Speaker 1: You're listening to an airwave media podcast.
Speaker 2: That is not dead, which can eternal lie and with
Speaker 2: strange eons, even death may die. The literary work of
Speaker 2: Howard Phillips Lovecraft is dark and macob. It casts a
Speaker 2: long shadow in American literature, influencing such writers as Rod Serling,
Speaker 2: Stephen King, Bob Howard, Robert Block, and many others. In
Speaker 2: his stories, he wove a tapestry of mad alien gods
Speaker 2: and unspeakable horrors, and of the insignificance of man, and
Speaker 2: of a mountainous evil that sleeps in the ocean, worshiped
Speaker 2: by mad cults in dark places, known only as Cthulhu.
Speaker 3: It's actually quite unlike anything we've ever seen before.
Speaker 4: A giant very creature party.
Speaker 5: In Luckness, a twenty four a mile long bottomless lake
Speaker 5: in the Highlands of Scotland.
Speaker 3: It's a creature known as the Luckness Monster.
Speaker 4: Monster Tall special literary additional.
Speaker 2: Hello. I'm Blake Smith, the producer and co host of
Speaker 2: Monster Talk. Today, We're going to flex our leathery wings
Speaker 2: and fly off into some new territory. Traditionally Monster Talc
Speaker 2: I am my co hosts Ben Radford and doctor Karen
Speaker 2: Stolesno discuss monsters that are part of folklore and legend.
Speaker 2: But today we're going to talk about monsters created by
Speaker 2: writer H. P. Lovecraft. Lovecraft was not well known in
Speaker 2: his lifetime, but his influence grew strong, and in recent
Speaker 2: years he attained a great deal of posthumous fame. His
Speaker 2: work is cerebral and literate. His erudition found no stricture
Speaker 2: in the pulse where he was published, and to approach
Speaker 2: his tales without a dictionary would be foolhardy for most.
Speaker 2: Yet within those multi sellabular and archaic syllables lay tales
Speaker 2: of terror as visceral as those of any writer in
Speaker 2: American literature. Today on Monster Talk, we'll talk with two
Speaker 2: guests regarding Lovecraft's work. First, the well known Lovecraft scholar
Speaker 2: Robert M. Price, we'll talk with us about the writer's
Speaker 2: life and his works, and then biologist P. Z. Myers
Speaker 2: will talk with us about the biological inspiration for Lovecraft's
Speaker 2: most well known creator, Cuthulhu.
Speaker 3: Monstrutal.
Speaker 2: Tonight, we're interviewing Bob Price, a scholar of religion, a
Speaker 2: member of the Jesus Seminar, a teacher, a regular host
Speaker 2: of the Point of Inquiry podcast, and a noted scholar
Speaker 2: of HP. Lovecraft in his works, and so those are
Speaker 2: kind of what's the word there, They're different, different specialties
Speaker 2: that you have there. The Lovecraft stuff seems somewhat at
Speaker 2: odds with the religious studies maybe, But how did you
Speaker 2: become interested in the works of HP Lovecraft?
Speaker 4: Well, I was, I guess.
Speaker 5: This was back in about sixty six or sixty seven,
Speaker 5: and Lancer Books had just, I guess, done their second
Speaker 5: printing of the two Lovecraft collections, The Color Out of
Speaker 5: Space and the Done Which Horror, and I was in
Speaker 5: the midst of just bathing in all this great pulp
Speaker 5: revival in the paperback books, plus new stuff like Tolkien
Speaker 5: being offered, and I was reading Robert E. Howard and
Speaker 5: Doc Savage and Lynn Carter and you name it. And
Speaker 5: then a friend suggests that I would really like this,
Speaker 5: and so I did immediately, and I loved the poesque style,
Speaker 5: and the more the Cthulhu mythology business unfolded in the
Speaker 5: writings of Lovecraft and his buddies, the more intriguing it got.
Speaker 5: And so I was deeply into conservative Christianity at the time,
Speaker 5: and I was into theology, and eventually I got a
Speaker 5: doctorate in theology and another New Testament. Well, the same
Speaker 5: interests made this very interesting to me too, because here
Speaker 5: was Lovecraft fabricating a myth system and doing it in
Speaker 5: texts that required interpretation. So this is the perfect sort of.
Speaker 4: Hobby for me.
Speaker 5: And I've always been really equally interested in the writing
Speaker 5: itself and in the mythology of Lovecraft. So they've it's
Speaker 5: been a seamless thing. Actually with now of course I'm
Speaker 5: understanding all to be mythology and such, so it's even closer.
Speaker 4: But I think I always was in.
Speaker 5: Touch with the deeply mythological character of all that and
Speaker 5: another favorite interest of mine superhero comic books. That's raw
Speaker 5: mythology also, and I love all that stuff.
Speaker 2: I come from a very conservative religious background myself, and
Speaker 2: it's been an interesting transition into a more I guess
Speaker 2: their plight thing was just to say liberal with did
Speaker 2: you find that when you were reading Lovecrafts or even
Speaker 2: Robbery Howard and that sort of thing, did you feel
Speaker 2: like you were doing something a bit profane? Did you
Speaker 2: have to cover the book up if you were at school,
Speaker 2: or you know, the covers? Are I a lurid sometimes
Speaker 2: on those books?
Speaker 5: Well, I seem to remember feeling occasionally that there might
Speaker 5: be some incompatibility, but on the whole, I don't believe
Speaker 5: I did. But there was a time when I just
Speaker 5: felt like I needed to drop everything.
Speaker 4: Else away for a few years.
Speaker 5: But I was really into witnessing and the old thing
Speaker 5: and got into intervarsity Christian Fellowship when I was in college,
Speaker 5: and I was then instead of out and out fantasy writers,
Speaker 5: I was reading theologians and such and just love that.
Speaker 4: I'm glad I did.
Speaker 5: But once I decided I just didn't see the cogency
Speaker 5: of Orthodox religion anymore. I decided I would take a
Speaker 5: second look at these old things that had always charmed
Speaker 5: me and got back into them as well.
Speaker 1: So, Bob, who was HP Lovecraft? And how did a
Speaker 1: writer he's so little recognized by modern readers come to
Speaker 1: be so well respected by modern writers?
Speaker 5: Well, he was a proverbial pulp writer. He began just
Speaker 5: writing for himself. He had read a lot of eighteenth
Speaker 5: century literature because he lived in his grandfather's house, read
Speaker 5: the old books in the library, poetry and prose cover
Speaker 5: to cover, top to bottom. And though he never finished
Speaker 5: high school, he was self educated and deeply so, and
Speaker 5: he wrote for his own amusement, And when somebody persuaded
Speaker 5: him to submit a couple of stories to the new
Speaker 5: magazine Weird Tales, he did so with the letter to
Speaker 5: the editor saying, now, if you publish these, I don't
Speaker 5: want a single comma changed.
Speaker 4: Are you willing to do that?
Speaker 5: And so the editor kind of laughed, we're told and
Speaker 5: said sure, and I guess kept his promise, and then Lovecraft,
Speaker 5: for years thereafter would curse himself for compromising his esthetic
Speaker 5: standards to appeal to the audience of the pulps, which
Speaker 5: he graciously referred to as.
Speaker 4: Yaps and nit wits.
Speaker 5: So and yet he claimed he didn't want to commercialize,
Speaker 5: or alternatively, would lament that he couldn't, unlike some of
Speaker 5: his friends like August Derleth, who was a chameleon and
Speaker 5: could do either one well. He was very, very popular
Speaker 5: with these young readers in his time. He didn't have
Speaker 5: to wait for recognition there though he never made much
Speaker 5: money out of it. He couldn't get a book of
Speaker 5: his stories published during his lifetime, though he came close
Speaker 5: a couple of times, and then there have been of
Speaker 5: course since his death, and the preservation of his work
Speaker 5: in hardcover by a couple of his pals, August Derleth
Speaker 5: and Donald Wandreie, who found at Arkham House expressly for
Speaker 5: that purpose. He's attracted more and more of a cult.
Speaker 5: Though Edmund Wilson was already denouncing the Lovecraft cult in
Speaker 5: the forties, I guess it was. But it's just continued
Speaker 5: to grow. And thanks to the work, I would say,
Speaker 5: mainly of St. Joshi, whom I interviewed recently on our
Speaker 5: Point of Inquiry show, he has become recognized more and
Speaker 5: more in the literary mainstream.
Speaker 4: Whether that's a good thing or not, I don't know.
Speaker 4: I guess it is.
Speaker 5: But writers, as you say, have always realized this guy's
Speaker 5: pivotal importance and great gifts and have been influenced by him,
Speaker 5: even when they don't want to admit it, and though
Speaker 5: many do. And now you've got the critical mainstream taking
Speaker 5: a second look at him, and whole new audiences of
Speaker 5: young readers who come to him through role playing games
Speaker 5: and the like, and they know all about his mythology
Speaker 5: before they've ever even read one of his stories. And
Speaker 5: some people come to him through the ever increasing number
Speaker 5: of Lovecraft based movies, and there's lovecrafty and rock, and
Speaker 5: then there are plush Lovecraft monster toys of cuddly Cuthulhu
Speaker 5: and so on. So it's this flood of popular interest
Speaker 5: in Lovecraft that would have completely astounded him had he
Speaker 5: lived to see it.
Speaker 6: We talked to some about the people who were influenced
Speaker 6: by him. What about some of his predecessors, such as
Speaker 6: Edgar Allan Poe. Obviously Poe plays a lot a big
Speaker 6: role in Lovecrafty and fiction, but what are some of
Speaker 6: the other lesser known influences you see in his work?
Speaker 5: Well, he loved m R James, the greatest ghost story
Speaker 5: writer in the English language, and he's somewhat like him,
Speaker 5: though it's hard to see specific influence other than a
Speaker 5: few ideas. In particular, I don't think the mood or
Speaker 5: the style is very close to James. But Count Magnus,
Speaker 5: for instance, is a big influence on the call of Cthulhu,
Speaker 5: as is Lord Dunsane's house in was at a shop
Speaker 5: I forget in go By Street, and a lot of
Speaker 5: things figured in there. Lovecraft seems to have gotten a
Speaker 5: lot of his notion of the cosmic outside neess. This
Speaker 5: mystery impinging upon our own from Algernon Blackwood, and he
Speaker 5: said that the probably the greatest supernatural story was The
Speaker 5: Willows by.
Speaker 4: Blackwood, and he also liked the Wind to Go.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 5: Then he just thought the world of Arthur Mackin, who
Speaker 5: is I think possibly the biggest influence on him. Once
Speaker 5: you've read The White People, the Great God Pan, and
Speaker 5: one or two others by Macin, you've almost read The
Speaker 5: Dunwich Horror already, and so he's a major influence. Especially
Speaker 5: the idea of the Old Ones, a surviving banished race
Speaker 5: from elder to times. He got that, i think from Macin,
Speaker 5: though he interpreted it as a pantheon of unknown gods,
Speaker 5: and picked that up from Lord Dunsane, the Irish baron
Speaker 5: and fantasist. And in some ways Dunsaney and Poe have
Speaker 5: always been considered the chief influences on him, because his
Speaker 5: earliest work was very much in the classical, almost biblical
Speaker 5: style of Lord Dunsaney, though he came upon it independently,
Speaker 5: and he had already written The White Ship considered a
Speaker 5: Dunsanean tale before he encountered Dunsainte's work, but then went
Speaker 5: whole hog for a while in that vein but Poe
Speaker 5: really claimed him. He preferred to pos my god of fiction.
Speaker 5: But I would say Mackin was at least as much
Speaker 5: of an influence Edgar Rice Burroughs, oddly enough as a
Speaker 5: big influence on him, as well as John Tayne, the
Speaker 5: science fiction writer. And yet I find that, having gotten
Speaker 5: into these other authors, and of course come to appreciate
Speaker 5: them greatly, when I go back and read Lovecraft and
Speaker 5: see what he's done. He did successfully just what you
Speaker 5: always hear writers ought to do, to assimilate influences and
Speaker 5: make them into something new by kind of artistic alchemy.
Speaker 4: He a sure did that.
Speaker 6: So most of the people what mid late eighteen.
Speaker 5: Hundreds, Mackin and Blackwood, and I believe m R. James
Speaker 5: were contemporaries of his. Blackwood read The Rats in the
Speaker 5: Walls and said that it was good, but a little
Speaker 5: too grossly physical in its horror. And I don't know
Speaker 5: if Lovecraft ever knew that that he had commented on it.
Speaker 5: But most of these guys were late nineteenth early twentieth century,
Speaker 5: except for Poe obviously, but he saw Dunsaney do a
Speaker 5: reading in person.
Speaker 4: For instance.
Speaker 5: He's the only one he met. I believe out of
Speaker 5: this bunch, but they were pretty much contemporaries.
Speaker 2: Lovecraft, that was a remarkable letter writer and correspondent. Was
Speaker 2: it a conscious decision on his part to build that
Speaker 2: shared fictional reality that he and other writers could place
Speaker 2: their works in.
Speaker 5: He didn't initiate the idea as far as I know,
Speaker 5: But once his friends began to copy him and say, oh,
Speaker 5: I like that acronomic and so I've come up with
Speaker 5: my own book of ibond.
Speaker 4: Oh. He loved that, as you can tell from his letters.
Speaker 5: And they say, oh, yeah, by all means, in fact,
Speaker 5: I may refer to your thing. And if some like
Speaker 5: young Robert Bloch said, here's the story with my grimoire
Speaker 5: the Mysteries of the Worm, Lovecraft would say, well, that's good,
Speaker 5: but let's pep it up a little bit with a
Speaker 5: Latin title as the original about Dave a Arms mysterious,
Speaker 5: and he would really get involved in He Richard Sea
Speaker 5: writes the elt Down Shards. Oh, he loved that, And
Speaker 5: so he said about making up this law background story,
Speaker 5: little realizing that Seawright was working on his own in
Speaker 5: another story. He hadn't shown Lovecraft yet, And so we
Speaker 5: have a two completely different accountings of that. Well, he
Speaker 5: loved the game once somebody started playing it, and he
Speaker 5: liked the fact that it would grow up with all
Speaker 5: these citations, especially in so far as they were somewhat inconsistent,
Speaker 5: because that apes the character of real mythology. It's not
Speaker 5: all in these system So he just loved it. There
Speaker 5: are some of his fans that say this is a
Speaker 5: big mistake, like if I'm not mistaken, Will Murray and
Speaker 5: David Schultz and others who are great, great Lovecraft scholars
Speaker 5: think that this made Lovecraft make kind of a joke
Speaker 5: of it in some ways, and he probably should never
Speaker 5: have yielded to it. But the result was this irresistibly
Speaker 5: fascinating pseudo religion that many Lovecraft fans find this to
Speaker 5: be the favorite thing of their there's their favorite aspect
Speaker 5: of his work, the Cuthulhu mythos, so called, and I.
Speaker 1: Was going to move on to Cthula and what is
Speaker 1: there Cauli mythos.
Speaker 5: Well, it's August der Leff's pretty good attempt at coming
Speaker 5: up with a title for this. Lovecraft himself called it
Speaker 5: a tongue in cheek yog sethothary, as if it were
Speaker 5: a religion, and he said, well, Judaism and Christianity are
Speaker 5: no more valid than my own yog suthothary. And he
Speaker 5: he set up this uh, this system of myths, whereby
Speaker 5: there were ancient races unknown to most people, who of
Speaker 5: beings that had come to the earth from unimaginable distances
Speaker 5: of outer space or other dimensions. But it's the creation
Speaker 5: or the evolution of humanity, or in some stories, created
Speaker 5: human beings as a mistake or a joke, because he
Speaker 5: has someone saying at the Mountains of Madness and it
Speaker 5: was all science fiction basically. But he has the poor, hapless,
Speaker 5: ignorant humans in in certain.
Speaker 4: Esoteric, degraded cults.
Speaker 5: Doing the bidding of these ancient beings now shut away
Speaker 5: in caverns and so on, communicating by dreams. And these
Speaker 5: people are the dregs of society, are trying to do
Speaker 5: what they can to release their masters, to pillage the
Speaker 5: earth and so forth, or to drag it off into
Speaker 5: a different dimension, as it says in the Dunwich Horror,
Speaker 5: and so that they're these evil but really just sort
Speaker 5: of stupid and venial humans trying to end the world
Speaker 5: as we know it and restore the rule of the
Speaker 5: beings who are indifferent to humanity. And and the big
Speaker 5: horror of this is not just while there's King Kong
Speaker 5: throwing the subway cars around and swatting the biplanes off,
Speaker 5: the empire state building physical destruction. You almost don't see
Speaker 5: that happen in his stories. One or two cases you do.
Speaker 5: But the shocking humbling of the sense of human self importance.
Speaker 5: What you mean, there were millions of years ago intelligent
Speaker 5: cephala pods and ceqcumbers with wings who are vastly superior
Speaker 5: to our intelligence. Now we're the beasts, not them. And
Speaker 5: that's the really terrible, humbling insight that he communicates. Though
Speaker 5: this seems to be allegorical for Lovecraft's worldview. Of course
Speaker 5: he didn't believe there were monsters and such, but he said,
Speaker 5: the very indifference of the universe, this is the humbling
Speaker 5: and shocking truth that science tells us that people don't
Speaker 5: want to hear, so they retreat into religion and superstition.
Speaker 5: So it was a kind of a philosophy that he
Speaker 5: really did believe using the image the vehicle of science.
Speaker 5: It's fiction and the a kind of a hoax version
Speaker 5: of religion, as priest Craft and that's where the mythos
Speaker 5: comes in. It's gods and scriptures. But even in his
Speaker 5: own stories, it's only the duped fools who think so.
Speaker 5: So the really interesting combination of all these insights.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it seemed to me that the mythos itself embodied
Speaker 2: to kind of cosmic neilism. Yeah, yeah, does it's also
Speaker 2: informed by the science that was coming out at the time.
Speaker 2: Am I right? And remembering was he an amateur astronomer?
Speaker 5: Yeah, when he was a little kid, he was in
Speaker 5: the observatory and looking out at the heavens and even
Speaker 5: a hectographed i think a little Providence Journal of Astronomy.
Speaker 4: And sold it.
Speaker 5: The kid was a phenomenon and it just was absorbed
Speaker 5: in the vastness of the cosmos, and I'm sure that
Speaker 5: was a big influence on his whole outlook.
Speaker 6: Cathilla, mythos reminds me of something else. Do you see
Speaker 6: any parallels between Lovecraft and for example, l Ron Hubbard
Speaker 6: with cults and alien gods and intelligences.
Speaker 5: Well, from the little I know about the scientology mythology,
Speaker 5: it's more it comes out of more properly called pulp
Speaker 5: science fiction, with the space tyrant and all that stuff Lovecraft.
Speaker 5: That would be more like the aspect of Burrows that
Speaker 5: Lovecraft didn't care for. Scientology sounds like it's based on
Speaker 5: space opera, much like the Nation of Islam, with the
Speaker 5: mother plane ship up in the sky and the evil
Speaker 5: doctor yak Kube mutating specimens until he got to the
Speaker 5: Blue Eyed White Devils, just sort of Saturday afternoon matinee stuff.
Speaker 5: And as I understand it, Hubbard took a plausible technique
Speaker 5: of consciousness raising the dyetics thing, and then added this
Speaker 5: mythology to it to make it into scientology. And Lovecraft
Speaker 5: would never have taught a doctrine like that, or a
Speaker 5: method or anything. He thought people were generally all right
Speaker 5: as they were, and religion had a kind of an
Speaker 5: esthetic value into some degree of social control value. But
Speaker 5: he met Hubbard once, by the way, but as far
Speaker 5: as I know, his only comment was on his brilliant
Speaker 5: red hair. But I don't see a whole lot because
Speaker 5: I think it's Lovecraft did in his vision. His resulting
Speaker 5: mythology wasn't as trite.
Speaker 6: And I suppose also the Hubbard. Unlike Hubbard, Lovecraft didn't
Speaker 6: release set people to take it seriously.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was highly abused. When they did, he.
Speaker 6: Seemed as readers were smart enough to know this is
Speaker 6: just fiction.
Speaker 4: But sometimes they weren't.
Speaker 5: In fact, a collaborator of his, William Lumley, no relation
Speaker 5: to the great Brian Lumley today, he was in pall
Speaker 5: of Lovecraft. He collaborate with him. Sometimes he would sort
Speaker 5: of laughingly say in letters to other people, well, old
Speaker 5: Bill maintains that Smith and Howard Long and I are
Speaker 5: really unwitting mouthpieces for elder entities, and that Cthulhu et
Speaker 5: cept for really exist.
Speaker 4: And so it was already starting.
Speaker 3: Then.
Speaker 5: People would write to him and say where can I
Speaker 5: get a copy of an Acronomicon, And he would write
Speaker 5: in back say, I hate to tell you.
Speaker 4: This, but I made it up. There's no such thing.
Speaker 5: So it began immediately that people thought it must be real,
Speaker 5: and he had to try to disabuse them.
Speaker 2: I actually saw, I believe, in the seventies there was
Speaker 2: a black covered book that was called an acronomic on.
Speaker 2: I think it was a hoax of some sort. The
Speaker 2: other few of those, yeah, And I saw that before
Speaker 2: I ever read Lovecraft. And so when I first read Lovecraft,
Speaker 2: I thought that's all I've heard of this book before
Speaker 2: I got it a lot of order.
Speaker 5: So was it a big book looked kind of like
Speaker 5: a high school yearbook?
Speaker 2: No, this was actually the paperback and it was it
Speaker 2: was it was sort of the occult section of the bookstore.
Speaker 2: This was you know, this would have been in the
Speaker 2: probably the late seventies, and I really wasn't supposed to
Speaker 2: be in that section because they had the Satanic Bible
Speaker 2: and they had so over here with the cult stuff.
Speaker 2: Was a book called the Necronomicon, and it claimed to
Speaker 2: be you know, the writings of Abdullahlav read uh. But
Speaker 2: later on I had heard that that was actually a
Speaker 2: literary hoax of a sort. I mean, obviously it wasn't
Speaker 2: the real Necronomicon because, as you say, Lovecraft made it up.
Speaker 2: So I'm not going I'll look into that. See if
Speaker 2: I find the history of that book, that particular one.
Speaker 5: It's probably Simon's Necronomicon. This guy claimed to be a
Speaker 5: defrocked Eastern monk or something and called himself Simon and
Speaker 5: what he did. Basically it was published by the Schlanga
Speaker 5: Croft Barns. I think it was as a kind of
Speaker 5: a thing looked like a big high school yearbook, and
Speaker 5: then eventually Avon, who published the Satanic Bible, published a
Speaker 5: paperback edition of this that you still see and I'm
Speaker 5: pretty sure that's the one. And in it he claims
Speaker 5: this is the real necronomicon, but it is real ancient text,
Speaker 5: but it's part of some ancient Sumerian chants with a
Speaker 5: few mythos names thrown in, and it's it is a
Speaker 5: hoax though. And I one afternoon years ago, Lynn Carter,
Speaker 5: s t Joshi and I went to the Magical Child,
Speaker 5: a cult bookstore in the village, and Simon was lecturing
Speaker 5: in the back room and these kids were They're saying,
Speaker 5: can you use an acronomicon with your scrying crystal and
Speaker 5: see the old ones? And this guy was up there saying, well,
Speaker 5: it might work, but I don't know if I'd try it,
Speaker 5: And we were just fuming, and it was obvious this
Speaker 5: guy was just pulling show the Gourad's wool over their
Speaker 5: eyes and having a good time about it.
Speaker 6: But oh man, did you say the publisher called Shlung
Speaker 6: a craft barn.
Speaker 5: Yeah, maybe that's the most horrifying part of it.
Speaker 2: I'm sorry, I know I did the first I immediately
Speaker 2: thought and they make great porn as well.
Speaker 4: Yeah they should have. Yeah, they may also have, all
Speaker 4: I know.
Speaker 1: So who is this Cthulha character and why of all
Speaker 1: of Lovecraft's creations does he rank the fame that he has.
Speaker 5: Well, he's the star of this story, The Call of Cthulhu,
Speaker 5: which is one of the first to begin to move
Speaker 5: toward a system in that he uses together documents about
Speaker 5: this hitherto unknown cult of Cthulhu and eventually discovers a
Speaker 5: manuscript written by Norwegian sailor who happened to stumble upon Realier,
Speaker 5: the non Euclidean island in the Pacific, where Great Cthulhu
Speaker 5: is imprisoned. And by this time we know that Cthulhu
Speaker 5: is some sort of a space alien who ruled the
Speaker 5: world in the past. But he and his he was
Speaker 5: the great High Priest of the Old Ones, who might
Speaker 5: or might not have been like him, and Lovecraft describes
Speaker 5: him as having a roughly humanoid or ape like form,
Speaker 5: a kind of a colossal octopus head, rudimentary wings and claws,
Speaker 5: And he was the high Priest of the Old Ones,
Speaker 5: and they could only exist when the stars seen from
Speaker 5: the earth were in a seen and when they moved
Speaker 5: from that they would have to go into dormancy. But
Speaker 5: one day the day would come when they would be
Speaker 5: alive again on earth. And in the meantime they were served
Speaker 5: by these sort of idiot humans, but it was kept
Speaker 5: a great secret. You might find them in the Louisiana Bay.
Speaker 5: You you might find them among the greenland Eskimos or
Speaker 5: who knows where he threw a little theosophy into this
Speaker 5: un dying leaders of the cult existed in the mountains
Speaker 5: of Tibet and such. Well, this sailor finds that Relier
Speaker 5: has risen from the ocean and Great Cuthulhu emerges. The
Speaker 5: stars are right and the guy barely escapes with his life,
Speaker 5: and Cthulhu is this huge, lumbering, semi material titan that
Speaker 5: follows him through the water. But somehow must have gone
Speaker 5: back into dormancy without explanation because the world has not ended.
Speaker 5: But here's a case where he described the thing. So
Speaker 5: it's something he didn't with all of his monsters. And
Speaker 5: since August Lef coined the Cthulhu mythos and gave him
Speaker 5: the centrality, I guess people just liked him the best.
Speaker 4: There's like with some of these entities like Niro Latho Tep.
Speaker 5: He's described in radically different ways or as a thought.
Speaker 5: The nuclear chaos is never described and couldn't be, and
Speaker 5: Sath is pictured as a kind of by implication, a
Speaker 5: huge mountain of eyes and gaping mouths and tentacles and
Speaker 5: so on. So Cthulhu is the only one you could
Speaker 5: really easily make toys out of or do cartoons with,
Speaker 5: and that's been done. So I guess that's why. I
Speaker 5: don't really know, because there are about five or six
Speaker 5: that you could make the star of the show, but
Speaker 5: he's emerged as number one.
Speaker 6: It seems like in some ways he was kind of
Speaker 6: ahead of his times. For example, envisioning the extraterrestrials with
Speaker 6: amazing powers and stuff. It struck me. I don't know
Speaker 6: whether you would agree or not, but it struck me
Speaker 6: that without the horror aspect of it, it seems like
Speaker 6: some of the things. I might that some of the
Speaker 6: things that he writes about could have been written by
Speaker 6: a new ag or Ufo Boffs in the seventies in
Speaker 6: terms of, you know, visiting alien intelligences and gods looking
Speaker 6: over us.
Speaker 5: Well, some of those writers, like whatever the Powells and
Speaker 5: Begier or something like that, who wrote The Morning of
Speaker 5: the Magicians, big book in France translated into English a
Speaker 5: lovecraft with being a pioneer in this kind of thinking,
Speaker 5: and he did precede the Eric Vondanik and ancient astronauts thing. He's,
Speaker 5: of course, he wasn't promoting it as a genuine theory,
Speaker 5: but he did try to make it plausible and so
Speaker 5: that the ancient gods were really misunderstood aliens and so
Speaker 5: a lot of people. And that's not an absurd theory.
Speaker 5: I don't know how one would prove it, but it's
Speaker 5: it's not ridiculous. I find it even more amazing that
Speaker 5: in his phobia of of oh, non white, non western
Speaker 5: UH and to some degree even the female groups of
Speaker 5: factions of humanity, he was afraid that his UH, well
Speaker 5: to use these these terms lago centric, eurocentric, fallocentric, et cetera,
Speaker 5: the elite, the the not quite dead white males, that
Speaker 5: their cultural dem onion was about to be overthrown by
Speaker 5: the forces as he saw them, of barbarism, superstition, and
Speaker 5: irrationality stemming from Southwestern Europe, Africa, Asia and so on.
Speaker 5: And he if you just take the pajarative vocabulary away
Speaker 5: from it. It's very much what many people think has
Speaker 5: happened or is happening.
Speaker 4: And so, to some degree, his insidious cults of rat faced.
Speaker 5: Mongrel hordes and all that, especially the intermarried people like
Speaker 5: the ensmuth deep ones represented the non whites, and the
Speaker 5: terrible possibility of intermarrying.
Speaker 4: Between the horror groups. So he didn't like that.
Speaker 5: And so, but he did see just the kind of
Speaker 5: world cultural change coming about before a lot of people
Speaker 5: were talking about it. He didn't like it, but I
Speaker 5: think he saw it pretty clearly.
Speaker 2: I thought that it didn't. But he married a Jewish woman.
Speaker 2: But you know, it's kind of uh, not famous. I mean,
Speaker 2: he gets a lot of negative press for his anti
Speaker 2: jew attitudes. I haven't actually been able to I've heard
Speaker 2: he's written some pretty rude stuff along those lines, but
Speaker 2: you know, except for like the Horror of Red Hook,
Speaker 2: you know, some of that stuff pretty I don't know
Speaker 2: if it was edited down or it just he seems
Speaker 2: kind of vague about what it is he hates or
Speaker 2: doesn't like. I was very mixed about that. In fact,
Speaker 2: I actually ran into Julia Schwartz. I don't know if
Speaker 2: you know Julia Schwartz, but he Julius.
Speaker 4: Yeah, he had a pleasure of meeting him once.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was he used to be. He was a
Speaker 2: Lovecrest agent for at least a while. And I asked
Speaker 2: him about it because he was like the only person
Speaker 2: I ever got to meet that actually knew Lovecraft and uh.
Speaker 2: And he said that, you know that all the time
Speaker 2: they'd worked together, that he'd heard about that anti Semitic
Speaker 2: uh sort of attitude, but he said Lovecraft never showed
Speaker 2: it to him. And as far as he knew that
Speaker 2: the woman he had married was Jewish. So that's right,
Speaker 2: it's very very de Man's an enigmatic to me.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think I don't want to defend him. He
Speaker 5: was definite racist, But you're right. I mean, I don't
Speaker 5: want this to sound like, oh some of my best
Speaker 5: friends of belonging to in inferior racist right, right, But
Speaker 5: in fact, as you say, his wife is Jewish. Sam
Speaker 5: loved who admired and loved and was a good friend.
Speaker 5: He was a Jew and love him. And years after
Speaker 5: Lovecraft's death, I think, in as late as the seventies,
Speaker 5: heard about this side of Lovecraft and was just flabbergas
Speaker 5: and said the no good hypocritical so b, which is unfortunate,
Speaker 5: but Lovecraft asked for it by the things he wrote.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't anyway want to be an apologist for
Speaker 2: the man. I like his work separate from that aspect
Speaker 2: of his life. I just I thought it was more
Speaker 2: confusing and surprising than an excuse, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: It's just yeah, really really, you know, not exactly like
Speaker 2: the peopleple who you know who were secretly gay and
Speaker 2: then work really hard to stop gage from having rights.
Speaker 2: But something like that to me, to be vocally anti
Speaker 2: Semitic and write anti semitically and the yet mary and
Speaker 2: work with Jews seems really well, it's just it's odd.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, I guess it just means that it was
Speaker 5: just bad theorizing. Like I know a guy who's a
Speaker 5: New Testament scholar and didn't a scholar of Buddhism and
Speaker 5: just a compassionate, intelligent person, but he's.
Speaker 4: Also kind of a Holocaust revisionist.
Speaker 5: I'm not a denier exactly, but it's kind of startling
Speaker 5: to suddenly hear that and then you just think, well,
Speaker 5: at least it doesn't seem to permeate the rest of them,
Speaker 5: where it's like finding out Heidegger was a Nazi. He didn't,
Speaker 5: as far as I know, it didn't remain one when
Speaker 5: he was writing his famous philosophy, and I don't see
Speaker 5: how it taints the philosophy. Or Go Garden, one of
Speaker 5: big dialectical theologians, another Nazi. There's a few of those
Speaker 5: guys Islamic specialists, biblical scholars who were zig Hiling.
Speaker 4: You know, maybe they're in hell.
Speaker 5: Now, but I don't see how it spoils what they wrote,
Speaker 5: since they didn't actually write about that crap. I'd say
Speaker 5: the same with Lovecraft. He just, unfortunately had these stupid
Speaker 5: ideas on some things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the racism especially, it seems it's intellectual laziness. In
Speaker 2: my mind, is what the basis of it is, you know,
Speaker 2: using race as an excuse for whatever you're concerned with.
Speaker 2: But it seems, you know that it's hard to get
Speaker 2: around it from that era. It's a lot of stuff.
Speaker 2: But I do like his writing, you know, whereas when
Speaker 2: we're talking about fiction. But let me get get back
Speaker 2: to some of the deeper questions. Here's one for you, Bob.
Speaker 2: You're you're a famous person for your atheism, and you're
Speaker 2: also a well known Lovecraft scholar and St. Joshi is
Speaker 2: famous for his Lovecraft scholarship, but it is also a
Speaker 2: well known atheist, and you're kind of like bookends that way.
Speaker 2: Is this a coincidence or does Lovecraft scholarship ten ones
Speaker 2: toward disbelief.
Speaker 5: Well, I think it's part of a larger picture where
Speaker 5: though I couldn't prove this, I suspect that a huge
Speaker 5: majority of fantasy and science fiction and horror buffs are
Speaker 5: atheists or agnostics, as Lovecraft himself said that the idea
Speaker 5: of the fantastic is especially powerful since they don't believe
Speaker 5: in it, and it would require a big imaginative suspension
Speaker 5: of disbelief, and that's what they want to do when
Speaker 5: they're reading fiction. Also, though, I think that the natural
Speaker 5: hunger people have for transcendence of the mundane either comes
Speaker 5: to them through religion or through what they know to
Speaker 5: be fantasy. Somebody once asked Tolkien why he wrote so
Speaker 5: called escapist fiction, and he said, well, I don't see
Speaker 5: why we should require the prisoner to think of nothing
Speaker 5: but as four walls all day, and so, you know,
Speaker 5: you do need a horizon of fantasy and that's what
Speaker 5: all meaning is. In my opinion, we have larger brains
Speaker 5: than the animals. They have an instinctive environment that they
Speaker 5: inherit in many ways. We have to create one a
Speaker 5: cognitive atmosphere and habitat, and depending on what word you
Speaker 5: want to use, that is what leads us to create culture, mythology,
Speaker 5: and symbolism, and all of which give meaning, and two
Speaker 5: weave stories which we then take as models to live by.
Speaker 5: And so I think meaning is fiction. Fiction is meaning.
Speaker 5: I like Jung when he says that that hardwired into
Speaker 5: the brain are certain images that are presented to the
Speaker 5: consciousness in the form of religious symbols, magical symbols, fairy tales, myths, mandalas,
Speaker 5: and so on. There may not be any supernatural thing
Speaker 5: to correspond to it. I don't think there is, but
Speaker 5: we do need to connect with these fantastic archetypes of
Speaker 5: the unconscious to be able to flourish as individuals. And
Speaker 5: I think atheists find this through fantasy or fiction. Other
Speaker 5: people find it through religion, some find it through both.
Speaker 5: So I think that's the larger connection. I asked st
Speaker 5: the other day if he was influenced much by Lovecraft,
Speaker 5: toward atheism. But he said, now he had never really
Speaker 5: been a believer. He was not raised with any religion,
Speaker 5: where I was just the opposite. But my problem was
Speaker 5: I just came through critical study of a history and
Speaker 5: texts of religions to believe that there was not a
Speaker 5: credible case for these miraculous things having happened, and that
Speaker 5: probably God was a human creation, albeit a noble one.
Speaker 5: So I'm not like an anti religionist like a lot
Speaker 5: of my atheist buddies. I love religion, I just don't
Speaker 5: believe that it's true in a factual sense.
Speaker 1: And I was going to ask you what were Lovecraft's
Speaker 1: views on religion.
Speaker 5: Well, he thought it hung on because people needed assurance
Speaker 5: and they felt properly threatened by meaninglessness in an empty cosmos,
Speaker 5: so they'd rather not think that it was empty. And
Speaker 5: it is helpful for social control, and depending on the
Speaker 5: kind of religion you're in, it does have aesthetic satisfactions.
Speaker 5: And so he didn't think that it would be better
Speaker 5: if there were no religion. But he thought intelligent, thoughtful,
Speaker 5: thoughtful people would rise beyond the need, and that he had.
Speaker 6: Bob, I was trying to think of where the first place.
Speaker 6: I actually remember seeing a clear film reference to Lovecraft,
Speaker 6: and I think it was probably an Evil Dead with
Speaker 6: the book and everything. What are some of your favorite
Speaker 6: film references to his work.
Speaker 5: I like the sort of oblique tip of the hat
Speaker 5: in the Ninth Gate, with this, this Grimoire, the Dello Melanicon,
Speaker 5: the Black Book who Are written by Satan himself. That
Speaker 5: that's kind of lovecrafting, and with that beating to death
Speaker 5: of familiar names and such. I like the carbon No
Speaker 5: or the oh well that too, Yeah, and I think
Speaker 5: that's great and very lovecraft.
Speaker 2: How were you going with the Mouth of Madness?
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's the one.
Speaker 5: I was trying to think of both of them, one
Speaker 5: explicitly one implicitly Lovecraft. Of course, the thing is based
Speaker 5: on the Campbell's story, but many think that was based
Speaker 5: on Lovecrafts at the Mountains of Madness anyhow, But it's
Speaker 5: certainly the same sort of stuff.
Speaker 4: I like that a lot. I have a great Oh.
Speaker 5: I think this movie done by so called amateurs a
Speaker 5: few years ago called Cthulhu, based on the Shadow over Ensmouth,
Speaker 5: is very very good. I have a fondness for these
Speaker 5: old like the Dunwich Horror and Die Monster Died and
Speaker 5: the Haunted Palace. They're great cheesy moments in all of those,
Speaker 5: mister Ward, have you ever heard of the Necronomicon? And
Speaker 5: they're actually more love Crafty than the original story, so
Speaker 5: I got a huge kick out of those. There are
Speaker 5: others like The Resurrected and a serious attempt to do
Speaker 5: Charles dexter Ward in.
Speaker 4: The modern world. I thought that was.
Speaker 5: Not very interesting. Or the Curse based on the color
Speaker 5: out of Space. I didn't care much for that either.
Speaker 5: Or this recent one of the Dunwich Horror with Jeffrey
Speaker 5: Combs as Wilbur Wadeley. I thought that was awful, though
Speaker 5: not nearly as bad as Beyond the Dunewich Horror. This
Speaker 5: sickeningly terrible amateur work we screened up at the Lovecraft
Speaker 5: Film Festival.
Speaker 4: So I'm kind of piggy.
Speaker 5: The more I see of Lovecraft related movies, the more
Speaker 5: I am no longer eager to have a good one,
Speaker 5: though I think there is still a chance. Del Toro
Speaker 5: says he wants to make At the Mountains of Madness,
Speaker 5: and if he ever gets around to it, that will
Speaker 5: be a great Lovecraft movie. But having seen all these things,
Speaker 5: I kind of feel like, let me just read the
Speaker 5: original stories. What the heck, let's keep up the attempts.
Speaker 5: I hope somebody does make a real good one.
Speaker 3: Well.
Speaker 2: I tried to do, you know, just for the personal
Speaker 2: writing exercise, to try to do a screenplay of The
Speaker 2: Whisper in the Darkness. And it's hard because when you
Speaker 2: take a story apart, especially Lovecraft's work, it seems that
Speaker 2: sometimes the story in your mind after having read it,
Speaker 2: flows much more smoothly than the actual words on the page,
Speaker 2: especially that one, I mean, similar to the action is
Speaker 2: actually happening in letters already in the past. It's almost like,
Speaker 2: you know, Kafka, It's like the metamorphosis, I mean, where
Speaker 2: the action has already happened. You know, everything's already taking place,
Speaker 2: and you're just left with the horror, you know, which
Speaker 2: doesn't really work on screen very well.
Speaker 5: Almost everything is off stage, Like you say, the letters,
Speaker 5: what are you gonna do with that? But also when
Speaker 5: Will marthe is in the house and he wakes up
Speaker 5: and hears these choices and realizes, I got to get
Speaker 5: the hell out of here. Even there, you don't see
Speaker 5: what's happening, and of course if you did, it would
Speaker 5: ruin it, so there's not that much to see.
Speaker 4: And the biggest sequence would be this.
Speaker 5: Guy driving through the hills of Vermont, which would look nice,
Speaker 5: but you couldn't even do that for very long. And yeah,
Speaker 5: it's very tough, so they always have to add in
Speaker 5: the things Lovecraft carefully omitted, like characterization and action, so
Speaker 5: what he got left that is tough.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's been tough for me as a fan. You know,
Speaker 2: I don't want to be a snob about the movies,
Speaker 2: but really so the movies that seem to work best
Speaker 2: for me are like you say, The Ninth and I
Speaker 2: thought did a very nice job, and I love the thing,
Speaker 2: these movies that are influenced by, but not necessarily directly
Speaker 2: derived from, Yeah, Lovecraft's work.
Speaker 5: So Lovecraft's he never quite got away from the idea
Speaker 5: of prose poetry, which he learned from Dunsaney, and even
Speaker 5: his scientifically technical prose works in like The Mountains of
Speaker 5: Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, even they're artfully
Speaker 5: crafted in such a way that so much depends on
Speaker 5: the narration, not the story, that the whole experience is
Speaker 5: almost more like reading poetry than fiction, and that good
Speaker 5: luck making a movie. Out of a poem. Look at
Speaker 5: the horrible attempt of making the raven home.
Speaker 2: You know, you know, I thought Night Gallery did a
Speaker 2: few nice pieces. I don't know if you've seen those.
Speaker 5: I have, but I don't remember them well enough anymore
Speaker 5: to say.
Speaker 2: They did cool air and they did the Pigman's model,
Speaker 2: and you know, for the time, I think they did
Speaker 2: a good job.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I do remember those being pretty good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anyway, Famous game designer Sandy Peterson designed a very
Speaker 2: influential role playing game called col Cuthulu, which is how
Speaker 2: most of the people I know actually became introduced to
Speaker 2: Lovecraft's work. Have you actually played those games or have
Speaker 2: you have you seen that game or looked into it
Speaker 2: at all?
Speaker 4: I played it once or twice.
Speaker 5: I know I played it once because my wife and
Speaker 5: I got together with Chris Henderson, the great detective mystery writer,
Speaker 5: and Gayan Wilson, the cartoonist and played a game of it,
Speaker 5: which Gayan then reported on in the Twilight Zone magazine,
Speaker 5: and thereafter people would have some people thought I must
Speaker 5: be great aficionado of this game.
Speaker 4: I tried. I did that time. I just do not
Speaker 4: care for that kind of thing.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, all honor to those who like it,
Speaker 5: but I just would rather if I'm going to be
Speaker 5: plotting stuff out of it, or rather just write it
Speaker 5: down as a story. So you're right, you know, I
Speaker 5: owe a great deal to this though, because I only
Speaker 5: did all those Chaossium anthologies because I believe it was
Speaker 5: the lake Keith Herbert came up with the idea that
Speaker 5: they had all these minions of Lovecraft gamers that wanted
Speaker 5: to know where all this stuff came from, and a
Speaker 5: lot of the fiction wasn't even in print anymore, and
Speaker 5: so we did these thematic anthologies that you want to
Speaker 5: know who yagzethav is? Okay, here's the documentation. You can
Speaker 5: study the concept from the stories that influenced it to
Speaker 5: the one's Lovecraft has it in and the ones others
Speaker 5: have done. And so it helped bring some of the
Speaker 5: gamers into the fold, and then some of them began
Speaker 5: to get into the literary side of it and dump
Speaker 5: the gaming.
Speaker 4: Interesting how it evolved.
Speaker 1: Well, Bob, he's a final question that we like to
Speaker 1: ask all of our guests. What's your favorite monster?
Speaker 4: That's tough.
Speaker 5: I guess I would probably say the Frankenstein monster. All right,
Speaker 5: A particular reason why I always striking in appearance and
Speaker 5: as a character, terrifying and sympathetic, monstrous and childlike, almost
Speaker 5: a christ figure. I love all these old movies he's in,
Speaker 5: though I love all the universal monsters, but I guess
Speaker 5: he's really the archetypal one.
Speaker 2: The alien god Cthulhu is depicted as a cephalopod head
Speaker 2: set a top of ponderous humanoid body, replete with enormous wings. Implausible,
Speaker 2: but in the context of Lovecraft's fiction, it's alien weirdness
Speaker 2: is horrifically evocative. We now talk to biologists PS Myers
Speaker 2: about the biology of actual cephalopods, and they're weird, alien
Speaker 2: but real bodies. After all, it wouldn't be monster talk
Speaker 2: if we didn't sprinkle some science on our big bowl
Speaker 2: of horror.
Speaker 3: More monsterutal.
Speaker 2: So your PS Myers, and you're famous for your blog
Speaker 2: for angula. You're famous for your atheism, but I understand
Speaker 2: that you also are an evolutionary biologist and you specialize
Speaker 2: in octopuses.
Speaker 3: Not exactly. I'm yeah, I'm interested in evolution and development.
Speaker 3: Most of my work is actually gone accorded. I work
Speaker 3: on zebrafish, but theopods are especially interesting. If that's well studied,
Speaker 3: because they represent such a radically different body plan from
Speaker 3: what we're familiar with. Yeah, so there's been this long
Speaker 3: term fascination with them.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. I watch a lot of science fiction movies,
Speaker 2: and I think for expediency, people tend to create monsters
Speaker 2: that are anthropic. It's easier to put a guy in
Speaker 2: a suit if the suit looks something like a human.
Speaker 3: Bothy foreheads and things like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the body type of what's the right word here,
Speaker 2: I'm not sure what to call them?
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: So there's octopus, there's squid, there's cuttlefish. They're all cephalopods.
Speaker 2: So if you're talking about them as a group, do
Speaker 2: you say cephal pods, cephalopodia?
Speaker 3: What do you what's the right way to say that,
Speaker 3: you know, if you're podia, if you're just we're very oh,
Speaker 3: well dog, I prefer pods.
Speaker 2: But we can say cephalopods. But I want our listeners
Speaker 2: to know that we we we understand cephal is the
Speaker 2: right word. So that's cool.
Speaker 1: So, PZ, How did a person who has an interest
Speaker 1: in aquatic creatures end up in Minnesota?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'm about as far from the oceans as you
Speaker 3: can possibly be but no, it's it's simple academic realities
Speaker 3: that there's there are a limited number of jobs out
Speaker 3: there for people of my persuasion. You know, weird development
Speaker 3: valages and see take them away, you can get them.
Speaker 3: And I happen to be at a very nice school,
Speaker 3: a very good school which has got a very strong
Speaker 3: student body in the kind of place they wanted to work.
Speaker 3: So even though far from the oceans, the student party
Speaker 3: makes it worthwhile.
Speaker 7: I understand you've got to go where the jobs are. Fortunately,
Speaker 7: languages everywhere.
Speaker 3: For me, well, you know, the animal I work on
Speaker 3: in the lab is the zebra fish, which you can
Speaker 3: raise in the tank anywhere, so you know, that's very
Speaker 3: im portable. And then I get to travel a lot
Speaker 3: and I get to see these stuff with thought.
Speaker 2: Did you pick zebra fish for any particular reason?
Speaker 3: I like, yeah, I did my thesis on them. This
Speaker 3: was I picked them way back in the early nineteen
Speaker 3: eighties when they were just starting to take off as
Speaker 3: an experimental animal. I was in a lab the University
Speaker 3: of Oregon which was doing research on them, and the
Speaker 3: main appeal was I'm interested in the development of the
Speaker 3: nervous system. How do you make a nervous system function
Speaker 3: all this kind of cool stuff, and we started looking
Speaker 3: for organisms that have very simple nervous systems because simple
Speaker 3: is easier. And then we realized, hey, you know, if
Speaker 3: you look at really young animals, younger you get, the
Speaker 3: smaller the nervous system is, and the more and more
Speaker 3: madule it becomes. And vibrafish just happened to develop really
Speaker 3: really rapidly, and the transparency can see right into the
Speaker 3: skull and all kinds of cool stuff like that, so
Speaker 3: it made it very easy to study the nervous system.
Speaker 2: Would you call them the fruit fly of the yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the fruit fly of the freshwater Aquarium'm sure? Yeah?
Speaker 2: So what are you doing with them? I mean, this
Speaker 2: is way off topic from uh from Cuthil, But oh
Speaker 2: well maybe not some.
Speaker 3: Topic because kind of work I do right now is
Speaker 3: try to genesis. I make monsters in the lab using
Speaker 3: various agents.
Speaker 2: Oh cool, Yeah, that's what we have. Recent guests that
Speaker 2: did the same thing with chickens.
Speaker 3: Oh and what did they use?
Speaker 2: You mean, what did they use to make the monsters?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: You know, he just said agents. He didn't say what
Speaker 2: he was doing. He said that there were different things.
Speaker 7: They were doing, but it was classified.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's it's all top secrets, okay, mustard and secret
Speaker 2: herbs and spices. That is what I use in my chickens.
Speaker 3: Oh so that's that's where that new KFC sandwich came from.
Speaker 2: Yeah that's a monster. Yeah, all right, So let's talk
Speaker 2: about Cuthulla for just a moment. So in in HP
Speaker 2: Leftcraft's work, he's got this giant creature that essentially has
Speaker 2: an octopus for a head. It has somewhat anthropic body
Speaker 2: with wings. It's not really clear if if I guess
Speaker 2: it flies through space, I'm not sure. But it's really big,
Speaker 2: so big that he describes it as a mountain walk
Speaker 2: or stumbled. That's how big it is. Huge, huge, Okay,
Speaker 2: but in real life, you know, sea creatures don't get
Speaker 2: as big as that. But but octopus and squid do
Speaker 2: get pretty large. How big are these How big are
Speaker 2: they getting to these days?
Speaker 3: Oh gosh, I'm sure to remember some of the numbers
Speaker 3: up here. The giant octopus I can easily get up
Speaker 3: to you know, six eight foot span of tentacles, and
Speaker 3: so you find those quite common. So they're pretty good size.
Speaker 3: They can they can wrestle with a person. Giants could
Speaker 3: of course even bigger many meters long. But unfortunately, contrary
Speaker 3: to most of the their reputation, they're pretty placid animals.
Speaker 3: They're deep sea creatures. They tend to live in environments
Speaker 3: that aren't rich in resources, and so they tend to
Speaker 3: be kind of sluggish and soft and gooey tasty for
Speaker 3: a sperm oil, I'm sure, but now they're they're not
Speaker 3: quite the monsters they're made out to be.
Speaker 1: And I hear that cephalopods are the most intelligent octopi
Speaker 1: octopuses octopi what's the plural.
Speaker 3: To beginning of octopuses octopuses?
Speaker 1: I hear that they're the most intelligent of all invertebrates.
Speaker 1: So how smart are these animals? Because I've seen experiments
Speaker 1: where their opened jars to get to food.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, they can't screw driers. They can do
Speaker 3: they can remember things, you know, they will cash things
Speaker 3: around their tanks and remember where they are. They can
Speaker 3: pass very various kinds of memory tests. They recognize people,
Speaker 3: and they will respond to people and the tank. They're
Speaker 3: escape arns that get all kinds of talents. They do
Speaker 3: some spectacularly clever things. And then the surprising thing is
Speaker 3: that their brain is very tiny, not less. I don't
Speaker 3: understand yet.
Speaker 7: Is there a relationship between the size and their intelligence
Speaker 7: at all?
Speaker 3: Well, what do you mean a relationship. It's like with vertebrates,
Speaker 3: there doesn't seem to be much of a relationship. You
Speaker 3: can look at a gray whale or you can look
Speaker 3: at a human being. A gray wheel has a brain
Speaker 3: that's two or three times larger than ours. But I
Speaker 3: don't think they're as smart as we are, unless it's
Speaker 3: just that they're keeping quiet. Uh yeah, but that there's
Speaker 3: a really poor correlation there, and in particularly when you
Speaker 3: look at something like an octopus. Their brain is a
Speaker 3: small ganglion. It's basically wrapped around the esophagus, and when
Speaker 3: you look at it, it's got a relatively small number
Speaker 3: of neurons, you know, compared to ours, but you still
Speaker 3: a reasonable number. So it seems like they're doing a
Speaker 3: lot with very little impressive stuff.
Speaker 2: Wow, their brains wrapped around their esophagus.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah. Most invertebrates have a ventral nerve cord. You know,
Speaker 3: we have a dorsal nerves spinal cord that goes up
Speaker 3: and down our back. Their nervous system tends to run
Speaker 3: down the ventral side right there where the esophagus is
Speaker 3: also located, and the primary gangling is actually wrapped around,
Speaker 3: which is it's just kind of neat too. When they eat,
Speaker 3: you know, they when they chop a big chunk of
Speaker 3: something and pass it through their throat, it's actually compressing
Speaker 3: their brain a bit.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, Yeah, I mean it's not that surprising. I mean,
Speaker 2: I think part of my brains in my stomach and
Speaker 2: parts of my pants based on distributed brains.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it does it affect them to eat?
Speaker 3: Then?
Speaker 7: Does it affect thing right now?
Speaker 3: You think it would? You know, if it's you know,
Speaker 3: if you do something to put pressure on the brain,
Speaker 3: you can get responses. You know, they've kind of cognitive
Speaker 3: responses and visual hallucinations and so forth. So you know,
Speaker 3: I always imagine when when an octopus is eating, it's
Speaker 3: seeing stars. There's things flash by the throat. You don't know.
Speaker 2: They also have spectacular eyes too, don't they.
Speaker 3: They have very good eyes. Yeah, large eyes. They are
Speaker 3: very visual sorts of animals, and a lot of ways
Speaker 3: the eyes are better than ours. They're not inside out
Speaker 3: my cars are, for instance.
Speaker 2: So do they see the same way we do or
Speaker 2: is it somewhat different.
Speaker 3: It's somewhat different. I mean, the general plan of the
Speaker 3: eyeball is very similar, and they've got collections and photos
Speaker 3: of your cells just like we do. They have a retina.
Speaker 3: They have a distributed nerve net that's leaving the eyeball
Speaker 3: at the back, so there's no single optic nerve. The
Speaker 3: photo receptors are in the front instead of the back
Speaker 3: that they are in US visual processing. They've got gangling
Speaker 3: the handle a lot of the brain power of figuring
Speaker 3: out what the visual world is saying. That's separate from
Speaker 3: the subosophage gangling for instance. So yeah, they're fairly sophisticated
Speaker 3: with their eyes.
Speaker 2: A lot of them change colors. Is it safe to
Speaker 2: assume they can also see color?
Speaker 3: Yes, they can. So they've got lots of other photo receptors.
Speaker 3: They're very good color vision. Well, you know, I should
Speaker 3: say if a good color vision for them. The often
Speaker 3: which you find is color vision in the quantic animals
Speaker 3: is tuned for the environment because you know, the water
Speaker 3: filters light in particular ways. You find it's a different
Speaker 3: distribution of photo receptors than you would in US.
Speaker 2: Do they see in the same spectrum as we do.
Speaker 2: Or is it shifted or do you.
Speaker 3: Know, I'm not sure. It's probably shifted a little bit,
Speaker 3: but not much. That that four hundred eight hundred animeter
Speaker 3: range that we use is pretty universal.
Speaker 2: Now, did they start off in the water from an
Speaker 2: evolutionary perspective or oh.
Speaker 3: Yes, yeah, just like we did. Yeah what Yeah, all
Speaker 3: animals started out, you know, their their distant ancestors all
Speaker 3: evolved in the ocean many hundreds of millions of years ago.
Speaker 3: So yeah, they arose from creatures that were probably more
Speaker 3: slug like most of what we regard as unique to
Speaker 3: the cephal apros and all that that big rough of
Speaker 3: tentacles and so forth, all is a modified foot. But
Speaker 3: you have to kind of imagine a slug and just
Speaker 3: the base of that slug gets expanded and branches into
Speaker 3: tentacles and and that becomes the tentacle headed the end
Speaker 3: of the animal. And then that big head did you
Speaker 3: see back there, that's actually not that's actually not a head.
Speaker 3: That's that's a big bag of guts. That's what it's
Speaker 3: abdomen and some testines and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker 3: We're looking.
Speaker 7: Wow, the creationists don't want to hear that.
Speaker 3: Christians don't want.
Speaker 2: I don't think I want to do.
Speaker 3: Well. Have you ever cleaned them? I mean if you
Speaker 3: work with squider octopus for dinner sometimes and you get
Speaker 3: to clean them. Uh that that big head part, the
Speaker 3: mantle part is is basically a bag of guts and
Speaker 3: you just have to skip everything out of there total.
Speaker 2: Well, so do you do you eat the what is
Speaker 2: that called the mantles?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: I know that, I think as the head of the
Speaker 2: square is called. I think it's called the mantle. But uh, yeah,
Speaker 2: do you you eat that part too?
Speaker 3: Is?
Speaker 2: I thought it was just the legs we were eating.
Speaker 3: You know, it's rings And what that is is the mantle,
Speaker 3: which is a hollow tube which has been sliced up
Speaker 3: into Okay, do you wait them?
Speaker 2: Do I eat?
Speaker 3: I sure? I love them delicious.
Speaker 2: They're great breaded with salt and pepper. I think that's
Speaker 2: a deep fried. But we fry everything in the South.
Speaker 2: You know, they they sell fried pickles down here, and
Speaker 2: they sell everythings fried, So yeah, I know, sweet tea
Speaker 2: and fried pickles. What's the relationship between the squid, the
Speaker 2: octopus and the cuttlefish? Is one of them more like
Speaker 2: a recent development than the others or they just kind
Speaker 2: of brent, I mean, what what drove those evolutionary changes?
Speaker 2: Do you think?
Speaker 3: Oh, well, they have different lifestyles for what I mean
Speaker 3: an octopus from most octopus are pentic animals that think
Speaker 3: they live at the bottom. They so they clean to
Speaker 3: the shores. They live in the in the bottom of
Speaker 3: the rocks and the weeds and things like that. Squid
Speaker 3: tend to be deep water apologic and they're they're specialized
Speaker 3: for something. There are variations. There's some some squid that
Speaker 3: that hover down in the bottom and digging the sand
Speaker 3: for food. But yeah, basically there was a big split
Speaker 3: many hundreds of millions of years ago, largely into the
Speaker 3: eight armed octopuses and the ten armed squid. The ten
Speaker 3: arm condition is primitive and so octopus are derived there.
Speaker 3: They're the specialized form of ROAs later, so.
Speaker 2: Do the do the really large squid and giant octopuses
Speaker 2: do they use ink?
Speaker 3: Yes, it's a very common trait that they have.
Speaker 2: I understand that some versions. I guess even one of
Speaker 2: the most toxic animals in the world is actually an octopus.
Speaker 2: I think it's the blue ring.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but their skin contains phrase toxins and particular neurotoxin.
Speaker 3: That's why they're so lethal to go. They go right
Speaker 3: to your nervous system and fry things.
Speaker 2: So is that but is that normal for octopus or
Speaker 2: is that just specialized for that one species.
Speaker 3: It's fairly common manan Veribu's actually lots of them prediciss
Speaker 3: you know, for instance, to true to toxin, which is
Speaker 3: a common nerve poison that they make. It's rare for
Speaker 3: them to make it in such large volumes that the
Speaker 3: animal itself is entirely toxic. There are a number of
Speaker 3: sopple pods though, that secrete quantities of these poisons right
Speaker 3: around the beak, so they bite you. It can be
Speaker 3: quite painful. It can actually poison you that way. Many
Speaker 3: of them just trust in the fact that there's all
Speaker 3: kinds of filthy bacteria you're working there, and they can
Speaker 3: essentially do sepsis and their targets by biting into them.
Speaker 7: Yeah, we have those in Australia.
Speaker 1: I've seen them on the beach along with hypodermic needles
Speaker 1: and condoms.
Speaker 2: I had so that they have a drug problem.
Speaker 1: I've seen them on the sands and blue bottles and
Speaker 1: things so well.
Speaker 2: At least they're using safe sex. That's the important. Australias
Speaker 2: has like a dangerous place. I don't I'm not so
Speaker 2: sure I want.
Speaker 3: To go there.
Speaker 1: It's like your animals scam as well, so do you they?
Speaker 2: Well, okay, we'll talk about that later.
Speaker 1: Mountain lions and bears are always saying lions and tigers
Speaker 1: and bears.
Speaker 7: Tree alligators.
Speaker 2: Tree alligators are real frat but not so much in Colorado.
Speaker 7: I still haven't seen one. Yeah, I don't know why.
Speaker 2: You're not looking up. So what's the fossil record like
Speaker 2: for these creatures. It doesn't seem like much would be around.
Speaker 3: It's not great because of course their soft body there's
Speaker 3: there's really looking very preserved. But no, they found some
Speaker 3: specimens that are hundreds and millions of years old. They're rare.
Speaker 3: You could have a really good preservation to protect something
Speaker 3: that's alf bodied from immediate decay. But yeah, there's a few.
Speaker 3: There's a few really cool spossors that have been discovered
Speaker 3: to show all the octopuss, for instance, haven't changed that
Speaker 3: much in a couple hundred million years.
Speaker 2: So they survive the KT extinction. Interesting.
Speaker 3: Oh yes, yeah, well they're they're aquatic and in general,
Speaker 3: invertebrates are so profligate in producing offspring that they're really
Speaker 3: good at surviving these sorts of things.
Speaker 1: Going going back to eating these creatures, I was told
Speaker 1: that the giant squid have too much ammonia in them
Speaker 1: to be edible. Why is that?
Speaker 3: Oh, many of the squid that live in mid water,
Speaker 3: that do all the covered deep in the water, they
Speaker 3: use ammonia pre buoyancy ecc tissues to give them a
Speaker 3: neutral whin. Yeah, because it's it's lighter than water. Oh,
Speaker 3: that's basically the strategy they're following. Uh. So, yeah, they're
Speaker 3: they're kind of an edible unless you soak them for
Speaker 3: a long time, and even then, by that time there
Speaker 3: mush who wants to eat that?
Speaker 2: So why do you think so many people are frightened
Speaker 2: of these tentacled animals?
Speaker 3: Oh, it's it's the weirdness of them. It's that they
Speaker 3: look so unusual and different that, for instance, where is
Speaker 3: the face of an octopus?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 3: You. Yeah, we're so used to looking at creatures, whether
Speaker 3: you know, whether it's a dog or a tiger or
Speaker 3: a bear or whatever whatever you're afraid of, but at
Speaker 3: least you can see a face. You can see there's eyes,
Speaker 3: there's a nose, there's a mouth, and we can we
Speaker 3: can trick them into a mental model. That's what animals
Speaker 3: should look like, something like a squid. You don't you
Speaker 3: can look into it and gives you two eyes there.
Speaker 3: Then below that, uh, there's this confusing mass of technacles
Speaker 3: just branching everywhere. And I'm sure that's one of the
Speaker 3: reasons Lovecraft sort of seized on that imagery for his
Speaker 3: Risk Food is it's it's so different than what we expect.
Speaker 3: It looks pathologically weird.
Speaker 7: And probably because of the toxicity of these creatures too.
Speaker 2: Well I didn't even know about that really, but that's
Speaker 2: just me.
Speaker 7: But well that's coming from about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but everything is toxic.
Speaker 7: And including.
Speaker 2: That's funny.
Speaker 3: The uh yeah, I think it's just the visual impact
Speaker 3: of the animal that it's it's the creature that's just
Speaker 3: organized so differently from the way we are that that
Speaker 3: you get confused, you get baffled and looking at and
Speaker 3: that's that's one of the things that that Lovecraft really
Speaker 3: tried to get across his in his crazy writings is
Speaker 3: the idea of things that you cannot grasp that you
Speaker 3: look at, you see and they drive you bad because
Speaker 3: they're so different from everything they used to And I
Speaker 3: think a cephalopod fits that category pretty well.
Speaker 2: I think so too at least one more question, what
Speaker 2: is your fascination with them? I guess you've got them
Speaker 2: as your wallpaper on forringula.
Speaker 3: Well, as I mentioned earlier on, they have such a
Speaker 3: very different body planning from us. Yeah. That One of
Speaker 3: the things I'm always interested in my own work is
Speaker 3: how do you lay out the blueprint of an animal? Invertebrates,
Speaker 3: We've got a good idea that, for instance, are these
Speaker 3: things called hawks chains that are expressed early on, and
Speaker 3: they sort of stake out the foundation in the animal.
Speaker 3: They say, this is the front end, this is the
Speaker 3: back end, this is the stuff in the middle. And
Speaker 3: when you look at a cephalopod, it breaks all the rules.
Speaker 3: It's not a simple linear organism and whatsype kind of
Speaker 3: radio organization of tentacles. So I'm really curious to know
Speaker 3: how exactly in a molecular sense do they set up
Speaker 3: that pattern. What kind of genes are they using to
Speaker 3: do this sort of stuff. We know some of the answers.
Speaker 3: We know that they are using the hawks genes, the
Speaker 3: same hawks genes that we use to set up padding
Speaker 3: along the launch studios. They're using in a weird combinatorial
Speaker 3: scheme to set up the identities of each tentacle.
Speaker 2: So can you make tentacles grow in different places if
Speaker 2: you change the genes around?
Speaker 3: Well, theoretically, yeah, they've they've worked out the sort of
Speaker 3: hawk's code for a tentacle, so you know, you know
Speaker 3: which hawks genes are turned on for which tentacle. And
Speaker 3: if if cephalopods were better experimental animals from elecular biology,
Speaker 3: and they aren't, they're really hard to raise, then theoretically, yeah,
Speaker 3: we could go in there. We could do something ring
Speaker 3: and every once a cephal part will wash up that
Speaker 3: is strange different and it looks like it's a mute
Speaker 3: into some sort and usually the dead so haven't survived.
Speaker 3: For instance, it was one a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: It was really exciting because it actually bifurcating tentacles. Wow,
Speaker 3: technical branch and branch and branch. So we know there's
Speaker 3: also interesting stuff going on in the regulation of the growth.
Speaker 7: But that's the cause of that. When that happens, we
Speaker 7: don't know.
Speaker 3: That. That's what kind of need about it. You know,
Speaker 3: in vertebrates, we know how you regulate the branching pattern
Speaker 3: that we get a hand, you know, but plumbing their
Speaker 3: fingers and again it's hawks jeans switching on in particular patterns,
Speaker 3: and it means, you know, this is just a one
Speaker 3: off sort of thing, an odd specimen that washed up.
Speaker 3: We suspect it's probably something similar, but there's mis expression
Speaker 3: of certain genes that regulate these patterned expressions. We won't
Speaker 3: have it as ex primal animal, so we can through
Speaker 3: the experiments. It's it's kind of frustrating.
Speaker 2: Wow, but cool, but yeah, very cool. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 2: it's kind of funny because not like ha ha funny,
Speaker 2: but you know, we talked to doctor Marcus Davis, who's
Speaker 2: at my local university in Kinnesaw, and he was talking
Speaker 2: about some of the things they can do and what
Speaker 2: controls there are for making, you know, genetic manipulation. And
Speaker 2: I'm torn, you know, as a as a layperson because
Speaker 2: you know, on the one hand, I understand you don't
Speaker 2: want to be cruel to the animals, but on the
Speaker 2: other hand, you know, making an octopus with twenty four
Speaker 2: tentacles sounds cool.
Speaker 7: You know, what are the implications for human rights.
Speaker 2: When can I have tentacles? Exactly, Karen, thank you enough people.
Speaker 7: Ask me that's what you were thinking.
Speaker 3: It's also just a way to look into the fundamental
Speaker 3: aspects of organization of the matter, how does life get
Speaker 3: to be this way? And so do these kind of
Speaker 3: experiments are essential for understanding what's going on there. Like
Speaker 3: I said, you know, we've got these little examples like
Speaker 3: that that octopus of the bifurcating tentacles, and it's so
Speaker 3: per prolocative. You know how that worked. I'm wondering what
Speaker 3: are the rules for branching in a tentacle? I mean,
Speaker 3: really for you that you gotta do experiments. I'm sorry, Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know it's still it's still a little worse than
Speaker 3: chopping them up.
Speaker 2: And well that that was my thought exactly. I mean,
Speaker 2: nothing personal against the chickens, but although you have to
Speaker 2: have these ethical sign offs for for doing the experiments,
Speaker 2: I can go to KFC and get by you know,
Speaker 2: chicken on a chicken you know, g Center or whatever.
Speaker 8: Right, So yeah, and these experiments you can do in
Speaker 8: far more humane ways than even farming takes care of
Speaker 8: animals because we're not interested in cause them harm.
Speaker 3: We're not not interested so much in ripping them the
Speaker 3: pieces and putting their flesh on the plate to need it.
Speaker 3: So we can do things like very carefully and at
Speaker 3: the times monitor we euthanize if there's any sign of stressed.
Speaker 3: So yeah, we most scientists are pretty dark ethical about
Speaker 3: this sort of thing.
Speaker 2: Okay, Well, we have a sort of a mandatory question
Speaker 2: we ask all of our guests, and that is what
Speaker 2: is your favorite monster?
Speaker 3: Oh well, gee, uh, many of them like a clog
Speaker 3: because anything you want it to be.
Speaker 2: I mean, the last one we had.
Speaker 7: With Yeah, I just wanted to say that, you know that.
Speaker 3: I hate to say it because I don't think it
Speaker 3: really is a monster. But the Empire Tufis is pretty
Speaker 3: dark cool.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely, the Empire toothis for analysis. Is it's a
Speaker 3: deep water squiz wicked cool. Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's
Speaker 3: very creepy looking this way down the darkness. Uh, it's
Speaker 3: got these these tentacles that are bridged buy by webbing
Speaker 3: and so forth, and it's you have to see pictures
Speaker 3: in this shoot.
Speaker 2: I'll shoot here in a picture. We'll put a picture
Speaker 2: in the show.
Speaker 7: Notes yeah, it sounds monstrous.
Speaker 3: They don't have islands instead of the skin around you,
Speaker 3: I just kind of irises shut around them. Well, and
Speaker 3: it's bizarre to see it. It's it's just again so
Speaker 3: alien looking to see that.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you so much for spending some time with
Speaker 2: us today, PZ. I appreciate it. Monster Thanks for listening
Speaker 2: to this special literary edition of Monster Talk. I enjoy
Speaker 2: putting the show together, and if you enjoy listening to it,
Speaker 2: let us know. Today we heard about American cosmic horror
Speaker 2: writer HP Lovecraft. Our guests were Robert M. Price and
Speaker 2: PZ Myers, your host for myself, Blake Smith, Ben Radford,
Speaker 2: and doctor Karen Stoles. Now, as I put this show together,
Speaker 2: I had envision in reviewing St. Joshi, the biographer of
Speaker 2: Lovecraft we mentioned during the show. However, Bob Price effectively
Speaker 2: conducted the exact interview I wanted over at point of inquiry.
Speaker 2: So as an adjunct to this episode, I suggest you
Speaker 2: check it out. A link is in our show notes. Also,
Speaker 2: while I was putting this together, a paper was published
Speaker 2: on the evolutionary basis for cephalopod pseudopods. The CB show
Speaker 2: Quirks and Quirks did an excellent interview with the PHT
Speaker 2: candidate Martin Smith on his findings. It's a great interview
Speaker 2: and I've put that link in the show notes. Monster
Speaker 2: Talk is produced with the assistance of Skeptic Magazine. When
Speaker 2: the stars are right, Cathula will rise and destroy us all.
Speaker 2: In the meantime, why not relax and enjoy an ice
Speaker 2: riada Skeptic, you might gain one dye ten sanity. No
Speaker 2: promises on that. Music for today's episode included Monster Talk's
Speaker 2: theme by Peach Stealing Monkeys one thousand PSI Ar Morgan,
Speaker 2: and now, by special permission, a snippet of a most
Speaker 2: excellent song by the Even Brooks Band. Hey There, Call,
Speaker 2: Hey there, Cthulhu.
Speaker 9: Down there in your sunken city, your abillion like years distant,
Speaker 9: and the stars look very pretty from relay, So close sandy,
Speaker 9: yet so far away?
Speaker 3: E e a.
Speaker 9: Kulou photoggin or is that culoupha tine? I can never
Speaker 9: quite remember because I'm not in my right mind. Since
Speaker 9: I met you. No one corrupts the way you do.
Speaker 9: You know it's true. Oh it's what you'll do to
Speaker 9: me yo and null humanity. Oh you'll rise up from
Speaker 9: the sea, kill everyone slowly, except the ones like.
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