Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Great White Shark Attack - Rodney Fox and the White Pointer

Episode Date: November 14, 2022

On this episode, Wes tells the story of South Australian man Rodney Fox and his extremely bloody encounter with a great white shark. Jeff makes an incredible comeback during the Were You Listening quiz, while Mike admits to crying during an unexpected movie. ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If the world were like a sleep number mattress, everything would adapt for your comfort. Because as your life changes and your body changes, sleep number mattresses adapt and shift to give you personalized comfort night after night. And now everything's on sale during our Memorial Day event. Save up to $1,200 on mattresses for a limited time. To experience a whole new world of comfort, visit a sleep number store or go to sleepnumber.com. Sleep number to a good life sleep. Hey everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw. I'm Wes Larson.

We're joined here by Jeff Larson and Mike Smith. What do you guys have been up to? I've been on Twitter and I changed my name to Elon Musk on there. Yes, like that was some of other people. I loved, I loved like some of it where they changed their name to Elon Musk and say, like, I drink my own urine and stuff. Yeah, it has been pretty funny. So I have a very, very small Twitter. following. But like five or six tooth and claw people have found me on Twitter. And I feel like

they're probably like, oh, this is one of my favorite podcasters. He's funny on tooth and claw. Like he'll have a funny Twitter. And then they get on there and it's just me being like, Rudy Gobert sucks. Minnesota should have never traded for him. And it's just all me like talking about way too much about Rudy Gobert. That's all my Twitter is. Jeff and I actually, we started Twitter accounts together one night, and it was specifically to slander individual NFL players. What was your name again? It was like Warson Kent's or something, like a Carson Wentz play.

I'm going to say this, though. I was down on Carson Wentz way before the rest of the world was. I didn't even know we were down on him. I'm going to pin that feather in my camp. Have you seen the picture where he like shot 100 ducks and nailed them all to his shit? No, I don't love that, though. Pretty crazy. It's really morbid.

Speaking of sports, I feel like we brought this movie up before on the podcast. I watched Hardball the other night with Keanu Reeves. Keanu. And it was funny because I went- G-baby. Yeah, and G-baby. I went into it watching it thinking like, okay, this movie's a lot cornyer than I remember.

It's a lot more like problematic than I remember. I'm not going to cry. And I cried. Oh, yeah. It's a sad. The baby's death is sad. Whoa. Spoiler.

Yeah, sorry, everyone. Spoilers. You know what? Yeah, it's been long enough. But not, sad. No, you shouldn't be. There's a great part of that movie at the very beginning. Because Keanu Reeves is like a down-and-out sports gambler.

Michael B. Jordan's in it, too, at the beginning. That was an important interruption from January. Well, you can keep going. Down and out sports gambler, and he goes to, like, this bar, and he's trying to, like, get some more leeway from the bartender. and they throw him out and he like punches a window of a car and then he holds up his hand and it's all bleeding he's like you want to kick my ass no one kicks my ass like i do and then he headsets a window in the bar and everyone just kind of like quietly goes back inside and it was one of my favorite kiana reeves performances of all time it's great man he's so great so everyone watched that movie even though now you know the saddest part of it he's so great

unless you're Matthew Perry. Yeah. And he sucks. Matthew Perry doesn't care for Keanu at all. It really is sad when that window gets broken and the proprietor's like, man, I'm going to have to replace that. Is that the part you cried at? Yeah, it was pretty, it was actually a really beautiful stained glass window. He just, like, loses every single bet and he, like, has no money.

And then he wins, like, one big bet and he just spends all his money the next day. He, like, takes the kids to a baseball game and then, like, buys them brand. Maybe don't buy him, like, front row. Just like, keep some of your money. Oh, yeah. So speaking of Keanu Reeves, we got a message from our, from our patron member and our listener, Vanessa, who lives in Australia. And is a big point break fan. And she told us kind of a crazy story that I wanted to tell you guys really quick.

She is friends with this guy who's friends with a base jumper. And I guess there was like two of them were up base jumping and one of them touched an electric. They like climbed a tower to base jump. and one of them accidentally touched an electric box and it shocked him so bad that he passed out and fell and the other guy jumped off the tower and saved him midair and pulled his own shoot and like save this dude had the time to do that

which is just insane to me I've been thinking about it since he told us like I don't know to me like the point break plane scene at the end is like the craziest thing I've ever seen in a movie that like I completely believe someone could do. Yeah. I had one more thing about my Twitter that I forgot to mention that I want to say. Yeah.

I also sent a tweet to Spectrum just saying like, hey, Spectrum, your commercials suck the most and it's not even close. And they like responded immediately, like the official spectrum. Yeah. And was like, we'll take this into consideration. And I just thought it was really funny that like they're responding to someone with like 10 followers. I think they probably have bots that do that. But yeah. But they knew what to say.

I have a funny story with that. Maybe I've told it on the podcast before. Those commercials are so bad. For a while, my Twitter handle name was Scroto Baggins. And I wrote a complaint to Movie Pass at the time. This dates when that was. And I got this nice message back from Movie Pass that was like, Dear Mr. Scroto Baggins.

That's great. Yeah, and I think I have a screenshot. Movie pass. Yeah. I, like, went to so many movies when we had movie pass, like, all the time. And then when they went out of business, I just went back to Costco and, like, got a full refund. So you got truly free movies. I think the, like, six months that I had movie pass was, like, some of the best months of my life.

It was truly wonderful. Anyway, speaking of Australia, we're going to do another story about Australia. Jeff, do you want to let everyone know who we are? Yeah, so Wes said our name, Tooth and Claw podcast. Wes is pretending to be a wildlife biologist. I'm not pretending. He's a real one, but he doesn't know where his degree is. And then I was his field tech, and Mike is awesome.

He's a cool guy. Mike's kind of our producer, I think, is what he is, you know, plus our friend. He's a cool guy. Yeah. We like him. Yeah. You know? Well, as I hinted at, we are doing.

another story from Australia, and this happens to be another Great White Shark story, which happens to be in constant contention for one of my favorite animals that's ever existed. Great White Sharks are really up there for me. And this is kind of a funny way that I got to this story because I was in the mood to do a shark story. It had been a minute since we've done one. There's a lot of shark stories out there. Like shark and bear stories are going to pop up a lot on the podcast.

What gets you in the mood for that? Just thinking about them, you know? thinking about I'm just biting people. It just really gets me in the mood. So I was doing some research into shark stories and I was like, oh yeah, Rodney Fox. And I decided to pick Rodney Fox's story. And then as I went through it, I was like, oh, yeah, this is the most famous shark attack story probably ever. You know, we have these stories that we've been saving and kind of spacing out.

And this is definitely one of those. This is like a blue chip story. This is the story of like the most famous great white shark attack, probably in history because it really changed a lot of how we see them. And like it was also, he was considered one of the people that was attacked the worst. And we're going to get into kind of how that shaped out. Yikes. But it's a really good story. And the thing that made me really happy about it is as I was researching, I was like, well, I'm kind of getting these same little articles that explain in one paragraph what happened to him. And then I realized that he wrote a book. And I was like, oh, I got to

get this guy's book. And so I bought his book. It's called Sharks the Sea and Me. It's by Rodney Fox. It's autobiographical. And it's exactly about that. It's about sharks, the sea and him. And it goes into some really good detail about his actual attack and about a lot of other things, too. I'm assuming since he wrote a book, he lives through this attack.

He did. He wrote it before he got attack? Yeah, I guess I was trying not to spoil that earlier. But he did live. But he was the person that sometimes people say, like, you can't be more mangled by a shark and survive than Rodney Fox was, which I think is up for debate. But he did, like, he's in, like, the Guinness Book of World Records and, like, Ripley's Believe it or not and stuff because of how badly he was mangled and still managed to survive.

He was munching on him pretty good. It munched him good. I want to know what metrics you use to determine the world record for worst shark attack. I think a big part of it is number of stitches, actually. Oh, is that interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense.

So you'd probably want to be as big as you can if you're going for that record. Yeah. Like more space for you to get stitched. Or maybe they use, maybe they use our measurement the most ouchy is sustained. You think that's maybe what they do? Yeah, I looked it up and I couldn't figure out how many ouches they assigned his attack. But you know, at the end of our podcast, he'll have outchies assigned to him. His book is really interesting.

It feels very much like if your grandpa had a really interesting life and wrote like a journal and you got to read it, it's very, it's written like in a very kind of casual way. So I wouldn't recommend it as like a really compelling read as far as like you're going to learn a lot. But like it's very interesting because it's about this guy who lived a very unique interesting life. Yeah. So I'm going to get started really quickly. We're going to talk again about sexual dimorphism in this episode. A couple people have written us and I think I issued this correction maybe in a Patreon episode.

sexual dimorphism is all about morphology. It's not just a size difference. So any kind of morphological difference is included in sexual dimorphism. We're just getting that out on the table. No one needs to write us about it again. It's out there for the whole world. Correction issued. Sorry about that.

And you underdistance? It doesn't irritate me, but I just want to make sure everyone knows that that's been cleared up. So Rodney Fox was born in 1940 in Adelaide, Australia. His childhood was in this really rural part of Australia. he was hunting wild rabbits all the time. He would go spearfishing in the waters near his home. He lived in like a really humble DIY kind of house that his dad had built and his mom had built. And he actually learned how to swim in this big concrete water tank in his neighborhood.

So at age 15, he really started leaning into spear fishing because he met some friends that also really liked spearfishing. And they were obsessed with it and they started this club called the Octopus Club. And they would plan excursions out into the water together, and they'd even compete within their own club to see who could get the biggest fish. A really interesting fact to me is this is before wetsuits were really a thing. And he would just wear this really tight woolen sweater when he was like scuba diving. Or not scuba diving when he was snorkeling. And that wool was tight enough that it like helped conserve some of the heat.

And like that helped a bit. That sounds terrible. Yeah. But it does make sense because I did notice this summer. when I was backpacking in Yellowstone, I would always want to, like, soak my feet in cold water afterward. And sometimes the water was so cold I couldn't keep my feet in, but if I left my, like, nice wool socks on, it was really doable.

So it does kind of help. Anyway. Case closed, Mike. Yeah, no. I got corrected. All right. So he met his wife, Kay, when he was 17. And, like, kind of a strange part about this book is, there's a bit of horniness that pops

up a number of times and he like fondly remembers yeah what's it called again sharks the sea and me yeah 50 sharks 50 shades of dark white yeah that'd be a good name so he fondly remembers like how into her boobs he was and just like boobs in general and he brings it up a lot in the book and here's a passage from his book i would have write a book it's going to be a lot of them all right he says I would have loved to have played with their boobs, but until then, all the girls I'd met had brilliantly defended their virtue, keeping even their boobs under wraps.

Their mothers would have been proud. The main point here is... I was kind of surprised by how much boobs pop up in this book. It's like every other page there's a section about boobs. I like picturing your copy of his book and that's highlighted. Little, like, a note to the side is like this dude's really... Marginlea. All right.

It's funny. It is. It is. Like, I don't know. It's more interesting than just being like, there's this beautiful girl named K who I want to ask on a day. That's true. And a lot of 17-year-old boys are boobs really occupy a lot of their thoughts. If I'm like his grandkid reading it, though, I'm kind of like, why are you talking about grandma that way?

Anyway, the Octopus Club turned into the Knights of Neptune. They rebranded. They got more members, and his time went on. You're kind of like the first name more. I like Knights of Neptune, but they're both good. They're both pretty good. Yeah. They started spending more and more time in the water spearing fish, and they started to have

run-ins with sharks. So a lot of these run-ins were with what are called bronze whalers. They're kind of like a medium-sized shark, a little bit smaller than a bull shark. They're very like streamlined and fast, and sometimes when they would spear a fish, a bronze whaler would shoot in and grab the fish, and it was always really surprising to them. And it kind of taught them like how fast and, impressive sharks can be.

But they had yet to see a Great White. But in March, 1961, Rodney and his friend Brian would see their first Great White, or as they call them in Australia, a white pointer. And Brian would especially would learn just how important it was that they really gave great whites the respect that they deserve. Summer serve up the cookout classics, Heinz ketchup, and Kraft Singles. Every good burger needs a layer of perfectly milty cheese and thick, rich ketchup. We all know it's not a cookout without Heinz and Kraft.

So on the morning of March 12th, 1961, the Knights of Neptune are out. They're doing an interclub competition. Brian has just surfaced, and he's towing, like, this fish behind him. And what they would do is they would catch all these fish, and they'd put them on a line, and then they'd attach that line to a buoy. And what that did is it kept the fish kind of away from them, but it still kept them connected to him. So he's towing these fish on this line away from him. And suddenly something grabs his leg, it bends his leg backwards,

and he finds himself, like, shooting through the water. Like, picture the girl at the beginning of Jaws when the shark first grabs her, and she's, like, shooting across the top of the water. That's what's happening to Brian. Or Ace Ventura Pet Detecting. Exactly. Yeah. So the water turns red around Brian, and he kicks his leg free from the shark's mouth,

and then he watches it turn a really tight circle and it heads toward him again. And he extends a spear gun and puts it up against the shark's face, But with the spear gun, it needs to be able to, like, the entire length of the spear needs to be able to leave the gun for it to have any real power. And he didn't have that length. So when it hit the shark, it did stick into the shark, but it didn't really go out with much power. But just that poke was enough to kind of deter the shark, and it turns away from them and it swims away. And his leg had been torn up pretty badly. So he pulled this, like, rubber gasket off of his spear gun and pulled it up on his leg as a tourniquet, which was a really smart move for a seven, or I don't know how old he is.

this point, but he's like a teenager. He has a kilometer to swim to get back to shore. Meanwhile, Rodney's like 100 meters away. He's looking down and he says he sees a massive blue-gray shape of a shark that fills his view. He describes it looking like a small submarine. It was so big. And it follows him for nearly half an hour and at times it would like rush up at him and then dive back down. And he's just like, this is a white pointer. I'm going to die. This is the most terrifying thing that's ever happened to me. And the shark starts doing bigger circles. And then it would disappear from view.

And that was even scarier because then he wouldn't know when it, like, what direction it was going to show up in again. And so he would have to like look around in 360 and then it would come out of the gloom again and come in close. And this is happening for a while. And so what he starts finally doing is he's like a tantric shark attack. It's, it would be really scary to like have it disappear. The spear must have kind of affected the shark, though, because it feels like if it didn't get speared, it'd just go bite him or something.

I don't think so. I think this is a curious shark. I think it bit Brian realized he wasn't food, and now it's checking out Rodney, too. For a half hour, Rodney must be a good-looking guy. Like, what else is the shark in the ass? That's true. So it could have been that they're just kind of swimming in the same direction, too. So what Rodney starts doing is he dives down, like, 20 feet.

to the bottom of the ocean and swims on the bottom because then he doesn't have to worry about his underside, like it gives him some protection. And then he would like surface and grab a breath and swim down. So he's doing this like the whole way back to shore. That sounds like what would Jeff and Mike do. Yeah, it very much does. He's exhausted though. And he's also having at this point he has a dry suit.

It's been a while now like wetsuits and dry suits are available. And he's having some problems with his dry suit too. So it's this whole ordeal, and he finally gets back to shore. And when he does, Brian's on shore and a doctor's attending to his leg already. He had been picked up by a boat, and they had taken him back to shore. He had lost a bunch of muscle on his leg. But he would actually end up making a full recovery, and they both started diving a few months later. But this was like a really sobering thing to Rodney and Brian, because up until this point,

aside from these bronze whaler sharks that would show up every once in a while, they hadn't seen anything that really had scared them in the ocean. Both of them felt like it was their place, their kind of like happy place where they didn't have to worry about anything. Suddenly they really do have to worry about, you know, great whites. We've had a few great white episodes. We've talked a lot about their physical biology, kind of all their senses and stuff that make up their like ability to hunt and do everything.

Jeff, you remember the one that sounds kind of Italian? The Linguini. Ferecini-Lorinzini, Ambulide de Lorenzini, which is the way they pick up electrical fields in the water. I'm going to say, before you keep going, it makes a lot of sense that now they're diving,

but, like, it'd be so different. Like, I can't imagine hiking and glacier if I had been mauled by a grizzly bear and gotten my arm bitten. Yeah. Like, every hike in glacier would feel so different for the rest of my life. It's like when you see a spider in the toilet.

That honestly, why? Like, I saw a spider in the, toilet on arachnophobia the movie and I didn't like sit on the toilet for like six months after that I just went in the shower right yeah yeah I didn't go into shower but I think my example is better than that one I do but this does have a real world application anyway I do agree with you and like it didn't stop them from wanting to go back in the water but they do have a new appreciation for what can happen while they're in the water because we've talked so much about their biology

I did want to kind of rehash a little bit about why Great Whites attack people. So quickly, they are... Three reasons. What are they? Well, I know there's three. Okay. Yeah, we'll go into it. Really quickly, though.

Predatory, investigatory, and territorial? Yeah, that's pretty much it. That's pretty good. But we're going to talk more about, like, kind of the theories behind those investigatory bites. Really quick, among sharks, only whale sharks and bears. basking sharks are larger than Great Whites. They are the largest macro predator sharks. So they are officially larger than tiger sharks.

And the Greenland shark can get bigger. This is like, I look this all up. As far as macro predator sharks, these are sharks that eat like fishes, marine mammals, anything bigger than small fishes and krill, great whites are considered the largest. Both there are instances of tiger sharks, great hammerhead sharks, and Greenland sharks that people think may have grown larger than Great Whites. but as far as like length and size considered, Great Whites are the biggest.

I mean, they're called Great White for a reason, not good white. So there's reports of females larger than 20 feet and up to 5,000 pounds, but verified there's been like a 20-foot shark that was about 4,500 pounds. It's pretty big. So they are huge. So a little bit about attacks. What's that? Four-fifths of a bus?

Yeah, sure. All right. So the international shark attack file, began collecting data on shark attacks in like 1958. Since then, they've recorded 292 unprovoked attacks from Great Whites and 59 provoked attacks. Up to 74 of all those of attacks have resulted in a fatality. That number kind of varies between who you talk to, but 74 is like the most recent number I could come up with.

So they are the shark species. They could up their numbers, but pretty good. That's pretty good. They're the shark species that's responsible for the most attacks. on humans, and by a good margin, they're responsible for the most fatalities. So one thing I wanted to bring up, often when you talk about a Great White attacking someone or biting someone, there's this theory that's been prevalent my entire life of mistaken identity, that they saw a person, they thought they were a sea lion or a seal, and they went in to bite

them, realized they were a person, they don't like the way we taste, decided not to eat it. We talked about that in an episode and kind of debunked that theory. There are still sharks scientists out there that kind of believe in that, that think that there's even a study done that shows that, like, they react the same way of an image of a person moving through the water as a seal moving through the water. I don't think it gives sharks enough credit. I don't think you can say, like, this predator that's evolved for hundreds of millions of years can't tell the difference between their main prey source and, like, a human.

I just don't think. Like, something humans are so obviously don't belong in water to. Right. compared to like a seal. I do want to say I'm not a shark researcher, but I just don't, I don't think there's many cases in nature of like predators that do this mistaken identity thing. I think predators usually know what they're going for. I want to say from the last episode to one of my biggest takeaways is like they don't

really like eating us because of how much like bone to fat we have. And like Mike just talked about pinopeds and those things are like, what is like 50% of their milk is fat. Like, those things are just, like, fat. Yeah. So I was going to say that. And there was another study of, like, this guy who dragged a pig carcass, a seal carcass, and a sheep carcass behind his boat.

And all three were attacked by the sharks, but only the pig carcass and the seal carcass were consumed because they were much higher in fat content. Oh, interesting. So the seal got more of, like, this exploratory bite. The sheep. There's some other research out there that shows that they think, like, a great. great white shark that's already eating seals. So they don't eat seals when they're young, but they kind of grow into that.

An adult great white that's feeding on seals or sea lions or marine mammals probably has to kill a seal about every two to three days. And if they eat a person, we're kind of digesting in their stomachs and all our bones are a lot harder for them to process. It's probably more energetically costly for them than what they get from us. So it's like not worth. Especially me and you because mom's... I'm still good about giving us milk.

Yeah, our bones are dense. Yeah. Yeah, we've got big old bones. Yeah. I heard that same thing about how it costs humans more energy when we eat celery than the energy that it gives back to us. So that's probably why most humans aren't out there hunting celery. Yeah, you're probably right. All right.

So. Mike hate celery. I hate it. Oh, man. This is my last thing about attacks, and we brought this up a little bit, this exploratory bite. We've talked about, you know, how they probably don't do the mistaken identity thing in our opinions. But they are curious animals and they are opportunistic. And if there's like a carcass or something in the water, they'll go check it out.

Or if there's some potential prey source in the water, they'll go check it out. They don't have hands. They don't have a way to go up and feel it and say, you know, what is this? So they explore with their mouth. That's just what they do. And we all know, like Great Whites have a pretty impressive mouth. Their mouth is built for biting. And so if you get explored by a Great White with its mouth, it can be really disabling.

It's going to feel like an attack. Yeah. So that's one thing they can do. But then another thing they do with bigger seals, like elephant seals and stuff in California, they'll go up and do this really devastating bite. And then they wait for that elephant seal to bleed out before they go back in and feed on it. And that whole thing is like, I'm not going to even give this thing a chance to hurt me. I'm just going to like pretty much kill.

it, but then wait for it to bleed out and then go eat it. And a lot of scientists do think that's sometimes what they're doing to people too. Because a lot of people that have been on their own, they get a really devastating bite from a shark. The shark ends up feeding on them. But often people get that devastating bite and then they're rescued by their friends or they're able to get to rescue. And so one thought of why sharks don't kill more people, Great White specifically, is because we've figured out how to get out of the water quick enough to where we don't bleed to death and the shark can kill us. That's interesting.

Which is a really fascinating theory to me. And it was actually, I'm going to tube my own horn for a second. I read that elephant seal thing and I kind of put that together in my head. Like, oh, maybe they do that to people and we're just able to get out of the water fast enough. And then I was reading a paper and that was the whole hypothesis of the paper. And I was like, I knew it. You're a genius, Wes.

Thanks, Frank. You should take credit. Yeah. Anyway. We'll cut the part where you read the paper. Yeah. I wrote a paper. Okay, so that's a bit about shark attacks.

I just wanted to go over that again because I think it's endlessly fascinating. I think people out there need to realize these aren't like man-eaters that are just chasing after humans as a source of prey. But they do bite us sometimes and that bite can be enough to kill you. And who knows, after it kills you, they might come in and feed on you somewhere. And every once small, Jeff, you're right. Sometimes they're predatory too and they just completely consume the person right off the bat. Yeah. Or defensive.

So those t-shirts people wear with like the shark mouth that says bite me. Yeah. It's accurate. Yeah. They will bite you. It's also hilarious. Sharks are into biting. Yeah.

Like a bucket list on my life is to bite someone wearing a bite me shirt. Okay. Where would you get them, do you think? The shoulder. Back of the shoulder. That is a nice spot to bite. There's just like a good spot there for purchase. All right.

So this attack that happened to Brian and that Rodney, was there to witness was really sobering. Like I said, it made them re-evaluate the relationship with the ocean, but neither of them gave up the hobby. And Rodney actually started really excelling in spear fishing. He even won the South Australian Championship in 1961. And in that time, in between... Stuff in waste and his fishing.

Exactly. In that time, he actually witnessed another shark attack, and the victim was Jeffrey Corner. He was a fellow spear fisherman, and he died on the scene from... loss of blood. Like by the time they got to this guy, he was dead. I hate losing Jeff. It's hard. This is G-O-F-F-F, though. So it's a different kind of. There's not many of you guys out there. Yeah. Rodney, though, like, this was again very sobering, but he saw sharks as an acceptable risk, more of an inconvenience than anything. That would all change in December 1963. The South African Spear Fishing Championship was being held at Aldinga Beach on December

8th, 1963. You better believe Rodney was there, and you better believe he was hoping to win his second championship, because he was. He and Kay, his childhood sweetheart had married, they're expecting their first child, and Rodney had actually scored like a really good job at a local insurance firm. So everything's coming up Rodney at this point. His life's going great. That's all about to change. Hope he's insured. That's a good point. You know, in Australia, it probably doesn't matter. You probably just go to the hospital like most countries. Wishing you could be

there live for the big game, soaking up the atmosphere of the crowd. But too often, life gets busy. Or the price hold you back. Priceline is here to help you make it happen. With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see

the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline. Line.com. Actual prices may vary. Limited time offer. Four hours into the competition, Rodney's doing really well, but he needed some big fish to close it out and close this gap between him and the leaders. And one fish in particular that he really need was the dusky Morwang, which to me, I looked it up. It looks like a really

big white fish or like carp. It kind of looks like a really big trash fish to me. But he describes them as just being beautiful. So he heads out past the relative safety of the reef, and he's out kind of in this mixed ecology kind of where there's seaweed on the floor, lots of seagrass and stuff, and he spots a really large dusky Morwang. The water's about 20 meters deep, so close to 60 feet deep. And Ronnie's accustomed to making these really deep dives to go down and get these fish. So he dives really deep, and he's letting the current push him toward this really large fish.

60 feet is pretty crazy, like just free diving. I know. But he was really good at it. Because then once you get to the bottom, you have to like stay down there a bit probably too. So that's what he described too because he slowly extends his spear gun. And he didn't want to spook this fish by swimming up to it. So he just like let the current push him toward it. And he got pretty close.

He was within a meter or two and he's like, I'm getting this fish. It hadn't stirred. It didn't know he was there. He was like already kind of checking it off in his head, getting really excited. His finger slides to the trigger. When suddenly he says it feels like he got hit. by a train. There we go. I know they all say it, but that's what he said. I just, I just think he needs to get hit by a train to be able to say that. I don't think people that get hit by trains

ever say anything again. Yeah. Well, then it's not a good thing to say. I know. They all say it, though. Train or truck? Okay. It's a detail you need to add. Maybe like a San Francisco trolley. Or like one of those trains that take kids at the zoo. Yeah. His spear gun falls from his hand, and his mask slips off his face, which to me is a really important detail, because if I'm being attacked by a shark and I don't have my mask, it just makes it that much more horrific for me. And he, at this point, he's kind of still wondering what happened,

and he's hearing this gurgling of the water rushing past his ears. So he knows he's moving through the water, like really fast. And in his book, he mentions, this is by far the fastest I've ever moved through the water. And then he puts it all together. He's like, I'm in the mouth of a great white shark. of a white pointer. He was struck at that moment

by how casually the shark is swimming, but how quickly he is moving. And he realizes the shark's jaws are completely pinned around the left side of his chest, and his legs are bent back and they're kind of flapping against the side of the shark as they're moving through the water. He has the clarity of mind to think back

on discussions that he had had with Brian after his attack, what they would do if either of them were ever attacked by a shark again. And they both had agreed that the only thing you could really do is try and gouge out its eyes. So Rodney starts to flail his arms around and he's hitting the shark and he's trying to gouge out its eyes and he's not really sure if he's doing it. But as he's trying to do all this, the shark does release its grip.

And in the split second- Probably sucks to like move because it's just razor. Like it's like every time you move, you're just getting cut by razors. That's a perfect observation because the second the shark releases him, he as like kind of like a defense mechanism shoots his arm out and it goes into. the shark's mouth. And when that happened, it slices his palm completely open and the underside of his arm because he's dragging it across his teeth.

And then he realized that he just stuck his hand in the, like, shark's mouth, his arm. So he pulls it back out. And again, the top teeth just completely shred the top of his arm. That's insane. So he's like in pretty bad shape, but he's also very lucky that this shark didn't close its mouth down on his arm and that it's never shook him at all. It's really just bitten into him pretty good. So he's free at this point, but the shark's still right there next to him,

and he knows it's probably going to bite him again. So what he decides is the best thing to do is to try and bear hug this shark and just hold on to it so it can't bite him. And so he, like, tries to grab it, but it's so big he can't get his arms around its girth, and he's just kind of holding on to the bottom of it, and it just shakes him off. But then suddenly... He's like one of those fish that attached to the side of them. Yeah, like a remorse.

Except you don't have like the little suction. Those fish like to live on the edge. They do live on the edge. Yeah, they must taste terrible because sharks don't seem to ever even try and eat them. Suddenly, in the midst of all this that's happening, the shark doesn't matter at all to Rodney because he just realizes like, I'm out of breath. And that's all that matters to him. He describes it as being like the single thing in his mind was needing to get air. He completely forgets about the shark.

He surfaces. He gets the surface of the water. He takes a huge gulp of air. Then he remembers the shark. He sticks his head back down in the water. And this is what he says is the nightmarish visual that will stick with him for the rest of his life that he would see in his dreams. It's when he looked into the water, it was like crimson red all around him. And then he could see where it was like spreading into the water at getting pinker and pinker as the water mixed in with his blood.

And he sees the head of the shark like coming through all this blood coming up to bite him again. Oh, wow. So the shark's like coming up towards the surface at him. Exactly. That's insane. So he instantly kicks out toward the shark and he misses, but the top of his flipper kind of grazes the head of the shark. And for whatever reason,

maybe the shark just realized, you know, I don't want to deal with this. It turns and it bites into his fish that are floating right next to him on that little buoy. So it bites the fish and the buoy all at once, completely swallows them, and it's got the rope stuck in his mouth.

Rodney has like a split second to take a gulp of air and he's dragged under water by this rope. Oh man. Yeah. And now he's got to catch more fish. Shoot all of his fish all over. Exactly. So again, this gurgling noise of like the water rushing by his ears fills him. And he has this moment of extreme clarity where he's like, I have a quick release clip on this tether.

I need to get to it or I'm going to die. And he starts fumbling for it and he can. can't find it. And then he realizes that it's like in all this commotion, it's been pulled across him. And he still can't find it. And he's starting to kind of lose consciousness. He remembers like things getting fuzzy. Just from lack of oxygen. Yeah. And just all the exertion of fighting the shark. And he can't even use his right arm because it's too mangled. And he's just not finding this release buckle. And he's like really starting to pass out. When suddenly the line snaps, the shark swims away and disappears into the darkness.

He floats to the surface. He immediately as he gets to the surface sees a boat nearby. His friend Brian and another mutual friend Jeff, we got another Jeff. Nice. Had been looking for him. They'd seen the pool of blood. They knew something was wrong. And they raced over to help.

So as soon as he gets there, they're pretty much there. He can't reach his arms up to like try and get into the boat because they're both so shredded. So his friends have to like reach down and pull them out. And when they pull him onto the boat, blood just like gut. out of his wet suit all over the boat. The captain of the boat couldn't even turn around and look at him because he was so mangled and like he wanted to not pass out. So he's in that the road too.

He was in such bad shape that his friends were confident. He wasn't even going to survive the boat ride back to the beach. But they all tried to comfort him. He had gone completely white from the blood loss and all of the ribs on the left side of his body had been totally crushed. And so like any bumping of this boat was just. causing excruciating pain. But he makes it back to shore.

And when he gets there, there's more people that are ready to help him. And here's an excerpt from his book. A little trigger warning here, if you're not into hearing like graphic descriptions of wounds, maybe skip forward 15 seconds. As they lifted me out of the boat, my ripped side opened up and bits of my organ slipped out and hung like sausages. Hurriedly, I was turned up the other way and dive club member Malcolm Baker, who had studied first aid for police.

examinations, pushed it all back in with his fingers. Good thing he stabbed. Yeah, that's what I thought too. He studied first aid, so he was the guy to just push in my organ sausages. Luckily, one of the rescuers had decided to risk driving a car down that day for the competition. So there's actually this Ford Falcon that was parked on the beach. And I guess that was like a bit of a hassle to get it down there. But it was a big deal because otherwise they would have had to like take Rodney up this cliff.

and it would have been this whole thing. But they loaded them back into this Ford Falcon and they sped off to the hospital while someone else called an ambulance. The plan was just to like go as far as they could until they met the ambulance and then they'd transfer him into the ambulance. But as they're going, like his rescuers,

the guy driving this Ford Falcon and the other guys with him are not confident that he's going to make it. And they're telling Rodney to like keep breathing and to do it for Kay and their baby. But breathing was the thing that was like really hard for Rodney at this point. And the reason is because his left lung had completely collapsed.

So he's like sucking air through his right lung and they're hearing this like gurgling, spitting noise of his left lung that's just like, you know, it's not working anymore. And then he had also lost so much blood that his veins were actually like in danger of collapsing. So he's not getting much oxygen to his body either. Oh man. The driver saw the approaching ambulance. He flags it down and they transfer Rodney into it.

And the paramedics give him oxygen, and he's painfully trying to suck it into this deflated lung. And a cool thing about this is, like, the word had gotten out so quickly that he had been attacked, that there was policemen at pretty much every stoplight that were just waving them through. And so he said that, like, they never dropped below 95 kilometers an hour, even around curves. Wow. And they made it to the hospital in, like, record time. That driver is probably still. Yeah, I know.

Just finally gets to go as fast as he wants. So from the time that he was attacked to when he finally made it to the hospital, it was only one hour, which is pretty crazy considering he had to get a boat ride, get loaded into a car, get loaded into an ambulance, and go to the hospital. Like, that's pretty good. It's pretty good. It's still like some attacks. It's like a helicopter. Just takes them straight there. Totally.

But in 63, I think this is like a pretty... An hour is a long time. It is, especially... That's out of an attack. So he's wheeled into the operating room immediately. the doctor said the thing that every single doctor and every single story says, had it been five minutes longer, you wouldn't have survived. His veins would have collapsed from blood loss. They cut his wetsuit away from him and blood just like pours out.

And later, like a leading theory would be that his wet suit is actually what saved his life because it held it like his organs and everything in and also like kept pressure on a lot of his wounds. Yeah. So Rodney passes out. The doctors get to work stitching him together. This process would take hours. It would lead to multiple surgeries, months of recovery. All of the ribs on his left side were completely pulverized. One of the teeth of the shark had punched a hole right through his shoulder blade, and there was bone fragments in that hole.

His lung needed 29 stitches to be fixed. The tendons in his hands were all cut, and they had to reattach those. The doctor stitched his ribs together, and then they tried to make sense of his back muscles, because his back muscles had been completely ripped apart. Mike, you look confused by stitching ribs together. Yeah, I didn't know that that was... Can you stitch bone to bone? Yeah, because there's connective tissue in between your ribs.

So I think that's what they mean is they had to stitch all that together. Interesting. Like my kneecap, they drilled holes in my kneecap and stitched my tendon back onto it. Wow, that's crazy. You are just a Frankenstein's monster, aren't you? Not as much as this guy. Yeah, that's true.

All right. So they're trying to make sense of his back muscles. They try and stitch those together. They cover it with some skin. His spleen and his major artery from his heart to his stomach were both exposed, but neither those had been nicked. Yeah, spleen aren't important. Yeah, spleen.

This doesn't sound that bad. Had his artery been nicked at all, he would have bled out. Like, that's without a doubt he would have died. Yeah. Overall, Rodney Fox was. received 462 stitches. Photos of his wounds were sent throughout the global medical community. You can still see them online today.

They're pretty bad for a shark attack. Like, bear attack wounds still look worse to me, but these are pretty bad for shark attacks. They were sent to the global medical community as a testament of what the human body can survive. It's like they're still used as that, like, you can't survive much more blood loss and punishment than this. So here's a couple crazy anecdotes from his injuries and his surgeries. while the doctors are paring his lung,

apparently, like, they stitched it all up, and they, like, stitched around a little section, like a flap that was hanging off. So the doctor just cuts this chunk of his lung off and feeds it to a cat in the hospital room. What? Yeah. Which was just crazy to me.

Another crazy thing is, like, a big chunk of a tooth broke off in his wrist. It's, like, three-eighths of an inch long. And they missed it and they sewed it up inside. And it's never caused him any pain or anything. So he left it there. And now, like, when he tells kids about his attack, they all, like, want to touch the tooth. That's kind of cool.

Yeah, it is cool. His recovery was really rough. It was super painful. One of the worst parts was the nightmares of the attack that made it impossible to sleep. So he said the only thing that helped him was focusing on the things that brought him the most joy. And here's another excerpt from the book. Oh, I can tell her this is going. I desperately wanted to sleep out.

And after a few nights, when the amount of drugs had been reduced, I started to have nightmares and relived the horror of my shark attack. Fortunately, each time I was able to wake up and think of other things. I tried counting sheep and imagining fields of yellow, red, or blue flowers. Thinking of great food helped, barbecued steak, and hot lobster with butter. But visions of boobs, round beautiful girls' press, was by far the best relief. I am quite proud that over the years I was able to suppress those awful nightmares of the attack and I haven't had any sense. How old was he at this point? I'm not, he was still young.

I think he was in his 20s, but. Is he still alive? He is, yeah. Wow. So he made it to the internet age, boom. I don't know. Probably, yeah, I mean, he's still alive. Well, yeah, he did.

He's a lot. Yeah. Oh, I thought you were asking. Yeah, he definitely has. Wireless can feel like a world of traps, but not with visible. It's one-line wireless with unlimited data and hotspot, powered by Verizon for $25 a month. Taxes and fees included.

Plus, for a limited time, new members pay just $20 a month for one year on the Visible plan. Using the code Fresh Start. Refresh your wireless with Visible. Tap the banner to switch today. Terms apply. Limited time offer subject to change. See Visible.com for plan features and network management details. Okay, so when the attack happened, Kay, his wife, had been sitting in the living room of her parents' house and the phone ring. And she actually had this premonition that something had happened to Rodney.

so she refused to answer it, but her mom answered the phone and told her, Rodney's been attacked by a shark, his parents are on their way to pick you up. They went to the hospital and while they were like visiting the hospital, she started feeling bad. They took her to another hospital and she miscarried their child, which is like a really tragic part of it. Is it related to like getting bad news? I think it could have been related to the stress and the trauma of like.

Padme? Kind of like Padme. sure, but she died, right? Her kids made it. It happens. I mean, I think it puts a lot of stress on a person and a woman. And she had had a history of miscarriages, I believe. So it was just really tragic after effect of the attack.

They both make a full recovery, and he's actually back in the water within months. And a year to the day of when he was attacked, he's competing in the South Australian Spear Fishing Championship again, which is wild to me. I had a wrist surgery, like, two months. months ago and I still can't like do a push up and it was to like get a cyst out of my wrist and this dude like got mangled and he's spearfishing months later it's crazy what did you dream about at night to get over your visions of just big old round plooboves no that's not what I was thinking

of I didn't have any nightmares of my my wrist cyst no all right he did though he was still afraid of sharks and he was having some problem with this fear of sharks and there's this really famous shark hunter at the time who had like he had the record of like the biggest fish ever caught on a rod in line it was like a 2000 something pound great white and this guy offered to take rodney out for a shark hunting expedition and they go out and this guy kills five white pointers or great whites while rodney's there and there's this photo of them on the deck with these massive dead great whites and rodney thought it was really sad he was like this is actually tragic this isn't, I didn't, like, I think he expected to feel this sense of justice, but instead he just

felt like they had taken something out of the ocean that belonged there and felt really sad about it. And he decided to actually devote his life to understanding sharks and Great White Sharks specifically. And today Rodney's considered one of the foremost experts on Great White Sharks and a pioneer and a lot of the technology that we used to understand more about sharks. He was actually the guy who first built Shark Cajy. And when Steven Spielberg filmed Jaws and he wanted underwater shots of sharks, he hired Rodney and his friend to do it. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Man, I love when stories end that way. You've told a few that just like learning to love and appreciate. Sharks, especially that people end up advocating for him after attacks. There's that one headline that gets like shared a lot where like a woman being attacked by a shark as she's being pulled down, yells out. I still love sharks. Yeah, exactly. I think with Rodney, it's more so than anyone else we've talked about. Like, he truly devoted his life to them.

He is like, I had heard of Rodney Fox throughout my entire life. Like, he was a hero of mine. I knew a lot about him. He was in all the shark documentaries I'd seen. He was like a consultant for Steven Spielberg. He had done all this shark cage diving, all these amazing documentaries. He started the Fox Shark Research Foundation. and he's been awarded these really prestigious conservation awards.

Like this guy really devoted his life to Great Whites, and he and his son own like a cage diving operation now. They do a lot of really great outreach for Great Whites. Everything I've read from him is really well thought out and really smart. So I do think like... The boobs? Besides the boobs. I mean, didn't get too academic about that.

He's honest. You know, he's honest. I do think a lot of straight dudes. are thinking about boobs a lot when they're that age. All right. So I mean. I just wanted to put that to what we're saying about. I think his editor was just like, come on, man.

Can we just like cut out like two or three? He's like, nope. Maybe it's just like she had a nice body in the editor's like, hey, do you want to go into this part a little bit deeper? I will say I only read up to directly after the shark attack in his book and then all the other stuff about. like what happened afterward I got from mostly like popular articles and his Wikipedia articles and stuff. So I don't know how many other references there are to boobs. But in the first like 10 or 15 chapters of this book, there's quite a few. Quite a few. Quite a few for a normal book at least. Quite a where I was like, huh? There's like two is a lot. Yeah. That's that's what it's a normal amount.

There's like three or four. All right. So let's give them our ouchies. I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to say ouchies for me. If it's like one of the worst lived through great white shark attacks, I would give a 10 if he had died from it. But long recovery, he had to have like a needle stuck into his chest a bunch of times to drain fluid afterwards. Really bad recovery, ton of stitches, some trauma. It's a 9 out of 10 for me.

I feel like that's right. The detail of him kind of just getting prepped and ready to be back in the water so fast. He was obsessed with the time. though. I know. And that's really unfair to like hold. I'm not holding anything against this guy. Obviously got put through it. But yeah, I'll go with a nine. This like every attack is bad. We realize that, right? This is a scale of our stories and our ouches. I'm giving it a seven. Why is it a seven? So he didn't get any sand in it, which shark attacks a lot of times. It just wasn't included. Well, okay. If it is in the details, I'd give him another point.

All right. And then he makes a full recovery and he doesn't die. And he like goes back to what he is doing before. Sure. It's a really, sevens are terrible. All right. Yeah. He didn't lose any body parts, did he?

I guess part of his lung, the cat got that part. The cat did more damage than the shark, it sounds like. If he had died, I feel like he would have taken over that cat and like had to go back to the family and like tried to become the. the family pet type of thing. Yeah, a bit of long. A bit shaggy dog. You should option that idea for a screenplay.

Well, there's our ouchies. Something I want to talk about that we haven't really, like a lot of the kind of more biology parts of this one I wanted to save for the conservation segment. I'm going to tell you why. But something I wanted to talk about that's really important when you talk about Australian shark attack specifically are coals. So C-U-L-L-L-S. In Australia, there is a history of one.

there's a really bad shark attack that there's this kind of public pressure for the government to do shark coals and they'll go out and they'll kill a bunch of sharks. It's been proven that it's not effective. It doesn't stop sharks necessarily from attacking, but it kills a lot of animals. So both Queensland and New South Wales are states in Australia that do coals. There's also one in Western Australia, I believe. It kills a lot of different species. It kills dolphins, it kills turtles, it kills whales, and it kills sharks. And 15,135 marine animals were killed in New South Wales from 1950 to 2008 because of Coles. Eighty-four thousand marine animals were killed in Queensland from 1962 to 2015. So what's the method that they're using

if so many animals that aren't sharks are getting caught up in it? They mostly just put out these big gill nets that animals will get caught in and they slowly die. So New South Wales only uses nets, Queensland uses nets, and drum lines that just have hooks on them. So the animal bites into the hook, can't get away, and slowly dies. From 1962 to 2018, Queensland authorities killed 50,000 sharks, many of which were great whites. From 2013 to 2014 alone, 667 sharks were killed by Queensland authorities, including Great Whites. New South Wales between 1950 and 2008, a total of 577 great white sharks were killed in nets. It's a big problem.

It's something that they still are doing when there's really bad attacks. It's not something that there's any kind of scientific proof that it helps reduce attacks. So if you live in Australia, if you have a way to vote against Coles ever, make sure you vote against them because they're really barbaric and they don't work. dress up like the left shark from katie perry's super bowl and go protest at your capital sure that would actually be a good protest yeah that just seems like such an exaggerated response to i mean there's got to be maybe one death a year from sharks in australia maybe probably the way the math works out maybe more maybe less on a given year it's probably less it probably averages less than that over on average It's just crazy that one person can cause such a massive destruction to see life, you know?

I don't know. It just seems so unfair. Yeah, it's terrible. I mean, it's awful. And I think it's a practice that needs to be done away with. So I think we all three agree on that. Yes. All right.

So that's it for the story. Do you guys have any questions about Rodney Fox's shark attack? No. At the very beginning, you said he was. into hunting wild rabbits. Yeah, which is good because if he was hunting domesticated rabbits, then it's not really a question,

but just kind of an observation, I guess. It might be, like, more exhilarating to, like, break into someone's house just to kill their rabbits. Yeah. Pretty messed up, though. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like he killed a lot of rabbits,

but it sounded like there was kind of like a rabbit plague almost in Australia at the time. There's just way too many rabbits. You said, This place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough.

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It matters where you stay. Hilton for the stay. All right. Well, we'll move on to our categories then. So we've done a lot of pop culture sharks, so we're going to change that up a little bit. And we actually got a question from our patron member, Carlos, that I wanted to work into this one. Carlos asked, what was a favorite movie other than Jaws that involves a seawater or creature attack? They said, I remember growing up in the 90s and there were a lot of these kind of movies going on. So what are your guys' favorite movie?

I want to start because I'm worried you're going to. and take mine. Let's hear it. I'm going Pirates of Caribbean 2 with the Cracken. I love, like, the final standoff. I don't really understand Jack Sparrow's motivation because he's been, like, selfish the entire time, and then all of a sudden he sacrifices himself for everyone.

But it was a cool scene. Where do you guys come down on the Pirates of the Caribbean sequels? I don't like them that much. Really at all? I like the... The second one's okay. The first movie's, like, in a level of its own, but I really like the second and third.

I like the second one, okay, third and on. I don't like. I remember even kind of like it. I like all of them to a degree. I'm just kind of a pirate guy, I guess. Me and Jesse watched the first one not too long ago, and afterward we were both like, and this is such a fun movie. It's just like such a fun watch.

Wait, but what were you saying, Mike? I just like them, pirates. Do you like past three? Yeah, I like, I don't even, I think there's been one that I have. haven't even seen. I saw the fourth one. But you like it. Yeah. Penelope Cruz did a lot for that, though. There's like a recent one with Javier Bardame in it that was like one of the worst movies I've seen. It was terrible. I'll probably like it. Mike, what's your pick for sea creature attack?

I was thinking of just going with Godzilla again. I know that's not technically like an attack at sea, but I think we've picked a Godzilla for enough categories at this point that I'm just going to go with Korea Godzilla in the movie The Host, Bong Tunho. Basically, I love it, man. It's so, like, it starts off as like a fun and even kind of a funny romp. Yeah. Some pretty suspect special effects going on, but I still love it. I mean, like all the way to the end, I think it's great.

Yeah. I'm going to go with the Deep Blue Sea, the Samuel Jackson movie and a little cool Jay and stuff. Another shark movie, but it's just a really fun one and it has like some really great scenes. So that's what I'm doing. You really, yeah, the death is amazing. You really missed an opportunity for favorite pop culture boobs. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, that's true. I wasn't about to open up that can of worms. All right. And then I wanted, because I just watched Hardball, I also wanted to ask you guys, what's a favorite movie that makes you cry? Because Hardball is one for me, but I'm going to pick up because that's one I can't get through the first bit of without crying.

I'm going to go both Paddington movies always get me and Coco. Coco gets me every day. I've only really cried in earnest at one movie, and I think people might make fun of me a little bit for it. At the very end of Life Aquatic, the Wes Anderson movie, when they're in the submarine and he finally sees the Jaguar shark. Yeah. The needle drop when Siguros starts playing, the first time I saw that, it was like openly

weeping. And I've thought a lot about why that is. And I've got like a whole dissertation typed up right now on my screen. I'm not going to go into it. But I think I've arrived at an academic place to explain why it got me so good. But man, like it's so emotional to me. We'll have a Patreon or a subscriber episode where you can explain why the jaguar shark and life aquatic makes you cry.

So we're going to go into one of my favorite categories where Mike and Jeff paying attention. I am Venmoing whoever wins today $10 right at the end of us. If you tie, then I'm going to keep the money myself. All right. So who wants to go first? It's always a flip of the coin, which questions are harder. So who wants to go first this time? I think Jeff should go first.

Okay. Jeff, what was Rodney Fox's wife's name? I don't know. Past. Mike, can you steal that? K? K, exactly. Yeah.

Mike, what was the name of Rodney Fox's friend who was also attacked by a shark? Jeff with a G. No. No. There was a Jeff, do you want to answer? No. Brian. What?

There was a Jeff that was attacked, but that wasn't his friend. All right. What the heck? Jeff. What year was Rodney Fox attacked? It was the 60s. 64. Mike, what do you like to steal?

1963. Correct. It's 2.0, Mike. I didn't pay it to me. Mike. What was the original name of the Spear Fishing Club that Rodney started with his friends? Octopus Club. Correct.

3.0. Jeff, what is the Australian name for Great White Sharks? White point close you're almost there is there another word I'm not giving you any hints white point shark no Mike white pointer correct white pointer four zero Mike if you get this next one I don't think there's any way Jeff can win I'm already planning what I'm doing with that 10 bucks Mike how many great whites did the hunter kill when Rodney was with him five five correct I think this one's over. I don't think we need to do the rest of the questions. Jeff, I'm going to ask you one of the hardest questions that I have on here.

If you get it right. Stitches numbers? Yes. If you get it right, then you win. I guess the question, right? Yeah. Is this like a winner takes all? How many is like 462?

Oh, shit. He got it right. No, I didn't. Yeah, you did. It's 462. Did you look it up? No, I only knew 400. Oh, that's crazy.

It's 462, exactly. Well, man, I pulled that out from somewhere. I snatched a feat right out of the mouth of victory. We do this. We do this. What did you say if I got the last one? You won. You win.

It's Hogwarts rules. You beat me, Jeff. Congrats. You earned that one. Good job. I kind of did. That was a hard. That was a good poll.

Yeah, that is a good poll. Okay, well, good job, Jeff. So our next category is, if you're Rodney Fox, and this happens to you, and you could have one photo for. this to put on your Instagram, what would you want it to be? I'd want it to be, like, me about to shoot that one fish. What is that a fish called? Dusky Morlong.

Just completely oblivious with, like, a huge great white with its mouth open behind me. That's a good answer. I'm going with the moment the shark's face becomes visible in the cloud of blood. Another good pick. Mine's going to be, like, my little piece of lung right as the cat starting to eat it. That's the winner. That's the best one. Okay.

Our next category is one we haven't done in a while, but it's a fun category. We're resurrecting it. Mike and Jeff are both going to say a shark fact, in quotation marks. We just did a random fact. Oh, just a random. It doesn't have to be a shark. They're doing a fact. Each of them came up with a fact.

One is false. One is true. I have to decide if I can pick out the wire. Tell us who goes first. Mike, why don't you go first? Okay. Okay. So I picked the fact that isn't true, Wes. Okay.

Or did I? So my fact is, you know what anglerfish are, right, Wes? Yes. Name five of them. I don't know their species. Yeah. The fact is, only female anglerfish are bioluminescent. You know, the little bulb that hangs off the head?

Right. Only females have that little... Sexually dimorphic. Danger. So my fact is that Asian honeybees have a... with Japanese beetle. That's what we call it here. I don't know what they call it in Japan.

Going into their hives and they've developed a system of like creating static electricity that will stun the beetles until the beetles die. Okay. I know that male anglerfish are tiny and the females are much, much bigger. I also know that Jeff has worked with Japanese beetles. So if he had to make up something, his brain might go right to something. something that's close to him. So I'm going to say that Mike's is the real fact and Jeff's is the fake one, but I'm not sure.

Yeah, I made my name. Oh, man. That was like Sherlock Holmes, Wes. So now we both each owe you $1,000, I think is what we said. Yeah, we'll just say it's even. Our next category is, what would Mike and Jeff do if you? Yeah, I got a quick one. I would shoot the shark and win the competition.

and if you get a great white, like you're winning that thing. Yeah. Good point. It's a good point. So I would, I'd swim in. I think the only way is to like shoot it straight through its open mouth. So you get in there and shoot its heart through its mouth. I feel like that's been a thread in a few of your answers, like trying to get all the way through its body into its organs, like through its mouth.

Well, normally it's my body. This time I got a spear gun. Okay. Right. Fair enough. Mike, what's your answer? I would do, uh, oh, what was that story? The 127 hours guy, he cut his own arm off.

And you're in Ralston. Yeah, that's what I would do. Why? I don't work for him. It would be worse than he was. Yeah, maybe then it's like, oh, too many bones. I don't want this. Yeah, okay.

All right, well, we've been over this. That's two episodes in a row where you've said you'd cut your arm off. Yeah, I wonder what that scene. The last one. Attached a chainsaw to your arm for no reason. Mike, do you just really want to cut off your own arm? Ah, man. He doesn't want his arm.

All right. I'm not doing anything with it. The left one, at least. As far as what you actually should do, avoidance is really the key to, like, avoiding, you know, to not being attacked by Great White Shark. So you really want to avoid things that are attractive to sharks. So you don't want to be swimming.

Killing fish, you're probably making them, bringing them in. Exactly. Like, if you have dead fish and blood hanging out in the water right next to you, that's a really bad way. Like a whole competition of it. Exactly. But if there's, like, a dead fish. marine mammal nearby if there's a dead whale if there's a bunch of sea lions in like a colony or

something low visibility in the water dawn and dusk you want to avoid you want to pay attention to the signs on the beach you want to learn about the beach before you go and then if you do go in the water just try and go in groups because often the person responding to the person attacked is enough to discourage the shark if you do see a shark while you're out in the water get to safety as calmly as as possible while keeping the shark in your field of view as much as possible. If you have something large that you can put in between you and the shark, something larger like a long pole or a spear gun or something, do it. But you don't necessarily want to poke the shark because that can trigger a defensive attack

or a territorial attack. Just have that thing in between you and the shark, so it's going to hit it first when it comes in. If it does actually bite you, try and stay calm, try and get to safety as quickly as possible. if you're actually being bitten by the shark, that's when you kind of just do whatever you can. So try and gouge its eyes, try and punch it. But at that point, you're not going to fight as hard as a sea lion or an elephant seal fights.

So you're probably not going to discourage it. But you might. I just want to bring up because, again, sharks are kind of one of the animals we talk about that people have the biggest kind of natural inherent fear for. In California, the highest risk group of people are considered surfers. surfers have a 1 and 17 million chance of being attacked by a shark. That's like one of the highest risk groups and one of the highest risk places on earth.

I do have to imagine that spear fishermen have a much higher risk than that because Rodney and his friend were both attacked by Great Whites. So I think if you're a spear fisherman in South Australia, you should be really careful. I think you have like a one in five chance of being attacked by Great White. Especially if your name's Jeff with a G. I did read some things that said that shark attacks have actually fallen, like the percentage of people attacked have fallen a lot in the last few decades. I'm not totally sure why that is, but I do think people were attacked more regularly back in these times. Jeff, do you have some listener questions for us?

I have a couple patron ones. Sure as heck do. Why don't you start us off with the patron ones? Okay, cool. And as always, patrons, subscribers, thanks so much for sending us these questions. If we don't read your question on the podcast, we will answer it at some point, whether we record that as just like a question answering session or we write you. We'll get to your questions. Okay.

One that I really liked, Lexi and husband said, if you went back in time and met a caveman, what would you show them to absolutely blow their minds slash kill them instantly? What would you guys show a caveman? Wait, it has to be both things? No, I think they're just joking that like if it was so mind-blower. they would just die of a heart attack or something. Probably a holographic, chari-eyed Pokemon kind. That's a good one. I feel like I'd show them the show.

You got a Charzard holographic, original? I think I'd show them the show Euphoria, and they would just be like, no. That'd be traumatizing. Mike, what are you showing your caveman? I would show them, like, artistic impressions of, like, what we think cavemen look like today? and they'd be like, well, that's not what we look like at all. And it'll be like exactly what they look like. All right.

Here's another one. This is from Victoria. Or wait, maybe like a rocket ship. I think that would surprise them. Pretty badly. Or that lightsaber. Like bend your thumb and then you make it look like your thumb pops off your hand. Or steal their nose.

There's no way they know how to do that. I got your nose. Yeah. And just drops dead. All right. The printing press. That would be pretty crazy for them. Here's one from Victoria.

pancakes, waffles, and French toast, give me your ranking. French toast, waffles, pancakes. I think I'm the same. I think I would go that same exact ranking. It kind of, I don't know how to approach this question, to be honest, because by far what I have the most of is pancakes. And it's like, waffles are a little more of like a special occasion kind of meal for me. Yeah.

And then French toast is like, I usually get them when I'm going out somewhere for breakfast, you know. Remember when you were mad at it? your roommate because he wouldn't let you pay rent in ego waffles. You're like, why can't I just pay you $700 worth of aga waffles? It would have been so smart for him because, like, my rent was only, it was low. It was like $350. And I was like, if I give you $700 worth of agos, that's like a huge bargain. Did you stumble into some, like, treasure trove of eggo waffles?

Why were you so rich in aga waffles? Yeah. Well, okay. Let me answer the question. Fats if he stole the ego waffle truck. Yeah, so I'm going to go waffles, french, waffles, pancakes, French toast. Okay, after some real thought.

Yeah, one more. This is from Possum Sonic Burger asked, Do you have any weird habits or obsessions? It's probably one I should have prepped you on. I know Jeff's, it's opening starbursts to thousands of people and showing them what colors he got. No, it's cool. I got one.

For whatever reason, and people are probably going to judge me for this, and that's okay, I have a really hard time eating the last bite of food on my plate. It's something I don't really even think about psychologically. I'm not, like, thinking about it. I just kind of, like, as soon as there's, like, one bite of food left pretty much, my stomach is full and I don't want to eat it. I think, like, somehow I've trained my stomach to feel really full when there's just one bite left. and I find myself constantly kind of getting rid of my last bite of food,

which I wish it wasn't that way, but it just is. And I truly feel like really, really full when there's just one bite left. Mike, you got anyone? So I have a really weird habit of trying to pluck out unibrow hairs with like my bare fingers. And I do it constantly throughout the day. And I'm going to tell you, when you finally get one, it feels great. You know? You don't have a unibrow at all, so it's working.

I'm doing pretty good job. Well, yeah, I don't really have, like, one that connects super hard. So there's only, like, two or three strays that really are available for plucking. But, yeah, it's a little mini accomplishment. Jeff, you got any other listener questions? Yeah, so let's go to Instagram. So I lost the last batch of questions. Yeah.

Jeff loses stuff. And I told everyone that in our story. So first is from Ellie Audrey. One question. How dare you? I don't know. I don't know. And then single mama Trist says, my question is, how did you lose the questions? Well, I learned that I used to like time it for like right at like the 24th hour.

I'd screenshot all of them. But then I learned that you could go to the archive of your story and like look at it. But I didn't realize like three days later that archive doesn't have any of the responses. So that's how I lost them. Oh. Okay. from Totally Kyle 24. Who is the best fictional president?

Ooh, for me it's President Palmer from the 24 series. Oh, that's mine too, the All-State guy. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know why that president really stuck with me, but he did. He just seemed like a good leader. Yeah. Mike, you got an answer to that one?

Oh, man. This isn't a president, but I really want to talk about Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear of Vengeance, or Rising. He's the nanomachine son guy. You got you have no idea when I'm talking about. You're not even saying a president and you're giving us a reference, no one's heard. Yeah, exactly. We'll accept it.

I'll say the escape from New York because like it's America and there's just like a British president, which was great. Oh, wait, I got one. So Shadow the Hedgehog, the video game. The president of the United States has a framed picture of Sonic and Shadow on his desk. So I'm going to go that to that guy. From Jekyll Barry, a billion lions versus one of every Pokemon who wins. A billion lions? The billion lions wins.

There's pretty much a billion Pokemon now. But one of, oh, it's one of every single Pokemon at the same time? Yeah. There's like, Snorlax will take out. No, the lions win. It's a billion lions. It's so many. Too many lions.

But aren't there like, you guys, I don't know why I'm addressing this question. question is if you guys would know the answer, but there's like literal gods that are Pokemon that are just like they can control time and space and stuff. So I don't know. O'Duconio has ice powers. Yeah, can't forget that. We're pretty well against everything. Okay. So I want to talk about something when it comes to conservation. And it's kind of a correction corner. It's like the deepest that I think I've dove into shark conservation since we started the podcast. And it's mostly because my friend Grace, is a shark researcher and has worked with sharks, wrote me,

Grace is a big fan of the podcast, but she did say, hey, there's a couple of things that you should probably bring up when you talk about shark conservation. And a couple places where you guys kind of miss the mark a little bit. And we're always welcome to that kind of feedback. We want to make sure, especially when it comes to the science and the conservation, that we're getting it right. So I do want to add some things to what we usually talk about with sharks.

So Great Whites are IUCN vulnerable. There's no real consensus, though, how many great whites are out there, so it's pretty hard to say where they're actually at as far as their conservation. I think all of us can agree that the coals are really messed up, but we do really need to talk about how nuanced of a problem shark conservation is. I think in the past we've been guilty of kind of glossing over it, throwing out these crazy numbers that are reported in the news, like 100 million sharks, and saying that it's shark finning mostly. that's the problem. It's actually a lot more nuanced than I thought it was. So one of the papers that I read was called inaccurate and biased global media coverage underlies public misunderstanding of shark conservation threats and solutions by Schiffman et all. It was a really interesting paper. It talked a lot about how shark finning is just one of the threats facing sharks, that general overfishing and bycatch and then the shark meat trade are

pretty much as big of threats as shark finning is. And it talked a lot about how shark finning is like a uniquely Asian thing. And all this media that reports on how shark finning is killing all the sharks has like really been targeted at Asian communities. But like the US, Mexico, Spain, some other countries are just as guilty when it comes to killing sharks. Yeah, it's just that we're doing it more by overfishing bycatch than for like shark finning.

The paper brings up the fact that, like, media is to blame for this, and I do want to mention that, like, then we are also culpable in kind of spreading that. So shark finning is terrible, and shark fin soup isn't something you should ever eat. You probably should never eat shark meat, but I do want to talk about that a little bit, too. I've kind of taken the position with seafood that I just don't eat it, because figuring out what's sustainable and what's not can be really tricky. Sometimes a restaurant or a store won't even give you accurate information. But that's not possible for everyone.

And I was actually surprised to learn that there are some sustainable shark fisheries out in the world too. About 9% of shark fisheries are sustainable. So there are ways to eat shark sustainably that it's been ethically caught, but it is really tricky to find them. And I wouldn't recommend it unless you're positive that it's from a sustainable shark fishery. I do also want to mention in some developing countries, sharks do make up a food source for them. And saying that there should be a global ban on everyone eating sharks is kind of overlooking that and realizing that like some of these developing countries, they've been doing it for a long time. They would still have plenty of sharks to eat if it wasn't for some of these developed countries removing all these sharks from the water.

So I do think that's important to say. Now, all that being said, many shark populations are still in danger of total collapse. A 2014 paper by Dolvey et al estimates that one and four of shark, ray, and skate species are threatened with extinction, mostly as a result of overfishing. 389 species of all the shark ray and skate species are considered to be safe, which is about a third of all shark ray and skate species. They're grouped together because they're all cartilaginous. So about a third of them are expected to be safe. And the ones that are actually at the biggest threat are the really large-bodied sharks. So sharks like great whites, sharks like great hammerhead sharks,

Thresher sharks, tiger sharks. A lot of those sharks are really at risk of going extinct. So one last thing I wanted to talk about with conservation, just because I got all this really good information from Grace, there are some really great organizations that you can support if you want to help sharks. And I wanted to list a few of them that are really trusted, vetted advocacy groups. So one is called Shark Advocates International. Another one is Save Our Seas Foundation.

And then if you're in the United Kingdom, maybe, shark trust is another really great one. So those are three that I recommend. If any of our listeners are obsessed with sharks like we are, those are some places where you can put some effort or some money if you have it available to help with shark conservation. I'm going to make a donation to all three of them. So just so you guys know, there are some really great advocacy groups out there fighting for sharks. And personally, I'm never going to eat a shark. Neither am I.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. It's just not something I think I will morally feel okay about. I agree. And I think if you live in a country where you have that ability to, like, come. completely avoid it, you should because you're not sure where you're getting it from usually. All right.

So that's it for Conservation Corner. Thanks again, Grace, for sending over that information. We want to get things as right as possible. Our final category is our claw scale. How much do we like this animal? This is an easy one for me. It's a 10 claw animal. This is like if we could have our gilded 10 claw animals, if I had to give it to like five,

this is one of the animals I'm giving it to. So I absolutely love that. rank as far as ocean animals for you? It's probably number one. Oh, over whale shark? Honestly, like, between grizzly bears and great whites are like my favorite animal. Cool. Yeah.

I have them ranked 12th. That's 10, that's 10 claws for me. 10 claw territory. They're in my top 10 as well. I like, well, I don't, we're talking about great whites. I don't need to compare them to an animal. I like more. Yeah.

So are they 10 claw for you? They're a 10 claw boy. Yeah. Wow. Easy. This is really, really easy. An agreement 10 claw animal. for all three of us.

It might be our only one. Yeah, they're so cool. All right. Well, thanks, guys. I really had a lot of fun with this story. It was a really interesting one for me. And as I mentioned, Rodney had been kind of like... Rodney's sweet.

A hero for me for a lot of my life. So it was fun to tell a story. And Rodney, if you're out there listening, thanks for all you've done for sharks. And hope you have just wonderful dreams tonight. I have boobs. All right. Thanks, everyone.

That's what you want him to hear you say when you listen. We love you all, and hey, I love you guys too. We'll see you later. Love you guys. Bye.