Speaker 1: Hey, Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the Old Vault. This one is
Speaker 1: an episode from last October. It was our first episode
Speaker 1: on horror anthologies. Yes, uh so the basic format here
Speaker 1: is that in we'll explain this in the actual episode,
Speaker 1: but we each picked different episodes from horror sci fi
Speaker 1: anthologies of the past, you know, stuff like Night Gallery
Speaker 1: or Tales from the Crypt, Twilight Zone, etcetera. And then
Speaker 1: we tease apart some of the science in them, you know,
Speaker 1: more or less online with what we do with our
Speaker 1: movie episodes when we do our regularly uh recurring uh
Speaker 1: movie episodes here on the podcast. And uh and also
Speaker 1: we will notice it's still marked his volume one. That
Speaker 1: is because volume two is coming up next. I'm so excited.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, let's dive right in. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind. My name is Dr Anton Jess,
Speaker 1: Professor of Monster Studies, and I am Professor Griffith Wells
Speaker 1: Warden of the Howling Pit. Robert and Joe have a
Speaker 1: delightfully ghoulish installment of the podcast for you today. One
Speaker 1: guaranteed to curdle your blood and expand your mind in
Speaker 1: the most cranium popping ways imaginable. It's a science based
Speaker 1: stroll through the world of horror anthology, television and cinema,
Speaker 1: The Twilight Zone, the Night Gallery, Tales from the crypt Tree,
Speaker 1: House of Horror, and more so, stake around blood suckers
Speaker 1: and find out which episodes they picked and what sorts
Speaker 1: of scientific subjects they were able to suck from their ters.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And
Speaker 1: as you can tell from our delightful intro there, I
Speaker 1: by a couple of colleagues of ours. We'll just assume
Speaker 1: it was delightful. It was. They sounded delighted. They sounded
Speaker 1: delighted there. But they always even the most, even in
Speaker 1: the most inopportune of times. Well, it comes down to
Speaker 1: the things they delight in, I suppose. But but what
Speaker 1: they told you is correct. We're gonna be talking about
Speaker 1: horror anthologies today and then we're gonna we're gonna ring
Speaker 1: some science from their their desiccated corpses. That sounds like
Speaker 1: great fun to me. But Robert, so, by horror anthology,
Speaker 1: you mean like TV shows where say it's it's horror
Speaker 1: themed and it's not the same characters every episode. We're
Speaker 1: we're not so much talking about like Monster of the
Speaker 1: Week episode on the episodes on the X Files are buffy, right,
Speaker 1: and we're also not talking about them from modern version
Speaker 1: of this you see with American horror story where each
Speaker 1: season it's a different story. No, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: likes of the Twilight Zone, Night Gallery, Tales from the Crypt, uh,
Speaker 1: the Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror, personal favorite of mind. Yeah,
Speaker 1: shows of shows of this nature where each episode is
Speaker 1: a self contained story or sometimes a pair of stories
Speaker 1: or a short story and like a sliver of a
Speaker 1: little extra on there. But they're they're self contained. They're
Speaker 1: they're essentially horror, short horror fiction that has been translated
Speaker 1: generally for television. But then of course you also see uh,
Speaker 1: cinematic installments of these shows as well, where you'll have
Speaker 1: a feature league length film that consists of say three, four,
Speaker 1: maybe five different short horror segments. Oh yeah, maybe we
Speaker 1: can do maybe we can include movies like that in
Speaker 1: the future. I think we just did TV shows this time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are a few, a few kind of branch out
Speaker 1: into film a little bit um and of course, of
Speaker 1: course we'd be remiss we don't end up talking about
Speaker 1: any of these episodes. But Black Mirror, I think is
Speaker 1: one of the finer examples of horror at times more
Speaker 1: sci fi. But really most of those episodes are pretty terrifying.
Speaker 1: I think you could make an argument that Black Mirror
Speaker 1: is a horror anthology television series. Now, Robert, I'm a
Speaker 1: little at a disadvantage in this episode because you have
Speaker 1: seen far more of these types of shows than I have.
Speaker 1: I'm I'm big on Simpson's tree House of Horror, but
Speaker 1: I've actually seen pretty I've seen no Tales from the
Speaker 1: Dark Side, I think, no Night Gallery. I've actually not
Speaker 1: seen all that much Twilight Zone. A few episodes you know,
Speaker 1: here and there, and the only full Tales from the
Speaker 1: Crypt episode I've actually seen that I remember is deeply
Speaker 1: inappropriate one with Tim Curry, who is the most wonderful
Speaker 1: actor ever in in all of acting history. But it's
Speaker 1: just too grotesque to even talk about out well, as
Speaker 1: we'll get into that description can go for just about
Speaker 1: every Tales from the Crypto, like great actors and sometimes
Speaker 1: great filmmakers, but kind of a deplorable story. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if I've seen a lot of her anthology TV
Speaker 1: SHO shows, it's because I watched a lot of Sci
Speaker 1: Fi Channel and syndicated cable back in the nineties. I
Speaker 1: guess you could say it was my my teacher mother
Speaker 1: secret Lover U to reference the Triosa far Um, But yeah,
Speaker 1: I watched like stuff like Night Gallery, Twilight Zone, Outer Limits,
Speaker 1: both new and old. I think on the original Sci
Speaker 1: Fi Channel watch Tales from the Dark Side in like
Speaker 1: Syndication on Sunday afternoons. It always felt like a particularly
Speaker 1: unholy place for it to be. Well, you know what
Speaker 1: I do expect to find if we get into If
Speaker 1: I go back and start watching shows like this, as
Speaker 1: I bet I will recognize things from when I was
Speaker 1: a kid and we would go on a trip and
Speaker 1: like stay in a hotel or something like that, and
Speaker 1: of course they always had all the channels we didn't
Speaker 1: get at home, so they had the Sci Fi Channel
Speaker 1: and I just tuned into whatever in the hotel, And
Speaker 1: so occasionally I'll see some crazy movie now and realize
Speaker 1: I saw a piece of it as a child on
Speaker 1: vacation with my family in a hotel. Well, I didn't
Speaker 1: have ready access to Tales from the Crypt. I would
Speaker 1: what would happen? Is occasionally that on HBO was on HBO.
Speaker 1: It was really one of the original original HBO programs.
Speaker 1: But to watch it, since we were not HBO subscribers,
Speaker 1: I had to either hit it and just mainline it
Speaker 1: during HBO preview weekends, or more often watched them half scrambled,
Speaker 1: because I think it would be like it would be
Speaker 1: kind of like pizza colored scrambled versions of it, or
Speaker 1: sometimes you know, it would just become black and white.
Speaker 1: So there are some episodes for Tales in the Crypt
Speaker 1: when I go back and watch them now and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 1: I had no idea. For instance, I had no idea
Speaker 1: that that was Tim Curry playing female character, because clearly
Speaker 1: the first time I watched it, it was too scrambled
Speaker 1: for me to tell well in that episode. That's kind
Speaker 1: of a mercy, I think. But wow, it's amazing the
Speaker 1: things people will will put up with in the search
Speaker 1: for for a story that they're into, you know, like
Speaker 1: like the idea I always think it's funny that, you know,
Speaker 1: people watch like theater bootlegged videos that like somebody will
Speaker 1: record a movie with the camcorder inside a theater and
Speaker 1: people will watch that. That's kind of look terrible, but
Speaker 1: I don't. I mean people you're they're hungry for it.
Speaker 1: They want that movie. And I guess you were like
Speaker 1: that too, watching through through all the static and weird
Speaker 1: color variations. Yeah, that was how you got to watch it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So to today's episode for any long time listeners to
Speaker 1: stuff to prow your mind. This is essentially the same
Speaker 1: concept as the three Creepy Pasta episodes that I did
Speaker 1: with Christian where we would pick a creepy Pasta stories
Speaker 1: and sort of squeeze the science out of them. And
Speaker 1: I have to say, we we squeezed all the science
Speaker 1: out of Creepy Pasta. I don't think there's there's much left.
Speaker 1: So this feels like the next logical place to, uh,
Speaker 1: to start squeezing horror anthologies. Well, I say, let's get
Speaker 1: right into our first selection of the day. Alright, Uh,
Speaker 1: my selection here for our first one is a Question
Speaker 1: of Fear, and this is this is one of my
Speaker 1: favorite episodes of Rod Serling's Night Gallery, his horror anthology
Speaker 1: series that ran from nineteen through ninety three. Uh, and
Speaker 1: then of course just eternally on the Sci Fi Channel
Speaker 1: during the during the nineties. Is this a picture of
Speaker 1: Leslie Nielsen with an eye patch and a mustache? I'm
Speaker 1: looking at Yes. This episode starred um Leslie Nielsen as
Speaker 1: Colonel Dennis Malloy and it also starred actor Fritz Weaver
Speaker 1: as Dr Mazzi. Weaver is terrific in this as well.
Speaker 1: I mean, Nielsen is great and this this is the
Speaker 1: pre naked gun Nielsen. This is the serious actor Nielsen. Oh,
Speaker 1: he was that way for a long time. What movie
Speaker 1: did I just watch recently where he plays a straight character?
Speaker 1: I can't remember right now, But of course he was
Speaker 1: in Forbidden Planet, was he? Yeah, you don't remember. He
Speaker 1: was like the main he was the commander astronaut and
Speaker 1: Forbidden Planets. I mean Forbidden Planets great, it's not great
Speaker 1: for the astronaut characters who as usual or just like
Speaker 1: some stiff white dudes. Well, you could say that Leslie
Speaker 1: Neilson was also one of those those stiff white dudes
Speaker 1: for sure. Um, he's kind of like put him in
Speaker 1: the same category as Peter Graves, you know. Uh and
Speaker 1: and like Peter Graves, and was later used to terrific
Speaker 1: effect in comedy as such as in the Airplane movies
Speaker 1: and the Naked Gun movies. Uh. And in this he's
Speaker 1: he's pretty great because he plays just a very um,
Speaker 1: just a very hard cold character. And this colonly plays
Speaker 1: he's a fearless mercenary. Uh that has you know, just
Speaker 1: been in multiple wars, and even after World War Two
Speaker 1: was over, you know, he couldn't get enough. So he
Speaker 1: just continually works as a mercenary and kind of a
Speaker 1: Lee Marvin type. Yeah, very much, very much a Lee
Speaker 1: Marvin type character here also reminds me a lot of
Speaker 1: the kind of character that, say, um, Lee van Cliff
Speaker 1: would have played. Oh yeah, okay, So in this episode,
Speaker 1: it starts off with a gentleman's club, and here is
Speaker 1: Colonel Malloy, uh, you know, talking it up with the
Speaker 1: other gentleman there. And one of the gentleman there, Dr Mazzi,
Speaker 1: played by Fritz Weaver, starts talking about an episode at
Speaker 1: a haunted house, some sort of an encounter with a
Speaker 1: haunted house where it was just too terrifying for anyone
Speaker 1: to survive, and of course the fearless colonel. Here he
Speaker 1: starts talking about just how fearless he is and how
Speaker 1: fear is a disease. He says, I'm careful, but I
Speaker 1: am incapable of fear. Okay, So this leads to a bet,
Speaker 1: as of apparently tends to happen in stuffy gentleman's clubs.
Speaker 1: Mazy says that he bets he cannot survive one night
Speaker 1: in this haunted mansion with being scared to death. And uh,
Speaker 1: and he puts ten dollars on the line. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a load of cash, and so of course our mercenaries
Speaker 1: up for it to prove how fearless he is and
Speaker 1: to and to to get a nice pay day. He says,
Speaker 1: of course I'll do it. So uh. And this is
Speaker 1: one of the fabulous things about this episode. It's basically
Speaker 1: a two person show. It's just just Weaver and Nielsen.
Speaker 1: So and you don't even see Weaver again physically. He
Speaker 1: only appears on a television set. So what happens is
Speaker 1: that Malloy braves the ghost effects in the house, you know,
Speaker 1: all these smoke and mirror effects that seem intended to
Speaker 1: scare him out of his pay day. He definitely fires
Speaker 1: a few rounds and do some obvious special effects. Uh,
Speaker 1: and just the audience is clear that they're special effects,
Speaker 1: or it's obvious within the story that they're special effects.
Speaker 1: Think a little of both, especially the modern viewers. Uh.
Speaker 1: The effects aren't like outright terrible, but anything they're lacking,
Speaker 1: I think actually enhances this aspect of the episode. So
Speaker 1: it's like supposed to be visible to Malloyd that it's fake, right,
Speaker 1: or certainly after he's through, you know, emptying his gun
Speaker 1: into it, he's like, oh, you're just sitting real. Um.
Speaker 1: I dealt with the problem the way I deal with
Speaker 1: all my problems. I attempted to murder it. Uh, and
Speaker 1: then I saw that it wasn't anything to be afraid of.
Speaker 1: So uh. He eventually, though, he settles into bed, he
Speaker 1: has a little coffee for some reason, and then he says,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm just gonna go to bed, and when
Speaker 1: I wake up, I'm gonna be ten thousand dollars richer
Speaker 1: dreaming of mounting ghost heads on this wall. Right. But
Speaker 1: then the second he settles in, iron bar snap into
Speaker 1: place over him, and a pendulum starts descending from the ceiling,
Speaker 1: and he still refuses to give into the fear. He's like, yells,
Speaker 1: all right, Mamsy, you can do this, you can kill me,
Speaker 1: but you're not gonna win because look at me, still
Speaker 1: not afraid, not afraid to die and uh. And so
Speaker 1: he ends up going to sleep and when he wakes up,
Speaker 1: he makes himself breakfast and Mazy communicates with him via
Speaker 1: a live TV transmission and he reveals the following first
Speaker 1: of Malloy apparently encountered Mazzi's pianist father in Italy during
Speaker 1: the Second World War, where he tortured him for information,
Speaker 1: pouring gasoline over his hands and setting them on fire. WHOA. So,
Speaker 1: as you can imagine Mazzi's for to find Malloy and
Speaker 1: to break him. You burn my daddy's hands, I'll get
Speaker 1: you for this, right Yeah, So now we know it's
Speaker 1: a revenge piece. So Mazzi reveals at this point that
Speaker 1: he is a biochemist, one of the greatest biochemists in
Speaker 1: the field and is highly respected uh in the realm
Speaker 1: of biochemical warfare. And he says that he and his
Speaker 1: colleague recently discovered a way to convert a complex enzyme
Speaker 1: in the human body into that of an earthworm, and
Speaker 1: by injecting this, he says, quote, the bones of the
Speaker 1: body disintegrate without affecting the nervous system or the vital organs,
Speaker 1: until the victim is as near as can be an
Speaker 1: earthworm able to move on its belly, but without vertebrae,
Speaker 1: unable to stand, able to feed, able to pass waste matter,
Speaker 1: unable to use its arms and legs except to assist
Speaker 1: with a slithering motion in the manner of an earthworm.
Speaker 1: I can't help but notice this sounds like a better
Speaker 1: and more interesting version of a movie I don't like
Speaker 1: to talk about. Yes, I have long thought about this.
Speaker 1: We've had a couple of movies that have come out
Speaker 1: over the past ten years in which a deranged scientist
Speaker 1: wants to turn somebody into a creature of some sort,
Speaker 1: generally a lesser invertebrate. And and and I find that all
Speaker 1: of those men like the concept is initially revolting and appealing,
Speaker 1: but then you realize it's not really dealt with in
Speaker 1: any depth. It's only rolled out to to revolt the audience.
Speaker 1: Whereas in this episode, I feel like it is. It
Speaker 1: is leveled in a in a very intelligent way. Uh so,
Speaker 1: so yeah, to continue going. Malloy initially doubts this. He's like,
Speaker 1: you're you're full of it, but Masi tells him, oh well,
Speaker 1: why don't you look in the cellar and see what
Speaker 1: became of my colleague and says that he was a
Speaker 1: large man, but now he's reduced to something like a slug.
Speaker 1: And indeed, earlier in the episode, when when Leslie Neilson's
Speaker 1: character is looking around the mansion, one of the things
Speaker 1: he encounters is this unexplained trail of slime through the cellar,
Speaker 1: and there's this it's it's it's it's a legitimately creepy
Speaker 1: moment and certainly seems a little different from the uh
Speaker 1: the ghost effects that are thrown at him. So then
Speaker 1: he tells Molloy. Massy tells Mooy that the transformation is
Speaker 1: going to take time, but that he's going to go
Speaker 1: down in medical history and there's no stopping it. He said,
Speaker 1: you can after you leave here, you can tell the police.
Speaker 1: You can go to a specialist, but first of all,
Speaker 1: the specialists probably won't believe you, and even if they do,
Speaker 1: they're not going to be able to help you because
Speaker 1: this cannot be reversed. Wait, so at this point he's
Speaker 1: done something to Malloy. He's like injected him or something.
Speaker 1: That's what he claims, yes, and Molloyd calls his bluff,
Speaker 1: but but he's already beginning to give in the fear.
Speaker 1: Massy tells him, Uh, look, you should just wanted to
Speaker 1: check your inside forearm. I believe it is you'll find
Speaker 1: an injection point. We drugged your coffee, and I snuck
Speaker 1: in and injected you while you were asleep. And and
Speaker 1: if you still don't believe me, then go into the seller.
Speaker 1: Go into the seller and see what my colleague became.
Speaker 1: And at this point, he's like really working Molloy up.
Speaker 1: And Molloy begins to move towards the seller and he
Speaker 1: sees the trail of slime this time, uh you know,
Speaker 1: working through the hallways and descending into the cellar. And
Speaker 1: then he turns around and he tells Mazzi that he
Speaker 1: still isn't that there's no way mass is gonna win,
Speaker 1: that that that that he Malloy is going to win,
Speaker 1: and then he shoots himself with his own gun. And
Speaker 1: at this point, um Mazzi uh admits, he says, actually,
Speaker 1: I win because there's nothing in the seller that's pretty good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean this is just my retelling of it, so
Speaker 1: certainly the episode itself is a is a finer version
Speaker 1: of the tail than my synopsis here. I love the Uh.
Speaker 1: It's a common thing, apparently in horror to just talk
Speaker 1: to people through TVs. I'm thinking about those solid movies.
Speaker 1: Isn't there a segment in Creep Show where somebody talks
Speaker 1: to somebody through a TV? Yes? I believe it is
Speaker 1: actually Leslie Nielsen. I think so. In the bed where
Speaker 1: Ted Danson and I can't remember the other actor's name,
Speaker 1: where they're buried up to their necks in the surf
Speaker 1: in the sand. Yeah, and Leslie Nielsen's like, ha ha,
Speaker 1: I'll talk to you through a TV. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 1: that's a nice connection between this episode and Creep Show
Speaker 1: horror anthology film, which, incidentally enough, Fritz Weaver is also
Speaker 1: in In the crate segment, he plays the professor. Uh.
Speaker 1: That works with how Hobrook's character. Oh okay, and he's
Speaker 1: fabulous in that as well, like he's he really should
Speaker 1: go down as more of a horror anthology legend. Well,
Speaker 1: I I got to see this episode this is pretty
Speaker 1: creepy just hearing you describe it. Yeah, it creeped me
Speaker 1: out then it still creeps me out now even though
Speaker 1: there's no actual transformation, it's described so well. It's a
Speaker 1: it's set up so well that you don't even care
Speaker 1: like it it. It doesn't deflate the horror of it
Speaker 1: when when you have this final twist at the end.
Speaker 1: But this, uh yeah, particularly this concept of transformation into
Speaker 1: an earthworm, I feel like there is a lot of
Speaker 1: dread here and it and uh and I'd like to
Speaker 1: know discuss a little bit why uh we feel that
Speaker 1: sense of dread when we imagine being turned into what
Speaker 1: is essentially a noble organism, uh, the earthwork. Now. I
Speaker 1: can think of quite a few culturally common body transformation
Speaker 1: or deterioration phobias. People have phobias about loss of teeth.
Speaker 1: That's a common when people have from nightmares about losing
Speaker 1: their teeth. Uh, There's like the penis retraction phobia. You know,
Speaker 1: people have genital deterioration fears. But I've never heard of
Speaker 1: bone disappearance phobia before. That's a new one. Uh, It's
Speaker 1: it's a great one. Though. There's actually an episode of
Speaker 1: The Ray Bradberry Theater from the eighties, which has a
Speaker 1: similar plot line in which I believe Eugene Levy plays
Speaker 1: an individual who goes to a doctor for some sort
Speaker 1: of skeletal issue and he like removes his skeleton and
Speaker 1: reduced him to a like essentially an invertebrate. Oh so
Speaker 1: he like becomes a human jellyfish basically. So perhaps it's
Speaker 1: not explored enough the bone removal or disintegration um sub
Speaker 1: genre body horror. Well, Robert, I assume you're going to
Speaker 1: tell me something about the science of earthworms, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: this gave me a good excuse to look into the
Speaker 1: science of earthworms. And I have to apologize to earthworms
Speaker 1: and humans who have been transformed into them, because you know,
Speaker 1: we could do a whole episode just on the importance
Speaker 1: of earthworms and the evolution of earthworms. That's probably true
Speaker 1: of any of the subjects we discuss in this episode,
Speaker 1: that we could probably expand them into a whole episode
Speaker 1: of their own. Yeah, if we were. If I was
Speaker 1: a little more of a grown up about it and
Speaker 1: was and didn't want to just use these things as
Speaker 1: an excuse to talk about night Gallery. Um, the so yeah,
Speaker 1: the uh, we're talking about the analyds here from the
Speaker 1: analytic phylum, which includes all the segmented worms such as earthworms,
Speaker 1: Lee choose, and a whole host of polychy marine worms
Speaker 1: such as the bristle worm, which I recently got to
Speaker 1: see on a vacation in Costa Rica tide pools. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: what do they look like? Are they bristly? They are
Speaker 1: bristly And if you touch them, especially with a five
Speaker 1: year old touches them, uh, they will they will sting you.
Speaker 1: But the child was fine. It was a friend of
Speaker 1: my son's. Yeah, he was fine. He got that. But
Speaker 1: he did get to have a very up close and
Speaker 1: personal experience with with the bristleworm. Um. So, the this
Speaker 1: particular phylum contains more than nine thousand species and six
Speaker 1: thousand species of earthworm. They live everywhere except Antarctica. And
Speaker 1: there are even bioluminescent earthworms. Oh I don't think I
Speaker 1: knew that. Uh yeah, I found a couple of great
Speaker 1: sources on them, in particular Dr Frank Anderson and Dr
Speaker 1: Samuel James. They did a blog post at Biomedical Central
Speaker 1: titled the Evolution of Earthworms. So earthworms are fabulous. There
Speaker 1: their eco system engineers working draining, aerating the soil. I
Speaker 1: feel like nowadays most people realize that, hey, if you've
Speaker 1: got worms living in your garden, earthworms, they're they're doing
Speaker 1: the Lord's work. That's good. But what did we not
Speaker 1: always realize that worms were good for the soil? Well,
Speaker 1: it seems like we didn't. I mean, you can look
Speaker 1: back to the writings of say Aristotle, who referred to
Speaker 1: them as the intestines of the earth, which is in
Speaker 1: many ways true. It seems like a good thing, right,
Speaker 1: You don't want to not have intestines, right. But but
Speaker 1: apparently before Charles Darwin came along with his interest in earthworms,
Speaker 1: there was this idea, at least in the Western world,
Speaker 1: at least in in Europe, in Britain specifically, that earthworms
Speaker 1: were kind of a pest in your garden, that they
Speaker 1: weren't really doing anything. Get there. By the way, Dr
Speaker 1: Anderson and James, one of the things they discussed in
Speaker 1: their their article is that roughly one third of the
Speaker 1: earthworms species in North America were introduced from Europe or Asia,
Speaker 1: and some were introduced into northern forests which had been
Speaker 1: free of earthworms since the end of the Last Ice Age.
Speaker 1: Roughly eleven thousand years ago. Oh wow, I've never thought
Speaker 1: about that the way um like the soil fauna has
Speaker 1: to recover after areas have been covered by glaciers. I
Speaker 1: guess yeah. I believe we've touched on this in the
Speaker 1: past on the show. Maybe it was a very old
Speaker 1: episode about the idea of of earthworms being brought in
Speaker 1: by by colonial forces from the from the Old World
Speaker 1: into the New World. Anyway, but earthworms, there are a
Speaker 1: lot of them out there. The largest is the giant
Speaker 1: African earthworm. Uh. It's typically typically reaches fifty four inches
Speaker 1: or one point thirty six ms in length, but its
Speaker 1: record length is twenty two ft or six point seven ms. What. Yeah, Now,
Speaker 1: even this species before anyone pictures like a full Leslie
Speaker 1: Nielsen transformed earthworm, uh, this species was still the giant
Speaker 1: here was still less than an inch in diameter. Uh.
Speaker 1: So nothing that could scare a man to death. A seller.
Speaker 1: That makes me wonder what are the upper limits of
Speaker 1: Like how how filament like an organism can be? Like
Speaker 1: at some point you would think that the strains of
Speaker 1: moving something that long and that thin would want to
Speaker 1: rip it apart or something. I guess that's one because
Speaker 1: you see them remaining so thin, you don't see them
Speaker 1: reaching sandworm or gravoid size. So Anderson and James that
Speaker 1: they believe that the ancestor of all living earthworms probably
Speaker 1: lived over two D nine million years ago, making earthworms
Speaker 1: about as old as mammals and dinosaurs. They based this
Speaker 1: estimate on DNA sequencing as well as the fossil record,
Speaker 1: which they said, you know, ultimately doesn't tell us a
Speaker 1: lot regarding earthworms, but it does give us leech cocoon
Speaker 1: fossils from the late Triassic two one million years ago, so,
Speaker 1: which presents a minimum age for leeches and earthworms. But
Speaker 1: the idea of a human becoming an earthworm, the loss
Speaker 1: of our vertebrate status, I think it terrifies us because
Speaker 1: it also, you know, it reduces us to the activities
Speaker 1: mentioned by Dr MASI right, moving, eating, producing waste, and
Speaker 1: these are all things we do naturally. But but we
Speaker 1: tend to focus on all the other aspects of our
Speaker 1: human existence. I mean, sometimes to the point where we
Speaker 1: want to reject our inner worm. You'd say, I think
Speaker 1: generally bones are pretty important to our lives. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: agree with that. We we need our bones. But but
Speaker 1: but also just the idea that the worm doesn't do
Speaker 1: anything else. I mean does a lot. Again, but to
Speaker 1: the sort of the human perspective, digging around in a
Speaker 1: garden and not knowing what the earthworms are doing, all
Speaker 1: it seems to do is just food goes in one end,
Speaker 1: poop comes out the other. It crawls around. It is
Speaker 1: like just the you've stripped everything more interesting away from
Speaker 1: the certainly the human experience and the mammalian experience as well. Well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean a common feature of body horror. You know,
Speaker 1: long before we had David Crone and Berg, we had
Speaker 1: older strains of body horror, the kind of horror that's
Speaker 1: based not saying a monster chasing you, but in the
Speaker 1: transformation of yourself into something you don't like or recognize.
Speaker 1: I mean that the most common version of that is say,
Speaker 1: reduction to what people would consider a lower strata of
Speaker 1: animal existence, you know, being made into a beast that's
Speaker 1: less than human. Oh yeah, I mean I can't help
Speaker 1: but think, of course, of of Kafka's the metamorphosis. Yeah uh,
Speaker 1: though of course that that beast like he was turned into.
Speaker 1: I think the term directly translated into translates into something
Speaker 1: like vermin. But it's often interpreted as like a you know,
Speaker 1: a cockroach or something like that. But yeah, he The
Speaker 1: weird thing there is he retains all of his mental faculties.
Speaker 1: You know, he has full sentience. He's just said his
Speaker 1: body transformed. I absolutely love that story. That is. I
Speaker 1: think that is the only horror story that I've actually
Speaker 1: read in a foreign language. I read it in a
Speaker 1: German class. Really yeah, yeah, what was it like in German?
Speaker 1: It was. It was a cool experience. I've since forgotten
Speaker 1: any you know, smidge of German that it was. That
Speaker 1: was that Reading that story in German was the absolute
Speaker 1: peak of my, my, my, my German language reading ability. Well,
Speaker 1: it sounds like a good peak to climb before committing
Speaker 1: to the valley forever. So I mentioned Charles Darwin earlier.
Speaker 1: Charles Darwin, of course, the famous naturalist who gave us
Speaker 1: the theory, the theory of natural selection. He was quite
Speaker 1: interested in earthworms, and in fact they were the subject
Speaker 1: of his last book, Ones, The Formation of Vegetable Mold
Speaker 1: through the Action of Worms. And despite this, you know
Speaker 1: what makes him dry subject matter? Perhaps, uh, it was
Speaker 1: still the most successful book published during his lifetime and
Speaker 1: uh and uh yeah, And according to Anderson and James,
Speaker 1: it was pretty key in changing Western views on earthworms. Uh,
Speaker 1: they were no longer soil pests. People realized they had importance.
Speaker 1: And the tying in with our directly with our Night
Speaker 1: Gallery episode it's it's success inspired an eighteen eighty two Punch,
Speaker 1: which is a publication punch magazine. I guess you would
Speaker 1: call it. Um. They had a cartoon that depicted worms
Speaker 1: evolving into monkeys and monkeys evolving into men in you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a spiral around a cartoon version of Charles Darwin. Well,
Speaker 1: I feel like I should know the answer to this question,
Speaker 1: but I honestly don't. Are is a worm like organism
Speaker 1: at some point believed to be part of our phylogenetic history?
Speaker 1: Or is or have worms always been separate from whatever
Speaker 1: became vertebrates and eventually became us? Well there They've been
Speaker 1: a lot of studies over the years looking at nematodes
Speaker 1: in particular. Um, Like, if you just do some searches
Speaker 1: for uh, human genetics and worms, you'll find these, uh,
Speaker 1: these articles. And I was tempted to go into those
Speaker 1: deeper here, but then realized that's it's really deserving of
Speaker 1: a whole episode. But but either way, I mean whether
Speaker 1: or not some type of worm is a direct ancestor.
Speaker 1: Obviously we share common ancestry, so the question is how
Speaker 1: much do we have in common? Well, I was looking
Speaker 1: at a paper that goes into this, a bit titled
Speaker 1: Earthworm Genomes, Genes and Proteins The Rediscovery of Darwin's Worms,
Speaker 1: and this was by strussan Baum, Andre Kylie and Morgan
Speaker 1: was publishing two thousand nine and in the Proceedings of
Speaker 1: the Royal Society b SO. I I'd like to read
Speaker 1: just a section where they referenced Darwin here, and in
Speaker 1: particularly they're referencing that illustration I talked about with the
Speaker 1: worms transforming into monkeys. Quote. The illustration is a humorous construct,
Speaker 1: but an examination of the earthworm structure and function reveals
Speaker 1: cells and tissues and cell types with vertebrate counterparts. Earthworms
Speaker 1: are ce limit protostomes, possessing an anatomically and functionally differentiated
Speaker 1: alum terry canal with brush bordered absorptive epithelia, a closed
Speaker 1: blood circulation with hemoglobin in free suspension, an organized nervous
Speaker 1: system with cepholic ganglia, and neuro secretary activities, a multi
Speaker 1: functional tissue for which carbohydrate metabolism and storage properties are
Speaker 1: reminiscent of mammalian heptocytes, a series of paired tubules in
Speaker 1: each segment with renal urine forming functions, and a systemic
Speaker 1: immune system comprising leukocite like cells. So I realized there's
Speaker 1: a lot of though very technical information there that I
Speaker 1: had to stumble through. Uh. But you know, what it's
Speaker 1: basically getting down to is that, yes, we're very different
Speaker 1: from earthworms. I'm not saying that earth worms and humans
Speaker 1: are basically the same thing, but when you start looking
Speaker 1: at genetics and just sort of life itself, we're not
Speaker 1: that different. Ye know. They've got a lot of similar
Speaker 1: anatomical counterparts, some of the same stuff you'd see in mammals,
Speaker 1: and in a way, you can see them as a
Speaker 1: reduced version of what we are right Um, and in fact,
Speaker 1: when you look at our genes. Uh, one thing that
Speaker 1: the author's pointed out here is the earthworms share something
Speaker 1: like two d and twenty genes um of their of
Speaker 1: their then catalog that eight thousand, one hundred twenty nine
Speaker 1: gene objects with humans, and that's more than with fruit
Speaker 1: flies sixty eight genes or nematode worms forty nine genes.
Speaker 1: Despite the importance of fruit fly and nematode genes in
Speaker 1: human research, there's so you know, so there are a
Speaker 1: whole lot of vertebrate homologies in there. They wrote in
Speaker 1: summary that more earthworm genes are conserved between earthworms and humans.
Speaker 1: Provides anecdotal support of the original Punch Cartoons strapline quote,
Speaker 1: man is but a worm. That's wonderful. And I like
Speaker 1: how they have fundamentally conclusively proved that you can inject
Speaker 1: somebody with an enzyme and turn them into an earth
Speaker 1: No no, no no, no no, that's still pure science fiction.
Speaker 1: But but I think maybe it does lean into the
Speaker 1: idea that it is science fiction and not just pure sorcery.
Speaker 1: Like there there there is a connection, there are There
Speaker 1: is a wormy, slimy trail descending through the haunted House
Speaker 1: of human evolution if we dare follow it. Well, I
Speaker 1: have greatly enjoyed following the slimy trail. Robert, Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's part of the fun of going after these
Speaker 1: is like sort of picking an episode from an anthology
Speaker 1: series and then just seeing what kind of science you
Speaker 1: can probably squeeze out of it. Um. On that note,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break, and when we come back,
Speaker 1: I believe you have a selection for us. Thank alright,
Speaker 1: we're back, okay, Robert. Treehouse of Horror. Do you have
Speaker 1: a favorite Treehouse of Horror of all time? Oh? Well,
Speaker 1: I have a I definitely have a favorite episode, yes,
Speaker 1: that I watched last night, because it has some of
Speaker 1: the best segments. It has. It has the Shinning, which
Speaker 1: I I referenced already in the episode. It also has
Speaker 1: Nightmare Cafeteria, the one where you know, all the teachers
Speaker 1: in the lunch room returning to cannibalism and eating the children.
Speaker 1: But it also has has one more just really stellar segment. Yes,
Speaker 1: and this is, of course the Simpsons Treehouse of Horror segment,
Speaker 1: Time and Punishment, one of the great Simpsons Treeouse of
Speaker 1: Horror shorts of all time, maybe maybe the best one ever.
Speaker 1: So I'll give you the quick rundown. Homer Simpson breaks
Speaker 1: the toaster by getting his hand jammed in it twice. Uh,
Speaker 1: one of the best gags ever on the show. It
Speaker 1: still makes me laugh every time the second time he
Speaker 1: gets his hand jammed in there. So I think Lisa's like, Dad,
Speaker 1: your hands still in there, and He's like, there's just
Speaker 1: so much fabulous screaming and sprawling about. Anyway, So toasters broken,
Speaker 1: he has to do some repairs. So in doing so,
Speaker 1: Homer accidentally turns the toaster into a time machine that
Speaker 1: takes him back to the Cretaceous period, and upon arriving,
Speaker 1: he recalls the advice his father gave him on his
Speaker 1: wedding night, which is, if you ever happened to travel
Speaker 1: back into the past, don't change anything, because the ripple
Speaker 1: effects through time could be disastrous. Unfortunately, of course, Homer
Speaker 1: ends up killing bugs and you know, generally messing stuff
Speaker 1: up in the past. And so Homer comes back to
Speaker 1: the present the first time to find a kind of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty four scenario where ned Flanders rules the earth,
Speaker 1: a kind of nineteen eight didle for if you will,
Speaker 1: and uh, it's just too good. So eventually Homer he
Speaker 1: goes back through time again to try to fix things,
Speaker 1: and every time he changes something in the past, the
Speaker 1: future changes in horrible ways. Finally, in the end, he
Speaker 1: settles for a present in which things are basically normal,
Speaker 1: but everybody has forked lizard tongues yeah, he says, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: good enough. Uh. And of course this seems to be
Speaker 1: based on Ray Bradbury's short story A Sound of Thunder,
Speaker 1: which was originally published in Collier's magazine in nineteen fifty two.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Robert, I think I'm to understand
Speaker 1: you have not seen the two thousand five movie version
Speaker 1: of A Sound of Thunder with Ben Kingsley and that
Speaker 1: dude with an attitude from Saving Private Ryan. No, I
Speaker 1: haven't you sent me a trailer for it? And somehow
Speaker 1: I totally missed this movie ever even existed. It has
Speaker 1: some of the most deliciously awful c g I monsters
Speaker 1: of all time. It's, you know, that kind of early
Speaker 1: two thousands c g I that at the time people
Speaker 1: just thought was amazing, and now you can't look at
Speaker 1: it without laughing. Yeah, it's it's a it's a shame,
Speaker 1: you know. It's like, it's not like some of the
Speaker 1: stop motion animation you find in older some older horror
Speaker 1: films like this is the Puppets. Yeah, yeah, puppets like this.
Speaker 1: Maybe maybe you know, our taste will change, Maybe we'll
Speaker 1: look back on them in ten years and we'll love them.
Speaker 1: Right now, it's very difficult. Well, I mean, I do
Speaker 1: love them, but not for the reason they were expecting
Speaker 1: people to love them. It's it's hilarious like reading movie
Speaker 1: reviews from the late nineties in early two thousand's where
Speaker 1: critics will say like, well, this movie wasn't very good,
Speaker 1: but at least it has dazzling special effects. Some people
Speaker 1: were just they're out of their minds in the late
Speaker 1: nineties and early two thousands for these c g I
Speaker 1: movies that looks so bad you cannot keep your eyes
Speaker 1: focused on them. You have to look away. I remember
Speaker 1: seeing the Spawn movie when it came out and thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: well that that had some pretty cool looking action in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I recently like glanced back like Glant. Granted I
Speaker 1: didn't watching him full. I just watched a few scenes
Speaker 1: on YouTube and I was just really astounded at how
Speaker 1: bad the c g I was. It's it's amazing. But anyway,
Speaker 1: this movie, it takes this story. At one point, there's
Speaker 1: this monster, this kind of like a baboon velociraptor hybrid.
Speaker 1: It's just amazing. But anyway, so, what what is the
Speaker 1: plot of A Sound of thunder Ray Bradberry's original story, Well,
Speaker 1: it involves hunters traveling back through time to go on
Speaker 1: the safari through time and kill a turano source Rex.
Speaker 1: And so this time travel afari in the story is
Speaker 1: believed to be safe because scouts have gone ahead and
Speaker 1: selected an animal that was about to die anyway, so
Speaker 1: killing it shouldn't change too much about the past. But
Speaker 1: then in the story, won one of these safari guys.
Speaker 1: I think this rich guy pay in to go on
Speaker 1: this trip. He sort of goes off script. He falls
Speaker 1: off this levitating path that they've constructed. Uh, and he
Speaker 1: changes too much about the past, especially in the end
Speaker 1: by discovering that he crushed a butterfly under his boot.
Speaker 1: And so then when they return to the future, everything's weird.
Speaker 1: English words are spelled different, and a fascist politician has
Speaker 1: come to power. It's a fabulous story. I should also
Speaker 1: point out that I think it's the third season of
Speaker 1: the Ray Bradberry Theater had an adaptation of this that
Speaker 1: I think was actually scripted by Ray brad Berry and
Speaker 1: I remember as being pretty good. Yeah, so do not
Speaker 1: feel like you only have that that awful c g
Speaker 1: I film to fall back on. But but isn't it
Speaker 1: interesting that probably more people have been exposed to this
Speaker 1: concept through The Simpsons, then through the Ray Bradberry Theater,
Speaker 1: or certainly that the writings of Ray Bradberry. Oh. I
Speaker 1: think that's how it often is. I mean, lots of
Speaker 1: classic sci fi stories ended up as Simpsons episodes, and
Speaker 1: that's what people primarily know them from. Just like I
Speaker 1: bet more people of roughly our generation know the Tale
Speaker 1: of the Monkeys Paw as the Twisted Claw episode of
Speaker 1: Are You Afraid of the Dark? I mean it makes sense.
Speaker 1: We're essentially talking about folk tales and myths, and these
Speaker 1: things evolved, These things change with the teller historically, and
Speaker 1: so it makes sense that they should change with the
Speaker 1: teller even today. Yeah. But so this is sort of
Speaker 1: a timeless story in a way, because it's illustrating a
Speaker 1: concept that if you've ever really thought about time travel
Speaker 1: and what it would mean if time travel into the
Speaker 1: past could exist, if you think about it hard enough,
Speaker 1: you're likely to stumble across some version of what's come
Speaker 1: to be known in chaos theory and meteorology and mathematics
Speaker 1: as the butterfly effect. Now, there are plenty of popular
Speaker 1: misconceptions about the butterfly effect. You heard about it in
Speaker 1: Jurassic Park and stuff. One of the common misconceptions is
Speaker 1: that the term actually comes from Ray Bradberry's story A
Speaker 1: Sound of Thunder, because what do we find out at
Speaker 1: the end that this guy stepped on a butterfly and
Speaker 1: he sees it on his boot and realizes, oh no,
Speaker 1: that caused these cascading effects through time and changed everything. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is not the case that the term does not
Speaker 1: come from that story. In reality, credit can be given
Speaker 1: to the m I. T. Meteorologist Edward Norton Lorenz, who
Speaker 1: was discussing the accuracy of weather prediction models. And Lorenz
Speaker 1: found while working on meteorological computer programs that extremely tiny
Speaker 1: changes in initial inputs would lead to huge differences in
Speaker 1: predicted weather patterns over time, such that unavoidable errors in
Speaker 1: our inputs will probably always make weather fundamentally unpredictable beyond
Speaker 1: a certain distance into the future. And you actually know
Speaker 1: this from your own experience. Right, you look at today's
Speaker 1: weather forecast, it's probably pretty accurate. Tomorrow's is probably pretty accurate.
Speaker 1: You try to go seven days into the future, it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of a crapshoot. Then, in predicting, say whether
Speaker 1: a month into the future is almost useless. And this
Speaker 1: is because even though we have very good weather prediction
Speaker 1: models at this point, their accuracy just deteriorates over time
Speaker 1: because of the amplification of tiny initial differences that you
Speaker 1: can't ever totally eliminate. So you know, uh, you you
Speaker 1: make a tiny, tiny, you know, many many decimal places
Speaker 1: behind the zero change to some initial input in a
Speaker 1: weather prediction model, and then you run that, run that
Speaker 1: alongside something with the original input, and one day into
Speaker 1: the future they will be pretty similar, but five days
Speaker 1: into the future they will be dramatically different. So whatever
Speaker 1: you've got slightly wrong today, however tiny that error is,
Speaker 1: will mean you just can't predict the future in a month.
Speaker 1: And illustrate this concept, Lawns used the image of a bird,
Speaker 1: I think a seagull or a butterfly flapping its wings
Speaker 1: leading to changes in the weather that would create a
Speaker 1: tornado that you wouldn't have had otherwise. Now, one thing
Speaker 1: I also want to make clear is that this is
Speaker 1: talking about the predicted movements of like specific weather patterns
Speaker 1: and events. Right when they're trying to say where rain
Speaker 1: will be at a certain time and how the front
Speaker 1: the you know, the the air fronts will move and everything.
Speaker 1: We can, on the other hand, make some solid predictions
Speaker 1: about whether just based on climate and statistics. For example,
Speaker 1: you can predict it is much more likely to be
Speaker 1: raining in Seattle tomorrow than it is to be raining
Speaker 1: in Death Valley tomorrow, and you you are likely to
Speaker 1: be correct based on those predictions made on on the
Speaker 1: basis of knowledge about climate and statistics. But still, if
Speaker 1: you're trying to predict far in the future with specific
Speaker 1: movements of weather patterns, you're you're gonna have a really
Speaker 1: hard time doing it. Another misconception about the butterfly effect.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times people interpreted exactly the
Speaker 1: wrong way. It's like the opposite of what it means.
Speaker 1: They think that it means you can identify small changes
Speaker 1: that lead to big effects in complex systems. This is
Speaker 1: the opposite of the point about the butterfly effect. The
Speaker 1: butterfly effect is specifically about the lack of deterministic predictability
Speaker 1: in complex systems with sensitivity to initial conditions, and the
Speaker 1: technical term for this would be deterministic non linear systems.
Speaker 1: Nonlinear systems are systems where the outputs are not directly
Speaker 1: proportional to the inputs. You know, you can slightly vary
Speaker 1: an input and get big changes in the difference of
Speaker 1: the output. So the point is not that you can
Speaker 1: see a tornado and actually trace it back to a
Speaker 1: butterfly flapping its wings. Rather, the point is that weather
Speaker 1: systems emerged from complex interactions over time with extreme sensitivity
Speaker 1: to initial conditions, meaning that if you move far enough
Speaker 1: back in time, you could not have predicted that a
Speaker 1: tornado would emerge. It's not about predicting the future of
Speaker 1: a complex system based on tiny initial changes. It's about
Speaker 1: how complex systems are more and more unpredictable the farther
Speaker 1: into the future you try to predict. This, of course,
Speaker 1: is one of the fundamental concepts of chaos theory, and
Speaker 1: maybe maybe we should come back and devote a full
Speaker 1: episode to this one day with special GUESTI and Malcolm.
Speaker 1: I've never really thought to look critically at whether the
Speaker 1: way Ian Malcolm tries to apply chaos theory and Jurassic
Speaker 1: Park is a legitimate application of that theory. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: the maybe it is, I don't know. That would would
Speaker 1: actually be fun to just to do a breakdown of
Speaker 1: the original Jurassic Park film, Uh, and it would give
Speaker 1: us more opportunity to rail against what Jurassic Park, especially
Speaker 1: the recent films, are doing the understanding of dinosaurs. I'm
Speaker 1: really into kids now whose favorite dinosaurs are fictional dinosaurs
Speaker 1: from this most recent movie, and I feel like it's
Speaker 1: a shame. Real dinosaurs are good enough. Come on, Yeah,
Speaker 1: It's like everybody they're like, oh, it's this blue velociraptor
Speaker 1: or something. I don't know, I haven't seen it yet.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's wonderful. I suppose I should just be played
Speaker 1: that they're interested in dinosaurs at all. But they're just
Speaker 1: so many wonderful actual species, and our current scientific understanding
Speaker 1: of them I feel like should be reflected to some
Speaker 1: extent in our fiction. Totally. Uh So, it's pretty widely
Speaker 1: accepted that something like the butterfly effect applies to whether
Speaker 1: I think there are actually are some who dissent and say, no,
Speaker 1: it's just, you know, problems with our models or something.
Speaker 1: But the question is would it apply to the biological
Speaker 1: history of Earth? Would stepping on a fish seventy million
Speaker 1: years ago change the present substantially? And how would it
Speaker 1: change the present? Unfortunately, this is not a question that
Speaker 1: I think has a firm scientific answer. I think this
Speaker 1: is just something people we don't know what the answer
Speaker 1: to this question is. Uh. One thing I think, though
Speaker 1: I could be wrong, is that I think stories like
Speaker 1: this often get the scale of the changes wrong, like
Speaker 1: that It's interesting that these stories tend to assume kind
Speaker 1: of nonsensical esthetic changes around the margins of reality, but
Speaker 1: where the broad strokes are the same, uh. You know,
Speaker 1: example would be Ned Flanders still exists the Simpsons, The
Speaker 1: Simpsons still exist there apparently the same people. Uh. Ned
Speaker 1: Flanders is still the Simpsons Simpsons next door neighbor, but
Speaker 1: is also the dictator of Earth, you know. And I
Speaker 1: know that's a parody. I'm not trying to like rag
Speaker 1: on the Simpsons for that, but it's a It's a
Speaker 1: good parody because it highlights the kind of absurdity that
Speaker 1: you see in stories like this, like in a Sound
Speaker 1: of Thunder, the idea that you'd still basically have the
Speaker 1: same uh people existing in the same like candidates running
Speaker 1: for offer It's office, but a different one of the
Speaker 1: candidates one yeah, and the bactor the Simpsons, Like why
Speaker 1: would everything be the same except for the tongue? Right? So,
Speaker 1: I you know, I could be wrong, But I would
Speaker 1: tend to say, just intuitively and based on you know,
Speaker 1: using the weather analogy, that butterfly effect type changes from
Speaker 1: deep into the past would result in let's say, larger
Speaker 1: amplitude changes tens of millions of years down the road, bigger,
Speaker 1: bigger amplitude changes than which candidate wins an election. Would
Speaker 1: people even exist if they did with the same individual
Speaker 1: people even exist? I don't know. It seems kind of doubtful.
Speaker 1: There's that great scene in that episode where Homer sits
Speaker 1: on a creature emerging from the water. Yes um, which
Speaker 1: I love that because I feel like it it kind
Speaker 1: of calls back to um paleo art in our science
Speaker 1: textbooks where you're told about the evolution of life and
Speaker 1: you see this picture of some sort of creature waddling
Speaker 1: out of the water, talking about like life coming from
Speaker 1: the sea and then becoming terrestrial. But it it can
Speaker 1: it's kind of accidentally put this idea in your mind
Speaker 1: that there was one fish. There's one creature like that,
Speaker 1: just like this is the one and if you sat
Speaker 1: on it, it would change everything. Yeah, that that kind
Speaker 1: of misconception, like one fish got brave and it climbed
Speaker 1: out of the water, and if it hadn't done that,
Speaker 1: there never would have been uh any kind of like
Speaker 1: water to land dwelling vertebrate transition. Yeah, I mean maybe
Speaker 1: that's part of like an American exceptionalism, right, kind of
Speaker 1: kind of you know, accidentally drained into our science. God,
Speaker 1: that fish, really it was a freethinker. It really changed everything.
Speaker 1: It's the great Man theory of history exactly. Of course
Speaker 1: we got no time for that, but hey, this story
Speaker 1: also deals to the practical effects of time travel, something
Speaker 1: that unfortunately again is in in the speculative realm. But
Speaker 1: at least we can offer some informed criticism even if
Speaker 1: we can't have a like, you know, a proven scientific
Speaker 1: theory about time travel. So one of the things we
Speaker 1: often point out on the show is that, of course
Speaker 1: time travel into the future is easy. In fact, you're
Speaker 1: doing it right now in more ways than in more
Speaker 1: than one, more than one way, more way than one,
Speaker 1: more ways than one anyway. You are traveling into the future,
Speaker 1: of course, at a rate of one set can per second.
Speaker 1: But beyond that, you are in fact time traveling into
Speaker 1: the future in the way that many stories imagine, meaning
Speaker 1: you're going into the future faster than other things are.
Speaker 1: Because of time dilation effects, you're closer to the center
Speaker 1: of gravity of Earth, so you are actually going into
Speaker 1: the future faster than objects farther away from the center
Speaker 1: of gravity of Earth that are moving at the same
Speaker 1: velocity as you. Also, because you're moving faster, that's dilating
Speaker 1: time in a way, speeding up your travel into the future.
Speaker 1: If you get in a spaceship and travel even even
Speaker 1: faster than you will even more greatly speed up your
Speaker 1: relative travel into the future. You will get old slower
Speaker 1: than things that are not traveling with you in that
Speaker 1: fast moving spaceship. So yeah, time travel into the future
Speaker 1: is totally real, proven feature of relativity, and it's just
Speaker 1: it's actually almost kind of easy. Um. On the other hand,
Speaker 1: we often talk about how time travel into the past
Speaker 1: is perhaps impossible, and if not impossible, at least very
Speaker 1: very hard. Uh, the ways in which it has done.
Speaker 1: I was I was reading a post about this, UH
Speaker 1: on Sean Carroll's blog, The physicist Sean Carroll, Caltech physicist.
Speaker 1: He writes a lot of great, you know, popular science
Speaker 1: writing these days, and he's got a great blog. One
Speaker 1: of his posts from two thousand nine is called rules
Speaker 1: for time travelers, where he just says, Okay, if we
Speaker 1: were to try to make scientifically accurate time travel movies,
Speaker 1: what would happen in them? He argues that traveling into
Speaker 1: the past is difficult, it might not be impossible. If
Speaker 1: you can do it, it would be based on what's
Speaker 1: you know, basically like bridges through space time known as
Speaker 1: closed time like curves. And if it is possible to
Speaker 1: travel into the past. One of the things about this
Speaker 1: is that it is not possible to change the past.
Speaker 1: So you might be able to travel back in time,
Speaker 1: but you couldn't create a paradox by say, going back
Speaker 1: and killing your grandfather or whatever, so that you never existed.
Speaker 1: In fact, anything you went back into the past and
Speaker 1: did you would find was in fact already part of
Speaker 1: the past in the future that you came from. That's
Speaker 1: the paradox of the whole situation, right, I mean, And that, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes it kind of weird because that seems to
Speaker 1: sort of create a paradox as well, like it's the
Speaker 1: closed time loop like you see in the original Terminator movie. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a boy who exists or a person who exists
Speaker 1: only because somebody from the future was sent back in
Speaker 1: time by him to become his father. So like, how
Speaker 1: how did that closed loop get initiated? So anyway, backward
Speaker 1: time travel still generally smells rotten to me. But but
Speaker 1: Carol saying, if it's possible, if it's possible at all,
Speaker 1: you can't change the past. You you know, whatever's done
Speaker 1: is done. That just is the past, even if you
Speaker 1: can go back. Also, another point he makes is that
Speaker 1: you can't travel back in time to before the time
Speaker 1: machine was invented. He says, you know, maybe you can
Speaker 1: travel back to a point you know, you've got a
Speaker 1: time machine later and you can travel act to when
Speaker 1: the time machine was made, But you can't travel back
Speaker 1: to the Middle Ages or something like that, because you
Speaker 1: get paradoxes again, which takes some of the fun out
Speaker 1: of our timetab travel fiction. But it also would explain
Speaker 1: why we haven't been visited by time travelers. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's always a great question. Now you might
Speaker 1: be thinking, okay, but wait about wait a minute, what
Speaker 1: about like forking branches of time? You know, can't you
Speaker 1: like fork off into different branches of time? You know?
Speaker 1: Even Sean Carroll, he he adheres to the many worlds
Speaker 1: theory of quantum mechanics, right, so he thinks that the
Speaker 1: universe is constantly branching off into different realities based on
Speaker 1: the wave function of quantum mechanical objects and events. Um.
Speaker 1: But but even if you accept that, there's no reason
Speaker 1: to think that traveling back into time would somehow give
Speaker 1: you access to different quantum realities. It just seems like
Speaker 1: you know you're here, You're here, this is the one
Speaker 1: you have access to. You can't interact with other quantum realities.
Speaker 1: By definition, you can't interact with them. That's what makes
Speaker 1: them differ realities. So unfortunately, I don't think you you know,
Speaker 1: if you don't like the your lot in life today
Speaker 1: and you want to change things, I don't think you
Speaker 1: can do it by going back and stomping on a
Speaker 1: fish or even a butterfly. Still, great episode of tree
Speaker 1: House of Horror, so good, and and I do recommend
Speaker 1: that Ray brad Berry a theater episode as well. I
Speaker 1: believe you can find the full thing on one of
Speaker 1: the video streaming sites if you love bad movies. I
Speaker 1: also recommend the two thousand five movie. It's It's one
Speaker 1: for the c g ages. All right, Well, let's move
Speaker 1: on to another one, shall we all right? So, Joe,
Speaker 1: you've flown with me before, Yes, so you probably have
Speaker 1: observed that then I'm kind of a slightly nervous flyer.
Speaker 1: I like to try to be a calm, reassuring presence,
Speaker 1: trying not to raise my voice around you when we're
Speaker 1: getting onto an airplane. Yeah, and I have to say,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't have anywhere near the difficulty that
Speaker 1: I know some people struggle with when it comes to flying.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I've I found myself grow more anxious when
Speaker 1: it comes to flights in recent years, and I've I've
Speaker 1: been able to successfully uh manage this to to a
Speaker 1: certain degree, uh with a little uh Zanex, a little
Speaker 1: Steve Roach and being electronic music, maybe a little biosphere uh.
Speaker 1: And then that seems to do the do the job.
Speaker 1: It makes me a more pleasant flyer, it makes me
Speaker 1: more pleasant to be around when I'm flying. But so,
Speaker 1: given this reality, I couldn't help but discuss the classic
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone episode from October of nineteen sixte uh Nightmare
Speaker 1: at twenty thousand feet based I should point out on
Speaker 1: the Richard mathieson short story Alone by Night, Isn't it great?
Speaker 1: How many of these shorts come from great short stories
Speaker 1: by sci fi writers. Yeah. I mean we're gonna get
Speaker 1: to some that are not based on terrible stories, true,
Speaker 1: but but yeah, so far we've been talking about some
Speaker 1: big names here. Uh Richard Matheson, Uh what is was
Speaker 1: a legend? Um. This episode, of course, is famous because
Speaker 1: it also started with him Shatner. Uh so just a
Speaker 1: quick thing. Oh yeah, he's he's pretty good at this.
Speaker 1: But and he was in at least a couple of
Speaker 1: Twilight Zones, maybe more. I remember there being at least
Speaker 1: another one he was in. Yeah, what was he He
Speaker 1: was in one that had like a what was it
Speaker 1: a jukebox napkin napkin dispenser? Yeah? Why why did I
Speaker 1: think juke box it like to spit out fortunes or
Speaker 1: somethingthing to that effect. Yeah, it's like a fortune cookie
Speaker 1: napkin dispenser. I'm blanking on the details. He's not nearly
Speaker 1: the same as this episode. So in this one, William
Speaker 1: Shatner plays a nervous flyer who witnesses a creature on
Speaker 1: the wing of the plane during flight. Um, and he
Speaker 1: has in the episode he has he's just bouncing back
Speaker 1: from a nervous breakdown a board of flight, So everyone's
Speaker 1: doubting him when he starts reporting seeing a creature on
Speaker 1: the wing of the plane. Uh this, so what what
Speaker 1: is essentially a grimlin? Though it's kind of a YETI suit.
Speaker 1: It's like a combination of a YETI suit and it
Speaker 1: also kind of looks like that dog down the hall
Speaker 1: and the scene in the Shining. Yeah, it's not a
Speaker 1: great monster suit, but the episode is so solid it
Speaker 1: somehow works. And I guess it makes sense that it
Speaker 1: would be furry if it's at such a height. You know,
Speaker 1: it's cold up there. Um I should point out I
Speaker 1: said it's a grimlin. Well it's a pre Magua Grimlin
Speaker 1: of a pre gremlins, and grimlins to gremlin, not the
Speaker 1: Joe Dante kind, right, Yeah, this is, you know, essentially
Speaker 1: the folkloric creature that messes with technology, an idea that
Speaker 1: spread especially during World War Two. So if something went
Speaker 1: wrong with your airplane engine, you'd say they're gremlins in there, right.
Speaker 1: So in this episode, the crew attempts to state and
Speaker 1: I think they even give them a pill shatter or
Speaker 1: not the gremlin, right, they don't. Nobody sees the gremlin.
Speaker 1: They're just like here take this pill crazy person. Um.
Speaker 1: By the way, good luck trying to get any kind
Speaker 1: of sedatives out of out of the crew of your flight. Semifly,
Speaker 1: that's the policy. You can't ask for them. You have
Speaker 1: to say you see monsters, and then you'll get them. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So he's raving about the creature and finally like the
Speaker 1: plane lands, he's rolled away in a straight jacket. But
Speaker 1: as he's rolled away, he sees the claw marks on
Speaker 1: the outside of the plane, the proof on the engine
Speaker 1: that the monster was tearing apart the plane. He was
Speaker 1: right all along. He's not the insane person. In fact,
Speaker 1: he's the only same person of course. This uh. This,
Speaker 1: this episode was also recreated in the three film Twilight Zone,
Speaker 1: the movie in which John Liftgau played the lead played
Speaker 1: the nervous flyer. Uh. And he's absolutely wonderful in that uh.
Speaker 1: And oh and by the way, George Miller of Mad
Speaker 1: Max directed that that segment in the film. I like
Speaker 1: the gremlin in the in the movie version. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: the movie version. Grim one is a lot more frightening.
Speaker 1: And then also there's a Treehouse of Horror that did
Speaker 1: this as well. When they do it with the school
Speaker 1: bus right tere at five and a half feet. Uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's pretty wonderful as well, and then does a
Speaker 1: great job of delivering exactly the same story essentially, except
Speaker 1: with it's on the outside of the school us right.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah. And then when they put barton the ambulance
Speaker 1: at the end, it follows him under the ambulance. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's a nice twist, like they added sometimes the Treehouse
Speaker 1: of Horrors, Like they add a little extra element to
Speaker 1: the existing story and it really works. So the science
Speaker 1: of this, well, uh, you know, we could probably have
Speaker 1: a really rich discussion about flying anxieties in general. We've
Speaker 1: touched on it before in our Escape Pod episode. You know,
Speaker 1: we we we trust ourselves over to the machine and
Speaker 1: the people, companies and regulations that ensure everything is working.
Speaker 1: There's a loss of agency and flying and I feel
Speaker 1: like it's you're just you're constantly reminded or are reminding
Speaker 1: yourself about the potential undesirable possibilities. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: like standing atop of mountain when you look out and
Speaker 1: you see the height that you have achieved, not through
Speaker 1: any skill of your own, but just through the technology
Speaker 1: and people surrounding it. It's like being deposited on the
Speaker 1: top of the mountain. Yes, it's a little bit less empowering. Yeah,
Speaker 1: airplanes are are sort of great to look at it
Speaker 1: when you're thinking about fear, because they combine so many
Speaker 1: different kinds of phobia triggers for people. Um. Of course,
Speaker 1: there's just fear of like heights and stuff, you know,
Speaker 1: looking out the window and looking down that that can
Speaker 1: upset people. There is fear of an accident of the
Speaker 1: plane crashing, but there's also just a fear that has
Speaker 1: always been more salient for me whenever I've had airplane
Speaker 1: fear is mainly what it is is, um, what do
Speaker 1: you call it? Here? It's a sort of a type
Speaker 1: of a variety of claustrophobia, I guess where um, not
Speaker 1: being able to leave a place when you want to.
Speaker 1: You know the idea that like, okay, for so many hours,
Speaker 1: I'm stuck here and I could not get off if
Speaker 1: I wanted to. Yeah, the most I can do is
Speaker 1: go through a lot of rigamar role to walk down
Speaker 1: the hallway and you can use a very difficult bathroom,
Speaker 1: uh and potentially have to wait in line. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: guess that's the type of fear. There's also just like, uh,
Speaker 1: I know, airplanes are are a particular type of agoraphobia
Speaker 1: trigger for some people, where you know, like the fear
Speaker 1: of losing control or having a panic attack or something
Speaker 1: like that in a public place, and that itself can
Speaker 1: trigger anxieties. And then on top of that, you've got
Speaker 1: the travel anxieties leading into it, you know, because inevitably
Speaker 1: you had to get to that airport, you had to
Speaker 1: get through security, purity, and you know, maybe customs if
Speaker 1: you're on the other line, like there, They're all these
Speaker 1: other stresses added on top of it makes for you know,
Speaker 1: a very stressful day of travel. Really, in my experience,
Speaker 1: there would be a lot of problems solved if airports
Speaker 1: would actually just play you knows music for airports, yeah,
Speaker 1: instead of CNN yeah on the TV, instead of instead
Speaker 1: of Eno, I don't get it, Yeah, play me something calming,
Speaker 1: just like ENOS music, and just scenes the scenes from
Speaker 1: Legend of Unicorns drinking water. That's all I need. No goblins.
Speaker 1: So I guess the thing we should talk about is
Speaker 1: the idea that this is a nightmare at twenty thou feet?
Speaker 1: What what is the feet about? Right? Uh? To put
Speaker 1: this in perspect to the top of Mount Everest is
Speaker 1: twenty nine thousand and twenty eight feet above sea level.
Speaker 1: But that's also quite a bit below the Carmen line
Speaker 1: at three thirty thousand feet, which is generally considered the
Speaker 1: rough boundary between the atmosphere in space. And I say
Speaker 1: rough because it's not like the atmosphere just stops. There's
Speaker 1: more of a tapering off. Now for modern flyers such
Speaker 1: as ourselves, we're generally working with a cruising altitude. And
Speaker 1: cruising altitude, you know, that's that's when you've achieved, you know,
Speaker 1: the altitude that you're gonna have for the main portion
Speaker 1: of your flight. You're not ascending or descending. You're just
Speaker 1: achieving an optimal altitude, optimal speed, et cetera. But it's
Speaker 1: generally going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty
Speaker 1: three thousand feet to forty two thousand feet. So according
Speaker 1: to the USA Today article of what is the altitude
Speaker 1: of a plane in flight, the upper limit is generally
Speaker 1: the domain of private jets because that's gonna be more about, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we want to get where we're going. Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: price isn't much of an option, But with commercial flights,
Speaker 1: everything is kind of a careful algorithm, like, how can
Speaker 1: we do this in the most cost effective way possible
Speaker 1: and the safest way possible. But for the rest of us, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're gonna be, you know, somewhere closer to that thirty
Speaker 1: three thousand uh foot altitude. It's gonna be this sweet
Speaker 1: spot where the ear is thin enough to reduce drag,
Speaker 1: but there's still enough oxygen for the engines. Plus it
Speaker 1: allows them to fly overmost weather, which is located further
Speaker 1: down in the troposphere. So we're talking about minimal turbulence,
Speaker 1: which is exactly how I like to consume the word turbulence. Now,
Speaker 1: I would guess at normal cruising altitude because cabins have
Speaker 1: to be pressurized, Like you couldn't just like breathe the
Speaker 1: air at that height, right, Yeah, since we're flying above
Speaker 1: ten thousand feet, airliners are are pressurized, hence those little
Speaker 1: drop down mass for oxygen in the event of cabin depressurization. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, the Twilight Zone episode, the original one, takes
Speaker 1: place in the early nineteen sixties, so it made me
Speaker 1: think what sort of altitudes were we talking about here? Well,
Speaker 1: I was reading a longing for the Golden Age of
Speaker 1: air travel. Be Careful what you wish for by history
Speaker 1: professor Janet bed Narnick on the conversation, and she points
Speaker 1: out some key factors in flying during this time period,
Speaker 1: and as the title implies, why you'd be better, far
Speaker 1: better off flying now as opposed to that Golden age,
Speaker 1: no matter how cool it looks on you know, stuff
Speaker 1: like mad Men. Yeah, but can you smoke a pipe
Speaker 1: on a plane today? Well? Yeah, these are the things
Speaker 1: people get nostalgic about. I guess if they're smokers. So
Speaker 1: she points out that prior to the introduction of jets
Speaker 1: in night, the transatlantic commercial flight might last something like
Speaker 1: fifteen hours and they had a maximum cruising altitude altitude
Speaker 1: of ten to twelve thousand feet, meaning that they couldn't
Speaker 1: fly over bad weather. So you thought modern delays were bad,
Speaker 1: No way. Basically like, if the weather was bad, you
Speaker 1: just too bad to fly through it, and then it
Speaker 1: wasn't gonna happen. The then you had the propelled were
Speaker 1: driven Boeing Strato cruiser come along, for example, that could
Speaker 1: see fifty first class passengers or one coach passengers and
Speaker 1: it could cruise at thirty two feet above most of
Speaker 1: the weather. But during its heyday, only fifty six were
Speaker 1: active in the entire world. So that's the other thing
Speaker 1: we have to realize. Now, It's like the commercial flight
Speaker 1: world is just so much vaster than it was uh
Speaker 1: in the in previous times. Later we got the d
Speaker 1: C six and the d C seven, both pressure pressurized planes,
Speaker 1: but they had to fly at lower altitudes. Guess what
Speaker 1: we're talking twenty thou feet. So that's where we I
Speaker 1: think come back around to uh, to the to the
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone episode. Uh. Here for the for these flights,
Speaker 1: turbulence was common. The engines were difficult to maintain, and
Speaker 1: this resulted in frequent delays. Uh. So this just matches
Speaker 1: up perfectly with the ZIGRIDGM idea the Twilight Zone concerned
Speaker 1: about the you know what the engines are doing, engine malfunctions, turbulence, uh,
Speaker 1: all happening at around twenty thou feet. Now, I must
Speaker 1: notice in in Nightmare twenty feet that the windows on
Speaker 1: the airplane look very large compared to the windows on
Speaker 1: a plane today. You know, I didn't I didn't look
Speaker 1: into this as much. I wonder if that's just so
Speaker 1: you can see the monster through it, or they used
Speaker 1: an actual fuselage. Yeah, I didn't research that particular aspect
Speaker 1: of it, huh so. But Nerik also makes some other
Speaker 1: important notes about safety at the time, because ultimately this
Speaker 1: is a film about airline safety and fear of of
Speaker 1: of bad things happening during a flight. She points out
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties and the nineteen sixties, US airlines
Speaker 1: experienced at least a half dozen crashes per year, most
Speaker 1: leading to fate to the fatalities of everyone on board.
Speaker 1: Compare that to seventeen, the safest year on record in
Speaker 1: commercial air history, zero accidental deaths in commercial passenger jets,
Speaker 1: and that's with many more flights, tremendously more flights. Uh
Speaker 1: Dutch aviation consulting firm uh to seventy estimated that the
Speaker 1: fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger of flights is
Speaker 1: point zero six per million flights, or one fatal accident
Speaker 1: for every sixteen million flights. I would suggest by that
Speaker 1: calculation that it appears gremlins are either extinct or endangered. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would seem to be the case. Like this is
Speaker 1: ultimately a story that speaks more to an earlier age
Speaker 1: of of commercial air travel, despite the fact that every
Speaker 1: time I fly, legitimately, every time I fly, if I
Speaker 1: look out the window and I see the wing, I
Speaker 1: think of this Twilight Zone episode. Yeah, not that I
Speaker 1: like freak out about the possibility of an actual gremlin,
Speaker 1: but I still I can't help but think think about it.
Speaker 1: It's just always been there. But I'd like to turn
Speaker 1: to the biological element of nightmare twenty feet. What sort
Speaker 1: of organism can actually become a factor at that altitude? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know there there are bacteria that live
Speaker 1: in clouds, but are there are there large animal that
Speaker 1: fly up that high? That's a great question because we're
Speaker 1: talking about some extreme heights here, right, Um. And again, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we require pressurized cabins and or masks to
Speaker 1: to survive up there. Everything has to be uh, you know, temperature,
Speaker 1: The temperature has to be carefully maintained. But evolution delivers
Speaker 1: certain bird species to these lofty heights as well, and yes,
Speaker 1: some of them can pose grave danger to flights. These
Speaker 1: are of course referred to as bird strikes, um, which
Speaker 1: which are when they occur, can be pretty pretty terrible.
Speaker 1: I've read that most bird strikes are encountered at below
Speaker 1: ten thousand feet. I've also read that most are actually
Speaker 1: occurring below three thousand feet, so I mean, I think
Speaker 1: that should give you an idea, like most of the
Speaker 1: birds are are are operating at at lower altitudes. When
Speaker 1: you fly above the weather, you're probably flying above the birds.
Speaker 1: So as with most things in air travel, the majority
Speaker 1: of the dangers are going to be closer to take
Speaker 1: off and landing, not at crewing altitude. Right and and again,
Speaker 1: they can be pretty dangerous, especially in the event of
Speaker 1: a double bird strike, where like both engines are hit
Speaker 1: by the birds. Still, major accidents are few, but we
Speaker 1: have to consider some of the birds that do get
Speaker 1: up to some crazy heights. So I just want to
Speaker 1: run through a few of them here before we get
Speaker 1: to the like the King of Altitude. Uh, there are
Speaker 1: migrating white storks which can reach sixteen thousand feet or
Speaker 1: forty eight hundred meters. They're migrating bar tailed godwits that
Speaker 1: can that can actually reach twenty thousand feet or six
Speaker 1: thousand meters. There's the bar headed goose which can get
Speaker 1: up to twenty nine thousand feet or eight thousand, eight
Speaker 1: hundred meters. And these guys fly over the tallest mountain
Speaker 1: ranges on Earth. Why do they go up so high?
Speaker 1: Do you know? Well, with the earlier species we're talking about,
Speaker 1: like this ends up being a part of their migration. Um.
Speaker 1: But the king of all this, the king of altitude,
Speaker 1: is definitely Ruple's vulture, also known as Ruple's Griffin. Whoa,
Speaker 1: we're talking a maximum altitude of eleven thousand, three hundred
Speaker 1: meters or thirty seven thousand, one hundred feet. So these
Speaker 1: are these are vultures. They're extremely keen of I you
Speaker 1: know there they have evolved to fly above it all
Speaker 1: and uh and taking everything beneath. But they can get
Speaker 1: up to just crazy altitudes. Uh, they're just unchallenged in
Speaker 1: their ability to do so. Now. Fortunately they're found only
Speaker 1: in the Sole region of Central Africa. This is a
Speaker 1: belt stretching across the continent just below the Sahara. But indeed,
Speaker 1: a bird strike entailing Ruple's vulture actually occurred over the
Speaker 1: Ivory Coast at an altitude of thirty seven thousand, one
Speaker 1: hundred feet or eleven thousand, three hundred meters on November three.
Speaker 1: According to serious vulture hits to aircraft over the world,
Speaker 1: a two thousand report by the International Bird Strike Committee.
Speaker 1: Outside temperatures were frigid, there was almost no oxygen, and
Speaker 1: yet here comes this, uh, this vulture and it hits
Speaker 1: the plane. So that I think is one of the
Speaker 1: you know, these are some of the few examples of
Speaker 1: organisms that are actually going to be going about their
Speaker 1: normal business, like large organisms, organisms large enough to pose
Speaker 1: a potential and slim, uh, you know, threat to commercial flights.
Speaker 1: By the way, I also ran across a story from
Speaker 1: in which a Ruple's vulture escaped from a bird show
Speaker 1: in North lack Shear, Scotland, and her name was Gandalf
Speaker 1: and uh and after she escaped, airports in the area
Speaker 1: were put on notice, and there was no evidence that
Speaker 1: she was, you know, ever recovered or anything. Fly are
Speaker 1: you fools? But but it's it's like, it's kind of
Speaker 1: an alarming story because it's like, oh, this bird has escaped,
Speaker 1: and it could there's a very slim chance it could
Speaker 1: pose a danger to commercial flights in the area. But
Speaker 1: we should remind you that even with the Ruple's vulture
Speaker 1: flying around somewhere out there, flying is generally pretty safe
Speaker 1: these days. Yeah, it's far safer than driving when you
Speaker 1: break down the statistics again, commercial flying, not necessarily getting
Speaker 1: in the airplane that your dentist buddy owns. Right, we're
Speaker 1: talking about commercial flights again, seventeen safest year on record. Um,
Speaker 1: you really don't have to worry about green ones on
Speaker 1: the wing of the plane, only about the langue years
Speaker 1: land the plan. Speaking of late nineties c g I right, yes,
Speaker 1: for real, man, that's a good one. I love that
Speaker 1: short story though. That was that was definitely a Stephen
Speaker 1: King wellmank It was more of a novella, but it
Speaker 1: it definitely harkened back to some of those Twilight Zone
Speaker 1: type scenarios. I've never read the story, but I remember
Speaker 1: seeing that on TV sometime around back when it came out,
Speaker 1: and oh man, that was one where maybe even maybe
Speaker 1: even the critics of the time, we're not wowed by
Speaker 1: the c G I. Yeah, they were essentially like the critters,
Speaker 1: the crits from the Critters movies. There were just these
Speaker 1: big c g I mouth is like eating the sky.
Speaker 1: It's a shame because the original story it is a
Speaker 1: lot of fun. I do recommend it. I mean, don't
Speaker 1: read it on a plane, for God's sake. Um, you know,
Speaker 1: do read it when you're on the ground. Okay, we
Speaker 1: need to take a quick break, but we will be
Speaker 1: right back with more horror, anthology, science. Thank thank Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So what do you have for us, Joe, Well,
Speaker 1: you just did a Twilight Zone episode. I feel like
Speaker 1: I gotta do a Twilight Zone episode they had. There's
Speaker 1: so many thoughtful episodes of the Twilight Zone. And perhaps
Speaker 1: because you know, it wasn't just pure hard it also
Speaker 1: had a lot of science fiction in it and just
Speaker 1: sort of weird fiction in general. So here is a
Speaker 1: sci fi horror episode of the Twilight Zone. This is
Speaker 1: one of the classics. You probably, I bet the majority
Speaker 1: about you out there listening already know the story here,
Speaker 1: but for those of you who don't, I've got to
Speaker 1: tell it. It is to serve man. Uh. This is
Speaker 1: one that was written by Rod Serling, based on a
Speaker 1: story by a writer named Damon Knight. It was originally
Speaker 1: aired on March two, nineteen sixty two, and it's just
Speaker 1: got a whist to put him Night Shamalan to shame.
Speaker 1: It is the best. So here's Rod Serling's teaser for
Speaker 1: the episode, respectfully submitted for your perusal. A cannement height
Speaker 1: a little over nine feet, weight in the neighborhood of
Speaker 1: three hundred and fifty pounds. Origin unknown motives. Therein hangs
Speaker 1: the tale for in just a moment, we're going to
Speaker 1: ask you to shake hands figuratively with a Christopher Columbus
Speaker 1: from another galaxy and another time this is the Twilight Zone. Well,
Speaker 1: that's already a terrifying possibility here. So it's got a
Speaker 1: guy named Lloyd Bachner in it as he's a Canadian
Speaker 1: actor as this government cryptographer who who is tasked with
Speaker 1: decoding and alien books. So I actually I should say
Speaker 1: first aliens show up. They're called the Cannimates. They're played
Speaker 1: by Richard Kiel who ended up playing Kyle or Kiel.
Speaker 1: Do you know how you pronounce it? Always heard Kio,
Speaker 1: but it could be drastically wrong on that. He's the
Speaker 1: guy who played jaw Us in the James Bond movies.
Speaker 1: He was he was, he got yeah. Uh, And so
Speaker 1: he plays all of these aliens. They all look the same,
Speaker 1: uh and uh. Richard Keel in in like some weird
Speaker 1: head makeup, shows up on Earth and he speaks to
Speaker 1: the United Nations telepathically and he's like, hey, we're here
Speaker 1: to help you. We're gonna solve world hunger. We're going
Speaker 1: to make we're gonna make war disappear. We're gonna solve
Speaker 1: all your problems and make life on earth great. Don't
Speaker 1: you want that? Don't you want this free new energy
Speaker 1: source that you can, you know, power a whole country
Speaker 1: for a few dollars a day? Don't you want all
Speaker 1: this great stuff? And people are. They're hesitant at first,
Speaker 1: but they're like, well, okay, And so Jaws brings a
Speaker 1: book with him that has like a title in these
Speaker 1: alien glyphs on the cover. He's like reading things from
Speaker 1: this book as he's promising stuff to humanity, and they
Speaker 1: get a copy. The humans grab a copy of the
Speaker 1: book and they bring it to this government cryptographer and
Speaker 1: they're like, can you decode this? Tell us what it means?
Speaker 1: And so he works on it. He's got a colleague
Speaker 1: named Patty who works on it. Uh. It proves too
Speaker 1: difficult to decode, except that Patty decodes the title and
Speaker 1: figures out that the title is to serve man. Well,
Speaker 1: that sounds noble and wonderful and and really works out
Speaker 1: well for us exactly, So they can't decode the rest
Speaker 1: of the book, but to serve Man, and that sort
Speaker 1: of puts people at ease. They're like, Okay, well, the
Speaker 1: book there is about how to serve humankind. That that
Speaker 1: sounds like a good thing. So people start getting on
Speaker 1: spaceships to go with Jaws to his home planet where
Speaker 1: they will be given. I think that at one point
Speaker 1: they're talking about how they've even got baseball on the
Speaker 1: Cannibate's planet. Uh, to go to the Basically it's like
Speaker 1: a forever vacation where everything is just going to be awesome,
Speaker 1: so that people are getting on the spaceships to go there.
Speaker 1: And then the big twist that comes at the end
Speaker 1: is right as the main guy is about to get
Speaker 1: on the spaceship to go to the cannon It's planet
Speaker 1: and uh and and live out his days at the
Speaker 1: baseball resort or whatever, Patty comes yelling at him, don't
Speaker 1: get on the ship. It's a cookbook. It's so good
Speaker 1: to serve man for dinner. I believe the sentence of
Speaker 1: period this as well to a limited extent, right, how
Speaker 1: to serve mill House for dinner? Oh oh, I'm vaguely
Speaker 1: I don't remember when that which one? I don't I
Speaker 1: can't remember which episode it was, okay, but they definitely
Speaker 1: touched on it at one point. Now, I don't want
Speaker 1: to be too literal about interpreting the science of the story,
Speaker 1: because if you really wanted to be nitpicky, you could
Speaker 1: point out a million really funny details. And its like,
Speaker 1: there's one point where to try to make sure that
Speaker 1: the aliens intentions are actually good. They hook Jaws up
Speaker 1: to a to a polygraph test. It's just like they
Speaker 1: give him a human polygraph to to see if he's
Speaker 1: lying about wanting to help them. And another thing that's
Speaker 1: funny is they bring in this cryptographer to decode this
Speaker 1: alien book, but to decode it to what like cryptography
Speaker 1: usually consists of trying to decode encoded messages to ann
Speaker 1: language where you're like, you know where it will code
Speaker 1: out to some kind of script that you already understand.
Speaker 1: How would you decode an alien language when you have
Speaker 1: nothing to start with? Yeah, and I like the idea
Speaker 1: that they could they could figure out nothing from the inside,
Speaker 1: like no content but just the title. Yeah, it's great.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Okay, the main thing I wanted to talk about,
Speaker 1: ignoring all that other stuff is the idea of aliens
Speaker 1: invading in order to eat us, or perhaps more realistically
Speaker 1: another option, just to eat earth life in general, maybe
Speaker 1: not focused on us, but just here to eat things. Okay,
Speaker 1: so not just to say, harvest the resources of our
Speaker 1: planet or to do something to our star, which we've discussed,
Speaker 1: and but you're talking about like just just just tear
Speaker 1: into the bio mass of Earth. It's a very common
Speaker 1: theme in sci fi horror. At a glance, it sort
Speaker 1: of makes sense because you think about, like, okay, so
Speaker 1: what do human invaders do when they invade a country. Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of times what they'll do is they'll just
Speaker 1: like raige your village and take all your food. They
Speaker 1: want food, they need all your steal all your grain
Speaker 1: and stuff. And then they'll move on, or they'll land
Speaker 1: on an island. And if there's a particular flightless bird
Speaker 1: or or some sort of a turtle or tortoise that
Speaker 1: is uh, you know, notoriously unable to defend itself and
Speaker 1: and perhaps even trusting to a fault of humans, they
Speaker 1: might just eat them all or just every time they
Speaker 1: come back, harvest as many as they can and eat
Speaker 1: them on the ship, or just kill them and not
Speaker 1: eat them human as did the did that too? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that's a little maybe maybe we don't want to
Speaker 1: think about that comparison. Uh but okay, so would they
Speaker 1: want to eat us or eat our food? I came
Speaker 1: across an interesting opinion about this. This was in a
Speaker 1: chapter from a book called Aliens, The World's Leading Scientists
Speaker 1: on the Search for Extraterrestrial Life, published in twenty seventeen
Speaker 1: by Piccador. And this book was edited by the Iraqi
Speaker 1: British physicist Jim al Khalili. And there's a chapter in
Speaker 1: this book that was written by the British astrobiologist Louis
Speaker 1: Dartnell where he's talking about what would aliens actually want
Speaker 1: with Earth? Why would they be interested in coming here?
Speaker 1: And he's making the case that a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that people usually imagine aliens would want to come
Speaker 1: here for doesn't make any sense. That they want water,
Speaker 1: or they want raw minerals or something like that. He
Speaker 1: just you, oh, that's one too with all those things.
Speaker 1: He points out, how you know that's either and that's
Speaker 1: not actually a concern for anything they would want, or
Speaker 1: they could get this more abundantly elsewhere. And so here's
Speaker 1: Dartnell's case about whether aliens would want to eat us. So,
Speaker 1: the cells in our bodies are made of large collections
Speaker 1: of specific organic molecules. You've got proteins, which are chains
Speaker 1: of amino acids. You've got the nucleic acids like DNA
Speaker 1: and RNA, which are chains of bases and sugars. And
Speaker 1: then of course you've got the best part, the membranes
Speaker 1: and the phospholipids UH, and so in order to keep
Speaker 1: our bodies alive and working properly, we need to have
Speaker 1: steady incoming streams of those molecular building blocks, so we
Speaker 1: eat other life forms like plants and animals in order
Speaker 1: to get them. You can't survive obviously, just by like
Speaker 1: eating sand or tree bark or salt and ammonia. You
Speaker 1: need to get specific organic molecules like sugars, amino acids,
Speaker 1: and fatty acids in order to survive. It's also true
Speaker 1: that your digestive system is specifically evolved to break down
Speaker 1: certain kinds of stuff like earth plant matter and earth
Speaker 1: animal flesh, and it is it has specially tailored enzymes
Speaker 1: for breaking down those molecules likely to be found in
Speaker 1: the stuff Your ancestors were eating. Yeah, it's also worth reminding,
Speaker 1: you know, we eat a lot of creatures and a
Speaker 1: life on this planet. It's easy to forget that there's
Speaker 1: a whole lot of stuff we cannot eat. There a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of species that are just not
Speaker 1: on the menu for us. Most of the mass of
Speaker 1: planet Earth you can't eat. I mean that. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff you just can't get nutrition from.
Speaker 1: Even if it contains raw atoms that you might want,
Speaker 1: you know that would be useful. Your body doesn't have
Speaker 1: a way to break them down properly, doesn't have the
Speaker 1: right chemical enzymes and stuff to separate out the parts
Speaker 1: that you would need or put together the parts that
Speaker 1: you would need. Your digestive system is shaped by what
Speaker 1: was available to the creatures that you evolved from. Now, fortunately,
Speaker 1: most other life forms on Earth have these useful molecules
Speaker 1: in some nutritionally available way. Other animals on Earth are
Speaker 1: nourishing to us because we came from a common ancestor
Speaker 1: and we share common biochemistry. So in order to get
Speaker 1: nutrition from eating us and the alien would need to
Speaker 1: share our biochemistry, And in order to do that, we
Speaker 1: would either need to share a common ancestor, and unless
Speaker 1: they're coming from somewhere else within our solar system, which
Speaker 1: seems unlikely at this point, It's not likely we would
Speaker 1: share a common ancestor or we need to have the
Speaker 1: same biochemistry by coincidence. So what are the odds of
Speaker 1: sharing biochemistry by coincidence? Dartnehill rights, well, that's certainly possible
Speaker 1: for all we know. Perhaps our DNA based life is
Speaker 1: the only way you can make self reproducing life forms
Speaker 1: out of the chemistry available in the universe. Dartnell points
Speaker 1: out that quote, a whole variety of amino acids, sugars,
Speaker 1: and fatty molecules are actually found in certain meteorites, having
Speaker 1: been produced by astro chemistry and outer space, and so
Speaker 1: maybe extraterrestrial life would be based on the same basic
Speaker 1: building blocks as us. So the point there is that
Speaker 1: we haven't found life beyond Earth, but we found a
Speaker 1: lot of the chemical building blocks of life beyond Earth. Uh,
Speaker 1: And maybe our way is a common way, or even
Speaker 1: the only way for the universe to put evolution in
Speaker 1: motion and create the possibility of intelligent life. But then
Speaker 1: Dartnell points out a big complication quote simple organic molecules
Speaker 1: like amino acids and sugars can exist in two different forms,
Speaker 1: mirror images of each other, in the same way your
Speaker 1: two hands are similar shapes but can't be placed exactly
Speaker 1: on top of the other. These two versions are known
Speaker 1: as a nantiomers. And it turns out that all life
Speaker 1: on Earth uses only left handed amino acids and right
Speaker 1: handed sugars, whereas non living chemistry produces even mixtures of
Speaker 1: both kinds. So, yeah, picture that what he's saying about
Speaker 1: holding your hands on top of each other. They're they're
Speaker 1: the same shape, but you can't put one on top
Speaker 1: of the other one. You have to invert one of
Speaker 1: them in order for them to match up. And with
Speaker 1: three dimensional things, that means that they're they're not chemically
Speaker 1: the same. Actually you can't you use one for the other.
Speaker 1: And in science, this this handedness of sugars and amino
Speaker 1: acids is known as chirality. Uh, the fact that all
Speaker 1: life on Earth uses only left handed amino acids and
Speaker 1: right handed sugars, that's known as homo chirality. And it's
Speaker 1: a fascinating mystery to people who study the chemistry of life.
Speaker 1: Why why not the other way around, or why not
Speaker 1: both Both chiralities are and presumably always have been available
Speaker 1: out there in the universe. So why did life on
Speaker 1: Earth end up using only these kinds? Why only left
Speaker 1: handed amino acids and only right handed sugars? And in fact,
Speaker 1: Dartnell points out that chirality is a good way to
Speaker 1: know that traces of life we find, say on Mars,
Speaker 1: are actually authentic. So imagine you've got a rover on
Speaker 1: Mars and it picks up amino acids somewhere on the
Speaker 1: surface of Mars, and they employ the opposite biochemical orientation,
Speaker 1: so you've got right handed amino acids. Then we could
Speaker 1: know that they were genuine the alien and not simply
Speaker 1: contamination from Earth life that we took along with us
Speaker 1: on the rover by accident. And so Dartnell writes, quote,
Speaker 1: so here's a fascinating thought. Alien invaders could be based
Speaker 1: on exactly the same organic molecules amino acids, sugars, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But they still wouldn't gain any nutrition from eating us,
Speaker 1: as the origins of life on their own planets settled
Speaker 1: on the opposite in anti amours, we'd be mirror images
Speaker 1: of each other on a molecular level, and of course,
Speaker 1: if this applied to us, meaning we couldn't be nutritious
Speaker 1: to them, it would also apply to our food sources.
Speaker 1: It would apply to all life on Earth, so they'd
Speaker 1: be like, ah, that Earth food, I can't handle any
Speaker 1: of it. In fact, it might even be toxic to them.
Speaker 1: I was looking at a paper from in pl Os
Speaker 1: one by jiang in son Um about how how bacteria
Speaker 1: are able to sort of break down right handed amino acids,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that they talk about it
Speaker 1: is how right handed amino acids are toxic for life
Speaker 1: on Earth, and it's actually important that back to bacteria
Speaker 1: do some breaking down of these right handed amino acids,
Speaker 1: or else they would accumulate to toxic levels in the environments.
Speaker 1: Oh man, I think it has to be some hard
Speaker 1: sci fi that explores this possibility. What did aliens come
Speaker 1: here to eat us but then we poison them? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean just the idea that their reflections on a
Speaker 1: molecular level and therefore incompatible with us or our food. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I like that idea that like they could they could
Speaker 1: in theory even look exactly like us. They could have
Speaker 1: bodies that are very so they were just toxic to
Speaker 1: each other, like contact and sharing organic molecules from each
Speaker 1: other would be poison us. Like if it was the
Speaker 1: movie Alien Nation and you had to have like left
Speaker 1: handed food restaurants and right handed food restaurants, and there
Speaker 1: was you know, it was you know, there's certainly discrimination there,
Speaker 1: but also the fact that the each species can only
Speaker 1: eat a certain type of matter and organic matter. Uh yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I mean but the thing there is that if you
Speaker 1: assume their ecosystem is their planet is also from a
Speaker 1: single common ancestor maybe it would be that all of
Speaker 1: their planet uses the opposite chirality of us, meaning that
Speaker 1: it's not just like we need different food, but every
Speaker 1: bit of life in their whole world would be toxic
Speaker 1: to us and all the life in our world would
Speaker 1: be toxic to them. So like, in order to interact,
Speaker 1: we almost need to like you know, be be sort
Speaker 1: of sealed off in a way. Oh wow, well see
Speaker 1: that's a wonderful sci fi concept there. So anyway, I
Speaker 1: thought that was an interesting possibility. Even if they wanted
Speaker 1: to serve man, it might the dinner might not go
Speaker 1: so well. I like that we were taking some of
Speaker 1: the anxiety out of our twilight zone. Episodes here. Don't
Speaker 1: have to be as afraid of creatures on the wing
Speaker 1: of the plane, don't have to be as afraid of
Speaker 1: alien civilizations coming to our planet to cook us and
Speaker 1: eat us. Well. I mean, the downside of that, thinking
Speaker 1: about the incompatibility of different biochemistries is that you could
Speaker 1: have a liens that meant well and that didn't want
Speaker 1: to eat us, but you know, just wanted to make
Speaker 1: contact and actually be helpful, wanted to serve man in
Speaker 1: the original naive sense of the understanding, but just brought
Speaker 1: with them a bunch of molecules that are deadly to us,
Speaker 1: which brings us kind of back to the Christopher Columbus idea,
Speaker 1: doesn't it. Well. I wouldn't say that Christopher Columbus meant well.
Speaker 1: I know that's not what you were saying. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: but just the idea that on a biological level ends
Speaker 1: up bringing death and also on a cultural level as well. Yes,
Speaker 1: like that even if Columbus had actually meant well, he
Speaker 1: wouldn't have been able to help bringing death along with him.
Speaker 1: All Right, I feel like we're going pretty long here,
Speaker 1: but I think we have time for just one more story, okay,
Speaker 1: and this one comes to us from Tales from the Crypt.
Speaker 1: It aired in the fifth season, episode five. This was October.
Speaker 1: I love how most of these episodes actually aired during
Speaker 1: October at some point, and it was titled people who
Speaker 1: Live in brad Hersars. Alright, So this one, this is
Speaker 1: a delight because this is one of four episodes directed
Speaker 1: by Russell McKay, the visionary director who gave us Highlander one,
Speaker 1: Highlander one, and Highlander two, Highlander two really yes, and
Speaker 1: most of the great music videos of the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1: Total Eclipse of the Heart. That was him, Wild Boys,
Speaker 1: that was him. How do you say his name? Makakey.
Speaker 1: It's it's I believe it's more kay. It's m u
Speaker 1: l k h y. I've never been able to pronounce that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, the the visionary behind uh Highlander, various other films.
Speaker 1: And I do mean that authentically, like there is a
Speaker 1: visual style to his work. There is an intensity that
Speaker 1: you just you know what when you see it. A
Speaker 1: thing that I think I rediscovered this year upon going
Speaker 1: back to the first Highlander movie. And it's your insistence
Speaker 1: is that actually the first Hilander movie is almost as
Speaker 1: bad as the second one. It's pretty bonkers. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: what we'll say that for for an upcoming episode. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we've still got Science of Highlander two coming out. Yes,
Speaker 1: before the year's up, that episode will finally come to fruition.
Speaker 1: We're not joking. Yes, it's real. So this episode of
Speaker 1: Tales from the Crypt, Uh, it's like a lot of episodes,
Speaker 1: It's a wealth of just wonderful acting talent, spectacular gore effects,
Speaker 1: a notable director, and the script that well depends on
Speaker 1: how you look at it, right, I mean, it's easy
Speaker 1: to take these scripts out of context and dream about
Speaker 1: what a stronger, uh you know, rewrite could have done
Speaker 1: for it. But on the other hand, the material is
Speaker 1: the material, and the whole premise of the show is
Speaker 1: that these are retold classic horror comic shorts, you know,
Speaker 1: from the the you know, the golden age of horror comics,
Speaker 1: and they tend to throw some sort of a heel
Speaker 1: character through the ringer with the murderous or supernatural circumstances
Speaker 1: taking place. Yeah, it's generally there, there's some kind of
Speaker 1: nasty dude, he gets his come up and through some
Speaker 1: kind of supernatural karma, Yeah, nasty meets nasty, and then
Speaker 1: there is a joke about it. There's not a lot
Speaker 1: of nuance. It's uh, these were horror stories essentially for
Speaker 1: for for for kids, and uh, but with completely inappropriate contome.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah it was. That's the other thing. All of
Speaker 1: these stories are so inappropriate you go, even going back
Speaker 1: now and watching these these episodes, like some of them
Speaker 1: are just like so cringe worthy. Uh. And I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that it's a flaw. It's like it's kind of
Speaker 1: what you get. It's that stales from the crypt. It's
Speaker 1: it's gross, it's inappropriate. Yeah, and yet there's something wonderful
Speaker 1: about it. So this particular episode definitely brings it with
Speaker 1: the cast because this one started Bill Paxton and Brad Dorrif.
Speaker 1: That's of course Bill Paxton from Aliens the Terminator, um
Speaker 1: and uh and Brad dorrif played worm Tongue in the
Speaker 1: Lord of the Rings movie is a voice of Chucky.
Speaker 1: Then in so many fabulous films over the years, one
Speaker 1: Full Over the Coupo his Nest. Yeah, that was another
Speaker 1: one of his big accomplishments. He was also in What
Speaker 1: Wise Blood I think, Oh yeah, he was in Exorcist three. Yes, Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's a fabulous character actor. So already you have some
Speaker 1: wonderful talent to work with here. Uh. They play brothers,
Speaker 1: Billy and Virgil. Billy is a mean spirited slime bag
Speaker 1: fresh out of prison, but performance by Paxton that reminds
Speaker 1: me a lot of his vampire character in Uh Near Dark,
Speaker 1: you know, just just a bad person, and his brother
Speaker 1: is essentially Lenny from Steinbeck's of Mice and Men, so
Speaker 1: they have that kind of relationship. Billy talks Virgil into
Speaker 1: an ice cream factory heighs, which goes all wrong. They're
Speaker 1: gonna steal a bunch of ice cream there, steal some
Speaker 1: money from a safe, but they end up just murdering
Speaker 1: some people instead, and as a fallback plan, they go
Speaker 1: after the ice cream truck driver who originally turned Billy
Speaker 1: in for stealing from the company, a man by the
Speaker 1: name of Mr Bird. And Mr Bird is played by
Speaker 1: Trian character actor Michael Lerner. Oh, the producer from Barton Fink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he was nominated for an actor for that role. He's
Speaker 1: tremendous and he's he's great in this too, like everybody's
Speaker 1: great in this. But here's the twist, here's the grotesque
Speaker 1: tales from the crypt twist. Mr Bird turns out to
Speaker 1: be two men conjoined twins, and the episodes grizzly payoff
Speaker 1: as that while the brothers succeed in killing one of
Speaker 1: the twins, they shoot him. He's shot in the head
Speaker 1: with a shotgun. When he emerges through a beated curtain,
Speaker 1: it turns out there the other one lives and he
Speaker 1: gets his vengeance. The final shot of the episode, after
Speaker 1: he's killed the brothers shows the surviving Mr. Bird Twins
Speaker 1: sitting in his ice cream truck making his rounds with
Speaker 1: his decaying twin hunched over in the back seat. And
Speaker 1: this is I didn't even touch on some of the
Speaker 1: just truly bizarre elements of this episode. For instance, Billy
Speaker 1: Bill Paxson's character totally does not need to have a
Speaker 1: butter eating a dick, but he's like eating sticks of
Speaker 1: butter throughout the whole film for no reason, with no payoff,
Speaker 1: Like he already had a pretty good, you know trope
Speaker 1: character here Bill, you know, Bill Paxton is playing a
Speaker 1: slime ball. It's wonderful he was born for this role
Speaker 1: and you're throw in the butter for some reason. There's
Speaker 1: also a part where Virgil is reading a comic book
Speaker 1: and it is Predator versus Jesse Jane, which doesn't I
Speaker 1: have no problem with I love it, but it's just
Speaker 1: such a random element to throw in. That's the original
Speaker 1: Cowboys versus Aliens. It really was. Yeah, I would love
Speaker 1: to see it. Uh let's give me Jesse James versus Predator.
Speaker 1: Uh So the science question here, though, of course, is
Speaker 1: could this happen? If one conjoined twin were to die?
Speaker 1: Would the other one be able to live on in
Speaker 1: this grotesque? Grotesque manner? So to begin with, I do
Speaker 1: have to point out again that Tales from the Crypt
Speaker 1: is pretty far from any sort of fair or reasonable
Speaker 1: portrayal of conjoined twins or just humanity in general. The
Speaker 1: show and the comics they're based on, they tended to
Speaker 1: have a real freak show vibe concerning any sort of deformation,
Speaker 1: birth defect, mutilation, or even just something is routine is
Speaker 1: identical twins. You know, everything was played for weird, Everything
Speaker 1: was played for grotesque, and the stereotypes are pretty broad
Speaker 1: and grotesque too. So you don't go to Tales from
Speaker 1: the Crypt to think about how to model thinking about
Speaker 1: medical conditions. No, not not at all. And yet that's
Speaker 1: kind of what we're doing in this this segment, So
Speaker 1: here we go. So scientifically, conjoined twins are monozygotic twins
Speaker 1: who were joined at some region of their bodies, and
Speaker 1: the details depend on exactly where the conjunction is situated.
Speaker 1: So the exact cause of conjoined twins isn't fully understood.
Speaker 1: But major theory here is that the fertilized egg is
Speaker 1: going to split into a monozygotic set of twins, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't fully separate and they remain connected. So the
Speaker 1: bird twins here are represented as terada catadidema conjoined twins.
Speaker 1: These are lower body conjunctions and more specifically, they are
Speaker 1: phyg pagus twins, meaning they're back to back joined at
Speaker 1: the rump. So this accounts for roughly nine I've also
Speaker 1: read seventeen percent of conjoined twins, but don't let that
Speaker 1: number free you. That still means that they're extremely rare occurrences.
Speaker 1: Um these individuals. They commonly share the gluteal region, terminal spine,
Speaker 1: and lower gastro intestinal, neurological and reproductive tracks. So surgical
Speaker 1: separation of conjoined twins in general it ranges from simple
Speaker 1: to near impossible depending on the conjunction. In many cases
Speaker 1: it's a highly risky surgery with potentially fatal outcomes for
Speaker 1: both patients. However, successful separations of phygo pegas conjoined twins
Speaker 1: have occurred, and uh, you know, with various cases presented
Speaker 1: in medical literature. Uh. And the cases of separation do
Speaker 1: tend to be presented in medical literature like these are
Speaker 1: these are generally know, the more certainly the more complicated.
Speaker 1: Um separations are exactly the kind of thing you're gonna
Speaker 1: find written up in a journal. But a separation is
Speaker 1: not what we see in this episode of Tales from
Speaker 1: the Crypt. One twin is killed via shotgun blast of
Speaker 1: the head, and the other continues to live, dragging him
Speaker 1: around while he kills off the two brothers and then
Speaker 1: continues his ice cream rounds. Could this happen? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: broadly speaking, noah, And I don't think that should come
Speaker 1: to anybody's surprise, given it again, this is Tales from
Speaker 1: the Crypt. Dr Eric Stratch a pediatric surgeon at the
Speaker 1: University of Maryland Hospital for Children. He actually covered the
Speaker 1: matter in the Esquire article how to Separate a conjoint
Speaker 1: twin On his deathbed. Yeah, he was interviewed or interview
Speaker 1: segment was used in that article. He did not write it,
Speaker 1: but he pointed out that once one twins heart stops beating,
Speaker 1: the blood stops pumping, and the vessels dilate, then the
Speaker 1: living twin will essentially bleed into the dead twin, and
Speaker 1: this will happen quickly. The physical connection between the two
Speaker 1: is large enough, but with smaller cases, there will be
Speaker 1: an infection in a matter of hours. And in these
Speaker 1: cases it's technically possible that surgical separate separation could save
Speaker 1: the living twin, but he didn't think it had ever
Speaker 1: been attempted. Again. In many cases, separation might not even
Speaker 1: be possible under ideal conditions, much less like an emergency
Speaker 1: UH intervention scenario. So while we may be able to
Speaker 1: accept the idea that they're surviving bird twin murders his
Speaker 1: brother's killers, the idea that he goes on to drive
Speaker 1: the ice cream truck around seems a bit of a stretch, now, Robert,
Speaker 1: I see you've attached a panel from a comic, so
Speaker 1: that this one was based on I guess something that
Speaker 1: was told in the comics before it was on the show. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one was definitely based on a comic. Those comics
Speaker 1: managed to come up with some really gross stuff that
Speaker 1: became only grosser when it was translated to to HBO. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that the comics were big about, like the just the
Speaker 1: visual visceral horror, and the show did agree job of
Speaker 1: of portraying that. Uh yeah. This this panel that I
Speaker 1: found from it, which which is easy to find if
Speaker 1: you do just a Google search for for the title
Speaker 1: of this episode, which was also the title of the
Speaker 1: comics People who Live in Brass Horses. Uh yeah. You
Speaker 1: just see the the ice cream truck driver climbing out
Speaker 1: of the back of the truck and he just has
Speaker 1: this this rotting corpse attached to the back of him
Speaker 1: with flies buzzing around it. Uh. It's it's horrifying, grotesque, insensitive,
Speaker 1: everything you would expect from the tales from the crypt Robert.
Speaker 1: And you're reading about the actual uh like the surgeries
Speaker 1: involved here and stuff. Do you get the sense that, um,
Speaker 1: that medical science is making a lot of progress in
Speaker 1: in how to help conjoined twins, especially in cases where
Speaker 1: they do need to be separated. Yeah, I mean it
Speaker 1: seems to be the case. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: it's like so many of these cases they are they're different.
Speaker 1: Each one has its own individual challenges, and that's rare.
Speaker 1: It's rare, uh, and you know when it when it
Speaker 1: does pop up, there also going to be a lot
Speaker 1: of arguments potentially about is this the thing to do?
Speaker 1: Is is is this is this the morally correct um
Speaker 1: medical intervention if there is such a risk to both patients,
Speaker 1: because there are some heartbreaking accounts in the literature where
Speaker 1: an attempt is made to separate to conjoin twins and
Speaker 1: they simply both die, they do neither one actually survives
Speaker 1: the surgery, right, Well, I mean, I guess I was
Speaker 1: specifically thinking of cases where it is medically necessary in
Speaker 1: order to save them or create better health outcomes to
Speaker 1: separate them. I mean, I don't think we should just
Speaker 1: assume that all can joined twins naturally want to be separated. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Basically it comes down to just the complexity of the
Speaker 1: of the connection. Like if if the connection is is
Speaker 1: smaller and more simple, and then it can actually be
Speaker 1: a pretty safe procedure as I understand it. But then
Speaker 1: there are just other cases where it is going to
Speaker 1: be kind of like the the malin everest of surgical intervention.
Speaker 1: And and yet sometimes depending on the situation, it may
Speaker 1: be something that has to be done. This is yet
Speaker 1: another thing that I think I might deserve a deeper
Speaker 1: look sometime in the future. Oh yeah, absolutely, we've only
Speaker 1: just we've we've only we've barely brushed the surface of
Speaker 1: twins and certainly conjoined twins. And obviously there's a lot
Speaker 1: of a lot of fascinating information out there about you know,
Speaker 1: the lives that led by actual conjoined twins, and not
Speaker 1: the you know, the cartoonish examples that we see in
Speaker 1: like Tales from the crypt which, sadly it tends to be.
Speaker 1: This is the kind of thing that tends to be
Speaker 1: one's first introduction to conjoined twins. In the same way
Speaker 1: that unless you have identical twins in your classroom growing up,
Speaker 1: if you're not encountering them in your life, your first
Speaker 1: example to to identical twins is likely going to be
Speaker 1: some sort of weird horror show. Example, when you're five
Speaker 1: and you watch Dead Ringers, well with hope, but sartainly,
Speaker 1: you can watch The Simpsons, right, The Simpsons had the
Speaker 1: Treehouse of Horror where twins Evil Twin was separated from
Speaker 1: him and his living in the attic. I wonder, I mean,
Speaker 1: is the belief in evil twins actually a fairly common
Speaker 1: thing or does everybody understand that's not real? I hope
Speaker 1: everyone understands that. I mean, I have friends with with
Speaker 1: twins and um, and I I've talked to them a
Speaker 1: little bit about just you know, to the point where
Speaker 1: they just want to avoid any like creepy twin content.
Speaker 1: I don't don't blame them, um, but I basically I
Speaker 1: think comes down more to the to us untwinned individuals
Speaker 1: where we see this, we see two identical individuals, and
Speaker 1: we think of all the potential self exploration, like what
Speaker 1: if I were two people, what would that mean? Would
Speaker 1: have one represented my best qualities and one my my
Speaker 1: you know, my my, my, my darker qualities. And of
Speaker 1: course meanwhile, these twins are are two separate people, were
Speaker 1: just trying to live their lives, and we're staring at them,
Speaker 1: trying to gaze down our own navel or write a
Speaker 1: grotesque horror story. Yeah. The the looker, the person who
Speaker 1: looks at another is the real monster, you know, because
Speaker 1: they always want to make monsters out of people who
Speaker 1: are just people. Yeah, all right, so there you have it, uh,
Speaker 1: Anthology of Horror, Volume one. Because if everyone liked this.
Speaker 1: Maybe we'll do it again next year. Maybe this will
Speaker 1: be our new Halloween thing. Uh. And if it is,
Speaker 1: what would you like us to cover? I guess this
Speaker 1: means before then, I'm gonna have to go back and
Speaker 1: watch some some horror anthology series I am. I am
Speaker 1: under exposed at this point. I had a hard enough
Speaker 1: time picking just the ones that I did today, though,
Speaker 1: I guess I'd never run out of Treehouse of Horror
Speaker 1: episodes to pick tree Yeah, Treehouse tends to be a
Speaker 1: nice like overview of great anthology works in places. Other times,
Speaker 1: of course, they're parioding of futially linked films. I think
Speaker 1: Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Black Mirror. These are great
Speaker 1: places to look to Tales from the crypt a little
Speaker 1: bit harder. I ran into a lot of dead ends
Speaker 1: and bad pun before I decided to, uh to talk
Speaker 1: about this one. Well, it is a forest of dead
Speaker 1: ends and bad puns, as I'm to understand. All right, Well, hey,
Speaker 1: everybody out there, you have a year to catch up
Speaker 1: on higher anthologies as well, and to suggest episodes from
Speaker 1: those anthologies you'd like us to consider covering in the future.
Speaker 1: In the meantime, check out stuff to blow your Mind
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Speaker 1: pick up some cool merchandise UH that either has our
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Speaker 1: a specific episodes that we've covered on the show. Big thanks,
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producers Alex Williams and
Speaker 1: Tarry Harrison. If you would like to get in touch
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