You're listening to Part Time Genius, the production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. Guess what will?
What's that mano?
So you know how sometimes after it rains you see snails on the ground, uh huh. And you know how sometimes you pick up those snails and collect that trail of clear, slimy stuff they leave behind and rub it all over your face as a moisturizer.
So we're like fifteen seconds into this episode and you have already lost me. Is that actually a thing?
Yeah? Well, I don't know about the DIY version of it, but there's definitely a whole industry around snail musin and in fact, snail slime might be our most valuable of the slimes. If you're going to put money in slime, it is probably the top slime to put money into right now. But some forecasters believe that the market for snail slime beauty products will actually top seven hundred and seventy million dollars in the next year, and that's in the US alone.
Wow, that's more than we brought in in advertising for this. Isn't that amazing? I can't believe we've been stepping over this primost line for all these years.
I know it's embarrassing, but from smearing it on our faces in the name of beauty to getting it dumped on our heads on kids shows in the name of comedy, Today's episode is all about trying to figure out why humans are so obsessed with slime.
Let's dive in. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. I'm Will and as always, I'm here with my good friend Mango, and somewhere back behind that big booth is our pal Dylan, who many of you know Moonlights is a snail beauty influencer because of his beautiful dewey scan. We were just talking about it before we started recording.
I know, we get it, Dylan. Your skin is beautiful and glowing. You're better than us, all of that.
Let's let's move on. I'm getting I'm getting upset. But Mango, what, why are we talking about slime today again?
Well, in addition to complimenting Dylan, it's it's just like a weird topic. But you know, I live in Brooklyn, right and we have this little fence in backyard and for some reason there's a hole in the fence and it was there when we moved in. But it's great because our kids, and the neighbors kids use it to sneak over to each other's houses. So I'll throw my kids in the backyard and suddenly they're like three more kids playing in the backyard with them. And it's really
sweet and kind of Americana to me. But we have this one little neighbor, Yuki, and when it rains, he comes over in his little raincoat and he just goes snail hunting in our flower beds. Yuki is just the best. Yeah, even does this like little hand civil for snails. I don't know, have you ever seen this? Okay, he does that, and so partly that and then part of the fact that Ruby is just on an age where like kids are always playing with slime and making slime at home
because of like science or something. It's just around my house all the time, and I hate it, Like, I hate slime so much, so I wanted to do this episode to try to understand why slime exists and why some humans are so attracted to it.
Wait, I want to go back, though, Why do you hate slime so much?
I mean, it sounds fussy, but I don't like my hands being like wet and sticky, right right? I like putty, like silly putty. I can get behind it and you can bounce it, you can transfer images, it can erase stuff. But you know it's not slime.
Okay, so we're going to change this episode is now about putty. Now I'm actually glad we sort of that. But because you've done a lot of thinking about this, maybe we should start with what slime is, like what counts as slime.
Yeah, so slime is a pretty broad term. Even scientists will use the word slime without specifying exactly what it is. But it's basically anything that's kind of saw and creepily fluid. So in nature, slimes act as one of three things. They can be a lubricant or a barrier, or they can be in adhesive. And one really common slime is
egg white or albumin, which is a hydrogel. So egg whites are actually ninety percent water, and they provide protein and water for bird embryos and also cushioning inside the egg. But one of the most important things they do is that they act like a firewall against microbes. So it's actually this very sophisticated thing, and human embryos are protected by a similar a very similar slime, amniotic fluid. It's strange to think about, but yeah, I guess that's right.
I mean kids are born, they're basically covered in egg white. Yeah, I mean for century, slime was especially associated with women because of pregnancy and childbirth.
That's it's kind.
Of that weird extension of those four humors and those old theories like blood and phlegm and bile. Plus there's obviously all this ignorance about women's anatomy. But slime plays this weird role in our imagination because it's almost this boundary between health and sickness, right Like, on one hand, it can be this protective layer and on the other hand excessive puss or mucus, which are also slime's signal disease to us. And in fact, I can read you
this little quote from a book by Suzanne Wedlock. It's called Slime and Natural History. She says, humans are quote probably hardwired to find signs of their own mortality and animality disgusting and to shrink from contamination.
All right, so we're kind of hardwired to be grossed out by slime. But I feel like that's definitely changed some over the years, and we now have a working definition of slime. So why don't we get back to that slimy gold you were talking about at this start. So this is snail musin.
Yeah, so this is really cool and probably the thing that makes me like snails so much more. The reason snails secrete slime is actually for movement. I always thought it was just like this disgusting evolutionary mistake, but snail slime is also referred to is pedal mucus because snails use it to move. They're basically generating their own waves or surfing them in slow motion. So snails are they're basically like surfing their own.
Snot Yeah, that is awesome.
I'm going to read you the exact quote from Wedland's book because it's so fun. A series of contractions sends numerous little waves across their souls. Every elevation presses directly on the slime below, causing its molecular framework to break or shift. If the pressure is strong enough. The snail foot then glides on the more fluid slime. Once the wave has passed, the pressure abates and the molecular framework recovers.
The slime hardens again, and the snail foot pushes away until the next surge.
Okay, so that's why snails make their slime, but I'm still missing this leap of why people are scooping it up and putting it on their faces.
Well, snail musin has actually been used in Asian beauty products for years, but it got super trendy in global skincare around twenty seventeen. Advocates say snail musin hydrates the skin and reduces wrinkles, but you know, the science on that's kind of mixed. But whether or not it works, there's been a huge boom in the snail slime industry or hellicic culture I guess it's called that wasn't familiar.
In Italy, there are more than four thousand snail farms and they've seen a forty six percent increase in snail slime in the last ten months, all due to demand from the cosmetics industry.
I mean, I will say I think when people hear cosmetics industry and they hear animals of any kind, we do get a little bit concerned. For good reason.
Yeah, I mean, the industry doesn't have the best track record, but several companies say they've actually developed processes to extract the slime that doesn't injure the snails. So there's a South Korean company it's called cause RX, and they say, quote, the snails are placed over a mesh in a dark and quiet room for about thirty minutes. The snails are left alone to freely roam the net, leaving musin in
their trails. There's no external process applied to the snails or the mesh to force muse and production.
I just had this great mental image when you said the snails are free to roam the net, surfing, turfing the web, the darkness. Yeah, exactly, all right, Well, so far slime is three for three and it protects fetuses, you can surf it, and you can wear it on your face, which I know people are looking for things to put on their face. So one thing I'm kind of fascinated by recently is slimy foods.
Though so things like okra.
I love some good slimy ochre, I actually really do. But it's also things like Nato, which is a Japanese fermented soybean that's delicious when you eat it with rice, and it's very gooey, and in fact, that guy texture is kind of common in Japanese food. You find it in stuff like seaweed and mountain yam, and the Japanese
have a word for it. It's neba neba, which translates to sticky or slimy, and it's it is supposed to be on a monopoia for the noise your mouth makes while enjoying these slimy foods.
Never neva, never neva.
Yeah, it's definitely fun to say. All right, well you keep working on your neva's. Let's take a quick ad break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius where we're talking slime, and I think it's time to veer into slime of pop culture because of course it's one of the most popular places where we encounter slime. You'll see these in TV and movies. Of course, there's Ghostbusters with Slimer, that green floating slime.
Who became such a fan favorite. I mostly remember him from High Seed Juice Box.
Yeah, Slimer was such a big deal in here, like like Todd It was like Michael Jordan's Slimer Madonna, you know what I mean. It was just Slimer was a big deal. And then there's the Blob, which features, of course a blob, this expanding, massive red gelatinous material which just grows and it eats, and it like pulls human victims into itself from all directions. And some of this
imagery actually goes back to the nineteen thirties. You've got writers like HP Lovecraft and Corell Chappek, and they actually who wrote War with the Newts.
You know, I feel like I read a good bit in college, and I'm not familiar with that literature.
You need to do a little bit more reading. But it's it's about slimy neutes that quote wage war on humanity and strive toward world domination. It's famous because it's basically this allegory, Like what you find out is the Newts were peaceful and kind until humans started abusing. So Cheppek, you know, was writing this in nineteen thirty six Czechoslovakia, so it's basically about fascism. So you saw that coming
right clearly about that. Yeah, And of course there's this slime from Nickelodeon, which we knew we had to get to at some point, which is actually kind of messed up when you hear the origin story. I did not know this origin story before this, Yeah, but it's actually messed up in a fun way, I promise. So back in nineteen seventy nine, which side note the ar you and I were both born, You Can't Do That on television premiered in Canada and it was such a big
hit that Nickelodeon picked it up. But in a twenty twelve interview with Vulture, co creator Jeffrey Darby explained that the slime was actually a total accident. I don't know if you remember this, but there was this funny dungeon set on the show. Do you remember this?
Yeah? I do. When Cable and Nickelodeon came to our neighborhood in third grade, all the kids in our neighborhood were completely obsessed totally that and doubledare h Double?
There? For sure? That was another show with slime. But back to You Can't Do That on television, the set had a chain hanging down, and the whole day they were shooting, there was this running joke between producers where they'd say, whatever you do, kids, don't pull on the chain. So as bits go. Eventually someone decided to commit and they went to the cafeteria asked for all the day's
plate scrappings. They collected these all in one bucket, and their play was to dump it on a kid when he or she inevitably pulled the.
Chain because you know, as we both know, when you tell a kid not to do something, he or she pretty much has to do it. Of course, so slime was originally just food scraps.
Well, they actually ran out of time to shoot the scene that day, and you can't go to overtime with kids.
Of course, but you can dump food scraps.
Yet that seems to be seems to be fine, So they come back the next week to get the shot. But the prop guys like, I didn't get a new bucket of food slop. I just have the old one from last week. And we all know what happens to a bucket of food slop if you leave it backstage for a week, it turns it a compost. Yeah, I mean,
it got all green and gooey and moldy. And I guess this is because it was the eighties and they actually dumped this gooey mold on a child and it got such positive response from Nickelodeon that they wrote a show with nothing but slime in it. And that's how Nickelodeon's Greens was invented.
And I'm guessing they've changed that recipe over the years.
They did just a little bit. Yeah, it's proprietary, so we don't know exactly what it is. But Darby says it's all edible and non toxic, so that's good. But he also has this really insightful thing to say about the nature of sliming someone. So here's what he had to say. Slime is a leveler. It's violent, but it's not violence. It's safe. That's why it resonated with kids.
You're pulling these people who are on pedestals down green Slime was about trying to give this come upance to kids on TV so audiences at home wouldn't feel so jealous of them. And of course plenty of adults started getting slimed too.
You know, that's something I actually hadn't thought of, Like, you get all the fun of dropping something on someone's head looney Tune style, but because it's slime, it's not an anvil, and no one's getting hurt.
That's right.
It's kind of a great evolution for comedy.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of this one journalist what he said about the prevalence of slame and more adult movies, especially in the nineteen eighties. Also, it captures these feelings of uncertainty of the times, like I mean, honestly even like fears of radioactive threats.
Yeah, slime is I guess pretty versatile in terms of what he plays on at philosophically, here's something that's kind of fun. Did you know mid pandemic? HuffPo actually looked into claims that slime has mental health benefits and it's something I've seen more and more like this idea that
we like slime because it's both distracting and calming. Anyway, HuffPo talked to Jack Turbin, who's a doctor and chief Fellow and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at Stanford and while he said he's not aware of any peer reviewed studies looking at the impact of slime on mental health, things like slime and putty have interesting textures which make it easier to capture our attention and draw ourselves into our senses, which can make it easier to take a moment away
from our thoughts and anxieties about the past or future. And he's not the only one who thinks this. There's this author Britney Johnson, who's also a licensed mental health counselor, and she said soothing sounds and soft textures have been known to be a great coping skill for people of all ages. Touching slime can actually trigger calming signals in your brain.
That is pretty interesting. So it feels like one minute you're catching slime in a ghost trap and the next minute you're squeezing him like a therapy dog.
Yeah, like a wet green you can see therapy dog. Now.
Of course, slime has plenty of negative connotations too, Like we've talked a little bit about the health benefits and nature our mental health, I guess, and possibly magically deaging your skin like your Benjamin button. But slime is still gross, and especially when you're talking about pink slime.
I'd actually forgotten about pink slime and food, right, So tell me what it is exactly.
So, pink slime has an official name. It's called lean Finely Trimmed Beef or LFTB, and in the nineteen nineties it was in a ton of pre made beef patties in the US. And the term pink slime was actually coined by a micro biologist named Gerald Zernstein in two thousand and two, but most of us became aware of pink slime from the two thousand and eight documentary Food Ink. You remember all the noise it made.
Yeah, I just remember like thinking at the time it was so gross. It was on like magazine covers and things.
Everywhere everywhere, and it's not appetizing. I mean, pink slime got a lot of bad press for that. It was a two thousand and nine New York Times expos and it reported that BPI, the company who made LFTB, had been lowering the levels of ammonium hydroxide it used to treat it in response to complaints of the strong ammonious smell in meat. But the reduction of ammonium hydroxide caused several batches of burger destined for school lunches to test positive for E. Coli and salmonella.
Oh that's gross.
Yeah, there's this twenty twelve ABC News report that ran about LFTB. BPI eventually sued ABC and its parent company, Disney for defamation, but the damage was done by that point, so grocery chains said they would know longer carry pink slime. Sales plummeted for maybe five million pounds per week to less than two million pounds.
I mean, pink slime is legitimately disgusting. Be careful, though, because we don't want to get sued, so don't tell see too much. Yeah, I mean, pink slime is delicious right right in Cereal. But I think we're allowed to safely say that sea snot is gross? Is that? Okay?
I don't know. I don't know what sea snot is, but yeah, sure, I agree.
Sea snot are these thick, slimy, gray brown sheets known as marine mucilage, and they are made of dead and living organic material, but a lot of it is phytoplankton. And these microscopic algae usually help fill the ocean waters with oxygen, but when they're stressed, they can grow out of control and produce this sticky mucus like substance that can span miles. In twenty twenty one, turkeys Marmara sea.
It was actually overrun with sea snot, boosted by global warming and also from an overload of pollutants like wastewater and also pesticides.
Oh goodness, so ce snot could talk, it would probably say stop dumping poison on me, and I'll chill out a little bit.
Yeah. I mean, it's funny you say that, because that's something we tend to do with slimes, right, Like we treat them like they're sentient. And it seems like we've
done this for a while. So back in nineteen seventy three, a woman in Garland, Texas named Marie Harris, she found a mysterious slime oozing from the ground in her backyard, and she said it was reddish and foamy, it had this black mucus inside when it was punctured, and it also released this purple goo, so really really gross, And eventually she hacks it in half with a garden hoe, but two days later it's back, and it's doubled in size, and over the course of a couple of weeks it
grew to sixteen times its original size.
It definitely makes it sound like it's a lie, I know.
And a Dallas paper called it, quote the brooding and inscrutable organism, and it set off this minor media frenzy, and of course rumors start to spread that it had come from outer space, and it turns out it was just a slime mold, which you know, is gross, but soil dwelling amiba, these brainless, single celled organisms that you
see growing on forest litter and decaying wood. I mean slime molts don't have brains, but they actually are kind of smart mango, So how do you mean, Well, like you said, they don't have a brain, but slime molds can make really strange and sophisticated shapes, including.
Add this to the list, a replica of the Tokyo subway system. I mean that's pretty smart. They connect it. This is this is actually true. A group of researchers from the Hokkaido University in Japan placed FI serum policy fallum. Say it with me now, FI serum policyfallus in a petri dish scattered with oat flakes, and they sprinkled the food scraps in a pattern meant to replicate the locations
of some of the most visited sites in Tokyo. So first the slime mold size grew exponentially, and then it branched out, and then the the size of the branches started to shrink and eventually recreated this complex, interconnected network made of slimes that looks almost exactly like the Tokyo subway system.
See super smart, which is cool, but it also sounds like you can just like mold slime molds to look like art or architecture.
Yeah, I mean, it's so easy to endow this inanimate growth with intention. Actually, the original the Blob movie from nineteen fifty eight was probably inspired by slime molds because it's fun to imagine that the slime is actually thinking. But it's just a movie. It's not like slime can actually become aware and kill people, so you can relax.
Well. Actually, in twenty sixteen, there's a mass migration of snails that left a trail of slime on a German motorway and it caused a car crash. Or I guess a car surfing out.
Of control always comes back to the snails.
So there's one other thing about snail slim. I want to say, snails actually leave molecular messages, were potential mating partners in their trails, So it's not only a wave, but it's like uh tinder for snails.
Ah, that's pretty awesome. All right, Well, we've got a few more facts to get to, but before that, let's take a quick break. Welcome back to part time Genius, where we're still talking slime. Mengo and you know who loves slime mango cool youths.
Cool youths is not what they call themselves.
I don't know. They don't talk to me, but cool youth do love slime. In twenty seventeen, everyone on the Internet was trying to make their own slime. According to Google, the number one how to question of the year was how to make slime. Slime is even part of the cool youth secret internet slang mango.
The more you say it, the cooler. And yeah, I know, I know, cool youth.
Because everyone was so obsessed with making slime, a ton of these slime tutorial videos popped up on YouTube. So now when someone uploads a bootleg of a popular movie, they'll put in a slime tutorial in the title to bury the bootleg and a sea of legit slime tutorial videos.
I mean, that's I guess pretty smart because YouTube's much less likely to find and take down those videos. Right.
Yeah, so if you type like slime tutorial and for instance, mean Girls, you might get a bootleg of Mean Girl's movie musical. Not that we're condoning bootlegs. I just thought that was interesting.
Yeah, of course we're not. But as far as slime's involvement. It's pretty incredible that people are so obsessed with it, and slime tutorials are so prevalent that it's a good hiding place for like illegal recordings of comad movies.
Yeah, I mean, I gotta say that, after all these impressive slime facts, I have one remaining question, and that is what can't slime do?
Maybe that's a good cue for one of our old fashioned fact offs.
Let's do it.
All right?
Why did I kick this off?
So?
Did you know that slime has actually been to space? In twenty twenty, Nickelodeons sent about two leaders of slime to the International Space Station, where astronauts played with it to figure out how slime acts in weightless environments. That's
actually so cool that they got to do this. According to Nickelodeon, scientists shot it out of a giant syringe, popped a giant slime balloon, and plopped it on the ground to see if it would break apart and create a mess or stay clung together, Which is a super fun way to get kids interested in how materials react in these microgravity environments.
It's made me change my stance on slime. Now we can play with it in space.
All they want.
So here's a gross one. I'm not sure if you've ever seen a hagfish. Have you ever thing?
So I don't know.
There are these like eel like creatures. There are delicacy in some parts of the world. But one of the most amazing things about hagfish is the way that they create an enormous amount of slime. So this is according to The Atlantic science writer Ed Yong, hagfish produced slime the way humans produce opinions, he said, which is a
great line. But according to Yong, basically, when they're scared or stressed, they release a teaspoon of gunk, and in a fraction of a second, when that mixes with water, it expands ten thousand times and that single teaspoon can fill buckets. Wow, that goog can actually protect hagfish from sharks because it stops them from being able to like
breathe I guess. But there's actually a photo of Yong's Atlantic piece when a truck full of hagfish overturned and they spilled on a road in South Korea, and there's a car that's just covered in gunk. It looks like it is like slimed and it can't move. It is so funny and so horrific, you have to say it.
I definitely have to see that. All right, here's another quick one. So toy slime first became a thing in the nineteen seventies, and in nineteen seventy six Mattel released the first line. It was called Slime and it was sold in these little trash cans. I feel like it was sold in trash cans for years, right like, even when we were kids. And from there it slowly got incorporated into other nineteen eighties franchises, from Masters of the
Universe to of course Ghostbusters. But my favorite slime toy, which I first learned about doing through you know, a little bit of research sought on Wikipedia, there's this board game called Slime Monster, and the rules are amazing. So let me just read you this directly from the box. All right, the slime Monster has invaded the town. You've got to stop him. You must get from the high school to the armory, pick up a landmine and knock the slime monster over. But be careful that the slime
Monster doesn't knock you over with his slime. So basically, you keep trying to move this super gross, weird monster around, so he's standing over another player, and then you get to slime them, and if the slime knocks them over, they have to move back to the beginning. It actually makes no sense, so we just stopped playing this game. But it was a funny description.
So here's a sweet one. It's about Slimy the Worm Oscar the Grouches pet from Cemer. So I've always seen Oscar the Grouch. I known about Slimy, but this is
the origin story. So apparently the first time Slimy met Oscar was on a rainy day when Oscar went to the park to see mud puddles and he saw these other worms playing in one place, but there was this one baby worm playing alone, and then Slimy climbed up onto Oscar's shoulder and falls asleep, and Oscar takes them back to his trash can and feeds him strawberry sodas. That is where the friendship was born, which is, you know, almost too sweet a story for Oscar the Grouch, but
I really like it. But the funniest thing about the whole mythology is that Slimy actually has his own family. He's got parents, named Dusty and Eartha and a cousin named Squirmy, and also Rachel.
No it right, Rachel makes perfect sense. All right. Well, if you want any indication of just how big the DIY market is for slime, take a look at the
growth of Elmer's glue. According to The Washington Post, the trend really kicked off in twenty seventeen, like we were talking about earlier, partially inspired by social media and YouTube, but also because of the varieties of slime you could make, from sequence slime to glitter slime to cloud slime, and so, as Elmer's marketing director told The Washington Post, we shipped more glue in the month of July of twenty seventeen.
Then we shipped the entire year of twenty sixteen. It was a wild and crazy time.
That's insane, considering like they supplied glue to like every school.
In the game, everywhere. It's amazing.
So how about this one to closes out. If you want to make slime a career, why not consider becoming a slime tender at the Slumu Institute and twelve thousand foot Slime Museum in Manhattan. In addition to guiding kids through glow in the dark, slime caves, making their own slime at slime bars and slime waterfalls. You get to rev kids up by saying, when I say slime, you say times slime.
That's right. Wait, I have never heard of this place. It's in New York.
I have thought about taking Ruby and their friends to it, and it just feels like a nightmare.
Yeah, it really does. But when they say slime and you say time energizing, I think for that, I feel like you're gonna win the fact off today. So congratulations.
I am so honored, and I think the cool youth are really gonna the cool youths.
All right, Well that's it for this week's Part Time Genius. We're so excited to be doing this show again. Thanks so much for listening.
Part Time Genius is a production of Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio. This show is hosted by Will Pearson and Me Mongas and research by our good pal Mary Philip Sandy. Today's episode was engineered and produce by the wonderful Dylan Fagan with support from Tyler Klang. The show is executive produced for iHeart by Katrina Norvell and Ali Perry, with social media support from Sasha Gay, Trustee Dara Potts, and Viny Shorey.
For more podcasts from Kaleidoscope and iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.