===TRANSCRIPT START===

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.

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

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And today, we are teetering at the edge of safety and sanity, looking down from thousands of feet in the air to discuss a topic that we have been avoiding since day one of this show, Heights. If you've ever been standing on the top of a building or a mountain or looking out the window of a plane and felt a precipitous drop in your stomach, this is the episode for you. Or maybe it's the episode that you will want to nervously avoid. But if you decide to stick around and listen, we are going to make this trip to the very tippy top of the world a little less nausea inducing with the inclusion of a couple of very close, very terrified friends to help us explore why your brain betrays you when you get too high, and some survival stories of folks who have plummeted all the way back down to earth. So get comfortable and stay away from the edge, it is a long way down.

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time. Now it is time for.

Time for Scared All The Time. Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Just another quick housekeeping with myself and no Ed. And if you are watching this, I guess you can see I have my cat Gertie right here. She leapt into my lap. She's much cozier than Ed. Ed's great, he's a great co-host, but not a super cuddly cozy person. That's okay though. Just a couple of quick things. As always, if you have not signed up for the Patreon and you wanna go check it out, patreon.com/scared All The Time. We have a ton of great rewards and benefits for our patrons. I think we do a really great job with it. As Ed says, we wanna give you the most bang for your buck on the internet. So go over there, check out our three tiers. If you're hearing this on Thursday, the day it drops, we have a live show, Friday, February 20th. And we'd love to see you all there. So if you haven't signed up for the Patreon, to be able to come join that, go ahead and do that. Otherwise, rate, review, all of it helps. If you leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple, we will sometimes do five-star review corner and we will read your five-star review in the housekeeping of the show. We have an archive to go back through, but Ed has the access of which ones you've done under like lock and key. So I don't know which ones we've read and I don't want to reread one we've already done. So we'll revisit that next time around. But yeah, until then, we have a great episode for you today. Zac and Sarah are two of the nicest, sweetest, funniest people who have ever been afraid of Heights. And I think you guys are going to enjoy our conversation with them. So without further ado, here we go. Get ready, get set, Heights. All right, this was going to be interesting. I have used Heights as an example of the impossible show. It's a topic that is hard to cover because while it is an extremely common fear, it's also extremely broad. So most of the time when a person encounters a fear of Heights, it's combined with another fear, like planes or cliffs or skyscrapers or bungee jumping, that kind of thing. And those topics always feel like the more complete episode. But today we are throwing the fear of the impossible out the window and tackling Heights in its most pure, adrenalized form. And that's because of our guests today, Sarah Potter and Zac Clark. You might remember Sarah from our curses episode. She's a witch, tarot reader, and author whose book Sober Magic is out now. Sarah, welcome back.

Hello.

We had a blast with her the first time and our fans really responded to her too. So we knew we had to have her back on. But plans for this episode didn't come together until the stars aligned for our second guest, a man who is a wizard in his own right, a singer, songwriter and composer, Zac Clark. Welcome to the show, man.

Pleasure to be here. Good to see you guys.

It's good to see you too. Thanks for coming, Zac. Well, we'll get into it in a second. I know to those listening to this episode, it may sound like the set up to a weird joke, a comedy writer, a horror writer, a musician and a witch walk into a bar to talk about a fear of heights, but it makes sense. I promise. So Ed and I have known Zac since college. So coming up on like 20 years, I think.

Oh boy. Don't love that.

20 years since that fateful email.

Yes. I was a fan of Zac's music in high school. He's a few years younger than me and I found his music on like mp3.com or something in high school.

That's correct.

And when we were making music videos in college, we hit him up to be like, hey man, you want to make a music video? You don't know any of us. Promise we're not weird. And he was like, sure, let's do it. And we were all weird.

It turned out.

Yeah. Promise we're not any weirder than you, which they.

Exactly. Exactly.

We were equally.

So we were all buds and then Zac met Sarah in his travels along the way as a musician and they became buds. And so as we were discussing Fears to cover on the episode that they would guess on, it came up that they both have a fear of heights. So I relented, the impossible episode lives. We're doing fear of heights.

Amazing.

Yes.

Finally.

Finally. Finally the episode that everybody has been clamoring for. I actually think we might get people telling us that this is one of those episodes they can't listen to because people who are afraid of heights are really afraid of heights. But before we get into all the science and the stories around fear of heights, I think we'll do what we always do and try to set the table with some personal connections to the topic. So Zac and Sarah, since you both share this fear, we'll start with you guys. Have you always been afraid of heights? Was there some sort of trigger for it? Zac, maybe we'll start with you because you fly for shows all the time. So is that where you face this fear the most?

No, no, absolutely not. Like that to me is I forget where I heard the term used first, but I love the term orbital to describe a fear. Like it's way too far out for me to give a shit at that point. Can I say bad words on this? Is that okay?

Oh yeah, yeah, you can say fuck. Say all sorts of stuff, dude.

Balls.

Say fuck shit, balls. Get the earmuffs on, dude.

Yes. Thank you. Freedom. Yeah, no, it's way too, it's way too far out for me to care at that point, you know, for some reason. For me, like, dude, I could be like, I'm like 10 feet off the ground and I get towards the edge of something 10 feet up and I'm like, ah! And that's, I'm like 70% of the way to being 10 feet tall looking out of my eyes.

Oh my God, yeah.

You know?

Yeah, you can't, people who are, even if you're watching this episode, Zac is a tall person. You can't, you might not be able to tell, but.

No, if they're watching, his hat's leaving the frame. He's the only person whose hat's leaving the frame in this.

So yeah, so you'll feel it, you'll feel it anywhere. Do you, what happens when you feel that sense? Is it in your stomach? Is it in your spine? Does the hair on your neck stand up?

Yeah, it's a physical core feeling. Like, ugh, you know, it's danger. It feels just like an illness, a nausea, a stirring of like, just don't stand near the edge. And when people, I don't know, like I've for a while dated a very adventurous woman who really wanted to go on hikes and see these beautiful vistas. And I was grateful and appreciative of the vistas, but I'll never forget. Like, she really, she spotted this black sand beach in Maui and was like, I want to go there. And I was like, yeah, how do we get there? And she was like, hmm, let's walk around a little bit and see, and she's like, ooh, I found a path. There's a little rope. See this little rope, you'll hold onto it. And then she's just like, you just go down here. And I was like, you know what? I'll just fly home if this is it.

I'm sorry.

I'm not the man.

Yeah, you're looking for a rope guy. Just not a rope guy.

Not a rope guy, dude.

So sad. When I was in Hawaii, maybe this is a Hawaii thing. I was in Hawaii. It wasn't Maui. I forget which island it was, but it was a few years ago. And Anna and I walked out into the jungle to explore this waterfall. And I noticed by the side of the waterfall, there was a rope hanging down. And I was like, oh, huh. I wonder where that rope goes. So I like grabbed it and put my feet on the wall and like climbed to the top. And then when I got up on the ledge, there was another rope. And I was like, oh, wow, where does that rope go? And I kind of foolishly thought there would only be like one or two of these ropes, but they just kept going deeper and deeper into the jungle. And I kept getting higher and higher off the ground, but I didn't realize it because every time there was another like ledge, you kind of go a little further into the jungle. You weren't looking straight down. And so up was pretty easy. Down was a nightmare.

Down is always harder. Down is always harder.

This story is making me physically ill. Yeah.

Yeah. Not only do I have very little upper body strength, but I, Anna and I couldn't hear each other because there were waterfalls. So, and our phones didn't work in the jungle. So, she just thought I was dead. I was gone for like 40 minutes and then I eventually came. I eventually came squirming back down, rolling down the hill. But yeah, ropes in Hawaii, I guess people are braver than than us.

That's really interesting, Chris, because what you just described, I'm having this like physical sense memory of, but I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit discombobulated about which side was, was tougher for my fear of heights. But I went to this, I went to a wedding with the same adventurous girlfriend. And was it hers?

You had moved on at this point?

No, no, no, but, no, but I'll tell you what was, what was almost as scary as, as being up high for me was being seated next to an ex girlfriend at the wedding, which was not actually, that was nowhere near as scary as heights. It was, it was incredible, incredible dope move by my friends who, with whom I'm mutual friends with my lovely, lovely long ago girlfriend. But no, we, we went on a hike the day after, like the whole, you know, wedding party and a bunch of friends and family. And we're like among the red woods and it's so gorgeous. And there was yet again, another beach that you could get to going down. I feel like this time going down was easy, but then getting back up was scary. I think for me, because at each point I could look down, there was no rope and it was like, my ability to get out of here depends on me not being too scared to just collapse, you know? And again, there I am, you know, there I am in front of everybody.

Well, that'll give you a little courage. Maybe you didn't have earlier. You don't want to be embarrassed.

Just panic, just pure panic.

How high up was this? Do you like approximately, was it like more? It's more than 10 feet at this point.

Numbers are really not my strong suit. I was just with our mutual buddy, Chris, Mike Poorman today and I was at a venue the other night and I was describing to him. I was like, yeah, it was sold out. I mean, what's that, like 1500 people? He's like 700 or so. That's not that bad. Yeah, I don't know. I just, it could have been, it was probably, I don't know, a thousand feet, but like not straight up.

Either way, that's still too high.

That's, that's very, remember that a thousand feet.

It's a thousand feet from you.

It could have been, could have been 50 feet.

Realistically it was.

Could have been 50,000 feet.

Right, right.

Sarah, how about you? Have you ever, how, how high do you have to get to trigger some kind of a panic attack?

Is it starting to sound like our Bad Trips episodes all of a sudden?

Oh, hey now, dude.

Yeah. I don't, I'm also not a numbers gal, so I, I don't know, but it is funny. I'm thinking of a date that I went on where my fear of heights was totally triggered, because I feel like I've always been afraid of heights, but I completely forgot about this. Gosh, it must, it was maybe like 12 years ago. This guy for our first date, he flew me out to Chicago.

Okay. So the heights start early in this.

And I am, I conquered my fear of flying, but I went through that whirlwind. And then he was like surprising me with this date. And he took me to like, there's like a very tall building in Chicago that has a glass.

It's like the Sears Tower or something.

I think it was that. And there's like a glass, like.

You can look down or observation deck kind of thing. Yeah.

That's my fucking nightmare. My fucking nightmare. I don't like, and I was like, I just like, I didn't want to offend him, but I was like, why is this the date? Like, I mean, he didn't know I was terrified of heights and like how it was just, I don't know, that should have been my sign to not pursue this further.

There's a couple I could point out before that moment, but I know I look at the dating world different than you.

I generally feel like it's only polite to keep a first date on the ground.

Yeah.

Because you don't need to add- Thank you.

And in your zip code.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. But you need to add to the first date nerves, unless maybe that was his plan, was like, he's super nervous, so he figures if you go to the top of the Sears Tower for your first date, everyone's palms are sweaty anyway. So maybe he felt like it would-

Wasn't there like a myth that guys were circulating about how it's like, get a girl to watch a scary movie with you? This I think is a very outdated belief and I don't know.

Well, that is Roger Ebert used to talk about.

What is this? How come you both know what this is? Zac and I seems like do not know this.

Roger Ebert-

I try to stay away from dudes talking about, you know, how to do this idea. Yeah, I got a great idea. Like, all right, guys, you chat about that over there.

All I know based on the two dates I've heard so far is I'm too broke and I'm too non adventurous enough to go on dates. We got one that's like, let's go down this rope and see a beautiful beach. I would never have even been there. And then also there are the ones like flying people out. Like I feel like I'm ill equipped for the dating scene now.

Oh, I'm out. I'm totally, this was years ago. I've cashed out.

Oh, sure. Get to a rope in this economy.

I don't think Roger Ebert was particularly red-pilled, but he did. I think it's in his review of Raiders of the Lost Ark, maybe he talks about, he has some word, he used a term that he uses, I think, but it's a great arm around your date movie. And so there is some logic to the idea, I guess. Oh, I see.

You wanna go on a first date. I see, like someone might grab you.

Yeah, or you might be like, whoa.

Protect me.

But then also that doesn't work for the Sears tower either, unless he thinks that you think you're gonna go off the edge. There's no reason that you'd be like jumping into his arms.

Yeah, there's no, or it's like, he's the only guy with the key to the elevator. And it was like, without me, you'd be up there forever.

Here's a fear, here's a fear for an entirely different episode, people trying to trick other people into. I agree with that, you can just leave, I'll just leave that there.

That's a great idea actually.

That freaks me out pretty deeply.

Anyone with a plan to manipulate you in any way, I mean, it could be like a monsoc project at that point. I mean, it's the same.

That's what I'm talking about. Like, oh, y'all, a bunch of dudes talking about plans.

Not a good idea.

Not for me, I'll be at the piano.

Bunch of dudes in a room talking about plans is called a cabal. And we try to keep away from them. Ed, okay. So Ed, we know that you are not cut out for the modern dating scene, but how about your fear of heights? Do you have, what is your, what is your acquaintance with a fear of heights? Do you get freaked out when you're up too high?

Yes. I think I'm not.

How high?

Any height. And the thing is, I, but I also, if I'm not looking down and I'm just going up, I'm good. Like I'll take a ladder to the top of like a construction crane, but getting back down, forget it. But then also I think it's just I come from a long family of scaredy cat height people. Like my favorite place, which is weird because my favorite place, maybe on earth, I love the Grand Canyon. I just love it. Like I don't want to go in. I don't want to hike. I don't really want to even do. I just want to look at it. I just love looking at the Grand Canyon. It's like one of my favorite activities I can do. And I took my dad there when we drove across the country. I'm like, you got to see the Grand Canyon. It's the fucking best. And then he who's like so afraid of heights and has like some vertigo issues. So it's like a whole other thing, too. But he's so afraid of heights he wouldn't even get like within like 200 feet. And this is I can gauge distances and it's an actual 200 feet. And it's like he wouldn't. He was like, I got to go back to the fucking whatever. Like and I was like, no, it's cool. We got to get a picture of us here. He's like, I can't even fucking do it. Wow. So I was shocked because then I was like in the car. I'm like, well, I'm not going to like abuse you into getting a photo. But like my whole life, I'd come and work the summers and stuff at your plumbing company and they do giant like he's up on catwalks 300 feet in the air and shit and worked on skyscrapers in New York in the 70s. And I was like, how did you do it? He was like, they paid me. He's like, if it wasn't if it wasn't like I had to keep my kids in school, I like I that's what got me up there. But no, he's like, I hate it. I hate every second of it. And I was like, well, just make I'll give you five dollars. Can we get this fucking photo then?

That's why.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I couldn't believe I figured he was the opposite. I figured I'd always see him up there as a kid and stuff.

Then he passed some of that down to you.

I think I got a lot more of it. I feel the vertigo coming for sure. They have your issues and stuff. But I bring this up to say I'm super afraid of heights. Like just the other day I was trying to get something down and it was taller than my step ladder allowed. So I then went up onto the dresser and now I'm like on the dresser, like a five shelf dresser and I'm trying to get this thing down. Gunning up was fine and then for some reason I turned around and it felt like my body broke. Wow. I lost the ability to step down again. Whoa. It was like I got through it, but it was something where the space below me all of a sudden, I had a lot more space for my feet. I wasn't at a lack of landing to be standing on, but all of a sudden it felt like I had nothing. I'm like, oh shit, I'm going against the edge. How do I get one foot down? Do I get down onto my butt? It was crazy because even if I fell onto my head, I mean, that would be a problem. But even if I just fell, it's what? Five and a half feet, six feet? I fell like one Zac Clark to the floor. You know what I mean? I probably wouldn't die. No, but I felt like I was going to die and that was three weeks ago.

I get that.

So I might be the least afraid of heights person then on this episode. I thought I would maybe be a little bit closer to the top, but as we've discussed on the show, I have a-

You're afraid of flying and it's a totally different thing.

Yeah, I have a fear of flying and I certainly, I don't like looking out the window as we go up, but I do like looking out the window as we come down. I very much am in the boat with Zac of once you're up that high, at that point, it's a negligible. I'm really more afraid of why the plane might go down than the actual falling out of the plane, because it's so high that you can't really comprehend it. You're just, it's 30, 40,000 feet up.

Has anyone here jumped out of a plane?

No, thanks.

No.

A guy tried to take me on a date to do that.

Unbelievable. I did skydive. I skydived.

Wait, a first date? A first date?

Or where do you meet these guys? The Red Flag Factory, Sarah?

Yes, I meet them. They played Warped Tour and.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, now it's fine. You'll follow anyone in checkered vans to any location. Checkered vans shoes, like not like creeper vans you drive.

I just imagined a dude on Warped Tour wearing checkered vans in a checkered van. And I'm like, hey, would you like to take me out?

Hey, you want to go on a really weird date?

You want to get on my banana board and roll over to this weird date?

Things are suddenly making a lot more sense about why these dates are so strange.

Here come the emails, by the way, from all of our Warped Tour fans.

You want to listen to 10, 3 and a half minute ways to manipulate you into falling in love with me? That me and my boys concocted in a room together?

Yeah. I was going to say this might actually be a good place to pause quickly before we get to the whole episode.

Do some vlogs. To update our membership to Ebert's fucking nagging Emporium, Red Pill Corner.

Now a word from our sponsor, Warped Tour.

Do you have a warped view of power dynamics in the dating scene?

If so, have we got the tour for you. The Warped Tour brought to you by Vans, a tour that the producers and guests of Scared All The Time would like you to know is not affiliated in any way with the more recognizable Warped Tour, of which they have no genuine negative opinions of, and is brought to you by the type of vehicle, not the popular shoe brand. As further evidenced by your van-shaped ticket, clearly stating, admission for one to the warped WORPT Tour. Said tickets are non-refundable. If purchased by mistake, we hope you are better at recognizing red flags in a partner than what's in your online shopping cart.

Yeah, and Sarah, even though I may be the least afraid of heights out of this whole group, I certainly would not enjoy a date or even eating dinner at the top of a tower. I don't know if you can eat at the top of the space needle or something, but I certainly... No, thank you. You know, I want to be the... If I'm going to be up somewhere high, I want, you know, like a mountain for me feels a little more comfortable because it's not straight down. You know, if something goes wrong, I can take a roll. There's something that might break the fall. But the four of us are not unique in our fear of heights. It's important to note, I think, that lots of people have at least some wariness around heights. A fear of falling, after all, is what kept our ancestors from wandering off of a cliff. And the ancestors who did wander off a cliff were unable to pass their genes down. For a long time, psychologists believe that a fear of falling, along with a fear of loud noises, is something that we are born with. Now, I went down this rabbit hole because I always thought that that was true as well, that fear of heights was just something babies were born with. It turns out, though, that that belief mostly stems from a famous experiment that was done in the 1960s called the visual cliff test. It was actually developed to test depth perception in babies and a whole bunch of animals, including turtles, goats, rats, lambs, kittens, dogs, pigs, and monkeys.

That's the craziest group.

And I guess it is interesting. I'm sure turtle scientists are very interested in the kinds of depth perception that turtles have, but it seems extremely specific.

I think they probably went with turtles being like, why aren't they that slow because they can't see far? And they're afraid to, you know what I mean? They're always kind of feeling around. That's probably how they got there.

They got to bust a move. This experiment, though, it did show that once human infants gain a little bit of crawling experience, they quickly learn to avoid crawling over a glass floor with a drop beneath. So the way that this experiment was set up was that they created a glass floor that they would put the animals or the babies on, and then there was a drop built beneath it so nobody was actually going to fall off of a ledge. But if they saw that there was a ledge beneath them, both babies and animals sense that depth and get very, very, very wary of putting another hand or foot over that edge. So those results prompted other researchers and textbooks to run with the idea that the fear of heights must be innate. But it turns out the scientists who actually produced this experiment never concluded that a fear had anything to do with the avoidance of the drop. In fact, one of the scientists, Eleanor Gibson, was later quoted as saying, quote, It is worth mentioning that we were never struck by an animal's apparent fear of the deep side of the cliff. All the non-human animals, to the extent that they could see it, simply avoided it. Human infants occasionally cried, but that was attributable to a frustrated urge to get to their mothers who were calling them across the invisible surface.

Okay. Well, it got dark fast, huh?

I mean, look, any psychological experiments done with babies in the 1960s, there was probably at least some degree of, man, we probably wouldn't do that now. And this was how they got the babies to move forward, was to coax them with their parents. But later work supported the observation that a fear of drop-offs was learned, probably after self-initiated locomotion is well underway. But by that time, it could easily be learned from anxious parents. So that's the quote that Eleanor Gibson has about whether or not babies-

Every mom listening right now is like, immediately blames us. Fucking right away, right away. We did something wrong.

Well, I think what the people who built this experiment were suggesting is that even when like parents from a very, very young age, if they see their baby getting anywhere near the edge of something, go, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you know? And that it's more likely that babies have learned a fear of heights from that.

That's true.

Than something that they were born with.

It's almost Pavlovian at that point.

Yeah. I do want to note that there's actually more evidence that cows have an innate fear of heights than there is evidence supporting that result in human babies.

They can't go downstairs, right?

I've heard that this doesn't actually pertain to their ability to go up and down stairs, but I think that might be true.

I feel like it's having, it's definitely affecting their ability to get jobs on the second floor.

Yeah, I don't know a lot of cows that work on the second floor.

Exactly. You've seen why now.

They work in those long buildings where they're just milked, hopefully, ethically.

So tell us more about cows.

Well, according to Wikipedia, 12 dairy heifers were exposed to a visual cliff in the form of a milking pit while walking through a milking facility. Over this five-day experiment, the heifers' heart rates were measured along with the number of times they stopped throughout the milking facility. Dairy heifers in the experimental group were exposed to a visual cliff while dairy heifers in the control group were not, and the experimental group was found to have significantly higher heart rates and stop more frequently than the cows in the control group, which provided evidence of both depth perception and acute fear of heights in cows. So if you're thinking of asking a cow on a date to the top of the Sears Tower, don't even bother.

Don't even bother. There goes my plans on the 14th.

Sarah, you have cats, right?

I do. I have one cat.

I don't think I've ever noticed I have a cat. They're not very afraid of heights. They seem like they love it.

When I adopted Polly, I lived in a loft and her favorite thing to do was we had those, it was like very high ceilings and there was a gap between the wall and the ceiling, and she would get up there and like walk across the perimeter of the rooms in the loft. I was having a heart attack, but she was loving it.

She then does not suffer from what fear of heights is officially known as, which is acrophobia. It's characterized by a fear so intense that it interferes with a person's everyday life. So a person with true acrophobia, which it sounds like some of you guys might have.

Only sometimes.

Well, all the time, they experience crippling anxiety when walking up a flight of stairs, being on a ladder, using a multi-level parking garage, being on or crossing over a bridge, standing near a balcony or at the top of a building or looking out a window of a tall building. When placed in situations like these or sometimes even just thinking about situations like these, an acrophobe may experience rapid heartbeat, dizziness, lightheadedness, trembling in the body, and shortness of breath.

Why are people called acrobats and not acrophiles?

That's a great question, Ed. I don't know. But I do, I imagine that the prefix acro must mean heights in Latin.

In some way, I imagine. The guy who researched 18 pages of this didn't. This is the thing is it's hard to research. So that's why I don't do it.

Do either, Sarah or Zac, do either of you guys experience that level of crippling anxiety or is it more just like, oh, I don't like this?

I have had that experience when you mentioned like looking out at a window high up. There's something that I wouldn't call it crippling, but that physical sensation you were describing, it's wildly uncomfortable, and that's where I really see it coming in for me.

Did that feeling make you want to run into the arms of a guy or does that matter?

I'll pay attention that I'll give you guys an update for the next time I guess.

Let us know.

Absolutely. I don't think so though.

I feel like there's, for me, there's something about like, if I've got a gate of some sort, like if I'm on a bridge and there's a pretty clear thing I can lean on and look over, I'm gonna be all right. It's when there's no barrier between me and the open air and a place I could just kind of free fall. I'm the guy that like, I'm the last one to do the cliff jump and everyone's already down in the water and they're like, come on, man, it's so fun, dude. And I'm like, that's not fun for me. But I'm also, I'm wondering now that we're deep enough in this, I'm like, am I afraid of heights or am I afraid of like, am I just not into risk as sport? You know what I mean? Like, it's not, like I have a bandmate, for instance, who recently, I was recalling this, I probably shouldn't have told his wife this, I guess. But he had a balcony, they had a balcony at their hotel room. And I was like, oh man, this ain't high at all compared to the one time I saw your husband sit on, sit with his back off the edge and just kind of like swing back and forth, just chilling on this, on the side of a balcony, a hotel balcony in Vegas, 45 or 55 floors. And I was sitting there like, no dude, no, no, no.

Vegas is the one place you think they wouldn't let you be able to jump.

I was the parent going, ah, but he was cool with it. He liked it. He felt calm and I did not, you know, a real, a real, a free solo Alex Honnold type there.

That person I would, I would not see.

I'm so afraid of heights. I don't even know who that is.

Yeah.

Oh dude, you would love free solo is a documentary about a guy named Alex Honnold who climbed the sheer face of El Cap in Yosemite with no ropes, just his hands in his feet. It's one of the greatest feats of human endurance and strength that's like ever been attempted or recorded. It's insane. He has to memorize. He starts like first thing in the morning, and it takes most of the day to climb. So you're using your whole body all day. And he memorizes like hundreds and if not thousands of little movements of, I put my hand here and then I put my toes there. And then I put my right pinky here and then I put my left finger there. And he maps, he has to map the whole way up the side before he can actually attempt the climb.

So he does it with a rope and then he then he does it with rope.

I think he does it with the ropes first. And then yeah, at the very end, he attempts the climb on his own. And I it's a phenomenally well made documentary. And a fun joke that I tried with my mom was I was like, Mom, you got to watch this documentary. The ending's a little sad, but it's great. And then when she watched it, she called me and she was like, He lives.

He made it.

I thought you said the ending was sad. And I was like, Yeah, I know. I just I wanted to put the fear of God in watching the movies so that you don't know. You think something horrible is going to happen.

I mean, they do talk about it in the doc, though, where he's like, Oh, my friends are dead. Like everyone you meet in that community is not in the community for a super long time. He's like, yeah, has a longevity. Other people haven't.

He just free soloed a building tower in Taipei or something on Netflix.

It was live.

Yeah, it was live. But that looked kind of it looked I think they played up how hard it was for him.

Your handholds on glass. He's not Spider-Man.

You just you have to see the building. I mean, I'm not saying it's easy for him.

Oh, the great Taiwanese ladder building. It's just like a huge ladder. I don't know.

Chris looks pretty calm in the saw bathroom right now.

Well, this is below ground, so.

He's only comfortable places you can't hear him scream.

According to the Cleveland Clinic, approximately three to six percent of people in the world have acrophobia, making it one of the world's most common phobias. How this fear develops into something that gets out of control is still up for debate. Um, as we discussed, there isn't much evidence that we're born with a crippling fear of heights, so that suggests that anyone with this clinical phobia must have developed it through some kind of trauma. Either they fell a long way or maybe they saw someone else fall a long way. But at least one large study found that children who had never suffered a fall were actually more likely to have acrophobia by age 18 than kids who did get their shit wrecked in a fall. So in other words, safely raised children retained their intense fear of heights, whereas kids who fell early maybe got desensitized to the idea of falling and they did not seem to express as much of a fear of heights.

I think that's across the board, like sheltered people are afraid of big cities and stuff, you know what I mean? Like, you have to go out and live your life a little bit, you gotta break a few eggs.

Yeah, and it sounds like the kids who broke a few legs were much less afraid of having anything happen to them.

Yeah, why do you fall, Bruce? You know what I mean? Batman begins. So we learn how to get up again.

Exactly, exactly.

I'm paraphrasing.

While the jury's out on what exactly happens to our minds to cause acrophobia, science does know for sure what happens to our bodies when we are up too high. It's something that was brought up by somebody a little bit earlier, Vertigo. Ed, did you see Vertigo?

Yeah, yeah. It's coming for me. I'm looking down the barrel at Vertigo for sure.

Sarah, Zac, do you guys ever suffer from Vertigo?

Yes.

I'm not sure I do, but Sarah, tell us, tell us about it.

I mean, well, I feel like, Ed, you mentioned the inner ear situation. I feel like when I had, I'll have like a season of Vertigo. That's actually, Zac, before we did the full moon together, I was having Vertigo and that day, the day before, the day before it was pretty bad.

Oh, wow.

And it seems like coincide with seasonal allergies for me. But I don't get it a lot, but every once in a while, it comes up and it is so debilitating.

It's brutal.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is.

And then I feel like I've had sensations similar to it, but not prolonged when like high up looking out a window like skyscrapers. I have a really clearly tough time with.

So that's what I guess. If you've never dealt with it, right? It's like you ever get drunk and get the spins. It's like that, but you like close your eyes. It doesn't matter. You look at the clock doesn't matter. It's just like your body is like, we're doing the spins now.

So yeah, I was going to say our friend Tina has pretty bad vertigo and can't, she can't get out of bed when it hits really bad. She just has to lay there because she feels like she's on a spinning platform or something.

I remember helping people I know in my life who have it real bad. And it's the thing where it's like, you know, can you take me to the bathroom and you're like this way? And until like, I don't know which way is this. Like, I don't know which way this is. Like, I don't know if I don't know if I'm laying down or if I'm standing up or you have to physically take me, bud. Like, I can't.

Yeah, mine is mine is there's a physiological aspect to my to my fear of heights and the the jangly feeling of being way up there. But it is so psychological almost to the point of where I'm like, I'm a psychonaut and in a great many senses of the term, I'm always more and more as the years go by intrigued to kind of like step back further into my awareness of my awareness and be like, what is going on here? Where is this coming from? Even when I'm totally terrified or totally triggered in any number of directions or ways. And for me, it's like, it's always in fairly, they're not safe situations, but they're, they usually involve other people. They, they usually involve a bit of a feedback loop between how unwilling I am to get closer to the edge or to do the climb or to climb down and how I feel about those people seeing me afraid of doing it.

Right. Right. Right.

Or witnessing me not doing it. And, you know, that's why I think when there's an airplane or when I'm way high up and there's a railing, I'm like, I don't care, man. If something bad happened here, it'd only scare me for an instant and then it all...

Yeah, exactly.

Be the credits. Roll those credits, baby.

Well, all forms of vertigo boil down to a terrible, miscommunicative feedback loop between our eyes and our ears, which are the two systems that help us keep our balance, which Sarah might explain why you feel vertigo more during allergy season, because our eyes and our ears are normally in sync and they each detect the same small micro movements that we make even when standing or sitting still. But what happens when you're high off the ground, the reason a lot of people associate vertigo with heights is that even if you're only 10 to 17 feet or 3 to 5 meters up off the ground, it's much harder for our eyes to detect those small micro movements that get made. Everything in your field of view seems much more static because the parallax effect, which is the term for the sensation of objects closer to you passing over objects further away, becomes harder for your eyes to detect. The problem is that our inner ear still says, hey, we're moving even if it's just a couple of centimeters here or there. And the mismatch between your vision saying, we're standing still, and your body saying, no, we're not, we're moving, is what researchers think causes that vertigo from heights. So it's really just your brain misfiring, basically.

Where's that Pixar movie? Where's that Inside Out sequel?

Right. The Inside Out 3, the trials of the inner ear. And they just, it seems like it would be a boring, it would be just a boring discussion about how high off the ground someone actually is.

That's fine. I would watch, I would watch like an Inside Out meets a dinner with Andre.

There you go. Just those characters chatting it up. Yeah. But let's say you're up way high, way too high, and you try to step away from the edge when you get struck with that wave of vertigo, but your panicking body makes a tragic misstep and you fall. Now you are in the nightmare scenario. You are probably going to die, because let's face it, a fear of heights is really more of a fear of falling. The drop wouldn't be scary if the landing couldn't kill you. And the human body can suffer serious trauma when falling from almost any height. Plenty of people die every year from slipping and falling and hitting their head. And that's five or six feet, or in Zac's case almost 10 feet or however high you said your head was off the ground.

Well, I take it back. The next time I'm on my dress room, I'm going to be fucking more terrified. Thanks Chris. Because I said, I'm like, oh, if I fall, I'll be fine. But no, it turns out I won't be.

I was curious because for an episode on fear of heights, obviously, you know, you can talk about these extreme heights, but most people are really only ever going to face a fear of heights at a much lower level. So I was curious to see if we could really freak people out by discussing the kind of damage that the human body can sustain when falling from various heights. So I did what I like to do. I've done a number of times on this show and found some factoids on a literal slip and fall lawyers website that break down the kind of damage that you can suffer in pretty clear detail. So here I am reading from westernjusticelaw.com. Falls from one to five feet. While you might not think climbing on a chair to change the light bulb or stepping off a curb is dangerous, falling from as little as one to five feet can cause serious harm. These injuries can include head trauma, a backward fall onto a hard floor can result in concussion or skull fracture, as well as fractures of the wrist, arms or hips which break when people try to brace themselves during a fall. westernjusticelaw.com tells us these incidents are dangerous for children and older adults. Many times they cannot reduce the force of impact from the fall. But let's say you're a full-grown adult like the four of us on this on this episode. Falls from six to ten feet can be much more dangerous. When you fall from heights at this level, such as working on a ladder or climbing on a roof, your injuries may become more severe because the velocity of the fall increases. So common injuries that can occur from falling just six to ten feet, spinal injuries, falling backwards can compress or fracture your vertebrae, or multiple fractures of your arms, legs and ribs, which are all at high risk when a fall occurs from six to ten feet.

Dude, there are, just to interrupt for a moment, there are six million episodes of ER with ladder falls. I used to do a joke that I wanted to make a medical show where every person who comes in, it was a ladder fall because it just seemed like ER was doing it so much over the years. It was just every single case was a ladder fall. And it really is like, what happened to this man? What happened to his head, arms, and legs? Like, what do you mean? It's like, well, they're gone. It was like, oh, ladder fall. Ladder fall. Blew them all off. It was six and a half feet. So you're confirming this bit I used to do, but now you are, now it sounds like that's, fuck, I'm learning too much in this episode.

Well, according to OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration falls from six feet or higher account for the largest percentage of workplace fatalities. So it's not very high to fall from it. At the workplace to get down. We then have falls from 10 to 20 feet. These heights are usually the equivalent of a second story window or a high roof. Most of the time they occur in construction settings or during recreational activities. At this stage, the risk of life threatening injuries at these heights is high. Falls from these heights can lead to severe head injuries because the velocity at impact can cause skull fractures, brain swelling, or long-term cognitive issues.

I feel like we shouldn't even be watching those fail army videos and shit. Like every one of those is a fatality then.

Pretty much. Pretty much. I think a lot of those result in real tragedy for the people that we're seeing fall. You can also suffer internal organ damage because the impact force from 10 to 20 feet can rupture internal organs, lead to internal bleeding, and may be fatal without immediate medical attention. Limbs and joints will often shatter into complex fractures at these heights, and many times might require multiple surgeries to fix.

Just roll the credits on me, thanks.

Yeah.

Just roll them.

If I was walking down the street and I saw someone fall out of their second story window, even if they landed on a garden bed, I would get on my phone and be like, I just witnessed someone die, get over here. Like, my brain is like no one's surviving, and after listening to this list of injuries that can occur, now I'm only going to double down on that, which is, don't send an ambulance, send a hearse.

The only place people survive falls like this are action movies, where people jump off of a building, and even falling into trash at that height, you better hope that trash doesn't have any pointy objects in it or you're donezo. But westernjusticelaw.com does have one further category for us to explore, which is, falls beyond 20 feet. Wouldn't you know it? Once a fall exceeds 20 feet, the chance of survival drops precipitously. Medical professionals often refer to this range as the quote, critical height, because injuries are likely catastrophic.

Yeah, and they also, at Western Justice Law, they refer to this section as not a client anymore.

Yeah. At this point, it gets passed off to the police. That is where, that is who takes care of these, and a cleanup crew. Many times, the force of a fall from beyond 20 feet can rupture major organs, cause permanent brain damage, or crush the spinal cord. For construction workers, roofers, and others in high-risk professions like Ed's dad, falls from this height remain one of the leading causes of workplace deaths. So, you don't want to fall from any height, but none of these heights are high enough for the human body to hit what is called terminal velocity. Do any of you guys know what terminal velocity is?

I do, cause I jumped out of an airplane.

Sarah, you might have learned about terminal velocity when you jumped out of an airplane.

Oh no, I didn't go on that date.

Oh, you just, okay, they just asked you to. Okay.

I wasn't buying two tickets, so for the longest time, Sarah, did you say no to the date and then go on a different date or were you like, yo dog, no way I'm out.

No we were like in a relationship. It was just, that's what he wanted to do for his birthday. And I was like, that's great. You can do that. I'm not joining you. And so we did something else. But he did ask me multiple times because we were together for multiple birthdays. But I'm not jumping out of an airplane.

What he should have taken you to do is see the Charlie Sheen movie, Terminal Velocity, which is the only thing I knew about that term until much later in life. It's an action movie where Charlie Sheen plays a skydiver who I think has to like pull off a heist or something. But Ed.

It's no point break. I'll tell you that much.

It's no point break. Ed, do you want to tell us a little bit of what you know about terminal velocity?

I've looked into this not at all after hearing the term that day. But I think, I think because I didn't hit the ground and lose all my memories. I and life, I set that old Seinfeld bit in his old stand up where he's like, why do they wear a helmet in skydiving? At a certain point, it feels like the helmet's wearing you. But the I think it's when you can't go any faster. Like, that's as fast as something's going to fall. Like you've hit the speed at which something's gonna go. And I think that's the reason I even learned the term is because there was a sensation dropping out of a plane. It starts with fear. And then when you hit terminal velocity, you know it because all of a sudden it's fucking cool. All of a sudden you just feel like you're laying in bed. Like you don't feel there's wind hitting you in the face and stuff, but you don't feel like you're falling anymore. You just feel like I'm kind of hanging out in the sky and it's very unusual. Kind of I haven't felt it since feeling we're like most of that fall is just feeling kind of awesome. And then because I was a guy strapped to me because who kept asking me to stop talking because my spit was flying in his face is he then when he pulls the ripcord that sensation I never want again going from my terminal velocity to like three miles an hour in a second because I was knowing about my inner ear issues. I was fucked like the rest of the day and we had like plans as a couple of friends. We had plans for like wine tasting this up in Santa Barbara or whatever. And it was like the rest of the day I was like oh those olives look good. Can't have it. I'm going to throw the fuck up still like it's so I was so like just nauseous the rest of the day from that insane like speed change. But right otherwise I don't know if I do it again but terminal velocity is genuinely a really interesting fun feeling.

Well right that's and that's because until you hit terminal velocity with the sensation that you're feeling falling is your speed continuing to increase. But when you are in a human so for a human who's falling out of falling in a free fall in what they call belly to earth which is just sort of like spread eagle the way you would out of a plane when you're skydiving. The sweet spot that you'll hit is around 120 miles an hour. That's terminal velocity for a person in a belly to earth free fall. So when you feel that sensation you've hit about 120 miles an hour and it takes a free fall of about 1500 feet to pick up that amount of speed. After that you're coasting straight down at about 1000 feet every five seconds. Meaning a 15,000 foot jump gives you about a minute of free fall at top speed. Or if you are falling out of a plane at 30,000 feet, Zac you'll have a long time for those credits to roll because that would be about two minutes of free fall.

No, they would roll pretty quick still because that you need oxygen I think anything over 18,000 feet. So you'll probably that's true before.

That's true. But humans can break that.

That's so heavy.

Yeah.

That's what the guy I was strapped on said.

I'm like, I can't tell. I can't tell if hearing all this is making me kind of go, maybe I should just try and jump out of a plane and see what happens. Or if I'm totally out on like.

I don't know. It's weird because it's like really scary in some ways. But I'd also recommend it. But the scariest part was I was like, the people who were packing the parachutes look like interns. It was just like 15-year-old kids being like, here's your suit, sir.

I'm like, what?

Do you legally work here?

Yeah. You look like an orphan. I don't understand why you're the one. Well, maybe because his parents both died skydiving.

Skydiving, yeah.

I think skydiving is one of those things that I think if you do it once, it's probably incredibly safe. If you do it at a company with a good track record, and they're double and triple checking everything, I think it's scary, but it's pretty safe.

The numbers game of it is probably like you're likely going to be fine.

Yeah. Skydiving as a hobby, like free soloist, that's where I think those numbers of death start to probably go up because after a certain number of attempts, the chances that something is going to go wrong, I think, start to go up.

You watched the last couple of Mission Impossibles?

Oh, yeah.

I can't even fucking, whether he's got a rope on or not, I can't even believe the shit Tom Cruise is doing in his last couple of them, man. It's fucking, like I was going to have a heart attack in this last movie in the theaters that there's like this two plane thing that I was like, whoa, adios, guess he's CG now. There's no way he's going to live through this. And then I watched behind the scenes and it was incredible.

You can cut this because this is a pretty boring aside potentially, but the end of the latest, the end of the latest Mission Impossible actually reminded me of a genre of film that used to be popular, I think in like the 30s and 40s where people. Snuff films? No, no, no, no.

That's about people tying, right?

Yeah. No, there were, there used to be like stunt flying films where there would be-

The barnside. Isn't that what's called barnsiding?

Barnstorming.

Barnstorming, barnsiding is something else I can't afford.

People, people would like crawl around on planes as they flew through the air and they would do upside down maneuvers and they'd get out of the seat and go stand on the wings. And there would be different movies that were made that would always feature like a big sequence of barnstorming, whether it was an action sequence or just a stunt sequence. And that's really what those Mission Impossible, what that Mission Impossible climax I think harkens back to are those old days of the sort of like, it was just a way to make people in the theater say, wow, because they'd see someone doing this incredible stunt. And Tom Cruise said, sign me up. I'm going to do the same thing.

Yeah, it's cool.

But if Tom Cruise were to fall off of that plane and he wanted to break the 120 mile an hour barrier of the terminal velocity barrier, humans can actually fall a lot faster than 120 miles an hour.

Okay, so it's not strictly physics.

Well, it is. It is physics. But if you tuck into a torpedo or dive directly head down, you could cut through the air much faster. Professional speed skydivers, which I did not know was a real hobby until I researched this episode, do that for fun. And routinely, clock falls over 300 miles an hour. Wow. The world record for speed.

Is it Felix Bonsler or whatever?

Yes.

What was his name? That was him.

Close.

Bonsler.

Something like that. I remember watching it on television.

Felix Baumgartner.

Okay.

Jumped from the edge of space. And the thin atmosphere meant that there was no atmosphere to slow him down. So Felix Baumgartner actually broke the sound barrier in Freefall and he hit about 843 miles an hour or Mach 1.2 before opening his chute.

Dude. And if you remember, did you watch it? I watched it live.

Yeah, I remember watching it.

Because he got all fucked up with the chute and he got all spun. It's a Capcom. So the thing that's interesting about him. So this is actually an interesting aside, but it's really fast.

The thing that's interesting about him besides the fact that he jumped from the edge of space.

No, no. Yeah, but there's actually there's a reason why it's not that interesting sort of in a weird way too is so in the old days, in the early days of the space race, Capcom, which I think is the either way. I don't know if it's Capcom, but whoever you're talking to when you're up in the rocket back when it was like fucking what was it? Not Gemini. That was the second one. So the original like Mercury astronauts, they were the fucking first guy. So like Alan Shepard go up and then someone else would go up. And so the person you spoke to when you're up there is the last guy because no one else you can really talk to about it. Right. And so you'd always speak to the last person. So they'd be like, hey, did this thing fucking shake a lot when you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, it shakes a lot, like a lot more than they say it will. And then so they always were able to do that. And so Felix, when he jumped his like Capcom, whatever the guy he spoke to was a guy who also did this in the 60s, who actually, he did not break this guy's record. He broke the record of like speed because he did it from like a higher thing. But he didn't, the other guy like fucking landed with 1960s technology. And so I always thought that was really interesting. They would always like cut to this other like old man being like, yeah, it's gonna get fucking wacky. Like, wow. So that is interesting to me. Yeah, so he was actually trying to break the record of a guy who did it in the 60s, who was there and was in his like radio earpiece being like, looks like it's going real bad for you out there. Are you going to ever stop spinning?

Well, wait, he was trying to break this guy's height record or free fall speed record.

I think it was height record that he ended up breaking the speed record. But he technically, for whatever reason, he pulled his parachute too soon to break some other record that this guy held. Cause that guy was a steely eyed missile man and Felix was sponsored by Red Bull. So I don't know. The other guy was doing it for the love of the game. You know what I mean?

Right.

Felix Baumgartner did not break the absolute altitude record for balloon flight set in 1961 by Malcolm Ross, which required the pilot to remain in the balloon. While he broke records for exit altitude and vertical speed, he also did not break the record for the absolute longest freefall time, which remained with Joseph Kittinger, the Capcom guy, in some interpretations of that specific record.

Dude, I think I saw Steely-Eyed Missile Man on Warp Tour a few years ago.

Shit, man, I hope you... I think that was Steely-Eyed Missile Van is what you saw.

Only stayed for a few songs. I don't know.

In my research, I learned about something else that I think is important when discussing A Fear of Heights, because it is sort of the strange inverse of acrophobia. The French have a term for it, la pelle du vide. In America, or in English, not just in America, in English, we call it the call of the void.

Well, I've heard that term before. I don't know what it, but I heard the term.

I'm pretty sure I saw the call of the void on Warped Tour 2.

Yes. That actually is a much better band name than I think Steely Eyed Missileman.

The caller ID said Warped Tour, so I avoided the call.

Oh, shit, dude. Well, this term is a real thing that is the term for the intrusive thoughts that some people feel when they get close to the edge of a building or cliff, or the intrusive thoughts that Sarah gets when she meets a band on Warped Tour. Even though people know that it would mean certain death to jump, they have the sudden urge to do it anyway. It's basically an intrusive thought, but it's one that can be really frightening if you've never experienced it before. And it's also related to the feeling that some people will get where they're driving down the road and all of a sudden they'll feel the urge to wrench the wheel into oncoming traffic, or stick their hand in the trash disposal or something. Wow, wow, wow.

And now, do you know what year that was coined?

I don't know what year this term was coined.

I only ask because I would like to see what the relation to the Eiffel Tower being built would have been, because it's France and I don't know how known they are for mountains. But it's like, we got this high structure, it's a beautiful view from up here. But maybe, I don't know, I've been up there and it's high as shit. And so, it is.

Well, Ed, you said you've never experienced the call of the void. You've never experienced the urge, the sudden urge to feel like, to do something that would mean getting killed.

Fucking, I have, I experienced no calls.

Sarah or Zac, have you guys ever had that sort of intrusive thought moment?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of the fear, which I'm now through this conversation, kind of thinking about as, it's as much fear as it is, like, just discombobulation, total, like, anxiety, in the sense that it's like, it's lack of control, pure and simple. Like, if there's no barrier between me and the fall, I'm like, okay, well, yeah, it is just, you're just a step away from a misjudgment, part of your subconscious being like, let me see what's up, you know, I'm curious.

Do you think the call of the void is your brain's attempt to have one second of control again, where it's like, I can just jump if I want to right now. Like, I'm in control of that.

Hmm, interesting. Yeah, I wonder, I wonder if it's one part of your consciousness going, I'm not afraid, and the other part going, I am. That is almost like eyes and ears of awareness, and they are unsinked all of a sudden, and then you're dizzy. Then you have a little bit of existential vertigo, and that's what it is for me. It's like, there is a part of my consciousness that's like, I don't know, I could touch this hot stove. I could, you know, do this dangerous thing. I could, you know, I think, yeah, this could go any number of ways, saying what I'm about to try and put into words, but like, to your point, Chris, you could jump out of the car. You could swerve the car. You could jump off the cliff or whatever. You could also just in a more menial set of circumstances, and many of us have, and a lot of people do, someone really legendarily just did when I was in LA driving recently, you could just flip someone off from the car window. You could yell at someone because they nearly clipped you with a bicycle while you're walking. This is a really fundamental thing about our psyche, that kind of like, I could, I feel it all the time. I'm like, oh man, I could get so angry about this thing, or I could get so freaked out about this. But with physicality added to it, like, I could fall off of this. Just like a banana peel, a misplaced piece of trash, or someone yells something, and I'm off balance, you know?

Right. Sarah, have you ever felt like the call of the void? Have you ever felt the intrusive thought urge to leap from something?

I have. I think that's just how my anxiety manifests sometimes. But, and I feel like I agree with Zac. I think there are these in that, what is it? I mean, it's like a millisecond of a thought. And I think it's, our brains are wild and doing all kinds of, you know, all kinds of things to try to protect us. And so I've absolutely felt the call of the void, but have not needed it.

We could have called this show Our Brains Are Wild.

The most intense call of the void I ever felt is at Niagara Falls in like 6th or 7th grade. I have a very clear memory of standing near, there was like a rock wall. And I remember like right over the edge of, it wasn't directly over the edge of the falls, but it was like kind of right where the river races by to go over. And I remember having the distinct feeling of like, I should just fucking do this. I should just jump. But it wasn't, but it's not, what's interesting is that in the research on this topic of which there is not much. In fact, one of the only studies I could find on this topic was out of Florida State University very recently. But what they found is that having these thoughts, the call of the void is not actually linked to any kind of suicidal ideation or actually wanting to die at all. They surveyed about 431 undergrads and found that about a third of them reported experiencing this sudden urge to jump when standing at a high place. And 50% of those who felt that urge had never had any kind of suicidal ideation whatsoever. And so psychologists are still unsure what exactly caused this, but Zac, the closest they have is sort of related to something that you were saying about the two parts of the brain. They think that what might be going on here is that the sudden urge to jump is basically your brain misinterpreting a safety signal. So it works kind of like this. If you're standing near the edge of something and you're really high up, maybe you're closer to the edge than you should be. Your body's built-in survival instinct in your subconscious kicks in and you step back almost reflexively. Or if you don't physically step back, you have the feeling, the urge to step back. Your conscious brain tries to make sense of this abrupt feeling or movement, and it tries to create a rationale basically for why you stepped back. And instead of that rationale being, oh, I need to be safer, your conscious brain in some people for some reason misinterprets that signal as, oh, I must have felt an urge to jump. So it's your brain trying to explain a built-in instinct and kind of explaining it the wrong way. So you feel after the fact like, oh, I must have wanted to do this incredibly dangerous thing when really your body was just like, get the fuck out of there.

It was just reminding you that it is a dangerous thing.

Yes, exactly. So it's a really interesting. And I think I didn't include the quote in here, but who was the British leader in World War II?

Churchill.

Churchill.

Churchill. Winston Churchill wrote about this urge at one point. It's somewhere in his writings. So people as prominent as Winston Churchill have experienced this and talked about it. And I think there's going to be a lot more research into why our brains act this way in the future. But with all that in mind, I thought the best way to end this episode and make our stomachs really just plummet through the floor would be to take a look at three of the highest heights that humans have ever survived falling from. And it turns out that each of these stories are even more interesting than just the fact that these people survived. And you can listen to this section without fear because despite the fact that these are really stomach churningly high heights, they did all live. So you know that up front.

They all happened on top of a trampoline factory.

No, no, Ed. They did it. In fact, two of them, and this is where I say that that fear of heights tends to overlap with other topics. Two of them happen to have happened in falls from airplanes.

Okay.

So the highest height ever survived by a person occurred when Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant on JAT Yugoslav Airlines flight 367 was 22 years old in January, 1972. They were cruising at 33,000 feet over what was then Czechoslovakia when the plane exploded in midair, the target of a bomb placed by Croatian nationalists. The aircraft broke apart and Vesna still strapped into a section of the fuselage plummeted without a parachute from the 33,000 foot altitude that passenger jets fly at. This is over six miles in the sky. I don't even walk five miles a day cause that's 10,000 steps, which I never reach. So this woman fell from an mind-meltingly high height, well over the height that she needed to achieve terminal velocity.

And I guess I take back the thing about oxygen seemed like she did fine, oxygen-wise.

The odds of survival were essentially zero. 27 other people on this flight died on impact, but Vesna miraculously survived. Her section of wreckage with her inside slammed into a snowy, forested hillside. The impact was tremendous and Vesna's injuries were horrific. She suffered a fractured skull, three broken vertebrae, broken legs and assorted other injuries which probably makes her seem like a really appealing client for Western justice law if they'd been around.

She sounds like the woman who survived the elevator fall at the Empire State Building or whatever. Yes, very similar injuries. Also probably like a youngish woman. This is peak fall out of shit age for ladies.

That's true.

Like that's what you want to be exactly that when you fall.

Yes, you want to be 20, 21, 22 and you have a better shot of surviving a perilous fall at that age when our bodies are a little more rubbery.

Really? I see. I always heard. I always heard that that it's now this was a this got bandied around a lot in our our touring party for a summer or so. Drunk people and babies. Oh, that's there because you have because they're chilling.

They don't tend out when they fall into gorgeous.

They just kind of roll.

Yeah, they survive a car crash more easily than the gorges at Cornell University. Drunk kids fall in all the time in the ones who are like hammered drunk, have a way better chance of survival because they didn't even like realize it. They didn't tense up. But I was just joking about the ladies age. Yeah, I mean, there's no science behind what I said. But but drunk, drunk people and babies who act a little similar all the time. I think Handel falls the same, too.

True. If drunk babies, if we went back to the 1960s, restrictions around experiments were probably lax enough we could find out who survived.

There's got to be so many drunk baby experiments at the time.

But no, Ed was bringing up in our elevators episode, there's the person who survived the highest elevator crash. She survived falling the height of the Empire State Building in the Empire State Building in an elevator. And she was also like an early 20s woman.

I think.

Hell no dude, hell no.

When rescue workers arrived at the scene of the crash, they could not believe that Vesna was alive. They assumed that the segment of fuselage she was trapped in must have landed at just the right angle in the snowy soft ground to cushion some of the blow.

And she was still strapped in her seat? Yeah, so that's the movie that I always say Final Destination took everything from, Soul Survivor, which is a schlock ass movie from the 70s, maybe early 80s, I think 70s. It's the woman who survives the plane crash is still in her seat. They probably took her from this.

They might have, they might have. She survived strapped to the seat and they think that possibly being inside a piece of the plane's wreckage might have created a bit of like an air break when everything hit the ground. But surviving the fall was really just the first miracle in this story because the area where she landed was as desolate as Siberia and there's every reason she should have frozen to death but a former nurse lived near the crash site and when she saw the plane fall out of the sky she raced over there and gave Vesna first aid until rescuers arrived to pull her from the crash. She was in a coma for days and when she woke up she had no memory of the fall which led to her never having a lasting fear of heights or flying. In fact I believe she went back to work on an airplane because she's contractually obligated to, piece of shit company. She didn't remember the fact that she fell around 33,000 feet without a parachute.

Also conveniently doesn't remember planting the bomb.

Well, here's the kicker to this story. In 2009, The Guardian ran an article detailing how two investigative journalists in Prague made the startling claim that the story of the crash was a fabrication by communist authorities to cover up a mistake. These two journalists, Peter Hornung and Pavel Tyner, claimed that the Yugoslav plane on which Vesna was a flight attendant was not destroyed by a separatist bomb. It was probably mistaken for an enemy aircraft and shot down by a MiG fighter from the Czechoslovakian Air Force, which caused it to fall and break up at a much lower height than previously believed.

What year was the MiG that shot down the Korean air flight?

I don't remember.

They would be out there. There was a time during the Cold War, I guess. They'd be blowing up fucking passenger planes.

Well, there's evidence that showed that this aircraft, for whatever reason, had some difficulty and diverted from its course, and went into a steep descent over a sensitive military area, just two flight minutes from a nuclear weapons storage facility. So they think that the Czechs misidentified the plane as an enemy aircraft and shot it down. And the fact that Vesna survived, actually... So the plane did crash, and Vesna did miraculously survive, just at a much lower altitude than previously thought. And part of what helped this cover up story last for so long is that the story of her survival became the story. No one really looked into what actually happened with the crash because they were so amazed by the fact that this woman lived to tell the tale. So it wasn't until 2009 that they dug into the story and found that perhaps it wasn't actually as high. They did also ask Vesna, and she said she could care less if her record holds or not.

So I love that.

Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, it's one of those things that you shouldn't put in the... We talk about this sometimes. Some records you shouldn't glorify or get people to try and beat. You know, like don't put certain suicide attempt from the highest place or whatever. Don't make that a Guinness record. You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah, please. They don't. They don't. Actually, and there was a little bit of I didn't include it in the episode, but there's a lot of back and forth with Guinness post all of this about whether or not she should still get to claim the mantle. And if she doesn't end up with the mantle, the survivor of the second highest fall on this list, World War II Royal Air Force Airman Nicholas Alkemade, might be the true world record holder. Nicholas was born in 1922 in Norfolk, England and was a gardener before he signed up with the Royal Air Force when World War II broke out. He was trained as an air gunner and after completing his history, he served, or I'm sorry, after completing his training, he served as a tail gunner with RAF 115 Squadron. According to an article on the very generically named warhistoryonline.com, Alkemade's bomber, The Werewolf, flew night missions and had flown 14 successful missions before fate caught up with him and his crew on March 24th, 1944. From War History Online, that night The Werewolf was part of a bombing raid targeting Berlin. They successfully delivered their payload, but on the return journey, heavy winds took them off course. They ended up flying over the Ruhr region, which had a high concentration of anti-aircraft defenses, and about 18,000 feet, Werewolf was attacked from below by a German night fighter aircraft. The damage tore up Werewolf's wing and fuselage and set the plane on fire. It was obvious that Werewolf was beyond salvation and the pilot ordered the crew to grab their parachutes in preparation for an emergency exit from the burning aircraft. Alkemade, alone in his turret at the back of the plane, was basically already burning to death. His rubber oxygen mask started to melt on his face, and his arms were seared by the fire. He scrambled for his parachute and was hit with a moment of pure dread when he finally located it because his parachute, like everything else, including his face, was on fire. So he was faced with either burning to death or falling to death, and he chose the latter. He jumped from the burning plane without a parachute, and falling at about 120 miles an hour, looking up at the starry sky and the burning airplane crashing above him, he lost consciousness. Amazingly, he woke up three hours later lying in deep snow in a pine forest. It seems that the flexible young pines had slowed his descent enough that the snow was able to cushion his fall. He had not broken any bones.

Wow.

He managed to sprain his knee after his 18,000 foot fall from the sky, and he had suffered burns and had pieces of persipex, which I guess is windshield glass, embedded in his skin.

Well he was like the ball gunner. I think those were made of like a weird glass thing, like a weird pla- You know what I mean? You see through it.

Yeah. This is where his story gets even wilder. His knee was in too much pain for him to walk, and the freezing cold was beginning to take its toll. So he started blowing his distress whistle, which attracted the attention of German civilians. He was taken to Mishkety Hospital, where his wounds were treated, and when he was well enough to talk, he was interrogated by the Gestapo. He told them what had happened, but they refused to believe that he could have survived without a parachute, and not been injured. They insisted that he was a spy, and he buried his parachute somewhere, but when they sent men to investigate the landing site, as well as the wreckage of the werewolf, they were amazed to find the remains of Alkemade's parachute were indeed still in the wreckage of the plane.

So they were like, I thought only we had Ubermensch or whatever. Like, how did you fuck it?

Yeah, he then became a celebrity in Germany and met a number of Luftwaffe or the German Air Force officers who wanted to hear about his miraculous survival.

Is this a defection story?

Where's this going? No, it did not earn him any special treatment at the end of the day. And like all the other captured Allied airmen, he was sent to Stalag Luft III. But this man is the man who could not die and when the camp's 10,000 inmates were forced to track hundreds of miles across northern Germany through a blizzard with temperatures that dropped as low as negative 22 degrees Celsius, he survived and was eventually liberated. He lived a long life in the UK and died of natural causes in 1987.

Wild. Fucking that person so holy smokes.

So, Sarah, it is your job to contact this man. I need to talk to Nicholas Alkemade01 and find out what else he survived in his life, because he sounds like Bruce Willis in Unbreakable.

No, yeah, that's something where that's so crazy.

Now the podcast will shift into the seance.

Yes, here we go.

I thought, I'm happy he lived. I didn't know what the extremes that he would go through to live. Because when you first said that the guy was coming back and he was shot down in like mid or late 1944, I'm like, buddy, just a couple more months and this shit's over. Like it sucks to be the last one to go down. But did you ever see the movie A Matter of Life and Death? It's a wonderful fucking movie from 1946, I think. It's got one of my favorite openings of a movie. I've played you the opening before.

Yes, you've I've watched the whole movie with you.

Yeah, but it's about a Royal Air Force bomber that goes under and he jumps out without a parachute and survives. This is such a famous story. I wonder if that had anything to do with the movie being written, I'm saying. Like he survives and it's a whole thing about life and death and he should have gone to heaven. It's a whole crazy romcom, but it would have been contemporary news less than two years previous. So I wonder if that news article was impetus for writing this great movie.

It may have been, it may have been because it does sound like this guy got pretty famous for a while, as he should. He fell out of a plane and didn't break a bone. So we'll wrap this episode up on, I didn't want to just do all the other highest heights that have on the records list are all from planes. So it kind of gets a little repetitive. You get the idea, something horrible happens on a plane.

Nothing else is higher.

Nothing else is higher.

It's kind of hard. You have to have an asterisk next to your name.

I wanted to end on the highest land-based freefall ever survived. And good God, does this one make my skin crawl. On December 7th, 2007, Alcides Moreno.

The day that would live in infamy.

Yeah. Alcides Moreno and his younger brother Edgar woke up at 4 a.m. to start their job washing windows. A profession, they'd worked together for more than a decade. The morning started normally with the men working 500 feet up on the side of the Solo, which is a terrible name for a very tall building, it's not Solo at all. It was the Solo Tower Apartments on East 66th Street. So Sarah, if you wanted to go check these buildings out, you probably could go stroll by.

Free Solo.

Yeah, Free Solo. Unfortunately, around 10 a.m., disaster struck and the platform cables holding the metal off snapped and sent them plummeting to the ground. Edgar died instantly on impact, but Alcides somehow managed to survive the fall. Now, one of the reasons this makes my skin crawl so much is just because I do, every time I see window washers up on those little scaffolding platforms, I've wondered how often those things must break. And while I didn't look up the number of accidents like this that have happened, just the fact that it happened once. Jesus Christ, I hope they would pay well.

No, I mean, it's funny. I think when they think they do strap into the cage, but if the whole cage falls, then now you're stuck to it. Did you watch that Daisy Ridley Die Hard meets window cleaning movie called Cleaner? Yeah, like that's her whole thing. And her origin story is like, I'm not afraid of heights. And it gets a cleaning job on a window. And it has to stop a terrorist attack that's happening in the building.

Good for her. Good for her. Her character was not only not afraid of heights, but I guess not afraid of guns or terrorists either.

Well, they established that they were like, we looked her up. She's former Royal Navy or something.

I see.

After she was discharged, she got a window washing job.

Ed, the rest of this story dovetails with your new ER show Fall Unit. As you might imagine, Alcides was in really, really, really, really bad shape. According to an article in The Guardian, quote, the president of New York Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Herbert Pardes, described Moreno's condition when he arrived for treatment, which treatment is a hell of a word for what they had to do with this man. They described his-

Reconstruction.

Yeah, the six million dollar man.

They make it sound like they gave him cough syrup. His condition was described as, quote, a complete disaster. Both legs and his right arm and wrist were broken in several places. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column. He was bleeding in his brain and throughout his body. In the first hours, doctors gave him 24 units of donated blood, about twice the entire blood volume in a person's entire body, as well as plasma platelets and a drug to stimulate clotting and stop the hemorrhaging. They put a catheter in his brain, which is not where I thought catheters went.

But I mean, according to some people, right? Yeah, what's he thinking with?

Hey, they put a catheter in his brain to reduce swelling and cut open his abdomen to relieve pressure on his organs. He was at the edge of consciousness when he brought in. I wish for his sake he was over that edge and just unconscious, honestly. But they sedated him and did a tracheotomy to put him on a ventilator. His condition was so unstable that doctors worried that even a mild jostle might kill him. So, they performed his first surgery without moving him to an operating room. Nine orthopedic operations followed to piece his broken body back together.

So, this is what city is this? New York City?

This is New York.

I don't know. You know, the EMT drivers were like, how many fucking potholes we hit getting over here? This guy is fucking jostled out.

He cannot be jostled.

No more jostles, we're saying. Got it.

Yeah.

Fully jostled.

Yeah. The jostling saved his life.

Yeah. They jostled a few bones back into place.

Yeah, back into place. Who set these bones? Taxpayer did.

Even at his worst, hospital staff marveled at his relative luck. They said his head injuries were relatively minor for a fall victim.

That's what they say. You know how minor this was? Put a catheter in your fucking brain.

Yeah.

That seems pretty not minor.

But he lived, so I guess it's a pretty binary.

That's just some way to not have the insurance company pay for it. They're like, oh, it was actually minor. So he's on the hook for that.

If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one, said the hospital's chief of surgery. New York Presbyterian had treated people who have tumbled from great heights before including a patient who survived a 19-story fall. But most of those tales end poorly. The death rate from even a three-story fall was about 50 percent, and people who had fallen more than 10 stories almost never survived. 47 floors is virtually beyond belief.

What was it, awnings? Like, what was the, because the other place we saw was baby pine trees or whatever, right? They were nimble and soft and they slowed them down. What's slowing you down in Manhattan or wherever?

Like nothing. That's why this is such a miraculous story. This is just fell.

Guys, they're treating a deity at this point. Like there's no way it's.

And he pulled through. He was in a coma and had extensive surgeries, but in less than six months, he was not only alive, but walking on his own. So Alcides is the man who could not be smashed, crushed, splatted.

Where's the Guardians of the Galaxy with these fucking four survivors?

I know, we've got to put a team together.

That one I want to know, do you have any follow up on whether he went back to a gig that took him high up above the ground or?

I don't. I hope the follow up was he just sued the scaffolding company and is living a very peaceful, cushiony life somewhere where he does not have to climb anything anymore.

He called up Saul Slip and Fall.

Yeah. westernjusticelaw.com.

It's like in Back to the Future. It's like, you know that sound you've been looking for? It's like somebody calling them being like, you got to fucking hit this guy. Just you got to get him as a client. He's unconscious now. No one else even knows.

So after all that, we're at the fear tier. Guys, this is where we place on our personal fear tier on a scale of zero to 10, how afraid we are of this week's topic.

And before we start that, I would like to just point out that it's very funny that Zac thought the sound they were looking for, that it was actually the sound splat to me. And I just walked right over that. I got that new sound.

I got that new sound for you, splat.

So I took it as I was making the comment and the excitement someone would feel about being the first one at the scene. And he was like, literally, the sound splat is very funny to me. So I just wanted to shout that out.

I was picturing, I was also picturing Danny DeVito in that John Grisham movie, when he plays a personal injury lawyer, just standing at his file cabinet, going, I got this new sound for you, splat.

Shit, dude. That's really good. RIP God bless almost to this person though.

Yes, and RIP God bless to all of those who did not survive their terrifyingly far falls from various heights. But we here at the end of this episode have to rank our fear of heights on our personal fear tiers. So Zac, since this is your first time on the show, we'll start with you. Where on a scale of zero to 10, 10 being the worst fear you can imagine, would you place your fear of heights?

Oh man, I mean, now that I've heard the range that we've talked about, I can't put it, I don't think I could put it much higher than a six. You know, it's not so bad for me. Yeah, it's the feedback loop of it that really is the thing. You know?

Six is pretty high still.

Six is pretty high still.

But I, yeah.

So it's a healthy fear of it.

Sarah, what about you?

Well, I feel like this is my own, like, personal fear tier, right? I mean, I'm not afraid of anything as much as I'm afraid of heights. So, but I still feel like I want to give it a little room. So I'm going to give it an eight because maybe like I'm not, I'm not testing fate to give me a higher fear, but like this is my thing. This is what I'm afraid of.

So if any emails we get to the show are to be believed, we manifest a lot of stuff and we apologize in advance.

Yeah. So it's good that you put it in an eight. We don't want to manifest any kind of falls or height based problems for anybody involved in this show or anybody listening. Ed, what about you? Where do you put a fear of heights on your fear tier?

From the top of a building in a plane, a three from my dresser at seven.

Absolutely.

I like that.

That's where you're most likely to suffer some kind of grievous injury.

Hang in a rocketeer poster.

I'll put mine at a five. I get a little woozy. I don't like being up near the edge, but compared to the crippling fears of heights that we learned about in this episode and how afraid Sarah is of heights, I feel like I really don't have... I can't hold a candle to that. So I'm going to put my fear at a five and leave it at that. Just kind of right in the middle. Don't really want to fall from any kind of height. And I'll stay away from edges. And hopefully...

I can't spell edge without ed. You're fucked.

That's true. That's true. And last but not least, Zac and Sarah, if you could just give us a little bit of where people can find you out there on the internet and when and where you'll be on tour, doing readings, et cetera. Zac, I guess we'll start with you.

Yeah. So I'm right around when this podcast comes out today, as you're hearing it. Listener, beloved listener. I'll be getting in the van heading to that great Eastern peninsula of this country, Florida. I've got rehearsals down there for a cruise ship that I'm going on with my bandmates in three different Andrew McMahon fronted bands and a bunch of our friends.

Don't listen to our episode on cruises beforehand.

Don't read the David Foster Wallace book, a supposedly fun thing I'll never do again because it's not not about cruises, but this is I was just telling someone earlier today, there's something about going on a cruise that's for something you love with a bunch of people you love and you all kind of have a have a connection to a similar group of bands or type of music. So we'll be doing that. We're doing rehearsals in Miami. I'm playing a show in the Miami area, which I believe by the 19th, there should be a way for people to see if the host of this private show will give them an invite because I think some cruise goers will probably be there and in the area. That's on the 27th of February and then we cruise for a week to the Dominican Republic and kind of circle around international waters out there presumably. And then I'll play Clearwater Florida on the 7th of March and Gainesville, Florida on the 8th of March. Nice. And then South by Southwest after that. All right.

It sounds like people can see Zac and some of the last remaining Hooters at the same time. So that makes me happy. Both of those things make me happy.

Are those gone? Is that over?

Hooters is basically gone, but Clearwater is the home of Hooters. So I imagine they kept the flagship.

That clocks. I'll keep my reasons for why I think that clocks to myself.

That's right. I should keep my love of Hooters to myself, but it's a come with thing on the show.

There's a great band called The Hooters. If you guys don't know the band, The Hooters, it's one of the greatest bands of the 80s, I think, some amazing songs. The lead singer co-wrote that huge Joan Osborne hit, What If God Was One Of Us.

Oh, a classic. If he was one of us, his favorite podcast would certainly be Scared All The Time.

If God was one of us, they'd be afraid of heights.

Exactly, exactly.

That's why they never come down anymore.

Yeah.

And where could people follow you online and find your stuff?

I don't even know anymore, Chris. I haven't been there in so long. I think the best-

Well, we'll put it in the show notes, whatever it is.

Well, right now, I'll tell you this, just off the cuff, you probably can best find an assortment of stuff from me right now on Instagram, which is imzacclark, and we'll have you guys put the link in. But I gotta say, I gotta get out of there, man. And I wanna just- These days, I'm really fascinated. You guys mind if I tell you something that you can cut out if it disrupts the flow here, but it's so pressing. I saw this show the other night, a couple of friends work with this artist who did a really sweet, almost secret last minute show where she announced it two days beforehand, sold the tickets via a 9 a.m. ticket pre-sale bundled with the record at the local record shop, and the owner of the record shop owns this venue. So, sold out show. We went over and saw it, and she played a new song, and to introduce it, she was like, she was like, oh man, I'm gonna play a new song. Thank you guys for being here. I really want to show my gratitude, and show you by playing a new song. The phones go up. But I started to watch from the back, the real snake charmer aspect of a good performer, or someone who's taking the responsibility and the mantle of having a microphone, having a show, having a business, having some art out in the world. She was like, and can I just ask you, if you're thinking of taking a video and you see a few phones go down, instantly chastened. Because she's, because they're suddenly, I've felt it. I think we've all felt it. Someone goes, you don't like, why don't you just be here in the moment? You go, oh shit, I was holding my phone up for no reason. And then she kind of, she kind of backed off and was like, you know, if it's going to kill you not to take a video of this, I don't want you to die. So like, you know, a bunch of phones went back up and it just, it was this thing where I kind of was like, gosh, I want to go all the way and kind of say, don't follow me. Don't, let's not follow each other. Nothing's going to happen. If you hear this show, if you like what you heard from me, tell 10 people my name, fine. Like make them a tape of my record or like, you know, pirate my record to them. And some like really, I don't know, I think we're four people who were at a common age group where we saw the other side of this thing. We're like, it's so pleasant. It's so cool. In fact, like we use technology to meet you and I, Ed and Chris and I, an email was sent, but it was very direct and personal. And I think there's, I don't know, there's so much to be, to be said about finding a different way, finding a way out of that melee. So I may, when all is said and done after this, I might send you like a website link and we'll send them there cause that's where I'm going to end up at some point. Great. And just like, Hey, just go there.

I mean, we have a PO box and it's always very cool to get letters from people and little gifts and things they make by hand and art. Like this great guy, Vince sends like hand drawn art from Ireland and it like was in our PO box who was like, Hey, I drew this while listening to the pod. It's like a joke based on something you said. And it was all very sweet and cool. And someone made, I'm sorry, their name is escaping me right now. Someone made Chris' baby when Felix was born, like handmade, like baby things. That are based on the interest of the show. So we really like having a PO box and that feels very alive and real and pre-internet. I also don't want people knowing where I live in case they want to follow me in other ways that I'm not comfortable with.

So. And Sarah, your book is out everywhere in bookstores now. Where can people find information about you and where you're doing readings and buy the book?

So you can buy this book wherever books are sold. And hopefully you're perusing your favorite indie book shop or your favorite witch shop. But I am on the Internet. It's I am Sarah Potter, Sarah with an H. I'm having so much fun on Substack because it feels like I really I love writing letters. Like I still write handwritten letters. Actually, Zach, I wrote you a postcard. I have to pop that in the mail. Oh, cool. I forgot about that. I'm a big fan of writing postcards, letters. Valentine's Day is coming up. As we're recording, I wrote a bunch of valentines. And so Substack, I feel like I get to do that without having to put a stamp on anything. So that's lovely. And I am taking on new clients. You can book a reading for yourself or someone you love or your pet. And when this airs, I'll be getting ready for February 23rd. I'll be at Honey's in Brooklyn. We're doing a really fun fundraiser for Animal Farm Foundation. It's Foster Fest. I'm really excited about that. Cool. And you can see me at the Jersey Shore under the full moon every month. And we're even doing it inside until it gets warmer for the blue moon.

Amazing.

And lots of good things. I have some sober magic events from my book coming up in San Francisco, Montana, in Missoula, Montana, and coming soon to LA. So I hope you'll join me on the Internet so I can announce those dates and maybe see you in person.

Amazing. Well, yeah, we'll make sure links and dates for all your guys' stuff are in the show notes for people who want to find you. I think it's time to bring this episode to a close. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us this week. You could find Sarah at IamSarahPotter on Instagram. You can find Zac floating through the ether at whatever links we place in the show notes and description.

Send him a smoke signal, a messenger pigeon.

Well, you can, I'll tell you now, I mean, you can likely find me at iamzacclark.com.

Okay, fantastic.

IamZacClark on Instagram. But you know, stay off Instagram, kids. Just stay away from it.

Oh, yeah.

Amazing. So until next week, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And the show is Scared All The Time. And we will see you next week. Bye bye.

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 Fifle.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

And just a reminder, you can now support the podcast on Patreon and get all kinds of cool shit in return. Depending on the tier you choose, we'll be offering everything from ad-free episodes, producer credits, exclusive access and exclusive merch.

So go sign up for our Patreon at scaredallthetimepodcast.com.

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No part of this show can be reproduced anywhere without permission.

Copyrighted Astonishing Legends production.

Good night.

We are in this together. Together. Together.

===TRANSCRIPT END===