I mean, you always have killing in
Speaker 1: in the in the science fiction because it ups the
Speaker 1: anti You know, if it just kind of made you
Speaker 1: feel sick and then you've got better, that wouldn't be
Speaker 1: such a dramatic story. But but yeah, I mean a
Speaker 1: parasite that kills its host is kind of doing bad job, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I think about it this way. Okay, So carbon
Speaker 1: life forms they oxidized, right, We oxidized and unite oxygen.
Speaker 1: Maybe during burning it becomes a gas like carbon dioxide.
Speaker 1: We emit carbon dioxide. But if silicon oxidizes, it becomes
Speaker 1: a solid silicon dioxide, which is also known as silica,
Speaker 1: which is sand. Right, So imagine this creature. I guess
Speaker 1: it's just coughing up sand. Constantly. Um so. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: that's one very simple reason why it probably couldn't support life,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure somebody with an interesting enough imagination would
Speaker 1: be able to envision a sand breathing creature of some type. Well,
Speaker 1: actually sandworms of dune. I think Robert and I in
Speaker 1: an episode we did about about alien life forms in
Speaker 1: the shapes they could take. We talked about sand based life,
Speaker 1: like a life that that had this silica basis, and
Speaker 1: we referenced the Stephen King short story Beach where yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems to have sentient sand dunes as a life form.
Speaker 1: So this next X Files episode, which is yet another parasite,
Speaker 1: and this is this is the last parasite. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's well at least the last one we're going to
Speaker 1: cover here. There's probably hundreds of bears the X Files.
Speaker 1: But this is another classic X Files episode. It's I
Speaker 1: think it's the best episode of the first season. It's
Speaker 1: one of my favorites. It's called Ice. It's basically the
Speaker 1: movie The Thing. Yeah, it's an homage to the Thing. Uh.
Speaker 1: And they're basically paranoia worms that get inside you. And
Speaker 1: in fact, last night I I rewatched the episode in
Speaker 1: preparation for us to record this because I was just
Speaker 1: I really like that episode. It's got some great moments
Speaker 1: from other character actors. Felicity Huffman shows up in it.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in this episode Ice, what happens? We have
Speaker 1: Molder and Scully flying up to this Arctic research station
Speaker 1: because it seems that all of the people on the
Speaker 1: station have killed each other. And well, yeah, the cold
Speaker 1: open begins with there's dead bodies everywhere, and there's two
Speaker 1: guys left and they're about to kill each other, but
Speaker 1: then they turn their guns on themselves and each of
Speaker 1: them kills themselves and they keep saying over and over again,
Speaker 1: we are not who we are, something like to that effect, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: something like that. Yeah, And so Molder and Scully and
Speaker 1: a team of other people get there, and this team
Speaker 1: is kind of important because then we can we can
Speaker 1: play the factions in Paranoia game. And they discovered that
Speaker 1: this Arctic research station had come across what was it,
Speaker 1: a frozen meteorite. Yeah, well they were they were researching
Speaker 1: and drilling down into ice that was inside a meteorite
Speaker 1: crater I believe, Okay, Yeah, and so it was it
Speaker 1: was many thousands of years old, and they came across
Speaker 1: this organism that they brought back to the research station
Speaker 1: with them. That's a tiny worm of some sort, and
Speaker 1: essentially what happens is the worm gets into people and
Speaker 1: turns them paranoid and they started killing. Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: like all these other parasites that we've been talking about
Speaker 1: out it it enters its host inside a larval form.
Speaker 1: In this particular case, it's it's real gross. It moves
Speaker 1: around on the back of your neck and somehow attaches
Speaker 1: to your hypothalamus. You can see it's scuttling around under
Speaker 1: the skin. Yeah, Yeah, it's it's not pretty. Uh, And
Speaker 1: there's I had forgotten about this until I rewatched it
Speaker 1: last night. But one of the ways that they can
Speaker 1: tell if you're infected with the worm as you start
Speaker 1: getting these like little black nodules growing under like your
Speaker 1: armpit and stuff like that. Uh. But yeah, they say
Speaker 1: that it's uh, it stimulates the chemical act of colon
Speaker 1: that's in the hypothalamus and that this causes the hosts
Speaker 1: in this case to exhibit extreme paranoia and then subsequent violence.
Speaker 1: So that's why all the other scientists all killed each
Speaker 1: other and themselves. They're infected by this worm, and it's
Speaker 1: a paranoia worm. So let's set aside the alien stuff
Speaker 1: for a second and just say, is some kind of
Speaker 1: terrestrial paranoia worm visible at all? Well, it's probably not
Speaker 1: an extreme aphile like we're just talking about earlier, right
Speaker 1: with Firewalker, because again, how would it be able to
Speaker 1: survive in both these extreme cold conditions and then also
Speaker 1: in the relative heat of the human body. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be adapted for both, right, So it's probably of terrestrial origin,
Speaker 1: even though Molder immediately is like, oh, this is from
Speaker 1: matter space, it's an alien It was in a meteorite.
Speaker 1: We have to document this. It's proof of alien life, right, right,
Speaker 1: But the Cavella says in her book, sell you, Ule Molder,
Speaker 1: it's probably actually terrestrial origin since it's evolved in particular
Speaker 1: to be a parasite with mammalion hosts, right, or I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess the possibility is that this meteorite is from
Speaker 1: a planet where there are hosts that are just like
Speaker 1: dogs and humans, because it also infects a dog in
Speaker 1: the episode. Right. Okay, Well, as we've talked about in
Speaker 1: the other episodes, one of one of the things that's
Speaker 1: common to these worm infections in the body is that
Speaker 1: they need to get out of your body to pass
Speaker 1: on to the next host somehow, and typically they're going
Speaker 1: to do that through the most attractive method of feces,
Speaker 1: as we said earlier, right, and yet again in this episode,
Speaker 1: like with the flukeman. Uh, it's it's well, it's not
Speaker 1: entirely spelled out, but we know at least one person
Speaker 1: gets infected from a bite, so that somehow the larva
Speaker 1: of this worm or in the saliva of the dog
Speaker 1: that bites a guy. He's the pilot in his name
Speaker 1: is Bear. Uh. And Bear gets bitten by the dog
Speaker 1: and then he gets infected, he gets paranoid and he
Speaker 1: starts attacking everybody. Right, Uh so yeah, why why doesn't
Speaker 1: it just go the good old right out the digestive system,
Speaker 1: tried and true parasite method. Instead it's this bite thing.
Speaker 1: And the other problem with this, right is that you're
Speaker 1: even if you're provoked into violence, you're not necessarily going
Speaker 1: to always bite your victim. Yeah, it seems like they're
Speaker 1: I don't know, relying vaguely on the notion that this
Speaker 1: is adapted to an animal that bites when provoked, though
Speaker 1: humans don't necessarily do that. I mean, I guess if
Speaker 1: you imagined it was adapted to mammals on Earth, a
Speaker 1: lot of mammals probably bite when provoked. Yeah, And I
Speaker 1: think that the writers were probably thinking along the lines
Speaker 1: of rabies, sort of like a combination of a tape
Speaker 1: worm in rabies here and that like it would be
Speaker 1: spread by a bite, uh or or in the episode
Speaker 1: that I had forgotten this but rewatching it last night,
Speaker 1: they just at some points just take the worm and
Speaker 1: shove it in somebody's ear, and that's how they get infected,
Speaker 1: which is also gross. It reminds me Raphicon. It reminds
Speaker 1: me exactly of that scene. So what's what's this stuff
Speaker 1: you said that the worm produces that causes the paranoia
Speaker 1: and violence? Would would that actually work? So it's it's
Speaker 1: again it's a setal coline uh. And it's supposedly it's
Speaker 1: interacting with that hypothalamust trying to trigger our fight or
Speaker 1: flight mechanism, right, which would lead to the bites. I guess. Uh.
Speaker 1: But like I said, in the episode, they're they're shooting
Speaker 1: guns at each other, they're punching each other. So I
Speaker 1: don't know if that does the worm any good. The acetalcoline,
Speaker 1: it has a way more complex relationship with the human
Speaker 1: body than just making you violent or paranoid. So, uh,
Speaker 1: you know the research that Cavelos pulls out, she says
Speaker 1: that toxins like saren like saren gas, Yeah, they can
Speaker 1: break that down and they can cause similar effects of paranoia,
Speaker 1: but it very low doses. At high doses acetalcoline, however,
Speaker 1: it just basically stimulates your body's parasympathetic system and it
Speaker 1: slows down functions like your heartbeat, blood pressure, and ultimately
Speaker 1: leads to respiratory paralysis. So again, like the I don't know.
Speaker 1: And there was another aspect in the episode that I
Speaker 1: noticed last night that they didn't really talk about even
Speaker 1: in caveluss book, which is that this thing like exists
Speaker 1: specifically in ammonia, like it's evolved to be an ammonia
Speaker 1: dwelling worm. And there's some implication that there'd be a
Speaker 1: connection the ammonia and the aceticcoline. I that doesn't particularly
Speaker 1: line up, so I guess we'd have to go no, Uh,
Speaker 1: this thing couldn't exist in the ice as it did, right,
Speaker 1: and also be did not exist in the ice and
Speaker 1: be it and be a parasite that could infect humans
Speaker 1: and other mammals, and then the acetacoline. It would have
Speaker 1: to have a very refined way of accessing that within
Speaker 1: the hypothalamus in order to get those specific, violent paranoid
Speaker 1: reactions out of people. Yeah. I think this is a
Speaker 1: thing that you see in science fiction writing a lot
Speaker 1: is they'll take a supposed fact about a neurotransmitter or
Speaker 1: some kind of hormone or chemical that they know of
Speaker 1: that's active in the body and kind of oversimplify what
Speaker 1: it does or overstate a correlation. You've probably read some
Speaker 1: stuff along these lines. For example, with the hormone oxytocin.
Speaker 1: Remember people say, oh, this is the love hormone, it
Speaker 1: makes you be in love, and you know that that's
Speaker 1: not exactly accurate. It's much more complex than that. It
Speaker 1: causes complex cascading effects, and it is involved with other
Speaker 1: hormones and combinations of things. It's just not as simple
Speaker 1: as this one neurotransmitter causes this macro behavior on the
Speaker 1: on the large scale exactly. So I think we can
Speaker 1: safely scratch ice off as being something that we should
Speaker 1: be terrified of making its way into the human population.
Speaker 1: From watching this X Files episode, so with that, I
Speaker 1: think we need to take a break, but we when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're going to transition away from parasites
Speaker 1: and talking about some other strange science of the X files. Perfect. Hey, everybody,
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Speaker 1: that stamps dot com into s t U F F. Alright,
Speaker 1: so we're back. We're moving now from parasites into another
Speaker 1: classic X Files A way to come up with a
Speaker 1: villain for a Monster of the Week. It's a mutant,
Speaker 1: right of course, and some of the most famous ones
Speaker 1: are mutants. We've got Tombs who we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about from the classic episode Squeeze and uh, of course
Speaker 1: Leonard Betts. We gotta talk about Leonard Betts. That's one
Speaker 1: of the most famous X Files episodes. Uh. And I
Speaker 1: learned this from listening to Comin on Johnny's podcast. But
Speaker 1: apparently it was the most watched episode of all time
Speaker 1: because it happened to air like right during a Super Bowl,
Speaker 1: like right after a super Bowl. Well, it's not a
Speaker 1: bad one to do exactly. Yeah. So let's just established
Speaker 1: right up front from Kveliss book and also just from
Speaker 1: general science about mutations. Uh that that you know, the
Speaker 1: possibilities here are about inheritance evolution and how mutation could
Speaker 1: alter instances of I guess we would consider them natural selection,
Speaker 1: right ull, sure, Yeah, I mean, mutation is an inherent
Speaker 1: part of evolution. It's it's how random change occurs, but
Speaker 1: mainly it's beneficial traits that are bred into this particular species,
Speaker 1: right right, Well, all kinds of mutations occur, and most
Speaker 1: of them have no effect whatsoever, or they are slightly detrimental,
Speaker 1: but natural selection tends to mean that those mutations are
Speaker 1: eliminated over time. And so if you have a mutation
Speaker 1: that makes you worse at surviving, obviously you're less likely
Speaker 1: to pass that gene onto your kids because you won't
Speaker 1: be having any kids, or you'll have fewer kids than
Speaker 1: the one with the beneficial gene or at least without
Speaker 1: the negative gene. But are are we likely to encounter
Speaker 1: mutants in the real world, as in mutants with these
Speaker 1: big noticeable powers that powers fundamentally change, Yeah, how they
Speaker 1: interact with their environment? You're gonna meet somebody who has wings. No,
Speaker 1: you're not, because in one sense, yes, we're all mutants.
Speaker 1: I mean we all inherit some amount of mutation from
Speaker 1: our parents germ cells than our selves. Of course continue
Speaker 1: to mutate throughout life, but in the most relevant sense,
Speaker 1: we're not going to be able to mutate to have wings,
Speaker 1: or mutate to become goo and then reform into a human,
Speaker 1: or have any of these other huge macro mutations and mutations.
Speaker 1: And creatures that survive into adulthood tend to have extremely
Speaker 1: small or almost non existent impacts on the body. And
Speaker 1: the way species change over time is through the accumulation
Speaker 1: of mutations, not through one gigantic mutation that makes you
Speaker 1: massively different. Alright, so let's get into Leonard Bets then.
Speaker 1: So the premise of the Leonard Bets episode uh is
Speaker 1: basically that this is a guy with a mutation in
Speaker 1: which all the cells in his body are cancerous. Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: So well we don't get there first, right, First, Heason E.
Speaker 1: M T who gets his head cut off, that he
Speaker 1: survives the decapitation exactly, so he gets his head cut
Speaker 1: clean off in an ambulance accident. Leonard is fully decapitated,
Speaker 1: and later his headless body gets up, flees from the
Speaker 1: morgue and gets busy trying to regrow ahead. Okay, and
Speaker 1: I believe the way he does that is by like
Speaker 1: taking a bath in iodine. Right, Yeah, he gets into
Speaker 1: some iodine. Don't know why. I don't think even Cavello
Speaker 1: has had an idea about why iodine, But he gets
Speaker 1: into it. He gets into a bath. Yeah, and a
Speaker 1: bath of iodine is creepy, I guess. It leaves these
Speaker 1: weird brown stains on him, and so that looks creepy enough,
Speaker 1: I guess. But and he eventually regrows ahead through powerful cancer,
Speaker 1: the powers of cancer. I mean to say, he is, actually,
Speaker 1: we find out, made of cancer and eats cancer and
Speaker 1: eats cancer, and so he's he's participating in a wonderful
Speaker 1: cancer economy that allows him to regenerate not only lost limbs,
Speaker 1: but a lost head. Now, it's not uncommon to hear
Speaker 1: discussion about the extremely brief, momentary survival of decapitation, but
Speaker 1: that's usually talking about the head of surviving decapitation, not
Speaker 1: the body. So, for example, there there are legends that
Speaker 1: the heads of people like Charles, the first of England
Speaker 1: or or Anne Boleyn appeared to try to talk after
Speaker 1: they were severed from the bodies of the people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've heard that. We did an episode of the of
Speaker 1: the show What the Stuff video show that Joe and
Speaker 1: I write for, and I wrote about the Worst Ways
Speaker 1: to die and decapitations were in there and that those
Speaker 1: legends showed up right, And so the debate sort of
Speaker 1: continues about whether severed head can can experience consciousness beyond
Speaker 1: a second or two. Maybe they do, maybe they don't,
Speaker 1: But like we said, that's the head. The really weird
Speaker 1: thing about the story of Leonard Bets in this episode
Speaker 1: is that the body survives decapitation and his body gets
Speaker 1: up and walks away from an ambulance crash. Yeah, walks home,
Speaker 1: I think, or maybe walks out of the morgue somewhere
Speaker 1: to take. Walks to the iodine store and says, give
Speaker 1: me all of you, like a whole. Yeah. And the
Speaker 1: best part of the dumbest part of this episode, Multa
Speaker 1: walks in s he's a bathtub full of iodine and
Speaker 1: doesn't bother to look in it. He's just like, okay, cool,
Speaker 1: it turns around, it walks out, and then this guy's
Speaker 1: body emerges with a newly grown ahead. Whenever I see
Speaker 1: a bathtub full of iodine, I reach in. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: that's what you should always do. You take like a
Speaker 1: broom handle, just stick it in there. See what's going on.
Speaker 1: So this might be kind of obvious, but it's probably
Speaker 1: worth saying. Why does a decapitation kill you? Obviously, the brain,
Speaker 1: especially the brain stem, is sort of the command center
Speaker 1: for the impulses that control the body. So without the
Speaker 1: command center, you can't breathe, you can't digest food, you
Speaker 1: can't perform directed movements of the muscles. It's kind of
Speaker 1: like taking the CPU out of your computer. You're just
Speaker 1: nothing much is going to happen. Then, of course, on
Speaker 1: top of that, you've got for the body itself, you'll
Speaker 1: have catastrophic blood loss. So many blood vessels carry blood
Speaker 1: up to the head and it's a very high pressure.
Speaker 1: It's gonna pump it up there, right, So you're gonna
Speaker 1: get a nice like Quentin Tarantino blood squirting effect. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when you cut the head off, you're just gonna gush
Speaker 1: blood out, have immediate loss, immediate massive loss of blood,
Speaker 1: and that massive sudden loss of blood and blood pressure
Speaker 1: means blood can't get to all the lower body tissues
Speaker 1: to supply them with nutrients, and they're just they're out
Speaker 1: of luck. And then of course the final thing is
Speaker 1: you can't eat without a mouth. Yeah, I guess that's
Speaker 1: a problem. So it's pretty obvious why creatures like us
Speaker 1: can't survive decapitation. But one of the weirdest facts is
Speaker 1: that some animals sort of can not forever. But I
Speaker 1: want to talk for a second about cockroaches. Now. I
Speaker 1: found this great old Scientific American article from two thousand
Speaker 1: seven that spoke to several experts about cockroach decapitation. So
Speaker 1: you can cut a cockroach's head off and its body
Speaker 1: doesn't immediately die. That's I mean people out there, I'm
Speaker 1: I just kind of genuinely generally don't like cockroaches, But
Speaker 1: there's people out there who are like definitely afraid of them.
Speaker 1: That's got to really squip them out. So cockroaches don't
Speaker 1: have blood vessels and high blood pressure like we do.
Speaker 1: So you cut a cockroaches head off, it doesn't gush
Speaker 1: all of its important fluids out immediately. A cockroach has
Speaker 1: an open circulatory system. This is what it's referred to,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't have blood vessels. It's just kind of
Speaker 1: a it's just kind of a bag of juice. And
Speaker 1: when you get it, when it gets its head cut off,
Speaker 1: it doesn't all gush out. It can just kind of
Speaker 1: like seal itself off and then it's it's it's still okay.
Speaker 1: Basically being called blooded, cockroaches don't need to eat as
Speaker 1: much as animals like us, so they can also survive
Speaker 1: decapitation much longer without eating, you know, because the head
Speaker 1: isn't there to eat, so the body can kind of
Speaker 1: hang around for a while. You could also just like
Speaker 1: maybe take a like a slurry ivy and just plug
Speaker 1: it right into the decapitated head part, just feed it
Speaker 1: that way. According to this Scientific American article I read,
Speaker 1: there have been experiments in the lab, but yeah, they
Speaker 1: there's this entomologist named Christopher Tipping at Delaware Valley College
Speaker 1: and Doylestown, Pennsylvania at least at the time, and and
Speaker 1: he'd done a bunch of cockroach decapitation to study. He
Speaker 1: did it very carefully, I'm sure he did. And then
Speaker 1: they got some dental wax to seal up the wound
Speaker 1: after they cut the head off off and this prevented
Speaker 1: them from losing all their fluids. Yeah, and they said
Speaker 1: that the bodies without the head lasted for several weeks
Speaker 1: in a jar. Wow weeks. Yeah, these things live for
Speaker 1: weeks without their head. So imagine this like performing this
Speaker 1: experiment on human being. You cut its head off, you
Speaker 1: see it with dental wax, and then you put it
Speaker 1: in a giant jar. Now, the body doesn't necessarily even
Speaker 1: the cockroach body doesn't necessarily do a whole lot without
Speaker 1: the head. Uh, But insects don't necessarily control all of
Speaker 1: their body movements with the brain alone. They were still
Speaker 1: able to do some things because they have these clumps
Speaker 1: of ganglia throughout the body tissues which can act sort
Speaker 1: of like simple local mini brains. Yeah. That's one of
Speaker 1: the reasons why cockroaches and this is something else we
Speaker 1: could cover in a cockrotch episode, But why they're such
Speaker 1: a great model for building robots off of actually because
Speaker 1: their legs and limbs act both centrally from you know,
Speaker 1: like a central nervous system. But then each one has
Speaker 1: its own independent movement and it's almost like it has
Speaker 1: its own little brain. That's not the right way really
Speaker 1: to put it. It's not the right metaphor, but uh,
Speaker 1: they act independently of the central nervous is. Yeah. One
Speaker 1: of the crazy things that was in this Scientific American
Speaker 1: article is that apparently roaches need their whole body in
Speaker 1: order to remember things. So you can also cut a
Speaker 1: roaches head off in the head can continue to live
Speaker 1: under lab conditions, but the head without the body won't
Speaker 1: remember things that the roach could remember before it got
Speaker 1: its body cut off. Oh that's interesting, Okay, some memories
Speaker 1: stored there. So there are some animals that might sort
Speaker 1: of be able to live without a head for a
Speaker 1: little while and that and that's pretty creepy on its own. Now,
Speaker 1: what about regrowing ahead as Leonard bed steps. That sounds
Speaker 1: like kind of a tall order because right exactly, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's not exactly a head in the way we
Speaker 1: think of. But there is an excellent little animal called
Speaker 1: snail fur that I read about. They can regrow its
Speaker 1: head in a way, though, like I said, it's not
Speaker 1: like a skull with a brain in it. It's it's
Speaker 1: this tentacled upper part of the animal. Snail fur are
Speaker 1: these tiny stalk like animals that look like living hair
Speaker 1: and You can find them growing on hermit crab shells,
Speaker 1: and they give the hermit crab this look like it's
Speaker 1: a crazed insect, and a clown wig. It's this this
Speaker 1: hilarious pink clown wig. And sometimes fish come along and
Speaker 1: bite off the heads. They just chop off the end
Speaker 1: of the stalk of the snail fur that has its
Speaker 1: little tentacles, and then the stalk grows it's tiny tentacled
Speaker 1: head back in a couple of days. And it does
Speaker 1: this using retained embrion stem cells that detect the head
Speaker 1: is missing and then grow to replace the lost tissues,
Speaker 1: which is kind of amazing. But then again, it's not
Speaker 1: a head like our head. Yeah, but then again, there
Speaker 1: are some interesting possibilities about what humans could be able
Speaker 1: to regrow. I mean, obviously we know that if you
Speaker 1: cut a human's arm off, they don't grow an arm back,
Speaker 1: but some animals do. And we also know that we
Speaker 1: our genome has the knowledge about how to grow an arm,
Speaker 1: how to grow a leg, and how to grow ahead.
Speaker 1: Because it's done it before. This has already happened to
Speaker 1: you once. The question is why won't it do it again? Well, um,
Speaker 1: you look to like salamanders or newts for an answer
Speaker 1: to this, right, So they regrow limbs all the time.
Speaker 1: The way that they do it is by differentiating their
Speaker 1: cells underneath the wound, by basically making the cells go
Speaker 1: back to like an embryonic state, like cancer cells. Right. Uh, So,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe there's some plausibility there with the whole
Speaker 1: cancerous aspect of Leonard Bets. But you know, as they grow,
Speaker 1: they recognize whether they have a normal or abnormal neighbor
Speaker 1: around them, and that's how those sentiment or a new
Speaker 1: cells regrow into the right kinds of things. Right, That's
Speaker 1: how they know how to grow into a hand or
Speaker 1: a finger or whatever you need. And they're mainly guided
Speaker 1: by fibroblast cells. But then of course, there there's the
Speaker 1: question of if an organism could regrow its head, would
Speaker 1: that still be you? I mean, if you could get
Speaker 1: your head cut off and then grow a new one back,
Speaker 1: would that really be you growing a head back? Or
Speaker 1: would that just mean you were dead and then a
Speaker 1: different person that's basically a clone of your body grows
Speaker 1: a new head. Yeah, I mean, I think the sci
Speaker 1: fi implication of the Leonard Bets episode is that his
Speaker 1: consciousness is like stored in every cell of his body,
Speaker 1: and so he can lose his head and then re
Speaker 1: grow it and remember everything because like every cell contains
Speaker 1: is I don't know, overall memory. Well that's obviously ridiculous. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that much more than that sounds made up than being
Speaker 1: made of cancer and growing a head back. Uh, this
Speaker 1: whole concept of Leonard Bets being made of cancer. I mean,
Speaker 1: there's a reason they invoked this in that, like we said,
Speaker 1: there is a sort of similarity or association between the
Speaker 1: kinds of stem cells that differentiate into body cells and
Speaker 1: then become a new arm or become ahead or something
Speaker 1: when you're when your cells are dividing and you're growing
Speaker 1: and cancer cells because cancer cells are cells that that
Speaker 1: grow rapidly. They have uncontrolled cell division. And the other
Speaker 1: issue with them is that they don't differentiate into the
Speaker 1: body tissues that we would normally use. And normally a
Speaker 1: cell divides and it's a type of cell that is
Speaker 1: dedicated to making a certain kind to body tissue. It's
Speaker 1: the you know, a muscle cell or a liver cells
Speaker 1: what its role is, right, Yeah, the cancer cells are
Speaker 1: more they're just kind of glop they're saying, no, I
Speaker 1: don't want to be a brain cell. I want to
Speaker 1: be just some cancer, right. And in fact, for cancer
Speaker 1: cells to continue to grow to like tumor, suppressing genes
Speaker 1: usually have to be damaged as well the genetics that
Speaker 1: we have that keep those cells from growing into tumors.
Speaker 1: So you're looking at either genetic damage, like a mutation
Speaker 1: like where I guess assuming Leonard bets hash or something
Speaker 1: that's epigenetic, right, something that's external that changes the expression
Speaker 1: of those genes. But Leonard Betts, Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 1: if that exactly works out. Yeah, I mean, part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that Leonard bets body cells couldn't really
Speaker 1: be cancer cells because he has a body. I mean,
Speaker 1: if his body were may just be a pile of
Speaker 1: it would just be cancer. I mean, part of the
Speaker 1: whole thing, like we're saying about cancer cells is that
Speaker 1: they don't make useful normal cells. And so if he's
Speaker 1: got muscle cells to move around and brain cells to
Speaker 1: think with, and cells for digesting food and all the
Speaker 1: other cells that make a body, then that seems almost
Speaker 1: by definition not cancer. Well. So okay, So in Cavello's book,
Speaker 1: she has a hypothesis for this. She says that she
Speaker 1: thinks that the pathologist that looks at Leonard Betts cells
Speaker 1: and says, oh, they're all made a cancer. That the
Speaker 1: reason why is because you can mistake some kind of
Speaker 1: cells basically for kids, like if you just look closely
Speaker 1: at the cells instead of outwardly at the at the
Speaker 1: macroscopic effects exactly. Yeah, and that like the distinctions would
Speaker 1: be if they're crowded together because of their rapid division,
Speaker 1: and then also if they have a small skirt of
Speaker 1: cytoplasm around them. So you know, she posits that maybe
Speaker 1: this person, the pathologist just saw that and went, but
Speaker 1: it's cancer. Okay. So we've pretty much, I think debunked
Speaker 1: the idea that Leonard Betts is going to be a
Speaker 1: functional mutant, right right, unless he's a cockroach in disguise,
Speaker 1: ye I I just even then, I don't know that
Speaker 1: it adds up necessarily, but we this is a good
Speaker 1: opportunity for us to move from Leonard Betts, who was
Speaker 1: the most watched episode of the X Files, to probably
Speaker 1: the most famous other than the flukeman Uh mutant of
Speaker 1: the X Files. And this is of course Eugene Victor
Speaker 1: Tombs from the episodes Squeeze and Tombs another mutant. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so Eugene Victor Tombs is played by Doug Hutchinson. You
Speaker 1: you might remember this guy from a Lost or from
Speaker 1: the Green Mile. He's he's a uh ubiquitous creep in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: He always shows up playing a creepy looking guy. And
Speaker 1: he shows up in the third episode of The X File,
Speaker 1: so he's very early on and he sort of establishes
Speaker 1: the monster of the Week model. I would say he
Speaker 1: plays a serial killer with creepy, glowing yellow eyes who
Speaker 1: has this recurring pattern where he hibernates in a cocoon
Speaker 1: made of newspapers and bile for thirty years and then
Speaker 1: wakes up. He kills five people and eats through livers.
Speaker 1: Then he goes back to hybrid. So that's back to
Speaker 1: the old that that livers is and good that some
Speaker 1: of those parasites love the liver. The fictional X Files
Speaker 1: pars I saw a story saying that they came up
Speaker 1: with the idea for him to eat livers after Chris
Speaker 1: Carter rates some fuag raw. That's true. It might not
Speaker 1: be true, but that that's the story at least, So anyway,
Speaker 1: he stalks his victims using a pretty amazing power, and
Speaker 1: that power is to squeeze himself into and through tiny openings,
Speaker 1: for example, a six by twelve inch chimney, a six
Speaker 1: by eighteen inch ventilation shaft in an office building, and
Speaker 1: at one point he even seems to be trying to
Speaker 1: come up through a toilet sewer pipe, but if I
Speaker 1: recall correctly, he is thwarted by a childlock on the
Speaker 1: toilet lid, which is got to be the most interesting
Speaker 1: way a serial killer was ever prevented from doing his duty.
Speaker 1: So how how realistic is this could even if you
Speaker 1: were a mutant, uh, you know, which is basically what
Speaker 1: they just say in the episode. They're like, oh, it's
Speaker 1: I think this guy's a mutant who has been living
Speaker 1: for hundreds of years or whatever, right, and of course
Speaker 1: he's right. Well, you know. Cavelos in her book points
Speaker 1: to this famous circus contortionist with the Jim Rose Circus
Speaker 1: side show act, known as the Armenian rubber Man. And
Speaker 1: I found a photo online of this guy from a
Speaker 1: show he did in the nineteen nineties where he's playing
Speaker 1: an electric guitar with his legs behind his head. So
Speaker 1: he's very, very flexible and can fit through tiny openings
Speaker 1: and stuff. This guy, according to Cavelos, could fit his
Speaker 1: whole body through the frame of a tennis racket, and
Speaker 1: not through those huge tennis rackets we used today, but
Speaker 1: those like tiny old tennis rackets you see people using
Speaker 1: in old movies, which that's this oval about eight inches
Speaker 1: by eleven inches, so that's tiny. So for Toombs is
Speaker 1: early stunts with the six by twelve inch chimney and
Speaker 1: the six by teen inch ventilation shaft. This might be
Speaker 1: a case where no superhuman mutation is required, just simply
Speaker 1: pushing the limits of human contortionist mobility. Somebody might be
Speaker 1: able to do that, right, Yeah, yeah, well somebody who's
Speaker 1: a contortionist, somebody who's either practiced this or has some
Speaker 1: kind of physiological abnormality that allows them to squeeze their bodies.
Speaker 1: But but is there any sort of inherited condition that
Speaker 1: can make you any more squeezeable than even the average
Speaker 1: contortions born born Eugene Victor Tombs leave out the eating
Speaker 1: livers part and the sewer pipe, which I'm gonna get
Speaker 1: back to, so maybe sort of Cavello's points to a
Speaker 1: condition known as Ailer's dan Los syndrome. And I went
Speaker 1: and look this up, and there are actually many different
Speaker 1: types of Ailer's dan Los syndrome. What they have in
Speaker 1: common is that they affect the body's connective tissue, like
Speaker 1: the collagen that your body generates to form ligaments and
Speaker 1: connecting tissues in between bones and muscles and things like that.
Speaker 1: And all the different types of this disorder affect the
Speaker 1: joints and the skin, and they're associated with what's known
Speaker 1: as hypermobility, which is unusually mobile joints, both large joints
Speaker 1: and small ones, so like your knees and your fingers.
Speaker 1: And one particular subtype of Ailor's DANLST is known as
Speaker 1: the hypermobility type, affecting up to one in every ten
Speaker 1: thousand or fifteen thousand people. Really, yeah, and the hypermobility
Speaker 1: subtype of the disease and is especially intense in causing
Speaker 1: this hypermobility condition. Where the hypermobile joints um they're not
Speaker 1: really a superpower, but they are. They have a much
Speaker 1: wider range of flexibility and movement than normal people's joints do,
Speaker 1: but they're also prone to freak went dislocation and partial dislocation,
Speaker 1: which can be very painful and cause difficulty with many
Speaker 1: activities in life. So this is not a condition you want.
Speaker 1: So it's possible that somebody with this condition could contort
Speaker 1: themselves in such a way to make it through these
Speaker 1: very tiny openings. But let's establish this. There's two episodes
Speaker 1: of the Eugene Tunes. The first is Squeeze and the
Speaker 1: things that you described there, that somebody might be able
Speaker 1: to make it through those things, like the ventilation shaft
Speaker 1: thing isn't all that big, but that they ca all
Speaker 1: that small that they find him in like in the
Speaker 1: parking garage in that episode, But in the following episode
Speaker 1: he doesn't totally bonker stuff like squeeze his face through
Speaker 1: like prison bars and stuff and coming up through the toilet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I mean that that's just I find that
Speaker 1: unlikely person would be able to write, yes exactly. I
Speaker 1: mean I'll get to that in a second. Now, there
Speaker 1: are some animals that have really really amazing uh fit thruitiveness.
Speaker 1: Let's call it this trade, the ability to squeeze through
Speaker 1: amazingly small openings, and one of them would be the octopus.
Speaker 1: So I found this video it's a Bermuda Institute of
Speaker 1: Ocean Services student Raymond Decal and his advisor James B.
Speaker 1: Wood didn't experiment in November two thousand six, and it's
Speaker 1: on tape. You can watch it on YouTube where they
Speaker 1: got this octopus to speak. The species was an octopus macropus,
Speaker 1: or the white spotted octopus. And they put this octopus
Speaker 1: in an enclosed, clear plastic box underwater, and the box
Speaker 1: had a single hole in the side where the octopus
Speaker 1: could escape, except the hole was only one inch in diameter,
Speaker 1: like two and a half centimeters. And this was not
Speaker 1: a tiny octopus. This wasn't one of those little little guys.
Speaker 1: This species can grow up to fifteen centimeters long in
Speaker 1: the body and up to a meter long including the arms.
Speaker 1: It's hard to tell a exactly how big the particular
Speaker 1: one in the video was because it's very uh okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it looks at least two feet long arms included,
Speaker 1: so it's big. And it squeezes out through the hole.
Speaker 1: It squeezes out through this inch wide hole that's just tiny.
Speaker 1: It puts its whole body through. You can see the
Speaker 1: part where it's beak kind of pops through and then
Speaker 1: after that, it's it's just going. And there's a whole
Speaker 1: other video I found that's sort of less scientific and
Speaker 1: kind of sadder of people on a boat with an
Speaker 1: octopus on the deck and I don't know how it
Speaker 1: got there. I assume they caught it somehow. And it's
Speaker 1: a very large octopus and it pokes one of its
Speaker 1: arms through a through a hole in the side of
Speaker 1: the bulwark on the boat and I guess feels water
Speaker 1: down there. Oh, I've seen this as well. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're yelling at it. They're like, look, it's escaping, but
Speaker 1: it's squeeze. It's amazing watching it squeeze through this tiny,
Speaker 1: tiny slip much smaller than the octopus his body. And
Speaker 1: James b Would the guy, one of the guys associated
Speaker 1: with that first video I mentioned. He explains that this
Speaker 1: is not just extreme survival behavior for the octopus. This
Speaker 1: is not like the the Octopus equivalent of the James
Speaker 1: Franco movie where he cuts his own arm off right,
Speaker 1: And this is normal behavior for an octopus. In an
Speaker 1: email to National Geographic for an article about this, uh
Speaker 1: Wood told them that octopuses typically live in layers with
Speaker 1: restrictive openings to protect them from predators, and every time
Speaker 1: they enter or leave their house, they squeeze through small
Speaker 1: holes or crevices. So this is just part of the
Speaker 1: octopus's normal life to squeeze through, you know, a hole
Speaker 1: the size of a quarter or something. But do octopus
Speaker 1: pie We've had this conversation before. The octopuses do do
Speaker 1: Octopuses eat each other's livers and then live for hundreds
Speaker 1: of years in piles of newspaper. You know, I don't
Speaker 1: even know if an octopus has a liver, Probably and
Speaker 1: an octopuses eat each other that they cannibalize. Remember we
Speaker 1: we look that up for a previous episode. They are
Speaker 1: serial killers. We established that before. In fact, sometimes when
Speaker 1: an octopus catches another octopus to cannibalize, it takes it
Speaker 1: back into its layer and then it places rocks over
Speaker 1: the entrance to the layer so it can eat with privacy.
Speaker 1: So Eugene Tombs is part man, part octopus. That sounds
Speaker 1: about right, can squeeze and it and it eats its
Speaker 1: own kind. So yeah, but of course, then again the octopus.
Speaker 1: It's it's less impressive for the octopus to do this
Speaker 1: than for a creature like us, because they don't have
Speaker 1: rigid structures like bones, except for maybe the beak um.
Speaker 1: So no matter how flexible or hyper mobile, even if
Speaker 1: Tombs had some kind of condition that caused hypermobility and
Speaker 1: the joints, he wouldn't be able to fit up a
Speaker 1: sewage pipe because being human, he has a skull and
Speaker 1: he has a rib cage, and these structures do not flex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if they do, I mean the purpose of the skull
Speaker 1: is to put checked the brain from physical trauma. So
Speaker 1: assuming he did have a flexible skull like made out
Speaker 1: of flexible cartilage like the bones of a shark might
Speaker 1: be or something, he would almost definitely suffer brain damage
Speaker 1: and organ damage. Coming up through a tiny pot. Does
Speaker 1: seem to kind of have a bit of brain damage,
Speaker 1: doesn't he? In those episodes, like I remember him being
Speaker 1: like a little, uh like unfamiliar. Maybe it's just from
Speaker 1: him being an hibernation for dozens of years, right, but
Speaker 1: he's like very unfamiliar with how things work around him
Speaker 1: and how to interact with with other human beings. But
Speaker 1: so maybe that's possibilities or it could just be because
Speaker 1: he's smushing his brain too hard. Yeah, he sleeps every
Speaker 1: thirty years for thirty years, I guess, okay, And there's
Speaker 1: one more episode where Scully and another guy both get
Speaker 1: tattoos that cause hallucinations and talk to them because the
Speaker 1: tattoos are contaminated with ergotism. Yeah, And the reason why
Speaker 1: we feel like we have to mention these is because
Speaker 1: stuff to Biliar mind is just this year talked about
Speaker 1: ergotism and about the hallucinatory effects of them. So we're
Speaker 1: not gonna spend a ton of time on it here
Speaker 1: because there's a whole another episode that you could go
Speaker 1: listen to it. But that is absolutely a real thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you should go check out the episode Robert and I
Speaker 1: did from last summer called the Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is true that ergotism is a real thing, and
Speaker 1: it is not pretty, and it's not just Ergotism shows
Speaker 1: up several times in the X Files. It's not just
Speaker 1: in that Never Again episode with the tattoos. It's also
Speaker 1: in some other episodes. As Cavello's points out, well, I
Speaker 1: mean it's a convenient it's a convenient plot point if
Speaker 1: you want to explain some violent, nightmarish hallucinations. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: absolutely so. Yeah, if you want to learn more about that.
Speaker 1: I don't think that you guys end up getting into
Speaker 1: why Jodie Foster would particularly be the voice of ergotism
Speaker 1: inside your head, but as she is in this episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so this guy gets a tattoo and it's Jodie Foster's voice,
Speaker 1: talking trash about other women stuff and essentially just encouraging
Speaker 1: him to do evil. But but but this is yet again
Speaker 1: like another example of the writers on X Files doing
Speaker 1: some research, and you know, they stretched things a bit
Speaker 1: here and there, but there's scientific basis to this, all right,
Speaker 1: So that's gonna have to be it for the first
Speaker 1: part of our exploration of the science of the X Files.
Speaker 1: But please come and join us again. Next time. We're
Speaker 1: gonna explore some recurring themes to the show, like monsters
Speaker 1: based on insects and deep regression hypnosis. Yeah, we'll talk
Speaker 1: about alien hybrids and uh, all kind of big themes,
Speaker 1: weaponized bees. Oh yeah, it's gonna be fun. So if
Speaker 1: you've got questions related to this first episode or any
Speaker 1: comments or feedback, you can get in touch with us
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