During a moment of personal turmoil, Rocky Villanueva gets an email from a long-time client. His client is in his final weeks of life, and is getting his last wishes taken care of. One of those wishes: to look like himself when he dies. Rocky says that many hairdressers and barbers have similar experiences: helping their clients through the last stages of life and letting them look the way they want to look for a final time. Rocky packs his haircutting tools and bikes acr...
Feb 19, 2025•32 min•Season 10Ep. 9
Jeff walks to the edge of Berlin and explains why the Here Be Monsters feed has been quiet for so long. On the way, Jeff talks about plans for upcoming episodes, looks at the ways that moving to Berlin has changed him, and discusses a pair of films featuring Tilda Swinton: Cycling the Frame (1988), and The Invisible Frame (2009). Both movies feature Swinton riding a bicycle around the entirety of the Berlin Wall—or, in the case of the latter, where the Berlin Wall used to be. Please ...
Dec 09, 2024•24 min
n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich . Note: this episode contains sounds that cannot be accurately represented by speakers. Please use headphones. Steve Reich compositions excerpted in this episode: Clapping Music , performed by Steve Reich and Wolfram Winkel Violin Phase , performed by Jonathan Morton Pendulum Music , performed by Joan Cerveró, Víctor T...
Dec 14, 2022•40 min•Season 10Ep. 8
Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher. He’s also a father of three. His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos . In that episode, Alex tells stories from his childhood of chasing strange phenomena with his father. In this episode, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman talks to Allen to get the “fatherly perspective” on UFOs, black lodges , tarot, The Day the Earth Stood Still , and (most of all) how to be a good parent.&nbs...
Nov 28, 2022•40 min•Season 10Ep. 7
Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building. It’s one of just a dozen remaining pieces of Nazi Architecture in Berlin. And it’s not much to look at. It was built in 1941 as a test structure for a triumphal arch that Hitler wanted to build in that spot. The Schwerbelastungskörper (“heavy load-bearing body”) is the arch’s test structure. It weighs about 12,650 metric tonne...
Nov 09, 2022•19 min•Season 10Ep. 6
The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back! It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger and get a piece of art in return. It’s open to artists of all experience levels from around the world. The deadline to sign up is November 10th, 2022 . Sign up and more info here: https://www.hbmpodcast.com/art The art exchange is made possible this year by HBM listener Devon Sherman , who’s offered her time and expertise to help with communication...
Oct 24, 2022•13 min
Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry. Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid. His dad ( Allen H Greenfield ) self describes as a “researcher in the shadow world.” And his mom soon grew tired of her husband’s lifestyle, which included a lot of time on the road: chasing rumors of cryptids, ghosts, and aliens. But after his parents split up, Alex, his dad, and an ever changing cast of motorcycle gang members and s...
Aug 24, 2022•32 min•Season 10Ep. 5
Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius . Apicius is a bit of a fluke. It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did. And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice their gilding skills. And thus, this fascinating book of recipes (featuring cooking instructio...
Jun 22, 2022•24 min•Season 10Ep. 4
In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife. In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote about the dinner party where they attempted to make an uneasy friendship. Jeff re-edited the essay in 2022 and gave pseudonyms to the main characters (“Cliff” and “Sophie”). Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast supp...
Jun 02, 2022•12 min
The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening. She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears. But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain . Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work. About six years ago, on an episode of Here Be Monsters called Sam’s Japan Tapes , Sam shared dozens of recordings he made during his first (...
May 04, 2022•50 min•Season 10Ep. 3
What do you want to happen to your body when you die? It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play. But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, which both have substantial ecological impacts . In 2019, Washington State passed SB 5001 , which legalized several new options for deathcare. In this episode, host Jeff Emtman visits Return Home , a facility in Auburn, Washington that’s using one of those ne...
Mar 30, 2022•35 min•Season 10Ep. 2
Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours. Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store. Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon , and have your boss sponsor an episode . Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Serocell and The Black Spot Sponsor: RadioLab Are you curious about the world, but also want to be surprised, ...
Mar 09, 2022•27 min•Season 10Ep. 1
Season 10 is nearly here! The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published. Want to advertise on an episode? Fill out the sponsorship request form . Want to support HBM with a small monthly donation? Become a patron on Patreon . Can’t wait to share the season with you. More soon. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot...
Feb 11, 2022•5 min
I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify. It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that Spotify treats the medium . If you listen on an app other than Spotify, you don’t need to change anything, just stay subscribed, and you’ll get all the new episodes (Season 10 is coming soon!). If you do listen on Spotify though, you’ll need to download a different app to keep listening. Personally, I’m a big fan of Poc...
Feb 08, 2022•13 min
The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down. She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken heart had something to do with it. She spent about three years going through some excruciating physical sensations: immense chills, brain fogs, pregnancy nightmares and the feeling that her blood was about to boil through her skin. Doctors weren’t able to figure out what was wrong, nor were the array of alternative healers she...
Jul 01, 2021•40 min•Season 9Ep. 10
A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast . Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day. This episode, The Daily Blast , features two computerized voices (Wendy and Ivan), who share the day’s news. To get new versions of this episode, you’ll need to either stream the audio in your podcast app/web browser, or just delete and re-download the episode. It’s updated every 24 hours. Note: Due to Spotify’s policy of do...
Jun 16, 2021•2 min•Season 9Ep. 9
Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure. It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes. That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first of its kind. It’s called Neutrinowatch , and every day, each episode is regenerated with new content. But this is a conversation between Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters’ host), and Martin Zaltz Austick ( Answer Me This , Song By Song , Pale Bird and others) ab...
Jun 16, 2021•26 min
As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM , a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses. One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming. He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious. Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they’re asleep. Some sleepers become lucid completely at random, but lucid dream training can dr...
Jun 02, 2021•33 min•Season 9Ep. 8
With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open. In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram microscopy page @tardibabe about the joy of looking at small things, and whether it’s possible to find beauty in things you don’t understand. Chloé also gives Jeff instructions for finding tardigrades by soaking moss in water and squeezing out the resulting juice...
May 19, 2021•21 min•Season 9Ep. 7
A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, good advice, and some strange poetry. Her account’s called Hypothetical Inspiration . Give her a follow.
May 05, 2021•2 min•Ep. 21
How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction? Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules. Every language rule seems to have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions etcetera. Typical, “if this then that” approaches to language just don’t work. There’s too much nuance. But each generation of algorithms gets closer and closer. Markov chains were invented in the 1800’s and rely on nothing more than basic probabilities. It’s a simple...
Apr 28, 2021•28 min•Season 9Ep. 6
Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction. But she was able to find work at a juice factory in the vineyards of western New York. Her job was quality control, which meant overnight shifts at the factory, tasting endless cups of fruit punch and comparing them to the ever-evolving set of juice standards that they kept in the “juice library.” She calls herself and “odd creature”, especially for the time a...
Apr 14, 2021•25 min•Season 9Ep. 5
HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down. In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound of places he likes: Padelford Hall’s Parking Garage , The Wayne Tunnel in Bothell , his old house in Roosevelt, The Greenlake Aqua Theater , and his front porch on a snowy day. The sound of a popping balloon can be used to re-create a space digitally. These...
Mar 31, 2021•30 min•Season 9Ep. 4
Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context. In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them. Ashley Ahearn : Journalist and producer of Grouse , from Birdnote and Boise State Public Radio Joel Balsam : Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives . Joel co-created a photo essay for ESPN about the “pororoca”, an Amazonian wave chased each year by surfers. Kevin Coffey, Ph....
Mar 17, 2021•26 min•Season 9Ep. 3
1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency. It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at , creating radio waves that can be detected far away. And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the universe by observing this “hydrogen line” frequency with radio telescopes Extraterrestrial research astronomers also take a lot of interest in the hydrogen line...and it’s for the same exact reason, though the context is different. It’s thought that if an alien s...
Mar 03, 2021•28 min•Season 9Ep. 2
When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially assuming it was stolen. But he’s soon corrected. Confronted with the shocking amount of food waste in the local dumpsters, he quickly turns into a freegan dumpster diving evangelist , but is often thwarted by an angry employee of a local produce stand. An employee whose face is always hidden by a bright headlamp. These encounters ...
Feb 17, 2021•40 min•Season 9Ep. 1
Season 9 will be here soon! We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown. We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world. We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture the souls of doomed buildings. We’ll listen for alien transmissions on a reserved shortwave frequency. We’ll luxuriate in the scent discarded cocoa bean husks. and you’ll get quick-fixes to all your problems from the all-knowing, hyper-dimensional e...
Jan 08, 2021•6 min
For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW . And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint. However, moving forward, HBM will no longer be associated with the station, instead continuing as an independent production. This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded. So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community sponsors. HBM would love to promote your business or project or just say some words that are mea...
Aug 13, 2020
There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T Washington called it “Black Wall Street. ” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.” In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chap...
Jun 24, 2020•Season 8Ep. 20
Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness , the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease. But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make everyone blissfully happy is to use technology and genetic engineering to make physical and emotional p...
Jun 10, 2020•Season 8Ep. 19
