Eaten Alive!

and that's off the album Picturesque. I highly recommend uh everyone go download the full song, the full album or whatever after the podcast. But it's great because it deals with the idea of being eaten alive, not only eating alive, but swallowed alive whole by an enormous whale, which I think, at the end of the day is sort of a primal fear that we have. And the reason I think that is because there are so much literature, children's literature

that is concerned with this idea. And if you are a small child, you are also concerned with it, right because you know that to some extent you are defenseless. Well yeah, and certainly a small child is a more corrective snack to various creatures they would otherwise hesitate to praying a human. Certainly, anyone, anyone who lives in Florida knows that the rules concerning alligators that they are more likely to eat children whole as well as dogs and whatnot,

then they are gonna eat the whole human whole. It's just a more attractive snack. Uh. And and again we we get back to the primordial mindset of humans that were not quite at the top of the food chain. There was the possibility things going to eat them. Now beaten whole, Well, that's a totally different scenario. And we'll discusses is this podcast rolls on. But but yeah, I could see, you know, definitely where that is. It's a

very primal fear. It is a primal fear. You see it in Hansel and Gretel, you'll see it in Little Red Riding Hood. Um. Last year there were five hundred German fairy tales that were unearthed from the eighteen hundreds and um they are very dark, grim like. Actually in the same period that Grim wrote The Grim Brothers and when the stories that I think was really interesting U featured a tale of a maiden who escapes a witch

by transforming herself into a pond. But then the witch kind of just slurps her up and the girl has to use a knife to cut her way out of the witch. So it's a survival story. And that's what I think is at the really the basis of this swallowed whole idea that death may be imminent, but maybe, just maybe you could escape it if you were whole. It's interesting. Uh, And and certainly it's it's again. It's a trope that comes back again and again in our

myths and our fictions. Obviously, there's a story of Jonah who's ordered by God to go to the city of Ninevah. But Jonah, he was He's a free thinker and then a bit of a coward, so he decided to go a different direction and not do what God told him. So God sent a storm to destroy his boat, and just to make sure that that the deed got done, also sent a whale or a giant fish, depending on

your you're reading, to swallow him whole. And then of course he lives inside the whale for a little bit, thinks long and hard about what he's done, and eventually the whale frees him. Uh. And then in fiction, we've seen various characters that either either wind up in the in the belly of a whale, or alive miraculously in the belly of another terrestrial creature or in an alien creature.

You see, like, there's Baron von Munchausen, there's myth the Lean, There's Pinocchio, There's Little Red Riding Hood, There's Isaac Clark, There's Boba Fette, there's hand Solo, there's John Voight in the belly of the Konda. Uh. So many, so many great family moments of various characters either almost becoming digested or or being partially digested, or just kind of magically held in the stomach of a creature and then eventually escaping.

Generally they escape either through the way that they came in or out the stomach well. And then there's the flip side, us as predators, right, we have a bit of an obsession with that, or we have in our

our past cultural histories. And you had mentioned in the last podcast um Sideshow Carney's ingesting frog's hole as a trick, right to to show to freak out really the audience, and then that frog surviving because they can breathe through its skin, so it's got some oxygen along with that glass of water in the in the sideshow Carney's body, and it can then regurgitate it. Yes, all right, So that's just something that I think really arrests our imagination.

But turns out that something called stomach frogs and boosom snakes and slugs and slugs were a thing back in the day, along the late eighteenth century. If you had a stray gastric symptom, like you know, flatulence or um, I must have stomach snakes lactose intolerance. Before you could even identify lactose intolerance, right, you would begin to suspect that you were harboring some sort of creature whole in

your digestive system. And people began to have these ideas like, well, you know, I was walking home and there's this pond, and I was thirsty, and I took a drink from it. Surely I swallowed a frog unbannach to me, or maybe some frog eggs or some snail eggs or something, and then it ends up hatching in you and then they're causing turmoil. And then in some cases there were reports where people claimed to have um pooped out live creatures and in some cases they would actually have them um

like in jars and whatnot. And it was it was quite a big, big idea and in the time to the ex it was creeping into actual medical medical literature

at the time. Um I did a blog post about this and about one of the positions New York position who who actually experimented this by feeding force feeding some live slugs to a dog and then uh peeking inside and having a little rummage around via surgery to find out if this if the slugs were intact, and of course the slugs were being broken right, like the surgeon actually made a fistula in the dog's stomach to take

appear into the stomach ak a whole stomach. Yes, yes, because the whole is a is a great way to find out what's going on inside of something, be at a house or a dog's stomach, or a cow's stomach or a human stomach. I mean, that's one of the ways we learned about what's going on in there. But but in reality, of course, these individuals were not um having slugs grow the maturity inside their their guts and

then crawling out their poop. Shoot, No, they were They were, you know, probably they came home from the lake or whatnot, and they had maybe there was a slug or a lizard attached to their swimsuit or their clothing. They found it in the vicinity of their bathroom or their their garments. They put one and two together with this strange stomach

ache they had. And and then if we've talked about with any kind of like paranormal experience, if the story is out there, if the storyline is established, it's easier

to fall into it. So the first person in the world to think, oh, my goodness, I bet I swallowed some slug eggs and I just pooped them all over the place, that person may have been a bit of a nut But like the the the sixth person, the fiftie person, the hundred and fiftieth person to come up with that, they had the pre existing storyline to fall into,

so it becomes less and less nutty. Yeah, And I was just thinking how that ties into some of the pathos that we've seen with witchcraft or some of the myth making that that comes out of that. So, yes, I fell asleep and an evil snake crawled into or slithered its way into my esophagus into my bowels. That's an example. I didn't really think that. Um. Yeah. But

back to the idea of being swallowed whole um. It Also it also gets into this this idea of of almost a desire and a comfort, which I think is interesting too, because on one hand, primal fear, nobody really wants to be eaten alive. Nobody really certainly wants to

be eaten whole and partially died, part possibly digested. Um. But you do have apparently this thing called voraphilia, which I was not aware of until I guess it was vaguely aware of it to via like the German cannibal trial, where we get one individual who was seeking looking for that special someone who might want to be eaten, might want to be eaten and would have this desire to

be eaten. But then there's a whole side of it that I discovered when I was researching the the winged devour creatures from BeastMasters, the ones that wrapped their caps from people and melt them down, really cool monsters. Um. Check out the blog post on that if you want. But but I ended up finding that there there's like a whole section of the Internet devoted to fantasies about them, about people sometimes been sell being eaten generally whole by

some sort of monster or a monstrous person. And it's it's very it's very strange. Um. But but so I'm trying to wrap my head around it, like, like what is it about that? And uh, And it never really made sense until I was reading this article that they

We're going to get into a little more uh. Later in the podcast by Ben Shattuck for Salon dot Com titled Swallowed by a Whale A True Tale question Mark, where he says that he he says this regarding being swallowed by whale, says, still, you'd like to think it's possible, you want to believe in an animal that can fit you inside them, that you might be consumed, not piece by piece, mouthful by mouthful, as sharks and bears would eat you, but wholly, to be encased as your full

self womb like, so returning to the womb. And it's kind of a return to the womb. It's kind of like, it's kind of like the idea of being eaten alive, eaten whole by a monster. He's kind of like a big hug. Now that's one of the types of for I feel you, that's the kind of the kinder, softer side of it. There are other types that aren't quite as Yeah, it's there's a whole l it's the Internet, so there's a whole dark corridor to vanish down if you so choose. But now that's that's not the reason

why we wanted to take you here. We wanted to take you here because we do think that at the core of this idea is this interest in like, what about being swallowed whole? What about escaping death? What about returning to lum in a sense as well? And what extent is it possible? To what extent has it actually happened? Uh, it's fascinating, um, fascinating area of discussion. And of course we have to turn to animals that actually swallow their prey alive and in many times whole to actually get

a beat on this subject. And that's the thing because obviously, when when you or I eat things, we tend to chew. We tend to We've just done an entire podcast about about smelling our food, tasting our food, and then chewing it up and transforming the food into uh, into a parcel that can be then sent through the rest of the justice system. So there are various creatures that don't do as much chewing. There are creatures that don't do

you know, any chewing for the most part. But cows on the opposite spectrum, by the way, choose something like sixty shoes a day and have like three stomachs. Well, they've got the room in then yeah, I don't know, I didn't know. I didn't know research cows for this one. So if you're thinking, hollis, what is the opposite of swallowing something? Hole is a cow? Yeah it's steady, yeah, steady digesting and chewing and process that goes on there. But you look at some of these other creatures like

snakes off and consume prey whole. Though, don't get your hopes too high, because pythons, for instance, killed before eating. There is an advantage to be had in killing something before you swallow it um and if nothing else, is just easier to the creature. Take like for instans, owls. Owls, you know they'll eat their prey whole, but they have these powerful beaks and uh, it's I'm quite a challenge to get past that powerful killing beak to make it

down into the rest of the owl hole. Um Likewise, crocodiles may swell pray hole, but then they'll also chop them up pretty good. I was looking at some rather horrifying photos of of supposedly, Again you never know what the Internet, and certainly when you start looking into accounts of people being eaten by animals and being eaten whole, there's a whole world of hoax out there that you

have to deal with. But I saw some some photographs supposedly of crocodile's stomach, a nile crocodile which do eat humans on a fairly regular basis, and they've cut it open, and there were some pieces of of what appeared to be human there, and it was not at one piece. Sharks obviously, as Mary Road points out in her book Gulp, they can and do eat like three turtles at once,

it's possible. But they're also pretty famous for their smiles, and they're not above In fact, they seem to relish chewing up their food to some extent before it goes down the whole. But then there is the the big one, the one that of course has mentioned in the December song at the start of this podcast, and the one that we're gonna spend the most time with, and that is the idea of the whale. This is, after all, this is the creature that supposedly swallowed both Noah and Pinocchio.

So it's kind of a big deal, especially when you consider the kind of food that are found in well whales bellies. I mean it's it's basically like a fish market in a belly when you cut these guys open. Yeah, specifically, um of the sperm whale is the big one here, because the sperm whale is eating fairly large prey. We're talking man size squid, we're talking sharks, we're talking bucket loads of fish, coconuts, what have you showing up in their stomach. And certainly the sperm whale exists on a

scale that dwarfs human. We're talking like a male sperm whale may weigh up to forty five tons that's and it maybe fifty two ft or sixteen meters long. I mean, it's just a scale of a living creature that dwarfs us so enormously. Like the idea of being consumed by a whole is even more powerful, well, you know, especially when you when you consider like, you know, sixteen of us could just hang out in the mouth, you know,

side by side, waving at each other. Um. And also if you consider that in nineteen fifty five, a four hundred and five pounds squid measuring six six six ft six inches minus the tentacles was recovered intact from a sperm whale. Yes, because look at that and you say, wow, like this, couldn't you just have a human in there? Yeah, because here's the thing with the with the with the sperm whale, as in evidence by the by that large squid whole in its stomach. They feed by suction a

lot of the times there're sucking the food down. Now, they do have some jaws as well. We're talking to twenty six banana shaped teeth on the lower jaw to fit into sockets in the upper jaw and uh. And these things are used to choose some stuff up. They don't always always chew them up. And you have to consider too that the squid is a Bonleus creature, right, So that's what you see to swallow. The only thing be in the beak, which we'll get to, which is

really interesting. Um. So yeah, let's get into this territory of what if what could you be swallowed by a whale? What would the conditions have to be in order for you to survive? Is it a myth? Or is it possible? Yes? Then this is this is uh. This topic has been explored both by Mary Roach and her book Goal, but also in this excellent Salon article by Ben Shattuck Swallowed

by a whale a true tale question mark. And so there have been a lot of stories over the years about people being swallowed by a whale, particularly out of the period in um in particularly American history, where a whaling was big medicine. Because this is where and even looking back on it, you can say, if there's a potential for this animal to swallow a human hole, this is it. Because as we mentioned, UH, the m whale is not really interested in eating um, you know, hairless

apes like ourselves as they fall off of ships. It's concerned with with eating deep and eating squid, eating sharks and what have you. We're not their food. But if you put you have an environment here where humans are actively hunting down sperm whales uh and trying to kill them, and then the whale retaliated is retaliating. It is and is no, slouch is quite a deadly creature, uh, in

in these encounters. So you end up with these these encounters like you see and read about in Moby Dick, like you see in a thousand different whaling m illustrations, where you have men in boats just battling the sperm whale and you see people just falling all over the place, falling into the open mouths of whales. Well, you also have whales who are breaching the water and then you know, chomping down on the whole of a ship. Okay, so

this is a possibility, and this this has happened. But of course, when you get these accounts, and let's say that you have an unlucky crew member who happens to be right there at that time, I'm that person is going to fall into the mouth right or or be part of just the wreckage and uh you know, maybe maybe they escape the mouth and they tell tale of it. But being in a whale's mouth is very different than

being in a whale's gut. Yes, now, one of the more amusing stories, and this is bogus, by the way, but it made the rounds pretty big for for a brief period. As the star of the east. The sub vessels bothically sailing around the Falkland islands and uh, you know, some some bad stuff happens, and someone ends up falling into a whale's mouth it's from west mouth and uh, and ends up in the stomach, and then it then escapes.

The stomach is eventually sped us spat out, and it's his skin is bleached white from the stomach acids, and he's he's somewhat horrified and shaken, as you might imagine, but he lives and everyone goes gaga over the story. But then it comes out that it was just it was made up. It was a hoax perpetrated by some

whitlers well. And one of the reasons why we know as a hoax is because the four stomach does not have gastric juices lulling about it, or rather, there's some question about what to what degree there would be stomach acids. So this idea that he would be ejected from it bleached is pretty erroneous. Well, on that note, let's take a quick break and when we come back, more of this adventure inside of the whale's stomach again, we're talking about the idea Canna can a sperm whale swallow a

human hoole? Can I swallow a man hole? If it was gonna happen, It was gonna happen during the heyday of whaling, when you had nine battling sperm whales to the death out in the middle of the ocean. As all the art illustrates, you have people falling into their mouths, falling into the water around them with his giant jaw

thrashing about. Well in in his article for Salon Ben Shattuck he actually visited the new Bedford Whaling Museum research Library, and he was looking into all these accounts of whale deaths, situations where crew members died because of a whale, and a lot of these were caused by whale on boat ash action or especially the thrashing of the of the giants flukes the tail fins as they thrash out of the water. We've all seen pictures of the of the tail of the whale coming out of the water, and

it's and this is a an enormous thing. Again, these are these things away tons, These are behemoths, these are well more to the point, these are le viathans and uh and they can and do crush boats when they're in close proximity to them when they're breaching the water. Well. Of course, you have the cartoons too of people being swallowed whole and then being ejected out of the blowhole.

You know, there's this idea of just being sent through the digestive system of the whale is pretty deeply entrenched in our cultural fabric. Yeah. And then some people were chomped by these by by the job and the jaws

moving on. The job does have teeth, And there's some pretty gruesome accounts of this, but one particular Edmund Gardner, and I'll try to include I'll try to put a photograph of this up on the website when this episode airs, because there's a there's a fairly famous photo of him, and he's sitting there in his black and white photo.

You know, he's sitting there in his chair posing, uh, and you can clearly see that one of his hands is just a stump, like a just a mangled stump with no fingers on it, and that is due to a whale light he fell in uh and uh nearly died. Yeah. And again, you know, these stories get circulated as being swallowed by the sale and what we're talking about here semantics, because if someone were to be in the mouth, yes, they could escaped from the mouth, hopefully with their lives intact,

but not again be digested. And that's where you see this idea being taken for granted, like you could be swallowed by a whale. Yeah. And again it comes back to this idea that it is such a compelling story. It's such a compelling idea. I was swallowed whole, and then I was in a way that you know, I returned to the womb, and then I was born again out of the whale stomach, out of the sharks by

a whale. Yeah, because we both ran across this one story as we were researching this where of course we're doing all these Google searches and and uh and you know, academic article searches for swallowed alive by and then throwing in shark and whale and muskrat or whatever we happen to be looking for. And uh. And there was a

story from a couple of years back. I think, um that made the rounds, I want to say, in the Telegraph or one of the major British guardian Guardian, I think and uh in the headline was something to the effect of man partially swallowed hole by shark, which which it was. You know, they at least knew better than to say in the headline that he was swallowed hole, because the whole story was he was in he was sort of partially in a shark's mouth for a little

bit being chomped on, and then he escaped. And not to discount that that's a miracco's story, Like that is the kind of thing where you that incident defines your life, um for the duration I was in a shark's mouth and I didn't die completely, um, but they had to. They felt like they had to dress it up and at least tease the possibility that he was swallowed whole. Well.

And what I love about Ben Shaddock's article in Salon is that he takes on, uh, not just the research of like you know, is it's plausible, but this the imaginary realm of like what would this look like if it actually happened, If circumstances were perfect and you somehow were able to get past those those gnashing teeth right, and somehow you didn't asphyxiate, you know it, with a

lack of oxygen as you traveled into the belly. What would it look like if you're in the fourth stomach, drawing on his article in Salon, drawing a little bit on Mary Roach's book Gulp, which is again is excellent and everyone should pick that up, and also drawing on a little outside research and our own imaginations, let's go through that journey. Let's let's imagine being consumed by a whale. Now, the first thing, of course, of course, is we have

to think about those teeth again. We have to get past those teeth without having any of ourselves torn away, And then we have to be sucked down that esophagus, which in Shattuck's article he describes this way, says, imagine a black and mucous smothered tube, socks slipping over you suck down into the holding bag holding bag, the four stomach of the sperm whale. That's right, we're talking about seven feet long by three feet wide, shaped like a big egg. Uh. He says that there will be lots

of other things in there. You would likely be joined by squid, but a coconut or shark might come to Most squid that sperm whales swallow are bioluminescent. The neon flying squid is a favorite. So no time at all, you'd be bathing in a pool of phosphorescence, a slew of green yellow light winking around you, like you were standing in a field in Maine come July when all the fireflies are sparking up. The rest would be black,

very black. That's beautiful. It's beautiful, and it's uh. First of all, it brings to mind us something to marry. Roach I mentioned in her book the blanket effect. She's talking about some experiments to see whether worms can eat their way out of the belly of a sale lizard or frog or a snake that has consumed it. And they talk about the blanket effect where the animal is so it's again kind of hugged by being swallowed alive

and kind of goes into a comatose state. Um so, and so I can't help but think of like the hug machine, uh and and just the feeling of the cozy feeling being wrapped up in a blanket. Um except of course, this would be a mucous covered stomach that

is holding it with some serious contraction strength. Yeah, I think, but unlike the like the scene in Pinocchio, it wouldn't be this vast chamber that is more or less the size of the whale in which you could set up shop on a little you know, floating dany, have a tin, cook food and have conversations or strangle um a you know, a hated enemy to death inside the belly of the

We'll get to that part in a bit. But the interesting thing about the fourth stomach is that there's there's no acid present present, or that's the predominant theory right now. So I was looking around in a number of websites that are really into the idea of Joan in the whale. Uh, really lashed onto this idea because I mean, I love the story of Joan in the Whale. It's one of the great stories to come out of Judeo Christian beliefs.

But as always, there there are some people who want to have a very literal interpretation of these, uh, these iconic tales, and so they look for ways that science and religion can line up. And so we found this fabulous diagram of a sperm whale's stomach that shows although the different layers of the four stomach, the main stomach, et cetera. And then you see the icon the outline the silhouette of a little boy in prayer in the fourth stomach to show this is where Jonah wound up.

This is where he hung out and prayed for prayed to God, and then God eventually it all right, You're you're all right, Jonah, you can you can go free. And then he's he spat out of the whale um, which you know, it's certainly if there's a place that you're going to remain whole inside of a sperm whale and and have a long hard you know, think about what you've done, Like that's where it's going to happen.

But as Mary Roach points out, in gulp um, there's gonna be a lot of stuff competing for your attention there, and uh, it's going to be pretty greesome. Yeah, I mean, essentially it is a large area and it does seem to be devoid of gastric juices. But you would be smashed because if you look at this diagram, you see that the little holding tank to that four stomach as a tiny little tunnel leading to the other stomach chambers.

Something you're gonna go, right, if you're gonna go through that that tunnel to those other ones, you're gonna get

smashed to pieces. Now, Mary Roach had said she couldn't figure out what the stomach pressure of those contractions would be in a sperm whale, but she did have information from French naturalist Renee you are, and he conducted an experiment on a small raptor, and he found that the only material that emerged from the from the gizzard uncrushed was lead tubes that could withstand five hundred pounds of pressure. So this gives you an idea of the contraction strength

and a small raptor. But what about in a sperm whale just much larger and swallowing things whole and having to really use a ton of pressure to get through that tiny, tiny little tunnel to the other chambers. Yeah, because the the muscular walls inside that four stomach three inches thick. This is that you were. You were inside the crush zone. It is just because the whale didn't chew you with its teeth. Uh, don't don't get excited, because you're about to be chewed with the fourth stomach.

The four stomach is gonna ground you up into a small enough pieces that can pass into the main stomach. You know, this would make for a great haunted house. Yeah, these little chambers of digestion, don't you think it would? It gets h you know it. It's pretty bad, pretty quick. So obviously, if you're going to pass from the four stomach to the main stomach, um, you're not going to

be alive for the main stomach. Assuming you miraculously made it to the four stomach, then it's just gonna be a slurry and chunks to make it to the main So in the main stomach, this is where the acid comes into play. This is where stuff will be broken down even more into a into a dissolving mass. This is where you're gonna have more and more enzymes and

more and more liquification of your former body. Yeah. This this is where Shatic, in his description of trying to survive being swallowed whole, sort of seeds to well, this is the part where you become liquid goo. In his explanation, he says that liquidated you would ooze into the intestine and eventually leave the whale as excrement, floating out of the anus and into the cold deep ocean, dissolving still further until you have become so small as debris. But

you were indistinguishable from the ocean itself. You would lap against whaling ships looking for whales, which is which is really the most beautiful description of a man to whale poop transformation I've ever read. Now. Now, of course, there are things that do not digest entirely inside of a sperm whales digestion system in the same way there are things that don't that don't digest completely in our own systems,

one of which is the beak of the squid. There's a lot of these giant squid gulps him down, sucks him down whole in some cases. But but that beat doesn't really go away all that easily. No, And what it does is it passes through the whales intestines wholly, other bones to write of other creatures. And along the way it's screeched the intestinal line in creating scar tissue, which is then passed in a new form called ambergeese. Yes.

And this is the precious commodity that is uh that is often sought after by by perfumest Yeah, it is the precious actually, and that is the because it is about six dollars per pound to purchase and use in perfume. And it turns out that Egyptians burned it as incense.

So the idea here that Shaddock puts forth is that, okay, sure, now you've passed through the digestive system and your bones are helping to create, uh, you know, one of the most beautiful smells on earth in the form of this ambergeese. And that wouldn't be too bad at least there's a silver lining right to to your your your crushing death inside the fourth stomach and then your continue digestion in the main stomach and beyond. Yeah, you've contributed to genite.

That's a joke by Perkingum probably Shanel number five or something like that. Yeah, something along those lines. Um. But you know that that the ambergas also joins the cats of it, right the gland the anal glands of the cats of it, which is also you just imperfume. So there you go. Out of out of darkness comes a light always always um, all right, So I have a question for you. Would you rather be swallowed whole by you're us this? I think a vulture, a human, or

a penguin. Well, um, these would have to be pretty big penguins and they would have to be Okay, imagine that you either shrink yourself down or the penguin just can miniaturize. Okay, we menatorize, and uh, and I'm going to be eaten whole by one of these creatures. Well I'm from well, from reading Mary Roach's book, I know that the penguin is supposedly the preferred method of death here bingo, because it's kind of like a chronic suspension

down there. Yes, that's that's a that's a great description of it. Because penguins have to travel a long distance back to feed they're young, they essentially use their stomachs as a freezer to transport it, so they lower the temperature and their stomachs and this this geese is digestion. Well, as long as I have a way to cease my

need for breath, I guess I'm good. Because that's another big thing that most of these, most of our dreams and nightmares of of whole consumption by us some sort of enormous predator forget, is that we do have to breathe, and uh, and we need our air and how are we going to get it inside the belly of a monster?

We mentioned the frogs earlier, Like the old Carney trick, of you swallow a frog along with a bunch of water, and then within a very short period of time and you know, in other words, the the amount of time between you swallowing the frog and spitting them up during your carnival act. The frog is able to live inside your stomach because the frog, uh pretty durable to begin with, this cut coded and productive slime, and also breathe through

its skin sort of the oxygen from the water. But but you and I we cannot do that, so we would kind of be up a creek inside the belly of just about anything, be it, uh, the chili guts of a penguin or the phosphorescent crushing beauty of the sperm whales. Four stomach It's true, it's not a feat to try. Actually, yeah, well, on that note, let's close out our discussion of sperm whales with just a little more from the Mariners Revenge song by the Simbrist off

the album Pigaresque. Don't know how I survived the crew all was due to live. I must have slipped between his teeth. But oh, what providence, what divine intelligence that you should survive as well as made it is my eye great try to see your green clothes, and I will whisper the last where and I of how on that song he he does mention that he that he had to get past the teeth like that most of the sailors were crushed up or didn't make it that far, but only two of them actually wound up in the

belly of the whale. You know, this is a song that I love to read the lyrics, um better than I Actually, I like to listen to the song, and the song is wonderful and actually I think you should put headphones on listen to it. Um. It's it's an epic length song. But it is such a good story. It's such a it seems like such a nautical tale

brought to life by the December. Yeah, I mean, because it begins it's a story told by one man to another inside the belly of a whale, with secret identities and play and longstanding um, you know, vengeance in the works. It's it's it's got all the cliches in and it's told in such a fresh way that anyway, I love it every time I take a gainder at it or listen. Alright, well, on that note, let's uh, let's call the robot over here and just do just a quick you know, one

or two listener mail. Bring no more to me, robot, just one or two. All right, here's a little bit of listener mail um coming to us from Stephanie. And this is cool because this one is about our episode about regurgitation, so it kind of ties into what we're talking about here, she says. Hi, Julian Robert, I have to say, as everyone does, I absolutely love the podcast. You guys get me through a night after night of mindless sweeping and mopping at the kennel I work at.

I'm writing in response to the Regurgitation Celebration podcast. I love that you guys mentioned vultures because I have a soft spot in my heart for these amazing creatures. I did an internship and Slash volunteered at a nonprofit Raptor Rehabilitation and Education center for three years, and they had two turkey vultures that were unreleasable due to injuries. You know this of course often the case. They'll have their

their wings don't work anymore. They can't really live their lives in the natural world anymore, but they can be a part of you know, they can live here peacefully, and they can be part of an educational UM, an opportunity UM. She continues, while one of them got used to me coming in cleaning every day, the other named a Dante, which I also, of course, did not every day, No matter how gently and quietly I tried to enter the enclosure, Dante's reaction was to hawk up a nice

steaming pile of vomit. I must say, even after three years and a whole mess of repulsive odors, there is still nothing I've encountered quite as repulsive as vulture puke. If I were a predator and had vulture vomit land anywhere near me, I would definitely high tail it out of their A S A P. Just as you said, Robert, it really is a magnificent defense mechanism, and while most

may disagree, I find them absolutely beautiful. I would fully support a podcaster or two about the amazing behaviors or adaptations in the raptor world, like the awesome vulture, though not really a bird of prey. Keep doing the fan fascinating podcast, you guys do fondest regards. Stephanie from Connecticut. I love that firsthand account of vulture vomit right there. Yeah, indeed, that's a that's a great that's a great little story there. And uh and yeah, there were a lot of fascinating

raptors out there. I don't know if I've taught much recently, but I do love the Lambur Guyers. The Lambur Guyers probably my one of my favorite, haven't recently the one that drops bones from high altitudes under rocks. All right, Well, there you have it. Uh, if you have any thoughts you would like to share with us about regurgitation, about vultures, about Lambur Guyers, or more to the point, about sperm whales eating humans alive, about any other animal eating people alive,

people being swallowed whole. Um, you're looking at me kind of concerned. Uh no, And I'm just gonna say, but not people eating people, right right, that's that's a totally different podcast. That would be incriminating, none of that. But certainly any stories of of monsters eating people whole. I mean, it's uh that we that we should mention in pop culture and fiction and myth etcetera. We'd love to share

that with everyone. If you have thoughts on the the sperm whale journey that we have presented with you, here let us know about that as well. Where can you find us? Well, are a lot of places these days. First and foremost Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership for everything we're doing these days. You can find a podcast there, you can find the video episodes there, you can find our blog posts, you can find pictures of us. You mean, you name it,

it's there. But you can also find us on Facebook. You can find us on tumbler. We are stuff to Blow your Mind and both of those. We have a Twitter account of course, where our handle is blow the Mind. And hey, if you go to YouTube, you and you look up mind stuff show, that is where all of our videos are. That's right. Check it out, Check it out, and you can always drop us on lines at blow the Mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.