Sharks, Stomachs and Body Counts | Doomsday Mailbag 3

Hello, and welcome to Doomsday, History's most dangerous mailbag. Hello, dear listeners. Together, we've seen an awful lot of sh across time and space, and it's only natural that you would have questions. So here is your chance to hear them answered, maybe learn something a little gross, maybe a little interesting. This is my chance to publicly answer some of the friendly, odd and occasionally gross questions that feed in through our various social media channels. On today's episode, we're covering a classic would you rather? Involving spiders and sharks. I'll tell you about an episode that never happened, and I'm holding a fairly disturbing counting contest, headphones, safety glasses. Let's get into it all right. In today's random mail Bag, Carrianne from Twitter is full of would you rather? Questions? And I do love would you rather? Questions? So she has asked ready, she wanted to know is it better to be locked in a room full of spiders or to be trapped in a tank its sharks? And at the very same night that I got this question, I'd actually been asking my kids if they had to be eaten by any animal, what would it be and why? What they came back with was, like hippos and sharks, they conflate mouth size with maybe having a less painful death. I have no idea if that's actually true or not, but my daughter did raise the point that a hippo could fold you in half, you know, just shatter on all your limbs to get you in easier, and then you're just kind of half alive, floating around and stomach acid waiting to either dissolve or drown. Plus, if bomit smells like your stomach and people smell better than bomit, then by contrast, if a hippo does not smell all that great on the outside already, what in the hell would a trip through its stomach smell like. Everyone agreed that turning into animal pooh is not their ideal way to go, but I'm going to try to stay on topic. Here is my list of considerations about door number two, the arachnodome. I got questions, well, I have a light in my spider room and how big is the room? The question, as stated implies something super claustrophobic. But if I say I choose a holiday in conference room, that makes me feel pretty good about my chances. But If that means a conference room packed to the ceiling with spiders, that might be worse. You see what I mean. Everything's a balance, everything's a ratio. And can I do this thing while wearing a full body bubble suit? And can I bring a couple of hands of hairspray and a lighter? When I think of put a holiday in compared to a shark tank, at least we breathe the same thing as they breathe at the holiday in. Spiders breathe what we breathe do. Sharks, on the other hand, they live in a medium that I can't stand on or breathe in, so I feel like they've got a pretty significant home turf advantage. Well, you want to attack a shark by the eyes and the gills, and some people like to punch them in the snout. But you ever try punching something underwater. Your arm comes around all slow. You're all like, oh, that's nice, I'm not treadwater boxing a tank full of sharks unquote. So when you think about shark bites and shark injuries, the huge majority are these little exploratory bites, these little nibbles. And if you remember from our typhoon Cobra episode. Sharks. They're gonna sneak up onion. They're gonna pull out a chunk about the size of a plate while they knake up their mind about how tasty you are from an outside point of view. They're basically playing with you. If I'm going to get stuck in either of these things for a day, I'm going room full of spiders. Final answer, I don't have any natural defenses against the shark. Even if you defecate in the water, it won't dissuade them. They just don't care, as many have learned the hard way, and the best and only defense you have against the shark is to keep your head on a swivel and maintain eye contact and always face them with your eyes and your body, much like Leo. People call sharks stupid eating machines, but they have been doing this for what six hundred million years? Pretty sure sharks are older than trees, so by definition, they would be very very good at all this by now, and that means they're not going to waste any energy in a fight if they don't have to. They know they could take you out in a second, but it's just how they roll. Efficiency above all and I already met a nurse shark once while I was snorkeling on vacation. So me and a shark, I can already check off my list room full of spiders unenthusiastic double thumbs up. And here's how I kind of see it going. Ready, First, you keep your eyes shut tight, you know, once you start to feel them crawling on you, because once they swarm, you're not gonna want their furry little feet kicking you on your unblinking eye. What you're gonna want to do is sit on the floor, clench your buttocks, pull your shirt tight over your head, you know, to keep them out of your ears and nostrils and mouth. Now you're gonna slow your breathing and repeat the mantra. This could be worse, This could be worse, and you're just gonna meditate to quiet your thoughts. This could be so much worse, and you just do that until the time a run out or the cocoon. You you know, actually, in the question, we never really established a time frame. How long are we stuck? And I get it. Meditation super difficult. Most people have no idea kind of like trying to calm yourself in the middle of a panic attack, when you're surrounded by people and the looks on their faces are telling you that you should really actually be panicking harder than you are. I'm certainly not ignoring the majority of my listeners with my prey the pain away idea for you. You're going to want to pull your shirt over your head, like we said, but you're gonna pull it up just to the nostrils so your mouth is still free. You're gonna want to beat your chest and get into a fighting spirit here. I mean, you're already probably killing spiders just by walking around and eating your chest is probably killing some more. Now you can't see, and that's okay. But what you're gonna do is swing your hands around to locate those areas of the room where they're most densely concentrated. You're gonna grab handfuls of spiders and jam them in your mouth. Take a handful and just punch it flat into a paste you can all up and eat like an app and double fists it. Show the spiders who bites and who gets bitten. Spider's gonna have thousands of replacement babies, but they can't do it faster than you can. Chew. So spiders are They're what three calories You can throw up later, but for now you just want to concentrate on clearing out an operating space for yourself and show them that you mean business. And either way, whether you choose the way of the peaceful warrior or the way of the unintentional buffet warrior, I think our chances of getting out of this alive with most of our mind intactor pretty good. Thanks carry Ann so the next see the next question, which is less gross but very interesting all on its own. Madame Ovary wrote in to ask what was the saddest death or detail from the show that really got to me? And do I have an incredibly strong stomach? And I will say right up front, no, no, no, I don't. Oh. I have thrown up from smells. I have thrown up from sites. I almost threw up once talking to my wife about the Queen's Corgis. So there you have it. The ladies over at the yield Crime podcast asked me this when they interviewed me a long time ago, and I'm just gonna take this moment to plug their show, yield Crime. Them and Kate from Ignorance was bliss These were the first podcasters to welcome me to this game, and I appreciate them endlessly for it. Anyway, I'm going to tell you what I told them. Actually I don't remember what I told them, but trying to think what was the last thing that nearly made me barf? Just reading about you got to understand I waded through some fairly gory detail all year long, Hey, Leo, and just to be able to bring you this show. So you think i'd grow a pretty thick skin about it, you know, like a almost like a rescue worker or a first responder. But from my experience with these kind of people and the work that they do, which it's not too much to a Leo call it God, he's very distracting. Yeah, they're heroes, and the only thing that we really have in common is a dark sense of humor about these things. And that's just psychology. You can't really judge it. I picked up this book a few years ago and it was literally just about all the different ways that you could die in Yellowstone National Park, and I was boiling through it. You wouldn't believe the dozens and dozens and dozens of different ways. But when I finally got to the chapter on deaths from falling rocks. I was done. I was done. I had to stop. There wasn't any funny to be had. Oh you know what that end? There was a book. It was Letters from Chernobyl. I couldn't even get into it. It was just so sad. Yeah, it's too visceral, too easily imaginable, black boy. It caught me the wrong way for sure. And all those TLC shows about surgery fuck UTLC and rotting garbage. Whoa, yeah, that's set me off before. And what was the saddest death or detail from a show? Best answer, whatever it was, I blocked it. A few times. I've started most of the way down the long road learning about some catastrophe, only to figure out there was no way to survive and there was no lesson to be learned or involved children. I don't love child death. Before I had kids, s I could watch someone beat a kid to death using another kid as a club. But now I'm all, that's someone's baby and never really done an episode that kept me up at night, But actually episodes keep me up at night all the time. There is a lot of work, but not because I didn't think I could sleep or blink anymore. And the episodes that got to me the most were and I went through and I'm thinking the skinilav Air Show disaster of two thousand and two, the Lake NIO's disaster of nineteen eighty six, and the Indianapolis Colosseum of Death Capades of nineteen sixty three. All these had speed and surprise in common. And they also involved children and families. And that's a problem with most older industrial disasters, and children were all over them because like that working age was like eight. So when you think of any long live manufacturing company like in your town or just top of mind, that business was probably built on the blood and bones of children. And then I remembered that I got really far down a road on an episode called the ten Young Gack Christmas Disaster of nineteen seventy one, and yeah, it was going to be a Christmas episode. It took place at the tay On Gak Hotel in South Korea, and people were celebrating, you know, it's Christmas, of course, and then there was this gas explosion and it set off a fire in the lower floors and then for the next ten hours it just cooked its way up. The next twenty two floors. There was nothing anyone can do. I mean, they brought helicopters and people were throwing themselves out of the building writing mattresses, but no one survived. It was the worst hotel fire in history. But there wasn't any benefit to the listener, just awful detail after awful detail, And kind of the point about me and the show is that I'm all Then then her head slid off. Yuk yukieu. But I couldn't even begin it with this one. I guess you don't know what you're really squeamish about. To your squeamish about it. I've known a few people who've seen incomplete bodies in real life, and they all walked away with lasting emotional damage and I just not really built for that. But again, I don't know what you can live with until you have to. And now let's finish things up this week with a little bit of fun. Ready, This came from a local listener. I'm just calling Tom from Toronto, and he wanted to know if I had any idea how many people have died on the show so far. Well, I sat down and did the math, and it's pretty amazing. And if you're thinking, well, I was going to ask how many bodies you could fit into a Dodge caravan for reference, Well are they pre burial or post cremation? That would really change things up, But Nope. What I want you to tell me is your best guests and the closest answer wins something t shirts a set of steak knives. Who knows, and if you got that steak knick reference, he gets stickers too. Everybody gets stickers. So let me know how many people do you think have died on this show and I will let you know who wins in the next few weeks. Good luck everyone. So this mailbag kind of turned out to be a fun and you got to hear a little bit about an episode than never even happened. People will write into just see how I'm doing. So here we go for this week. In related news, my full time job is going away, so I am about to have a lot more time for content, and I encourage you to see Patreon for more as news develops. Now, the other side of that coin is, of course, it means my full time meal plan is also going to kind of got away. So if you would like to buy me a coffee to stave off the hunger pains. Please feel free to buy me a coffee dot com slash tunesday. Then I wouldn't normally ask, but it's going to be hard to record in a mobile studio when my whole family is living in it with me. And actually, on that note, my car is also going the way and I'm actually in the market for he could previously loved Dodge caravan. I am not joking. If you or someone you know has one for sale, let me know and I will road trip it back here. And if you've ever heard of a podcast meet and greet weirder than that, let me know. As always, this mail bag made references to a lot of weird episodes and post links in the description, and also remind you that all of our older episodes can be found wherever you found this one. And while you're there, you can leave us a review and tell your friends. And I want to shout out all those listeners who do as I always do, because you are quite literally the beating heart of the show and I know what that sounds like. And do you think I care? I don't, So if you care to support the ongoing production of the show, you can find us at Patreon dot com, slash funeral Kazoo, or again. You can just buy me a coffee like I said, And if you are curious to hear my take on things rattling around in your head, just reach out on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook as doomsday Podcaster, fire us an email to doomsday pod at gmail dot com and on the next mail bag who we're going to talk about my favorite ways to die by air, will revisit my earliest disaster memories, and we're presenting tales of the troop Acabra. We'll talk soon. Safety goggles off and thanks for listening. M M.