Heroes of the Old Internet: Troy Hurtubise

that has really hit all of us really hard. Yeah, and really yeah deeply now that now that Trump is has been charged with felonies, he's officially a friend of mine. So Trump, now I really convict. I'm really conflicted between my acab side my illegalist side. It's really it's really hard. I mean, thirty four felonies, that's quite a legalist. Very few of the people I know who commit crimes is

like a vocation, have that many pretty difficult. But at any rate, you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks, and I thought we could use a lighter episode to you know, help everybody everybody feel better. And I know that you Mia and you gare are both young uns. Uh, you you missed the earlier age of the Internet and the heroes of that ancient age you know when I was a child, you know, it was Jupiter and uh and and all the Greek gods of the old Internet y'all.

Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of the old Internet era. So yeah, I wanted. I wanted to talk about an ancient hero of the Internet. And perhaps this will become a series that we do now and again where we we talk about we talk about the gods of the past and today. The ancient deity that we're talking about is kind of like the Internet's Hercules, a man named Troy Herdabes. Have you guys heard of Troy Herdabes. No, I've not. I've not heard of Troy Hernabes.

But I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a Roman god. The Greek version is you're right, You're right, You're right. Before before some freak dms me and sends me like three phs on this, I'm just gonna put that out there, do not DM me about this. Yeah, wet do that thing where we start, we start including one of these every episode that driver just fucking up purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it,

they love being able to hop on. I do, ever, we did get recently, we did the liver King episodes this week and somebody popped on to be like, hey, guys, you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of polar bears contain enough vitamin hundred and forty people something like that, Um, don't eat polar bear livers. This is relevant because we are talking about a man today whose lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that allowed him to fight bears in hand to hand compact.

I mean or this is actually very applicable to us because just last week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. You're right this this man would have been one of the only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So once upon a time, before the breaking of the world, there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Hurdibes. Troy was a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in nineteen sixty three. He liked the outdoors and he was a dedicated conservationist. The one exception

to his abiding love of nature was bears. On August fourth, nineteen eighty four, when Troy was twenty one years old, he went hiking in central British Columbia. Now, he's given a couple of versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened, say that this happened when he was a boy. Others say he was like twenty years old, but all agree that he wound up in close proximity

to a grizzly bear. In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped the twenty two caliber rifle he was carrying, which would not have made much difference against a grizzly bear. You will only make it more upsets. Two is not the up and you want to that situation. In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're gonna talk about Troy's knives in a minute here now.

In an interview with Mental Floss many years later, Troy claimed that seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him. After this, Okay, that's not how bears were. Has this bear been like involved in other fights? Thus, like another mania bear got stabbed behind a seven eleven and is like, na, man, I don't grizz don't funk with knives no more. I've been through that ship like a street gay, like nah brought no bro, a're worth

it and so um. He later claims an expert told him he would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs. This I believe bears very rarely attack people. Now, a normal man would have taken this number one as boy, I sure got lucky, and number two as I should be more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was not a normal man. His first thought was that he needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically four bears. He had been beaten and developing bear

mace by an actual scientist. Although the first paper on bear mace was published in nineteen eighty four, so it makes sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time. It was a reasonable thing to be, like, maybe we should have a mace for use against bears. There are

again several versions of what came next. I'm going to quote from one that I found in a write of by the spec Now quote from then, he decided that his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear spray repellent, but he realized field testing with bears would be needed. This would require a protective suit for the

person doing the test. In his interview with Mental Floss, one of the later pieces on the Man, Troy dropped the mace story and claimed that he had the idea just to make bear resistant armor a year after his grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear researchers would need protective armor that would let them test

bear spray and also safely observed grizzly behavior. Troy is something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I do not doubt that the film RoboCop influenced his subsequent ass No, he absolutely had this idea that makes the most sense out of anything you said. It is very logical, So it is now. Troy, it should be noted, is not the first, probably not the first man who has thought I should develop a suit of armor to allow

me to grapple with bears in hand to hand combat. Um. It is possible that in medieval Europe some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether or not this really happened. The gist of why this is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit of armor currently in a Houston museum that is probably made in Switzerland or Germany,

like four hundred dish years ago. Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or for what purpose, but one theory is that it was used for bear abaiting. If so, it was used for European bears, which are significantly smaller than Presty bears, and as far as we know, was never a widespread practice. This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand to hand with a suit of armor is insane and something only a madman would do.

But I am going to show you this suit of armor because it looks like something from a David Lynch movie. Oh I'm so, I'm so thrilled, specifically the face. So look at that, look at that beautiful thing. Oh my god. Yeahase of that unsettling. But they think probably somewhere around Austria or Switzerland, although it's not I don't think known to a point of certainty. That looks fucked up. It looks like it looks like a like like like a metal casting at someone's head, but with like but with

like the pinhead thing. Yeah, it's a hellrazy. I think is the movie. Ye, the face on it is distinctly unsettling, like they could have just made a normal helmet. But no, no no, there's a nose. It's the guy's face. We gotta it's We're not doing this right unless we like

peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Troy was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight a bear in body armor is just objectively nuts, and since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then testing it. I'm going to read another quote from the Specs right up,

because it's extremely funny. So the suit became his focus of attention, putting it through all kinds of tests that included being run down by a pickup truck driven by his father, rolling off the side of a cliff, and being pummeled by bikers with base ball bats. And I'm gonna play you a video of Troy um one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree. It's almost exactly that scene from hot Rod. If you've watched the movie hot Rod, where they like swing a log

down at him and hit him. Um, that may in fact be what that scene is based on. But I'm gonna I'm gonna share that with y'all. Now here a little bit. The log is, Oh my gosh, so guys, I cannot emphasize enoughten. It looks like half this armor is held together by duct tape. Like this looks like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of and like the and like the Battle of Endor. He walks, he walks throwing massive logs. And the guy in the middle

tin suit. It's white. It's a white suit too. Yeah, it looks almost like something from um like speed Racer. Is weird. The aesthetic that I would reckon, I would closest compare it too. It is kind of like that anime robot style design. Yeah, it's it's it's profoundly unhinged. So I want to I want to play you a clip of him getting the helmet off so you can listen to Troy talk and see this man's face better than the first. Yeahs, I had that to that stuff on my mouth. Yeah, if I have a most piece,

a mostpiece, you can do that all day long. I got the air bags in the back, so my neck hasn't got a lot of play, so that'll be perfect for the grizzly. I can. I can take what he can give me with that log there if that couldn't do anything to me, And I feel great, like really great. And actually my left hand was asleepis now a week? Really you don't say yeah? Damage? Fascinating man, So I'm gonna play you now him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball bats as he attempts to move

in this suit. And I have to emphasize to you, he is not capable of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit of armor that he can He can almost shuffle in it, but not quite. His idea with the with the pickup truck and the bikers. With regards to big men, and being an anthropologist, he yet he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal sized men, you know, one hundred and fifty hundred and eighty pound, he said. The public isn't gonna buy it.

They're they're looking at this monstrous, groovy bear and they're looking at a normal size man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff like that. They're not going to buy. You have to give them reality. This is insane. This is so weird, amazing, amazing, like a gang of Venet attacking this nerd in a metal suit. Yes, it's so funny. It's it's it's extremely funny. They're like and they pick like Terminator two looking bikers, like they go out of

their way. All of the stylization is super super bizarre. Yeah, it's it's such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary Project Grizzly, and there's Troy gives. In the various interviews, he does some pretty incredible quotes, like years after this, he wrote, at fifty two, I have to know whether or not the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things. We tested the suit a lot of ways,

but never went against the Grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus Mark one. He eventually gets up to the Mark six and spends more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I think the one that we're looking at in the documentary is the Mark six because he did eventually, after years of this quest, get a documentary and interested and

the film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun piece of trivia about it is that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes Yeah, it makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just one last piece of context about the personality, what kind of man is Troy her to Bees or was Troy her Tobes? I am going to play you a clip of an interview with this man from the documentary that's

just perfect. He's holding in this a gigantic booie knife in his hand, and he has another booie knife strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder but pointed down yea, which is the way a crazy man carries a booie knife. He's also, it's worth, dressed as like a frontier settler, but wearing like aad Harry Paray, I go into the bush. I don't use a gun, never, don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They save your life a thousand times around.

If a grizzlies gonna come at you. And I'm not saying knives are gonna save you, That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzlies fifty feet one hundred feet away from you got one shot. I don't give a shit who you are or how steady you are. You've got one shot, not Grizzly. And if he's still coming at you that gun, you might as well use the barrel on him, or you can use the stock on that's useless. But if you've got some half decent knives, at least you got a

fighting chance with animals. But that's not the reason why when I go into the mountains, or I go into the bush, or any man goes into the bush, they don't carry knives for the four legged animals. They carry knives for the two legged animals. Because nowadays it's a lot like the old days. You've got a lot of whackos up there, and it's knives you want to close quarters. You do, indeed have a lot of whackos up there,

Troy um. So that's that's a brief introduction to Troy Hertebes. Now, the suit that you've seen in the Project Project Grizzly documentary weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and it was not in any way powered. As you see in the dock, he can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He

falls over very easily. Troy liked the documentary, felt like it helped expose his work to a wider audience, but he took issue with the fact that the documentary did not delve into what he described as the science behind it all, adding being able to get hit by the truck took years of development, now years of practice of getting hit in the trucks. Yeah, it's you can't just

jump into getting hit by a truck like that. In two thousand and two, a trainer who probably should not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully the bear was too confused by Troy's armor to what to get near him, which you might this is technically a wind for Troy. The armor did do its job, just scare them away. Yeah, you know, the bear just saw that was like, you know what, this guy, it's clearly unwell. I do not

want to be around this person. Right now. Here's mental Floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she urinated her abuse recalls I didn't look human enough. Limited mobility and questionable usefulness combined to doom the Mark series. We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Sierronello, PhD. A bare behavior expert, a solid knowledge of bare behaviors. The best thing one can use to avoid being attacked,

which is rare. And this is this is common whenever they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like do you want a suit of armor? They're like, no, that that's not at all useful. It's very easy to not get attacked by bears. Actually, and again, if you watch the documentary Grizzly Man and the man in the documentary, Grizzly Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hertabes.

They are both people. I do believe Troy Hertabes might need a suit of bear armor because he seems like the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hertabes fame. He was all over the internet. I found out about him because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him in an article, but like you would see this guy all the time, I'm sure I I think I also

ran across him on something awful. Earlier, he would regularly put out videos. He had an early kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a brand on the internet in order to get funding, and so he was very successful at raising money in order to make new iterations of his armor. He was also recruited on several Japanese game shows, and he inspired a two thousand and three episode of The Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear

fighting suit. He even filmed an outie commercial. Of course, he always reinvested the proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now, the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears, but he never got over his

desire from making a suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that now his brother was in the military, and so he wanted to make flexible body armor themed after the armor in Halo to help keep soldiers and swat officers safe during dangerous raids. His next suit was called the Trojan and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons that are deeply confusing. Wait, that's not even it's not even a useful spot, like put it

on your watch him. He is adamant that he had talked to special Forces guys and they said, right in the dick is where you want a compass. It like flipped down, so it looks like he has a penis that's made out of compass. Okay, that that is kind of funny. I'm gonna play you a clip of this armor, which I will say looks a lot more professional than the last suit, the first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit

of armor. This came from twenty years of development through the Bear suits and about seventeen hundred and fifty hours of actual building time. And it came from so many calls I got from friends of mine in Iraq and an Afghanistan. My brother was in the military, talking about is there can you not go in the direction that we need, which is you know, against the ieeds improvised explosive devices, and you know, build it to the point where you've got the flexibility, the lightness, but with the

strength of what the bear suits were. And that's where that's where this came from. So I'm going to tell you right now that suit is not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic heavy armor you see in the hurt Locker only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small I eed, what he's built is not going to protect you from like an explosively formed penetrator or like a five thousand pound fertilizer five hundred

pound fertilizer bomb or something like that. To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman, the guy who he claimed had previously covered him out in the woods on bare expeditions with less lethal amo, and he asked this man to shoot him point and blank with a rifle. So thankfully, this guy was like Troy, it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person in our province. I'm not going to shoot you directly in the chest

with a hunting rifle. So Troy had him take the armor out of the suit and then shoot at it, and the bullet went immediately through the armor. It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct was not shoot the armor without a human being in it. But um, at least he was yeah, at least the guy who was testing it did not shoot him directly in the chest and kill him. I'm gonna quote again from mental Flaws here. Herdibes tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in

two thousand and seven to little notice. Eventually, he offered is designed to the Canadian military for free, but it can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology, and existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed with industrial military contracts are sewn up and they don't want anyone stepping on toes. He says. Engineers pick my brain, but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose

cannon and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions over the years. For one thing, Troy invented a burn paste, a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in order to protect you. Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered in the burn pace, being exposed to temperatures above thirty six hundred degrees fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his

helmeted head for ten minutes and it worked. This leaves out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired to make his burn pace because one day, while wearing his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly. So he needed to make the burnt paste in order to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get in and out of. Like, no, it would not be easy to dawn your If you look at the helmet there,

your peripheral version is going to be shit. It's not going to be good for like fighting in and it is going to exhaust you. Like he builds an air conditioner for it, but that's only gonna do so much like body armor is always kind of like a trade off between mobility and protection, and something like a plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's not powered in a meaningful way just is not going to be practical yet. This is why I do not respect

the Mandalorians. No, no, you you've been vocal about that for years. I have. I'm gonna play you a video of him testing this firepaste from that Canadian Discovery Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a thin layer of firepaste, effectively starving out the fire. And according to Troy, clean up is a breeze due to firepace only weakness water. See it turns back into a paste.

See I'm already into a layer. It's just past now which is firepiece. This is its natural steam. And when it dries. See I'm already slopping it off. Now there's the is there It turns to the peace. This is what's gonna happen on your host. Now it's a he's chewing it up. Oh and oh that's so cross. He's just spitting it all over his house. The dog comes along, takes a little in his mouth, washes it around and spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biden ridable, non topsic.

Don't have to worry abe anything happening. So how would a homeowner remove the firepace from the outside of their home? This is gonna be Bob fus next door. Bob Sulst is gonna be fine. The next day he's gonna come up with his garden the holes of a cannabier and in two hours he'll be ready for the football game. Oh what, there goes to the house. After ten minutes, Troy inspects the firepaced house. Look at look at this. Look at this. There's a little barbie. She's all kay.

Barbie's fire Barbie's sister. The barbie is clearly sin. Now he does note again that the only weakness of the fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now, why why does he keep giving platforms? Like? Why why does he continue? He was because because this was really funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that

came out would get shared all over. People would watch it. It would get him attention, he would get donations. There was like one point where he had to he had to sell his body armor. He had to like sell it to a pawn shop because he was broke, and a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and gave it to him so he could continue. Yeah that's nice. Yeah, he had a fan base. Like I said, he was

a hero of the old Internet. He did eventually succeed in making an armor suit that was resistant to twelve gage shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive. Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor. Most soft body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it. Shotguns are not for penetrating armor, there for damaging meat. But Troy made a big deal about how this would

save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention, as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much detail on what the Godlight was, but he says it shrunk tumors in mice as well as his sister's tumor, and he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers. All I did was take all spectrums of light electromagnetic

radiation and put them together and it works. I don't know why, but I think that's how you get cancer. But okay, funny, funny, you mentioned that. So obviously his claims about the Godlight were never validated by any outside force, in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it. But Troy turned the light on himself and experienced what

he calls the hide effect. I think as in Doctor jekyline, mister Hyde, his hair fell out and he lost twenty pounds curious a mystery. Then he claims the godlight mysteriously stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix it up. There are amazing I love this man. It's it is. It is fascinating that the closer society comes to this complete collapse, we get more of these little weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to

survive the apocalypse and exactly the wrong way. Yes, um, I'm going to read another quote from Mental Floss article today. Hertabes operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents. The stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs eighty thousand dollars to file an application. He rejects offers to outright sell his creations like Firepaste, because he frequently

sells off shares to fund their development. By the time I got Firepace to the point of testing, seventy percent of it was owned by investors, so when a university wants it, I only have thirty percent left. They're not interested in that. And yet Hernabes can't stop inventing. He still feels compelled to put in twenty one hour days

refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding for the Apache, the latest version of his Rosian suit, which he says protects ninety three percent of a user's body and offers ninety six percent flexibility. A prototype will cost seventy thousand dollars. It'll take six to eight months to build by hand. I'll try to market it to law enforcement like SWAT. He needs another one hundred thousand dollars to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR five, which

he now claims will only cure breast cancer. He wants to take it to John's Optics for testing. So well, I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions. Yes, yes, I do support that. Thanks to that dit compass, they'll never get lost at the wrong house again. Could really save a lot of lives. That's the problem SWAT teams have is poor land nav. I think so. I think the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member should be forced to wear that barrasuit for everything they do. Yes,

the only thing Swat could get du so. Tragically, Troy died in like twenty twelve, I think in a fiery collision. Yeah, he drove right into a few tanker. Oh yeah, it's very sad. He was fifty four years old old. His widow says that he swerved his car or the police say that he swerved his car into the pathway of the truck. He had been very depressed because he'd encountered financial difficulties and had not been able to sell his inventions. Um,

obviously this is very sad for them. He seems like, despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around, and then yeah, fell on hard times. Um it is. It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy lives on in the documentary project Grizzly, and in the impact he had on all of our hearts, and in the memory that you know, even if your dreams are are crazy, you should you should try and live them because who knows, Maybe maybe you'll develop a suit that allows you to fight a Grizzly bar in hand to

hand combat. Anyway, That's that's this Hero of the Internet episode I hope you all found it edifying. That is that is an inspiring in ringtail. Yeah, um, it's it's it's you know, he's fucking more of an inventor than Elon Musk has been. And he would have been a better ruler of Twitter, if that's true, was in charge

of Twitter. He's he's really the last guy from the old error of capitalism where you would actually like return your profits into into R and D instead of just like paying Elon Musk like forty seven million dollars to hire a bunch of consultants who also make forty seven million dollars. Yeah. One thing you have to say about Troy is he was not He was not in this

for the money. This was a man who believed more strongly than I think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of building a suit of armor to fight grisly bears, um and whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely, absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going to end by playing a brief montage of him testing out his first version of the armored suit, which looks more or less like a set of heavy

base ball armor. Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a baseball helmet or a sorry, a football helmet. In fact, I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah, here's here's Troy's early tests in nineteen eighty eight. That's definitely a ball helmet. That one looks kind of cool. That one looks pretty cool too. Yeah. They look increasingly Space Marini in this period, and he has some range of motion, doesn't even have his helmet on, just knocking

him down with what looked like to buy force. It doesn't. It does look more Oh my gosh, he just he keeps getting he walks right in the face. Yeah, it's it's just amazing. That last one looks super space Marine as Yeah. Yeah, some of them looked pretty cool. Um, and he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing, So you got to give him one thing. He knew how to make a suit of armor that would not get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Hertabes

like to do. It seems like he was good with like with like blunt force trauma armor. Did anyone ever do like a CTE skit like test on him every dime? Because this man had a thousand micro head injuries. Absolutely I mean, I think the real lesson here is that he was able. He was he was able to continue his work thanks to Canadian healthcare. Um. He was probably like five percent of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's

the story of Troy Hertabies. I hope you've all found it useful. Um, go into the world, and if your dream is to create a suit of powered armor that will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat, then by god, you know, shoot for the stars. It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

You can find sources for It could Happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.