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Astonishing Legends Network.

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 this week, Our Fear has legs. Eight legs to be exact, spindly, crawling, awful legs that apparently upset a lot of you. Spiders are one of our most requested fears. And while I don't totally understand what the problem is, I'm always curious about what scares other people and why. To me, spiders are nature's best bug control and a very welcome addition to any house, haunted or not. I don't want them snuggling with me under the covers at night or crawling into my mouth while I'm asleep. But generally I see spiders as harmless little monsters that we get to live with. Sort of like if we could keep face huggers as pets. But to people who fear spiders, they are nothing of the sort. To an arachnophobe, a spider is a grotesque nightmare, an abomination unto God, a reminder that hell is real and we are living in it. And I guess I just want to understand why. What's the root of our fear of spiders? Which primal buttons do they push? How dangerous are they really? Do people die from spider bites? Can spiders really lay eggs in your face but you think it's just as it until it pops and they come swarming out from beneath your skin just before the big high school dance? Of course they can. Or can they? I don't know, that's the point. So we're gonna learn. Sit back, relax and get trapped in our web as we sink our tiny little fangs into one of humanity's greatest fears, spiders, man. Now it is time for. Time for. Time for Scared All The Time. All right. Welcome back everybody. Episode two of season three. I hope you guys liked slash cringed a lot through episode one. I certainly did while I was researching it and Ed, I think you probably did while we were recording it.

100%, yeah.

But housekeeping as always, we wanted to start off this episode by saying, we want to do another fan push because we have some numbers that are getting close to very cool and we want to push them over the edge. So on Facebook, we want to try to get our Facebook fan number up over 800. I think we're at like 750 something right now. And Instagram, the big one for me, I want to get up over that 1000 mark. We're close, we're at like 900 something.

Yeah, that would be cool.

So it'd be awesome if you guys, I mean, look, in the past, you've already spread the word. I know a lot of you have told your friends, you've told your family, you've tied your grandmother down to nursing home and made her listen to our show. So we thank you for that. And we just want to keep spreading the word, keep spreading the gospel of the scaredy cat and getting our voices into more people's ears. So anything you can do, anyone you can let know, lots of summer driving about to happen, lots of flights. So, you know, give people a show, help them out.

Speaking of summer driving, I'm off the road, I'm back. Sorry, I missed everyone for housekeeping last week, but it was a good drive. I mean, I enjoy driving across the country.

Yeah.

It was a lot of fun. Got to work out a few different places.

And you met some cool people, yeah?

I met some awesome people, yeah. And I also like made these little Scared All The Time cards that I like left places, that had a little QR code on it or whatever. And actually the QR code was trackable and I just looked it up yesterday or something. And it was like 25 people scanned it. So I don't know. They were just like left on tables and stuff and in bathrooms. And yeah, so we got like 25 people. So it's like over 10% of the cards I left were scanned.

Considering our show's relationship to buckets of hot piss and shit, I feel like bathrooms are a great place to leave those cards.

Oh, hell yeah, dude. That's why I thought I would do it there. It was also great to see my friend Katie's mom, RIP, God bless Katie. She rules. We actually mentioned her and her mom in the, I think was it Bad Neighbors, in the Bad Neighbors episode, because they were the ones who were living next door to BTK when he was captured.

Oh yeah.

Yeah, so it was great to hang out with their mom, do some stuff in Kansas. We visited her grave and all that stuff. So it was a bittersweet part of the trip, but it was good to see everyone. And Kansas is always a vibe. I saw a very, very pretty sunrise there, that within a minute of being like, how pretty is that? A bird hit my car. So I was like, oh no, a bird. So God doesn't give with both hands. That's what I'm getting at. And didn't need to stay with anybody who listens to the show, which was good. I ended up finding like other stuff, but I just went a huge shout out and a big thanks to Jenny and Rachel and Matt and Ben and Sarah and Seta, C-E-T-T-A, I'm not sure, who all offered me couches in places in their states, which was super rad. And I'll definitely be taking up some of those on the drive back, but either I didn't get to their town or I wasn't gonna be there at a reasonable hour or what have you. But then I also just met super awesome people, including Nicky and Brad in St. Louis, who were so fucking cool and so hospitable and definitely are listening to the show now and it's so cool of them. So yeah, that was a lot of fun. That was a fun town.

How was St. Louis you stopped for, you were telling me for some St. Louis pizza?

No, I did end up having pizza there. I would never stop for St. Louis pizza.

How was St. Louis pizza?

It was, it was pizza.

Okay, all right.

The place was great. The beers were cheap. The pizza was definitely serviceable. But no, I don't think St. Louis is gonna be known for their pizza anytime soon.

I would hope not. I'd be hard pressed to try something that went by, someone was like, you gotta try the St. Louis pizza. I'd assume it was made of like, not even cheese and tomato sauce. I don't know why. I've got nothing against St. Louis.

Michigan has Detroit style pizza, which is not a type of pizza I care for. But I went to a bar with Tess, our producer Tess, in DC on the way back. And there was a Michigan bar and they had Detroit style pizza. And I was like, I'll just have a hot dog. But yeah, I don't know. You'll be out in Connecticut soon. I'll take you to get like real pizza. We'll get like New Haven pizza and it'll be legit.

Thank God.

Yeah, but everyone was cool. Like I always like meeting people. And I gave a card to a lot of people. I talked to a lot of people about the show. Met some really fun, interesting people on the road. But yeah, didn't have to stay with anybody who listens to the show, but I definitely will on the way back. I've never been to the, I've been to a lot of places at this point, but I've never been to like the Great Lakes States. And I really want to check out like Wisconsin and stuff.

Cool.

So I think I'm gonna, you know, kind of take a right on the way over up to those states and then come across the fucking top and then maybe just come down from the Pacific Northwest back down to LA. So I might be doing like a northern perimeter for the way home.

Nice. That sounds like a good trip.

Potentially, yeah. But I'm back. So welcome back to me, to the show.

Welcome back to Ed. We're glad he's back. And then finally, well, I guess two things finally. So one thing we want to start doing because you guys have been so sweet about leaving lots of great five-star reviews around the internet, particularly on Apple podcasts. Although I think Tess was telling us that we need to try to get people to leave us reviews on Spotify too, but I don't know how you do that.

I don't think there's a way to leave a review on Spotify. I think just maybe five-star reviews or something. I have no idea. I use Spotify. I enjoy that it turns our chapters into like clickable things where I think Apple podcasts doesn't, but I don't know if you can actually leave a review. I have no idea.

Well, to encourage you guys to continue to leave five-star reviews, if you want to get featured on the show, leave us a awesome five-star review. It can be funny. It can be serious. It can be whatever you want. And it just has to be five-stars. Fuck four-stars. We don't accept four-stars around here. We only accept five-stars. And if you leave them, we will read some of them. So I just thought to prove that we'll do that, I'd read some of the ones we already have, and you guys can take it from here. So let's see. Just another ginger cat left a review that says, male version of Karen and Georgia from MFM, which I think is my favorite murder. I first discovered this podcast on Astonishing Legends. I was instantly hooked. Their connection and banter reminds me of Karen and Georgia from MFM. Definitely enjoyed it and it will be added to my podcast rotation. Highly recommend giving these guys a chance. So thank you. Just another ginger cat.

Hell yeah. Do you want me to read one?

Yeah, you read one.

I got, we got one here from TGNX and the topic or headline to the five star review is not horrible. And the body of this review is one star review for enthusiasm, which is a direct reference to something I said recently. So that's nice. I do like that it's a five star review and then a little inside joke, like they're listening, which is pretty fun.

Yeah. And then we'll wrap up today's five star reviews with this five star review from Rageful Waffles, which is headlined, Makes Thursday Better. And I hope Rageful Waffles, I hope it makes you a little less angry towards your breakfast foods. But Rageful Waffles says, My 14 year old son and I immediately check to see if a new episode has dropped every Thursday. It's fun to see him try to not laugh at the quote, inappropriate stuff. We both love Ed and Chris. So much more inappropriate stuff to come. We love you guys. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks so much for signing up for premium. And without further ado, episode two, spiders. All right. So up top, a warning to our genuinely arachnophobic listeners. I kind of wrote this one with you in mind because I'm not arachnophobic. And I wanted to make sure that it would be very, very tough for you to listen to. So if you are genuinely arachnophobic, go easy. We're going to cover everything nasty that we can think of. We don't want to make you too queasy. So maybe just go catch up on an episode you missed, or I don't know, test your mettle. Listen to as much as you can and drop us a message to let us know at what point you had to tap out. It's the Scared All The Time Fear Challenge. Builds character. It's good for you. But before we dive in, Ed, tell me how you feel about spiders. Have you ever had a big problem with them?

I hate them. I hate them. I live with them in the sense that they're in here and I have to kill them. And that's, I don't have to kill them. But if they're within reach, I'll kill them. I've never like put one onto a plate or anything and then brought it outside. I either kill them or ignore them.

Okay, all right, so you will get close enough to strike.

It depends. I mean, if it's huge, if it's crazy looking, if I've seen it jump like a lunatic, I, you know what I mean? I'll gauge it and I'll bring with me the necessary, like if I need a broom, I'll bring a broom. You know what I mean? Like if I need to create distance.

Got it.

But, and I have some spider stories later, don't worry.

Okay, well, you can share them whenever you feel like it because I don't think I've ever had much of an issue with spiders. I've been bitten a few times, I've woken up with bites that sometimes seem a little bit more severe than a mosquito bite and I go, oh, it's probably a spider bite. I know one of my sisters got bit by something really nasty at church camp one year and her whole ankle and calf area swelled up and my mom was always like, it was a black widow. I don't think it was a black widow. I think it, I don't even know if it was a spider, but.

I have a friend whose daughter, son, daughter, I don't remember whether it's two.

Mm-hmm.

Some kid they made. The kid has a black widow as a pet.

Yeah.

As a pet, and then you and I went to that reptile show.

Show, yeah.

And they sell them, they sell for pet purposes.

I don't think I really fit it in here anywhere, but jumping spiders, part of what's gotten me back into spiders is that I've been getting served a lot of Instagram videos of jumping spiders because people keep jumping spiders as pets, they're apparently super friendly and pretty intelligent, and the videos of them are very cute. I can't really imagine keeping a black widow. That seems, I don't know, baby Dracula.

We saw it for sale, yeah, we saw it for sale at the show, but also I think this is one that they found, and then instead of burning your home down and trying to get money for insurance purposes, I think if you burn your home down trying to kill a black widow, you should get your insurance money. But that said, I think this is one that they found and then they made a little enclosure for it or whatever. So I guess what I'm saying is they have a prisoner. They have a prisoner they treat very well.

Yes, is it in a big container or one of those little plastic desk size ones?

Little, wait, you can put it on a desk. It's in a little plastic. Do you remember, I would say it's a little bit bigger than if you remember Happy Meals for McDonald's when they actually came in the cardboard. I would say it's a little bigger than that. And it's glass, it's see-through. Then of course, I'm sure every couple of days, you're like, is it hiding under something or did it get out?

That makes me feel like McDonald's should have had a Spider Happy Meal at some point. Just like a little case. Each one's got a different arachnid inside. Could have changed the generation.

McDonald's used to have incredible stuff, like incredible stuff, like the Batman Forever tie-ins. Maybe that was Burger King. Either way, the whole gang, there was a, I would say the 90s was an unbelievable time for getting genuinely awesome toys in either your Happy Meal or your Burger King, whatever the fuck their version of it is.

They put the effort in. I think maybe that started to change because kids now, I guess in general, I sort of wonder, but physical toys, I feel like, probably don't mean as much to kids anymore as digital stuff.

Yeah, no, you can't make microtransactions on an action figure. I will say also there was a monoculture. We all loved Ninja Turtles. We all loved the Batman movies. We all loved Jurassic Park. And so it was like, okay, 100% of kids love this stuff. So 100% of kids are gonna get excited when they see it at the drive-through window.

Yeah.

And I sure did. I just remember there was like, forgot which ones it was, and then we'll move on from this because there's no reason to talk about this. But there was a couple or at least one aquatic-based Happy Meal toy that actively the whole thing was like, these are for the tub.

Yeah.

And they float.

Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they float. They have a purpose. They're not so small you'll swallow them and die. Like it's fucking rad. Like you go and get a delicious McDonald's burger, then you actually had a toy that you genuinely would play with. It was awesome.

Yeah.

So anyway, yeah, to tie it all back in, I think so fondly to that time period is because unlike your suggestion, they never made Spider House Happy Meals. They only made things that I would want, that I would enjoy, and that I would talk fondly about.

Well, and here we are.

Spider-Man, I'll take Spider-Man.

Yeah.

You wanna put Spider-Man in something.

That's true, and I'm sure they did. The worst spider bite I've ever actually seen was last year, my wife's cat, Nico, beautiful old Siamese cat, and we didn't know he'd been bit, but we noticed his lower jaw started to swell up, and this was on like a Thursday, and at first I was like, well, we don't know, maybe it's just like he hit it and it's swelling or something, but then it got worse, and so we called to set a vet appointment, and they were like, well, bring it in on Monday if it's still swollen. Sunday morning, Nico starts whining, and he jumps up on the bed, and there's just this gusher of blood running down his lower jaw, down the front of his chest. He didn't really seem to mind, he seemed totally cool about it, but of course, my wife and I freaked out, and we brought him in for an emergency checkup, and when they cleaned the wound, there was this disgusting hole that had eaten through his flesh and looked like almost into his throat. I don't know if anyone really wants to see this, but I have pictures I can put in the show notes.

I didn't wanna see, I remember you sent it to a group text I was on.

Yes, yes, it was disgusting. There is a happy ending, I should say. Don't worry. Well, the cat's dead, but it didn't die from this. It died from old age. But in the moment, I was like, oh, this cat's not surviving this. It looked like something had just eaten through into his throat. And the vet was like, they didn't know if it was 100%, but they thought it was likely a brown recluse spider bite. And we had Nico on meds for months, and then he healed up. He pulled through it like a champ. But then I looked into it, and apparently brown recluse spiders don't actually live in California. We have brown and black widows, as well as desert recluse spiders, which are different from brown recluse spiders. And I looked up some of those spider bites, and they also seem pretty gross. So maybe it was a desert recluse spider. But yeah, all that to say, I've never had a spider encounter that would cause me to fear spiders. I've never had an innate fear response to spiders or snakes. Maybe because I grew up in the woods, but I've never really had a problem with anything slimy, dirty, creepy crawly. I'd honestly put bees and wasps much higher on my do not fuck with list than spiders.

All of them, all of them, all insects. Get them out of here, fucking beat it. Yeah, I don't like spiders at all, man. And I don't, you know, there's also, I don't like them even described.

Oh, okay.

Because I love Stephen King, and you know, spider imagery is pretty big in it. Spider imagery is pretty big in a couple of The Dark Tower books and stories. So he returns to that well pretty often because why wouldn't you if you're writing a horror? Spiders are disgusting. Well, even Charlotte's Web, I'm like, fuck, write off. And then if, or what about, was there a spider in James and the Giant Peach?

Yes, I think so, yes.

Cause that, remember they made that movie and it was like claymation?

What was supposed to be like the big followup to Nightmare Before Christmas, I think it was Henry Selick directed both of them.

Well, they're both terrifying in the sense that, you know, people love Nightmare Before Christmas, but if you removed all of the lore to that and just showed some of those character designs, just on a white wall, like you'd be like, that's, I wouldn't want to meet that in an alleyway. And I feel that way about all the James and the Giant Peach characters.

Well, what happened was it was a complete bomb when it came out, but then everybody who didn't see it when it came out became emo teenagers and then it got huge, so.

I don't love it, but one of my favorite moments in the Rick and Morty writer's room is, we were talking about, you know, how sometimes at Rick and Morty, if you watch the show, there'd be episodes that are kind of clearly inspired by things like, oh, this is the thing episode of Rick and Morty, or this is the Ocean's Eleven episode of Rick and Morty. We were talking one time, and this wasn't a serious talk, like no one was really seriously pitching, I think, a Nightmare Before Christmas crossover episode, but one of the other writers I was working with, Dave Horowitz, it made me laugh so hard. He was like, man, if we do a Nightmare Before Christmas mashup episode, do you know how many that episode-themed weddings there's gonna be? Because they're both such rabid fanbases, you know, Rick and Morty and Nightmare Before Christmas, and people do do those types of things as weddings. So he was like, man, oh my god, the number of this episode-themed weddings would be insane.

I mean, it's statistically likely that you and I probably would have been invited to at least one of those weddings.

Oh yeah, I think Keto's, our friend Keto, the placing, whatever, like the thing where it says where you sit at the tables, that was all like Nightmare Before Christmas themed or whatever.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I am in the majority of people who like Nightmare Before Christmas, but I am in the minority, I think, of people who aren't afraid or have no problem with spiders.

Well, what are you doing when a spider's in your house? Do you kill it or do you get a paper plate and try and bring it to freedom?

Most of the time, unless it's somewhere that I don't want it to be, I don't know, on my bed or something, most of the time, I don't take them anywhere. I just let them go about their business.

Yeah, I try and have that mentality more and more. I try and be like, well, they say you're good. You'll lead up things that I don't want here. And so just stay on your side, but it's hard for me. It has to really be out of my reach to kind of let it go.

Yeah, well, I don't, I mean, I certainly would never squish one on purpose. If I had to move it, I would get a plate or something.

The last, I think, spider Googling I did was, and this is my only spider story really, is we talked about it a little bit in the Hat Man episode. You know I had a mannequin from a music video you directed in my living room, had a costume from a movie on it, and that costume was like a long black trench coat and a fedora, what have you. So the way it was situated is its whole back was to a Florida kind of ceiling window. It had curtains in front of it, but there's no time when it wasn't hit by the sun during the day. And when I finally took that outfit off, after a decade almost of just sitting in front of the window, the flaps of the trench coat, so it's a long trench coat and it has like, it kind of folds in on itself at different times. In all of those folds, not all of them, but like almost every fold was just so many spider eggs. Like the weird kind of almost diaphanous paper, you know, it's not like web, where it's like a bunch of eggs in it. And I was like, okay, I better jump on the internet. Like, do I just light this on fire? Do I move? Like if I touch it, will a million fly out and go crazy? And I got basically all three of those as responses on the internet was like, yes, that might happen. You should probably move and maybe bring your house down. And I just remember like very gingerly trying to move the whole mannequin to outside without like jostling it too much of them like waking up the swarm of a million baby spiders. And then when I got outside, I like ripped it off and like shook it and then just took like a paint stir stick and tried to like scrape them away. And then I put the outfit in like the hottest water known to man. And then I, from there, it's still, so the thing is, even when you do all that, I don't know what their like spider egg web is made of, but it is, it really sticks around. Like, it still just looks like crazy jizz stains, like, cause it's a black thing. Just the weirdest, wackiest stains like you've ever seen on it. But now all of that just kind of baked like a fucking t-shirt transfer.

Gross.

It's so gross. So I brought it to a dry cleaner and I was like, hey man, I just found this in an abandoned warehouse. Just like fully lied or whatever. I'm like, I don't know anything about it. It looks pretty gross. I definitely didn't do this. So-

I like that you thought this guy would look less judgingly upon you. If you came into a dry cleaner's with a coat, you said you've found an abandoned warehouse.

Well, I want it to be something where it's like, it could have sat long enough that it became a spider condominium or whatever.

Yeah.

And so I was like, I felt like I did a pretty good job, but it was still so gross. And so I brought it to the person and the guy looked at it for like so long, being like, what did you do?

I used to, I worked at a dry cleaners in high school. I've been the guy looking at the clothing going, what did you do? And they have to tell you.

Yeah. And one thing I remember is the guy was like, okay, you can pick it up on Monday. And I remember going back that Monday, him looking at the ticket, you know, trying to find it, whatever. And he just comes back and he's like, yeah, we need more time. I was like, what? He's like, yeah, it's not ready.

We have top men, top men on this, on this clothing.

Yeah, no one's ever seen anything like this before. But you know what? It makes sense. It is dark space that flapped over fabric area. It's constantly dark, but constantly warm from the sun. So it does seem like the absolute perfect, like-

It's a womb.

It's a womb.

You could grow a homunculus in there.

Well, if those were in fact cum stains, then it would have been a homunculus, but since they were just like weird melted spider hammocks, then that's all they were. But yeah, it was probably a couple vials of jizz short of a homunculus.

Well, that's not where I thought that this bit was gonna end up, but here we are. So let's see, what was I saying? Oh yes, I'm not afraid of spiders and I have no problem with them, but I was very curious about why people are afraid of spiders, because clearly many people are. Many people have like just an innate gross reaction to spiders. And I find that really curious. So I was doing some research and I found an article from 2014 in a publication called The Conversation that basically says no one's really sure why we're afraid of spiders. Psychologists believe that one reason people fear spiders is because of some direct experience and still that fear in them. So they were bit or one scared them as a child, that kind of thing. This is known as the conditioning theory of arachnophobia. And in 1991, Graham Davy at City University London ran a study to understand more about this view. He interviewed 118 undergrads about their fear of spiders. About 75% of the people sampled were either mildly or severely afraid of spiders. Of those, most were female, which I looked into this, because of course that's kind of like a, you know.

A trope.

Yeah, a trope. Yeah, exactly.

You know, they can give birth 13 hours of labor, but afraid to kill a spider type of thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I was like, I don't know. So I looked, but it does seem like the gender bias in arachnophobia has been supported by subsequent research. But in any case, Graham Davy found that people fearful of spiders reported having a family member with similar fears, but he was unable to separate any genetic factors from environmental ones. What I think is surprising about his study is that Davy couldn't find evidence of arachnophobia being the result of specific spider trauma in these undergrads, which meant this study gave no support for the idea that arachnophobia is conditioned. He also found that the threat of being bitten has very little to do with the fear of spiders.

Yeah, I've never been bitten by a spider. I mean, not in a way that I've been awake or knowledgeable of it. Same as you, like if I wake up, it's kind of a wacky bite, could be a spider. But I've never been like, get back, it's gonna bite us.

Sure, well, so what would you say that your most specific concern about spiders would be? What is it that grosses you out about them?

I don't like their legs, I don't like their bodies, I don't like their million eyes.

Okay, all right.

I don't like the fact that they're Cirque du Soleil performers when they wanna be, like you're trying to hit it with a broom, and then all of a sudden it's like doing flips and going crazy and dropping web out of its ass six million miles an hour. And then it's gone. I don't like that when they die, they curl up and it's gross.

Sure, well.

Yeah, but it's weird that you say it though, because when forced, when pushed into a corner right now, I really, it's prejudice toward spiders. I have no real.

I feel like you're gonna say something racist against spiders is what it sounds like we're going.

Yeah, it really is just don't trust them, don't like them. And if, yeah, if you replace spider with a type of human being, I'm a piece of shit. But I think we can all agree that spiders are, they're gross and terrible.

Not humans, so.

They're not humans, so fuck them.

Well, so Graham Davy asked people to rank their specific concerns about spiders and the results are very funny to me, but also pretty interesting. So the number one concern about spiders was their legginess.

The legs. I mentioned the legs first, didn't I?

The legs, yes. Well, that's what I was gonna say. I could have stopped you right at the beginning of your response, because legs.

Oh, we've seen worse legs. We've seen worse legs, bro. I mean, and this is not a joke about a person we know. The two of us at the same reptile convention, people who, I don't know if they eat them for food, but I don't know why they're buying it, but we saw like millipedes, like huge ones and like centipedes and like not fun, oh, I moved a rock and now it's under here. Like ones that look like it could move rocks on its own.

Yes.

Those I thought were more egregious, almost ostentatious show of legs.

Leggy, yeah, leggyness is number one. So people who rank that probably would also really not enjoy the millipedes. But number two is sudden movement. Number three is speediness. So kind of the same there.

I've gotten all of them so far.

But then hairiness, crawliness, size, skin contact and other. Other is listed last, but has a large bar on the bar chart here, but it didn't elaborate about other.

Well, I will say, like my initial knee jerk, when you asked me, I feel like I totally got the first three or four, whatever those are. But then everything from hairiness to the end could also describe me for all those things too. For like reasons they might not like me, which was that was hairiness.

This is why Ed and I record separately, the hairiness, crawliness, size, skin contact.

Yeah, these are all like things people might not like about a human, the first ones, like I don't, yeah.

Well, Davey felt that the responses he got, Graham Davey felt that these responses meant that quote, animal fears may represent a functionally distinct set of adaptive responses, which had been selected during the evolutionary history of the human species, which I think kind of makes sense. A lot of these features, sudden movement, speediness, crawliness, I think also transfer to other phobias like snakes, so a baked in human response kind of makes sense as a good explanation as opposed to conditioning.

We know what it is, I'm just thinking about it right now, is spiders, hornets, millipedes, centipedes, whatever, insects, we're talking insects here.

Well, spiders are arachnids.

Okay, I'm sorry, well, here come the letters.

Here come the letters, baby.

But yeah, you know what I'm saying, like anything that...

That guy who doesn't like our outdoors facts.

Oh, he's gonna be pissed. The guy who wrote in saying that we're idiots, he's about to be justified on that one. So, okay, let's just say the catchall, any idiot that would call something an insect, let's just take that definition of it. I think part of the base fear is, if that thing was any bigger, I think I'd be in real trouble. And so that's how I feel about like, spiders are gross and they're awful, but they're pretty, like I can handle it in a battle. Where if spiders were also five, nine, six feet, I'd be fucking terrified.

Yes, but here's the thing, we don't, so I feel like this baked in human response of anything that is fast, hairy, crawly, whatever, like makes sense, but there's no evidence that spiders were ever that big.

Oh, I'm not saying that they ever were.

No, I know, but evolutionarily.

I'm just saying, I wonder if in our brains, we're like, look at these crazy attributes, if they were bigger, we'd be fucked. Maybe in your brain, you see them that big.

Well, maybe, but to me, it's like, there's definitely creepy crawlies of all kinds that can kill you, but most of them, most snakes, most spiders, aren't that dangerous to people. Like compared to bears, as we've discussed, like they will-

Yeah, they're big.

They'll definitely fuck you up to a permanent end, but people rarely have a phobia of bears. You know what I mean?

Because bears are where you aren't and spiders are where you are.

That's true. I guess if a bear was hanging over my bed at night, I might have a more baked-in phobia.

Absolutely.

But in 1997, another study looked into people's fear of spiders and came to some surprising conclusions about fear in general. This being America's number one fear-based podcast, that was obviously of great interest to me.

Absolutely.

And not only that, but this study employed the very cool sounding fear survey schedule for children to reach its conclusions. So basically what they did was ask kids to list their fears two different ways. The first was to check their fears off on a pre-existing list. And so when, again, the children did this, their answers were what you might expect. Things they checked off were not breathing, getting hit by a car, bombs, fire, burglars. Many kids also chose dramatic but unlikely events such as earthquakes. But when asked to write their own list of fears, both boys and girls listed spiders as their number one fear.

Wow.

Their second fear was being kidnapped, third was predators and fourth was the dark.

I'll tell you right now, one in four, okay, spiders in the dark, kids came to that on their own. Kidnapping and predators was reinforced by adults.

But that's, yeah, so it's so interesting that they listed spiders as number one fears because that would suggest that the fear of spiders is bread, baked, whatever, into children.

Well, children only care about a few things when they're kids. And I've forgotten most of them, but let's just say one of them is Halloween and spiders seem to have a ton of real estate on Halloween.

True, that's true.

I mean, they're around, baby. They're around. Like spiders are in every piece of decoration.

Yeah, and they're much bigger in a lot of those decorations, though. Those are the real fear-sized spiders. So I guess this study would seem to suggest that the fear of spiders is inherent in children. But the article also says that the people who conducted the study did find that the kids who listed fear of spiders as number one all had encounters with spiders that conditioned them to be fearful. So essentially, the first arachnophobia study found no support for conditioning, but the second one did. A third study was conducted in 2003. Again, these are all by different groups of researchers. I don't know if they were in communication with each other, but they're not all the same researchers. So this third study, though, took a look at the fear of spiders in twins to try to answer this question once and for all. What they did was they showed multiple sets of twins, two sets of images. First, they showed them what they called fear-relevant images of spiders and snakes, and then showed them fear-irrelevant images like circles or triangles. And statistical analysis of the results revealed that genetic influences were substantial, or in other words, if one twin feared spiders, more often than not, the other twin also feared spiders, which is interesting because even though they're twins, the chances that they both would have been conditioned by a fearful experience of the spider is less likely. So it suggests that it's more of an inherent thing. Also very interestingly, the article concludes by mentioning the results of a 2013 study that sought to find effective ways of reducing fear of spiders. They ran this really interesting test where they first split their volunteers into phobic and non-phobic groups based on what they call simple spider fear tests. So I don't know what these tests were, but they sound like they would have been fun to run.

It's just, they make you wait in a waiting room and then a person in a spider suit comes in like booga, booga, booga, it's like, oh my God. It was like, that's as simple as we can get, baby. That's as simple. Many people would say this is a bad test, but we try to make it as simple as we could. And we have these interns and we have this spider suit.

Yeah, after a week of doing these very simple tests, both of the groups, the phobic and non-phobic group, were then exposed to images of flowers or spiders. But the exposure was for a very, very short time. So short that the volunteers couldn't recognize the images consciously. And it was thought that by mixing these images deep in the subconscious, by flashing a flower and then flashing a spider, and then a flower, then a spider, then a flower, then a spider, it might have a healing effect on the people who were arachnophobic. And sure enough, when the spider fear tests were carried out on both these groups again, those who feared spiders in the initial test-

Now also feared flowers.

No, they had become less afraid. Although, I guess the worst case scenario would have been, yeah, they put a whole bunch of people out in the world who were now terrified of hydrangeas. But the article concludes that this must mean that sharing images of spiders must help reduce arachnophobia, which I think is, yes, in the most basic sense, this test would say that, but it sounds kind of self-serving because the article is written by a self-proclaimed spider expert who I think is probably shoving spider pictures in everyone's face at every possible opportunity.

It seems like this is a huge waste of grant money for several groups of people. And we could just end the sentence there, but I feel like there's a solution which will be a lot more expensive, but I think it'll get the job done, which is just put googly eyes on every spider you see.

There you go.

And that I think that'll drastically reduce the fear element. If you saw a spider come in with like dumb googly eyes, he'd be like, ah, you freaking idiot. I love you, get in here.

That's a good, that's a very good mental image. And it's good that we're painting mental images because one of the hard things that I was worried about doing a scary episode about spiders as a podcast is that spiders do look scary, but they don't really sound scary. You know what I mean?

Do they sound anything? Do they make noise?

Do you have a scary spider sound we could play?

No, I don't know. I don't think they make noise.

That's kind of an interesting question, I guess. Yeah, no, they don't. I mean, in real life, they don't. What gets used in movies to indicate like scary gross spider sounds?

I think it's always like just a hiss.

A hiss.

Hiss dot wave or whatever.

Fucking sound designers are out there making up hissing and screeching noises to make people fear our wonderful, lovely spider babies.

I mean, it's like guns in movies. It's like anyone who moves or touches a gun, there's that noise. There's like a noise. Like metal noise, like metal moving. It doesn't make any sense. You'll never hear that noise anywhere, but every movie in existence, it's like if you touch a gun, you fucking look at a gun, you get that weird noise. And yeah, you're right, it's just sound design.

Same way if you pick a sword up off of any table, it'll go swing.

Exactly, there's a sword noise, there's a gun noise. There's basically, I consider Indiana Jones punch noise. Does it make it more awesome? It absolutely does, but it's not in reality. But yeah, I guess a spider noise would be like just a high pitch like, ah! But I'm not even doing a good example of it. Have you seen arachnophobia? I never have, I won't watch it.

I actually have, yeah.

Well, what noises did they use?

I have to go back and look, I don't know. But my point is, I don't know how to make our listeners really uncomfortable about spiders without showing them the long spindly legs and the crazy eyes and shit, so.

That's fine, I think everybody here knows what a spider looks like.

That's true.

Well, hold on, I don't wanna say everybody. Might have some blind listeners, but I'm sure they'll be cool about it.

Well, I'm just saying if our audience has a good enough imagination, they can picture what it would feel like if there was a tickling feeling on the back of their neck and they reached around and found a tarantula just chilling on the back of their neck. Or if they went to bed and something at the bottom of the sheets started moving and they pulled the sheets back to find dozens of daddy long legs in there. For instance, if you were an arachnophobe, I would hope that you could imagine that.

Daddy long legs, I don't, they're just, their legs are so, so frail. They're just so little, baby. Like the thinnest little hair, thin legs. I'm not sure I would feel a daddy long leg walking on me. I feel like I need like a girthier spider to really be like, what the hell is walking on me?

Oh, we're gonna get to girthy spiders, my friend.

I wish we wouldn't, I wish we wouldn't.

But I agree with you, a daddy long legs, I wouldn't feel.

I do love that meme or whatever that is like, who the fuck named daddy the long legs? It's the most insane name ever for anything.

Somebody must have written like an Aesop's fable about it and called it daddy. Cause daddy long legs, there's no way it was like a cool guy being like, what's up daddy long legs? Like that's not how it got named.

Yeah, no, daddy long legs is probably more akin to like a guy you'd meet in like an S and M club versus like a 1960s motorcycle rider nickname. Like it's more of a nickname of a guy who's going to hit you with something, but like in a, in a sexual way.

Still much more afraid of that guy than spiders.

Oh yeah.

In an effort to see if I could scare myself, I visited planetdeadly.com, which hosts an article on the 10 deadliest spiders in the world. Unfortunately, the article begins by noting that while almost all spiders are venomous, very few of the world's estimated 40,000 species of spiders have the bite strength to break skin. And of the species that can, most don't pose any danger to humans. And speaking of daddy long legs, I did check on the rumor that daddy long legs are the most venomous spiders in the world. They just don't have the fangs to deliver the juice. And that is not true.

Yeah, I don't know who started that. I don't know who started. I've also heard that before.

Yeah, I assume some, you know, really sick second grader wanted to scare all his friends and were just like, yeah, you see those spiders that are all over the playground? It's the most poisonous spider in the world.

Can't get through your epidermis.

That's true. Also, I shouldn't even say poisonous because one of the things I learned while researching this is I learned the biology fact that I thought was cool. Poisonous and venomous are not interchangeable. They're two different terms. Venomous refers to animals who inject their targets and poison works by being ingested or through topical contact. So remember that when discussing poison dart frogs, they're poisonous to touch and ingest, but harmless otherwise.

Don't try and eat Chris's frogs.

It's estimated that during the whole 20th century, spiders were responsible.

For every major assassination.

For somewhere in the region of 100 deaths globally, which even though I'm here defending spiders, saying that they're fine and everything, 100 deaths in 100 years from spider bites seems very low to me.

Yes, but they're the 100 most important deaths. It was emperors, it was popes.

Yeah, JFK, spider bite.

That's the conspiracy theory we'll have to go down next. I don't know if they were taught to do this stuff or if they have their own understanding of global politics, but they're out there. Those are the 100. They're the 100 most important deaths if you actually go through history, so no good.

I also feel like most deadly spider bites probably occur in places without easy access to medical care. So I'm sure there's thousands of people who have died from spider bites in places where it just wasn't even reported. You know? So I don't know about that number. It is the number that I found, but fuck it. I think they're responsible for a thousand deaths in a hundred years.

No man, it's probably 10,000 times that number.

Absolutely.

Listen, if they have the wherewithal, the knowledge of our society to assassinate people at that level, I think they probably are also aware of how to work the system. So they probably have people with the highest levels of politics who are making sure that that number stays at 100.

I think we have a really good comic book character here.

Oh, Spider-Man? I think it's taken.

I was gonna say Spider-Assassin-Man.

Well, we'll see.

Anyone who did die from a spider bite probably got their ass kicked by one of the 10 on this list. So number 10, there's a drum roll.

I thought you were been bit by a spider and were dying. I'm like, what the hell is this noise? What are you doing with your face?

I was hoping the hobo spider got its name from hiding in empty cans of beans or its skills with a switchblade.

It's carrying a bunch of bindles.

Yeah, but no, it is not actually named, well, I guess it is sort of named for hobos. It's named for its presumed method of expanding its distribution by hitching rides with humans along major highways in the Pacific Northwest. The hobo spider wasn't even introduced to America until it came over from Europe in the 1930s.

Through Ellis Island. The real name were the Hobokowalskys. But they had to shorten it at Ellis Island to hobo.

There's names that are American and names that are not. Oh, and I didn't finish that last sentence. In fact, the Hobokowalski spider was introduced from Europe in the 1930s, and it's become established in at least six states since, displacing many native spider species as it spreads.

That's the immigrant dream, dude, in one, one maximum two generations. Like they've, it's amazing. You came here with a dream and they accomplished it. Damn, I love America.

The actual danger that the very successful immigrant, the hobo spider presents to humans is somewhat debatable. The CDC reported some case studies in the 90s that claimed hobo spider bites caused isolated cases of necrosis in some people, which would be similar, but a little bit less severe than brown recluse bites. These bites cause an open wound, which can take weeks to heal. Also, the hobo spider also looks quite a bit like a brown recluse spider. So it's possible that some of these reports are just mistaken identity. Either way, the hobo spider, like its namesake, is aggressive and fairly common. Well, I guess they're not really common anymore, but the aggressiveness and the widespreadness of the hobo spider increases the chance of an actual bite occurring. The hobo spider is actually sometimes referred to as the aggressive house spider, although some people think that that stems from a misinterpretation of its Latin name, T agrestus, which I guess if you asked me, I would be like, oh yes, the root of aggressive.

Yeah, maybe. An aggressive house guest that won't leave, it's moved from hobo spider to squatter spider.

Yeah, I don't know that they can change species like that, but number nine on this list is the camel spider. And this one looks pretty fucked up. I can put some pictures in the notes or you can Google it in the chat here. I put the link to camel spider.

I don't love this. I don't like that it's kind of like desert tan.

Yeah, the pictures are pretty fucked up. I would get skeeved out if it got too close.

Well, it's a picture of it in someone's hand. It's pretty fucking big. They get even bigger than that too.

Yeah, I mean, it's pale and hairless and very, very leggy. I also read that their jaws usually make up about a quarter of their body size, which from these pictures seems accurate and they can deliver a very painful bite.

Fuck that, dude. So are they like earwigs? Those things have big old fucking claw noses.

I don't know if they're in the same family as earwigs. They do kind of have an earwiggy looking face.

Yeah, that's how I got there.

It's a bit of a cheat to put them on this list because camel spiders aren't technically spiders. They're actually a type of solifuge, which literally translates as flee from the sun.

Weird.

Yeah, they also call these things wind scorpions and sun spiders, and solifuges are found in deserts throughout the world. I think there was a famous fake photo or that a soldier from Iraq had killed one of these that was the size of a dog.

I don't love that.

They don't look as big as dogs in these photos, but they look huge.

They look pretty big. They're the size of your palm, some of them. The people are holding them.

They're also fast. These things can run up to 10 miles an hour, which I feel like is crazy. Yeah, yeah.

That's so fast. That's twice the speed limit of a parking lot.

Luckily, the camel spider is not actually venomous, and whatever pain you'd feel from a bite is purely from the piercing of the skin and muscle, which makes me wonder why this is on a list of deadly spiders, if it's neither deadly nor a spider.

It could run 10 miles an hour. If it ran as fast as it can, it might push you down the stairs, dude. You can die from that.

It is an abomination. And I also love this one picture in the Google image search results of one chilling next to a box of Marlboros. That picture goes hard as fuck.

Yeah, well, I don't know if it's something where it bartered for that, or if they were just using it to show how big it is. It's bigger than a pack of Marlboro.

Yeah, it's an abomination. The eighth spider on the list is the yellow sack spider, which is the grossest name by far, so points for that.

Looks like he's wearing little shoes.

Yeah, it's a gross fucking name, but they aren't really the grossest looking spiders on the list.

It's a little translucent-y. It's another like, I don't know, I would describe it as yellowish tan, and I hate it.

Yeah, it kind of looks like a sack of pus with legs, which is maybe what it got its name from. But here's where it gets good. The venom of the yellow sack spider is a cytotoxin, which means it breaks down cells and can cause necrosis or tissue death. It eats your flesh if it bites you. The bites are characterized by an initial stinging pain followed by redness and swelling, which can develop into a blister or sore. And the bite is often compared to that of a brown recluse, although it's less severe and the wound is likely to heal much faster. And some experts think that many recorded brown recluse bites are in fact sack spider bites, and that these spiders are responsible for more bites than any other species.

So they're out there biting people.

They're out there biting people, but they still, again, we are three into this list, and so far none of the deadly spiders on this list appear to be deadly. But this is number seven, the Fringed Ornamental Tarantula, which seems like it could be deadly. Tarantulas are pretty scary. You know them, you love them, or maybe you hate them, but these giant fuzzy friends are the poster child for spiders that would cause you to shriek and fling them across the room.

Oh, forget it, yeah, forget it, forget it, forget it. I would never.

So, unlike the smaller spiders on this list, I learned that tarantulas are mygalomorphs, which means that their fangs point down and have to be stabbed into the prey rather than the sort of pincher style action of other smaller species. And I know what you're thinking if you're not an arachnophobe. You're thinking, Chris, I've heard tarantula bites. They're not so bad, right? And that's true. Most tarantula bites aren't any worse than a bee sting. Most tarantulas are also very docile. So good luck getting one to bite you even if you try. But this particular genus of tarantula are renowned for having a particularly bad bite. And not only is this genus supposed to have the worst, the fringed ornamental tarantula has the worst of the worst. The bite from one of these spiders can cause excruciating pain to the point where your muscles cramp involuntarily. At least one bite victim has ended up in the emergency room because they had severe spasms and chest pains after one of these spiders.

So this is a bite caused it like from a toxin or whatever, and not just like it bit you so hard that it messed up your muscles?

Yeah, no, there have been no confirmed fatalities. Again, no confirmed fatalities, not deadly, but the tarantula hasn't apparently killed anybody, but the venom is potent and it injects it by the bucket load. So you're getting physically pierced, but then that venom is making the pain worse.

Sure.

Number six on the list of 10 most deadly spiders is the mouse spider. And God damn, this one looks like a fucking demon.

I'm looking it up and I'm so mad that I am, because I feel like I'm gonna have a hard time sleeping tonight looking at these spiders. Nope, that's a fucking easy no for me. That's a, that shouldn't exist. What the fuck? I can kind of see why it might get that name because it's got a fat ass ass. Like where maybe like if you just saw that ass, you might be like, oh, it's, that's a mouse running over. I don't know, but damn, I hate this.

Giant fangs, giant fangs. If you're not near a computer and following along on these images with us, the mouse spider is the closest spider I've ever seen to a fake spider that you'd buy at like Spencer gifts or something.

Oh yeah.

It's just a giant, thick, rubbery looking, black, nasty spider.

It looks square, dude. This thing looks like it could lift you and throw you out the window before it comes and bites your head off. It can rough you up a little bit. It could probably get some money from you. It could probably lift you up, side down and shake all your money out.

It's the first Australian spider on the list.

That's making sense now. That tracks. They have the whole middle of that country is just uninhabitable. In everything I hear about Australia, it's always like, hey, you know that thing you have? We have a way bigger one.

Yeah, well, and there's 12 species of mouse spider in Australia.

Yeah, they run the 12 gangs that run Australia.

Yeah, they run the government. They pull the strings, literally. All 12 species are armed with huge fangs and venom that is similar to the deadly Sydney funnel web spider. The reason that the mouse spider apparently isn't higher on this list is because it is a less aggressive spider than the Sydney funnel web spider, and it also often gives dry bites or bites without any venom. So I didn't know that was a thing, but there's a couple spiders on this list that apparently sometimes give dry bites.

Well, you say sometimes, which means it's like a habanero, whatever, what's that one that like not everyone's a super?

Oh, the, why can't I think of it? You can get them like roasted and seared.

Yeah, I just recently was eating at a restaurant with friends in New York where I'm like, are those hot? And they're like, not all of them. And so I ate one with the meal as you're supposed to, and it was delicious. It was so good. And I was like, oh, I'm gonna go back for seconds. And the next one I had made the rest of the meal awful for me. Like it was so, so hot. So I got like a dry bite with that first one and then full blown venom with the second pepper.

Shishito, shishito peppers, I think is what people say that about.

Yeah, so shishito, this is the shishito pepper of muscle bound spiders.

Yes, pretty much. You nailed it.

But it's also like sometimes you'll see a lot of like really big dudes or just really jacked guys who are like really sweethearts because they have nothing to prove. Like why do they have to get in a fight? They're huge. And I feel like maybe that's a little bit of that going on too. I bet you that we'll probably get smaller as we go higher in the list because they're like fucking, they got something to prove and they're pieces of shit.

Well, the next spider on the list, I don't think is smaller, but your mileage may vary. The next spider on the list, number five, number five, the six-eyed sand spider from the deserts of South Africa or Southern Africa.

Okay, I'm looking at it. Lot to hate here, lot to hate, lot to take in.

It looks like a tailless facehugger.

That's exactly a great way to describe it. That is, it has a lot of facehugger kind of features and it kind of has a crustacean vibe too.

Like a land crustacean.

It seems pretty flat, weirdly. I hate it.

It is pretty flat because the way it hunts is it buries itself in the sand and waits for something to crawl by and then it pounces. The scientific name for the six-eyed sand spider's family is Sicarius, which means murderer. Although it doesn't murder humans at the rate that it murders rabbits, in trials it was shown that the venom from a six-eyed sand spider bite was fatal to rabbits in as little as five hours.

And a rabbit's not a small thing. It's small in terms of like things we hunt, but you're bringing down like a house cat basically.

Yeah, I mean, they seem like they're pretty nasty.

What six, are they normally eight-eyes? Yes. Despite like the six-eyes unusual?

I would assume so, yes. As far as I know, arachnids have eight eyes, so.

So six-eyes, they had to trade in two eyes and some sort of like crossroads with the devil to get that extra rabbit killing strength.

Yes. Well, they also, their venom is a cytotoxin like recluse spiders. And in the case of Sicarius, the venom is both hemolytic and necrotic, meaning that it causes blood vessels to leak and flesh to be eaten away. So a great combo, great one-two punch. No one's entirely sure how dangerous six-eyed sand spiders are to humans because there have only ever been two cases of bites to humans, and neither were really conclusively attributed to the six-eyed sand spider.

No, this sounds like another situation where you just didn't get to a hospital or based on where they are most commonly found, like you were saying earlier, these are not city centers, these are not like, these are places where you're pretty far from civilization.

Yeah, you're getting pulled right back into the sand by the sand spider or by the weather as soon as you go down. Number four on the list, finally, more than halfway through the list and we are at the first spider that I think has actually ever been officially categorized as deadly, the black widow spider.

Yeah, man, black widow. Such a famous spider.

Such a famous spider should get the EGOT for spiders. It's one of the most iconic spiders on the planet. You know it, I know it. You can tell right away what you're looking at because of the hourglass.

The red hourglass, it's such a, it's basically, it's tattooed like no different than a teardrop under your eye. Like you're a murderer.

Yeah, these spiders have gang signs.

Are there black widows that don't have it? Is the like, does that signify it's male, it's female or something, or is it always gonna have that red hourglass?

That's a good question. I'm pretty sure that the female spiders have the poison.

I didn't ask about that. I asked about the imagery.

Oh, about who has the hourglass.

Yeah, yeah, I wonder if does that like signify anything or if they just all have hourglasses.

I think they all have it. I think they all have it.

Interesting. I'm sure someone will write in and say, they were way wrong.

Probably. Listen, I'm looking up 10 different kinds of spiders here. I might get a factor two wrong. They have a toxin that can really fuck you up. Symptoms of a Black Widow spider bite depend on the amount of venom injected. Sometimes a Black Widow will give a dry bite, so you won't have any sickness or illness. And even then about 75% of wet bites basically just hurt. Localized pain, nothing crazy.

Really?

If there's a substantial dose of poison, a bite can cause what is called Latrodectism. And the symptoms sort of break down like this. Within five to 10 minutes after the first bite, you will develop an intense local pain, followed by sweating and goosebumps within an hour. So you're gonna feel like you have a pretty nasty flu and a really fucked up ankle or hand or whatever within an hour of being bit by a black widow. You might not see puncture marks and you might not see specific redness. If you are unlucky enough to move on from this stage to have widespread symptoms, you'll get even more pain, which will typically start near the bite site and then travel up your body from foot to thigh to waist, whatever, followed by just a generalized pain throughout your whole body. The venom directly affects nerves. So you also will continue to sweat severely, although sometimes, and what I can imagine is like, maybe bizarrely hilarious, sometimes if only the nerves in one limb or another will be affected, so like you might have a really sweaty right leg and your left leg and nothing else is sweating at all.

Oh, weird.

Yeah, and changes in your adrenaline can also lead to a mild increase in blood pressure and pulse. And then from there, you'll probably get headaches, nausea, vomiting. For the next one to four days, you'll feel very unwell, and sometimes patients will report for weeks or months afterwards that the bite site hurts.

Wow, man, that sucks.

This latrodectism is what killed people before antivenom became available. And even then, it was mostly fatal, I think, in the very old and the very young, people who were susceptible, their bodies weren't up to the task.

I mean, that's basically it's the flu of spiders. Like it kills the old, it kills the young.

Yeah, and you sweat your leg off.

Yeah, you sweat your leg off. The only good thing, the only redeeming quality of a black widow spider is of all the spiders we've had to Google to look at their dumb dumb faces, at least we get a bunch of Scarlett Johansson with this one. So it gets broken up, like gross spider gets broken up every third or fourth photo. So that's pretty nice. The other ones are just wall to wall gross spider.

And just like the flower test, it helps you lose your fear of spiders, looking back and forth between a spider and Scarlett Johansson.

All it's making me do is be afraid of beautiful women.

Well, at least we can say that this list of deadly spiders officially, finally, has a killer. features a deadly spider. Thank God. Number three, the brown recluse. Now, you've heard of these guys, if not before you listened to this episode, you certainly have heard of them now.

Well, you know where you hear about them. I don't know about you, but my first experience hearing about brown recluses is pretty much anytime spiders come up, it seems like, or especially black widows come up, at least here in the United States, you'll be like, black widow, it's killer, it's killer. And there'll always be some assholes, like actually brown recluse is more dangerous. So black widow is more famous, like you know what it is, with the brown recluse, which you really want to be worried about. And that person is the worst person every party.

And they probably grew up to write this list because they ranked brown recluse one spot higher than black widow, so.

Yeah, but everyone who's ever met them at a party ranks them as people.

Near the very bottom, because if you want to see some really gnarly shit, Google brown recluse spider bite.

I'm not, this is the one where I'm not gonna do it.

I encourage you listener, Google it.

I'm having a hard enough time Googling to just look at their dumb faces, let alone the aftermath of their actions. Because my pants, for whatever reason right now, I'm wearing very short socks. And so I'm getting hit with some sort of like cool air on my ankles this whole time. And I just keep being very reminded that I have exposed ankles right now. And then like every new spider we look at, my brain goes to like, are there spiders down there biting my ankles? So I have this very weird thing happening right now that I don't want to spend any more time. Like I'll look at the spiders, but if I start seeing the bites, then that'll transfer down there. So I don't need that.

Well, I'll tell you this much. Their toxin is necrotic as well. It's flesh eating and their bites result in some of the most severe cases of necrotic flesh that any bug bite can give you. The area around the bites will die and a deep, deep open sore will form.

Ugh, gross.

There's no effective treatment for these bites. Sometimes they take months to heal. Sometimes you actually have to get a skin graft to heal a brown recluse spider bite. In the worst, worst cases, people have had their limbs amputated and there have been a significant number of fatal bites from brown recluse spiders.

I mean, there's a little something to be said here about what I said earlier because I'm looking at pictures of brown recluses here and it seems like they can all fit within coin-based currency.

Yes.

Like they're not huge. They're not like some of the other guys in this list. They're pretty small.

I'll spoil this. We're gonna get to a story of a man who nearly died from a brown recluse spider bite a little bit later on. And he got his spider bite from reaching into a bowl of fruit and he never even saw the spider.

What was I watching? Jesus, I was watching something from the 30s or 40s and they work at a grocer, like a green grocer, and they're bringing in fruit from just fruit, bananas, let's say. And it's like, you don't see them or anything, but everybody keeps talking about, watch out for spiders when bringing the fruit in. They're constantly talking about it. This is a movie from the 30s.

Well, the hobo spiders were already riding the rails at that point.

Yeah, but then I think it did actually come up. I think it was something where it was like, oh, Stacey got bit from the banana spiders or something. There was, the banana spiders did come up again, but yeah, it was this thing where, and I imagine in the 1930s, before whatever we're doing now, like whatever kind of sprays we're using or certain rules and regulations about importing fruits and vegetables. I think in 1930s, maybe a lot of those weren't there. And it was just like every third banana has a black widow on it, I don't know.

Maybe, I don't know. I do know that according to Planet Deadly, you shouldn't spray brown recluse spiders with bug killer. They claim that the species of brown recluse spider is immune to insecticides and hitting them in some will only make them more toxic and angry.

It's the hulk. It's the hulk of spiders.

I don't trust Planet Deadly on this. That seems maybe angry, but make them more toxic? Yeah, it's not radiation.

Yeah, but I do see a world in which these are pretty tough spiders, you know? They'll kill you. For all I know is there's a couple at that office being like, and then also write that we can't die from bug spray. Like if you want to keep your leg, you have to write a couple of things in this article. There's a bunch of, I have to imagine, I don't know, spiders that learned English. They're there, they're talking.

They've been around a long time.

They went to the one office where people actually know what their deal is. So they know like, we have to listen to the spider. Like, hey, we know who you are, Brown Recluse. Your reputation precedes you. What can we help you with? It was like, yeah, if you don't want to lose your leg, there's a couple of things I'd like you to include in the next evening's edition. One of which is we're, can't be killed by bullets, can't be killed by feet, can't be killed by this. And so that way, everyone won't try and kill them when they see them. They'll think that they're impervious. It's not a bad idea.

It's not a bad idea.

It's never a bad idea to learn English, period. But if you're a killer spider, it really can go a long way.

Yeah. The number two most deadly spider on this list, I can only imagine how deadly this spider would be if it learned English. The Sydney Funnel Web Spider.

Okay, I'll look it up.

Ah!

Okay, this is for real, the worst one. This is for real, the worst spider I've seen. I am feeling like weirdness all over my body, my skin recoiled looking at this, and it doesn't help that the pictures that come up are of it like pouncing back on its back legs with its arms hanging out. And then other pictures are it like maybe on a horseshoe crab or something. So it's like hideous on top of hideous. I fucking hate this. Woo, wow, this is the worst one for sure. Nobody Google this. I'm not gonna sleep tonight, this sucks.

It has a super badass Latin name to match its super badass appearance, Atrax robustus.

Yeah, it's pretty robustus.

While most spiders on this list avoid humans, this spider will charge humans and it will deliver you not one bite, but a lot of bites while it clings to your flesh.

I'm gonna tell you right now, the posture of this fucking spider, it has the most come at me bro energy of any of the ones on the list. It just looks like it wants trouble, man. So I'm not at all surprised that it's also like a dirty fighter like that.

Yeah, part of why it ends up at number two is because its venom isn't any more potent than the other spiders on this list, but you always get the full dose.

They don't dry bite nobody, dude.

No dry bites, you get the full dose.

And repeated doses, it's just going at you. And you know the term murdered out? Like a vehicle could be murdered out, it's like black on black on black on black. That's very much also this thing's like a murdered out spider. It was like, hey, can you give me tints and make me like matte black? And then God of course said no, but the devil was like, sure.

Hell yeah. Sure. The Sydney Funnel Web also has the most impressive fangs of any spider. Their fangs are actually longer than some snakes, which is fucking long.

Are they retractable?

I don't think so.

I already closed the images because I simply could not look at it for one more moment, but I didn't get like a super good look.

You'll see it when you close your eyes.

Oh, fuck, you're not wrong.

So not only all of that, but between the length of their fangs and how hard they can bite, funnel web spiders have been reported to bite through shoe leather and even fingernails.

Oh, my God.

Which as a hater of fingernail trauma, that's the first thing we've talked about that makes me sick.

I closed my finger on a door today and it's already turned into that like weird green finger.

Yeah, can you imagine a spider biting through it? Like a fucking staple gun.

Here's the thing about Australia. This is Australia, right? It's gotta be an Australian spider. It says Sydney Funnel. I have never been happier to be quite literally just so far away from Australia than right now. We are, I think if you drilled a hole from New York City directly through the earth, you might end up in like Perth, Australia or something. So the fact that it's like on the other side of the planet is pretty good for me. I want these things on the other side of the planet.

Yeah, yeah, I mean.

Are you shocked into silence with having just no idea if what I said is true about Perth, Australia?

I'm sure.

Your face completely changed.

I'm trying to imagine it. I don't know.

I mean, I might be making it up. Who cares?

Well, I mean, you definitely shouldn't tunnel from New York City to Perth, Australia because your tunnel's gonna get filled with these fucking things. So.

That's true.

Unlike virtually every other group of spiders on earth, it is the male Sydney funnel web that's equipped with the most potent venom, six times stronger than that of the females. The venom itself is a neurotoxin, and it appears to be, in studies, particularly effective against primates. So within minutes of being bitten, you might get symptoms such as muscle spasms, palpitations, vomiting, confusion, and swelling of the brain. In some cases, people have died within 15 minutes after the bite occurred. The only good news about this fucking creature is that an effective anti-venom was introduced in 1981, and there hasn't been a death since.

Wow, but I bet you that anti-venom's not anywhere, like it's gotta just be in and around where they're found, right? Like I can't go to, can't get it here, right?

I mean, probably not. Certainly can't get it within ambulance distance of that reptile show we were at.

That's what I'm saying, man. Like, yeah, like I always wanna know where like, we need to make sure that the earth has a couple things. We have to always have a smallpox vaccine. We have to always have a venom for this. You're not wrong in calling it a creature because that thing is a creature, dude.

Yeah. Well, there's one more creature on this list. I'll make my bad drum roll sound again.

No, man, I think drum rolls bring spiders to the yard, man. Don't do that.

The number one most deadly spider in the world, according to this list, and lots of other lists that I looked at, is the Brazilian wandering spider.

Oh, Brazil, you enter the Scared All The Time podcast feed yet again. Is there nothing you won't harbor in that fucking country?

This one is a beast.

I think I would also have a huge carnival every year just to celebrate living another fucking year through whatever Brazilian creatures haven't killed me that year. Cause we had, was it piranhas were in Brazil, I think, during Eatin Alive?

Piranhas, I think, yeah, but piranhas are overrated as far as Eatin Alive goes.

Yes, but if you just look at like, hey, let me look on the side of the box that is Brazil. What terrifying ingredients are in here? And it's like, they have the giant snakes. They have the piranhas. They have the deadliest spider. They have probably more than I'm not thinking of.

So the Brazilian wandering spider has poison that is 20 times deadlier than that of the black widow spider if it gets into your bloodstream. That basically makes it as potent as some of the most dangerous snake species on earth. If you get bit, you might lose muscle control. You might have trouble breathing. You might have your respiratory system become paralyzed, which means you would asphyxiate and you would die. It's a bad bite. And there is one other major side effect to the bite that is some really good Scared All The Time content.

You turn into a spider after seven days, unless you can give that bite to someone else.

No, if you are male and you are bit by the Brazilian wandering spider, you will get an up to four or five hour long erection that is painful.

Wait a minute, what?

Yes.

I don't like that. That's insane.

Yeah.

And here's a better question. Jesus Christ, my brain is scrambled from that knowledge. But what I was about to say is, is this going to lead into some weird like, you know how inventions and stuff are always like by accident where like, is this how Viagra was made? Was it like, oh, we have this Brazilian?

Dull was in the jungle getting bit by spiders.

Yeah, like, cause you can have your Madame Web moment where it was like, my mom was in the Amazon instead of becoming Madame Web or whatever.

She had a multi-hour erection and died.

Well, not her.

But you know.

I'm just saying, I was waiting for you to be like, and interesting side note about this is that's actually how they discovered the formula for Viagra is just a bunch of this spider.

I assume it must have something to do with like your blood pressure or blood flow or something.

Wait a second though, before we move on, is it every time you get a boner from it?

I don't think it's every time.

Cause that's gotta be, that's gotta suck. You're already have to go to the hospital and be like, I got a spider bite. And it was like, just please ignore this other stuff. Just help me with the spider bite.

Yes, the erection is a common side effect of the spider bite, but I don't think it is every time.

That's so silly. It's the craziest thing.

I know, it's very funny.

If the venom doesn't kill you, you can die from embarrassment.

They're like, now this happened, you said, when you saw a spider? No.

No, not from when I saw a spider. I'm not a, I'm an arachnophobe, not an arachnophile.

There you go.

Please believe me. Like what, because I'm this whole thing.

As the name suggests, these spiders are not confined to their webs in a dark corner somewhere. They like to wander and turn up in all manner of hiding places for boots to clothes, log piles, cars and bunches of bananas. Oh, here we go. This is the banana spider you were talking about, Ed.

Oh shit, okay.

Because they would hitch a ride across the globe, boxes of bananas. Well, now you know why all those hard nosed 30s guys were checking the bananas for spiders. They didn't want to be walking around the grocery store with the heart on for six hours.

Yeah, well, they are, I think still. It's 1930s, you can do what you want. But I'll try and find the movie and I'll put it in the show notes. But the movie wasn't called like Banana Spiders, but it was weirdly came up a lot, like there were spiders in the bananas.

It was called Erection in Isle 7.

Erection phobia, no, I have that too. But no, I'm glad it came up organically that we got to the source, the root source of banana spiders.

Yes.

And I looked them up, they're not as scary looking. They're not by any means the scariest looking spider we've seen, which nothing to prove, per usual.

Nothing to prove. According to the Arachnology and Entomology Department at Burke Museum in Seattle, sources state that over 7,000 authentic cases of human bites from the Brazilian wandering spider have been recorded with only around 10 known deaths and about 2% of cases serious enough to need anti-venom.

Oh, so even with 20 times the toxin or whatever, you still might not die?

Yeah, it's 20 times more powerful, but that's if it gets into your bloodstream. And I assume not all bites enter the bloodstream.

Is this probably gonna come up, I guess, or it won't, then we'll just never have the answer. Is there a reason they're biting people? Like a mosquito, they want that blood. You know what I mean? What's a spider doing? Why are you biting us?

It's defense. I think most spiders bite humans. I mean, they're not trying to eat a human, so the only reason they'd bite would be defense.

Yeah, but I've woken up or you've woken up and people have woken up being like, that's a weird new bite. It must be a spider bite. And the last I checked, that's the most prone I'm gonna be, man. I'm asleep.

Well, if you roll over on it or something, you know.

Get out of here, spiders. Just scram already.

Scram they will, Ed. Scram they will.

They better.

So there we go. That's the list. The world's 10 deadliest spiders featuring by my count, three spiders that have ever killed anyone. So you don't have too much to worry about from small spiders at least, but what about big spiders? Like really big spiders? Because if you were looking at pictures along with us while we were just going through this list, yeah, you saw some nasty looking spiders, but you didn't see the biggest spider in the world. I want you to go look up the Goliath bird eater.

I don't like any word they've smashed together to name this thing. If even half of it is true, we're in trouble.

I mean, it's basically the biggest fucking tarantula you've ever seen in your life. This thing would ruin my whole day. I don't care who you are, how chill you are about spiders. If you see this, you will go the opposite direction. It's big, it's brown, it's fuzzy. It can weigh up to six ounces. It can be five inches long. The only spider that gets bigger is the giant huntsman spider because the huntsman has longer legs. But by body size, this is the biggest spider.

Just to give people an idea, six ounces, okay, that's over a quarter pound. So it weighs more than a quarter pounder for McDonald's.

And speaking of, we're gonna get to a little fact about eating these spiders in a minute.

Not to say that, I'm looking at some pictures and I hate it. It is big enough to maybe put it on a stick and this is something that the gears are gonna turn in someone's head in the Amazon and be like, it's kind of big enough. It's like meat in this.

It's fucking huge. Yeah, we'll get to that in a second.

I wish we wouldn't, but I guess it's coming, great.

Supposedly, the name of the Goliath bird eater is a bit of a misnomer and that it doesn't actually eat birds that often. Oh shit. But it still seems like it might eat birds sometimes, which is terrible enough. They aren't really that venomous, Goliath bird eaters, which is why they weren't on the list. They do have up to four centimeter long fangs that they bite with. And the bite has been compared to the feeling of having a nail driven straight through your skin. They also defend themselves with urticating hairs, which apparently, I didn't know this, are the same kinds of nettles that are used by some caterpillars in plants. They're those little stinging hairs that can get stuck in your skin. And like in your fingers and your eyes.

I hate that. I hate that. I hate that it's got two things. Two things I hate are on it.

It's got two things.

And for people who use imperial measurement, four centimeters, over an inch and a half, the fangs.

In addition to these defense mechanisms, they are big and they are common. And this is what I was saying earlier, Ed, it's actually considered part of the local cuisine in Northeastern South America. And the way they prepare this thing is they singe off all the urticating hairs, and then they wrap it and roast it in banana leaves. The flavor is described as shrimp-like.

Well, I mean, they look like, we mentioned earlier, they have very crustacean-y. I mean, they've gotta be on the 23andMe spectrum with like crabs and stuff. Like, cause crabs look like sea spiders.

I don't have all the facts in front of me cause I didn't end up finding a place for it in this episode. But for a long time, there was a fossilized genus, I think, of spider that people thought was like, oh my God, this would have been the biggest spider in the world that ever lived. It wasn't man-sized or anything, but it was like small monkey size. It was a big fucking spider. But then it ended up being reclassified as some sort of like underwater cousin of a spider. So yes, very similar.

Where was I? I was in not just my nightmares, this was a real place. I think it was like the Harvard- No, it was like the Harvard something museum of natural history. It was some like history museum in Harvard. And there was like a sea spiders, like there was an exhibit that I just head down, walked through that was like spiders and sea fucking things or whatever. And yeah, there was like a sea, I think it was called a sea spider. And it was huge and terrible. And I hated it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because it wasn't like, oh, it's a crab. It was like, nope, that's a spider that they've replaced its outside with like 1920s diver suit looking material.

Yeah, yeah, they are bizarre looking, the sea spiders and stuff. But I bet they don't taste as good as the Goliath bird eater.

I don't know. I mean, you wrap anything in a banana leaf and see how it goes.

Well, the Goliath bird eater might not actually be the biggest spider in the world because we're gonna take a turn down a cryptozoological path deep into the jungle. Since the 1850s, rumors have persisted of an absolutely massive spider living in the jungles of the Congo. This spider is called the Jba Fofi. The fullest account by Westerners appears in a cryptozoological book by George Eberhardt. Eberhardt relates the terrifying experience of an English couple traveling through a region of jungle in what is now called the Congo. RK. Lloyd and his wife were motoring in the Belgian Congo in 1938 when they saw a large object crossing the trail in front of them. At first, they thought it was a cat or a monkey, but they soon realized it was a spider with legs nearly three feet long. That report was followed up on by cryptozoologist William J. Gibbons, who in the 70s and 80s hunted for what some people think is a dinosaur living in the Congo called the Makili Mbembe, and on Gibbons' third expedition in search of the Makili Mbembe, he came upon natives who told him about their experiences with giant spiders. He wrote this, Quote, On this third expedition to equatorial Africa, I took the opportunity to inquire if the Pygmies knew of such a giant spider, and indeed they did. They speak of the Jabba Fofi, which is a quote, giant or great spider. They described a spider that is generally brown in color with a purple mark on the abdomen. They grow to quite an enormous size with a leg span of at least five feet. The giant arachnids weave together a layer made of leaves similar in shape to a traditional pygmy hut and spin a circular web, said to be very strong, between two trees with a strand stretched across game trails. Natives also claim the Jabba Fofi eggs are a pale yellow-white and shaped like peanuts, and hatchlings are bright yellow with a purple abdomen. They become darker as they mature. Some of the people indigenous to the regions of the Congo where the Jabba Fofi has been seen assert that the spider was once common, but has since become very rare.

And they're standing by their story that this giant purple and gold spider, it was huge. They're saying it was giant.

Yes, large enough to kill a man.

This is a Belgian explorer?

No, the first person to write about it witnessed it in the Belgian Congo because it was when the Congo belonged to Belgium.

About to say, fuck King Leopold, those pieces of shit.

But then Gibbons, I believe, was an American and he was there in the 70s or 80s asking about these spiders.

1970s and 80s, not the 1870s and 80s.

Yes, yes, yes, 1970s and 80s.

Okay, got you.

In 2013, some night vision footage, you'll see it in the show notes, surfaced online of video that does appear to show a glimpse of the Jabbas Fauvies kind of scrambling through frame.

I think the only thing that could be scarier than seeing a spider is seeing a spider in like night vision. It's gonna have like crazy glowing eyes.

I mean, the video is, it's as fuzzy as any Bigfoot or Nessie video you've ever seen. It does kind of move like a spider, but I mean, these days, it's so easy to fake video and stuff. I don't know. 2013, I don't know if I really trust it. My instinct is that giant jungle spider is probably more realistic than most cryptids. But I did come across a really interesting explanation for why the Jabba Fufi probably doesn't exist. And it has to do with what we know about spider lungs.

Why do we know anything about spider lungs?

Because we have to study them in case they get bigger. We know how to defeat them.

That's true. We do need to have all their weaknesses written down for generations to come.

Yeah, so get this. Spiders have really delicate respiratory systems. There's actually two kinds of respiratory systems in spiders. Tarantulas have what are called book lungs because they look like thin wrinkled pages of a book and they aren't all related to the kinds of lungs that evolved in other animals. Or I shouldn't say, they serve the same purpose as lungs in other animals, even though they evolved separately. So the purpose of these lungs is that they exchange gas with the air the animal needs to breathe, but book lungs function without any motion, which is a really cool idea, a lung that functions without motion.

It's weird they call it a book lung and not, they're like, oh, it's a book lung because it resembles pages of a book. Well, why isn't it just pages lung? So page lungs.

I don't know.

Yeah, well.

This page lung sounds like a German bodybuilder.

Ha ha ha ha.

Other spiders who don't have book lungs breathe through tubes positioned in their sort of like their back end near their butt. And these long tubes have small holes along the belly and air absorbs in and out through the skin along those what are called tracheal tubes. And so anyway, I bring this all up because as far as scientists are able to understand, neither book lungs nor tracheal tubes could sustain a spider much larger than a bird eater. So the literal exchange of oxygen would suggest that these animals could not exist at this size.

Or they would need like the puffy bag fills, bag collapses, human style lungs, or per the design of an alien, face hugger lungs.

Yes, and that said, we are learning more about spiders all the time. We actually thought that spiders couldn't feel pain for a long time, but recent studies show that that might actually be a misconception that spiders do feel pain.

So I'm gonna fucking make them believe they don't.

I wanna believe that they do. That gives me a chance against them.

No, I meant to absolve me of anything. That was for my conscience, so that if I killed it, it was like, well, it doesn't matter.

I see.

But I see for you, you're like, you can use it against them.

Yes.

Yeah, I just wanted to be like, I absolve myself of any wrongdoing. It's like, motherfucker didn't even feel me step on it. Right, right. But you, you want it to be like, to extract information, like tell me where she is. I'll fucking close your lines.

Yeah, I can take their teeth.

Oh, you want a little bit of this fire? And it's like, I know you feel this motherfucker. Like that's, so you're a sick son of a bitch. I'm getting it.

So who knows? Yeah, if spiders can feel pain, who knows what else we have wrong about them. Maybe they can become giant. But I wanted to wrap up with the story of a small spider that ended up being big dangerous. Sounds like a good movie poster. Small spider, big dangerous.

That's like, what if we let Alta Vista translate our posters to other countries?

So this story comes from The Guardian, and it is a first person recounting of a really brutal spider bite that is the kind of thing that gives spiders bad names. So this guy writes, it was October 2012 when a group of us were watching football at my mate James' house in London. During the second half, I decided to help myself to a banana from the fruit bowl.

Oh my God, bananas are back.

First mistake, didn't check the bananes. I felt a pinch and then my left hand became stiff. I showed my friends the bizarre black dot with a white ring around it on my hand. No one knew what to make of it. I started feeling peaky, so headed back to my flat in a cab. It's funny, this is like-

The most British thing with our accents.

Yeah, it's like somebody just like, they just did a find and replace for British slang or something.

I love that we're not even attempting, because A, we don't have to and B, I don't think either of us are good at accents.

No. As soon as I got in, I felt as if I had the flu and went to bed. My housemate, Travis, was in our flat watching a film in his room when I started having a fever dream and began screaming. He heard me through the wall, but assumed I'd stop soon.

Oh, that's very me as a roommate. That's very like, I think there's a couple stories of people like who were, whatever, and I would just text them like, you good?

Yeah, that is not-

If I heard seven gunshots and my roommate saying like, a man's in my room and I'm being shot at, and I could do every version of that, know exactly what's going on, I'd still would just text like, you good? Like I'm definitely not coming down there.

Yeah, well, this guy didn't even do that. He put on his headphones and watched the rest of his film.

Oh my God.

When he pulled off his headphones during the end credits, he could still hear me shrieking and decided to check on me. So this guy was shrieking from what he says felt like the flu.

The flu will fuck you up, flu will fuck you up.

Yeah, but does it make you scream? I don't know.

I don't know if it, I don't think it makes you scream. I think it's, you might not have the energy, but you're in a lot of pain though. If you have like proper flu, there's a lot of aches and pains.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. For more than an hour, this man shrieked through the walls.

Well, we don't know. Did it say it was an hour or was it like the guy was two minutes from the end?

It says he put on his headphones and watched the entire film.

Oh, I thought it said like the rest of the film. It might've been like, oh, I'm not gonna deal with his screaming right now. It's the climactic ending.

Yeah, I don't know.

If he's like, okay, if he's putting his headphones on, it says like a film by Martin Scorsese, then yeah. He's, it depends on what's on screen at that moment. He's a pretty shitty roommate anyway.

In any case, he could still hear this guy shrieking and decided finally to check on me. Not receiving any response to his knocking, he kicked down my locked door. So this guy goes from not helping at all to kicking a door in, nice, nice.

This actually, this, I don't mean to interrupt for this such a stupid thing. Did I ever say on the show, and maybe I said it in the show, I don't know. When I went home for like Christmas break or whatever, and I had a lock on my door because there was like people were gonna be subletting and crap at one of my apartments in Boston, and I just didn't want strangers in my stuff. When I was away, I put like a lock on the door, but I had forgotten to turn my alarm clock off that comes on every morning at like 7 a.m. And so I had come back to Boston from my Christmas break and the door was kicked in and the lock was shattered and everything, and I'm like, what the fuck happened? And they're like, yeah, maybe don't go home and leave your alarm clock on. Yeah.

That's brutal.

So anyway, this guy has had the full welcome back from Christmas break treatment done on his door. So what happened next?

Well, his roommate, he says, he found the white sweating, screeching, clasping my left hand, which had turned red, and looked like one of those comical foam hands. He bundled me into a taxi to the nearest hospital, and thank God he did. As the nurse took my temperature, her eyes widened with horror. Soon I was being rushed into an ambulance to be seen by the tropical diseases team in a nearby hospital.

Is it because he had an erection, like a crazy erection? Like what made them, what made her eyes go wide and knew, like, we gotta get this guy to the tropical boys?

My God, we need to get this man to a doctor.

Right now.

I was conscious in the ambulance, asking a million questions, but was out by the time we arrived. I went into what is known as hyperprexia, an extreme elevation in core body temperature. At 43 degrees Celsius or 109 degrees Fahrenheit, I had the ward's highest temperature that didn't result in death.

Oh wow.

I regained consciousness shortly after an emergency operation to open up the wound, to clean it and assess the damage. My arm was almost black, with track marks that snake towards my shoulder, which I later found out was the potent venom from a female brown recluse spider, a cousin of the black widow.

I had a boss once, this woman I worked for, who she got like a cat scratch, like a cat scratched her. And not what this guy is describing, but her veins like turned black and you can like follow where whatever, whatever she got from that scratch, like you can follow directly where it was like going into her body. And she did say one of my favorite things about an animal. She was like, man, if that cat was a person, it would be in prison. She was like, it was such a mean cat.

I'm imagining it with like an eye patch and a scar on its face.

Yes, it's like, oh, you want some of these poison claws?

I think when that happens from a cat scratch, I think it's bacteria that gets in the wound.

Oh, I'm sure it was something that was like on the claws or whatever. So either way, it's a bad cat. It's probably dipping that, like dipping its claws.

Although now I'm wondering, can you imagine if there were venomous cats? That would be brutal.

If there was ever a year for them, I mean, it's coming. I don't know. Every year, shit's getting worse.

Yeah. I was pumped with every kind of antibiotic and drip as initially they didn't know it was a spider bite. The telltale black spot with the white ring had been removed during the emergency wound cleaning session. I had both a dermonecrotic and systemic reaction, meaning not only that the venom killed off skin and tissue, but also my organs started to shut down as my blood thickened, which is rare and can be fatal. The doctors had to constantly put me under to open the back of my hand to cut away the flesh, trying to stop the venom and necrosis spreading further. They were also trying to work out what the venom was and pumping me with different drugs to bring down my temperature. After two weeks in hospital, the doctor recommended amputating the arm up to the elbow because of the risk of necrosis spreading to my heart.

Yeah, but speaking of amputations, why do the British always amputate the in front of hospital? They always do that. So I'm in hospital, I'm going to toilet. Fuck off.

Anyway.

So he's getting shit amputated.

Well, they recommend amputating the arm up to the elbow because of the risk of necrosis spreading to my heart. And he says, I was adamant I'd rather have died, which makes me wonder what the fuck he needed that arm for so desperately.

Yeah, like what arm based economy did he work in?

I don't know. He's addicted to slot machines. He's like, no, God, no, don't take my arm.

You got two arms.

Well, that's true.

I'm trying to think of something that like, it would have to be like a dominant arm.

But wait, here we go. Here he says, now with a clear head, I can imagine a life without one arm that would be preferable to dying. I was tired, confused and on a lot of morphine.

You know what? It's England, dude. Fucking, they love soccer. Like they don't even care. They don't even need your arms for anything important.

No, and I would like to point out the drummer of Def Leppard famously lost his arm in a car accident.

One arm.

And was a one-armed drummer. And I'm sure had a great life.

Yeah, nobody wants to pour any sugar on this guy.

So I don't know what this guy is so upset about. I had to undergo four operations in four weeks. The doctor said that after these grueling procedures, my body had started to combat the necrosis, which meant I didn't have to lose the arm after all. I breathed a sigh of relief. I had cheated death.

It sounds like you cheated death like six times. He had the highest temperature in the history of mankind. He had thick blood.

Thick blood.

Thick blood, hot head.

Huge hand.

Huge hand. Probably a five hour erection. So he cheated death like six or seven times.

The five hour erection is only from banana spiders and blue chew.

Technically, this is a banana spider. It was in a banana pile.

Well, but it's not scientifically and accurately a banana spider. It just happens to be a recluse spider that was hiding in bananas.

Doing its best to basically pin this on a banana spider. This is a frame job. This is a fucking frame job, dude.

I had a skin graft from my thigh to replace the tissue I'd lost on my arm. That was the worst part of the experience. It was so painful. James didn't find out about the spider. James is the guy who's flat they were at watching the football or whatever.

Oh, the guy who just has a disgusting spider-filled apartment?

Well, he didn't find out about the spider until three weeks later. It was only confirmed when the hospital had ruled out all other options and cross-referenced photographs of the bite taken at the first hospital. So the first hospital, I guess, took a picture of the bite, probably knew it was a spider bite, but in the chaos when they cut the wound, I guess the hospital that actually treated this guy had no idea. But anyway, when James did find out about his spider apartment, he had the whole place fumigated and then left two months later. I don't think he could cope with the anxiety. The skin graft took well and after waiting for six months for it to fully heal, I was able to begin physiotherapy. My hand had been immobile for so long and had lost so much muscle that even twitching my fingers was agony. After a year, I got most of the dexterity back, but even now I still can't feel the back of my left hand. I never got to see the spider that bit me and I still don't know how it got into the fruit bowl.

They say you never hear the bullet that kills you or see the spider that almost kills you.

True. He doesn't know how it got into the fruit bowl or the country for that matter. Brown Reckless is their native to North America. He finishes this by saying, I was never scared of spiders before, but after seeing a photo of what bit me, I now never reach into a bowl of fruit without looking first. So lesson learned, if you come away from this episode with nothing else, check your fruit bowls, people.

Check the banana bowl, check your shoes. Not all the time, but especially if you're camping or something, always give a little look in the shoe if there's anything crawled in there before you put your foot in it. Just check things.

Check things.

So I'm happy the guy's doing all right and it sucks about his hand and all that stuff. But yeah, what a hearty gentleman if he's able to survive all that stuff.

Yeah, he's a trooper. Well, Ed, that takes us to our favorite part of the show, the fear tier. Where on the fear tier would you place a fear of spiders?

See, it's tough because if I see a spider, I'm like, you know what I mean? But if I'm thinking about spiders, I don't want to give a shit. And I don't, well, here's the thing. I go into the shed, I have a shed, and if I go out in shorts, my legs can feel that I've walked into spider webs. I don't freak out. I don't go crazy. I hate it. I find it gross. And if I see a spider, I'm like, I'll jump back and try and step on it or whatever. But yeah, I don't let it dictate my life. The idea of getting bit and my life falling apart because of it, yeah, that doesn't dictate. But I also won't fucking spend any amount of time in the spider section of a discovery museum or something.

Interesting. I feel like a shed is not a thing that a man who fears spiders should have.

No, no, they definitely-

That's like a spider hotbox.

100%, spiders and mice. I don't know how they're getting along, but when I'm in there, I'll find like a new rat chewed or a mouse chewed through like a section of my golf bag and spiders have fully taken over whole sections. We've established they don't actually make sounds, but I bet you if I walked in, they'd be like, Saaah! I mean, there's enough of them in there. And then the mice are just walking around eating through everything, but it's like a real proper outdoor shed. It's not like a place you'd go hang out in. It's like storage only.

Right, right, right, right. Well, I would say I hate walking through a spider web.

Sucks.

Much more than I hate seeing a spider or being around a spider. The physical sensation of going through the web is awful.

Here's a question, web question. I feel like I see a lot of webs and not a lot of spiders in the webs. I feel like I see very rare, I'll see like the remnants of like a fly got caught or a bug or a leaf, but I don't really catch myself being like, hey, look at that beautiful, big, elaborate web and look at that spider crawling gingerly across it. I feel like I'm always running into them when they're not home.

Yeah, maybe. I mean, that might, I don't wanna say that might be a city thing cause I have no idea if that's true, but I know that back in Pennsylvania in like my known as garden and other outdoor spots where I would frequent, I would definitely see spider webs with big, I don't know what species they were, but they were like big garden spiders that would be sitting in the webs. I feel like maybe in cities, you get a lot more kind of like funneling spiders or like spiders that build a little web in a corner somewhere and they're not so much stretched out between leaves.

Yeah, a lot of transient spiders. There's a spider web like in my shower, like above, like up in the corner of the wall in the ceiling. And there's been a spider just there for, I don't even know if it's alive.

Well, so you see this spider all the time. So you're not totally...

Yeah, I don't freak out. I don't get out of the shower. It's out of the way. Like I can't get to it, but I'm also like a little concerned now. Like why haven't you moved on?

Good spot for bugs, I guess.

Yeah.

Maybe it likes looking at you.

At least something does. No, yeah, so I guess by virtue of mentioning that, I guess I'm, yeah, it's pretty low. I don't know. But I'm talking about just fucking dumb spiders here. If I'm at the Spider Museum, like the museum section that has spiders, I'm not gonna spend much time in there. And if I was in Australia or something and I saw like a real fucking spider, yeah, I'm not gonna take that well. So I guess I'm very comfortable with the spiders that I'm comfortable with, but I'm not comfortable with spiders I'm not comfortable with.

I wouldn't put it at the very bottom for me, but it's just a couple of rungs up, I think, cause I don't really, I guess I'm a little skeeved out that apparently a black recluse can, or a brown recluse can do this to your arm and stuff. But-

Did it see your cat?

Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. I would not have wanted his wound at all. So I'm not sure. I don't even know what I'm not sure of. I just don't want that to happen to me.

You mentioned it earlier in the episode, but I do put it like it's akin to, or I put it around the same spot, or even a little lower than like wasps and hornets and bees, in the sense that I would be livid if I'm stung or bit by those things, but I wouldn't be afraid of being stung or bit by those things.

Yeah, do you know what it is for me? The reason that I think I don't like wasps and whatever, like bees and stuff even more, because they're not necessarily aggressive, but I hate the way that if they decide that you're a target or that they're interested in the sugar that's on your lips or something after you drink lemonade or whatever, they just keep buzzing around and it's like they will follow you. And then to me, that's always how you're gonna get stung. Whereas a spider, spiders don't come at you, except that one from Australia that we talked about, but most spiders, they keep their distance. They're not coming up to you curious about stuff, which is what I think wasps and bees, I know they're not trying to sting me, but it's like that you wanna get away from them and you can't, they like follow you.

You really wanna get away from them and they have power over the air. And so that doesn't help. And they always roll like a million deep. There's never just a lone wasp being like, hello, I'm a wasp. It's always like one wasp being like, oh, see that guy over there? He's got sugar on his lips. And another wasp, of the eight wasps being like, hold my beer. And then he comes and bothers you.

Yeah.

So yeah, I guess insects gonna insect, arachnid gonna arachnid. I'll take a slow, less aggressive arachnid over a whooshing fast, aggressive bee or like wasp.

Any day. All right, with that, that does it for us on this episode. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And the show is Scared All The Time. We'll see you next week.

Of course they know it's Scared All The Time. Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is A*****.

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