Here Be Monsters

During a moment of personal turmoil, Rocky Villanueva gets an email from a long-time client.  His client is in his final weeks of life, and is getting his last wishes taken care of.  One of those wishes: to look like himself when he dies.  Rocky says that many hairdressers and barbers have similar experiences: helping their clients through the last stages of life and letting them look the way they want to look for a final time.Rocky packs his haircutting tools and bikes across Berlin to spend an hour with his client, giving him a haircut and receiving advice on love and grief. Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot, Serocell, Phantom FaunaSponsor: The Summer Diary of a Lady ArtistThe sponsor for this episode is The Summer Diary of a Lady Artist.  It’s a fictional illustrated diary of an artist navigating love and hatred.The Summer Diary of a Lady Artist is now available at all online book stores.See Jeff’s favorite images from the book, on the podcast websiteWant to sponsor an episode? HBMpodcast.com/sponsor Support Here Be Monsters with a small monthly contribution: patreon.com/HBMpodcast/

Transcribed - Published: 19 February 2025

Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin and explains why the Here Be Monsters feed has been quiet for so long. On the way, Jeff talks about plans for upcoming episodes, looks at the ways that moving to Berlin has changed him, and discusses a pair of films featuring Tilda Swinton: Cycling the Frame (1988), and The Invisible Frame (2009). Both movies feature Swinton riding a bicycle around the entirety of the Berlin Wall—or, in the case of the latter, where the Berlin Wall used to be. Please follow Here Be Monsters on Patreon: patreon.com/HBMpodcastField recordings heard in this episode (starting around the 17:20): a former site of the Berlin wall in Marienfelde  ~  birds and insects near Portbou, Spain  ~  canoe paddling near the in Germany’s Spreewald  ~  geese and peacocks calling on Peacock Island (Pfaueninsel)  ~  dusk crickets near Locarno, Switzerland  ~  a massive pipe organ that was part of Italy’s submission to the 2024 Venice Biennale  ~  public transport boats in Venice revving their engines  ~  Jeff singing in a bathroom while a faucet drips  ~  Water splashing against cement in Banyuls-sur-mer, France  ~  Hiking the Walter Benjamin memorial trail on the France / Spain border  ~  Baby goat at the peak of a mountain on the France / Spain border  ~  A canal boat passing in Amsterdam, Netherlands  ~  An announcement bidding visitors to be quiet while visiting France’s Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg.  Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 9 December 2024

n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich. Note: this episode contains sounds that cannot be accurately represented by speakers.  Please use headphones.  Steve Reich compositions excerpted in this episode: Clapping Music, performed by Steve Reich and Wolfram WinkelViolin Phase, performed by Jonathan Morton Pendulum Music, performed by Joan Cerveró, Víctor Trescolí, Isabel León, and  Estefanía SánchezHere Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by listener donations.  If you’d like to make a small monthly contribution, visit patreon.com/HBMpodcast. Producer: Jeff Emtman

Transcribed - Published: 14 December 2022

Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher.  He’s also a father of three.  His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos.  In that episode, Alex tells stories from his childhood of chasing strange phenomena with his father. In this episode, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman talks to Allen to get the “fatherly perspective” on UFOs, black lodges, tarot, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and (most of all) how to be a good parent. Allen Greenfield is currently working on the final installment of a trilogy whose first two entries are Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts and Secret Rituals of the Men in Black.  The forthcoming book is yet to be titled. Also heard on this episode: Rick Emtman, who is Jeff’s dad.Content Note: Language Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Serocell, The Black Spot Sponsor: Pal’s PlantsPal’s Plants is a Flatbush, Brooklyn based subscription service for potted plants and intriguing zines.  Plants can be delivered to the 5 boroughs of New York City. Zines can be delivered anywhere in the USA.  Pal’s Plants is customized to your preferences.  They’ll have you fill out a short survey when you sign up so that you can be sure to get something you like each month in the mail. Pal’s Plants makes a great gift.  Use offer code HBM50 at signup to get half off your first month’s subscription.  Thank you Pal’s Plants for sponsoring Here Be Monsters.

Transcribed - Published: 28 November 2022

Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building.  It’s one of just a dozen remaining pieces of Nazi Architecture in Berlin.  And it’s not much to look at. It was built in 1941 as a test structure for a triumphal arch that Hitler wanted to build in that spot. The Schwerbelastungskörper (“heavy load-bearing body”) is the arch’s test structure.  It weighs about 12,650 metric tonnes, or about 28 million pounds, and it’s the equivalent weight of one of the four massive legs of the never-built arch.This plan was abandoned as World War 2 accelerated.  And the structure remained, slowly sinking into Berlin’s marshy soil, providing proof of the arch’s impossibility. In this episode, HBM host Jeff Emtman visits the Schwerbelastungskorper, records some impulse responses in the structure’s single room and reflects on his discomfort in finding beauty in another Nazi structure nearby, Tempelhof Airport (now a public park and refugee camp). Also mentioned on this episode: The Berlin Airlift, Austrian Tyrol, The Little Mermaid (1989), and Der Herr Der Ringe (Lord of the Rings movies dubbed in German).  Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by listener donations.  If you’d like to make a small monthly contribution, visit patreon.com/HBMpodcast. Registration for the Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is open until November 10th, 2022.  Sign up: https://HBMpodcast.com/art/Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 9 November 2022

The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back!It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger and get a piece of art in return. It’s open to artists of all experience levels from around the world. The deadline to sign up is November 10th, 2022. Sign up and more info here: https://www.hbmpodcast.com/artThe art exchange is made possible this year by HBM listener Devon Sherman, who’s offered her time and expertise to help with communication between artists. Thank you Devon. Devon is a past participant in the art exchange, and has an ongoing project where she illustrates Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Another listener, known as “Endless_Want”, also helped out by making the Art Exchange’s promotional video, which you can see on the sign-up page and on our Instagram and Twitter.Music: The Black Spot, Robbie Quine—Glitter Rock Werewolf

Transcribed - Published: 24 October 2022

Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry.Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid.  His dad (Allen H Greenfield) self describes as a “researcher in the shadow world.” And his mom soon grew tired of her husband’s lifestyle, which included a lot of time on the road: chasing rumors of cryptids, ghosts, and aliens.  But after his parents split up, Alex, his dad, and an ever changing cast of motorcycle gang members and step-moms kept seeking the occult. Some of the topics discussed in this episode: St. Simons Island in Georgia (and reported hauntings), The Okefenokee Swamp (and the ignition of swamp gas), The Three Mile Island Nuclear Accident (and subsequent protests), Mono Lake in California (and the UFO sightings  there), and a movie called Being There (wherein the character played by Peter Sellers appears to walk on water).Alex Greenfield is the writer of The Sand, 10.0 Earthquake, and other movies.  He also used to be the head writer for WWE Smackdown. Alex’s dad, Allen H Greenfield (aka. T Allen Greenfield), is a UFOlogist and occultist.  He is the author of Secret Cipher of the UFOnauts, The Story Of The Hermetic Brotherhood Of Light, and other books. Unrelated to this episode, but do give a listen to the limited series that Jeff’s been mixing for Crooked Media.  It’s called Another Russia, and it’s about the assassination of Russian dissident Boris Nemtsov, as told by Ben Rhodes and Zhanna Nemtsova.  Available now on every podcast app.  Also, Jeff’s headed back to Berlin, Germany for about a month.  If you know any good stories/interviews he should record while he’s there, send a DM on Twitter or Instagram, or use the contact form.Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by listeners and sponsors. Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot, Circling Lights, August FriisSponsor: is / ought books  is / ought books is a publisher of spiral bound self help manuals, art books, and non literary works on paper.All titles from is / ought books are available to buy online via the link below. is / ought books are also distributed via Small Press Distribution (SPD).Thank you is / ought books for sponsoring Here Be Monsters.

Transcribed - Published: 24 August 2022

Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius. Apicius is a bit of a fluke.  It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did.  And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice their gilding skills.  And thus, this fascinating book of recipes (featuring cooking instructions for boiled ostrich soup, complex sauces, and cucumbers stewed with brains) is still feeding people today.While cuisine today might seem distant from ostrich soup, Grainger thinks that Roman food often gets inaccurately portrayed as overly decadent or overly spiced.  Cooked correctly, the cuisine is quite balanced, she says.  And in her book, Cooking Apicius, she uses her knowledge of ancient Roman life to put the recipes in context for a contemporary kitchen and contemporary cooks. Also, on this episode, Jeff also reads from a 1932 English translation of Apicius by Joseph Dommers Vehling, which is available in the public domain thanks to Project Gutenberg. Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black SpotHave you seen the new HBM stickers? They’re beautiful.  Get yours here.  As of publish date: if you buy 4, one of them will be free.  The discount gets applied automatically when you add them to your cart.

Transcribed - Published: 22 June 2022

In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife. In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote about the dinner party where they attempted to make an uneasy friendship. Jeff re-edited the essay in 2022 and gave pseudonyms to the main characters (“Cliff” and “Sophie”). Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black SpotHere Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by listeners and advertisements from small businesses. If you’d like to support the show, consider sponsoring an episode, or becoming a supporter on Patreon. Some other news: 1. Album of German field recordingsThe recordings from the last episode (HBM153: Klänge from Berlin) are now available as an album.  Listen and purchase here.2. New HBM stickers are here! They’re beautiful, screen printed, die-cut, clear vinyl versions of the “HBM” logo.  Available for purchase on the HBM store. Patreon supporters can get some for very nearly free by following the instructions in this post.

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2022

The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening.  She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears.  But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain.  Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work.  About six years ago, on an episode of Here Be Monsters called Sam’s Japan Tapes, Sam shared dozens of recordings he made during his first (and only) trip to Japan.  He released those recordings under the name Observance as an album called Japan, 6/21 - 7/14.On this episode, Here Be Monsters host takes two trips to Germany, and records the sounds of Christmas in Berlin, New Years in Saxony, and many hours of people and birds just going about their daily lives in the late winter and early spring. Before Jeff leaves on his first trip, he calls Sam Parker back, to ask for recording advice before the trip, and Sam offers three tips: Take lots of time.Capture moments of everyday routine. Trust your instincts The recordings on this episode are available as an album called “Field Recordings: Germany, 2021-2022” and it’s available for purchase on Bandcamp, under Jeff Emtman’s The Black Spot moniker.  Until June 30th, 2022, all profits from the sale of this album will be donated to The International Committee of the Red Cross. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Remixes from the recording session in HBM049: Sam’s Japan Tapes. Photos: Jeff Emtman Thank Yous: Sam Parker, Johanna Gilje Sponsor: HBM’s Patreon SupportersHere Be Monsters’ supporters on Patreon send a small monthly (or yearly) donation to help cover Jeff’s living expenses, pay contractors, fees, taxes, etc.Listener Kit Roberts supports HBM on patreon, saying “I’m a patron of HBM because no other podcast has ever made me feel like this one does…so small and singular and yet connected to everything all at once.”Thank you so much, HBM Patrons.👽👉Become a patron👈👽Recordings heard in this episodeMM:SS - Description.  (📸 means there’s a photo in the gallery)08:45 - Train to SeaTac airport.09:45 - Announcements on an Air France flight.11:00 - Turbulance and people rustling.12:30 - Berlin's Brandenburg Airport13:15 - A brown swan hissing and chirping13:30 - Boats rubbing against wooden piers and a small dog barking.14:15 - Cars driving on cobblestone streets.14:45 - Ice Skating at Berlin's Alexanderplatz 📸15:30 - Swing ride with metal chains at Alexanderplatz. 📸16:00 - Riding on the subway, then walking up several flights of stairs.18:45 - Radio playing advertisements, news, and christmas music20:45 -  A Christmas Eve service in a cathedral with a speaker reading a children's story.21:30 - Christmas carols playing as people mill around.22:00 - A wedding party in front of the Brandenburg Gate.23:15 - A Christmas exhibit with a lit up polar bear and fog machine.24:00 - Birds chirping in Berlin's Mauerpark as people walk by.25:00 - Crunching frosted leaves on a cold morning.25:30 - Walking through a forest in the Saxony Region of Eastern Germany.📸26:15 - Whistling through hands in the forest.27:00 - Buying 5 kilograms of potatoes from a vending machine as a dog barks.📸27:30 - Mountaintop shop selling hot drinks and snacks in Czechia.27:45 - Chopping kindling. Distant fireworks echoing through the hills in Saxony.28:30 - Snaps and pops of a small fire29:00 - Distant fireworks to celebrate the start of 2022.29:30 - Close fireworks echoing.30:00 - A strong wind blowing on a mountaintop in Saxony.📸30:30 - A tree swing creaking.31:15 - 6AM on the outskirts of Berlin.  Traffic starting, crow screaming.32:45 - Captive pigeons fluffing their feathers and cooing at Hasenheide Park34:00 - Slow motion recording of a sudden hailstorm.34:30 - A motorized billboard in a subway station35:00 - Accordion player performs in a subway station in Berlin's Mitte neighborhood.37:45 - Applause after a play.38:15 - A small bird singing several songs.39:30 - Church bells ringing.40:45 - Wind flapping the torn domes of the Teufelsberg listening station as people sing.📸43:00 - Walking through the forest near Teufelsberg as bikes pass.

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2022

What do you want to happen to your body when you die?  It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play.  But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, which both have substantial ecological impacts. In 2019, Washington State passed SB 5001, which legalized several new options for deathcare. In this episode, host Jeff Emtman visits Return Home, a facility in Auburn, Washington that’s using one of those new options, called “Natural Organic Reduction” (NOR) which is commonly called “human composting”.  Return Home has built the world’s largest NOR facility to date, with 74 available individual vessels.  Their process (which they’ve trademarked as “Terramation”) takes about two month to complete, and involves dressing a deceased person in a pressed cotton gown and placing them a bed of organic material, and left to naturally break down using active composting techniques that bring the contents of the vessel to well above 100° Fahrenheit for much of the composting period. The techniques used by Return Home were largely inspired by Katrina Spade, a death activist and the owner of Recompose, another NOR facility located near Seattle.  Spade was one of the people who strongly advocated for the passage of SB 5001.There’s currently one other NOR facility in Washington State: Herland Forrest in Wahkiacus.  Currently two other states, Colorado and Oregon have legalized NOR.  NOR’s future isn’t known.  It’s new and still relatively rare. Do enough people want to be composted to have it be a viable business model? Each of these companies have different approaches to their process.  Return Home’s model relies on scale.  They wouldn’t disclose the exact cost of building their facility, or how many simultaneous descendants they’d need in their facility to be profitable.  As of publishing, they charge $4,950 for their process and they have 15 of their 74 slots occupied.  And in some ways, the full ecological benefits for Return Home’s process also rely on scale.  In a follow up email, CEO Micah Truman stated that “We calculate our inputs as follows. Our electricity bill each month is about $1,700, and is sufficient to Terramate 74 bodies. This comes to $22 per body. In current gas terms ($5 a gallon at present) that is roughly 4 gallons of gas, which is about 1/8 the amount of gas used for cremation. The number is actually quite a bit better than that, as our electricity bill also powers our entire facility, not just the Terramation equipment.”When asked about the relative emptiness of the facility, Katey Houston (Return Home’s Services Manager) said, “The funeral industry is so slow to change. When cremation became a thing, it took sixty years to become mainstream.  The fact that we’ve served just over thirty families now in four months, is quite amazing.  And we’ve continued to grow month-over-month, and that’s all I can ask for.”Thank you Hannah Suzanna for help with research for this episode. Here Be Monsters is an independent, listener supported podcast.  Consider supporting the show on Patreon. Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot and Serocell Sponsor: Sleep With Me PodcastSleep With Me is a podcast that helps you fall asleep.  Host Drew Ackerman tells tangential stories, reads old catalogs, makes metaphors about washing machines, and does other calming things all in pursuit of slowing your mind down and letting you drift off to sleep more peacefully.  Subscribe to Sleep With Me on any podcast app.

Transcribed - Published: 30 March 2022

Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours.  Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store.Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon, and have your boss sponsor an episode.Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: Serocell and The Black Spot Sponsor: RadioLabAre you curious about the world, but also want to be surprised, and even moved? Radiolab experiments with sound and storytelling allowing science to fuse with culture, and information to sound like… well, music. Join hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser for an experiential investigation that explores themes and ideas through a patchwork of people, sounds, and stories. Listen to Radiolab

Transcribed - Published: 9 March 2022

Season 10 is nearly here!  The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published.Want to advertise on an episode? Fill out the sponsorship request form. Want to support HBM with a small monthly donation?  Become a patron on Patreon. Can’t wait to share the season with you.  More soon. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 11 February 2022

I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify.  It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that Spotify treats the medium.  If you listen on an app other than Spotify, you don’t need to change anything, just stay subscribed, and you’ll get all the new episodes (Season 10 is coming soon!).If you do listen on Spotify though, you’ll need to download a different app to keep listening.  Personally, I’m a big fan of  Pocket Casts, but there are a lot of good options out there. Direct links to HBM’s listing on several podcast apps: Apple PodcastsStitcherGoogle PodcastsPocket CastsCastboxDeezerPodcast AddictRadioPublicAmazon MusicPodBeanThere’s a million more too :).  If you can’t find HBM on your favorite app, please send an email or a tweet.  Last thing: If you’re a podcaster and you’re interested in removing your own work from Spotify, I just published an article called “How to remove your podcast from Spotify without losing (all) your listeners”.  Perhaps an overly bold title, we’ll see..  Thank you for all the support for all these years.  I really appreciate it.  Season 10 will be here soon. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 8 February 2022

The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down.  She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken heart had something to do with it.  She spent about three years going through some excruciating physical sensations: immense chills, brain fogs, pregnancy nightmares and the feeling that her blood was about to boil through her skin. Doctors weren’t able to figure out what was wrong, nor were the array of alternative healers she visited. Feeling that no one was able to help, she was at the edge of giving up. But, at her brother’s suggestion, she reluctantly visited a hypnotherapist who gave Julia instructions to swim daily in cold water.  So she started jumping in the ocean each day and felt a strange and near immediate change in her symptoms.  If you’re feeling suicidal, here are some numbers you can call to speak with someone who will listen. USA Suicide Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255UK Samaritans: 116 123Canada Crisis Services: 1.833.456.4566Japan Tell JP:  03-5774-0992Australia Lifeline: 13 11 14Denmark Livslinien: 70 201 201Other countries: check the list available at suicide.org~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~This episode marks the end of Season 9.  Season 10 is coming, but the date is currently unknown.  Stay subscribed!  And keep an eye on the HBM Patreon page for an upcoming message with a season debrief and some musings about the show’s future.  That post will be public, so no need to be a member to read it.  Also, please note that due to some summer busy-ness, Jeff will not be able to run an HBM summer art exchange this year.  Sorry about that.  Thank you for all your support through Season 9.  It is such a pleasure to make this show. ~~~~~~~~~~Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Julia’s choir group and The Black Spot Sponsor: AnimasusEmilius Martinez is an illustrator and designer who runs Animasus.  Animasus can help you design email campaigns, websites and improve the overall branding for your business.  Speaking of which, Emilius designed the new HBM t-shirt, which is wonderful. Thank you Animasus for sponsoring Here Be Monsters!

Transcribed - Published: 1 July 2021

A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast.  Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day.  This episode, The Daily Blast, features two computerized voices (Wendy and Ivan), who share the day’s news. To get new versions of this episode, you’ll need to either stream the audio in your podcast app/web browser, or just delete and re-download the episode.  It’s updated every 24 hours.  Note: Due to Spotify’s policy of downloading and rehosting podcast audio, this episode won’t work very well on Spotify.  Most other podcast apps should handle it well though. Neutrinowatch is a project of Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters’ host), and Martin Zaltz Austick (Answer Me This, Song By Song, Pale Bird and others). If you’d like to know more about generative podcasting and the story of Neutrinowatch, listen to So What Exactly is Episode 149? and Jeff’s blog post called The Start of Generative Podcasting?Neutrinowatch is available on most podcast apps, and as of publish date, there’s currently 6.5 episodes available.  Each updates daily. Producers: Jeff Emtman and Martin Zaltz AustwickMusic:The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 16 June 2021

Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure.  It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes. That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first of its kind.  It’s called Neutrinowatch, and every day, each episode is regenerated with new content. But this is a conversation between Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters’ host), and Martin Zaltz Austick (Answer Me This, Song By Song, Pale Bird and others) about the hows and whys of Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast (available now on most podcast apps 😉)

Transcribed - Published: 16 June 2021

As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses.   One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming.  He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious.  Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they’re asleep.  Some sleepers become lucid completely at random, but lucid dream training can drastically increase the frequency of their occurrence.Months ago, Jeff put out a call for dream prompts on social media.  He asked if anyone had questions for an all-knowing being to be conjured in a forthcoming lucid dream.  Some of the questions are heard in this episode.  While training for this episode, Jeff used two approaches to trigger lucid dreams.  The first was an audio recorder by the bedside.  Each morning, Jeff recorded his dreams (lucid or not).  The second method was a series of “wakefulness checks” throughout each day, stopping at random times to test reality, and to make a determination on whether he’s currently awake or asleep.  This tactic is useful as it may eventually trigger the same behaviour in a dream.  In this episode, Jeff attempts to lucid dream to answer listener questions, but finds the progress slower than he hoped.  Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast that is funded entirely by individual sponsors and donors.  You can become a donor at patreon.com/HBMpodcastProducer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna, and Serocell. Sponsor: Sleep With Me PodcastSleep With Me is a podcast that helps you fall asleep.  Host Drew Ackerman tells tangential stories, reads old catalogues, recaps old Charlie Brown specials and does other calming things all in pursuit of slowing your mind down and letting you drift off to sleep more peacefully.  Subscribe to Sleep With Me on any podcast app. 

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2021

With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open. In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram microscopy page @tardibabe about the joy of looking at small things, and whether it’s possible to find beauty in things you don’t understand.  Chloé also gives Jeff instructions for finding tardigrades by soaking moss in water and squeezing out the resulting juice onto slides.Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot Sponsor: Pod PeoplePod People is an audio production and staffing agency with a community of 1,000+ producers, editors, engineers, sound designers and more.  Pod People helps audio professionals find amazing job opportunities, and they're also  building a network of support that connects their members with other audio producers, educational workshops, events, and more.Pod People is free to join. After a short onboarding process, Pod People will send you clients and work opportunities that are a good match for your specific skills and interests. Join Pod People

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2021

A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, good advice, and some strange poetry. Her account’s called Hypothetical Inspiration. Give her a follow.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2021

How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction? Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules.  Every language rule seems to have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions etcetera.  Typical, “if this then that” approaches to language just don’t work.  There’s too much nuance. But each generation of algorithms gets closer and closer. Markov chains were invented in the 1800’s and rely on nothing more than basic probabilities.  It’s a simple idea, just look at an input (like a book), and learn the order in which words tend to appear.  With this knowledge, it’s possible to generate new text in the same style of the input, just by looking up the probability of words that are likely to follow each other.  It’s simple and sometimes half decent, but not effective for longer outputs as this approach tends to lack object permanence and generate run-on sentences. Markov models are  used today in predictive text phone keyboards, but can also be used to predict weather, stock prices, etc. There’ve been plenty of other approaches to language generation (and plenty of mishaps as well).  A notable example is CleverBot, which chats with humans and heavily references its previous conversations to generate its results.  Cleverbot’s chatting can sometimes be eerily human, perfectly regurgitating slang, internet abbreviations, obscure jokes.  But it’s kind of a sly trick at the end of the day, and, as with Markov chains, Cleverbot’s AI still doesn’t always grasp grammar and object permanence. In the last decade or two, there’s been an explosion in the abilities of a different kind of AI, the Artificial Neural Network.  These “neural nets” are modelled off the way that brains work, running stimuli through their “neurons” and reinforcing paths that yield the best results. The outputs are chaotic until they are properly “trained.” But as the training reaches its optimal point, a model emerges that can efficiently process incoming data and spit out output that incorporates the same kinds of nuance, strangeness, and imperfection that you expect to see in the natural world.  Like Markov chains, neural nets have a lot of applications outside language too. But these neural networks are complicated, like a brain.  So complicated, in fact, that few try to dissect these trained models to see how they’re actually working.  And tracing it backwards is difficult, but not impossible. If we temporarily ignore the real risk that sophisticated AI language models pose for societies attempting to separate truth from fiction these neural net models allow for some interesting possibilities, namely extracting the language style of a large body of text and using that extracted style to generate new text that’s written in the voice of the original text. In this episode, Jeff creates an AI and names it “Theodora.”  She’s trained to speak like a presenter giving a Ted Talk.  The result varies from believable to utter absurdity and causes Jeff to reflect on the continued inability of individuals, AI, and large nonprofits to distinguish between good ideas and absolute madness. On the creation of Theodora: Jeff used a variety of free tools to generate Theodora in the episode.  OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) was turned into the Python library GPT2 Simple by Max Woolf, who also created a tutorial demonstrating how to train the model for free using Google Colab.  Jeff used this tutorial to train Theodora on a corpus of about 900 Ted Talk transcripts for 5,000 training steps. Jeff then downloaded the model locally and used JupyterLab (Python) to generate new text.  That text was then sent to Google Cloud’s Text-To-Speech (TTS) service where it was converted to the voice heard on the episode. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Liance Sponsor: Liance Independent musician James Li has just released This Painting Doesn’t Dry, an album about the relationship between personal experiences and the story of humanity as a whole.  James made this album while he anxiously watched his homeland of Hong Kong fall into political crisis.Buy on Bandcamp. Listen on Spotify.

Transcribed - Published: 28 April 2021

Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction.  But she was able to find work at a juice factory in the vineyards of western New York.  Her job was quality control, which meant overnight shifts at the factory, tasting endless cups of fruit punch and comparing them to the ever-evolving set of juice standards that they kept in the “juice library.” She calls herself and “odd creature”, especially for the time and place: she was a woman working in a factory dominated by men, she was openly lesbian (and yet still rebuffing advances from her coworkers), and she was a lover of Richard Wagner’s—sometimes dressing up as a valkyrie.Unfortunately, much of her time at the factory was characterized by the antics of her juice tasting colleague, Tim, who, in some ways, mirrored the traits of her favorite composer.  He was incredibly gifted at understanding the flavor profile of fruit punch, able to predict the exact ratios of passion fruit, high fructose corn syrup, and red 40 needed to please the factory’s  clients.  But he also shared Wagner’s xenophobia and misogyny, with his own brand of paranoia, too.  Often, Amanda was a target of his outburstsThis came to a head when Amanda was suddenly fired and escorted from the factory after Tim levelled an incredible accusation of conspiracy against her. After this incident, Amanda got into grad school, and started her path towards teaching.  She is now a professor of chemistry at the Community College of Rhode Island.  She also runs the website Mail From A Cat where you can order mail...from a cat. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot, Serocell, Ride of the Valkyries (performed by The United States Marine Band),Overture from The Flying Dutchman (performed by University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Prelude from Parsifal (recording from the European Archive). Sponsor: Esoteric Bumper StickersEsoteric Bumper Stickers sells waterproof vinyl stickers can fit any feeling.  Not just for cars, Esoteric Bumper Stickers can show the world your knowledge of the briny deep, your passion for flora, your love of claws in the dark, etc. 

Transcribed - Published: 14 April 2021

HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down.In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound of places he likes: Padelford Hall’s Parking Garage, The Wayne Tunnel in Bothell, his old house in Roosevelt, The Greenlake Aqua Theater, and his front porch on a snowy day.  The sound of a popping balloon can be used to re-create a space digitally.  These popping sounds are loud ‘impulses’, and the space ‘responds’ accordingly.  These impulse responses can then be fed to an audio effect called a “convolution reverb” which interprets the impulse response and applies it to any incoming sound.  Rick and Kathy Emtman are heard on this episode.  Forrest Perrine helped with some of the recordings.  Support Here Be Monsters on Patreon! Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot, August Friis, Serocell, Phantom FaunaSponsor: Walk in the Woods ZineWalk in the Woods is a free mini zine that you can get in the mail! Zine-maker Flissy Saucier writes and draws about her experiences walking in the woods in this monthly+ publication. You can donate to keep the project going and get additional benefits.

Transcribed - Published: 31 March 2021

Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context.  In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them. Ashley Ahearn: Journalist and producer of Grouse, from Birdnote and Boise State Public RadioJoel Balsam: Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives.  Joel co-created a photo essay for ESPN about the “pororoca”, an Amazonian wave chased each year by surfers. Kevin Coffey, Ph.D.: Co-creator of DeepSqueak and researcher at VA Puget Sound and the University of Washington.  Kevin co-authored the paper DeepSqueak: a deep learning-based system for detection and analysis of ultrasonic vocalizations in Nature’s Neuropsychopharmacology journal. Also heard: calls of the Indies Short Tailed Cricket (Anurogryllus celerinictus), which may be the perpetrator of the so-called “sonic attacks” recently reported in Cuba.  Sound sent in by HBM listener Isaul in Puerto Rico.  Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot Sponsor: Chas CoChas Co takes care of cats and dogs in Brooklyn (especially in Prospect Lefferts Gardens, Bed Stuy and surrounding neighborhoods).  Chas Co welcomes pets with special behavioral and medical needs, including those that other services have turned away.  They offer dog walking, cat visiting, and custom care arrangements too.  Visit ChasCo.nyc to book an appointment. Thank you Chas Co for sponsoring Here Be Monsters.  Please consider becoming a patron of Here Be Monsters at patreon.com/HBMpodcast/

Transcribed - Published: 17 March 2021

1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency.  It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at, creating radio waves that can be detected far away.  And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the universe by observing this “hydrogen line” frequency with radio telescopesExtraterrestrial research astronomers also take a lot of interest in the hydrogen line...and it’s for the same exact reason, though the context is different.  It’s thought that if an alien species is capable of communicating with us, wouldn’t they also have figured out the importance of the hydrogen line?  And is it possible that just maybe, they’d use it (or frequencies near it) to communicate with us?  The theory being that the hydrogen line could be used as a kind of universal hailing channel for intelligent species—a representation of a shared understanding of physics. Talk of the hydrogen line was front and center in 1977, when an American astronomer named Jerry R Ehman found a very strong signal on the printout from a radio telescope dubbed “The Big Ear” at the Ohio State University.  The signal he found was close to the hydrogen line.  He noted the abnormality of the strong the signal by writing “Wow!” in red ink on the margins of the printout.  The so-called “Wow! Signal” has long been cited as potential evidence for alien communication. But Dr. Seth Shostak (senior astronomer at The SETI Institute and co-host of Big Picture Science) isn’t convinced.  His organization searches for extra terrestrial intelligence across the universe with a high degree of skepticism.  And he’s experienced a false positive or two over the years.  Seth thinks the Wow! Signal (and other related anomalous signals) are almost always tied back to human interference. In 1979 (not long after the Wow! Signal), frequencies near the hydrogen line became protected when a group called the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) created a 1000+ page document that included a worldwide recommendation to keep these channels clear for astronomy and SETI purposes, citing the “special importance to mankind to determine the existence of extraterrestrial civilizations.” (see page 920 of the Finals Acts of the World Administrative Radio Conference, Geneva, 1979)  Despite this protection, Seth Shostak says there’s still interference on the hydrogen line from human sources.  That interference draws the ire of radio astronomers everywhere. Seth says, “It’s like turning on a bright light in a movie theater—you don’t ingratiate yourself with the [theater’s] patrons.”*give or take some fractional hertzProducer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot SponsorHBM’s Patreon SupportersHere Be Monsters’ supporters on Patreon send a small monthly (or yearly) donation to help cover Jeff’s living expenses, help pay contractors, and help pay fees/taxes associated with running the show.Listener Andrew Conkling says he signed up for the Patreon because Here Be Monsters is one of his favorite podcasts: “I wanted to be part of the journey seeing it continue.”Please note that HBM is free and there are currently no plans to change that.  However, patrons do receive some modest perks for their support. And that support means a lot. Thank you so much, HBM Patrons. 👽Want to become a patron? https://www.patreon.com/HBMpodcast

Transcribed - Published: 3 March 2021

When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially assuming it was stolen.  But he’s soon corrected.  Confronted with the shocking amount of food waste in the local dumpsters, he quickly turns into a freegan dumpster diving evangelist, but is often thwarted by an angry employee of a local produce stand.  An employee whose face is always hidden by a bright headlamp. These encounters rattle him, making it hard for him to separate reality from his recurring night terrors about the incidents.  But, years later, and more than a hundred of miles away, he has an encounter in a chocolate dumpster which cures him of those nightmares. Many thanks to Jesse Chappelle and Hallie Sloan, who helped in the research of this episode. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Serocell, August Friis, The Black Spot Sponsor: Coffee Beer of Portland, Oregon Coffee Beer gets you to and from the best parts of your day.  Located at 4142 SE 42nd Ave, Portland, OR 97206, they serve coffee, beer, snacks and groceries for pick-up and delivery.  Order yours at coffeebeerdelivers.comCoffee Beer’s merch can be shipped!  HBM host Jeff Emtman especially likes their “Leave Me Alone” shirt.  Shirts, mugs and more, at coffeebeer.meThank you Coffee Beer for sponsoring HBM!

Transcribed - Published: 17 February 2021

Season 9 will be here soon!  We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown.  We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world.  We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture the souls of doomed buildings.  We’ll listen for alien transmissions on a reserved shortwave frequency.  We’ll luxuriate in the scent discarded cocoa bean husks. and you’ll get quick-fixes to all your problems from the all-knowing, hyper-dimensional entity that sometimes advises Jeff in his sleep. As a side note, we’ve been re-shuffling some things behind the scenes on the podcast feed.  If you’ve got duplicate episodes showing up, you can likely fix that by unsubscribing and re-subscribing to Here Be Monsters.  Thanks for your patience! Also, we have a Patreon now.  Your support is very much appreciated.  Thank you! Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 8 January 2021

For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW.  And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint.   However, moving forward, HBM will no longer be associated with the station, instead continuing as an independent production.  This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded.  So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community sponsors.  HBM would love to promote your business or project or just say some words that are meaningful to you.  Become a sponsor of HBM today.   Please note that the release date of Season 9 is currently unknown.  Probably early 2021.  We’ll be transferring our feed off of KCRW’s servers in the coming month.  If we do it right, you won’t have to do anything on your end.  If you’re experiencing any difficulty with the feed, please send us an email or tweet at us.  Thank you so much for your endless support.   Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 13 August 2020

There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T Washington called it “Black Wall Street.” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chapter of the KKK was starting to form. In the Spring of 1921, a Black shoe shiner named Dick Rowland was brought into custody for allegedly assaulting a white woman. Over the coming night and day, a huge mob of white Tulsans burned and looted and murdered in Greenwood and the surrounding areas. Dozens or possibly even hundreds of Black Tulsans died, thousands became homeless. But authorities never held anyone responsible. In fact, they detained many Black residents, some for up to a week. And insurance claims made in the aftermath were denied, as the insurance policies did not cover “riots.” Further reading on the Tulsa Race Massacre:Official Report from 2001 which describes the events of 1921 in detail and with context. Educational comic about the massacre published by the Atlantic and sponsored by HBO’s Watchmen. Riot and Remembrance By James S. HirschIn the decades that followed. Records of the event went missing, some fear they were destroyed. The mass graves have yet to be found. And many Black Tulsans believed they could face retribution for speaking out about the event. It wasn’t even taught in school until recently. As a result, a lot of Tulsans still don’t know the history of Greenwood. Local rapper Steph Simon was one of them. He grew up near Greenwood, and he went to middle school there. But it wasn’t until his 20’s when he stumbled upon a documentary about the massacre on Youtube. From there, he became obsessed with learning more about the true story of Tulsa. And in 2019, he released an album called Born on Black Wall Street where he reintroduces himself as “Diamond Dicky Ro” in homage to the young shoeshiner whom white mobs tried and failed to lynch on that night in 1921. In 2011, an Oklahoman journalist named Lee Roy Chapman wrote an article for the publication This Land. Chapman’s story, The Nightmare in Dreamland, was a devastating re-telling of the life’s story of an Oklahoman legend--a “founder” of Tulsa named Tate Brady. Brady was well known as an oil tycoon and hotel owner who ran in the elite circles. However, buried by history was Brady’s legacy of violence and racial animus. He was a defender of the Confederacy, he was credibly accused of tarring and feathering some IWW union members, and for part of his life, he was in the Ku Klux Klan. And on the night of the massacre, Brady was there, acting as a night watchman. He reported seeing several dead black people in the streets in or around Greenwood. With these revelations, a movement started to remove the Brady name from Tulsa. That movement succeeded partially, but the Brady name is still a part of the Tulsan landscape. When Steph Simon shot the cover image for Born On Black Wall Street, he wanted to incorporate the symbolism of Tate Brady. So he went to Brady’s former mansion—a house modelled visually after the house of Robert E. Lee’s, with murals of the Confederacy painted inside and big stone columns out front. It sits on a hill overlooking historic Greenwood. And he stood on the front steps of the mansion only to see a childhood friend driving by. It was Felix Jones, an ex-NFL running back. The two grew up together. To Simon’s surprise, Jones revealed that he’d just bought the mansion. And he invited Simon inside. Together they thought up ideas on how to transform the legacy of the house from something hateful to something loving. So Simon invited about a hundred Black kids to come have a party on the lawn while he filmed the music video for his single “Upside”. After that, Simon and Jones started throwing concerts there, drawing huge crowds and starting the slowly re-contextualizing the house into something positive. They renamed the house “Skyline Mansion.”As this transformation took place, another local DJ and producer, Stevie Johnson woke up in a cold sweat one night. He’d had a dream about rebuilding Black Wall Street, figuratively and literally. He opened his laptop and wrote down his ideas frantically, trying to remember his vision. And soon after, he started to act on it. His first step was Fire in Little Africa: a commemorative rap album to mark the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, featuring nearly sixty artists from Oklahoma. And over the course of a weekend in early 2020, rappers and community members and businesses filled Skyline Mansion to record dozens of tracks for the album. Fire in Little Africa will be available in February of 2021. Their podcast is out now. They’re also curating spotify playlists of the featured artists, and they’re accepting donations via the Tulsa Community Foundation. On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Taylor Hosking visits the former Brady Mansion to talk to the musicians who are looking to build a new Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Taylor also published an article in CityLab called Avenging the Tulsa Race Massacre With Hip Hop.A lot of people and organizations helped make this episode possible. We’d like to thank Steph Simon, Verse, Stevie Johnson, Keeng Cut, Written Quincy, Bobby Eaton, Felix Jones, Dan Hanh, Mechelle Brown, Chris Davis, Shruti Dhalwala, Brandon Oldham, Ben Lindsey, John DeLore, The George Kaiser Family Foundation, The Oklahoma Historical Society, and The Woody Guthrie Center. Producer: Taylor Hosking (Instagram) (Twitter)Editor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: Steph Simon, Verse, The Black SpotAlso heard on this episode: recordings from Black Lives Matter protests made by Neroli Price of Seattle, Washington; Bryanna Buie of Wilmington, North Carolina; and Bethany Donkin of Oxford, UK. 

Transcribed - Published: 24 June 2020

Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness, the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease. But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make everyone blissfully happy is to use technology and genetic engineering to make physical and emotional pain obsolete HBM producer Bethany Denton doesn’t fully agree. She thinks that heartbreak, homesickness, grief can all be good pain, pains that can make us better and kinder people in the long run. So what should the role of pain be in society? And further, what about the pains that we opt into, the pains we volunteer for? On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Bethany interviews people about long distance running, unmedicated childbirth, and voluntary crucifixion in the Philippines. Will James is a reporter for KNKX Public Radio. Ashlynn Owen-Kachikis is a special education teacher. Carlo Nakar is a social worker and recurring guest on HBM. Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff Emtman

Transcribed - Published: 10 June 2020

There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, the American archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki led a team who excavated a trench in Shanidar Cave, discovering the remains of ten Neanderthals who died about 50,000 years ago.  Dr. Solecki’s discoveries helped ‘humanize’ Neanderthals, a species of early humans often thought of as the brutish, stupid cousins of our species. In sharp contrast, Solecki believed Neanderthals to be nuanced, technologically adept, interested in art and ritual. Solecki suggested that the bodies at Shanidar Cave were intentionally buried.  Many of Dr. Solecki’s theories on the complexity of Neanderthal minds seem to be correct. But he also made a famous claim about one of the bodies, named “Shanidar 4.” This individual was found with flower pollen around the body. Solecki suggested this was a ‘flower burial’, an intentional death ritual where flowers were laid on the body, possibly to signify the passing of an important member. This interpretation was not universally accepted, as others pointed out there are several ways for pollen to wind up on a skeleton.  Half a century later, Dr. Emma Pomeroy from Cambridge University went back to Shanidar Cave with a team of archaeologists. They kept digging, hoping to help contextualize Solecki’s findings. To their surprise, they found more bodies. And their findings seem to support Solecki’s theories. The bodies were likely intentionally buried, and they were discovered in soil that contained mineralized plant remains, meaning that the pollen in Solecki’s findings couldn’t have come from modern contamination.  It’s possible that Shanidar Cave may have been a significant spot for Neanderthals. But Dr. Pomeroy believes that further work is still needed. Currently, their excavations and lab work are on hold due to the current coronavirus pandemic.  Dr. Pomeroy admits to imagining the lives of the Neanderthals she studies. She wonders how they spoke to each other, and what they believed about death and the rituals surrounding it. These things don’t preserve in the fossil record though, so we’re all stuck interpreting from clues, like the source of a bit of pollen or the maker of a tiny piece of string.  These clues have the ability to teach us the “humanity” of some of our closest evolutionary cousins.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna

Transcribed - Published: 27 May 2020

David Pearce thinks it's possible to end suffering. He’s a philosopher* who studies “hedonic zero”, the state of being which is completely neutral--neither good nor bad. He believes that, despite our momentary joys and sadnesses, most of us have a set point we tend to return to. And that “hedonic set point” falls somewhere on the spectrum of positive to negative.  For David, his set point is negative. He’s always been melancholic and he has depression. He remembers his interest in philosophy sparking in his teenage years, when he felt an outcast.  He’d sit in the dark, and listen to pop music and try to figure out how to end the world’s suffering.  He bought a book that introduced him to the concept of wireheading, which is the artificial stimulation of the brain.  The wireheads could experience instant bliss with nothing more than electricity. This concept was huge for David: promise of a concrete mechanism to elevate his mood, instantly and without drugs.  Since then David has dedicated his life to understanding hedonic set points and how to manipulate them through physical interventions (like wireheading), gene manipulation (which is arguably already being done with IVF babies), medication, and the eventual transition to post-humanity.  In 1995 David wrote The Hedonistic Imperative. He is the co-founder of Humanity+ (formerly the World Transhumanist Association).  He currently sits on their advisory board. *David Pearce’s views align him with several philosophical movements, most notably transhumanism, negative utilitarianism and soft antinatalism.  Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot, Circling Lights, Flower Petal Downpour

Transcribed - Published: 13 May 2020

In 2012, Jacob Lemanski started writing his autobiography a few words at a time when he signed his name on the digital card readers at the grocery store. He read somewhere that the credit card companies keep the signatures on file for seven years. He thought he might report his card stolen in 2019 so that some grunt at Mastercard would find the story of his life...or…more likely he thought it was a project destined to evaporate and never be seen by anyone.  His inspiration came from an email forward containing a certain Kurt Vonnegut quote about making art for the sake of making art—whether it’s singing in the shower or writing bad poems. Vonnegut argued that art is one way to make the soul grow.  Jacob considered turning this into a lifelong project. At the time that he and HBM producer Jeff Emtman first talked, he was four entries into the project. On this episode, Jeff checks back with Jacob about his grocery store autobiography.  Jacob is a longtime guest on HBM and is a retired ant farmer living in Boulder Colorado. Also on this episode, voicemails from listeners, who share stories about their bodies, sounds from the world around them, and the things that make them feel guilty. Call us anytime (765) 374-5263 Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot, August Friis

Transcribed - Published: 29 April 2020

We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evidence to the contrary. Amanda is a death doula, someone who provides practical, emotional, and spiritual support to people who are about to die. Sometimes this means that Amanda helps dying people and their families sort out their end-of-life paperwork and advanced care directives; Sometimes she helps dying people plan their own memorials. And sometimes she sits with people as they die. She says the tasks she performs are different for every person, but that her goal is always the same: to advocate for the wishes of the dying. Amanda says that, in her experience, death is often harder for the loved ones to accept than it is for the person who is dying. “It’s almost like, in Western culture, it’s not OK to die… Like we guilt the dying person into trying to keep them here longer, with medicine and medical procedures because we, the survivors, are not capable of letting go of that person.” Because of this, Amanda recommends that people grieve by holding and touching the bodies of their loved ones after they die. She believes that talking about death openly will help people be less afraid. Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 15 April 2020

Searching for something to do during government-mandated social distancing, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman recently digitized his cassette collection, and re-edited them into blackout poems and proverbs.  While in the process of doing this, Jeff re-discovered a mixtape he made in 1999, the product of endless hours of waiting by the boombox in the basement with a hand hovering over the 🔴 button.  And on this old mixtape, a 10 year Jeff attempted to make a fancy edit: swapping out the intro of one song for another’s.  It didn’t sound good at all, but it may have actually been Jeff’s first ever audio cut, predating the start of HBM by over a decade.  On this episode, Jeff shares a couple dozen of his recent blackout proverbs and short poems, made from a variety of bootlegged self-help audiobooks found in the thrift stores of New England.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot, August Blicher Friis

Transcribed - Published: 1 April 2020

Bodies are odd.  Anyone who can see their own nose will tell you the same.  So will anyone whose diet changed their body odor.  And so will anyone who’s ever felt their phone vibrate in their pocket only to later realize it was a phantom ring.  Our bodies make stuff up constantly and do plenty of questionable things without asking our permission first.  It can feel disorienting, especially due to the fact that being our sole points of reference, they’re hard to see outside of.  So, people invent analogies for the body, ways to understand what it is, and how to use it.  On this episode, Jeff interviews the operators of several bodies on the models they’ve developed to help them navigate the strangeness of the world we live in.  Dr. Kelly Bowen is a naturopath in Seattle, Washington.  Juliana Castro is the senior designer at Access Now and the founder of Cita Press.  David Schellenberg is the singer and guitarist of Tunic, a noise punk band from Winnipeg, Manitoba.  Divya Anantharaman is the owner of Gotham Taxidermy in New York City. Divya’s been on the show before dissassembling birds and explaining taxidermy.  See HBM093: The Brain Scoop.  Tammy Denton Clark is a medical social worker in southern Utah.  She’s also the mother of HBM co-host Bethany Denton. In the life of a man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapors; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion.  —Marcus Auralius, Meditations, circa 180 AD. Translation by Maxwell Staniforth. Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot, Tunic, Serocell, August.Belcher Friis  (👈 New!)Thank you Allison Behringer of the Bodies Podcast for sharing Juliana’s comic about bodies of water. Thank you Jackie Scott for helping record the freight elevator noises heard in this episode. 

Transcribed - Published: 18 March 2020

Natalia Montes was a teenager living in Florida when Travyon Martin was killed.  She says his picture reminded her of her classmates, “It could have happened to any one of us.” The Trayvon Martin shooting, as well as subsequent high profile police shootings and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked an interest in Natalia for trying to understand one of the most difficult elements of human psychology: implicit bias.  Natalia calls implicit bias “the cognitive monster.”  And she says it lives inside all of us; this unconscious, unintentional prejudice that works against our best efforts to be egalitarian. Natalia says this cognitive monster is especially dangerous for police officers, because they’re more likely to perceive black and brown people as threatening. She, like many social scientists, believes that implicit bias is at the root of police shootings of unarmed black and brown civilians. This was especially apparent to Natalia during the trial of Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Michael Brown in 2014. Wilson described Brown this way, “He looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face... it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked.”  Natalia studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Washington, and as an undergrad, she worked for the Center for the Science of Social Connection. Part of her job was to research implicit bias displayed by people trying their best not to be racist. One of the ways Natalia and her colleagues measured bias was the Implicit Association Test. The IAT is designed to measure the association people have between concepts (e.g. black people, white people) and evaluations (e.g. “good”, “bad”). The IAT is the most common way that implicit bias is measured, though it has come under scrutiny in recent years. As an undergrad, Natalia came across a study out of Oxford University. The intention of the study was to see if implicit bias could be treated with medication. The researchers administered the IAT to 36 participants. After the implicit and explicit bias of each participant was measured, half of the subjects were given a beta blocker called propranolol. Beta blockers are a common kind of blood pressure medication that block the effects of adrenaline. They can also be an effective treatment for anxiety. The results of the study showed that the participants given beta blockers displayed lower levels of implicit bias. Reading this study gave Natalia an idea: if medication could have this kind of effect on implicit bias, perhaps it should be administered to police officers. The implications are still theoretical, but Natalia argues that police officers are required to meet a level of physical fitness, so mandating officers take these drugs would ensure their moral fitness as well.  Natalia wrote about her idea in a 2017 essay, and won an award from the International Neuroethics Society. A year later, she was approached by another philosopher, Paul Tubig, to expand her idea into a longer paper. As of 2020, the two are preparing to submit their paper for publication, and have presented their essay at the Northwest Philosophy Conference. Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot and Phantom Fauna

Transcribed - Published: 4 March 2020

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store. At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood.  They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time with his cousins. He used to love playing outside with his cousins, and hear stories about the land around them. One of his favorite places to go was The Heart of the Monster, a landmark that is sacred to the Nez Perce people. They also made the trip to the Denton family plot at the Pine Grove Cemetery in Kooskia, so that Bethany and her brother could visit their Grandpa Bill’s grave. Bethany’s grandpa was Bill Denton, a sportscaster for KREM-TV in Spokane. She never met him, he died years before she was born. Audio from the Heart of the Monster site courtesy of Nez Perce National Historical Park, used with permission. Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 19 February 2020

Mother Pigeon says the wild animals of New York City are hungry.  So she feeds them.Each morning, a flock of about 150 pigeons waits for her at her local park in Bushwick.  She feeds them twice a day if she can afford it, and once a day if she can’t.  Peas, lentils, millet and other grains, and corn in the winter to keep them warm.  “When you go out to feed birds, you’re treated like a criminal, so I like to call myself ‘The Pigilante.’”Mother Pigeon considers herself a press agent for the city’s “maligned animals”—animals strong enough to survive in urban environments, but not charismatic enough to become our pets. Animals like rats, squirrels, raccoons, and of course, pigeons.  She considers much of the information available on pigeons to be propaganda from greedy exterminators. Less controversial though, are the dangers of inhaling the dust from dried pigeon droppings, which often carry fungus spores harmful to those with compromised immune systems.It’s completely legal to feed birds in NYC’s parks. Though in 2019, the city proposed a rule that’d make what Mother Pigeon does punishable by fines and/or jail time.  She and some others vocally opposed this rule—it did not go into effect. On this episode of Here Be Monsters, producer Jeff Emtman visits Mother Pigeon’s studio.  She tells him about the illegal capture of the city’s pigeons for transfer to Pennsylvania for live pigeon shoots.  And she tells the story of how she used to pretend to be a nun to gain access to the captured pigeons and surreptitiously re-release them. Mother Pigeon sells felt and wire animals (pigeons and rats, mostly).  You can find her and her fake animals many days in Union Square Park in Manhattan.  She posts her whereabouts on Instagram and sells her art in-person and on Etsy.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 5 February 2020

Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite likes it. However, it also makes him visually match the mythical underground people he spent three years studying on the Danish island of Bornholm.  Bornholm folklore sometimes references “De Underjordiske”, a kind of people that live under the many ancient burial mounds that spot the landscape. Lars sometimes calls the people “subterraneans”, “pixies” or “underearthlings”. They’re known as a militant group, fiercely defending themselves, their homes in the mounds, and the island. But not an unthankful group either, rewarding humans for kindness or bravery. It’s worth clarifying that Lars is no “troll hunter” (as the press often gleefully mistakes him to be), nor is he in the business of saying whether reclusive, sometimes-red-hatted people are real or legend. He is, however, in the business of collecting those legends and learning what they can teach us about us. And also what the legends can tell us about the archaeological significance of a Batlic Island that’s been conquered so many times that history’s forgotten who actually made those mounds in the first place.  Pursuing legends is difficult though, as Lars attests to in this episode of Here Be Monsters. He tells producer Jeff Emtman stories of both the underearthings and the stories of the skepticism he faced when he pointed the anthropological lens on the place where he grew up. He says, “That’s why there was so much talk about this project. Had it been an anthropological study of shamans in Siberia, or something in the Amazon, then there would have been then public expectation that, ‘of course people there have spirits and stuff like that.’...But when it’s about what happens in your own back garden, then I think that’s where it gets more controversial...there’s certainly magic in distance.” Lars is an anthropologist and the author of Tales in an Underground Landscape, a dissertation he wrote while pursuing a PhD at University of Copenhagen.  Many thanks to producer Rikke Houd, who connected Jeff to Lars and has interviewed him about De Underjordiske for the BBC show Short Cuts.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: Serocell, The Black SpotPhotos: Jeff Emtman

Transcribed - Published: 22 January 2020

Colby Richardson’s mom got leukemia when he was young. He has trouble remembering her. Soon after her death, Colby and his siblings wound up at a house in Hope, BC where he met Santo, a childhood friend of his mom’s. Colby remembers that Santo’s voice to be soft and extremely calm.  Santo told Colby that he had a beautiful, green aura, a glow that surrounded his body. Back when his mother was alive, Santo had been able to see her aura too, the same green, but with a deep purply violet mixed in.  That afternoon, Santo and Colby sat in a living room with their eyes closed. Santo led him in a visualization exercise where they breathed slowly together until a door emerged in their minds’ eye. They opened the door and let light shine down. And when Colby opened his eyes, he could see auras floating around too.  Colby only saw Santo that one day, but it made an impression. In middle school and high school, Colby would sometimes stare to see the moving shapes of light around people. Eventually the ability faded.  But even today, Colby still sees clouds of green and purple before he falls asleep. He says it makes him feel connected to his mom, like she’s watching over him. But he also worries that he was tricked into believing in magic while he was in a susceptible state, grieving the death of his mother.  So, these days, Colby is uncertain about how to reflect on that afternoon in 2003. In the intervening years, he’s thought about getting in touch with Santo, but never found the right time.  Just recently, he finally reached out. He found that Santo’s health has degraded, and he may have missed his chance to get clarity about his experience with auras.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 8 January 2020

Most of us want to help.  But it can be hard to know how to do it, and not all altruistic deeds are equal, and sometimes they can be harmful.  Sometimes glitzy charities satisfy the heart of a giver, but fail to deliver results. That’s the paradox: motivating people to give often demands glitz, but glitzy causes often don’t provide the improvement to people’s lives than their less glamorous charity counterparts.  GiveWell is a organization that quantitatively evaluates charities by the actions they accomplish.  Their current suggestions for effective charities include groups treating malaria, de-worming, and direct cash giving to the poorest people in the world.  These effective charities are able to accomplish more with less resources.  GiveWell is a part of a philosophical and social movement called Effective Altruism.  EA practitioners look for ways to maximize the effect of donations or other charitable acts by quantifying the impacts of giving.  This approach has been called “robotic” and “elitist” by at least one critic.  In 2014, a post showed up on effectivealtruism.org’s forum, written by Thomas Kelly and Josh Morrison.  The title sums up their argument well: Kidney donation is a reasonable choice for effective altruists and more should consider it.  They lay out the case for helping others through kidney donation.  Kidney disease is a huge killer in the United States, with an estimated one in seven adults having the disease (though many are undiagnosed).  And those with failing kidneys have generally bad health outcomes, with many dying on the waitlist for an organ they never receive.  There’s currently about 100,000 people in the country on the kidney donation waitlist.  An editorial recently published in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology estimated that 40,000 Americans die annually waiting for a kidney.  The previously mentioned post on the EA forums attempts to calculate all the goods that kidney donation can do, namely adding between six and twenty good years to someone’s life.  Quantifying the “goodness” of a year is tricky, so EAs (and others) use a metric called “Quality Adjusted Life Years” or QALYs.  The post also attempts to calculate the downsides to the donor, namely potential lost wages, potential surgery complications, and a bit of a decrease in total kidney function.   The post concludes that kidney donation is a “reasonable” choice.  By the EA standards, “reasonable” is pretty high praise; a month or so of suffering to give about a decade of good life to someone else, all with little long term risk to the donor.   On this episode, Jeff interviews Dylan Matthews, who donated his kidney back in 2016.  His donation was non-directed, meaning he didn’t specify a desired recipient.  This kind of donation is somewhat rare, comprising only about 3% of all kidney donations.  However, non-directed donations are incredibly useful due to the difficulty of matching donors to recipients, since most kidney donors can’t match with the people they’d like to give to.  When someone needs a kidney transplant, it’s usually a family member that steps up.  However, organ matching is complicated, much moreso than simple blood-type matching.  So, long series of organ trades are arranged between donors and recipients.  It’s a very complicated math problem that economist Alvin E. Roth figured out, creating an algorithm for matching series of people together for organ transplants (and also matching students to schools and other complex problems).  This algorithm is so helpful that it won him a nobel prize. While the problem of matching donors to patients is difficult no matter what, it becomes much easier when a non-directed donor like Dylan can start a chain of donations.  Dylan started a donation chain that ultimately transferred four good kidneys to people in need.  And since Dylan’s donation was non-directed, the final recipient on his chain was someone without a family member to offer a kidney in return—someone who otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to receive a new kidney.  Dylan speaks about his kidney donation experience to break down something that he sees as a unhelpful misconception: the perception that organ donors must be somehow unusually saintly.  He argues that kidney donation is a normal way to help others, and an option that most can consider. If you’re interested in kidney donation, Dylan recommends the National Kidney Registry and Waitlist Zero.  Dylan Matthews is a senior correspondent at Vox and the host of the podcast Future Perfect.  Jeff found out about Dylan from the podcast Rationally Speaking with Julia Galef.  Also on this episode: Beth’s looking for help. She’s been thinking about some media she consumed as a kid that no else seems to remember or have even heard of. She’s tried Googling and checked various message boards, but hasn’t had any luck. The first is a movie (or maybe a TV show). In it, a time traveler, who is an older man, travels to the “future” (which at the time of Beth’s viewing was the mid-1990s.) The Time Traveler is stranded when his time machine breaks, but he is hopeful and friendly, and he ends up enlisting some neighborhood kids to help him find the parts he needs to repair his time machine. Eventually the kids are caught by their parents, who call the authorities. The police confiscate the time machine and take The Time Traveler into custody. As he’s being arrested, the once-jovial Time Traveler is distraught. He cries, “I want to go home, I just want to go home!” over and over. The second is a book. In this book, there’s a family of three or so kids, a mom, and a mean step-dad. The mom dies, and the kids are left with their mean step-dad. They grieve, and the step-dad gets meaner. Then there is an alien that gets into their house, possibly crawling down the chimney. The alien gets into one of the closets, and slowly starts taking over the house. The siblings find the alien in the closet and observe it. There is either a beep, or maybe a flashing light, that is beeping/flashing slowly, but gradually starts beeping/flashing more rapidly. They realize the alien doesn’t want to hurt them, it just needs to use their house to build a spaceship.  The house changes, getting stranger and stranger, and the beeping/flashing gets faster and faster. The kids realize the beep/flash is a timer, and that soon the house will blast off into outer space. Just as the house is about to take off, the siblings lock their mean step-dad in the closet, and he is whisked away in a spaceship that used to be their house. Do either of these sound familiar to you? They both made an impression on Beth, and she’d love to revisit them as an adult to see how her memory holds up. Please call, tweet, or email with any leads.  (765)374-5263, @HBMpodcast, and [email protected] respectively.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 25 December 2019

How familiar are you with the shape of the continents?  What about the shape of the seafloor?  If you’re unfamiliar with the contours of our planet’s underwater mountain ranges and plateaus and valleys, then you’re not alone.  No one really knows what’s down there; at least, not in any great detail.  That’s because, well, the water is in the way, and that makes it hard for our mapping satellites to see down there.  Even the seafloor maps we now have, the ones that include prominent underwater features, are often based on predictions from satellite observations of the oceans’ surface instead of observed data. At present, as much as 80% of the seafloor has yet to be mapped in detail. Even the Moon and Mars are mapped at a higher resolution than our own oceans. Dr. Vicki Ferrini wants to change that.  She is a marine geologist who specializes in bathymetry, the science of mapping underwater topography, and uses sonar to take measurements of water depth.  She uses these measurements and other data to create topographic maps of the seafloor.  Vicki is part of a global effort called Seabed 2030, an initiative sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO) to create a high-resolution map of the entire ocean by the year 2030.  Having a completed map will inform almost everything we do in the ocean, including modelling currents and the climate, exploring for minerals, oil, and gas, and managing fisheries and underwater habitats.  Seafloor mapping was essential to the plate tectonics revolution, and some scientists think that a more detailed map could lead to another major shift in oceanography. Vicki isn’t just interested in mapping the deep ocean.  In this episode, Vicki tests a small sonar designed for shallow waters.  She and her colleagues need it to map a shallow lake in the middle of a crater on a newly-formed island near Tonga in the South Pacific.  Mapping this small lake will give Vicki and her colleagues some insight into how the island formed, and why it hasn’t eroded as quickly as other volcanic islands like it. Producer James Dinneen went to Vicki’s childhood home on Cape Cod in Massachusetts to record as she tested the sonar device she was about to send off to her colleagues in Tonga. This episode includes archival tape, used with permission from San Francisco Maritime National Park Association. Producer: James DinneenEditor: Bethany Denton, Jeff EmtmanMusic: James Dinneen, Lucky Dragons, The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 11 December 2019

There’s a beautifully written speech that was never delivered. Written for President Richard Nixon by Bill Safire, the speech elegizes astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, who’d become stuck on the moon, and were left to die there.  In reality, Buzz and Neil made it home safely, but this contingency speech was written anyways, just in case.  Sometimes it’s called The Safire Memo and is sometimes called In Event of Moon Disaster. The latter title share its name with an installation that’s (as of publish date) on display for the first time at IDFA in the Netherlands.  This project by Francesca Panetta and Halsey Burgund explores an alternate past where Aldrin and Armstrong don’t make it home from the moon.  The film portion of the installation heavily features a reading of The Safire Memo by a computer generated version of President Nixon sitting in the Oval Office, reading from notes, making all the familiar facial expressions, sharing the same vocal tics, presidential timbre, and some of the Nixonian je ne sais quoi that makes the fake nearly believable.  But it’s not Nixon.  And it’s not entirely accurate to say it’s an actor.  It’s a kind of mix of the two, a synthetic Nixon generated by a booming form of artificial intelligence called “deep learning” which creates mathematical models of complex systems, like speech.  Lewis Wheeler  (the actor tasked with providing the voice of Nixon) did not have to imitate Nixon’s voice, only provide a proper pacing an intonation.  From there, the artists hired several companies (including Re-Speecher and Vocal ID) trained a computer model to translate Lewis’s voice into Nixon’s. This kind of deep-learned fakery (called “deepfakes”) currently usually falls somewhere in the uncanny valley—the tech is good enough to get create a strong impersonation of a voice, but one that sounds still a bit mechanical, or metallic.  This won’t be the case for long though, as more and more convincing deepfake voices emerge with each generation of new code.   And on the visual front, current video deepfakes are often so good as often pass the gut check of credibility.  This may have been most famously demonstrated in a Buzzfeed article where comedian Jordan Peele impersonates President Obama’s voice and a video deepfake moves his face along with the spoken words.   With the 2020 presidential elections looming, it seems almost inevitable that deepfakes will enter the media fray that’s meant to discredit political enemies, creating scandals that never happened.  And outside of politics, deepfake pornographers take up the task of swapping pornographic actresses’ faces with those of celebrities or the faces of female journalists they seek to discredit.   On this episode of Here Be Monsters, Francesca and Halsey tell producer Jeff Emtman that deepfakes aren’t going to rupture society.  We’ve dealt with this before, whether it’s darkroom manipulations or photoshop, societies eventually learn how to detect deception.  But the adjustment period can be rough, and they hope that In Event of Moon Disaster will help educate media consumers on the danger of taking media at face value, regardless of whether it’s deepfakes or just old-fashioned photo mis-captioning. Also on this episode, Ahnjili Zhuparris explains how computers learn to speak, and we listen to some audio examples of how computer voices can fail, using examples from the paper Location-Relative Attention Mechanisms For Robust Long-Form Speech Synthesis.  Also heard: a presidential  parody deepfake from user Stable Voices on Youtube.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 27 November 2019

“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of research animals around him.  The monkeys were his favorite, especially the rhesus macaques. He loved to give them treats, play movies and Celine Dion for them. And sometimes he’d lean up against the cages to let his monkey friends groom him. He knew the work would be hard, but he believed his  was justified because the primate research helped people in the long run. In his two years at the lab, Gene radiated a lot of monkeys.  He and his colleagues studied the deteriorating effects of radiation and the side effects of experimental cancer drugs seeking FDA approval. Once a monkey became too sick and lethargic, it was Gene’s job to euthanize them. He would hold them as they died and tell them he was sorry.  After one study with a particularly high radiation doses, Gene found himself alone again in a lab late at night, euthanizing more monkeys and thinking to himself, “Those were my friends... Those were my fucking friends.” These words became the screamed lyrics to the unfinished, unpublished song that Gene performs in this episode. Gene left the job shortly after writing the song, but he still works in medical research. He no longer performs euthanizations.  Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spotand “Gene”

Transcribed - Published: 13 November 2019

Some time in the 90’s, Kathy Emtman received a gift from her husband, Rick. It was a pair of bent metal rods, each shaped into long ‘L’. Nothing special, not imparted with any kind of magic, just metal rods. Colloquially, these rods are called “witching rods” or “dowsing rods”.  HBM producer Jeff Emtman (child of Rick and Kathy) remembers a scene that took place the night of that gifting: each family member taking turns holding the rods, testing who had the gift of water witching. Each person held the rods by their short end with the long ends waving around in front of them. Gripped loosely enough, the rods spin freely, seemingly with a life of their own.  And believers say that when the rods cross, that’s where there’s water underground. That is...if a true witch is holding the rods. Who’s a water witch? Well it depends who you ask. Some say that the gift is rare, some say that it’s in nearly all of us. It’s a folk belief, one not canonized in any central text and one not well supported by science. However, it persists (strongly in some places) as a regular thing for people to do when they need a well dug—cited as a way to gather a second opinion before paying a well driller to dig on their property.  And this desire for a second opinion seems quite understandable. Wells in the Palouse Region of Eastern Washington State (where Jeff grew up) often require digging hundreds of feet to find water of sufficient quality and quantity to sustain a family or a farm. These wells might cost $10,000 to $30,000 each. Further, the well drillers charge per hole dug, regardless of whether there’s water down there. So, picking the right spot is paramount. Well driller Brett Uhlenkott calls water witching a “farce”, preferring to drill based on his understanding of the landscape, his readings of the geologic maps and his knowledge of nearby successful wells. But he’s had clients who request he drill in a spot a witch found. And if that’s what his client wants, then that’s where he drills.  Brett says there’s no mechanism for any information to travel the great distance between a witcher’s rods and a tiny vein of groundwater that runs hundreds of feet below the surface. Despite this, Brett keeps a pair of rods himself, saying that it might work for things closer to the surface. He cites an instance where he was able to locate a pipe or cable located several feet underground using the rods.  Brett thinks it might have something to do with minerals, or that it might just be something that we imagine in our heads. The mechanism most often cited for the seemingly organic movements of a witcher’s rods is so-called ideomotor movement, which is the same thing that makes Ouija boards work.  Simply put, these motions are the result of unconscious movements we make when we feel something should work.  With witching, these motions get amplified by the long rods, resulting in movement that seems to emerge from nothing.   Attempts to prove the validity of witching exist. Proponents cite a study by Hans-Dieter Betz that claimed incredible success rate in witched wells in countries with dry climates.  This paper received criticism for its unusual methodology.  Betz published another paper on water witching in a controlled environment, where he found a select few people who he claimed could reliably witch water, however that study also received criticism for its method of data analysis.   Back in the 90’s.  Jeff held the rods, and he was able to find the pipes in the house, the sprinkler lines in the yard.  The rods moved convincingly, crossing where they were supposed to, uncrossing where they weren’t.  In this episode of Here Be Monsters, Jeff revisits his hometown, debates the merits of black-box thinking with his parents (Rick and Kathy Emtman), talks with his grandma (Peggy Emtman) about the desire to have a talent she can’t have, interviews three farmers and a former farmhand (Ian Clark, Asa Clark, Ron Libbey and Owen Prout) about their experiences with witching, and asks his parents’ pastor (Wes Howell of Trinity Lutheran Church) to explain the origin of the term “hocus pocus”. Others who helped with this episode include Lindsay Myron, Nick Long-Rinehart, Brandon Libbey, Mary Clark, Joe Hein, and Kirsten O’Brien.  Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic: The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 30 October 2019

Mike Paros lives in two worlds. In one world, he’s an animal welfare specialist and mixed animal vet, meaning he works with both “companion” animals like cats and dogs, and large animals like horses, cows, goats, and sheep. He spends much of his time as a veterinarian working with animals that eventually become meat, and most of his human clients are farmers that lean right politically. In the other world, Mike is a college professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. There he teaches anthrozoology and agriculture to a predominantly liberal student body -- lots of vegans and anarchists. Crossing back and forth between these two worlds invites Mike to have many discussions about how to ethically treat animals, within and outside of the meat industry. Producer Bethany Denton spent a day shadowing Mike as he disbuds and castrates dairy calves, and she asks him whether he thinks meat can be eaten ethically. Bethany interviewed Mike in 2018 about a class he was teaching called “Liberal Education in the College Bubble: Crossing the Political and Cultural Divide.” You can listen to that story here. Producer: Bethany DentonEditor: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot, Circling LightsImages: Bethany Denton

Transcribed - Published: 16 October 2019

Angels saved Here Be Monsters’ host Jeff Emtman once.  They picked him up and took care of him after a bad bike crash.  It was just one of many times that Jeff felt watched over by God. Jeff used to think he might be a pastor someday.  And so, as a teenager, he made an active effort to orient his thoughts and deeds towards what God wanted.  In this episode, Jeff tells four short stories about faith (and the lack thereof) through the metaphor of declination, or the distance in angle between the unmovable true north, and the ever shifting magnetic north.   We have new stickers, commissioned from the incredible artist Violet Reed.  Get your HBM Can O’ Worms sticker at our store.   Producer: Jeff EmtmanEditor: Bethany DentonMusic:  The Black SpotPhotos: Jeff Emtman

Transcribed - Published: 2 October 2019

Published: 23 September 2019

In the fall of 1989, in Vancouver, Washington, a short, 29 year-old man named Westley Allan Dodd raped and murdered three young boys. The boys were brothers Cole and William Neer, ages 10 and 11, and four year old Lee Iseli. Content Note: Sexual violence, suicide and capital punishmentA few weeks later, police arrested Westley at movie theater after he tried and failed to abduct another boy. He quickly confessed to the three murders. The prosecution sought the death penalty, and Dodd pled guilty.Death penalty cases take a long time due to all the appeals built into the process. These appeals are designed to make sure the state hasn’t made any mistakes in the death sentence. They check for things like juror misconduct, incompetent defense lawyers, new evidence. Death penalty cases take years, sometimes decades.Westley Allan Dodd did not want that. Instead, he wanted to be executed as quickly as possible.In letters to the Supreme Court of Washington, Dodd urged the court to allow him to waive his right to appeal his death sentence. He believed he deserved to die for what he did, and wanted it done as soon as possible. Dodd was what’s known as a “volunteer”–someone who gives up their rights in order to hasten their own execution. The Death Penalty Information Center cites about 150 cases of “volunteers” in the United States. Dodd’s case sparked debate both among people who supported and opposed the death penalty. Some argued he had the right to choose whether the court would review the validity of his death sentence. Others argued that the law ensures that all defendants have due process whether they want it or not. In the meantime, Dodd continued to advocate for his own execution in interviews and in exchanges with his pen pals. He said he felt remorseful, and even wrote a self-defense booklet for kids to learn how to stay safe from men like him. The booklet was called “When You Meet A Stranger”.The debate made its way to the Washington Supreme Court.  In a 7-2 ruling, they decided that Dodd did, in fact, have the right to waive his remaining appeals. After just three years on death row (5 years shorter than the national average at that time) the State of Washington hanged Westley Allan Dodd. On this episode Bethany Denton interviews  Dodd’s former attorney Gilbert Levy. And defense attorney Jeff Ellis, who was a young lawyer during the time of the Dodd trial.   Bethany also talks to Becky Price, who was one of the recipients of Dodd’s pamphlet  “When You Meet A Stranger”.Producer: Bethany Denton Editor: Jeff Emtman Music:  The Black Spot

Transcribed - Published: 5 June 2019