Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh and
Speaker 1: there's Chuck and it's just us right now. But that's
Speaker 1: okay because we have a third and fourth man with
Speaker 1: us today in the form of Jerry and Dave.
Speaker 2: That's right. I feel I sense their presence.
Speaker 1: I do too, and they're guiding us on. They're saying,
Speaker 1: come on, you guys, you can finish the short stuff.
Speaker 1: It's gonna be a good one.
Speaker 2: I can feel it, Chuck, I think we're gonna be okay.
Speaker 1: We just demonstrated a really weird phenomenon pretty well, if
Speaker 1: you ask me, I think we did a great job.
Speaker 1: Just now everyone's saying so, but we just demonstrated this
Speaker 1: weird phenomenon called the third Man syndrome. There's an author
Speaker 1: named John Geiger who for some reason changed syndrome to factor.
Speaker 1: But that's typically what it's called, this third man syndrome.
Speaker 1: And like I said, it's weird. Chuck, take it away.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It has nothing to do with the movie The Third Man,
Speaker 3: which was good, great movie. And immediately when you sent
Speaker 3: this along and I saw the title, I thought it
Speaker 3: might have something to do with that. And it doesn't
Speaker 3: have to be a man. It really should be the
Speaker 3: third person syndrome. Sure, but it is this phenomenon that
Speaker 3: has been talked about by many people over hundreds of years.
Speaker 3: Where someone is in dire straits, oftentimes it's like somebody
Speaker 3: sort of like a mountaineer or somebody in the wilderness
Speaker 3: that's lost and struggling to survive.
Speaker 2: But not always as we'll see.
Speaker 3: And when they're at their sort of worse moment, maybe
Speaker 3: worse low point, they get a third a sense that
Speaker 3: someone else is there.
Speaker 2: And again it's not always the third person.
Speaker 3: If they're alone, it's just technically the second person, sure,
Speaker 3: but it's just somebody there kind of urging them on.
Speaker 3: But it's not just like, oh, I got this weird feeling,
Speaker 3: Like it's a real serious, tangible thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like whatever sense you have when there's somebody sitting
Speaker 1: next to you and they actually are there is a
Speaker 1: person sitting there, it seems to be the exact same
Speaker 1: type of feeling and level of feeling and all that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like this weird kind of like thought a
Speaker 1: little bit here there. It's like sensing another presence. And
Speaker 1: the first person to ever really kind of document this
Speaker 1: was Ernest Shackleton, surely he was not the first person
Speaker 1: to experience this, but he he was the first person
Speaker 1: to write about it, and his experience is just nuts
Speaker 1: in and of itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we talked about this guy before. It was a
Speaker 3: British expedition to Antarctica in nineteen fourteen slash fifteen, trying
Speaker 3: to get.
Speaker 2: To the South Pole.
Speaker 3: It was his third try and he's trying to establish
Speaker 3: a base there and his ship got trapped in sea ice.
Speaker 3: They tried to kind of ride it out, but eventually
Speaker 3: the ice kind of came together, and I mean, this
Speaker 3: just shows how forceful like creeping ice can be. It
Speaker 3: kind of crushed the boat and they abandoned ship, set
Speaker 3: up camp on other ice and stayed there initially for
Speaker 3: four months on.
Speaker 1: This ice, Yeah, waiting for the ice to break up
Speaker 1: enough to try to make an attempt by whaling boat
Speaker 1: over to Elephant Island, which is the closest island, and
Speaker 1: they made it. They rowed for six days before they
Speaker 1: reached Elephant Island, which was great. They weren't on the
Speaker 1: ice anymore, but they were on a deserted island. And again, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking it's pretty cold too. And again this is
Speaker 1: nineteen fourteen, they're not like, you know, picking up the
Speaker 1: sat phone and saying like, hey, can somebody come get us?
Speaker 1: Like they've got a real problem here. So they're stranded
Speaker 1: on this deserted island, and the closest place where there's
Speaker 1: other people where they actually can get in touch and
Speaker 1: say hey, somebody come get us is a whaling station
Speaker 1: on South Georgia Island, and that's eight hundred miles away.
Speaker 1: So Ernest Shackleton says, got to keep going and whittles
Speaker 1: down to a few men I think six, five or
Speaker 1: six other people, and they actually rode eight hundred miles
Speaker 1: from an arc to South Georgia Island.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so they get there sixteen days later.
Speaker 3: It turns out they landed on the wrong side of
Speaker 3: the island because the winds blew them off course, and
Speaker 3: so this guy was undaunted.
Speaker 2: Still he took two guys. I think you see where this.
Speaker 3: Is headed, even though the math is still wrong, and
Speaker 3: they made the rest of the way on foot. It's
Speaker 3: about eighteen miles or thirty kilometers and through some pretty
Speaker 3: treacherous conditions, took about thirty six hours. They finally get
Speaker 3: there and everyone ends up being rescued like that's the
Speaker 3: good news. But this is that last push, is when
Speaker 3: Shackleton feels the presence of this additional person urging them on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because this is like they've reached the limit of
Speaker 1: their endurance and they're still going on. And so Shackleton
Speaker 1: sensed it, but he never said anything about it until
Speaker 1: he wrote his book South It was published in nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 1: But he did say something to the other two people
Speaker 1: who were with them. One was Captain Worsley, and Worsley said, yeah,
Speaker 1: I had the same feeling, actually, and so did Crean,
Speaker 1: the other guy on this expedition. They all sensed another person,
Speaker 1: in this case a fourth person with them, kind of
Speaker 1: basically comforting them to some degree. So that seemed, in
Speaker 1: and of itself pretty cool. And I guess the word
Speaker 1: of this got out because ts Eliot, he's frequently cited
Speaker 1: as the person who who coined the term third man syndrome.
Speaker 1: As far as I can tell, no one knows who
Speaker 1: actually took this ts Eliot poem and turned it into
Speaker 1: third man syndrome, but it actually it did come indisputably
Speaker 1: from this ts Eliot poem from nineteen twenty two.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So, well, the Wasteland was the poem, and he
Speaker 3: again he was wrong in the math. He should have
Speaker 3: called it the Fourth Man. But this is kind of
Speaker 3: the funniest part. T. S. Eliot said that he couldn't
Speaker 3: remember who who inspired this, like which expedition it was
Speaker 3: when asked, you know why the number of people was
Speaker 3: or not three?
Speaker 2: Or three and night four rather exactly.
Speaker 1: And I'm feeling a little poetic today, Chuck, do you
Speaker 1: mind if I read this little This is from T. S.
Speaker 1: Eliot's The Wasteland? Three words? Who is the third who
Speaker 1: walks always beside you? When I count, there are only
Speaker 1: you and I together, But when I look ahead up
Speaker 1: the white road, there's always another one walking beside you,
Speaker 1: gliding wrapped in a brown mantle, hooded. I do not
Speaker 1: know whether a man or a woman. But who is
Speaker 1: that on the other side of you? Answer me? Thank you?
Speaker 1: Thank you? I say, we take a break and let
Speaker 1: everybody in stunned silence absorb all that.
Speaker 3: All right, We'll be right back, all right. So that's
Speaker 3: the third man syndrome, Shackleton's version. But it's happened a bunch,
Speaker 3: like we said. There was a collection by John Geiger
Speaker 3: called The Third man factor that you mentioned earlier from
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight where he dug up a bunch
Speaker 3: of these stories and we're going to go through some
Speaker 3: of them right now.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, I mean it's quite quite a feat that
Speaker 1: he got all these together because they were definitely few
Speaker 1: and far between. One of the first ones that he
Speaker 1: mentions is a guy named Frank Smyth who made a
Speaker 1: solo attempt at his Summat everest. He would have been
Speaker 1: the first back in nineteen thirty three, and he got close,
Speaker 1: but he didn't make it, and he realized he had
Speaker 1: to turn back. And his second man during this attempt
Speaker 1: was so real to him that at one point he
Speaker 1: actually turned to offer them food before he realized that
Speaker 1: there was no one there. So, like, this can be
Speaker 1: a pretty tangible presence, a tangible intangible presence essentially.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean I've seen this in movies, you know,
Speaker 3: and they don't call it out as you know, third
Speaker 3: man syndrome, but I've definitely seen these scenes, you know,
Speaker 3: where there's an unseen person and they look and then
Speaker 3: they're not there. You know. Yeah, it's but in a
Speaker 3: comforting way, not like well I was gonna spoil that.
Speaker 2: Nicole Kidman movie.
Speaker 3: But I guess I won't do that right, not in
Speaker 3: a horror movie kind of way, No, for sure. But
Speaker 3: there was another guy, a climber again named Joe Simpson.
Speaker 3: This is nineteen eighty five. He was climbing in the
Speaker 3: Peruvian andyes, and he broke his leg, so he was
Speaker 3: in really bad shape. And he wrote a book called
Speaker 3: Touching the Void where he talked about obeying this voice
Speaker 3: like guiding him, and a lot of times that's what happens.
Speaker 3: It's not just like you can do it. You can
Speaker 3: do it, but like go this way kind of thing.
Speaker 3: And if you're in this situation after reading all this stuff,
Speaker 3: I would be wise to go in whatever direction your
Speaker 3: invisible person is telling you to go.
Speaker 1: Yeah, obey the voice, I think is the upshot of
Speaker 1: all this. Yeah, he was guided to safety by his voice.
Speaker 1: And enough of these are mountaineers that I started to
Speaker 1: think maybe the cold has something to do with this.
Speaker 1: But this has also happened to other people who were
Speaker 1: not in the colt, who were in totally different situations.
Speaker 1: Very famously, out of the nine to eleven attacks, two
Speaker 1: people who survived reported experiencing third man syndrome. One was
Speaker 1: Ron Di Francesco, who was the last person out of
Speaker 1: the South Tower before it collapsed. He was led down
Speaker 1: while everybody else was going up and actually went through
Speaker 1: flames fired like three stories of fire to get to safety,
Speaker 1: and it was because he was being urged on. And
Speaker 1: then there was another woman, Janelle Guzman McMillan, who was
Speaker 1: actually trapped in the rubble of the North Tower and
Speaker 1: she had a similar experience too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know again it's it feels like it
Speaker 3: might be like in the movie, like a family member
Speaker 3: or something. And sometimes it seems like that can happen, Like,
Speaker 3: I know, wasn't there one of these where Yeah, it
Speaker 3: was a geologist who was on a cave dive and
Speaker 3: lost her guideline with twenty minutes left in her air tank,
Speaker 3: and she felt her husband, Rob, who had died, So
Speaker 3: her dead husband had died in a diving accident a
Speaker 3: few weeks prior, so he appears. So sometimes it's like
Speaker 3: a known individual.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And Janelle Guzman McMillan I read she named. She
Speaker 1: didn't think hers was a family member, but she considered
Speaker 1: it a guardian angel and its name was Paul. So
Speaker 1: they do get named sometimes even if you don't know him.
Speaker 2: I would name.
Speaker 1: Mine, what would you name yours?
Speaker 2: I don't know. It depends.
Speaker 3: I think it would hit me in the moment, but
Speaker 3: it seems like the respectful thing to do and not
Speaker 3: just say hey you, thanks.
Speaker 2: For all that.
Speaker 1: Right, Yeah, And just a little word of advice, if
Speaker 1: you can't come up with the name, just go with Tim.
Speaker 2: Tim.
Speaker 3: That's pretty good scientifically, I mean you might be wondering, like, well,
Speaker 3: what's happening here, and no, no one really knows. It's
Speaker 3: kind of one of those things where they think it
Speaker 3: may be some like hardwired innate instinct that just kind
Speaker 3: of kicks in.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: Obviously you can't study something like this, and if it
Speaker 3: is hardwired, we may all have it, but you're just
Speaker 3: luckily most of us aren't ever in that situation, you.
Speaker 1: Know, right, Like you not only have to be in
Speaker 1: this limit of your endurance life or death situation, you
Speaker 1: also have to survive it to come back and tell
Speaker 1: everybody about it too. So you would imagine like this
Speaker 1: is a pretty small population of people, right, I mean, clearly,
Speaker 1: just from the few stories that John Geiger was able
Speaker 1: to collect, did you see the thing about the bi
Speaker 1: cameral mind now hy theory. So remember our episode on
Speaker 1: the bi cameral mind from Julian James, and basically, just
Speaker 1: for people who aren't familiar, this is a hypothesis that
Speaker 1: all the way up until like the Bronze Age, people
Speaker 1: hadn't fully become conscious like we think of consciousness today,
Speaker 1: and so the voices in their head that we call
Speaker 1: an inner dialogue where we know we're talking to ourselves
Speaker 1: to them, this was the gods speaking to them, guiding them,
Speaker 1: instructing them. So this idea is the third man syndrome
Speaker 1: is kind of this vestigial by cameral experience that people
Speaker 1: used to have where what seems like something outside of
Speaker 1: your mind is helping you, urging you on, guiding you,
Speaker 1: but really it's just another part of your mind that
Speaker 1: gets kicked in.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love it, which kind of drives with the
Speaker 3: first theory anyway. You know, it's not like that doesn't
Speaker 3: cancel it out.
Speaker 1: Right, No, there's no canceling going on here.
Speaker 2: Yeah? Good? Uh?
Speaker 1: Are you got anything else?
Speaker 3: Nothing else? Hopefully this instinct is within all of us,
Speaker 3: because I wouldn't mind a pal urging me on in
Speaker 3: the end.
Speaker 1: For sure, yes, but hopefully no one listening ever, has
Speaker 1: to experience it because it sounds like it's pretty rough
Speaker 1: to get there. Agreed, Short Stuff is out.
Speaker 2: Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
Speaker 2: more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 2: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.