Endless Thread - Episodes We Love: Doom Jelly

Episode Date: May 3, 2024

Imagine sitting in a hospital room for 24 consecutive hours in the most agonizing pain you can possibly imagine. You feel a sense of impending doom. You have a feeling this won’t end well. Then, the pain subsides and you walk away. Jamie Seymour has had that experience eleven different times. He’s a leading expert on one of the world’s most frightening creatures and he’s paid the price. This episode originally aired on Oct 12, 2018.

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Hey, friends, it's Benny Ben. I hope you're doing well and enjoying some spring weather. We have some very exciting episodes coming up. One about scamming. One about virtual reality. And one about Sword Tube. We are excited to bring you those episodes. But this week we had a lot going on this week.

So we're going to take a bye and we're going to bring you one of our favorites that we have never replayed, Doom Jelly. Take a listen. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. My name is Dr. Theresa Corret. I've spent my career so far researching deadly and dangerous. Hi, I'm Bill Estright. I'm a retired Air Force colonel from P. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I've spent six tours of duty in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa,

and what I was doing in April 2014 was going through some combat water survival training in Key West Florida. While I was sitting there, I started to feel all these needles stabbing my thigh and then going down to my lower extremities, up and down both of my legs. I feel like I've got hot kind of stabbing pokers being prodded into various parts of my body, like random. None of it really makes sense. I start to have these extremely painful spasms in my lower back. At one point it felt like someone was hitting me in my lower back with a hammer. I had sort of holes I'd scratched all through, like especially all through my head or my through my scalp,

had kind of big marks of where I'd managed to scratch holes in myself quite successfully. Once it hit my spine, it literally felt like fingers were going up my spine and starting to wrap around my rib cage. You start to get this feeling of something bad is really about to happen. This week, Endless Threads episode of Scream Time starts out a bit like a sci-fi horror movie. Scene one, the scientist. Dr. Teresa Corrette is underwater, in full diving gear, off the Great Barrier Reef. in Australia. She's doing difficult research because before she can do her research, she needs to find her research subject. They are so hard to track down. They're an invisible animal in an ocean

that's not even needle in a haystack. That's, you know, needle in a forest. On today's dive, she thinks she's found the needle in a forest, which is why she's made all of the effort to protect herself from her special research subject, including diving gear, which doesn't leave an inch of skin exposed. But the diving gear still has flaws. We were fully covered with gloves, full suits, hoods, the whole lot. I had come up from a dive and was getting into the boat. And as I put my hands up onto the boat, actually a bit of water washed down in between my glove

and my suit. and a crazy sort of freak accident, a piece of tentacle actually washed down the inside of my suit with that water. Right here is where Dr. Corrette has a big uh-oh moment. She realizes something very bad has just happened. So does her research partner, Jamie Seymour. And that's when Jamie Cab brought the boat in and said, you know, how are you going? I said, look, I'm okay.

I think I'm doing all right. I don't need to go to hospital. He said, right, well, we're going to hospital now. We have to go now. And the drive is not long, maybe 10 minutes. But by the time we had got to the hospital, I was literally on my hands and knees trying to get myself to a hospital bed. Scene two, the pilot.

Thousands of miles away off the Florida Keys, Air Force Colonel Bill Estrite is doing survival training with a group of highly experienced airmen. We got to Fleming Key where the exercise was being held before dawn. We were all wearing our flight suits. We were preparing all of our equipment. Right at dawn, we jumped into the water. It was perfectly calm.

There was no wind. There was no clouds. It was a perfect day. And the boat left. So as I was trading water, and there were a couple other guys around me, I felt this sharp pain in my left thigh. It literally felt like someone took a hot screwdriver and just drove it right into my thigh. And I let out a groan and said, oh, something just said, oh, something just.

nailed me. Colonel Estreite isn't the kind of guy who bails from a training exercise, even if it's tough stuff. Let me put it into context. I'm six foot two, 225 pounds. I'm in decent shape. I could bench press 315 pounds. I have 374 combat missions.

I've been on six deployments. So I've seen and I've experienced, I've endured pain. This, this was terrible. Bill's about 100 yards from shore when this happens. So he starts swimming. When he drags himself onto the beach, he yells for a medic and rips off his flight suit. There's a bright red mark on his thigh.

He says it feels like his whole leg is now on fire. But the medic doesn't really know what to do. She pours some fresh water on his leg. I was very much aware that this is bad. This is very, very bad. And within a couple of hours, My throat started to swell shut. My neck started to thicken and swell shut.

So the nurse came over and immediately took me to the Key West emergency room. The next 48 hours for Bill will be a fever dream of hospital visits and writhing in his bunk on base. ER doctors get his neck swelling to go down, but his vitals are all over the place. Nobody can figure out what's happening to him. But one thing is clear. He's miserable. I had to actively think about breathing. I breathe in, breathe out, and trying to stay calm.

At some point, another pilot on the base named Ed Tarquinio catches wind of what is happening to Bill. Ed is the original social network. He knows everybody. And Ed said, hey, Bill, I know exactly what's wrong with you. And he said, last month, I just flew the Army Special Forces right here. And I met one of the doctors. And the doctor was talking about this venomous threat. this started hammering his guys.

So Ed put me in a car and late at night, take me to this Army Special Warfare base, hidden away in Q.S. It was so surreal going into it because it's a nondescript area. It wouldn't even know that it's there. You drive on to this base. I'm curled up in pain in the back of this car with my head against the window, just thinking that this is very bad. I've been in a lot of bad situations.

This could be the end. Back on the coast of Australia, Teresa and her research partner, Jamie, have reached the hospital. There's actually video of what Teresa is going through. Oh, it comes away, so every now there and I can kind of talk. They do administer similar amounts of painkillers as you'd give someone who's in a near fatal car crash. I had about five times the amount of morphine for my body weight. And I remember just getting locked out of my pain-killing machine.

The pain is not as bad at the moment. I've got this good little clicker. You're allowed to self-administer up to a certain point and it locks you out because it can't allow to give you any more. I've actually hiding my arms. It's killing me, both my arms. So I remember just continually pressing this button, hoping that I could have more because I just wasn't helping.

And just this feeling of not being able to sit in my own skin, Like I just wanted to take my skin off. I just couldn't be in my own skin. Everything just hurt. And my face, I just love. Everyone went skin. It's driving me nuts. Your body feels like it's betraying.

You know, when I'm going to be free of this? And am I going to be free of this? You know, it's that, like I said, feeling of potential doom, which is just very, very scary. This feeling of potential doom. This is weirdly something that has echoed around the planet by people who have been hit by the same animal. Teresa felt it. Bill felt it. And actually the guy who got Teresa to the hospital, Jamie, her research partner, he got hit too.

And his feeling of impending doom was so bad, Jamie says he asked for a cure no doctor would administer. We had a film crew there, so the whole, pretty much the whole 18 to 24 hours is on film. And I don't remember any of it. If someone had to given me a gun, I'd have just gone, thank you, I'm off the planet. I'm Ben Brock Johnson and you are listening to Endless Thread, the show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it is made. I'm here with my co-host, Amory Sieberton, and we are coming to you from Boston's NPR station, WBUR. All throughout the month of October, we are bringing you scream time. Scary stories found on Reddit.

Today's episode, Doom Jelly. Doom Jelly sounds like something that you'd be. put on murder toast. I would definitely spread some doom jelly on murder toast. No question. But this is referencing what some of us have probably already figured out by now. This episode is about a kind of jellyfish that the world is still learning about. And about a person who knows a butt ton load about this particular kind of jellyfish.

This is the person we've actually heard the least from so far. Okay, so Associate Professor Jamie Seymour. I work at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, in the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine. Jamie is Teresa's research partner, as we've said. They're experts in their own very specific area of focus, toxinology. The animals we play with are venomous, not poisonous. So not splitting hairs here, but poisonous are ones you've got to eat to die from, and venomous ones that have to bite and sting you.

If, for example, I took the vast majority of snake venoms and ingested them and swallowed them, it wouldn't be a problem for me. But if I injected them into my system, then it would. Note to self, new party trick, drink venom, impress friends. Jamie studies all kinds of venomous animals. But the one that he has the most love-hate relationship with, hands down, is this one. I'm afraid to try to pronounce it myself, ericongi. I'm not sure how to say it.

That's not bad. That's not bad. All you need to do is put an Australian accent on it. That's not enough. This is enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And sort of just, you know, sort of make it sound really bad and come up with Irokanji. It's a whole class of small box jellyfish.

And the world is still learning about them. Where they are, what they are, and what they do to you. Box jellyfish are, well, box shaped. And box jellies, of which there are 50 species, are powerful swimmers. When you think of normal jellyfish, think of them as like the little Priuses of the car world. And when you're thinking of box jellyfish, think of them as a Formula 1 GP. I mean, these are seriously sophisticated animals. So to give you some idea, a box jellyfish has 24 eyes, of which 12 of them are image forming.

So they've got lenses, pupils and retinas. Whoa, I didn't know that. I didn't know jellyfish can see. Oh, these guys do. Box jellyfish do. But interesting, the eyes look inwards. So they have 360-degree vision looking through themselves. Stings from Iroconji give rise to something called the Iroconji Syndrome. which is a strange combination of what starts out as a tiny pinch

and builds into days of vomiting, extreme pain, heart attacks, lung problems, and the weirdest symptom of all, unique among the venom of the world, a creeping, crescendoing sense of impending doom. The word Irochanges is actually the local tribe's name of the indigenous group that live around the Cairns area. So back in the 1950s and early 60s, the local indigenous tribe knew that if you went swimming in the world,

water at the wrong time of the year, you'd get out, and about 15 to 20 minutes later, you'd get really sick, and you didn't feel well for 24 hours in a lot of pain. And then a local general practitioner, a bloke by the man of Jack Barnes, came up with this idea and went, well, you know, I actually think it's a jellyfish that's doing this damage. So Jack came up with his great idea and found this little tiny jellyfish swimming along the edge of the beach one day and went, this is the animal that causes the problem. So to prove that, he stings himself, he stings his son, He stings the lifeguard and he stings an innocent bystander to see what's going to happen. Needless to say, 20 minutes later, all four of them came down with severe Urukensi syndrome.

That is a messed up level of commitment. True. But I mean, if you're committed to scientific studies, sometimes you are committed. Jamie and Teresa are good examples of this. They've both been stung multiple times. Jamie says he has been stung over 10 times. And when you look at this, some of these things, it's easy to see

why. They're tiny, translucent, thimble-sized creatures with little stringy tentacles. Dare I say, they're cute? You can imagine bumping into them in the ocean. You can also imagine loving them as much as Jamie does. It's the type of love

that makes him and then you excited about general box jellyfish facts like this. So if the animal has 60 tentacles, it has 60 stomachs. It then absorbs the food across there and then defecates at the end of the tentacle. So box jellyfish, it has 60 tentacles, has one mouth, and for the one of a better word, 60 bums. If you've got 60 bums,

or in the case of iroconji jellyfish, four bums, you can probably afford to eat a lot, right? And Iroconji do. Now, most people think of jellyfish, and they swim around and they blunder into things and catch prey. Big box jellyfish actively hunt their prey and track them down. Irikangi actually fish. And what I mean by that is their tenets. can be upwards of probably four to six feet in length when they're relaxed. And when they're contracted, they turn up to probably about six inches in length. And what they do is think of their tentacle as like a really fine piece of fishing line with little pearls about every two or three inches on them. And what they then do is they then jerk that tentacle through the water. And the little

pearl rushes through the water and it looks like a little fishing jig. I mean, how can you not have some sort of an affinity for an animal that does that? You can. But there's also still a lot of mystery because of the kind of diffuse nature of Iro-Kanji jellies, which compared to the rest of the sub-filem of jellyfish are pretty rare. Jamie says that Irokanji syndrome is interesting too because it's attributed to stings by small box jellies all over the place, both geographically and genetically. In Australia alone, we have good data for at least eight, possibly 10 species of small box jellyfish that give rise to Irikanji syndrome. Now, depending on the size of the animal, whether you're stung by the tentacle or whether you're stung by the body of the animal, whether the animal is young or old, whether it's from Cairns or Townsville or Weeper or somewhere else, is going to depend on how you are going to react.

It can be as mild as, I don't feel well, through to you're going to die. That's really interesting. Why is that? Why does it vary? Because they're feeding on different species of fish, we think. Whoa. So what they eat impacts the venom? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then if you skip out of Australia and go to any coral reef area, anywhere in the world that lies between the tropica cancer and the tropica Capricorn, you get iricangi-type animals that give rise to iriccansi syndrome. And they, again, all have slightly different venoms. So basically, if you're not in between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of Capricorn, aka anywhere in the world, close. to the equator, you're probably fine.

But part of the mystery of Iro-Kanji syndrome is that the human response to a sting is also all over the place. We know that in around 10 to 15% of cases, it is going to get worse than just pain. You're going to end up with what referred to as pulmonary edema, so fluid on the lungs. You could end up with increased blood pressure.

A healthy adult has got a blood pressure of 120 over 80. We have Irikangi patients where their blood pressure goes to sort of, you know, So 2, 210, 220 over maybe 100. And what that does is load up the pressure in all your veins and arteries. And if you have a weak spot somewhere in an artery, and if it happens to be, for example, in your head and it blows, we can't save it. And the two deaths we've had from Urukansi syndrome anywhere in the world have been exactly that.

Which brings us back to Bill Estreight, our Air Force colonel in Key West. His blood pressure rose pretty dramatically when he got stung. Oh yeah. We forgot to tell the end of that guy's story. My blood pressure was 180 over 90. And I'm keenly aware of this and thinking, whatever this is, I'm going to stroke out or go into cardiac arrest. So hours and then days of this intense pain go by,

and the medic in the emergency room doctors still had no idea what was happening to Bill. And I'm crulled up in pain with my head against the window of this car as they're driving there at 10.30 at night. and they take me to the small clinic. Within minutes, they diagnosed me correctly with Iroquenji syndrome. And just as quickly as that pain started coming into my body, the pain started leaving my body. So I was well enough that the next day I could complete the training,

and we left Key West and we came back to Pittsburgh. Bill went back to his home in Pittsburgh with a memory he will never forget. He's sure that he came pretty close to dying that day. He was lucky, though, because he was given some sort of Erikaangi anti-venom, and it worked. This is part of the mystery of these jellyfish, too. There are cures that exist, but they're inconsistent. Here's Teresa again. When we don't know nearly enough about the venoms and how they're working,

there's no one treatment fits all because we literally dealing with it, a large amount of different species, and they present so differently as well in patients. The way that these smaller box jellyfish hit you with their venom goes like this. You get stung. Sometimes you don't even know you've been stung for the first 20 minutes or so. And then it hits you like a freight train. For an irikanshi, the venom basically doesn't end up in your veins or arteries. It ends up in what's referred to as the interstitial spaces between your cells,

which means that's why there's this 20-minute delay. It's got to diffuse into the system. The interesting thing is if we take iroquangee, venom and inject it directly into the veins or arteries of a mouse, we can kill that mouse in five to ten seconds. So unless it's injected into the blood, Iroconji venom probably won't kill you, but it probably will make you think about pain in a whole new way. Childbirth is insane amounts of pain, but also childbirth, like I've got children out of it.

That's kind of a good result. And, you know, you've got to start, a middle and an end. and you know that's the process. So it's kind of easier to comprehend and it's way less scary. Whereas in this sort of situation, you honestly have no idea what's happening with your own body

and there's a great amount of fear that comes with that. There's only one other commonality among people who have been stung, the doom part. I originally thought all of this was psychosomatic and there was a psychological component to it. In other words, you've been stung, you didn't see the animal,

20 minutes later, you're in the world, worse pain, you're sitting in an emergency department, the doctors are basically going, well, look, we cannot give you any more morphine because if we do, we're going to kill you. So you're just going to have to ride this out. So, you know, it's psychosomatic. God, this is going to go wrong. What's wrong? Now, I've been there 11 times.

I know exactly what is going to happen, and that feeling is still there. There have been multiple reports of people with Iroconji syndrome asking the doctor to straight up euthanize them. even when they understand intellectually how ridiculous of an idea that is. And think about it, the fact that Jamie has been stung 11 times. He knows he's not going to die from the sting, but he's anticipating something terrible. He doesn't know what it is, but he knows he doesn't want to be around for it. So why is this feeling inescapable?

Hard to say, right? Jamie's theory about this creeping sense of existential dread goes like this. This feeling of impending doom, we think, it's sort of like a flight or fight response so that if I scare you, you get a big adrenaline rush. And so what happens is your blood pressure goes up, your heart rate goes up, and your body's response is get out. Something's going to go wrong. That's what we think happens with Eurikangi venom when you're stung. That not, you get this release of adrenaline, but not just a little bit for half a second, but a lot of adrenaline over a period of 15, 20, 20 hours, 24 hours.

It's all about this extended adrenaline rush. Usually this kind of thing happens in a split second. You're about to step into the road and a bus whizzes past your nose. Your heart pounds. You have almost like a hot flash. The hair on the back of your neck stands up. Now imagine if that feeling, that spike in anxiety and terror, lasted for 24 hours.

I said it's so hard to get this across to people that haven't been there. But when you talk to someone that's been stung, they just look at you and you just go, there's a kindred soul. They know exactly what I'm talking about. So you know what we have to do, right? Do we get to go swimming somewhere between the tropic of cancer and the tropic of Capricorn? Hell no. No, we have to eat some nutmeg.

What? I'll tell you more in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex.

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Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's business partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So other than Iroconji syndrome,

there are apparently just a couple of things in this world that give people this creeping, powerful sense of impending doom. And the list itself is weird. blood transfusions where the patient receives the wrong blood type, heart attack is another, and then there's ODing on nutmeg, which seems like the best option for us. Of all the things Emery I've done for the love of podcast, this seems like it's going to be the worst thing. It's just like we said earlier. Some people are just more committed to science than others, Ben.

All right. Let's do this. It's going to be good. No, it's not. It smells good. No, it doesn't. All right. So these are little plastic spoons.

Baby spoons. Baby spoons. No, they're regular spoons. They're pretty regs to me. And I think this is probably about a tablespoon that we're about to put in. Josh, how much did you say we're supposed to take or not supposed to take? Depends what our goal is. That's what he says.

Relative discomfort. No, I don't like this. You ready? Yeah. Full spoon? Full spoon. Okay, ready? Yeah.

I'm not ready. Are you ready? I hate this. I know, I hate it too. All right. One, two, you're a kanji. Not good. That's a not a good taste.

Amory, come on. I did it. I swallowed it. Okay. Do you feel impending doom? It takes four hours, apparently, to kick in. All right. Well, now we wait.

And then it can last up to 48 hours. Did you know that? Oops. I don't know how many people have died from nutmeg poisoning this year, but I'm glad so far we aren't those people, Amory. Yeah, keywords there have been so far. We'll give an update later in this episode on how this all goes down. But, you know, as Jamie said, only two people have ever died from Iroconji syndrome.

But he thinks that's bound to change. So it's not an animal that, by and large, goes backwards by the impact. of humans in the environment, it goes the other way. And as we put more and more people in the water, more and more people are going to get stunned. This is part of why Jamie and Teresa have been studying these creatures in Australia, because there's an impact there,

at a friction point for the local tourism economy. It's pretty contentious. There was a time when I gave up jellyfish research completely, and I decided I just couldn't do it anymore. It's exhausting. It's very little reward most of the time. I think a lot of the time the tourism operators can see you as the enemy because you're the person who's trying to tell people about jellyfish.

And I literally just, yeah, walked away, wasn't doing it at all. And, you know, when you have a family, like a parent, and they've got a small child who's suffering horribly from your Agenji syndrome, and they're looking at you know, and they're just saying, but if we would have known, we wouldn't have put them in the water, you know, or we would have taken precautions, but we just didn't know. I used to get calls from the ambulance every time someone with a jellyfish sting was going to the hospital

and I'd go in there and see the patients. And those are the kind of heart-wrenching moments that you just go, oh my God, you know, we're not, we're just still not doing enough. Jamie and Teresa are still researching. Jamie's pretty well known at the hospital in Cairns. First thing that happens is I get stung and I rock into the ED physicians

and they just sort of laugh and go, you're back again. It's like, yeah, righto. And then the next thing I'll do is just go, Okay, just load me up. I know this is going to hurt. Just load me up with every painkiller you've got, and I'm just going to sit in the corner and rock. Remember when we said there was video footage of Jamie and Teresa getting stung?

Well, that's because there was a full camera crew watching them. And while that misadventure caught on tape was really bad for Teresa, it was really bad for Jamie too. He tries to joke and talk about what he's feeling for the camera until he gets hit by another wave of pain. At one point, he just starts throwing up. Are there any positive things that could come out of the study of these jellyfish? Oh, absolutely.

For example, if we go back to big box jellyfish, we're pretty certain we've got a component out of the venom from big box jellyfish that will cure arthritis. We can certainly cure arthritis in mice with components of that venom. And one of the things that we think that we can get out of Iri-Canji venom is switching on, if you will, inflammation channels in the human system. Jamie says the complexity of iro-conji venom and its connection to the human immune system means it could be potentially used for everything from irritable bowel syndrome to asthma.

We just have to get better at understanding the group of jellyfish whose stings result in iroconji syndrome. Well, these animals have been doing it for hundreds of millions of years. It's up to us to go and find out what's in there that we can use because venoms aren't just one compound. Think of them as like a vegetable stew. so there can be hundreds of different components. And it's just a matter of us working out what the components are

and then going right at what does that component do? Can we use that for a novel compound for the cure of a variety of things? What's your like dream scenario there? My dream scenario? To find a compound that some pharmaceutical company will buy from me, I'll become rich and famous and I can retire in a white yacht in the Caribbean. That'd be great. Forget about the positive impact on the world stuff.

Exactly. Yeah. Fair. Yeah. No, look, in the grand scheme of things, I mean, the one that I really like at the moment that we're playing around with is this potential cure for arthritis. I mean, can you imagine somebody, if you were saying to them, okay, we can maybe get rid of 70 to 80% of your pain from arthritis.

I mean, that to me would be phenomenal. It really would. You can bury me in the ground and I'll be a happy man. The jury is out on whether Icarji syndrome, will someday lead scientists like Jamie to cure arthritis. But we should say that Jamie's work is legit. That camera crew following him around was from the Discovery Channel. And when we talked to him, Jamie was on a world tour of the planet's most innovative aquariums

funded by some aquatic genius grant. So he's not just a thrill-seeking Ozzy. He's the real deal. So we can probably take Jamie at his word when he says there's more to learn from these mysterious jellies. and we're going to have more opportunity to do that, maybe more of a need to do that. Because Jamie points out that as climate change continues, the territory of iroconji jellies in the warmer ocean waters near the equator is growing. So warmer water means more iricongi,

and more iricongi near tourist hotspots means more stings. One of my favorite stories about this is that apparently there are shark sirens on the beaches in parts of Australia, and supposedly the surfers, in Australia, Emery in the Iroconji zone, never get out of the water when the shark sirens go off. Because they're badass surfers. Exactly. But when there's even a whiff of Iroconji in the water, a vague rumor, the surf zone empties out in a matter of minutes.

Nobody wants to mess with Iroconji. Hence the fascination. We found several posts about Iroconji syndrome on Reddit, which is how we got the idea to tackle this episode. We also asked the medicine community on Reddit if anyone had ever treated someone who claimed to be feeling a sense of impending doom. And we got a lot of comments. Yeah, one person wrote, the old saying is, when patients say they're going to die, believe them. Working in emergency medicine, I do find that's often true. And I've seen a handful of real cases where people said that and promptly proved themselves right.

Ooh, that's a little spooky. Yeah, that's chilling. But if they got stung by an Iro-Conji jellyfish, you probably shouldn't believe them because they probably just have impending doom that's coming, but they're not really going to die. Yeah, I still wouldn't want to be them. You sure? You don't want to try that next? After nutmeg? Not even a little bitch. Well, Amory, surprise, I've brought an Iriconji jellyfish into the studio today with me.

Skid. Oh, and by the way, Amory and I did not feel a sense of impending doom from our. nutmeg experiment. Admittedly, we didn't go full throttle with the nutmeg, just one spoonful. I will say that one of us did wake up in the middle of the night with an impending stomach ache. No doom, though. And obviously, we do not condone or recommend giving yourself an irresponsible amount of a reasonable substance like nutmeg. Don't try this at home, kids, unless you've got a doctor or a podcast microphone very close by. Endless Thread is a production of WB.

B-U-R, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who heard about our nutmeg experiment and said, What could go wrong? Iris Adler is our executive producer, and she feels impending doom when she sees a boss fight. Mixing sound design by Paul Vicus and John Parati, and when they're not looking for jellyfish,

they're investigating a dolphin conspiracy. And speaking of conspiracy, one of our conspirators, Paul Vicus, came up with the idea for this week's episode. Paul, high fives. Our web producer is Megan Kelly, whose blood pressure rises when she hears... Dad jokes. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, who thinks Australia is full of...

Animals being bros. Even though you don't always hear his voice, it is also important to point out that our fellow producer Josh Swartz can also say that endless thread is... Something I made. Extra production assistance from James Lindberg. Our intern is Candace Lim. Whoop. Thanks to Redditor Fluffs for this week's. artwork. It is called Space Jelly. It's awesome. On Reddit, we are endless underscore thread.

If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. My co-host and producer is Amory Seabretton. I'm senior producer and host Ben Brock Johnson. I'll let myself out. Amory, it's nutmeg time. Don't you know it's fucking nutmeg time? Paul knows it's nutmeg time. And Candace knows that it's not my time.