It Could Happen Here - Heroes of the Old Internet: Troy Hurtubise

Episode Date: April 5, 2023

Today, Robert gives everyone a break from sad stuff by telling Gare and Mia the legend of Troy Hurtubise, a man who dedicated his life to building power armor to fight bears in.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new

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From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. your podcast. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. And we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

wherever else you get your podcasts from. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about putting them back together, sometimes just about enduring difficult times. And it's been a rough couple of weeks, what with the mass shooting in Tennessee and the right accelerating their anti-trans paranoia, the whole, you know, Trump getting arrested and all that. Yes, that has really hit all of us really hard. Yeah, deeply.

Now that Trump has been charged with felonies, he's officially a friend of mine. So we're on Team Trump now. I'm really conflicted between my ACAB side and my legalist side. It's really hard. I mean, 34 felonies ACAB side and my legalist side. It's really hard. I mean, 34 felonies. That's quite a legalist. Very few of the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation have that many. It's pretty difficult.

But at any rate, you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks. And I thought we could use a lighter episode to, you know, help everybody feel better. And I know that you, Mia, and you, Gare, are both young'uns. You missed the earlier age of the internet and the heroes of that ancient age, you know? When I was a child, you know, it was Jupiter and all the Greek gods of the old internet. Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of the old internet. Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of the old internet era. So I wanted to talk about an ancient hero of the internet.

And perhaps this will become a series that we do now and again, where we talk about the gods of the past. And today, the ancient deity that we're talking about is kind of like the internet's Hercules, a man named Troy Herdibes. Have you guys heard of Troy Herdibes? No.

I've not heard of Troy Herdibes, but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a Roman god. The Greek version is Zeus. You're right. You're right. You're right. I fucked it up. Before some freak DMs me and sends me like three paragraphs on this,

I'm just going to put that out there. Do not DM me about this. Yeah. We need to do that thing where we start including one of these every episode. Yeah, just fucking up purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it. They love being able to hop on. We did get recently, we did the Liver King episodes this week,

and somebody popped on to be like, hey guys, you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of polar bears contain enough vitamin A to kill 140 people, something like that. Don't eat polar bear livers. This is relevant because we are talking about a man today whose lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that allowed him to fight bears in hand-to-hand combat. I mean, this is actually very applicable for us because just last week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. You're right. This man would have been one of the only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So once upon a time, before the breaking of the world, there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Herdebees.

Troy was a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1963. He liked the outdoors and he was a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love of nature was bears. On August 4th, 1984, when Troy was 21 years old, he went hiking in central British Columbia. Now, he's given a couple of versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened

say that this happened when he was a boy. Others say he was like 20 years old, but all agree that he wound up in close proximity to a grizzly bear. In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped the.22 caliber rifle he was carrying, which would not have made much difference against a grizzly bear. You will only make it more upset. A.22 is not the weapon you want in that situation. In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're going to talk about Troy's knives in a minute here. Okay.

Now, in an interview with Mental Floss many years later, Troy claimed that seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him after this. Okay, okay. Wait a minute. That's not how bears work. Has this bear been, like, involved in other fights with knives? Is there, like, another maniac running around?

This bear got stabbed behind a 7-Eleven and is like, nah, man, I don't, Grizz don't fuck with knives no more. I've been through that shit. Is he part of, like, a street gang? Nah, bro, nah, bro, ain't worth it. And so he later claims an expert told him he would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs. This, I believe. Yes. Because bears very rarely attack people.

Now, a normal man would have taken this, number one, as, boy, I sure got lucky. And number two as, I should be more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was not a normal man. His first thought was that he needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically for bears. He had been beaten in developing bear mace by an actual scientist, although the first paper on bear mace was published in 1984. So it makes sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time. It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we should have a mace for use against bears.

There are, again, several versions of what came next. I'm going to quote from one that I found in a write-up by The Spec Now. Quote, from then he decided that his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear spray repellent, but he realized field testing with bears would be needed. This would require a protective suit for the person doing the test.

No. Oh, no. In his interview with Mental Floss, one of the later pieces on the man, Troy dropped the mace story and claimed that he had the idea just to make bear-resistant armor a year after his grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear researchers would need protective armor that would let them test bear spray and also safely observe grizzly behavior. Troy is something of an unreliable

narrator, but I will say I do not doubt that the film Robocop influenced his subsequent actions. No, he absolutely had this idea while watching Robocop. That makes the most sense out of anything you said so far. It is very logical. So it is now Troy, it should be noted, is not the first, probably not the first man who has thought I should develop a suit of armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand to hand combat. It is possible that in medieval Europe, some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether or not this really happened. The gist of why this is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit of armor currently

in a Houston museum that was probably made in Switzerland or Germany like 400-ish years ago. Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or for what purpose, but one theory is that it was used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for European bears, which are significantly smaller than grizzly bears. And as far as we know, it was never a widespread practice. This is because attempting to fight a bear

in hand-to-hand with a suit of armor is insane and something only a madman would do. But I am going to show you this suit of armor because insane and something only a madman would do but i am going to show you this suit of armor because it looks like something from a david lynch movie oh i'm so i'm so thrilled specifically the face so look at that look at that beautiful thing oh my god isn't the face of that unsettling they think probably somewhere around austria or switzerland although it's not i don't think known to a point of certainty that looks fucked up it looks like it looks like a like like like a metal casting of someone's head but yeah like but with like the pinhead thing yeah i i it's a hellraiser i think is the movie yeah the Yeah. The face on it is distinctly unsettling.

They could have just made a normal helmet, but no, no. There's a nose. It's the guy's face. We're not doing this right unless we peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of Michael Duda Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline Podcast, and we're kicking off our second season or wherever you get your podcasts. unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists

in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts.

Check out betteroffline.com. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. We'll see you next time. out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Troy was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight a bear in body armor is just objectively nuts.

And since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then testing it. I'm going to read another quote from the specs write up because it's extremely funny. So the suit became his focus of attention, putting it through all kinds of tests that included being run down by a pickup truck driven by his father, rolling off the side of a cliff and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats. And I'm going to play you a video of Troy, one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree. It's almost exactly that scene from Hot Rod. If you've watched the movie Hot Rod, where they like swing a log down at him and hit him um that may in fact be what that scene is based on but i'm gonna i'm gonna share that with y'all now let's go here The log is going to... Oh my gosh.

No. No. Oh my gosh. Get on him, guys. I can't emphasize enough that it looks like half this armor is held together by duct tape. This looks like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of Oz and the Battle of Endor. Ewoks throwing massive logs at the guy in the metal tin suit. It's a white suit, too.

Yeah, it looks almost like something from um like speed racer is weirdly enough the the aesthetic that i would reckon i would closest compare it to it is kind of like that anime robot style design yeah it's it's it's profoundly unhinged so i want to i want to play you a clip of him getting the helmet off so you can listen to Troy talk and see this man's face. How'd that one go? Better than the first. Yeah? Because I had that stuff in my mouth.

Yeah, if I have a mouthpiece, you can do that all day long. I got the airbags in the back, eh? So my neck hasn't got a lot of place. So that'll be perfect for the grizzly. I can take what he can give me with that. No problem. That log there, if that couldn't do anything to me and i feel great like really great and actually uh my left hand was asleep it's now awake oh really you don't say yeah so i'm gonna play you now him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball bats as he attempts to move in this suit.

And I have to emphasize to you, he is not capable of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit of armor that he can almost shuffle in it, but not quite. I love his idea with the pickup truck and the bikers with regards to big men. Being an anthropologist, he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal-sized men, you know, 150, 180 pounds. He said the public isn't going to big men. Being an anthropologist, he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal sized men, you know, 150, 180 pounds. He said the public isn't going to buy it. They're looking at this monstrous grizzly bear and they're looking at a normal sized man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff like that. They're not going to buy it. You have to give them reality. This is insane.

This is so weird. Amazing. Amazing. I have to emphasize a gang of men just attacking this nerd in a metal suit is is what it looks like yes it's so funny it's it's it's extremely funny they're like and they pick like terminator 2 looking bikers like they go out of their way all of the stylization is super bizarre. Yeah.

It's such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary Project Grizzly. And there's, Troy gives in the various interviews he does some pretty incredible quotes. Like years after this, he wrote, at 52, I have to know whether or not the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things. We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never went against the grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus Mark I. He eventually gets up to the Mark VI and spends more than $150,000 making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I think the one that we're looking at in the documentary is

the Mark VI, because he did eventually, after years of this quest, get a documentarian interested, and the film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun piece of trivia about it is that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes, yeah, it makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just one last piece of context about the personality, what kind of man is Troy Hurtubise, or was Troy Hurtubise, I am going to play you a clip of an interview with this man from the documentary that's just perfect. He's holding in this a gigantic Bowie knife in his hand, and he has another Bowie knife strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder, but pointed down, which is the way a crazy man carries a Bowie knife strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder but pointed down.

Yeah. Which is the way a crazy man carries a Bowie knife. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as like a frontier settler but wearing like a red military beret. I go into the bush. I don't use a gun. Never don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They save your life a thousand times around.

If a grizzly's gonna come at you, and I'm not saying knives are gonna save you. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzly is 50 feet, 100 feet away from you. You got one shot, I don't give a shit who you are or how steady you are. You've got one shot in that grizzly.

And if he's still coming at you, that gun, you might as well use the barrel on him. Or you can use the stock on him, that's useless. But if you've got one shot in that grizzly. And if he's still coming at you, that gun, you might as well use the barrel on him. Or you can use the stock on him. That's useless. But if you've got some half-decent knives, at least you got a fighting chance with animals. But that's not the reason why when I go into the mountains or I go into the bush or any man goes into the bush, they don't carry knives for the four-legged animals.

They carry knives for the two-legged animals. Because nowadays, it's a lot like the old days. You've got a lot of wackos up there. And it's knives that you want at close quarters. Yeah, days. You got a lot of wackos up there, and it's knives as you want at close quarters. Yeah, you do indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. So that's a brief introduction to Troy Herdibies. Now, the suit that you've seen in the Project Grizzly documentary weighed 150 pounds, and it was not in any way powered. As you see in the doc, he can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is unable to move or even stand on

uneven ground. He falls over very easily. Troy liked the documentary, felt like it helped expose his work to a wider audience, but he took issue with the fact that the documentary did not delve into what he described as the science behind it all. Adding, being able to get hit by the truck took years of development. Years. Years of practice of getting hit by trucks. Yeah. You can't just jump into getting hit by a truck like that.

In 2002, a trainer who probably should not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully, the bear was too confused by Troy's armor to want to get near him, which you might argue is technically a win for Troy. The armor did do its job. Just scare them away. Yeah. You know, the bear just saw that and was like, you know what? There's something wrong with this guy. This man is clearly unwell.

I do not want to be around this person right now. Here's Mental Floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she urinated, her debase recalls. I didn't look human enough. Limited mobility and questionable usefulness combine to doom the Mark series. We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Ciaranello, PhD, a bear behavior expert. A solid knowledge of bear behavior

is the best thing one can use to avoid being attacked, which is rare. And this is common. Whenever they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like, do you want a suit of armor? They're like, no, that's not at all useful. It's very easy to not get attacked by bears, actually. And again, if you watch the documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hurtubese, they are both people, I do believe Troy Hurtubese

might need a suit of bear armor, because he seems like the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hurtuby's fame. He was all over the internet. I found out about him because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him in an article. But like, you would see this guy all the time. I'm sure I ran. I think I also ran across him on something awful earlier. He would regularly put out videos. He had an early kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a brand on the Internet in order to get funding.

And so he was very successful at raising money in order to like make new iterations of his armor. He was also recruited on several Japanese game shows, and he inspired a 2003 episode of The Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even filmed an Audi commercial. Of course, he always reinvested the proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now, the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears, but he never got over his desire for making a suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that now his brother was in the military, and so he wanted to make

flexible body armor, themed after the armor in Halo, to help keep soldiers and SWAT officers safe during dangerous raids. His next suit was called the Trojan, and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons that are deeply confusing. How does that- Wait, that's not even a useful spot. Put it on your watch area. If you watch him, he

is adamant that he had talked to special forces guys, and they said, right in the dick is where you want a compass. It flipped down, so it looks like he has a penis that's made out of compass. Okay. That, that is kind of funny.

I'm going to play you a clip of this armor, which I will say looks a lot more professional than the last suit. The first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit of armor. This came from 20 years of development through the bear suits and about 1750 hours of actual building time and it came from so many calls I got from friends of mine in Iraq and in Afghanistan my brother was in the military talking about is there can you not go in the direction that we need

which is you know against the IEDs improvised explosive devices and and you know build it to the point where you've got the flexibility, the lightness, but with the strength of what the bear suits were. And that's where this came from. So I'm going to tell you right now, that suit is not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic heavy armor you see in the Hurt Locker only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. you see in the Hurt Locker, only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small IED.

What he's built is not going to protect you from like an explosively formed penetrator or like a 5,000 pound fertilizer, 500 pound fertilizer bomb or something like that. To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman, a guy who he claimed had previously covered him out in the woods on bear expeditions with less lethal ammo. And he asked this man to shoot him point blank with a rifle. So thankfully, this guy was like, Troy, it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person in our province. I'm not going to shoot you directly in the chest with a hunting rifle. So Troy had him take the armor out of the suit and then shoot at it, and the bullet went immediately through the armor.

It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct was not shoot the armor without a human being in it, but at least he was- Yeah, that's weird. Yeah, at least the guy who was testing it did not shoot him directly in the chest and kill him. I'm gonna quote again from Mental Flaws here. Hurtubise tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in 2007 to little notice.

Eventually, he offered his design to the Canadian military for free, but it can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology, and existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed. With industrial military, contracts are sewn up, and they don't want anyone stepping on toes, he says. Engineers pick my brain, but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose cannon, and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions over the years. For one thing, Troy invented a burn paste, a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in order to protect you.

Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered in the burn paste being exposed to temperatures above 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his helmeted head for 10 minutes. And it worked. This leaves out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired to make his burn paste because one day while wearing his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly. So he needed to make the burn paste in order to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get in and out of. No, it would not seem easy to get in and out of like no um it would not be easy to dawn at your if you look at the helmet there your peripheral version is going to be shit it's not going to be

good for like fighting in and it is going to exhaust you like he builds an air conditioner for it but that's only gonna do so much like armor body armor is always kind of like a tradeoff between mobility and protection, and something like a plate carrier is worth it, but full body armor that's not powered in a meaningful way just is not going to be practical yet. This is why I do not respect the Mandalorians. No, no. You've been vocal about that for years. I have. You've been vocal about that for years. I have.

Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field,

and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough.

So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again. The podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment

with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators,

sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el te caliente and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral.

Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm going to play you a video of him testing this fire paste from that Canadian Discovery Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire. And according to Troy, cleanup is a breeze due to fire paste's starving out the fire and according to troy clean up is a breeze

due to fire pace only weakness water look at how it's just see it turns back into a paste see i'm already into a layer okay it's just paste now which is fire piece this is its natural state and when it dries see i'm already sloughing it off now. There it is there, it turns to the piece. This is what's gonna happen on your house. Now it's a... He's chewing it up. Oh, that's so gross. He's just spitting it all over.

The dog comes along, takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, then spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biodegradable, non-toxic, don't have to worry about anything happening. So how would a homeowner remove the fire paste from the outside of their home? This is gonna be Bob's house next door. Bob's house is gonna be fine the next day. He's gonna come out with his garden hose and a can of beer, and in two hours, he'll be ready for the football game.

Oh, look, there goes the house. After ten minutes, Troy inspects the fire-paced house. Look at this. Look at this. There's little Barbie. She's okay. Barbie's fine. Save Barbie's sister.

The Barbie is clearly singed. Now, he does note, again, that the only weakness of the fire-paced is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now, why does he keep getting platforms? Like, why is he continuing? Well, he was because this was really funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that came out would get shared all over.

People would watch it. It would get him attention. He would get donations. There was like one point where he had to sell his body armor. He had to like sell it to a pawn shop because he was broke and a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and gave it to him so he could continue his research. That's nice. Yeah.

He had a fan base. Like I said, he was a hero of the old internet. He did eventually succeed in making an armor suit that was resistant to 12-gauge shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive. Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor.

Most soft body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it. Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. They're for damaging meat. But Troy made a big deal about how this would save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention, as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much detail on what the Godlight was,

but he says it shrunk tumors in mice as well as his sister's tumor, and he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers. All I did was take all spectrums of light, electromagnetic radiation, and put them together, and it works.

I don't know why, but it does. Why? I think that's how you get cancer, but okay. Funny you mentioned that. So obviously his claims about the god light were never validated by any outside force, in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it. But Troy turned the light on himself and and experienced what he calls the hide effect

i think as in dr jekyll and mr hide his hair fell out and he lost 20 pounds curious what a mystery then he claims the god light mysteriously stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix it up um there are amazing i love this man it's it is it is it is fascinating the closer society comes to this complete collapse we get more of these little weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to like survive the apocalypse and they keep in exactly the wrong ways. Yes. I'm going to read another quote from that Mental Floss article.

Today, Herdabees operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents. The stuff is too easy to duplicate, and it costs $80,000 to file an application. He rejects offers to outright sell his creations, like Firepaste, because he frequently sells off shares to fund their development. By the time I got Firepaste to the point of testing, 70% of it was owned by investors, so when a university wants it, I only have 30% left. They're not interested in that. And yet, Herdiby's can't stop inventing. He still feels compelled to put in 21-hour days refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding for the Apache, the latest version of his Trojan suit, which he says protects 93%

of a user's body and offers 96% flexibility. A prototype will cost $70,000. It'll take six to eight months to build by hand. I'll try to market it to law enforcement, like SWAT. He needs another $100,000 to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR-5, which he now claims

will only cure breast cancer he wants to take it to johns hopkins for testing so well i'm excited for swat teams to be using his inventions yes yes i do support that thanks to that dick compass they'll never get lost at the wrong house again could really save a lot of lives that's the problem SWAT teams have is poor land nav. I think the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member should be forced to wear that bear suit for everything they do. Yes, the only thing SWAT could do. So, tragically, Troy died in like 2012, I think, in a fiery collision.

Yeah, he drove right into a fuel tanker. Oh no, that's not good. Yeah, it's very sad. He was 54 years old. His widow says that he swerved his car, or the police say that he swerved his car into the pathway of the truck. He had been very depressed

because he'd encountered financial difficulties and had not been able to sell his inventions. Obviously, this is very sad for them. He seems like, despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around and then fell on hard times. It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy lives on in the documentary Project Grizzly and in the impact he had on all of our hearts and in the memory that,

you know, even if your dreams are, are crazy, you should, you should try and live them because who knows, maybe, maybe you'll develop a suit that allows you to fight a grizzly bear in hand to hand combat.

Anyway, that's, that's this hero of the internet episode. I hope you all found it edifying. That is, that is an inspiring inspiring tale yeah um it's it's it's you know he's fucking more of an inventor than elon musk ever has been and he would have been a better ruler of twitter um if that's true if troy was in charge of twitter

he's he's really the last guy from the old era of capitalism where you would actually like return your profits into R&D instead of just like paying Elon Musk like $47 million to hire a bunch of consultants who also make $47 million. Yeah. One thing you have to say about Troy is he was not he was not in this for the money. This was a man who believed more strongly than I think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of building a suit of armor to fight grizzly bears. And whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely, absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going to end by playing a brief montage of him testing out his first version of the armored suit, which looks more or less like a set of heavy baseball armor.

Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a baseball helmet, or sorry, a football helmet. In fact, I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah, here's Troy's early tests in 1988. Oh, that's definitely a football helmet. That one looks kind of cool. That one looks pretty cool too. That one looks pretty cool, too. Yeah, they look increasingly space-marine-y in this period,

and he has some range of motion. I just... Hits him with a bat. His friend is beating him with baseball bats. Doesn't even have his helmet on. Just knocking him down with what looked like two by force it doesn't it does look more oh my gosh he just he just he keeps getting ewoks right in the face yeah it's it's amazing that last one looks

super space marine ass yeah yeah some of them looked pretty cool. And he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing. So you've got to give him one thing. He knew how to make a suit of armor that would not get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Herdaby's liked to do to his armor. It seems like he was good with blunt force trauma armor. That's right. Did anyone ever do a a cte scale like

tests on him after he died oh no because this this man had a thousand micro head injuries absolutely i mean that i think the real lesson here is that he was able he was he was able to continue his work thanks to canadian health care um yeah he did He was probably like 5% of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget, just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Troy Herdibies. I hope you've all found it useful. Go into the world, and if your dream is to create a suit of powered armor

that will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat, then by God, you know, shoot for the stars. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media, visit our website,

cool zone media.com or check us out on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of right. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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