===TRANSCRIPT START===

Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And when I was a kid, my sisters and I got attacked by a dog. We were so young, we don't really remember this all that well, but according to my mom, the three of us, myself and my two younger sisters, were in the back seat of her tiny 1980s Toyota Corolla while she was loading groceries into the trunk. The car doors were hanging open, and one of my sisters was playing with a stuffed animal that she brought with her. And all of a sudden, this big black dog comes racing across the parking lot, leaps into the back seat, and starts trying to take the stuffed animal from my sister. My mom is pretty sure that the dog was just playing, but we didn't know that. We were, I was, you know, probably three or four, and my sisters were one in a couple of months or something. So we just had this huge, drooling, growling, barking monster stretched across us inside the car, buckled in, nowhere to go, screaming.

Oh my God. Yeah, a sandlot.

Keep in mind, my family didn't have a dog. I'm not even sure we knew anyone who had a dog. We certainly hadn't spent a lot of time around them. As far as I know, this might have been my introduction to the concept of dog in real life.

It's not a great way to meet one.

No, and so my mom finally got this hellhound Cerberus off of us and returned to its owner because it had leapt out of another person's car while they were loading groceries. And she got my sisters and I home, and we seemed no worse to wear, except I started having nightmares. And I don't remember the earliest ones, but once they started, they never really stopped. Sometimes they'd be about dogs, sometimes lions or tigers or bears, but I'd always be on the ground, usually on my back with some snarling drooling creature biting into my legs, climbing onto my chest, tearing up my stomach. And by the time I was in high school, I started having these recurring intrusive thoughts during the day. I'd be in math class or walking down the hall or trying to talk to a girl and just get hit with these images of getting torn apart by animals, wondering what it would feel like to get eaten alive.

During the day?

During the day.

Wide awake nightmares?

I still have them. And they're not quite like nightmares. They're intrusive thoughts. They're a really great way to help yourself understand that you are not your thoughts. Cause some people have intrusive thoughts about them doing things to other people. My intrusive thoughts are about things doing something horrible to me.

Well, I'm sure this will come up, but I mean, there was no, like you were never bitten by an animal that you know of. Like, cause this is starting to feel fire in the sky a little bit where it's like I'm having flashes or intrusive thoughts of, you know, being on a alien operating table or something that are resurfacing. Cause I don't, as you know, I don't know if it's truly to say in the episode, but I don't love, I'm not a dog person, but I don't wish them any harm. Like I don't, if a dog comes up and it's a friend's dog, like I'll pet it and stuff, but I don't A, want to own them and B also just don't want to own them. But my mom said that when I was a little tiny kid, right, I had like a dog like jump on me and nip at me and like really get aggressive with me. And I was like super freaked out and cried and all this shit, like very little. So I do wonder if that similar to your back of the car story, if that imprinted anything in me where I'm just super distrustful of dogs. People are like, he's fine, he doesn't. And I'm like, no, in my fucking core, I don't necessarily believe you. But I also am not like, get these pit bulls out of our city or anything.

No, I'm the same way, but I really just in the past maybe five to 10 years.

Started hunting them for sport.

I started collecting dog teeth. No, it was the first time that I started to feel comfortable around dogs.

What percentage of it is like, oh, I feel comfortable around dogs now. And what percentage is when you make a face or you say I'm not really a dog person, there's just so much judgment on you that you're at a certain point, you have to just like smile and be like, okay, cool, I'll pet it. Because the alternative is having to explain that like, no, it's like, I just, I have no problem with them. I don't, you know what I mean? Cause people do judge the shit out of me over the years when I'm like, not really a dog person. And then I feel like there's a lot of follow-up questions weirdly.

I don't know. I've told lots of people I'm not really a dog person and maybe they've judged me and I've just had face blindness and not noticed it. But I've never been ashamed of my dog concerns. I do remember that in college, our buddy, I remember going over to his place for the first time and they had that fucking pit bull. And pit bulls-

They still do. I think it's still alive.

Pit bulls are just, I have no issue with them. I don't think we should get rid of them. But any animal with that amount of bite pressure, no thank you. I don't want to be, I don't care how friendly it is.

Our buddy has a potentially delightful pit bull, was always delightful the whole time. Then one day just fucking attacked the post person, I was a postman based woman, I don't know, but attacked the postal worker. And then he was like in a lawsuit that went on for like years with the postal service. But it was like, you know, he was a staunch defender of like, she's a pit bull, yes, but they are not what people say or make them out to be. And she was, she was always very delightful and sweet. And then like one day it seemed like she was just like, you know, I'm gonna fucking bite this postman.

What I find so weird is that like pit bulls are sort of the flag bearer of the dangerous dog that people are like, oh, you shouldn't have those pets.

Well, there's certain cities, I don't know if it's not Los Angeles, maybe Boston. There's certain places I think we've lived where they have like rules against them in the city limits.

Right, but why, I guess I've never really looked into this, but like German shepherds, I also am equally uncomfortable around.

Well, I think there's historical context to that, yeah.

Sure, but I mean, like there's Rottweilers, there's plenty of dogs.

Doberman Pinschers.

Doberman Pinschers that have been bred at some point to be a weapon and no one ever seems to have problems with them, it's just pit bulls, I don't understand.

I feel like I heard once, I wanna say I didn't read it because I'm not often hitting up the dog forums, but I wanna say I heard once, so this can be complete BS, I don't know. But I wanna say something I had heard about how like, now that I'm saying it, this seems dumb, but like their brains keep growing, but their skulls, like-

That does sound dumb.

Like something in their brains-

That sounds very dumb.

Can't get big enough or something, and then like that squeezes on some anger, part of your brain.

No, the problem is with all dogs or most dogs is that they shouldn't have been bred to exist in the first place. There should be like three species of dogs. Pugs. Yeah, pugs are fucked up. Chihuahuas are fucked up. Schnauzers are fucked up. They're all broken and like their brains are snapped. Their noses don't work. They can't breathe. There should be like three dogs. There should be golden retrievers and then dogs that look kind of like wolves and like maybe a mid-sized like a collie or something.

Why are golden retrievers separate? Are they from like the wolf community?

I don't know.

Like a wolf makes sense. If you're like, oh, a dog looks like a wolf.

They seem normal.

Like huskies.

Yeah, huskies.

Dogs that had like a purpose, like sled dogs.

Right, okay, yeah, sure, sure, sure.

I don't know, I don't know. No matter what dog we name right now, someone's upset.

Yeah, that's true.

So we shouldn't say that there should and shouldn't be certain types of dogs.

I guess, yeah, yeah, yeah. Some people might take issue with that. As we will see in this episode, I do love animals quite a bit.

The audience might hear your fucking frogs a couple of times in this episode.

They might. Now that I'm recording at home, everyone's going to learn to love my dart frogs. I have three poison dart frogs and we'll get into them later. But the important thing is it's Thursday. This is Scared All The Time. And today's episode is Eatin Alive.

That's fucking gross, dude.

What are we scared? When are we all the time?

Now it is time for Time for Stand All the Time.

And we're back.

Yeah, we are. And before we get into the episode, let me just say that, you know, a couple of housekeeping things here. A, we got an avalanche of pronunciation and geography corrections. We took them to heart, and there's nothing we can do about it. The episode's out, but we now know that the Gulf Islands in Canada, you can't get to them by a bridge. Those are dirty, ferry islands, if anything, but they're not dirty bridge islands. We now know that Richmond is not a small town. It might be a big city. Ah, who knows? And we know that Blenheim House is in fact Blenheim House.

Blenheim. I can't get, sounds like something the Doctor and the Simpsons would say.

So we know all that now. Thank you, Canadians, per usual. You were the first to point something out.

Yeah, I mean, look, I don't know what I'm saying. I research all this stuff, but I'm reading it with my eyes, not hearing it with my ears. So if I say something wrong, you know, I apologize in advance and we'll see it afterwards from the Canadians.

Secondly, we, I think, just came out of like an eight minute story about fucking dogs and stuff. That's just us kicking off rust. You know what I mean? We've been away for a little bit and we're doing it because unlike Jackie Aids, sometimes we beat around the bush around here, you know, but you're gonna love it. You're gonna fucking love it. Either way, they get what we mean and they mean what we get. So we got a great episode. It meanders a little bit in the beginning, but then it gets fucking wildly fun. So stick with us. There will be chapters in the show description. So stick around for the fun meandering or jump straight to the stories. It's up to you.

So Ed, have you ever had a frightening animal encounter?

Yes. OK, besides the one that I guess I don't remember that my mom tells me about that has informed my view of dogs on a cellular level, I have a very, very vivid memory as a little kid on my own, which to the younger listeners, we're not that old. But this is a pre Internet era. You really were like ten just in where I grew up. You're just out in the world. So I was like probably ten, eleven years old. And I am just out on the Naggies farm. I don't know if they're still with us. I don't think they are. There was a horse farm across from our property. So you can walk up a hill for a little while, and then the land levels out. And it was a horse farm. They had horses and what have you. So I would just kind of stroll through their land, different spots. I'd go through the fence, the little barbed wire fence. And this is not a horse story. I found a giant turtle out there. It was, to my little body, it was big. Because in my mind, it was like Ninja Turtles is what I knew turtles from. And before, when they got the ooze on them, they're little fucking turtles. This was way bigger. And it was, I didn't know at the time, a snapping turtle. And so I was like, what's up, giant turtle? I'm gonna pet you, giant turtle. And I put my hand towards the turtle and its little fucking head, well, bigger than my finger, flew out of that shell. And I have killer reflexes back then. I could have been a Formula One driver. I whipped back, but that thing snapped, quite literally as how they're named, snapped super fucking loud and crazy at my finger. And I screamed and ran away. Not 100% away, but I jumped back, probably ran a couple 10 feet back and looked back at it and was like, are you fucking serious? You piece of shit. It was so scary. Oh, so there's just danger out here.

Yeah, fucking Snack-O-Langelo almost took your finger off.

Yeah, it was so scary. And that would happen to me again in my late 20s, but not with a turtle, but with a possum. And so I'll get into that story later or now or whatever you want. But that was a really scary example. But then the possum was a really quick story. Do you remember in Jaws when Brody is like, I can go full steam ahead. Why don't you come down here and chum some of this shit? And then he looks up when he looks back, the fucking Jaws is there. It was exactly that. Because I was bringing a garbage bag out to the garbage cans behind my place in LA. And I whip the top of the garbage can open, but I was talking to Steve or somebody, my cousin. And I was like, oh, hey, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I'm not looking when I opened the garbage can. And when I went to throw the bag in, a fucking possum jumped out and like snapped at me. I'm like, whoa, what the fuck? So I closed the top on. I'm going to went back inside. And then I felt sad that I maybe locked him in. I don't know. So I did go back out to let him out. And I brought him some old bread as a catruse to be like, sorry if I threw a goddamn garbage bag on you and locked you in.

That's a huge mistake. Huge mistake.

Yes. So I went to give him the bread and he like pounced at the bread and started biting at it all crazy. And so I ran away, but he probably had rabies, who fucking knows.

Yeah. I think you have just the appropriate amount of fear instilled in you by the snapping turtle and the possum in terms of, you know, animals are not dangerous, but they are animals. I actually, outside of that dog that I don't remember that my mom tells me about, I don't really have any, you know, I've been stung by a bee and like, you know, bitten by a snake being a kid and stuff, but like I don't really have any scary animal stuff other than those intrusive thoughts. And so I've always been haunted by the idea of being eaten alive. And it's not just me. This is a real fear. I looked it up.

It's also a sexual thing. Are we going to get into vor or whatever?

Oh, my friend. We are going to go down every filthy alleyway.

I worked in a writer's room where we had to learn about that. And that was, I was like, shit. People are fucking messed up.

Well, the fear, according to a site I found called phobias.com, the fear is called voraphobia.

Oh, is that why it's vor for the sexual one?

No, well, I think-

It's the same root I'm saying.

I assume it's the same root word, yeah. It's voraphobia, vararaphobia. There's an extra R in there that I'm having trouble pronouncing. Vararaphobia. And whether you have nightmares about it or intrusive thoughts or just an innate human desire to stay out of the mouth of a predator, I'm sure some of you listening are nodding along. I hope some of you are or were not hitting things that you're afraid of. But I couldn't find much on the actual science of vararaphobia, which is crazy to me because, like drowning or falling, it seems like a fear of being eaten alive must be a fairly common core human fear.

But I can also see it falling to the wayside. It's been like each passing year we're not living in a cave.

Right.

It's got to be like, I don't think, until the possum ends up in your manmade garbage can. I guess I don't think about it.

Well, your possum, you know, you're afraid of being bit or whatever, but you're not afraid of being eaten alive.

I was afraid of being eaten alive. Did I tell you? I think I told Maggie about it, our friend Maggie, that I saw the wolf recently. Like I was walking home from Chipotle and I had to go through like a parking lot of an apartment building. And I was like, oh, is there a way to go around these drug dealers a different way? This like drug deal was happening, this alleyway I was in. And I was like, I don't want to be fucking involved with that. So I started to go around and then I see this, I swear to God, it was fucking four foot tall if it was an inch. Like at least the size of like, you know those stupid giant fucking dogs people own, like the Mastiffs or whatever? It's like, why do you own that? Like are you fucking that dog? Why does it need to be so big?

Yeah, he's so muscular. He has such a nice chest.

You know what I'm saying? The really big stupid dogs. And like, can I hear come the letters? It was at least as big as that, but it was thick, super thick and dark, dark brown or black matted hair. And I literally saw it kind of go around the car into the only spot that might have been, and I don't know, might have been a way through that little apartment complex to go to the street. And I was like, that's a fucking werewolf. And I turned around and just took my chances with the drug deal. Like, just don't make eye contact, go through.

Was this in LA or Connecticut?

This was in LA. This was in LA pretty much right before the holidays. I was like, holy shit, like that's not a dog. I saw no leash. That is a wolf. And wolves can be huge.

Well, it was probably a coyote in LA. There's no wolves in LA.

I don't know. I feel like coyotes are smaller.

But that's the thing, your innate human fear of being eaten alive kicked in and your brain was like, oh, that's a horrific big wolf. And maybe it was a coyote or a slightly big dog.

But yeah, that's what I'm saying is that it was a fear of being eaten alive, not a fear of, I don't know what other fear it would be other than this thing can best me in any kind of one-to-one capacity.

A fear of getting teabagged by a giant dog.

No, not like that. I don't think it was doing it for the lulz. It was doing it. I just don't want to be between it and whatever its other food source was.

Sure, sure. Well, I will say in researching this, it seems like being eaten alive is such a primal fear that I think you're kind of right. A lot of research has moved on from our fear of being eaten alive to research about the way that fears of being consumed affects animals in the food chain and the ways that that fear shapes ecosystems and evolution. And I found a bunch of really interesting research, but it wasn't really all that pertinent. I couldn't find much information on, A, how many people are actually eaten alive by animals every year.

I mean, if they were never found, I guess they're not reporting it, but depends on how consumed they were.

True, true. If they were fully consumed, yeah. And I also couldn't find much on how many people suffer from voraraphobia.

Sounds like you do.

I, yeah, I do. And again, like the voraphobia term, I only found on that phobias.com site, which in and of itself was a pretty hilarious website because it's super generic, and it lists all these different kinds of phobias along with treatment suggestions. And I think it's sort of just like a, it has the same generic treatment suggestions for most of these phobias.

Just avoid them.

Yeah, well, it resulted for me when I was searching in the hilarious headline, Coping Strategies and Tips for Managing Your Fear of Being Eaten. And this is what it suggested. There are several practical tips and coping strategies that can help individuals manage their fear of being eaten alive, including practicing relaxation techniques, challenging negative thoughts, and my favorite, face your fears gradually. Gradually facing your fears can help reduce anxiety and build confidence, which seems like questionable advice for someone whose fear is being eaten alive. Because I don't know, you go to the zoo and stick your arm in the grizzly bear cage or something.

No, I think, well, as soon as you said it, I thought like, okay, what's that? What does that look like? And I guess maybe it's like, you know how people fish for catfish, by like putting their arm or feet or some shit in the water. It's like, maybe it's that. Maybe it's like, oh, I'm gonna let something kind of envelop my arm that isn't going to bite it off.

Yeah.

I don't think, I don't suggest this. I genuinely don't suggest this.

And then reward yourself for taking an important step in your mental health journey.

And then I guess you take that catfish, you eat it.

Well, and the other part of the reason, Ed, is you said that it's hard to find information on vorophobia is because there's a very similar, but much, much, much more popular term out there, vorophilia, which is the exact opposite of a phobia. Vorophilia, usually shortened to just vor.

Which is how I've heard of it.

Is the sexual desire to be consumed by something larger than you. And I don't want to fully derail this episode before we even get started, but ooh baby, what a rabbit hole.

Do you have a sexual desire to be consumed by a rabbit hole? Do you love that shit? You dive right in.

We might talk more about it later, but what's important for now is that the whole conversation around being eaten alive is so strange that somehow the desire for it is more popular than the fear of it. Which I think speaks to something about us as humans. We've climbed so high on the food chain that one of our, which should be a core, impulsive, evolutionary fear, we've managed to turn into a fetish. And talk about spitting in the face of God. We don't spend nearly as much time thinking about the brutal reality of what it means to be prey. But we should.

Part of me, I don't know, when we were looking at it, we were all pretty like, what? You fucking kidding me with this? But then I also thought that, and I think now, have you ever been cold out on a camping trip and then you kind of slither into your fucking sleeping bag and it's warm and it's close to you and it kind of feels like, is it about being eaten alive or is it just about returning to the womb in some way?

Well, I mean.

Because it's just, by being eaten alive, I guess ultimately you want to just be inside something. I don't know.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know. We should ask listeners right in, let us know, do you think it would be fair for Scared All The Time to do an episode on the opposite of being scared? Because I do feel like Vorophilia is a really fascinating fetish, and there's a whole episode, I'm sure, just on that. I know almost nothing about it because I researched mostly the fear, but I feel like there's a lot there.

Now, I'm sure everything that's there is going to make me blush and uncomfortable, but yeah, maybe there's like once a season we'll do like an opposite episode.

I know people fetishize, I mean like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, the 1950s sci-fi film, is like super fetishistic. And I don't think she actually eats anyone in that movie, but she definitely steps on men in high heels. She's definitely throwing people around. It's talk about returning to the womb. If she were to eat anybody, I feel like that would be, there's a whole other layer when it's just a giant ass lady.

Well, I have a comment I'm not ever going to make, so move on from 50 Foot Woman.

Okay, we'll move on.

In terms of returning to the womb, I just don't know that's how you're going to do it.

Sure. Well, I mean, look, who knows? You got to blow her up.

That is true when you're dealing with a big enough villain. At some point in a lot of this fiction, it's like, gotta let him eat me. Gotta let me eat me so I can blow him up from the inside out.

Yeah, true.

And it was like, dude, but a lot of guys are making this suggestion. You're the only one with a fucking heart on. Maybe you shouldn't be the one.

I'm volunteering. God, please, please.

Please give me the fucking grenades. I'd love to go in there. It's like, oh, calm it down, Rico.

Yeah. Oh boy, okay, we went a little off the rails there. I guess it's good to be back and kicking off the cobwebs, huh?

More like the podwebs.

Yes, more like the podwebs, but let's get into it. This week, we're gonna take a look at some of the most horrific stories about people being eaten alive and the animals who did the eating. But before we start, let me just say, to be clear, I love animals, sharks, bears, scorpions, spiders, cockroaches, whatever. I don't step on animals or bugs or anything. The last thing I want is for this episode to turn anyone off to nature. Nature is beautiful. It's awesome. And I don't think any of these animals are monsters. Tons of things get ripped to pieces every day. We just don't think of it as a tragedy because we can't know what if any horror and sadness and fear is going through the mind of prey that isn't human. The point is the idea here isn't to make anyone afraid of any particular animal, just to remind us that we are ultimately nothing more than meat and to treat the animals that think of us that way with respect.

Did you ever see the kids in the hall sketch about the small town who were dealing with shark attacks?

No.

And it's like a Jaws parody, but everyone in town just keeps being like, well, he's just a shark being a shark. You know, we shouldn't even be in there.

It's true. Well, okay, so speaking of, we're gonna start in the water. Do you want to start with sharks or whales?

I am from Connecticut, as everyone knows, and our state animal is the sperm whale, which, you know, I always thought was weird. It's like good luck walking that in a parade. So we can start with that.

All right, well, it's a good one to start with because in some ways, this story might be the most harrowing of them all because most people who are eaten alive don't survive to talk about how horrible it was. But this guy did. His name was James Bartley and he survived being eaten by a whale. I'm going to read from a BBC article here. In the late winter of 1891, the whale ship Star of the East was in the vicinity of the Falkland Islands when it came within sight of a whale. Two boats were dispatched with harpoons to snare and kill the beast, but the lashing of its tail capsized one of the launches, spilling the crew into the sea. All were accounted for except for a single sailor, James Bartley. Ultimately, the whale was killed, the carcass drawn aboard the vessel to begin the process of salvaging valuable resources. By the next day, good progress had been made in removing the layers of blubber from the beast, so a tackle was attached to its stomach to hoist it on deck. Sailors were startled by the spasmodic life within the belly of the whale, and upon further inspection, the missing sailor was found.

What?

Yeah, Bartley was quite mad for two weeks, but upon recovering his senses, he recounted what little he could recall of being dragged under the water.

Okay, so when you say mad, you mean like insane.

I assume so.

Yeah, because he was stewing for two weeks.

I don't think he was walking around going, mm, oh, I'm so mad, dumb whale.

Yeah, I had to just, for our American listeners, I felt like I had to confirm that.

So he said that he could recall being dragged under the water. Struggling for his life, he'd been drawn into darkness, within which he felt a terrible and oppressive heat. He found slimy walls that gave slightly to his touch, but could find no exit. And when his situation finally dawned on him, Bartley lost his senses completely and lapsed into a state of catatonia. Now, during his time inside the whale, the gastric juices of the whale's stomach affected his exposed skin. Ugh. His face, neck and hands were bleached a deathly white with a texture like parchment, a condition from which the skin never recovered. Bartley believed that he would probably have lived inside his house of flesh until he starved as breathing was not a problem. So, first of all, I feel like if this was my kink, the phrase he would have lived inside his house of flesh would have me going. I don't know if there's any vores out there, but what a phrase. I cannot imagine the horror. Like we're gonna do an episode on Buried Alive. That's bad enough, but to be buried alive in a stomach and you know that's where you are and you just can't move or get out, oh God.

No, that's very gross. I guess, I almost prefer being buried alive in a stomach because it's like maybe there'll be some acid that'll bring an end to this. We're being buried alive and we'll discuss it in the other episode when we do it. It does feel like just such a waiting game.

Yeah, well, the article also comes, this BBC article about James Bartley, comes with a section called advice for swallowies. So again, a vor warning here, whew, whew, pull over, stop operating heavy machinery. If you're a vor, just take a seat until we get through this part. According to the BBC, this is what you should do if you are swallowed by a whale. Quote, once inside, sit tight and try not to touch anything if at all possible. Gastric processes.

How big do they think this is? Look, it's like Pinocchio where you're like in a fucking boat, driving around in there.

It's a room with a table.

Oh my God, it's a job interview, so you wanna work in a whale. Okay, let's hear what you have to say.

Gastric processes are invasive and skin does not recover well from encounters with digestive fluids. The process by which gastric acid handles food is slow and wearing clothing, especially of the synthetic variety, is likely to buy you some time. So that's good. If you're thinking of stripping nude inside the belly of a whale, don't do it. Wear your clothes. Escape from the belly of a whale, aside from simple survival, may be far more difficult as the majority of whales, especially the baleen whales that rely on seething minuscule marine life forms for their diet, have complex digestive systems. This isn't in the article, but that means it's bad news for you.

I just feel like that sentence makes me think that it's like cube two hypercube. Once you're in, it's like, there's 13 stomachs and 500 tunnels.

Yeah.

Like how the hell do I get out of here? There's like a guy that's been in there for years. He's like, I don't know. I've tried most of these tunnels, man. And let me just say, it's a complex digestive system.

So these whales may have up to four stomach chambers, rather like the multi-stomach system of a cow, which allows for the controlled channeling of food through the digestive system. There's also, keep in mind, the constant intake of seawater that results from their feeding processes. So unless someone is looking for you, or you have a very large cutting implement and a strong stomach, you may have to be satisfied with simply surviving until starvation takes you, or good fortune saves the day.

So basically, if you get swallowed by a whale, it's like you're in an escape room inside of the Typhoon Lagoon at Disney World.

Basically, yes.

Where it's like, I'm in an escape room where every minute there's a fucking giant wave that's gonna have to crash into me.

Yeah, but I don't think you need a large cutting implement to eat your way out of the belly of a whale.

Eat your way out? No one said eat your way.

I think that's what they're implying.

You added that because you're a lunatic.

I think that's what they're implying with a large cutting implement and a strong stomach.

No, I think the strong stomach is maybe don't get sick or something. Don't get sick from having to chop up the inside of a whale.

Yeah, I guess they mean maybe it's gross, but I would say fucking do it, dude. Listen, you eat the whale, it's two birds with one stone because you're not only providing yourself with sustenance, you tunnel your way out. So I think that would be my vote. Just start biting.

I honestly thought you're gonna be like, cause number one, you're tunneling. Number two, you take a little bit of the whale's power from it with each bite.

Yeah, I mean, listen, if you could tunnel your way out of prison by eating your way through the wall and it made you healthy and strong while you did it, come on, man, who wouldn't?

I don't think that would be a very different Shawshank Redemption. If it was like, Andy ate a little bit of wall every day until he crawled through four football fields of intricate digestive system.

The guy who bites through, he spends three, four, five days slowly gnawing his way through the whale and he's like, I'm gonna be free. And then he just goes into the second stomach.

Oh, I'd be so pissed.

Wrong way.

I also think we need to write a movie that is for no one. That is like a cocky guy who is like a world food eating champion. Like a Nathan hot dog eating guy or like a person who's like going across the country and won every 72 ounce steak challenge type of thing. That he gets eaten by a whale and it's like the whales finally met its match because he's like, I can eat a whale in under an hour, dude.

Well, so there's actually a book that came out last year through MTV books, which I didn't realize was a thing.

I don't know what that would be a thing.

It's written by a guy, a writer named Dan Krauss, who's a great horror writer. It's called Whale Fall. And it's sort of like The Martian, except instead of being trapped on Mars, it's a guy who gets swallowed and trapped in the belly of a whale. And he has to like survive and get out. So people are already there. And I think it's already option to be a movie.

Well, I guess our idea is better because there's a guy who eats this way. I highly thought there's a chapter that says like, don't get full on the bread. That would be one of ours.

True. Exactly. Well, we'll release the competing lower budget whale fall ripoff.

It can't be that hard. I mean, you just throw a light up on a guy under a blanket and he's like, day 46 in this whale. Oh man, I miss my family.

Scared All The Time presents.

Well, you see, we have the Scared Home Video, which is the like fake label I put on all of our fake posters as kind of an homage to a Shrob Home Video. So we'll have to release under Scared Home Video. We will.

Well, of course, whales aren't the first thing that most people are afraid of getting eaten alive by in the ocean. That would be sharks. I'm not sure what's worse, being torn to shreds in a horrific couple seconds or being suffocated and digested in the living flesh coffin over the course of days or weeks. But the reality is that sharks do eat more people than whales and they get the spotlight. So we'd be remiss not to feature at least one death by shark attack here.

And I will say, you know, we will be addressing sharks again. They'll probably get their own episode. We're gonna do a lot more ocean stuff if I have my say on it. So this is not the end all be all, us talking about the ocean. We're just including that because there are animals.

Yes. And because we are scared all the time and we do everything hard as hell, we aren't doing just any shark attack here. I'm covering what for my money is the greatest shark attack story of all time. Some of you may know it from Quince Monologue and Jaws.

I was gonna guess it. I was gonna guess it's the Indianapolis.

USS Indianapolis, if you don't know this story, let me put it in your head to think about why you go to sleep tonight. So the USS Indianapolis was an American battleship operating in the South Pacific in the summer of 1945. It was tasked with delivering some of the key components of the atomic bomb that would get dropped on Hiroshima a few months later, but no one on board knew that at the time. They made the delivery to the island of Tinian and headed back out to sea. And just after midnight on July 28th, the ship was struck by two Japanese torpedoes. The Indianapolis was ripped into and miraculously of the 1,196 men on board, 900 survived. 900 men made it into the water alive. But honestly, getting blown up in the boat was probably a better fate. The Navy intercepted a message from the Japanese saying a boat had been sunk along the Indianapolis' route, but they disregarded it because they thought it was a trap to lure rescue boats to the area. None of the men in the water knew that though. They all assumed help was on its way. Not that it really mattered because by the first night, oceanic white tip sharks, one of the most aggressive species of shark in the world, began devouring the dead. I'm gonna quote from an article in the Smithsonian Magazine here. The first night, the sharks focused on the floating dead, but the survivors' struggles in the water only attracted more and more sharks, which could feel their emotions through a biological feature known as a lateral line, receptors along their bodies that pick up changes in pressure and movement from hundreds of yards away. As the sharks turned their attentions toward the living, especially the injured and bleeding, sailors tried to quarantine themselves away from anyone with an open wound. And when they died, they would push the body away, hoping to sacrifice the corpse in return for a reprieve from a shark's jaw. Many survivors were paralyzed with fear, unable even to eat or drink from the meager rations they'd salvaged from their ship. One group of survivors made the mistake of opening a can of Spam, but before they could taste it, the scent of the meat drew a swarm of sharks to them.

Oh no.

So they got rid of their meat rather than risk a second swarming. So it's a buffet. It's a living buffet.

Well, it's the inverse of like shooting fish in a barrel. It's now it's fish shooting men in a barrel.

Yeah. Many of these sailors group together with those at the center, usually being the safest and those on the edges getting picked off.

Well, yeah, they say in all animal attacks, right? You're only as good as the slowest, you know? Whatever that phrase is, right? Where it's like...

And I feel like this is very much like, if you watch a documentary on like wildebeests and lions or something, like the older ones on the edges are the ones always getting picked off. And that's basically what was happening here. To add to the horror, some of the survivors were delirious from pain or blood loss or exhaustion. And so some of them started drinking salt water, which I don't know if anybody, most people probably know this, but drinking salt water is like a big no-no for anyone who wants to be a living person. You absolutely will suffer from like salt poisoning and further dehydration. And these people, their lips and tongues would swell up and they would foam at the mouth and then die. But when you're all grouped together in these like little survival groups and someone in the middle of you dies, a lot of these corpses drag their living comrades into the water with them as they sank.

Yeah, because these people must be so exhausted after like day and night of just having to paddle like themselves, you know, whatever the word is.

Treading, when you're treading water.

Yeah, so just day and night of treading water, you must be so exhausted.

Yeah.

That if something now is weighing you down, because I guess they have boots on and stuff, you know, they were like on a ship.

Oh, for sure. I mean, yeah, they have boots on and who knows, supplies and backpacks and-

And if I'm a shark, I don't know how they communicate, but there's gotta be sharks being like, listen, you won't believe what I'm about to tell you. What? I mean, they're just here.

They're just, they're not going anywhere.

They're not, like, they just, it's been a while, bro. Like we keep eating them and they just like, they're still here. It's crazy. You gotta get down here. This is a fucking buffet, dude. This is golden corral, dude.

Yeah, the worst part of this, I think, was probably the night.

I think that's what Quinn says.

Because survivors gave testimony that the ocean air would be filled with the horrible screams of men being bit beneath the surface, their limbs torn from their bodies as the sharks ate them alive. That to me really cuts to the core of the fear of being eaten alive. Like, can you imagine, you're floating for days dehydrated, starving, and you can't even sleep because you know, this is something we might come back to a lot in season two because I'm fascinated by this, but dread, the anticipation of something awful happening is sometimes way worse than the thing actually happening. And this is like, you're up all night, just hearing men you know, men you are friends with, screaming and screaming and screaming as they just slowly experience one of the worst deaths imaginable.

And if it's a moonless night, I mean, it's fucking dark out at night. There's no light pollution. So you are just maybe can't see more than 10 feet in any direction. And you just hear in the darkness, like in the inky blackness of, I don't know, shimmering water, a guy just screaming at the top of our lungs. And you know that below you is thousands of feet, potentially, of predators on a crazy telephone line, telephone line, all getting calls, like you gotta get down here. I don't go in the water. Like I said, we're gonna have more episodes in the water. I don't fucking do it, period. And I recognize that there are plenty of good sharks out there, but I won't go in the water just because I can't see down there. And I just get so, like you said, it's either dread or like my imagination runs wild.

Oh, stepping on a piece of seaweed, forget it. I'll be out of the water the rest of the day.

Yeah, yeah, it's gotta be the scariest of all things. And also, can you sleep when treading water? Like, will you sink? Like if you're not wearing a life preserver, like what's gonna keep you up when you're sleeping?

Well, that's, I think a lot of guys were clinging to wreckage that was floating or life preservers. And I think the whole like guys drowning other guys was, you know, one guy had a life preserver and there's four guys hanging on to him. And then they all start to die. And you know, that guy's too weak to even hang on at that point. So after four days of this, a Navy pilot finally spotted the men and called in a rescue. Of the 900 quote unquote lucky survivors who made it to the water, only 317 survived. So about 600 guys died in four days. No one really knows for sure how many of them were eaten versus drowned or just succumbed to injuries that they'd suffered when the ship was blown up. But estimates range anywhere from a few dozen to 150 men were eaten alive over the course of four days by sharks. So fuck you ocean, fuck you sharks. JK, don't eat sharks or kill them. They're fine, but just awful.

Shark being a shark.

Shark being a shark. Now, of course, there are plenty of land animals that can eat humans alive too. It's not exclusive to the ocean.

But not 604 days.

Not 604 days.

I don't think there's a single land-based creature. Unless there was a now extinct form of zebra that was like, each of its legs was dynamite or something. I don't know. I don't know how they accomplish a feat like that.

I did see someone tweet once just the sentence, imagine horses were predators. Yeah, damn dude, we'd be fucked.

Well, unless they shoot dynamite out of their fucking ass, I don't know how they kill 600 people in three days, four days.

True, true.

Well, here's a question. In terms of like danger, I know we're moving on from the ocean onto like these part munitions, part animal creatures that we're coming up with now. A whale, there's nothing you can do, okay? It's like, it's a whale, too big to argue with. Now, it is interesting that like every year there's shark week and what have you. And it seems like at some point, inevitably, someone's always like, just punch in the nose. You just punch in the nose. You stand your ground. You're looking in the fucking eyes or whatever. And so there is potentially, even if it's complete bullshit, I guess there is some semblance of, well, there are, you know, defense options that I guess I can employ against a shark where a whale, it's like, hey, I ate you, man. I ate you. I didn't even know you're in me. I'm so, you're not an issue at all.

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's kind of interesting that we haven't just evolved to have that as a natural reaction in the face of a predator. Like you'd think our DNA would have figured that out by now that if you see, I guess not enough people get eaten by sharks for that to be a genetic thing. And I guess, yeah, because if you get attacked by a shark, the chances that you're gonna survive to create progeny with your mutated shark-proof DNA is pretty unlikely.

So I think we did evolve and the evolution was let's not go in the water.

We built missiles. We built torpedoes.

We have torpedoes, but also let's just not go in the water. We've talked about this before in the show. We're gonna get into more water. There's so much unexplored stuff down there. We are just so poorly equipped to maneuver down there that it's like, I don't wanna fight anything that that's its natural habitat. But shark we keep saying, different things keep saying, bop them in the nose, you'll be fine maybe. So who knows?

You got a whole, I mean, the muscle memory you'd have to have to be like, all right, there's a great white shark. It's swimming right at me. I'm gonna hold still. I'm gonna bop it on the nose. I'm gonna give it a little boop.

But like hold still unless it's attacking me in two feet of water. I have no real options to maneuver my body in a meaningful way. Which I think is why like boxers train like in deep sides of pools to like, cause there's so much resistance in your punches. Like on land, I've done those like at a bar and you like put money in and then you punch it to see like what your score is, how hard. I am very unsuccessful at getting a high score on those in the gravity I'm used to. I can't even imagine like I would get negative numbers if they put that underwater. I would have no force of this punch. So I think it's all bullshit. I think people just say like, if you get into it, try and punch them and likelihood is you'll never get back to tell us if it worked.

True. Well, of the land animals that can eat humans alive, we know one for sure that booping it on the nose won't work, the grizzly bear. The grizzly bear is responsible for some of the most horrific land based animal attacks in history. And there's one in particular we know for sure, the case of Timothy Treadwell, who was the subject of a really excellent Werner Herzog documentary called Grizzly Man. Timothy Treadwell spent years in an area known as the Grizzly Maze in Alaska, where he got way, way, way too close to bears. He recorded all of this and made his own sort of off the cuff animal documentary of his life living with the grizzly bears. And the footage, a lot of it's in the the Herzog documentary. It's crazy. He thought of himself as the protector of these bears. And of course, grizzly bears don't really need protection as much as they need food. And so one trip ended really terribly for Timothy Treadwell. He and his girlfriend, who didn't even want to come on this stupid trip, were camping in the Grizzly Maze when they were attacked in the middle of the night by a grizzly bear. Now there's a lot of theories that it was old, maybe it was starving. No one's really sure why it attacked, but it got into Treadwell's tent and ate both Timothy and his girlfriend alive. Even more upsetting, the entire ordeal was caught on tape. Treadwell, because he recorded all of his encounters with bears, had his camera on him. And on this night, the camera was turned on somehow. No one's entirely sure if it was in the scuffle or if he had it on prior to the attack and forgot to turn it off, but the camera recorded the attack. It had the lens cap on, so it was just audio. And the audio has never been released. In Grizzly Man, Werner Herzog listens to the audio through headphones, turns to the woman next to him and says, the tape should be destroyed. No one should ever listen to it. No one should ever hear those sounds. And I can tell you he's right, because while researching this episode, I found audio on YouTube that may or may not be a clip of the actual recording. And just don't go looking for it.

I won't, but basically what you're saying is, is Warner was like, hey, this should be destroyed. And she was like, you got it, Wink, and then uploaded it to fucking RedTube.

I don't know who, I would imagine that the woman in, cause I think the woman in the documentary is like one of Timothy's exes or something. I don't think she did it. I'm sure if it's real, it was probably uploaded by someone in law enforcement or in the park service. Cause I'm sure when something like that happens, at least internally, it probably gets copied and passed around for people to listen to. So, somebody might have uploaded it. And I mean, I don't know what to make of it. I watch a lot of horror movies, as you know. And if these screams are fake, it's people say this all the time. If someone's acting, they deserve an Oscar. But if these screams are fake, they deserve an Oscar. It's some of the most gut wrenching, horrific, just like there's something primal about it. It's the sound of man as animal, like realizing it's dying, realizing this is how it ends. It's really awful.

Is it him and the girlfriend that you hear? Is it her just being like, I don't even want to fucking come on this trip. Just like arguing till the end, just being like-

No, she's not making jokes.

No, no, no, I didn't say she was making jokes. This would be an impassioned go fuck yourself in the last, you know. That's what I would be doing. I would literally ask the bear to give me a minute to just yell at this guy and then they can devour us.

It's mostly Timothy screaming. At one point he passes out and then seems like he comes to as he's being eaten and like realizes all over again that he's being eaten. She screams. I think at one point he tells her to run. Another point he tells her to hit it. And I don't know. I think the tape's supposed to be like six minutes long and the upload I found is only like two minutes. So I don't know if there's more or what, but yeah, it's really fucking awful. And something that is really horrific to think about or something to be aware of, I guess, is that grizzly bears don't care if their prey is dead or alive. According to an excerpt I found from Walking Home, A Journey in the Alaskan Wilderness by Lynn Schooler, quote, big cats go directly for the head, killing with a single bite that penetrates the brain. Crocodiles drag their prey to deep water, spinning over and over to kill by trauma and drowning. But when a bear strikes, it simply rushes in like a locomotive and knocks its prey to the ground. Once the prey is down, the bear pins it with its paws and just starts feeding. It doesn't need to kill you first. A bear may take its time as it tears random mouthfuls from your back, buttocks, legs and shoulders, or goes in through the stomach for the organs. It does not care if you scream or for how long, it may even feed for a while and then come back for more later.

Bears are assholes, it sounds like. I understand it's a bear just being a bear, but you got cats over there being like, this is, it's inhumane to do what you're doing, bears. And you have crocodiles being like, you can't flip them? Just flip them a few times. You don't have to worry about this. Also, it's like, we're all trying to sleep over here and we got people screaming in the bear part of the woods. Just do us all a favor. Be a good neighbor, dude. Just fucking chomp them. Chomp their head and then do what you want.

Well, what's really interesting is that grisly bears aren't even carnivores. They're omnivores.

Oh my god.

Their diet's like 90% vegetarian.

That really confirms they're just assholes.

Yeah, they're just douchebags. Well, they eat meat, much of it is scavenged. A lot of it is salmon from the river, which we're not going into whether or not salmon feel fear and pain, but they're catching salmon. They're not ripping people to shreds.

Well, salmon's a gateway drug.

It is, yeah. They aren't really violent animals. It's just when they do want fresh meat, you really don't want to be anywhere near them. And in general, you probably shouldn't be anywhere near them anyway. They're wild animals, not your friends, no matter how cute they seem.

And if I'm not mistaken, they're fucking huge, right?

You're not mistaken. They are very big. I think some of them are like 12 feet tall on their hind legs. They're huge. They're really, really big animals.

Do they hibernate?

Yeah, yeah. And that's one of the theories about this treadwell bear is I forget if it was in like the dead of winter or approaching winter, but when they finally, they caught and killed the bear that had eaten them.

Yeah, you gotta jaws that, right?

Yeah.

You gotta like, I don't want the little kitten boy spilling out of this bear. Like, you gotta check this bear later, make sure it's the right guy.

It was thin. They suspect it was probably starving, possibly injured. And it went for what it, I don't know why a bear would consider a human easy, I mean, maybe if the human was asleep already, it considered it easy prey, but yeah, with bears, the only hope you have, they will outrun you, they will outhunt you, they can, I think there's probably a biologist out there who can correct me on this, but their sense of smell is like, I wanna say I read it was like seven to 10 times stronger than that of dogs, and dogs are like 300 times stronger than humans.

Oh wow.

So like bears, you're screwed. The only thing you can do is, if you make yourself real big and yell, that can scare, because they're scared. They don't wanna deal with a big animal. So if you stretch your arms out, stand on your tippy toes, clank things together and make yourself seem intimidating, there's accounts of bears charging, and someone does that, and the bear just like, whoa, like jumps back.

It's gotta be, let's say it's three in 10, it works out. It's embarrassing for everyone. Like of the three in 10 it works out, you watch that back on video and you're like, that bitch ass bear, look at it stupid. It was posturing, you know? But then for the other seven in 10, it's just a person looking like an idiot and then dying. Like at least everyone gets to walk away a little embarrassed. But if it doesn't work, it's just like, and you can see right here, the moment Greg knew it wasn't gonna work.

There's a far side comic in that somewhere. There's a couple other animals I want to touch on before we get to the grand finale here. So pythons, what about pythons? Do pythons eat people alive? Well, yes. Or anacondas, any large constricting snake, that happens. Though I guess there's a question of how alive you are when they start to eat you, because I didn't know this until I was doing the research. I mean, I knew they killed you by constricting, right? Like they wrap around you, they're just one giant muscle, and they wrap around you and squeeze the life out of you. And I guess I always thought they suffocated you. Like they squeeze you so tight you can't breathe. But what actually happens is they squeeze you so tightly that your heart literally can't pump because the pressure against it is too great. So they literally squeeze you so tight your heart stops. And then they start to swallow you. Tragically, they usually target smaller prey like children or babies.

Well, what's the size? Like what is it that we, because we've held ball pythons, which is a nonvenomous constricting snake, but they're small, we're in control. Like what size before it becomes like a problem?

I don't know. I do know that the largest anaconda ever found in Brazil was 30 feet long and weighed over 500 pounds.

Okay, how does Brazil not have a space program? If I fucking saw a 30 foot long 500, 600 pound python, I'd be like, I'm getting off this fucking planet, dude. Like, I'm not gonna be around this thing.

Okay, so it looks like Brazil has had a space agency in some form or another since the 1960s, but Ed still thinks they, and to a lesser extent, Australia, should be leaders in the field based on the terrestrial nightmares they live amongst.

There's a great photo in the history of cryptozoology of supposedly like a 50 to 100 foot long snake taken from a plane or a helicopter. It's a black and white photo. I mean, there's a lot of rumors that there's snakes out there that get way bigger than 33 feet long.

Their counterparts in the ocean get huge. There's like sea eels and like weird sea snake things that are at least in terms of like museums, so maybe they're extinct, but I still think there's some biggies, man, some fucking hundred foot long fuckers in the ocean. But yeah, I guess it wouldn't even be that hard, right? Like to hide if you're in the fucking rain forest, all that canopy, unless someone's there and it can probably just curl up around something. So I bet you they can get by without being found maybe.

Yeah, I found some stories of humans who have been eaten alive or eaten by pythons or anacondas. And it does seem like there's evidence that some of those people had medical issues before they died. So they were already basically prone, which has got to be. Can you imagine that like I've fallen and I can't get up, lady. She's just laying there and an anaconda comes up over her and like, you know, you're screwed.

There is no like what life alert commercial, you can't press that button enough, you know, like no one's coming. Like there's no way into this. But then also I would imagine if you are a snake, I don't think you're swallowed quickly. I think it's like this whole slow process with its jaw unhinging and now you're being like massaged into its body. So it probably, I would think there's like snakes who have a venom that can maybe stun you or something to keep the prey kind of through this whole automatic car wash that is going into this snake's body.

Yeah, death by weighted blanket.

Yeah, cause otherwise how much of it does it need to get of you before you're just be like, this is my life now. Like I feel like it would have to get up to my knees. If it, for whatever reason got up to my knees, I've been talking foot first here, cause I'm running and it gets me in the back of the foot. I think at that point, I'm just talking to it, being like, come on bud. But up until then I'd be trying to kick and stuff.

Well, but that's the thing. You're dead before that, I think in most of these cases, that's why they constrict you. So they constrict you and they stop your heart and you die and then they swallow you.

Oh, so it doesn't even need that. Well, honestly, that's not bad. I'll take that. I'll take that momentary and or extended momentary.

Yeah, and don't think it's quick.

Yeah, I'll take the like, squeeze me till I pop over. Slowly devour.

You're turning the vores on again.

I will take squeeze me till I pop over, very slowly consume me while I'm alive, but can't move because of some fucking, you know, Jurassic Park venom.

Yeah, no, there's not a lot of venom involved. There is, I'm going to forget the name of it now, but for anyone interested, there is a show that was on history, maybe history channel or discovery channel. It lasted one season. It's these two guys who get bitten by more and more dangerous things.

I fucking hate, I hate society we live in.

One of the last things they get bitten by is, I believe is some kind of large Python or Anaconda. And holy fuck, it basically ends the show. Like the show never came back. It's really intense. Again, I'll put it in the show notes.

You're saying it's got really strong jaws and it like crushed them or because they're nonvenomous, right? Like a Python.

Right, no, they're nonvenomous and it doesn't constrict him. They just get it to bite him, but it fucks him up.

There's not enough money for me. There's just not enough money where I would host that. It's just not. And I'm broke all the time, but I'm not like let something sting me broke.

Dude, I went down a rabbit hole. I think at one point I might have been looking for the show on YouTube. And there's multiple people who have started versions of that exact same thing on YouTube. And one of them, I think spun it into having one of the largest wilderness YouTube channels. So he started as a watch me get stung by this wasp, and I'll tell you how much it sucks. And then turned it into, he gets more views than National Geographic.

I hate that. I hate what I'm hearing. I just, it's not great for society. It's not great for that guy. And the worst part of it is like, it's one thing to have a show on Discovery Channel or History Channel or something, and there's like a crew and it's like, we have a staff that we've hired of like medical professionals and like paramedics on set. But if you're just a YouTube channel where it's like, babe, babe, bring in that wasp, babe. And then it's like, okay, let it get near me, put sugar on my hand, get it on my hands. And then like, he starts swelling up and it's like, I don't know, just no one there to really, like it's not something I want to start in my fucking apartment, you know?

No.

Or alone outside in the woods.

The guy that grew it into a big juggernaut had, he was a trained, I don't know if he was a biologist or a zoologist or whatever, but like he had some training. And at least all the episodes I saw, he did have medical professionals. Some of these other people probably don't though.

No, I do think if you were the person who trained him, if they went to like, I don't know, they went to a wildlife international university or some made up thing I just came up with. But if it's like, hey, did you hear about one of our alumni who gets stung like for a living? Do you have to put out a press release? That's like, this is not what we teach here. We teach to learn about animals, support their habitats, help them. We do not, there is no, you can't major here in getting bit a little bit more each week.

By a scorpion, yeah. Well, another thing I saw this guy get bit by, which I also wanted to cover here briefly because I think it's an animal that people, when they hear eaten alive, they probably think of piranhas. Oh. So I've seen this, the same guy we were just talking about, he does do an episode where he gets bitten by a piranha and it rips off a chunk of his finger. But interestingly, when I looked at the people who have been eaten alive by piranhas, I didn't really find much. People have definitely been attacked by them, but there are almost no corroborated stories of people actually being devoured and killed by piranhas.

Except for in movies, right? Because in movies, it's always like they're descended on by a hundred piranha and then it's just a skeleton.

Yeah, and I mean, it certainly seems like if you wanted to starve piranhas and then feed someone to them, I'm sure you probably could. I did, someone on the internet, a scientist of some import or whatever, said that it would take 300 to 500 piranhas, I think like six to eight minutes or something, to strip the flesh from a 180 pound human. So it could be done, but you're talking about a lot of piranhas and they have to be very, very hungry. It's probably not gonna happen in the wild. I did find one story from 2021 that's so absurd, it almost sounds like a Marx Brothers skit or something.

Or a Bond movie, a Bond villain.

No, well, apparently a group of guys were fishing in, again, in Brazil, maybe the most dangerous place in the world except for Australia.

Yeah, Australia is not great either because they just got spiders the size of your head, dude.

Yeah, so these guys are fishing and somehow they accidentally disturbed a beehive. They were swarmed stung and all three men jumped into the lake to avoid the bees. But in a real sitcom, kind of like, oops, the lake was filled with piranhas. So two of the guys managed to swim to shore, but the third was found dead. His face had been shredded by the fish bites. And it is unclear if he died from being eaten alive or drowning. But the article notes that he was, quote, found in a certain position that is commonly seen in drowning, which I don't know what that is. Just floating.

I don't know either. I can't actually, I just closed my eyes when you said it to like try and picture what that would be. And I don't know.

Floating face down.

Or just holding your mouth and throat. I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know why they don't just say the position he was found in. But yeah, they don't know for sure if he was eaten alive or drowned. But either way, pretty rough way to go.

Imagine being a coroner. Coroner in Brazil. And every night, it's like 13 different potential causes of death on each body. And it's like, oh, I mean, the guy's got bee stings, he's got a scorpion bite, he's got fucking a couple pieces missing from this, his heart was squeezed. And it was like, what happened to this guy? He's like, he went fishing.

I gotta.

Okay, he went fishing.

Yeah, if this had happened to me, I'd be the dead guy because there'd be this deep part of me that when I got stuck on the bees that jumped into the lake and there were piranhas, I just would not be able to stop laughing at the absurdity of like, the like, bleh.

No, I think you would laugh after, when you survived being like, could you believe the Rube Goldberg machine of danger we just went through? But I think at the time, you'd probably sound like that fucking bear video. Just primal guttural screams, trying to punch a piranha. Trying to like, get the piranhas and bees to start a war, to leave you alone. Like, make them fight each other.

Well, Ed, we have two more animals left on the list that have eaten people alive. The second to last one is the smallest animal that's ever eaten someone alive. Do you want to try to guess what it is?

I'm gonna guess insect, but you're saying animal, so it kind of doesn't seem like it would fit.

No, well, you're close. Scabies, dude.

The fuck is a scabie?

A scabie is a little parasite that burrows under your skin and lays eggs, causing inflammation, itching, redness and a pimple-like rash. They are-

Is it lice?

Super contagious. Basically, they're lice, yeah. I think I actually got these once when I was a kid. My Nona had a, what do you call it, a garbage pit in her backyard, like a-

Garbage pit?

No, what's the word?

She had a garbage pit in her backyard. She's got a can. You'd have to city pick it up.

No, no, no. She would compost. She had a compost heap. Oh, okay.

That's different entirely.

Yeah. Where she would just dump all her vegetable pieces and rotting food, whatever. And I rode a little tricycle down the hill and I accidentally fell into the compost heap. And I remember having some weird burrowing bug in my skin that I had to take medicine for. I think it might have been scabies. But in any case, they are animals. They burrow under your skin. They leave these eggs. They're super contagious. And they can be really horrific if left untreated. This case is a little controversial because again, it brings into question the definition of what exactly it means to be eaten and what the exact cause of death is. But I approve it for this episode because it makes me feel gross inside. So this happened in Georgia in 2018. A 93 year old woman named Rebecca Zenny was confined to her bed in a nursing home. Ms. Zenny had actually had a pretty remarkable life up to this point. She'd worked at a naval yard during World War II and then was a model in New York City and then worked at a TV station in Chicago. So she'd seen it all. She kind of had the American dream. But by 2010, she was suffering from dementia and she got moved into the Shepherd Hills nursing home by her daughter. At some point, reports of a scabies infestation at this nursing home were reported to the state, but no investigation was ever undertaken. And according to experts, that is what resulted in Zenny catching a case of scabies and being, quote, eaten alive by millions of parasitic mites over the course of several months or years.

Oh, what the fuck?

So this woman was caught these mites and somehow they were left untreated for a very long time to the point that pictures before her death show her skin flaking off and one of her hands had turned completely black.

Oh, buddy. I do wonder, 2018, I'd have to look it up. Was this around the time or maybe before, I don't know, when just hedge funds started buying up all the retirement homes and just one by one removing amenities and things for the, and we're dealing with that right now and that's political or whatever, but yeah, I can see how things maybe got understaffed and underhelped and what have you once it became this profit margin machine that retirement homes have sort of become.

Yeah, well, to quote from a report by ABC7, quote, there was a conversation at this nursing home with a healthcare provider about being careful about touching Ms. Zenni's hand for fear that it might fall off her body, her lawyer, Stephen Chance, claimed in an interview.

I don't wanna laugh, it's so fucking horrible, but it is just like, hey, maybe avoid the hand that just, falling, yeah, that's dying, separate from the rest of her body.

Dude, I don't, so to further quote from this article, forensic pathologist, Dr. Chris Sperry, estimates hundreds of millions of mites were living inside Zenni at the time of her death and gave the cause of her death as septicemia due to crusted scabies. Quote, this is one of the most horrendous things I have ever seen in my career as a forensic pathologist, Dr. Perry said. Having seen what I've seen with Ms. Zenni, I think that is frankly a good characterization. I would seriously consider calling this homicide by neglect.

Yeah. I mean, the fact that there are conversations where people are like recognizing that there's an issue, that she has mummified fucking hands.

Yeah.

And that you think at some point in that fucking shit, at least bring her lotion or something. Like, and what could you do? You got a hundred million scabies in you, just light me on fire.

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure she already felt like she was probably on fire. And I would like to think at this point, the daughter was out of the picture or died or something. And like, I don't know how she clearly didn't have any family visiting her at this point. So I don't know.

Or they did. And it was like, nobody, nobody stared her hand. Let's just get through this.

Yeah. So her flesh wasn't consumed literally, but she was essentially eaten alive by millions of microscopic bugs.

I hate this story. I hate this story because there is fucking people who could have helped. It's not like there's a bear. It's just like, hey, it's been years of a person complaining.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like you don't want to do anything here. You don't want to look into this.

Yeah.

Fucking Medicaid doesn't cover this.

The doctor's like, I don't know. I mean, last time we asked her if she was all right, she opened her mouth and millions of bugs came out. So she didn't say anything.

She green mild them.

She's probably fine. So the last animal that eats people alive, Ed, you're going to be so pleased. It's more cunning than any of these other predators. It's a mammal. It kills on land and in water and it can cook.

Better be people.

It is indeed human beings.

I knew we were coming.

Cannibalism is going to be a whole other episode.

Yes, but I do hope that the fucking first people these people eat are the people who were in charge of watching over that old woman.

Well, if Hannibal Lecter were real, I feel like he would definitely put them on a menu. That's not the case here.

Do you ever think it's lazy that they just changed one letter from Cannibal to name that guy?

Well, they, I think you mean the author, Thomas Harris, is a guy. He changed it, but yes, it's a little lazy. But Hannibal was also like a warlord, right? At one point back in the-

No, Hannibal, yeah, he, was it the Punic Wars that Hannibal fought in?

I don't remember.

Yeah, he had elephants. He brought elephants to like-

He was the elephant guy, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He wasn't the Elephant Man, which is, I'm sure, another episode.

And Hannibal Burris, Hannibal Burris, he kills.

He kills on stage.

Kills on stage. I wanted to highlight one of the craziest cannibalism stories I've ever heard because this victim was partially eaten while very much alive. And we know that because he asked to be. And we know that because this entire thing is on video.

What? How am I just hearing about this?

First, we have to go back to Germany. 1961, on December 1st, a man named Waltrude Mywase, Waltrude Mywase, Muse? Maybe it's just Muse, I don't know.

We never look up how to pronounce anything.

He welcomed his son, Armin, into the world. By the time Armin was eight, Waltrude had abandoned him and planted the seeds for him to become a monster. As Armin grew into adolescence, he found himself despairing and deeply lonely, feelings that he blamed on his father's abandonment of the family. He kept all this emotion bottled up and became a productive and pretty normal member of society. He was a computer repair technician who mowed his neighbor's lawn, helped friends fix their cars, and hosted charming dinner parties. But Armin wasn't well. He developed an obsession with serial killers. And worse, he was starting to wrestle with some new urges. He wanted to find a way to become one with someone who would never abandon him. And he felt that the only way he could do that was to eat them. So when his mother died, the 39-year-old Armin placed an ad on a forum on the internet called The Cannibal Cafe.

What year was this?

2000, I think, or 2001.

Fuck, I love the internet in this era.

Oh, dude.

It really is just like, it was a different time.

It was.

You didn't even need the dark web yet. It was just like, any niche will do, no oversight. rotten.com was, I think, a lot of people our age's first experience seeing something we definitely shouldn't have.

Well, and I think, I want to say the Cannibal Cafe forums played a role in the Cannibal Cop story in the NYPD too.

Yeah, and forums were just a thing too. They were usually public forums and you said to make an account to like write on them.

Yeah.

But there was no like age gating. They had no IDs, it was all anonymous.

No, dude. The internet was wild back then. I'm glad we were around for it.

I drove to fucking a flu. I flew to Atlanta, Georgia to meet people I met on the internet around 2001, 2002.

That's crazy, I never did that.

Yeah, my parents were like, oh, is this okay? But they also didn't know what the internet was. And I was like, yeah, we all make anime music videos, mom. It's gonna be fine. And I still talk to those people. I stayed with them on my drive across the country when I first moved to LA.

Well, hello, folks. I hope you're listening to this episode. You sound very nice.

They're the best.

Well, as long as you didn't meet them on the Cannibal Cafe, because that is where Armin met, well, the person that he was trawling for, a quote, young, well-built man who wants to be eaten, end quote. Now, as we discussed earlier, there are a not insignificant number of people in the world with a sexual desire to be consumed. And perhaps unsurprisingly, a bunch of them were hanging out in the Cannibal Cafe. A number of them responded to Armin's post. And we don't know exactly how many of these people actually entertain the idea. But when the time came to make it happen, they all backed out. Apparently Armin was as big on consent as he was on cannibalism and respected his potential victims' wishes.

I don't hate that.

No one was made to do anything they didn't want to do. And it seemed Armin might never fulfill his desires. Until March of 2001, when he got a reply from a man named Bernd Jurgen Armando Brandes.

I don't think he even had to tell us his name if it's that butchered. Just say you got a reply from a guy named Bernd.

He got a reply from Bernd Jurgen Armando Brandes, a 43 year old engineer from Berlin. And their relationship must have developed quickly because I don't know what date he got the reply, but on March 9th, 2001, Brandes and Armin met up in Rothenburg where Armin lived. They stopped by a pharmacy for supplies and headed back to Armin's home. Once there, Brandes swallowed 20 sleeping pills, drank a bottle of cough syrup, a bottle of peppermint schnapps and asked Armin, do you want to guess what he asked, Ed?

Are you seeing hat man or is it just me?

No, he may have, but more distressingly, he asked Armin to bite his penis off. Armin tried to bite his penis off, but couldn't chew through it. So he got a kitchen knife and cut it off.

He had to bob at that.

And at this point, Brandis asked if he could eat his own penis. So Armin let Brandis chew on his own cutoff penis.

I have a question.

Yes, Ed, you sir.

With his hand raised.

Yes.

You kind of skimmed over, you said that they went to a pharmacy to pick up supplies.

Yeah.

And I know he's taken all these sleeping pills and shit. How does that help in any way with, I figured they would need some sort of localized anesthetic. If I'm the guy, I don't want to feel pain during this procedure.

Well, they didn't get any localized anesthetic. I did see some of the reporting was that he also took a number of painkillers, but it seemed a little bit unclear as to whether or not he was taking sleeping pills or painkillers. But essentially, yes, the sleeping pills, cough syrup and peppermint schnapps was to put him completely out of it and slow moving and tired and not feeling much pain.

No fucking way. I still think they're pain. What you just described might get me on a dance floor. It's not gonna make me not feel a person really have trouble biting my dick off.

20 sleeping pills that puts you on the dance floor?

You're gonna need at least to get me out there.

What happens if you do cocaine? You can just dance off the planet.

No, I just complain really fast about how we shouldn't even have a dance floor to anyone who will listen and I'll just sweat. But I just feel like I would need more than that to not feel someone gnaw at my dick.

I would assume that painkillers were involved at some point here. But yes, so Brandeis tries to eat his own penis, but it's too tough and as he puts it, chewy.

God knows, no one's cooking anything? Not throwing this in a fucking skillet, dude? You gotta prepare it like any other meat.

Slow your roll, dog. We're getting there.

Sorry, it's just so. This one, I'm just shocked and surprised. I'm not upset like what happened to the old woman. These people deserve each other, but it is like fucking for a couple of guys who know how to use the, he's not an idiot, he's working at a computer company. Fucking figure out how to eat people, dude. This is the worst way to eat people.

Well, we know the level of detail here because before they started doing all of this, the pair set up a video camera. There's four hours of footage of what happened to Brandis.

And you watched this in preparation for the podcast?

I did not, no. Apparently, it has been leaked. It was never, again, it was not footage that was ever released. Apparently, you can find it. This was, I would never, I do not care to watch this.

Did I ever tell you about the old woman at Blockbuster when I worked there who came in and asked for faces of death?

No, I don't think you did.

I was working at Blockbuster and an old woman, I mean old.

Yeah. Are you sure she asked for faces of death or did she say she was seeing faces of death?

No, no. I remember like it was yesterday. She came in, she had a list from her grandson of movies that she was to pick up for him. And one of them was faces of death. And I was like, yeah, we don't have that here, lady.

Yeah.

And she's like, oh, is it like, is it a movie? I'm like, no, that's just like footage of beheadings and shit. Like we don't have that DVD here.

Although it has since come out that most of that stuff was fake.

I'm assuming it all had probably been fake for them to even have like that DVD come out, right? I mean, I don't know how that works exactly. I mean, we did watch Cannibal Holocaust together and I can't unsee that horrific shit that was real. So yeah, sorry to interrupt, but that is, I think about that woman pretty regularly.

So after Brandis couldn't eat his own penis because it was too chewy, which honestly sounds like a Brandis problem.

Okay, new question. I'm sorry for the people who hate that I interrupt, but new question.

By the way, for anyone who complains that Ed interrupts, it's literally his job. I don't think you want to hear this show without him interrupting.

But maybe you're getting to this and then I was wrong to interrupt. But was there a deal in place where it's like Brandis, whatever his fucking name is, was like, okay, you can eat me, but at the end, I need to die? Because if it's not the case, I'm like, you can have part of my arm, the part I don't use. But if it's like, hey, don't start with something I'm definitely gonna want to use after this.

No, I think Brandis was like, this was obviously, well, I shouldn't say obviously, but it was, I think, pretty clearly sexual for both of them. And I don't know for sure, because I don't think anyone really had ever asked him, but Brandis must've been basically vor. Like he took vor to its logical conclusion.

But the important word there is conclusion, because now you're, now you're fucking eunuch.

What he says on camera, because this was a big part of the trial later.

He says this was a big mistake.

He says, oh no, I see the hat man. No, he says, now do it, right, before Armin cuts his penis off. So he very clearly wanted this. So anyway, he couldn't chew it. Armin got to work cooking Brandis' penis. He fried it in a pan with salt, pepper, wine and garlic and added some of Brandis' fat for flavor, but ended up burning the penis to the point that it was inedible. So he chopped it up and fed it to his dog. Meanwhile, according to court officials who watched the entire video, those people were probably never the same again.

Yeah, that's a shit jury selection.

Yeah, Brandis was bleeding out and was probably too weak to eat anything at this point anyway. So Muse ran Brandis a bath, laid him in the tub, before going to read a Star Trek book while checking in on Brandis every 15 minutes.

Excuse me?

During which Brandis lay bleeding in the bath, drifting out of consciousness.

I find it hard to pay attention to reading when I'm, if it's a little cold.

Yeah.

Like I can't even imagine like what your mind must be, where you can then go and just compartmentalize to reading a shit novelization of some Star Trek episode. Hang out, yeah. And then drop it. Oh yeah, it's 15 minutes. I wonder if that guy who's bleeding out through his fucking poorly severed dick is how he's doing, how he's doing. Also didn't learn anything about tourniquets. Like the thing that annoys me about this so far is they're just fucking amateurs, dude. It's just they're amateurs. Like there's no localized anesthetic. There's no tying off his dick or whatever to keep this person alive. There's no thinking about what I'm gonna do without a dick after. It's just, God, these are impulsive people who spent months and months potentially planning this. One of them did, at least.

Well, one of them did, yeah. I don't think Brandis spent any time planning it. Anyway, after I assume Maiwe's finished the book and Worf found his uncle or whatever the fuck, Maiwe's finally killed Brandis by stabbing him in the throat, after which he hung the body on a meat hook. Mews, Maiwe's, our cannibal, dismembered and ate the corpse over the next 10 months, storing body parts in his freezer under pizza boxes, and ultimately eating up to 44 pounds of his victim's flesh before he was caught. Mews said of his first meal, I decorated the table with nice candles. I took out my best dinner service and fried a piece of rump steak, a piece from his back, made what I call princess potatoes and sprouts. After I prepared my meal, I ate it. He then searched for more victims online until 2002, when a student in Austria, who probably had a lot of explaining to do to his parents after this, reported Armin to the police. They busted Armin with what he claimed was wild boar meat under a false bottom in his freezer, but they also found the four hour videotape he'd made of the murder, so he was pretty well good and fucked at this point.

Do you think his new forum post was, you know, looking for someone to eat? By the way, I'm way better at this now. No matter what you heard, like, I'm excellent. I had 10 months, like I know how to cook now.

Yeah. It seems like he should have put, if not effort, into tourniquets and the medical aspect. Like, you get one chance at cooking this guy's penis and you're gonna burn it?

Yeah, that's, to me, that's so, that's what I'm saying. It's the amateur hour of it all that pisses me off. Like, you're tossing it to your dog, who's even like, mm, as a dog, he knows this could have been better.

Yeah, like, I practiced cooking salmon before I tried to make it for anybody else. I guess you couldn't practice cooking a dick, but.

Yeah, he was technically making it for someone else. You're right, that was a dinner guest.

Yeah, come on, man. Hannibal would never. So Armin's trial began on December 3rd, 2003 and resulted in a manslaughter conviction on January 30th, 2004. He was initially sentenced to eight years and six months in prison, but was eventually retried and slapped the life sentence.

Do you think the manslaughter conviction is because they have video of the guy consenting and not like homicide, just like proper murder one?

Yeah, I mean, I didn't do too much deep research on the trial, but I assume yes. I mean, that's one of the strangest things about this case is the like, it's still awful, but the guy who was the victim, I mean, it's hard to even call him a victim because he clearly-

I'm gonna call him a victim. I'm gonna go ahead and say that this guy's like, eat my dick. And then you know he's in the fucking bathtub being like-

And he's like, oh.

Yeah, I didn't think that I'd be dying.

Oh fuck, I should have taken those sleeping pills.

Well, no, I mean, I think he's a victim in the sense that maybe there was no discussion that this ends in your death, even though-

No.

I think there's an argument to be made. If you're like, take my dick, you think maybe death is coming. But it's definitely like he's dead because of he didn't, you know, stop the bleeding, not because he wanted to be eaten.

I guess I should probably go try to find the original forum posts if they're out there anywhere. But like-

Put the video in the show notes, that'll go well.

Not the video. The original video. The, like everything I've read sounds like Armin in his post made it pretty clear he wanted to cook and eat somebody and not just a part. Like I'm fairly sure Brandy's, this was a form of suicide, I guess. Like it was a sexualized suicide. It was a fetishistic suicide, but I'm pretty sure he knew he wasn't walking out of there. And I don't think he wanted to.

I had a friend who worked in special effects makeup, pretty successful at it in our business. Really amazing mold work he did and costuming he did and what have you. And one of the ways he made extra money, and I won't give out his name, he's no longer with us, is he made life-size xenomorph from aliens suits, body suits that are anatomically correct for sex, depending on which sex is wearing it, like which gender. They sold for a lot of money, each one, cause they were very bespoke into measurement and shit. And almost exclusively sold to people in Berlin. It was, I'm not trying to say anything beyond that about people in Berlin, but they seem to be like real open with shit maybe. Yeah. But I remember Berlin, he was like, yeah, it's a lot of times it's going to like people like who party in Berlin.

Well, guess who else might've been partying in Berlin? Armine Muse, because get this, I don't know exactly how or why it works this way in Germany. And I guess now that I'm, I don't know if this changed once he got hit with the life sentence, but he's allowed to leave prison for walks. And he's not only allowed to leave prison for walks, he's only allowed to leave prison for walks as long as he's in disguise. Which, which like, I guess it must be to avoid press and public attention or something, but it's not the worst idea Germans have ever had, but it feels close to it, to let the famous cannibal, who everyone knows what he looks like, out of prison, as long as he's unrecognizable as the famous cannibal, who everybody knows what he looks like.

Well, I genuinely thought you were gonna say that they let him go to like fucking clubs. He's like, oh, I go to super club.

I don't think they watched it.

Like they let him go to the fucking rave, you know, and just party.

He might've, I don't know. I don't know where he went when he went on these walks. I assume there must've been a guard with him or something, so he just, I don't think it was the honor system that the famous vicious cannibal would just be like, yeah, yeah, I'll come back tonight.

Well, I mean, I guess he's, you know, he doesn't work fast and he's not like a stabber of people other than once they're already in his house. So maybe he's fine. But it is funny that they give him like a Groucho Marx glasses with a nose attached and trench coat to just like walk off into the Berlin streets. But he lived in, no, he was in Austria.

So Armin was living in a Rotenberg.

No one knows what that is. But that's Germany.

Yeah, I think so.

Ed doesn't know why he thought the guy was from Austria, but Rotenberg is a town in central Germany with a population of about 1400 people who all probably hate that Armin Mites is on their Wikipedia page. Please excuse me if I pronounced anything wrong, as I am a robot and cannot help it.

Either way, there's a lot going on over there, and it's, hey, fuck it, right? Hey, go for walks.

Well, the kicker to this story is that while in prison, Armin has become a vegetarian.

I bet you that they might not even give him meat, though.

That's true.

Honestly, I mean, you let him walk. I don't know, he's got life in prison. It's not like he's ever gonna eat a guy again.

Yeah, I'll put pictures in the show notes, but if you see pictures of this guy, I think he might have been kind of part of the inspiration for casting Mads Mikkelsen in Hannibal on NBC. He doesn't look that much like Mads, but he's definitely got the same vibe. That kind of Teutonic thin lips, piercing eyes, you know, very obviously kind of German as opposed to Anthony Hopkins kind of Brit coded take on Hannibal. When you look at a picture of him, you'll see what I mean. But with that, Ed, I think it is time for the fear tier. Where do you place being eaten alive by man, bear or scabies on the fear tier?

You know what? I'm going bear. I'm going bear as my top fucking one.

Right, but where, where would you put bear?

I put it real fucking high.

I put this above hat man. This is my new top of the fear tier.

Yeah, this is my top one too.

More than stalking?

More than stalking, yeah.

Wow, okay, all right.

I would say bear. Shark's up there, but I can avoid a shark. I do once every few years, I get roped into fucking camping. One of my all time least favorite things in the world to do. But if you're gonna go camping, you might as well go somewhere like Beautiful, which would be like Proper Woods and who knows what the fuck's out there. They have black bears in Connecticut. I don't know if they have grizzly bears, but.

I don't think they have grizzly bears in Connecticut.

I don't think so either, but black bears surprised me.

Yeah.

Yeah. I would say it's definitely my top one right now. I don't know. I'm not saying it's my number one. I'm not even going to give a number to it. But if we were just looking at the fear tier, which, by the way, season two, still not really together. I kind of like the fear tier as a sliding scale more than a one through ten, where it's like something can be ahead of something else, but not necessarily. It's one, two, three, four. You know what I mean? It's like you can slide a magnet of a bear above a magnet of a hat man on like a board.

Sure.

But anyway, I would say being eaten alive is definitely my top thing we've discussed on the show so far. Just because it is around a lot more corners than almost anything else we've talked about. I mean, I thought I was going to be eaten alive by that fucking big dog, like in a city of Los Angeles.

Yeah.

Like being eaten alive by a human is less of a concern and actually even less of a concern post-talking to you about it because that guy did request someone who's like in good shape or something. Didn't he say he wanted someone who's like firm and fit or something?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So no one's looking for me.

He also is asking for a young man, so.

Okay, well then that's double.

Even once we get in shape, because this year Ed and I are going to be gym dogs.

I think they're called gym rats.

Oh, I wonder if rats ever ate anyone alive.

Yeah, they definitely have. Did you ever read 1984?

In real life, dummy.

Rats, we will include a rats' addendum, because I've had rats in my home.

I suspect this may be Eatin Alive part one. I feel like Eatin Alive is like a, like we could do one a season or something, because there's so many stories out there.

There's so many and we'll probably, because then we can get to things that are like insects that hit you with that venom that make you fucking freeze and blah, blah, blah, blah. So yes, I'm going to go ahead and say Eatin Alive, my top thing at the moment, for sure.

Yep, same here. Top of the fear tier, Eatin Alive. Well, this has been Scared All The Time.

Potentially former home of Hot Piss and Shit. We don't know if we're keeping it after season one.

That's up to Ed. He defined it, so I can't.

And now I'm defined by it, and I'd like to change that.

The first live show we're going to do ever, Ed, I'm going to bring a bucket of Hot Piss and Shit. And if the show goes poorly, I'm going to let someone from the audience dump it on your head.

He's not. This is not a real thing. That's definitely not fucking happening. And if anything, I think that we ended on a Hot Piss and Shit high note with Charlie in the finale of season one, actually remembering that news article. So true. Go out on top, go out on top. We got new things. We have Fucking Eating Alive, which is taking its place.

Hell yeah, dude. All right. Well, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we will see you next week.

Scared All The Time is co-produced and written by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola. Edited by Ed Voccola, additional support and keeper of sanity Tess Feifel.

Our theme is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

No part of the show can be reproduced anywhere without permission. Copyright Astonishing Legends Productions.

Good night.

We are in this together. Together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===