Endless Thread - Snacktime: Sharks And Aliens

Episode Date: July 18, 2019

SNACK ATTACK! I mean... SHARK ATTACK! I mean, BOTH. Another snack-sized episode for you, complete with shark attacks, the story of a chilling shipwreck, and whatever the heck is happening in Area 51. Boston-area listeners, join the Endless Thread team on July 25 at WBUR's CitySpace for a behind-the-scenes look at our five-part series, "Infectious: The Strange Past and Surprising Present of Vaccines – And Anti-Vaxxers." Event info: https://wbur.fm/2XXJIts

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

Produced by the I-Lab at WBUR, Boston. Amory, I'm eating sharks next, aka I'm eating baby seals right now. You wouldn't. You wouldn't dare talking to me. Yes, I would. No, you wouldn't. Mmm. Delicious baby seals.

All right, what's your baby seal? It's actually cherries. We're having a mind meld right now because I also have baby seals, aka cherries as my snack. Oh, double cherries! Yeah, but I meant to take them out of the refrigerator sooner, and now they're too cold to put in my... Really? I love a chill cherry. I like to keep all my cherries chill.

Too cold. I don't like it. You don't like it? Nope, but here we are. Just hold them in your hand. Hold those cherries in your hand. and they'll warm up. Okay. Amory?

Ben. This is a snack time. Obviously, this is one of those things where we're not releasing a full episode. It's just a little snack to carry you over to the next week. And we're going to have a little low-key discussion of some of our favorite Reddit stories. But I feel like this is also pretty summer-themed. Yeah, this week, Endless Thread is feeling snacky about scary ocean stuff because it's summertime. Also, Shark Week is coming up at the end of this month.

Shark Week, for those who don't know, is that block of television programming on the Discovery Channel about sharks. It is controversial for kind of pushing suspect science and helping to generate more fear about sharks when I think a lot of people would advocate that we should not be hating on the sharks so much. But Shark Week, Emery, is apparently 21 years old. Shark Week can drink. All right.

Cheers. Well, Shark Week will have a bloody Mary. But then you're also going to explain some Area 51 stuff that kind of blew up, I guess, on Reddit this week, that I apparently missed entirely, but now confirmed, source, am also all over Reddit. Like, it's my job because it is my job. Mine too. But, okay, you have to go first. Sharks, talk to me. Okay.

My snack, I feel like it's legitimately quite terrifying for anyone out there who, who also has what's called Thalasaphobia or a Fear of the Sea. There's a whole subreddit devoted to those of us with Thalasophobia. And a few days ago there was a video posted there with the caption. I think this might be the scariest underwater video I've seen so far. I think I've seen this one. Have you? Yeah.

This is the one. It involves a spear gun. Mm-hmm. Okay. So I need you to describe what happens in this video. So what happens in this video is like a diver is swimming along. Doot-to-do, no big deal. And all of a sudden, out of the deep blue, shoots this shark straight for the face of the diver.

And the diver just barely successfully sticks their spear gun into the mouth of the shark. It's not good. No, but this is not actually my snack. My snack came from the first comment to this video. Can you see that? Yeah, I just read it while you were talking. Okay. The first comment says,

Go watch the one where the ship sank and the cook was still alive. Man. Was the cook's name L.L. Cool J? What is that supposed to mean? You've clearly never seen Deep Blue. It's fine. Oh, yes, I know what you're talking about. I have seen it just a long time ago. L.L. Cool J is the cook.

Yeah. And he dies. Sorry. Does he die? I think he dies. I think he survives. But anyways, the comment. They found him three days later on a body retrieval dive. So a little more information. That doesn't sound good. There's nothing good about most of it, I will say.

This guy's name is Harrison Akenny. Okay. So he was a chef for an oil company boat. And this boat capsized and sank back in May of 2013 off the coast of Nigeria. Okay. He was one of 12 people on board. The others perish. He sees a few of them definitely get sucked down into the water and they, you know, presumably drown.

He stayed underwater in an air pocket. Like he's under the boat and there's a little pocket of air. that he has found for himself. He's under there for almost three days. Oh, God. Just breathing that tiny amount of air. The boat sank 100 feet under the water. So this is a very limited amount of air that he's breathing.

It's pitch black. He doesn't have food. There was like a bottle of Coca-Cola floating around, and all he had was that bottle of Coca-Cola for those three days. Great Coke advertisement right there. He said the salt of the water started peeling away his skin and his tongue. And there's this quote that he told the press. He says, I was very, very cold and it was black. I couldn't see anything, but I could perceive the dead

bodies of my crew were nearby. I could smell them. The fish came in and began eating the bodies. I could hear the sound. It was horror. But here's where it takes a turn. So there's a team of divers. Oh my God. They think they're just going on a body retrieval mission. They don't think anyone survived. So I'm going to play you a bit of audio here from the rescue. Oh, God. I know. Just listen. All right, so you should be walking on the ceiling, yeah? So this is the rescue team guiding one of his members through the rescue operation who's under the water.

He's alive. He's alive. Okay, keep in there. Keep in there. He sees a hand reach out into the water. Or not reach out. He thinks it's a corpse. He grabs the hand to pull the rest of the corpse out, and it's this guy Harrison, and he's actually alive, and no one can believe it. The diver is totally freaked out, not expecting him to be alive. What's your name? Harrison. And you hear that, you hear that, like, squeaky helium voice sound there? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So that's apparently just the way that diver's voices sound, because they're breathing in this helium-oxygen mix. Give me a thumbs up. So he's alive, but this story has so many things that I hate in it. The sea, a shipwreck, drowning, sea creatures, feasting. He survives. I know, but claustrophobia, being trapped in the dark, slowly suffocating. It's a stressful journey back to the surface, for sure. Now he gets to, he's like in the chill zone for the rest of his life.

this dude. He has said he would never go back in the water again. I don't know if he stuck to that. This was six years ago, but he said, you know, he was praying and he said, God, if you get me out of this, I promise to never go back in the water ever again. I would do the same. I'm already

ready to not go back in the water after hearing his story. I have one little thing to cheer you up, though, too, which I also found from Reddit. We need it. This is a Boston-related comment to a random post from four years ago about those child safety electrical socket shields.

Oh, yeah, I know all about this. Yeah, yes, you do. So Dougie 28 comments on Reddit, my mother is a pretty thick Boston accent. When I was a little kid, she warned me not to stick my fingers in outlets because of the shocks. Well, I thought she was saying sharks, because those two words sound exactly the same coming out of her mouth. When I inevitably stuck my finger in there anyways

and received a mild little shock, I thought I had just been bitten by a little shark. Oh, man. For a couple of years, I was convinced there were little sharks in the walls waiting to bite my fingers. Electric shark, do-de-da-de-da-electric shark. That's amazing.

Now, as a reward, we can play the Boston Sunfish video. These two guys out on a boat in Boston Harbor, they come across something, they have no idea what it is. So good. And in true Boston form, this is how they react. It's a baby fucking wheel, man. Holy shit, we are witnessing a baby fucking wheel right here, dude. Holy shit.

That thing is big, Jay. What is that thing? It looks hurt. I don't know. That thing looks hurt, Jay. A baby wheel, dude. It does not look like a wheel. I still quote this video.

all the time. It's so good. Yeah, so for anyone who missed this, this came out four years ago. We'll link to it on our website. It's still just as funny as it was back then. Such a good palette cleanser for the terrifying story of the guy stuck in an air pocket in the middle of the dark. That's exactly why I did it.

Well played. Thank you. We got to call the aquarium of something, dude. All right, let's take a little break, and then when we come back, you can tell me about your snack. Man, Jay, it's dead, bro, or something. 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. Of bugs. Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science,

we bring a rigorous curiosity to get you the answers. And hopefully make you see the world anew. Radio Lab. Adventures on the Edge. of what we think we know. Wherever you get your podcast. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. 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 WBURWR's. are.org slash creative studio. Okay, you're going to explain this area 51 stuff that I apparently completely missed this week, right?

Right. I'm going to try to explain this with several Reddit posts and a Facebook event invite. So the original source documents of our internet era, of course. Let's start with a post to the out-of-the-loop subreddit, a great resource for anyone feeling like a noob. Yeah, it references an event going on on September 20. 20th at Area 51. The invite says September 20th, Storm Area 51,

they can't stop all of us. The person who posted this, their name on Facebook is shit posting because I'm in shambles. So clearly this is a trolley type of person here. Yep. But over a million people have RSVPed to actually do this.

And 1.2 million people say they're interested. You know how Facebook does that thing? Oh, yeah. There's like, these people are going, these people are interested in going. Yeah, the commitment averse. Yes. So the origin was on Facebook and

you know, what a Redditors love more than anything, making fun of Facebook. So the result of all of this was a huge tidal wave of memes and conversations of all kinds on Reddit. People saying they were going to show up, saying what was going to happen when

people showed up. There was an Ask Reddit thread about this, asking people what their predictions were for what was going to happen when this all goes down on September 20th. And the top comment says, the army will be forced to set out an aid station with water and sunscreen because, of course, no one brought nearly enough. Because obviously this, you know, Area 51, as we all know, is in the middle of the desert. The teens subreddit was talking a lot about this. Huh. And making a lot of jokes.

I thought this one was kind of interesting. What if we rated Area 51, alien emoji, alien emoji, and used the extraterrestrial technology gun emoji to overthrow the government and set up a communist regime. Ha-ha, JK, JK, awkward smile emoji, unless flat mouth. Embarrassed emoji, flatmouth, embarrassed emoji. And then under that it says, but guys, I can't come. My mom said no. I can't tell if this is a total joke, a half joke.

Right. They're like, we would prefer a communist regime, but yeah. I don't think many people are going to show up to this. But it is serious. And the Air Force has now officially responded saying, quote, the U.S. military stands ready. Because this is a training facility. It's a military training facility.

And the Air Force basically said, guys, maybe don't try to swarm a military base that's not going to work out well for you. So it's, you know, it's getting kind of serious. Can I tell you my favorite meme about all of this, though? Of course. So my favorite post about this, says, I was nervous about the Area 51 event at first.

Then I remembered the training we received. And it's just an image of this arcade game. This was one of those arcade games that, like, it had plastic guns that you would, like, take out of a holster. Okay. And they had cords on them, and you would shoot stuff on the screen. It was like a split screen thing. You would shoot stuff on the screen, and then you would point away from the screen to reload.

I don't know. I just, as someone who put many, many dollars worth of quarters into that game, I appreciated that. But seriously, hotels are booked up for this 3 a.m. storming of Area 51. I know. I think that's like, I'm not sure why. They're trying to get them in the middle of the night. Yeah, so they'll be harder to stop these people swarming the base at 3 a.m. I feel like one way to avoid all of this would just be to give.

give a live-streamed tour of the base? Like, doesn't the Air Force have enough alien technology to just kind of, like, show everybody what's in there? I don't think people would at least, at least I, if I were skeptical of this, I don't, I'm not inclined to believe that the live stream that they're showing me is actually of Area 51. You're one of those moon landing was fake type of people. Is that what you're saying? Don't do that. No. Emery Siebertson on the record saying the moon landing was fake. On the 50th anniversary of that accomplishment, no less.

No, I'm just saying you're these people, that's not going to do it for them. That's fair. But you know what, I don't think these people are going to get in. Let me just put it that way. Okay. Well, whether you're in the desert looking for aliens or in the water looking for sharks, stay safe out there, everyone. Also, programming note, we are going to drop one more extra in the feed in the coming

days it is about our Get Motivated episode and our New Year's resolutions. Remember them? Yikes. We'll also have a full episode on deck for you next Friday. Until then, I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Amory Sievertson. Stay snacky, San Diego. Reddit Shark do-to-do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do.