August 11, 2016 • 44 mins
Yet again, the mailbot brings forth the responses and queries of many loyal Stuff to Blow Your Mind listeners. Join Robert, Christian and Joe on a sacred journey to catalog the Listener Mailbox of Babel and eventually find the precious texts of the legendary Crimson Inbox.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't just stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am
Christian Sager, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we bring
you yet another listener mail episode. In this case, we've
(00:23):
been combing through and what seems like an infinite library
of listener mail. That's nice, going back to your guys
Library of Babbel episode. Yes, our inbox contains not only
all listener feedback, but all possible listener feedback, from the
positive to the negative, from the sensical to the nonsensical. Uh.
Sometimes it does feel like that we get a ton
(00:44):
of listener mail, but I must say that we also
it's it's basically Crimson Hexagon stuff, and that it's almost
all really good stuff. I would say we we we
hear a lot of great feedback from y'all out there,
and so we have to say, as always, we get
uns of mail. If if what you sent us was
not included, please don't take that as a slight. We
(01:05):
we love reading whatever you get to send us, and
we like to respond when we get time, but we
often don't. But we're going to pick a few today.
We won't be able to go through the whole barrel,
but maybe we'll be able to not scrape the bottom
of the barrel, but scrape some of the sides of
the barrel near the top. Luckily, we have a fourth
entity here to do any scraping that's necessary. And that's,
of course, our good friend Carney. If the mail. But ah, yeah, hey, Carney,
(01:28):
what's going on? I've noticed that Carney has taken on
what seems to be a somewhat melancholy suicidal aspect since
we entered this vast library of all possible email. Well,
it's a lot to sort out, even with his his
high processing. Even Carney only has so much ram ram.
(01:50):
Oh why is it funny to talk about ram? Now?
Ram used to be a thing you talk about all
the time, not anymore. All right, Well, on that note,
let's let's let's jump into it. Let's call Carney over. Carney,
will you bring us our first bit of listener mail? Hey,
let's see. Okay, This first one is in response to
(02:12):
the episode that Robert and I did about flying fish,
jumping fish, flying fish, breaching sharks, sleeping mullets, all the
fish that do the equivalent of us jumping into outer
space momentarily. Uh. So this first one is from Mona
and she if you remember from that episode Robert and I,
we talked about a couple of species of Asian carp.
(02:32):
They are known for occupying North American river waters, jumping
out of the water when your motor boat goes by,
and in some rare cases breaking your face, yes, or
or worse yes. Yeah, and so, as we discussed, there's
this Chinese cultural concept of the carp that leaps over
the dragon gate right, literally, a mythical concept that if
a river carp can leap over a certain waterfall, it's
(02:55):
going to transform into a dragon. So it's a magic
carp turning into jidos. Uh. This is exactly what the
email is about. It had no idea about this, but yeah,
Mona writes to us to say, hello, Robert and Joe.
I just finished listening to the Leaping Mullets, Flying Fish,
Breaching Sharks episode of the podcast. I just wanted to
give you a fun fact about the Chinese mythology of
(03:17):
the leaping carb turning into a dragon. If either of
you have played or no of Pokemon, the video game
or the popular TV show. I think that's funny. She
specifies popular. It's still popular after all these years, is it. Yeah,
people still watched the Pokemon cartoon. Oh yeah, my wife
used to work at cartoon Networking. It's a huge hit
over there, so that's amazing. Yeah, they constantly are putting
(03:38):
out new seasons of it. Really had no idea they're
making more Pokemon. It's been around since I was in
my twenties, so it's got to be like what They've
been working on it for probably like almost twenty years,
and that's the thing. It came. It really emerged after
I was out of the main demographic. Yeah. I was
just immature enough to play the video game and watch
(03:59):
the car a little bit in my twenties, so I
know way more than thirty nine year old man shout
about Pokemon. Okay, well I didn't know this, but anyway,
Mona continues, Uh, if we know about Pokemon, you'd be
aware of a Pokemon called Magic Carp. It has always
confused my friends and I. How this pretty useless fish.
I guess that means not a good fighter. So in
(04:20):
the game, Magic Carp is like the worst possible Pokemon.
It can barely do anything, but if you level it up, okay,
she says, yeah, it ends up evolving into a completely
overpowered dragon type Pokemon. Giara dossise, this Pokemon is actually
inspired by the said myth that you mentioned in your podcast,
which gives this evolution a lot more since I know
(04:43):
mind blown and and then she says, thanks for making
quality episodes, regardless of how weird they get. Sometimes love
each and everyone, my favorites being the X Files episodes
and the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, looking forward
to more. Well, thank you so much, Mona. That is
very kind of you to say. And we also got
emails from a couple other listeners on the same topic.
(05:04):
Jeffrey rode in to let us know the same thing
about Magic carp and Jared do Yeah, I had no idea.
Oh man, yeah, I wish I had known. Jaredos was
like one of my favorites. Like when I would play
the game, I would always get a magic harp and
like keep them in reserve, level them up slowly, and
then once you get geared does it's awesome. Wait a minute,
you said you played the game a little in your twenties.
This sounds like you played a lot. Uh. Yeah, I
(05:27):
had a game Boy and would just play what is it?
Pokemon Gold I think was what it was. And then
my roommates and I got Pokemon Colosseum, which is the
one where you can plug your game Boy into your
Nintendo six or four and fight your Pokemon against one
another on the TV. Oh boy, Yeah, yeah it was great.
That sounds brutal. Okay, it looks like Carton. As my
father in law says, no adult man uh spends time
(05:51):
catching Pokemon. Clearly a false statement. I have to turn
in my adult man card. Uh. So, as I mentioned,
Carney is holding something out here. What is it? Oh,
he's got one. Uh. That is about cyborgs and trans humanism,
which is something that Robert and I have been weaving
in and out of over the last gosh three months.
(06:14):
We've done various episodes that tie into this theme. And
this actually came to us in May. I wish we'd
read it earlier. Uh. And he originally this isn't his
whole letter, but he originally wanted to ask us about
doing an episode on GMOs based on the organic food
episode that we did, but he tied into the cyborgs
episode that we did, which was the first of I
wanna say like three or four episodes where we talked
(06:36):
about sort of the future of changing the human body.
And he says, in your Cyborgs episode, you touched on
the ethical quandaries of performing surgical enhancements before a child
is born. I thought you might find it interesting to
know that, in a way, this does already happen. My
son has spina bifida, a birth defect wherein the spinal
(06:56):
column fails to close properly. It leads to permanent parrela
us and often brain damage. He actually underwent surgery before
he was born to repair the defect and minimize the impact.
He still lost some nerves, but probably saved enough nerves
above the knees that he's able to walk, or he'll
be able to walk with braces to make it weirder.
(07:17):
Another benefit of the surgery is reversal of associated hind
brain herniation, which if left unchecked, leads to hydrocephalus and
malformation of the corpus colossum. A downside in my son's
case is that he was born extremely premature twenty six
weeks two pounds, a significant risk to the surgery and
(07:39):
about ten percent are born early. This caused a stage
four inter ventricular hemorrhage, wiping out most of the left
side of his brain. Young brains can recover from this
to some extent, but science does not yet understand how
exactly it does. This a good lead is the subject
of neuroplasticity and neural reuse. See the book after Phrenology
(08:00):
for a rather technical intro. So my point is by
saving his ability to walk, we also repaired one part
of his brain and damaged another, so in at least
two ways fundamentally changed the architecture of his brain and
the type of person he will become. The surgery was
highly experimental just a few years ago, but is now
considered routine, albeit rare. I think he was number one
(08:22):
fifty to get it since the experimental study ended. In
all the discussion of ethics surrounding the surgery, which is
what Robert and I talked about in the show, mainly
in regards to cyborgs uh and and babies uh and.
There's many conversations about the ethics. The primary concern has
always been ensuring that the benefits outweigh the many risks
(08:42):
involved with opening up a womb, pulling the kid out,
putting him back in again, and closing up. Mom. Jeez,
that sounds horrifying to me, like not being a parent.
That sounds absolutely terrifying to me. The question of whether
it should be done at all versus letting nature ticket
its course ever, really crossed my mind, and to my
admittedly limited knowledge, did not seem prevalent in the medical community.
(09:06):
This may change as laparoscopic versions are perfected, minimizing risks,
and surgery moves from mere repair to potential upgrades. So
that's that's from Keegan. He went a weigh in on that,
and he actually, you know, we we talked a little
bit more over emailing. There's a lot here. Actually I'm
not going to read a whole lot more, but we
(09:27):
had a nice conversation with him, and he's continuing conversation
with us about this. But it's just really interesting to
hear about this real world example where you and I
based on Oh I can't remember off the top of
my head the name of the um of the theorist
on cyborgs who came up with that idea, but basically
they were very scenarios in which would it or would
(09:48):
it not be ethical to transform someone into a cyborg,
and and what does their identity become afterwards? And one
of them was what if you change a child before
it's born. Um, so this was a nice real world
example coming back to that, and with lots of science
in it. I was unaware of any of that. Yeah,
that's fascinating that that. Uh. People think of this as
(10:10):
a purely future concern, right, Like they don't think of right,
they don't realize that it's happening in present day. Yeah,
I mean, like, I genuinely we did that whole episode.
We've been talking about transhumanism, bio hacking, all this stuff.
I did not realize that you can, as he puts it,
take a baby out of its mother, change it physically,
and then put it back in. That's no pun intended
(10:34):
for the show. Mind blowing. Alright, it looks like we've
another bit of listener mail here. This one comes from
listener raw raw right soon and says, hey, guys, I
thought this was very topical. I enjoyed your recent show
on great flood myths. You may be interested to know
that the latest edition of Science August five, sixteen contains
(10:56):
an article with evidence supporting a Chinese Great Flood myth
um was the title of it, and he says the
team used a range of compelling, compelling measurements of sediment
compositions and radiocarbon dating to argue that it was very
plausible there was one of the greatest freshwater floods of
the Hollo scene in the Yellow River, coinciding with the
(11:18):
transition of the civilization in the region from the Neolithic
to the Bronze Age. In case you're you're interested enough,
I've attached a PDF copy of the paper. Enjoy. Thanks
for the show. Um So, as luck would have it,
we starved receiving a number of different comments about this
because it is very exciting. We had just done this
episode on great flood myths and and then there was
(11:39):
this really cool study that came out out of China,
and the main professor on this is NN Ginge Normal
University geology professor woo Ching Long, and it actually actually
wrote some copy and did a video about it for
Housetuff Works now, which I'll include a link to on
the landing page for this episode. But as Raw points out,
(12:01):
it's it's really fascinating because it's uh, I mean, it's
actual supporting evidence for UH for essentially what would have
been um A an earthquake oriented UM damming of the river,
like there's a collapse of of rock uh closes off
a portion of the over Hell River and then floodwaters
(12:21):
build up behind it until they reach a breaking point
and then crashed through with I believe like five hundred
times the normal of uh, you know, flow strength, resulting
in this uh, this flood that is actually very important.
I believe we discussed a little bit about it in
Chinese mythology because it's uh, it has to do with
the rise of You the Great, who's the first emperor
(12:44):
of the Shah dynasty, which is China's first dynasty, predating
the second millennium BC Shan dynasty. So it's uh, it's
a it's a it's a fascinating topic because you see mythology,
you see geology, UM, and history all sort of coming
gather in this one. Yeah. Yeah, which is what we
saw with a lot of that flood stuff. And I
think the geologists that we spoke about their work on
(13:07):
in that episode there they were probably fascinated by this
paper coming out. Hey, I gotta ask a tangential question, uh,
not related to floods, but related to Chinese myth. Have
you seen the trailer for this new movie, The Great Wall, Yes,
I have. What are your thoughts on it? Um? Well,
when I first saw it, I thought, well, that looks
like a bit. I tended to think about it in
(13:28):
terms of, like the business side, like, clearly this is
a like an international production. They're going for a large
Chinese audience as well as the US audience by having
that damon in it. But I didn't really think much
about it beyond that because I'm like, I can't see
what the monster looks like. I'll decide whether I'm interested
or not when I see a picture of the monster.
But then I I ended up running running across the
commentary from from actress Constance Wu. Yeah, yeah, of course,
(13:52):
most famous, I think to to our listeners for being
on the sitcom Fresh off the Boat. Yeah, and she
had a lot of you know, start criticisms. I would imagine, Yeah,
that's a particular story. So for our listeners, if you
don't know and Joe, you haven't seen the trailer yet,
it seems the from the trailer, but it looks like
it is a story about why the Great Wall was
(14:13):
built with a fantasy angle to it, that the secret
history of the Great Wall is that they were like
monsters or dragons or something like that. That sounds yeah
on the surface, that sounds great, but but Matt Damon
is the hero. Thatt Damon and the guy who plays
uh Um, one of the Dorn guys on Game of Thrones,
are like these like monster killers that they bring in
(14:34):
to help them. So it's been it's like an all
Chinese cast except those two guys who ostensibly saved the day.
I guess that sounds pretty Hollywood. It's a little whitewashy
and problematic, but I can I can absolutely see from
a business perspective why it's made the way it is.
It's it's like Netflix Marco Polo, which I've watched and enjoyed,
but it's like you, it's like you have this uh
(14:57):
this this Western figure at the heart of the drama
to anchor it, you know, Western expectations, and then that
at times that feels really yeah. Yeah, I just I
don't know. When I see stuff like that, it immediately
made me think of our episode on Flood myth and
how like we're we're building mythology today still with movies
(15:18):
like this, right, but they're just not Instead of explaining
the flood, they're sort of quasi explaining the history of
the Great Wall in a in a fake fantasy way,
you know. I mean that's kind of fun, Like I
don't mind, I don't know that that sci fi revisionist history.
But but in such a way as this, it seems weird. Yeah. Well,
speaking of going back and looking at old myths and
(15:41):
and and reinterpreting them in light of what we know today,
we got a great, just awesome email from our listener
Katie but responding to both the flood episode and Robert
and I are episode on geomethology and monsters. Yeah, we've
been hitting the mythology hard. This is a couple of
core themes over the last few months. Yapology, bioacking fish fish. Yeah,
(16:05):
we have done a number of episodes. You know, we
had a Mara Heart come back on and I didn't
think about that as a theme, but yeah, okay, Well anyway,
Katie writes, quote love your show to pieces, especially the
geo mythology episode. In the last episode about flood myths,
when you guys were talking about the old Norse flood myths.
You were talking about the emir who made all the world,
(16:28):
as you guys say, very metal. Yeah, Yumer is totally brutal.
There's gotta be some metal band out there named anyway,
Katie continues, there is another mythological flood in old Norse
mythology that comes from the poem vols Bo, And she says,
vols Bo is a poem found in the poetic Edda,
(16:50):
wherein you get everything about Norse mythology. For some context,
the volvar where the female soothsayers, and the poem, which
translates to the seeing of the year, is meant to
be a recitation of a volva uh that she gives
to an unnamed audience about the forthcoming Ragnarok the twilight
of the gods. That she didn't you just record an
(17:12):
episode about that before I walked in the studio. We
just talked about talk about yeah uh. But anyways, she writes,
Among the many awesome epic verses are several at the
end that described the world falling into the sea. Now
we can't read all of these, She's put a bunch
in there. Really cool. I just want to read one,
she says, quote or she doesn't write this she copies
(17:33):
in the translation of the head. Yeah. Um, the sun
turns black, Earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars
down from heaven or world fierce grows the steam and
the life feeding flame until fire leaps high about heaven itself. Nice.
That sounds like some man o war lyrics right there.
Oh that is so much better than man o war
(17:55):
lyrics and would be more about brave things with the hammer.
That's awesome though. I love that how that stuff plays
out in present present context and the mythology of it too.
Oh yeah, So anyway, Katie quotes more of the poem,
and she goes on to say, so, a giant flood
comes and destroys the earth in a very Noah's Deluge
(18:17):
type of way. Stars fall in this flood. Uh like
possible comets coming to Earth that was referenced in the episode,
but the falling stars seem more to set the cataclysmic
stage rather than recording any cause and effect occurrence with
commets like the pished Him and Noah's floods. The world
emerges from the waters, renewed, and the gods come back
(18:38):
to their halls and everything is beautiful and growing again.
In this poem, However, the world ends again when a
dragon flying up from the earth, bringing uh forth darkness
and destruction. You guys talked about dragons in the geomethology episode,
and I forget if you had made any kind of
speculations about dragons being connected with volcanoes or not. We
only very briefly mentioned it, but we did. Is this
(19:00):
dragon she's referring to the mid Guard serpent, I'm not sure,
but as part of the ragnar Yeah, but she says
the poetic edit was transcribed in Iceland, where they definitely
have volcanoes. That's certainly true. Skipping ahead just a little
for time, she says, it's a pretty cool thing to
think about, especially because this dragon brings darkness that destroys men,
(19:21):
like clouds of ash that have been known to cover
Iceland in northern Europe in ash clouds that block out
the sun and caused the summer to be basically winter.
On a sort of related geomethology note, in the eddic
poem and I'm going to do my best here, vath
prude Nis small Odin is discussing how humans will survive
fimble Winter, cataclysmic winter that proceeds Ragnarok. There were a
(19:47):
series of extreme weather events in five thirty six or
so that scholars believe were a historical fimble Winter where
Europe basically didn't have a summer for a while and
tons of people died. In or Old Norse religion, there
is a distinct difference between an earlier religious period where
human and bog sacrifices were made, complete with distinct artifacts,
(20:07):
and a later period where Odin, Thor and co. Are
tramping around killing giants and whatnot, and where the customs
found in archaeology changed. People think this separation of practice
came about because of social dislocation that happened because of
this fimble winter around the five thirties. Going back to
the Voluspo In earlier verses, they talk about the war
(20:29):
between two sets of gods, with the group belonging to
Odin being victorious. Some of the older gods, Freyer and
Freya of particular note, were taken as prisoners by Odin's
groups and were assimilated into their pantheon. And then she
gives some verses about it, uh that are also cool,
But for time, I'm going to skip on to the
end of her message. Here she says, quote, I love
(20:51):
this theory because there's geological evidence that there were extreme
weather patterns around the time. The archaeological evidence shows a
dramatic change in customs, which resonates in the mythological poems
that trickled down. I'd be happy to go in more
depth with the evidence, but this email is getting so long. Anyways.
I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I would highly
recommend reading the vels BO if you haven't. It's the
(21:13):
poem where the stuff with Emir comes from, along with
the creation of the world and its destruction during Ragnarok
War into the world by flood, rebirth and destruction again
by dragon. It's a pretty badass poem in all sixty
six stanzas should be read with lots of notes because
there are tons of names for the names of God's
keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Katie. That
(21:33):
was an excellent email and we really appreciate all of
you educating us on the totally the horrors of the North.
I think it's also one thing that I got out
of this that I liked is mentioning like multiple flood
myths within the North tradition. And you know, indeed, not
only are there you know, multiple flood myths from around
(21:54):
the world in different cultures. Within cultures, you have multiple version.
Chinese culture alone has has several different flood mythologies. Uh.
And the one that we talked about in our episode
and that I alluded to earlier is just like the
most dominant. Yeah. And I you know, like after that
episode and after hearing her reading her letter, I kind
(22:15):
of wish I could take like a a course on
Norris mythology now, like I have like a passing familiarity
with it, and I'm sure like I could do like
a sort of self guided deep dive into it on
my own, but I'd really like somebody who understands it
to kind of walk me through it. Like you wake
up on a on a ship, you know, thatched freezing
(22:36):
ocean and if your studies begin, yeah, nice, like a
wilderness adventure slash Norris mythology they use they blood the
keel with your body and this is how you learn. Well.
I got one here from Dr Britt M. Starkovic, who
(22:57):
is a professor at the University of Tubingen in Germany.
I believe is how you pronounce it. Looks like she
is an archaeo zoologist professor, and she writes to us
about our our episode on academ Gora Doc. She says,
Dear Robert and Christian, I love your show. You really
caught my attention in your academ Gora Doc episode when
(23:19):
you talked about the Russian domestic foxes. I teach archaeology, okay,
archaeology at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and this
is one of my all time favorite topics. I specialize
in the human use of animals in the past, what
humans eight, what different species were domesticated, etcetera. I wanted
to send you a link to some videos of foxes
(23:41):
interacting with people. These these are the specific boxes from
academ Gora Doc. She says, I find the quote aggressive
or normal wild version a bit depressing, but the tame
one is absolutely absolutely adorable. They're cool videos. I recommend
checking them out. They're hosted on Illinois University's website. She
also says, you mentioned in your episode the different coloring patterns.
(24:02):
I assume in your research you saw it's called piebald,
which is also coloring that shows up in a lot
of other domesticated animals, border collies, jersey cows, tuxedo cats,
spotted picks and horses. The physical changes in these foxes,
given that they were only being selected for behavioral traits,
has totally caused us to rethink how we understand domestication
(24:23):
and the modern diversity found among different breeds of animals.
The last thing I wanted to mention is that for
a time, this is awesome. There was a guy in
the United States who would help arrange the import of
one of these domesticated foxes to Europe or America if
you had an extra nine thousand dollars lying around. So
if you wanted to get an academ GOORADOC fox, some
(24:45):
shady dude would get you one. Uh. And she says
his website hasn't been updated in a few years. She
provides a link, and she says, I'm not sure what
the deal is. I'm a huge pet lover, but find
it unethical to keep a non domesticated animal as a pet.
These little guys have enough genetic changes, though that I
dream of someday having one. Well see, that's all well
(25:06):
and good until the fox gets too big and people
flush it down the toilet, and then they'll become mutant
sewer foxes. Is it gonna be academ gera dock fox
the movie? Is that? Is that what you're pitching here, Joe?
Thank you very much, Britt that that's really cool to learn.
I didn't, I mean when we talked about it. I
think I may be casually said as an aside, I
wonder if you can get one of these foxes? Um,
(25:27):
But yeah, I'm sorry, I'm still working on this. I
think it's your teenage mutant academ goa doc Foxes? Oh nice? Well,
you know? And in the teene mut Ninja Turtle comics
there is a fox ninja there hang out with it.
Is it a lady Foxes? It is? Yeah, the Fox Spirit? Yes, yeah, yeah, totally.
What's her name? I can't remember the name of it.
It begins with an a. She's like a white fox
(25:49):
with some markings and stuff. But she's occasionally an ally
of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. And yet again showing how
much I know about eighties cartoons, is there a fox Pokemon? Yeah,
there's multiple fox Pokemon. What how do you not know this? Alright,
here's another one. This one comes to us from Sarah.
She says, longtime listener, first time writer, I'm a huge
(26:12):
fan of the show and listen to every new episode
as soon as I can. Your episode about incomplete art
was incredibly fascinating, But of course you weren't able to
include every unfinished project. But I wanted to point out
a noticeable piece of unfinished art, the musical Rent. I
didn't know this. The writer of the musical, Jonathan Larson,
died the night before the show was to start preview performances.
(26:33):
According to the production staff, the show still had a
lot of issues that needed to be worked out, but
they were hesitant to move forward without the show's creator.
They chose not to write anything else, only to rework
the existing material. The shows that exist today is only
a portion of the vision that Larson had for the show.
We will never know how the show could have changed
(26:53):
if Larson had been able to finish it, but what
we're left with maintains Larson's legacy while being a highly
popular and hugely influential production. This is important because it
shows how I work can be finished without betraying the
original ideas of its creator. I can't wait to see
what else shall have in store for your podcast, and
hopefully y'all will never be included in the list of
things that went on unfinished. Thanks for blowing my own
(27:17):
mind with every new episode. Well, I will have to
say unfortunately, I think by nature we will have to
be unfinished. How can we finish talking about all the
things that will blow your mind? Well, speak to yourself.
I believe we can. We can complete three of our
minds into Carni and we just continue talking for eternity.
Oh it's true. Once we process the entire library library
of Babel, we will have exhausted synchronicity. Yeah, uh so
(27:42):
was the I'm curious now if the version of Rent
didn't have five hundred twenty four hours six hundred minutes,
did you I think the numbers are probably wrong. Yeah,
that's all I know about round. It's yeah, I I
have to plead ignorance on on the product. But it's
interesting to learn about it though. Um. I want to
(28:03):
mention real quick as for us incomplete works go. This
is one that I learned about researching the episode that
Joe and I uh just put together that has to
do with rapture and utopian trans humanism but apparently average averaging. Um,
there's a work. An incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis
(28:26):
Bacon UM six six or so titled The New Atlantis
UH that deals with a post trans human proto trans humanist,
utopian society on the island of Ben Salem, where there's
no slavery, slavery or poverty and everybody's ruled over by
a group of religiously tolerant scientific elites. So it's interesting.
(28:49):
It's interesting that was apparent. Yeah, that was the published
I think a year after his death UM, but a
very early proto trans humanist work, but also complete. Picking
up on that, I can offer a couple of ideas
about Incompleteness that we heard back from listeners are our
listener Jim in New Jersey, who often emails us with
(29:11):
with great email and awesome feedback. He wrote us about
the Incompleteness episode and I can't read his whole email.
He talked about the TV show Nashville, but he also
big hit I believe with the um Smithy ladies, they're
huge nash I didn't know that. But anyway, he offers
some psychological feedback on the idea of why why we
(29:33):
stick with incomplete works of art? You know, why we've
got to know the end, even maybe if we're not
loving it anymore. I I used the example of Lost,
how like I I got to the point where I
don't think I liked the show anymore, but I had
to keep going because I wanted to see how it ended.
And then I was very disappointed. But anyway, Uh, Jim says, quote,
(29:54):
sticking with something you've invested in falls into the sunk
cost fallacy. This is the economic my idea, that you
stick with something wasteful only because you've already invested a
lot of resources into it. I think of someone remaining
in a bad relationship because they've already invested five wasted
years into it. I think this is a good example.
Once you've already put the time in with something. And
(30:16):
our relationships with media are in many ways kind of
like our relationships with people, even if you know they're
not really changing based on our behavior, we sort of
feel like it's transactional. Uh. You feel like, well, I've
put so much into this, I've got to know how
it turns out. So even if you know you're at
season five, episode four, and if that's the first episode
(30:37):
you saw, you probably wouldn't continue. Now that you've watched
everything that came before, you're stuck with it psychologically. But
then he goes on to say the related term to
this is the lost opportunity cost. By sticking with a
failed endeavor, you're not available for something better. So the
person who's stuck in a bad five year relationship because
of sunk cost is also missing out on the opportunity
(30:59):
to start a relation and ship with their soul mate.
And I think this also applies to media. You know,
we we've got limited time in our lives to to
read books and watch movies and and experience all the
great stories that we want to interact with and and
have informed our brains. You can't, You can't experience at all.
So it kind of sucks to realize that you spent
a lot of times stuck with a story that you
(31:21):
didn't really love because you were motivated by the desire
to see how it ends. And here's one more about
the Incomplete Unfinished episode uh and and Unfinished workspart from
our listener Taylor. Taylor says, uh, dear, stuff to blow
your mind. I was just listening to your episode on
Incomplete and Unfinished Works, particularly your discussion of TV shows
(31:41):
and book series that are unfinished, and I was surprised
how little you discussed fandom. I think we did mention
it a little, but I think it a little bit.
We didn't get very deep into it, I guess h
Taylor writes. When people come across the series where they
have to wait for the next installment or when there
will be no more installments, many times they finish it
them selves. Huge communities online around fan art, fan fiction,
(32:04):
and other fan works thrive, especially for source material that
is unfinished. Fan creators at the Firefly Serenity community. Oh yeah,
Taylor continues, fan creators will also complete, quote quote complete
the source material by adding elements they feel should have
been in the story or would just like to see
(32:24):
in the story, even if it's completely unrealistic. They'll get
characters together that did not end up together in the Cannon,
revive characters that died in the Cannon, sometimes completely replaced
the universe the Cannon exists in altogether. The episode also
reminded me of my own worst experiences with unfinished works.
I do a lot of cooperative writing and role playing,
(32:45):
and I can attest that the story ended prematurely is
all the more painful when you had a hand in
creating it. I have even taken to writing shorter stories
to avoid that feeling. That's interesting anyway, Taylor's think we've
all been there, all of us who write fiction. Yeah.
Uh so, I'll just finish up, Taylor says, I want
to thank you in the Whole House Stuff Works Podcast crew,
(33:07):
I haven't written in before, but I've been following this
in a few of your other podcasts, like Stuff You
Should Know and Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
for a while. I always feel as if I'm smarter,
have more topics for conversation, and I'm better suited to
analyzing things when I'm done listening. Good luck, and I
have a mind blowing summer. You can tell this came
from a while ago. But thank you so much, Taylor.
That was a thoughtful and very nice email. Yeah. So, like,
(33:30):
I'm very interested in this topic, as you guys know,
Like I have a background in cultural studies and did
a lot of work on fandom in particular, Henry Jenkins
has a whole basically established a whole discipline on fandom.
So it's interesting to hear their perspective on this. That
might be something fun to tackle in the future. Yeah,
(33:50):
you know an author that I really enjoy and I
know you've been reading some of this stuff recently. Michael Shayum,
I love him, I I love how some of that.
I think his earliest, if not his first novel was uh,
basically an unofficially fiction, Yeah, basically fan fiction. He was
a big fan of Jack Vance's um books in the
(34:13):
Dying Earth series, and he caught him up. They wrote
him and said, hey, I'm right, I've written this, uh
the sequel, uh, a book that would go on to
be published as in Yanna as the title, and it's
a fabulous Jack Vancy adventure that has it has, you know,
a distinctive Michael Shay twist on everything. And he he
was basically Jack Vance uh said well, I'm not gonna
(34:36):
I'm not gonna read it, but you have my blessing. Go,
you know, get it published whatever. It's amazing. It never happened. Yeah,
it's hard to imagine happening now, but in this case,
you know, it launched this guy's career. He went on
to write a number of this wonderful books that are
very much distinctively his. If you haven't heard us sing
his praises before on other episodes, are especially on our
(34:57):
summer reading episodes. Michael Shay is fantastic. And uh, I'm
actually borrowing the incomplete and if the Lean stories from
Robert right now, and it's I read a couple of
pages every night before bed. It's just so good. It's
the best fantasy, Like the smartest fantasy I think I've
ever read. He could just construct these amazing worlds. Yeah, okay,
(35:18):
So this next one is from Rowan, who is local
to us here in Atlanta, and I'm going to try
to it's a longish letter, so I'm gonna try to
edit it down a little bit. Um. He just lets
us know that he's a bio nerd and he's written
into us before, and he used to work in an
HPV lab and is in love with the d I
Y bio hacking community. So when he heard us doing
(35:39):
episodes about trans humanism bio hacking, he got excited. So
he wrote in to tell us this regarding the man
who developed e V and this is in relation to
our tree Man Disease episode. E V as the shorten
name for tree Man disease after cutting his knee as
a teenager. That makes sense to me. Wounds are great
for introducing germs. HPV, for instance, usually infects mucous membranes
(36:03):
like genitalia, mouth, throat, et cetera, not places like your
knee where there's a thicker barrier, but a wound could
circumvent that barrier and let infection get a foothold. I
don't have time to dive into the research, but I
wonder if there's some correlation between people getting the infection
in unusual places and people developing extreme symptoms like tree
man disease. Who knows the HPV strains you guys listed
(36:27):
off are not super common. They it might be part
of the reason that it's so rare if it requires
a rare strain and a rare genetic mutation plus sunlight
and mysteries, which is yeah, and they just don't have
real answers yet to what's going on with it. Another
thing about HPV infection usually have more than one strain.
It would be interesting to know if particular combination showed
(36:49):
up more often, or if different strains interacted with each
other somehow. None of the ones you listed are in
the vaccines, but they're working on a more general vaccine
that would protect against all HPV streams. It wouldn't help
people who already had the disease, but it could prevent
any more cases. A bit of hope for your depressing episode.
(37:11):
Last fun fact about HPV, you guys said, it's super common.
It's so common, in fact, that we have a hell
of a time finding negative controls for our tests. It's
hard to find anyone who hasn't been exposed to HPV.
That's comforting. Most of the negative controls end up coming
from children's samples. And then he gets into bio hacking. Okay,
(37:31):
he says, bio hacking. The episodes that we did were
pretty needy, says thank you very much. As a kind
of not really bio hacker myself, I enjoyed them, though.
I'd like to note that trans humanists are just a
tiny section of the bio hacking and d I Y
bio community. Anyway, I happen to be local and thought
that you might want to know that at least two
maker spaces hacker spaces in Atlanta are trying to get
(37:54):
a bio hacking scene going. Maybe we'll be like, we can,
we can get together with these guys and get some magnets.
Putting our fingers, I am a member at Freeside, Atlanta.
We're in the process of setting up a lab. We
have a class on engineering glow bacteria, which will run
again as soon as I get things together. I'm editing
that he mentioned some other ones that are around town.
(38:18):
For people who aren't local, you probably wouldn't be familiar
with the suburbs of Atlanta. Um and And says that
there's some people working on brain computer for computer interfaces,
uh and teams that are building an e G from scratch.
So it sounds like Atlanta's got a burgeoning bio hacking community. Yeah,
so that's very interesting. He's plugging for that. So if
you are out there, you listen to our bio hacking
(38:40):
episodes and our trans humanism episodes and you thought that
sounds like it's something for me, you might want to
look into this, he says. Says that the spaces have
public events that are listed on meetup dot com. You
can check those out. UH. Side note, a friend of mine,
unrelated to us doing those episodes, became interested in getting
mag magn 's put in his fingers and went out
(39:01):
and found h tattooist I guess or a tattoo artist
who performs that function. As well, So he's getting the
he's doing the magnet thing. Yeah, alright, Well, here's a
one more piece of listener mail. This one is a
quick one. And oh this one comes. It's another one
from Jim. I hate to read one too, by the
same author, but this is just a real quick one
(39:22):
with a book book a recommendation in it Robert Joe
and Christian As for synthetic meat and or cannibalism and fiction,
I have two suggestions, pursue at your own peril. Um.
So the first one he mentions is The Food of
the Gods by author C. Clark, which I read decades
ago in the Wind from the Sun, a book of
(39:44):
short stories, and I really mean short stories. I think
each story was no more than a page or two long,
so like flash fiction before it was called that. I've
heard of this story, but I haven't read it. He says.
This short story addresses the very questions you brought up
in your synthetic meat episode by Clark d plus years
ago before the technology existed, um, which we're basically, would
(40:05):
you eat synthetic meat or would you eat synthetic human meat? Yeah,
like if it was it was synthesized human flesh. Would
you eat it? The problem? Yeah, that's what I said.
I mean, I said, I'm a vegetarian. The problem with
eating human meat is that it comes from it had
to come from a human. Yeah, well so, so easily
have more. He said, there was a second one. There's
(40:26):
a second one, and this one. I imagine we we
have probably all three. Read The Survivor Type by Sephen
King with an entry Yeah, and also book of short
Stories pretty just pretty. It's pretty disturbing in a Stephen
King kind of way. I think. I I think I
read a quote from Stephen King where he was saying, like,
I think my favorite types of stories to write are
the really nasty, grizzly ones. But on this one, I
(40:47):
think I went too far. There's also been and I
didn't add this to the listener mail, but several people
have written into us, both over mail and on Facebook
about because I mentioned Wolverine on that episode and whether
he cuts his own skin off and eats it at
any point because he can just regrow his own flesh.
And they pointed out that there's an issue of X
(41:07):
Force that I forgot about that I've read where Deadpool,
the famous character who just had a movie this summer. Uh,
does that to himself and feeds bits of himself to
another character who's like dying and starving. So he cuts
off his own skin and little chunks of arm flesh
and feeds into him. Gross where the mask come from? Like,
(41:28):
he's really not even beginning to obey. Basically, Oh, I
think Deadpool it's yeah, I mean it's not fiction. But
he's like Wolverini regrows. Why is he fighting good crime
or superviance when he could be feeding the masses. He's
not Deadpools a mercenary. Now alright, he's got an outfre
Sorry we shouldn't we We just went off in geek territory.
We we didn't explain what happens in the story. Yeah,
(41:50):
very brief synopsis. There is a drug smuggler who has
a bunch of heroins terrific, Yeah, but has a bunch
of heroin with him. He got stranded on a desert
island with nothing to eat, so he realized he's starving
to death. And he realizes that, well, you know, I
could just drug myself so I don't feel pain and
then cut my foot off and eat it and that,
and it proceeds from there. Yeah. Yeah, I guess in
(42:14):
that scenario, I would probably odon the heroine before I
would uh just use it as a pain cut off
my own limbs. See, the thing is he found a
pamphlet from the airplane that says, um, auto cannibalism is
it for you, and it's all about surviving a plane
cracks through auto canniba. That would be amazing if stewardesses
had had to explain auto cannibalism to you before a
(42:35):
plane took off. It's it's definitely a disturbing one. And
want to remember well from from when I read it
the first time I can Junior, Yeah, I read it
when I was a kid too. Okay, So on that note,
you probably wrapped things up on the auto cannibalism. No, yeah,
that that is only just a slice of the vast
(42:56):
listener mail, um flesh chunk consume for you today. Yeah,
we only were able to cut a little bit off
and chew on it for forty five minutes. Sorry, but
we will get two more in the next couple of months. Yeah.
And like I said before, if if we didn't get
your to your email, please don't take that as a
as a slide against the wonderful feedback that you send
(43:17):
us there. There's just too much good stuff for us
to get to use. Podcast is just reading letter mail. Yeah,
so so please keep sending it. We we love to
read what you'all out there have to say. So maybe
you're listening and you're thinking to yourself, Hey, I didn't
know that I could get my messages read on a
podcast that I like listening to all the time. How
do I do that? Well, there's a number of ways
(43:38):
that you can do that. You can always reach out
to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and Instagram. Although I would not recommend that you write
us a letter on Instagram. That's gonna be a bad
format for it. But you can see lots of cool
pictures on there from us, uh, all of those we
are blow the mind. Write us there, you can write
us messages. You could follow us and see all the
things that we post, not just our own content, with
(44:00):
the weird, bizarre science oddities that we find throughout the week.
Where else can they find his boys, Well, you can
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find all of
our videos or podcast episodes, blinks after those, social media
accounts and more, And of course you can always email
us directly and blow the mind at how stuff works
dot com. Well more on this and basands of other topics.
(44:30):
Is it how stuff works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you wasn't just stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I am
Christian Sager, and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we bring
you yet another listener mail episode. In this case, we've
(00:23):
been combing through and what seems like an infinite library
of listener mail. That's nice, going back to your guys
Library of Babbel episode. Yes, our inbox contains not only
all listener feedback, but all possible listener feedback, from the
positive to the negative, from the sensical to the nonsensical. Uh.
Sometimes it does feel like that we get a ton
(00:44):
of listener mail, but I must say that we also
it's it's basically Crimson Hexagon stuff, and that it's almost
all really good stuff. I would say we we we
hear a lot of great feedback from y'all out there,
and so we have to say, as always, we get
uns of mail. If if what you sent us was
not included, please don't take that as a slight. We
(01:05):
we love reading whatever you get to send us, and
we like to respond when we get time, but we
often don't. But we're going to pick a few today.
We won't be able to go through the whole barrel,
but maybe we'll be able to not scrape the bottom
of the barrel, but scrape some of the sides of
the barrel near the top. Luckily, we have a fourth
entity here to do any scraping that's necessary. And that's,
of course, our good friend Carney. If the mail. But ah, yeah, hey, Carney,
(01:28):
what's going on? I've noticed that Carney has taken on
what seems to be a somewhat melancholy suicidal aspect since
we entered this vast library of all possible email. Well,
it's a lot to sort out, even with his his
high processing. Even Carney only has so much ram ram.
(01:50):
Oh why is it funny to talk about ram? Now?
Ram used to be a thing you talk about all
the time, not anymore. All right, Well, on that note,
let's let's let's jump into it. Let's call Carney over. Carney,
will you bring us our first bit of listener mail? Hey,
let's see. Okay, This first one is in response to
(02:12):
the episode that Robert and I did about flying fish,
jumping fish, flying fish, breaching sharks, sleeping mullets, all the
fish that do the equivalent of us jumping into outer
space momentarily. Uh. So this first one is from Mona
and she if you remember from that episode Robert and I,
we talked about a couple of species of Asian carp.
(02:32):
They are known for occupying North American river waters, jumping
out of the water when your motor boat goes by,
and in some rare cases breaking your face, yes, or
or worse yes. Yeah, and so, as we discussed, there's
this Chinese cultural concept of the carp that leaps over
the dragon gate right, literally, a mythical concept that if
a river carp can leap over a certain waterfall, it's
(02:55):
going to transform into a dragon. So it's a magic
carp turning into jidos. Uh. This is exactly what the
email is about. It had no idea about this, but yeah,
Mona writes to us to say, hello, Robert and Joe.
I just finished listening to the Leaping Mullets, Flying Fish,
Breaching Sharks episode of the podcast. I just wanted to
give you a fun fact about the Chinese mythology of
(03:17):
the leaping carb turning into a dragon. If either of
you have played or no of Pokemon, the video game
or the popular TV show. I think that's funny. She
specifies popular. It's still popular after all these years, is it. Yeah,
people still watched the Pokemon cartoon. Oh yeah, my wife
used to work at cartoon Networking. It's a huge hit
over there, so that's amazing. Yeah, they constantly are putting
(03:38):
out new seasons of it. Really had no idea they're
making more Pokemon. It's been around since I was in
my twenties, so it's got to be like what They've
been working on it for probably like almost twenty years,
and that's the thing. It came. It really emerged after
I was out of the main demographic. Yeah. I was
just immature enough to play the video game and watch
(03:59):
the car a little bit in my twenties, so I
know way more than thirty nine year old man shout
about Pokemon. Okay, well I didn't know this, but anyway,
Mona continues, Uh, if we know about Pokemon, you'd be
aware of a Pokemon called Magic Carp. It has always
confused my friends and I. How this pretty useless fish.
I guess that means not a good fighter. So in
(04:20):
the game, Magic Carp is like the worst possible Pokemon.
It can barely do anything, but if you level it up, okay,
she says, yeah, it ends up evolving into a completely
overpowered dragon type Pokemon. Giara dossise, this Pokemon is actually
inspired by the said myth that you mentioned in your podcast,
which gives this evolution a lot more since I know
(04:43):
mind blown and and then she says, thanks for making
quality episodes, regardless of how weird they get. Sometimes love
each and everyone, my favorites being the X Files episodes
and the Mystery of the myth Fleshed Fossil, looking forward
to more. Well, thank you so much, Mona. That is
very kind of you to say. And we also got
emails from a couple other listeners on the same topic.
(05:04):
Jeffrey rode in to let us know the same thing
about Magic carp and Jared do Yeah, I had no idea.
Oh man, yeah, I wish I had known. Jaredos was
like one of my favorites. Like when I would play
the game, I would always get a magic harp and
like keep them in reserve, level them up slowly, and
then once you get geared does it's awesome. Wait a minute,
you said you played the game a little in your twenties.
This sounds like you played a lot. Uh. Yeah, I
(05:27):
had a game Boy and would just play what is it?
Pokemon Gold I think was what it was. And then
my roommates and I got Pokemon Colosseum, which is the
one where you can plug your game Boy into your
Nintendo six or four and fight your Pokemon against one
another on the TV. Oh boy, Yeah, yeah it was great.
That sounds brutal. Okay, it looks like Carton. As my
father in law says, no adult man uh spends time
(05:51):
catching Pokemon. Clearly a false statement. I have to turn
in my adult man card. Uh. So, as I mentioned,
Carney is holding something out here. What is it? Oh,
he's got one. Uh. That is about cyborgs and trans humanism,
which is something that Robert and I have been weaving
in and out of over the last gosh three months.
(06:14):
We've done various episodes that tie into this theme. And
this actually came to us in May. I wish we'd
read it earlier. Uh. And he originally this isn't his
whole letter, but he originally wanted to ask us about
doing an episode on GMOs based on the organic food
episode that we did, but he tied into the cyborgs
episode that we did, which was the first of I
wanna say like three or four episodes where we talked
(06:36):
about sort of the future of changing the human body.
And he says, in your Cyborgs episode, you touched on
the ethical quandaries of performing surgical enhancements before a child
is born. I thought you might find it interesting to
know that, in a way, this does already happen. My
son has spina bifida, a birth defect wherein the spinal
(06:56):
column fails to close properly. It leads to permanent parrela
us and often brain damage. He actually underwent surgery before
he was born to repair the defect and minimize the impact.
He still lost some nerves, but probably saved enough nerves
above the knees that he's able to walk, or he'll
be able to walk with braces to make it weirder.
(07:17):
Another benefit of the surgery is reversal of associated hind
brain herniation, which if left unchecked, leads to hydrocephalus and
malformation of the corpus colossum. A downside in my son's
case is that he was born extremely premature twenty six
weeks two pounds, a significant risk to the surgery and
(07:39):
about ten percent are born early. This caused a stage
four inter ventricular hemorrhage, wiping out most of the left
side of his brain. Young brains can recover from this
to some extent, but science does not yet understand how
exactly it does. This a good lead is the subject
of neuroplasticity and neural reuse. See the book after Phrenology
(08:00):
for a rather technical intro. So my point is by
saving his ability to walk, we also repaired one part
of his brain and damaged another, so in at least
two ways fundamentally changed the architecture of his brain and
the type of person he will become. The surgery was
highly experimental just a few years ago, but is now
considered routine, albeit rare. I think he was number one
(08:22):
fifty to get it since the experimental study ended. In
all the discussion of ethics surrounding the surgery, which is
what Robert and I talked about in the show, mainly
in regards to cyborgs uh and and babies uh and.
There's many conversations about the ethics. The primary concern has
always been ensuring that the benefits outweigh the many risks
(08:42):
involved with opening up a womb, pulling the kid out,
putting him back in again, and closing up. Mom. Jeez,
that sounds horrifying to me, like not being a parent.
That sounds absolutely terrifying to me. The question of whether
it should be done at all versus letting nature ticket
its course ever, really crossed my mind, and to my
admittedly limited knowledge, did not seem prevalent in the medical community.
(09:06):
This may change as laparoscopic versions are perfected, minimizing risks,
and surgery moves from mere repair to potential upgrades. So
that's that's from Keegan. He went a weigh in on that,
and he actually, you know, we we talked a little
bit more over emailing. There's a lot here. Actually I'm
not going to read a whole lot more, but we
(09:27):
had a nice conversation with him, and he's continuing conversation
with us about this. But it's just really interesting to
hear about this real world example where you and I
based on Oh I can't remember off the top of
my head the name of the um of the theorist
on cyborgs who came up with that idea, but basically
they were very scenarios in which would it or would
(09:48):
it not be ethical to transform someone into a cyborg,
and and what does their identity become afterwards? And one
of them was what if you change a child before
it's born. Um, so this was a nice real world
example coming back to that, and with lots of science
in it. I was unaware of any of that. Yeah,
that's fascinating that that. Uh. People think of this as
(10:10):
a purely future concern, right, Like they don't think of right,
they don't realize that it's happening in present day. Yeah,
I mean, like, I genuinely we did that whole episode.
We've been talking about transhumanism, bio hacking, all this stuff.
I did not realize that you can, as he puts it,
take a baby out of its mother, change it physically,
and then put it back in. That's no pun intended
(10:34):
for the show. Mind blowing. Alright, it looks like we've
another bit of listener mail here. This one comes from
listener raw raw right soon and says, hey, guys, I
thought this was very topical. I enjoyed your recent show
on great flood myths. You may be interested to know
that the latest edition of Science August five, sixteen contains
(10:56):
an article with evidence supporting a Chinese Great Flood myth
um was the title of it, and he says the
team used a range of compelling, compelling measurements of sediment
compositions and radiocarbon dating to argue that it was very
plausible there was one of the greatest freshwater floods of
the Hollo scene in the Yellow River, coinciding with the
(11:18):
transition of the civilization in the region from the Neolithic
to the Bronze Age. In case you're you're interested enough,
I've attached a PDF copy of the paper. Enjoy. Thanks
for the show. Um So, as luck would have it,
we starved receiving a number of different comments about this
because it is very exciting. We had just done this
episode on great flood myths and and then there was
(11:39):
this really cool study that came out out of China,
and the main professor on this is NN Ginge Normal
University geology professor woo Ching Long, and it actually actually
wrote some copy and did a video about it for
Housetuff Works now, which I'll include a link to on
the landing page for this episode. But as Raw points out,
(12:01):
it's it's really fascinating because it's uh, I mean, it's
actual supporting evidence for UH for essentially what would have
been um A an earthquake oriented UM damming of the river,
like there's a collapse of of rock uh closes off
a portion of the over Hell River and then floodwaters
(12:21):
build up behind it until they reach a breaking point
and then crashed through with I believe like five hundred
times the normal of uh, you know, flow strength, resulting
in this uh, this flood that is actually very important.
I believe we discussed a little bit about it in
Chinese mythology because it's uh, it has to do with
the rise of You the Great, who's the first emperor
(12:44):
of the Shah dynasty, which is China's first dynasty, predating
the second millennium BC Shan dynasty. So it's uh, it's
a it's a it's a fascinating topic because you see mythology,
you see geology, UM, and history all sort of coming
gather in this one. Yeah. Yeah, which is what we
saw with a lot of that flood stuff. And I
think the geologists that we spoke about their work on
(13:07):
in that episode there they were probably fascinated by this
paper coming out. Hey, I gotta ask a tangential question, uh,
not related to floods, but related to Chinese myth. Have
you seen the trailer for this new movie, The Great Wall, Yes,
I have. What are your thoughts on it? Um? Well,
when I first saw it, I thought, well, that looks
like a bit. I tended to think about it in
(13:28):
terms of, like the business side, like, clearly this is
a like an international production. They're going for a large
Chinese audience as well as the US audience by having
that damon in it. But I didn't really think much
about it beyond that because I'm like, I can't see
what the monster looks like. I'll decide whether I'm interested
or not when I see a picture of the monster.
But then I I ended up running running across the
commentary from from actress Constance Wu. Yeah, yeah, of course,
(13:52):
most famous, I think to to our listeners for being
on the sitcom Fresh off the Boat. Yeah, and she
had a lot of you know, start criticisms. I would imagine, Yeah,
that's a particular story. So for our listeners, if you
don't know and Joe, you haven't seen the trailer yet,
it seems the from the trailer, but it looks like
it is a story about why the Great Wall was
(14:13):
built with a fantasy angle to it, that the secret
history of the Great Wall is that they were like
monsters or dragons or something like that. That sounds yeah
on the surface, that sounds great, but but Matt Damon
is the hero. Thatt Damon and the guy who plays
uh Um, one of the Dorn guys on Game of Thrones,
are like these like monster killers that they bring in
(14:34):
to help them. So it's been it's like an all
Chinese cast except those two guys who ostensibly saved the day.
I guess that sounds pretty Hollywood. It's a little whitewashy
and problematic, but I can I can absolutely see from
a business perspective why it's made the way it is.
It's it's like Netflix Marco Polo, which I've watched and enjoyed,
but it's like you, it's like you have this uh
(14:57):
this this Western figure at the heart of the drama
to anchor it, you know, Western expectations, and then that
at times that feels really yeah. Yeah, I just I
don't know. When I see stuff like that, it immediately
made me think of our episode on Flood myth and
how like we're we're building mythology today still with movies
(15:18):
like this, right, but they're just not Instead of explaining
the flood, they're sort of quasi explaining the history of
the Great Wall in a in a fake fantasy way,
you know. I mean that's kind of fun, Like I
don't mind, I don't know that that sci fi revisionist history.
But but in such a way as this, it seems weird. Yeah. Well,
speaking of going back and looking at old myths and
(15:41):
and and reinterpreting them in light of what we know today,
we got a great, just awesome email from our listener
Katie but responding to both the flood episode and Robert
and I are episode on geomethology and monsters. Yeah, we've
been hitting the mythology hard. This is a couple of
core themes over the last few months. Yapology, bioacking fish fish. Yeah,
(16:05):
we have done a number of episodes. You know, we
had a Mara Heart come back on and I didn't
think about that as a theme, but yeah, okay, Well anyway,
Katie writes, quote love your show to pieces, especially the
geo mythology episode. In the last episode about flood myths,
when you guys were talking about the old Norse flood myths.
You were talking about the emir who made all the world,
(16:28):
as you guys say, very metal. Yeah, Yumer is totally brutal.
There's gotta be some metal band out there named anyway,
Katie continues, there is another mythological flood in old Norse
mythology that comes from the poem vols Bo, And she says,
vols Bo is a poem found in the poetic Edda,
(16:50):
wherein you get everything about Norse mythology. For some context,
the volvar where the female soothsayers, and the poem, which
translates to the seeing of the year, is meant to
be a recitation of a volva uh that she gives
to an unnamed audience about the forthcoming Ragnarok the twilight
of the gods. That she didn't you just record an
(17:12):
episode about that before I walked in the studio. We
just talked about talk about yeah uh. But anyways, she writes,
Among the many awesome epic verses are several at the
end that described the world falling into the sea. Now
we can't read all of these, She's put a bunch
in there. Really cool. I just want to read one,
she says, quote or she doesn't write this she copies
(17:33):
in the translation of the head. Yeah. Um, the sun
turns black, Earth sinks in the sea, the hot stars
down from heaven or world fierce grows the steam and
the life feeding flame until fire leaps high about heaven itself. Nice.
That sounds like some man o war lyrics right there.
Oh that is so much better than man o war
(17:55):
lyrics and would be more about brave things with the hammer.
That's awesome though. I love that how that stuff plays
out in present present context and the mythology of it too.
Oh yeah, So anyway, Katie quotes more of the poem,
and she goes on to say, so, a giant flood
comes and destroys the earth in a very Noah's Deluge
(18:17):
type of way. Stars fall in this flood. Uh like
possible comets coming to Earth that was referenced in the episode,
but the falling stars seem more to set the cataclysmic
stage rather than recording any cause and effect occurrence with
commets like the pished Him and Noah's floods. The world
emerges from the waters, renewed, and the gods come back
(18:38):
to their halls and everything is beautiful and growing again.
In this poem, However, the world ends again when a
dragon flying up from the earth, bringing uh forth darkness
and destruction. You guys talked about dragons in the geomethology episode,
and I forget if you had made any kind of
speculations about dragons being connected with volcanoes or not. We
only very briefly mentioned it, but we did. Is this
(19:00):
dragon she's referring to the mid Guard serpent, I'm not sure,
but as part of the ragnar Yeah, but she says
the poetic edit was transcribed in Iceland, where they definitely
have volcanoes. That's certainly true. Skipping ahead just a little
for time, she says, it's a pretty cool thing to
think about, especially because this dragon brings darkness that destroys men,
(19:21):
like clouds of ash that have been known to cover
Iceland in northern Europe in ash clouds that block out
the sun and caused the summer to be basically winter.
On a sort of related geomethology note, in the eddic
poem and I'm going to do my best here, vath
prude Nis small Odin is discussing how humans will survive
fimble Winter, cataclysmic winter that proceeds Ragnarok. There were a
(19:47):
series of extreme weather events in five thirty six or
so that scholars believe were a historical fimble Winter where
Europe basically didn't have a summer for a while and
tons of people died. In or Old Norse religion, there
is a distinct difference between an earlier religious period where
human and bog sacrifices were made, complete with distinct artifacts,
(20:07):
and a later period where Odin, Thor and co. Are
tramping around killing giants and whatnot, and where the customs
found in archaeology changed. People think this separation of practice
came about because of social dislocation that happened because of
this fimble winter around the five thirties. Going back to
the Voluspo In earlier verses, they talk about the war
(20:29):
between two sets of gods, with the group belonging to
Odin being victorious. Some of the older gods, Freyer and
Freya of particular note, were taken as prisoners by Odin's
groups and were assimilated into their pantheon. And then she
gives some verses about it, uh that are also cool,
But for time, I'm going to skip on to the
end of her message. Here she says, quote, I love
(20:51):
this theory because there's geological evidence that there were extreme
weather patterns around the time. The archaeological evidence shows a
dramatic change in customs, which resonates in the mythological poems
that trickled down. I'd be happy to go in more
depth with the evidence, but this email is getting so long. Anyways.
I hope you guys enjoyed this, and I would highly
recommend reading the vels BO if you haven't. It's the
(21:13):
poem where the stuff with Emir comes from, along with
the creation of the world and its destruction during Ragnarok
War into the world by flood, rebirth and destruction again
by dragon. It's a pretty badass poem in all sixty
six stanzas should be read with lots of notes because
there are tons of names for the names of God's
keep up the good work. Well, thank you, Katie. That
(21:33):
was an excellent email and we really appreciate all of
you educating us on the totally the horrors of the North.
I think it's also one thing that I got out
of this that I liked is mentioning like multiple flood
myths within the North tradition. And you know, indeed, not
only are there you know, multiple flood myths from around
(21:54):
the world in different cultures. Within cultures, you have multiple version.
Chinese culture alone has has several different flood mythologies. Uh.
And the one that we talked about in our episode
and that I alluded to earlier is just like the
most dominant. Yeah. And I you know, like after that
episode and after hearing her reading her letter, I kind
(22:15):
of wish I could take like a a course on
Norris mythology now, like I have like a passing familiarity
with it, and I'm sure like I could do like
a sort of self guided deep dive into it on
my own, but I'd really like somebody who understands it
to kind of walk me through it. Like you wake
up on a on a ship, you know, thatched freezing
(22:36):
ocean and if your studies begin, yeah, nice, like a
wilderness adventure slash Norris mythology they use they blood the
keel with your body and this is how you learn. Well.
I got one here from Dr Britt M. Starkovic, who
(22:57):
is a professor at the University of Tubingen in Germany.
I believe is how you pronounce it. Looks like she
is an archaeo zoologist professor, and she writes to us
about our our episode on academ Gora Doc. She says,
Dear Robert and Christian, I love your show. You really
caught my attention in your academ Gora Doc episode when
(23:19):
you talked about the Russian domestic foxes. I teach archaeology, okay,
archaeology at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and this
is one of my all time favorite topics. I specialize
in the human use of animals in the past, what
humans eight, what different species were domesticated, etcetera. I wanted
to send you a link to some videos of foxes
(23:41):
interacting with people. These these are the specific boxes from
academ Gora Doc. She says, I find the quote aggressive
or normal wild version a bit depressing, but the tame
one is absolutely absolutely adorable. They're cool videos. I recommend
checking them out. They're hosted on Illinois University's website. She
also says, you mentioned in your episode the different coloring patterns.
(24:02):
I assume in your research you saw it's called piebald,
which is also coloring that shows up in a lot
of other domesticated animals, border collies, jersey cows, tuxedo cats,
spotted picks and horses. The physical changes in these foxes,
given that they were only being selected for behavioral traits,
has totally caused us to rethink how we understand domestication
(24:23):
and the modern diversity found among different breeds of animals.
The last thing I wanted to mention is that for
a time, this is awesome. There was a guy in
the United States who would help arrange the import of
one of these domesticated foxes to Europe or America if
you had an extra nine thousand dollars lying around. So
if you wanted to get an academ GOORADOC fox, some
(24:45):
shady dude would get you one. Uh. And she says
his website hasn't been updated in a few years. She
provides a link, and she says, I'm not sure what
the deal is. I'm a huge pet lover, but find
it unethical to keep a non domesticated animal as a pet.
These little guys have enough genetic changes, though that I
dream of someday having one. Well see, that's all well
(25:06):
and good until the fox gets too big and people
flush it down the toilet, and then they'll become mutant
sewer foxes. Is it gonna be academ gera dock fox
the movie? Is that? Is that what you're pitching here, Joe?
Thank you very much, Britt that that's really cool to learn.
I didn't, I mean when we talked about it. I
think I may be casually said as an aside, I
wonder if you can get one of these foxes? Um,
(25:27):
But yeah, I'm sorry, I'm still working on this. I
think it's your teenage mutant academ goa doc Foxes? Oh nice? Well,
you know? And in the teene mut Ninja Turtle comics
there is a fox ninja there hang out with it.
Is it a lady Foxes? It is? Yeah, the Fox Spirit? Yes, yeah, yeah, totally.
What's her name? I can't remember the name of it.
It begins with an a. She's like a white fox
(25:49):
with some markings and stuff. But she's occasionally an ally
of the Teenage Ninja Turtles. And yet again showing how
much I know about eighties cartoons, is there a fox Pokemon? Yeah,
there's multiple fox Pokemon. What how do you not know this? Alright,
here's another one. This one comes to us from Sarah.
She says, longtime listener, first time writer, I'm a huge
(26:12):
fan of the show and listen to every new episode
as soon as I can. Your episode about incomplete art
was incredibly fascinating, But of course you weren't able to
include every unfinished project. But I wanted to point out
a noticeable piece of unfinished art, the musical Rent. I
didn't know this. The writer of the musical, Jonathan Larson,
died the night before the show was to start preview performances.
(26:33):
According to the production staff, the show still had a
lot of issues that needed to be worked out, but
they were hesitant to move forward without the show's creator.
They chose not to write anything else, only to rework
the existing material. The shows that exist today is only
a portion of the vision that Larson had for the show.
We will never know how the show could have changed
(26:53):
if Larson had been able to finish it, but what
we're left with maintains Larson's legacy while being a highly
popular and hugely influential production. This is important because it
shows how I work can be finished without betraying the
original ideas of its creator. I can't wait to see
what else shall have in store for your podcast, and
hopefully y'all will never be included in the list of
things that went on unfinished. Thanks for blowing my own
(27:17):
mind with every new episode. Well, I will have to
say unfortunately, I think by nature we will have to
be unfinished. How can we finish talking about all the
things that will blow your mind? Well, speak to yourself.
I believe we can. We can complete three of our
minds into Carni and we just continue talking for eternity.
Oh it's true. Once we process the entire library library
of Babel, we will have exhausted synchronicity. Yeah, uh so
(27:42):
was the I'm curious now if the version of Rent
didn't have five hundred twenty four hours six hundred minutes,
did you I think the numbers are probably wrong. Yeah,
that's all I know about round. It's yeah, I I
have to plead ignorance on on the product. But it's
interesting to learn about it though. Um. I want to
(28:03):
mention real quick as for us incomplete works go. This
is one that I learned about researching the episode that
Joe and I uh just put together that has to
do with rapture and utopian trans humanism but apparently average averaging. Um,
there's a work. An incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis
(28:26):
Bacon UM six six or so titled The New Atlantis
UH that deals with a post trans human proto trans humanist,
utopian society on the island of Ben Salem, where there's
no slavery, slavery or poverty and everybody's ruled over by
a group of religiously tolerant scientific elites. So it's interesting.
(28:49):
It's interesting that was apparent. Yeah, that was the published
I think a year after his death UM, but a
very early proto trans humanist work, but also complete. Picking
up on that, I can offer a couple of ideas
about Incompleteness that we heard back from listeners are our
listener Jim in New Jersey, who often emails us with
(29:11):
with great email and awesome feedback. He wrote us about
the Incompleteness episode and I can't read his whole email.
He talked about the TV show Nashville, but he also
big hit I believe with the um Smithy ladies, they're
huge nash I didn't know that. But anyway, he offers
some psychological feedback on the idea of why why we
(29:33):
stick with incomplete works of art? You know, why we've
got to know the end, even maybe if we're not
loving it anymore. I I used the example of Lost,
how like I I got to the point where I
don't think I liked the show anymore, but I had
to keep going because I wanted to see how it ended.
And then I was very disappointed. But anyway, Uh, Jim says, quote,
(29:54):
sticking with something you've invested in falls into the sunk
cost fallacy. This is the economic my idea, that you
stick with something wasteful only because you've already invested a
lot of resources into it. I think of someone remaining
in a bad relationship because they've already invested five wasted
years into it. I think this is a good example.
Once you've already put the time in with something. And
(30:16):
our relationships with media are in many ways kind of
like our relationships with people, even if you know they're
not really changing based on our behavior, we sort of
feel like it's transactional. Uh. You feel like, well, I've
put so much into this, I've got to know how
it turns out. So even if you know you're at
season five, episode four, and if that's the first episode
(30:37):
you saw, you probably wouldn't continue. Now that you've watched
everything that came before, you're stuck with it psychologically. But
then he goes on to say the related term to
this is the lost opportunity cost. By sticking with a
failed endeavor, you're not available for something better. So the
person who's stuck in a bad five year relationship because
of sunk cost is also missing out on the opportunity
(30:59):
to start a relation and ship with their soul mate.
And I think this also applies to media. You know,
we we've got limited time in our lives to to
read books and watch movies and and experience all the
great stories that we want to interact with and and
have informed our brains. You can't, You can't experience at all.
So it kind of sucks to realize that you spent
a lot of times stuck with a story that you
(31:21):
didn't really love because you were motivated by the desire
to see how it ends. And here's one more about
the Incomplete Unfinished episode uh and and Unfinished workspart from
our listener Taylor. Taylor says, uh, dear, stuff to blow
your mind. I was just listening to your episode on
Incomplete and Unfinished Works, particularly your discussion of TV shows
(31:41):
and book series that are unfinished, and I was surprised
how little you discussed fandom. I think we did mention
it a little, but I think it a little bit.
We didn't get very deep into it, I guess h
Taylor writes. When people come across the series where they
have to wait for the next installment or when there
will be no more installments, many times they finish it
them selves. Huge communities online around fan art, fan fiction,
(32:04):
and other fan works thrive, especially for source material that
is unfinished. Fan creators at the Firefly Serenity community. Oh yeah,
Taylor continues, fan creators will also complete, quote quote complete
the source material by adding elements they feel should have
been in the story or would just like to see
(32:24):
in the story, even if it's completely unrealistic. They'll get
characters together that did not end up together in the Cannon,
revive characters that died in the Cannon, sometimes completely replaced
the universe the Cannon exists in altogether. The episode also
reminded me of my own worst experiences with unfinished works.
I do a lot of cooperative writing and role playing,
(32:45):
and I can attest that the story ended prematurely is
all the more painful when you had a hand in
creating it. I have even taken to writing shorter stories
to avoid that feeling. That's interesting anyway, Taylor's think we've
all been there, all of us who write fiction. Yeah.
Uh so, I'll just finish up, Taylor says, I want
to thank you in the Whole House Stuff Works Podcast crew,
(33:07):
I haven't written in before, but I've been following this
in a few of your other podcasts, like Stuff You
Should Know and Stuff They Don't Want You to Know
for a while. I always feel as if I'm smarter,
have more topics for conversation, and I'm better suited to
analyzing things when I'm done listening. Good luck, and I
have a mind blowing summer. You can tell this came
from a while ago. But thank you so much, Taylor.
That was a thoughtful and very nice email. Yeah. So, like,
(33:30):
I'm very interested in this topic, as you guys know,
Like I have a background in cultural studies and did
a lot of work on fandom in particular, Henry Jenkins
has a whole basically established a whole discipline on fandom.
So it's interesting to hear their perspective on this. That
might be something fun to tackle in the future. Yeah,
(33:50):
you know an author that I really enjoy and I
know you've been reading some of this stuff recently. Michael Shayum,
I love him, I I love how some of that.
I think his earliest, if not his first novel was uh,
basically an unofficially fiction, Yeah, basically fan fiction. He was
a big fan of Jack Vance's um books in the
(34:13):
Dying Earth series, and he caught him up. They wrote
him and said, hey, I'm right, I've written this, uh
the sequel, uh, a book that would go on to
be published as in Yanna as the title, and it's
a fabulous Jack Vancy adventure that has it has, you know,
a distinctive Michael Shay twist on everything. And he he
was basically Jack Vance uh said well, I'm not gonna
(34:36):
I'm not gonna read it, but you have my blessing. Go,
you know, get it published whatever. It's amazing. It never happened. Yeah,
it's hard to imagine happening now, but in this case,
you know, it launched this guy's career. He went on
to write a number of this wonderful books that are
very much distinctively his. If you haven't heard us sing
his praises before on other episodes, are especially on our
(34:57):
summer reading episodes. Michael Shay is fantastic. And uh, I'm
actually borrowing the incomplete and if the Lean stories from
Robert right now, and it's I read a couple of
pages every night before bed. It's just so good. It's
the best fantasy, Like the smartest fantasy I think I've
ever read. He could just construct these amazing worlds. Yeah, okay,
(35:18):
So this next one is from Rowan, who is local
to us here in Atlanta, and I'm going to try
to it's a longish letter, so I'm gonna try to
edit it down a little bit. Um. He just lets
us know that he's a bio nerd and he's written
into us before, and he used to work in an
HPV lab and is in love with the d I
Y bio hacking community. So when he heard us doing
(35:39):
episodes about trans humanism bio hacking, he got excited. So
he wrote in to tell us this regarding the man
who developed e V and this is in relation to
our tree Man Disease episode. E V as the shorten
name for tree Man disease after cutting his knee as
a teenager. That makes sense to me. Wounds are great
for introducing germs. HPV, for instance, usually infects mucous membranes
(36:03):
like genitalia, mouth, throat, et cetera, not places like your
knee where there's a thicker barrier, but a wound could
circumvent that barrier and let infection get a foothold. I
don't have time to dive into the research, but I
wonder if there's some correlation between people getting the infection
in unusual places and people developing extreme symptoms like tree
man disease. Who knows the HPV strains you guys listed
(36:27):
off are not super common. They it might be part
of the reason that it's so rare if it requires
a rare strain and a rare genetic mutation plus sunlight
and mysteries, which is yeah, and they just don't have
real answers yet to what's going on with it. Another
thing about HPV infection usually have more than one strain.
It would be interesting to know if particular combination showed
(36:49):
up more often, or if different strains interacted with each
other somehow. None of the ones you listed are in
the vaccines, but they're working on a more general vaccine
that would protect against all HPV streams. It wouldn't help
people who already had the disease, but it could prevent
any more cases. A bit of hope for your depressing episode.
(37:11):
Last fun fact about HPV, you guys said, it's super common.
It's so common, in fact, that we have a hell
of a time finding negative controls for our tests. It's
hard to find anyone who hasn't been exposed to HPV.
That's comforting. Most of the negative controls end up coming
from children's samples. And then he gets into bio hacking. Okay,
(37:31):
he says, bio hacking. The episodes that we did were
pretty needy, says thank you very much. As a kind
of not really bio hacker myself, I enjoyed them, though.
I'd like to note that trans humanists are just a
tiny section of the bio hacking and d I Y
bio community. Anyway, I happen to be local and thought
that you might want to know that at least two
maker spaces hacker spaces in Atlanta are trying to get
(37:54):
a bio hacking scene going. Maybe we'll be like, we can,
we can get together with these guys and get some magnets.
Putting our fingers, I am a member at Freeside, Atlanta.
We're in the process of setting up a lab. We
have a class on engineering glow bacteria, which will run
again as soon as I get things together. I'm editing
that he mentioned some other ones that are around town.
(38:18):
For people who aren't local, you probably wouldn't be familiar
with the suburbs of Atlanta. Um and And says that
there's some people working on brain computer for computer interfaces,
uh and teams that are building an e G from scratch.
So it sounds like Atlanta's got a burgeoning bio hacking community. Yeah,
so that's very interesting. He's plugging for that. So if
you are out there, you listen to our bio hacking
(38:40):
episodes and our trans humanism episodes and you thought that
sounds like it's something for me, you might want to
look into this, he says. Says that the spaces have
public events that are listed on meetup dot com. You
can check those out. UH. Side note, a friend of mine,
unrelated to us doing those episodes, became interested in getting
mag magn 's put in his fingers and went out
(39:01):
and found h tattooist I guess or a tattoo artist
who performs that function. As well, So he's getting the
he's doing the magnet thing. Yeah, alright, Well, here's a
one more piece of listener mail. This one is a
quick one. And oh this one comes. It's another one
from Jim. I hate to read one too, by the
same author, but this is just a real quick one
(39:22):
with a book book a recommendation in it Robert Joe
and Christian As for synthetic meat and or cannibalism and fiction,
I have two suggestions, pursue at your own peril. Um.
So the first one he mentions is The Food of
the Gods by author C. Clark, which I read decades
ago in the Wind from the Sun, a book of
(39:44):
short stories, and I really mean short stories. I think
each story was no more than a page or two long,
so like flash fiction before it was called that. I've
heard of this story, but I haven't read it. He says.
This short story addresses the very questions you brought up
in your synthetic meat episode by Clark d plus years
ago before the technology existed, um, which we're basically, would
(40:05):
you eat synthetic meat or would you eat synthetic human meat? Yeah,
like if it was it was synthesized human flesh. Would
you eat it? The problem? Yeah, that's what I said.
I mean, I said, I'm a vegetarian. The problem with
eating human meat is that it comes from it had
to come from a human. Yeah, well so, so easily
have more. He said, there was a second one. There's
(40:26):
a second one, and this one. I imagine we we
have probably all three. Read The Survivor Type by Sephen
King with an entry Yeah, and also book of short
Stories pretty just pretty. It's pretty disturbing in a Stephen
King kind of way. I think. I I think I
read a quote from Stephen King where he was saying, like,
I think my favorite types of stories to write are
the really nasty, grizzly ones. But on this one, I
(40:47):
think I went too far. There's also been and I
didn't add this to the listener mail, but several people
have written into us, both over mail and on Facebook
about because I mentioned Wolverine on that episode and whether
he cuts his own skin off and eats it at
any point because he can just regrow his own flesh.
And they pointed out that there's an issue of X
(41:07):
Force that I forgot about that I've read where Deadpool,
the famous character who just had a movie this summer. Uh,
does that to himself and feeds bits of himself to
another character who's like dying and starving. So he cuts
off his own skin and little chunks of arm flesh
and feeds into him. Gross where the mask come from? Like,
(41:28):
he's really not even beginning to obey. Basically, Oh, I
think Deadpool it's yeah, I mean it's not fiction. But
he's like Wolverini regrows. Why is he fighting good crime
or superviance when he could be feeding the masses. He's
not Deadpools a mercenary. Now alright, he's got an outfre
Sorry we shouldn't we We just went off in geek territory.
We we didn't explain what happens in the story. Yeah,
(41:50):
very brief synopsis. There is a drug smuggler who has
a bunch of heroins terrific, Yeah, but has a bunch
of heroin with him. He got stranded on a desert
island with nothing to eat, so he realized he's starving
to death. And he realizes that, well, you know, I
could just drug myself so I don't feel pain and
then cut my foot off and eat it and that,
and it proceeds from there. Yeah. Yeah, I guess in
(42:14):
that scenario, I would probably odon the heroine before I
would uh just use it as a pain cut off
my own limbs. See, the thing is he found a
pamphlet from the airplane that says, um, auto cannibalism is
it for you, and it's all about surviving a plane
cracks through auto canniba. That would be amazing if stewardesses
had had to explain auto cannibalism to you before a
(42:35):
plane took off. It's it's definitely a disturbing one. And
want to remember well from from when I read it
the first time I can Junior, Yeah, I read it
when I was a kid too. Okay, So on that note,
you probably wrapped things up on the auto cannibalism. No, yeah,
that that is only just a slice of the vast
(42:56):
listener mail, um flesh chunk consume for you today. Yeah,
we only were able to cut a little bit off
and chew on it for forty five minutes. Sorry, but
we will get two more in the next couple of months. Yeah.
And like I said before, if if we didn't get
your to your email, please don't take that as a
as a slide against the wonderful feedback that you send
(43:17):
us there. There's just too much good stuff for us
to get to use. Podcast is just reading letter mail. Yeah,
so so please keep sending it. We we love to
read what you'all out there have to say. So maybe
you're listening and you're thinking to yourself, Hey, I didn't
know that I could get my messages read on a
podcast that I like listening to all the time. How
do I do that? Well, there's a number of ways
(43:38):
that you can do that. You can always reach out
to us on social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and Instagram. Although I would not recommend that you write
us a letter on Instagram. That's gonna be a bad
format for it. But you can see lots of cool
pictures on there from us, uh, all of those we
are blow the mind. Write us there, you can write
us messages. You could follow us and see all the
things that we post, not just our own content, with
(44:00):
the weird, bizarre science oddities that we find throughout the week.
Where else can they find his boys, Well, you can
head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
That's the mother ship. That's where you'll find all of
our videos or podcast episodes, blinks after those, social media
accounts and more, And of course you can always email
us directly and blow the mind at how stuff works
dot com. Well more on this and basands of other topics.
(44:30):
Is it how stuff works dot com
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