Morbid Mondays - Episode 25 - Discussion episode - Elixir's of life

Today we discuss humanities attempts at eternal life. As well as some possible new versions of the fabled alchemy.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

One.

SPEAKER_00 0:01

All right.

SPEAKER_03 0:02

Everything's wrong with me.

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Yeah. Jeez. Greetings.

SPEAKER_02 0:08

Hello.

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to or welcome back to Morbid Mondays, your unhinged source for what the fuck moments throughout history. We will uh where we will take turns giving you the weekly tour of all of the gross, gory, and downright odd moments in history. I will never memorize this. I know. I read it all the time. We are your hosts. I am Brian.

SPEAKER_03 0:30

I'm Katie.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Now let's get into it. Yes. We are both kind of ill. You are ill, ill. You are sick. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:40

Unfucking fortunate.

SPEAKER_00 0:42

We are. I am my arm's killing me. My whole body hurts.

SPEAKER_03 0:46

Just that's what you get for doing like hundred-pound flyaways.

SPEAKER_00 0:50

Yeah, works.

SPEAKER_03 0:51

In slow motion, Brian.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

That's it's a slow decline.

SPEAKER_03 0:57

You're insane.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

So you widen everything. That's the 50s. That's what I was. That's how that happened. Very slow. Very slow workouts hurt.

SPEAKER_03 1:06

Man knocked his shoulder out of place.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:09

I'm a rat on your ass.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Popped it. Only barely, though. It's just a big thing.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

I will invest all on you. Do not think I won't.

SPEAKER_00 1:19

That's I made the like rookie mistake though. I jumped back into working out and I just went too hard.

SPEAKER_03 1:24

Yep. You know, like that's I almost did that when I started working out again, and then I was like, bitch, no. You remember what happened last time? Uh-uh. You couldn't fucking move for two weeks. No.

SPEAKER_00 1:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:34

Put the weights down, grab the resistance bands. You're starting from zero.

SPEAKER_00 1:37

Fucking, and I'm getting I'm getting older, which is um why today's episode is on medicine.

SPEAKER_02 1:44

Oh, joy.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

Here we go. Specifically, medicine that might make you young forever.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Okay. What in the philosopher's stone?

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Oh, no shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

Yeah, and well, that and many other things. So uh Alchemy! Yeah. The episode elixirs of life go back for like forever. Yes. Right. In fact, one is in the epic of Gilgamesh, where Gilgamesh seeks out a plant at the bottom of the sea after getting advice from like a mythical Moses type guy. Um, just there's always an old man in the woods. Yes, you know, it's dangerous to go alone, Link.

SPEAKER_03 2:22

Take this. That guy. Some soggy tart in the lake throating your sword.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Um, and then uh also, you know, like, but yeah, that and and a ton of other stuff. There's uh Amrita, and I'm sure I'm probably saying some of these wrong. Um, the elixir of life in Hindu scriptures, it said that uh eating or drinking a small bit of this, which is a nectar, will give you eternal life. Uh it was eaten by very similar to ambrosia. Yeah, it's by the the divas uh drink it, and it it it is supposed to give them a mortality, but they can still be killed, I think. Um and it's made, at least in one of the uh scriptures, from the churning of the oceans between gods and demons, and then like something in that process.

SPEAKER_03 3:12

You know, that's how we got Aphrodite.

unknown 3:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

That's a euphemism for sex. Yeah, I was like, that's cool. Uh I mean, but very poetic, and and some of these some of these are less so. Yeah, we'll go into the other ones a little bit later. But the Chinese believed, um, and a lot of our a lot, let me let me backtrack a second. A lot of these myths are based around uh properties of things. Uh and past the like epic of Gilgamesh and some of the because the the Hindi stuff and the epics go back so far in time that we're kind of like pre-Greece, pre-China. And so when we get into the a little bit later, um the Chinese are gonna look at it differently, and so do the Greeks, um, and many other people as well. But they believe in ingesting um precious substances, and and we'll get into why that is, but in their medicines, they put things like jade and gold and cinnabar, strangely enough, into a lot of their like alchemical um their alchemical mixtures that they're trying to seek uh eternal life. And one of the reasons they do that is because these things don't tarnish.

SPEAKER_03 4:28

So something something that our audience may not know about me, that I know for a fact that you know about me, is that I am addicted to Chinese period dramas. Yeah. I love those things. Um the short ones and like the great long, like beautiful epics. I love those. But every I've noticed that there is almost always, always an alchemist and an uh and an astronomer.

SPEAKER_00 4:54

Yes.

SPEAKER_03 4:55

In every series.

SPEAKER_00 4:56

So let me tell you why that is. So the reason why is because in these uh searching things for eternal life, in China specifically, they had two separate like philosophies about this. So one was the path of like Taoism, and Taoism had this belief that a lot of the early Taoist uh alchemists believed that you could go out and find physical things that were that had the properties of non-corruption. So if we think of it like precious metals, they don't tarnish. Yeah, like gold. Yeah, and they don't react to anything. So they always stay in their state. So the idea is that you take something like Jade, which doesn't really change no matter what you do to it. You boy.

SPEAKER_03 5:39

But according to every drama I've ever watched, shatters so easy.

SPEAKER_00 5:43

It's very fragile. Yeah, it's it's you can't like yeah, smash it on anything, right? Um, but because of that, they figure, well, if you ingest it, maybe you can take on some of the properties. A lot of the stuff that they would use in these are are what they called the four yellow medicines. And uh so it's like sulfur, and so in large amounts, which will definitely do a lot of damage. Um and it smells bad, and it smells terrible, yeah. So like eggs, cinnabar is one that's in a lot of their recipes, yes, which is super toxic.

SPEAKER_03 6:16

So I never knew what that was, and I still don't have the greatest grasp of it because like I I will occasionally run into it in Minecraft, and I'm like, ha, Cinnabon. Yeah, and then I realize that it's like, you know, no, no, that's an actual like rock.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

Yeah, I want to say it's like mercury sulfate or something like that. I know it has mercury in it.

SPEAKER_03 6:34

There is so much quicksilver, mercury in in all of that medicine.

SPEAKER_00 6:41

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:42

And it frightens me because that'll kill you.

SPEAKER_00 6:44

Yeah, a ton of mercury, because then mercury is another one of those. So, and that actually is a great segue to one of the other properties that a lot of these early like alchemical mixtures were looking for. Gold is the ultimate, it doesn't change.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:58

Right? Because it doesn't matter what you do to it, you can mix it into other things and it will come out of those things. It doesn't alloy well, not really.

SPEAKER_03 7:06

Um but it plates like a champ.

SPEAKER_00 7:09

And what they were trying, a lot of people were trying to do is make a permanent liquid gold. No, not using heat, right? No, it's a metal, it doesn't want to do it how that works. Uh, but mercury does. Yeah. And so mercury has that liquid metal property to it. Another kind of like philosophical thing is that things like liquids or gases have more like life energy, right? Because they're they're moving. They're and we still kind of do this. If you go into like any current woo-woo shop, there there's a lot of the feeling that like things that that are bright smelling or citrusy have more life, have more energy in them. And that it's strangely, to some degree, that's kind of true, you know, like because liquids molecularly are moving around more, gases are moving around more than like reinvigorating. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 8:02

And so like or just invigorating in general, not necessarily re.

SPEAKER_00 8:05

Yeah. Re I'm gonna hit this corpse with some oranges. Uh wake up.

SPEAKER_03 8:12

Uh wake up, Mr. President. Here's your vitamin C.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

But so, like, moving on from that little bit, uh, because now we've kind of talked like we're kind of into the subject.

SPEAKER_03 8:22

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

Potions that make you immortal and the people who sought them.

SPEAKER_03 8:27

Allegedly.

SPEAKER_00 8:28

Allegedly, right? And there are some that like when you read through some of these old texts, they call they say, like, oh, and this is the immortality potion. And there's a weird thing that happens where there's kind of an assumption that even that even if you have the recipe, because we're not in science, right?

SPEAKER_03 8:46

No, no, no. We are firmly in woo territory.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, when you when you get into like old Taoist um pharmacological. Yeah, yeah. This is like some of this stuff is really interesting, and in some cases, they were correct about a lot of things. They could treat like infections and stuff with a lot of that.

SPEAKER_03 9:04

They accidentally got it right.

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Yeah, by just fucking around constantly. Um, and so like the people who tried to find out how to do that and how they tried the polls. Well, I I'll go ahead and give a couple of ones that are really interesting to me. We talked a little bit about the uh like the Chinese stuff, and I I'm not gonna go super into the individual names because there are so many.

SPEAKER_03 9:31

Oh, yeah, it's insane.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah, it's like, and some of these people probably didn't really exist. We do have a couple of their like um I mentioned very briefly earlier that we have some of their like recipes. People found some of their recipes. They absolutely will not make you live forever, they might make you live much shorter, actually. Um, but it's kind of assumed that even if you have it, you might not be able to make it. And the reason why is because you're not one of those like semi-magical human beings, right? Like when we talk about like old Taoist sages or these astrologers that are really big at the time, um they are kind of wizards in a way in the stories, right?

SPEAKER_03 10:17

Like they they have secret knowledge of all kinds of stuff, or uh, or they have fantastical ingredients like thousand-year-old ginseng. And uh some of these ingredients get crazy, especially when you start looking at like the uh the the Chinese, like the ancient Chinese medicines and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 10:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 10:32

Like it's if you really had that, that's very, very cool, but I don't think you had that.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Yeah, I don't I don't think you had it. And if you didn't, if you also sometimes they mention things, or this this is the the case in some old Japanese mythology and a couple of other places throughout the world, but it might be like all right, you've got the ingredients, but do you have the spider teapot? You know what I mean? Yeah, like you have to have the special thing to make the thing, and don't forget your unicorn tears. Yeah, they're right. This is the most the the most like insane together things, which means that it's like impossible if you present this to a you know tongue-era emperor of China. It's like impossible for you to prove that it's real, yeah, but also impossible for them to prove that you're a charlatan because they can never find the thing.

SPEAKER_03 11:23

The earliest snake oil.

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Yeah, so like the some of the patrons of these earliest people were like straight up emperors.

SPEAKER_03 11:30

Oh, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

And like like Dude, King Henry VIII was like down bad. Yeah, give me that unicorn horn, which is really like just a nar a discarded narwhal horn, or like a bizarre, which is like a gallstone. Correct, good job. This is not gonna do anything for you. Rub this gallstone on your chest, it'll get rid of poison.

SPEAKER_03 11:51

Grind this gallstone up and drink it, and it will neutralize every toxin. No, it won't.

SPEAKER_00 11:56

You're right.

SPEAKER_03 11:56

You are incorrect.

SPEAKER_00 11:58

Some of this alchemy led us to a great deal of scientific discovery. In the 1660s, a guy named Henning Brand um was searching for the philosopher's stone. As they do, as they do, and a lot of like Rosicrucians and other alchemists were looking for a theoretical philosopher's stone, which was either liquid gold uh in many cases, in many writings, or uh, and that is when I say liquid gold, I mean cold liquid gold, um, which was thought to be an acid of some form. Metals like mercury that would take a liquid metal form but be cold to the touch. That made no sense to them because all other metals require extreme heat. So, right, because there's their regular state, and that's the thing, right? Iron is liquid, not at our atmosphere and our temperature. It's only liquid when you add a lot of heat to it. But there are some that will maintain a liquid state in our atmosphere and our temperature. So, like, to them, they didn't know any of this, they were kind of unlocking the secrets of the world while they were still in the fuck around before they got to the find out, right? And so to them, to some of these people, especially in like the medieval period, this was just straight up magic. Yeah, they were like unlocking the secrets of God, you know, like and the when when they said elements, they meant fire, sand, yeah, stuff like that, right? Henning Bronn discovered phosphorus.

SPEAKER_03 13:27

Really?

SPEAKER_00 13:28

Yeah, so he he figured out that he by adding uh certain things to a boiling, like a a really, really hot calcium or a retort, he could turn it into a gas and then cool that gas almost like you do alcohol, uh, and then certain things would crystallize out.

SPEAKER_03 13:46

That's neat. So it's like early distillation, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

But with uh with with like gases instead of liquids, right? Uh and not turning into liquids, but trying to get like pastes or solids to drop out.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

That's nuts. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:00

So he would add something else into where it was distilling into to get it to like combine. They don't know anything about chemical bonds or anything like ionic bonds or anything like that. He's just fucking around a lot. What he was trying to do was turn other things into gold, right? So he was trying to find this liquid metal to to turn things into gold. He actually had a recipe in one of his things to turn like things into silver. Obviously, that does not work. But this is something that he wrote about phosphorus. I found this super interesting when he got it to crystallize out. Because phosphorus glows.

SPEAKER_03 14:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:41

And so they had already discovered that there were a couple of stones that if you left out in the daylight and then brought them into dark, they would glow. And so phosphorus has a kind of like bright glow to it at all times.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

Typically like a greenish.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

Yes. Yeah, once he we could could get it into a powder, he said it was kind of like a pale green glow.

SPEAKER_03 15:01

Hey!

SPEAKER_00 15:02

And uh and this remembering shit. This like this philosophy and and all of this alchemy, this shows up tons of times. Right? Like when we have these things that are like milk of milk of magnesia, that's old science. A milk of something is like a white acid.

SPEAKER_03 15:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:23

And so, like, or anything like that, right? Any kind of like white solution that comes out of something, and that is bismuth. So, like, or mag magnesia, sorry, but there is bismuth powder. They there's a milk of bismuth.

SPEAKER_03 15:37

Well, I mean, that's pepto.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Yes, pepto, right? Like, so there's there's all that kind of shit, right? They were doing all of this in their little home labs, trying to figure out how to get this various philosopher stone.

SPEAKER_02 15:49

I tried to make gold, but I made a pink goo. What happened?

SPEAKER_00 15:52

And then a lot of um, a lot of acids come out of this process because they're trying to what they're what they're doing is that they're putting things like copper and other metals and other like things that are just common in the world and dissolving them in acids, stronger and starter acids, and not really understanding what's happening.

SPEAKER_03 16:13

What kind of acids would they have had like access to at that point? Like obviously vinegar.

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Yeah, they would have they would have um malic acid, because that's from fruit.

SPEAKER_03 16:23

And probably ammonia, because they were cleaning stuff with urine.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Yeah. Well, that's actually back to our story. Hey, how you get phosphorus is that you distill urine. Because a small amount of your urine is phosphorus. So yeah, and and and getting ammonia, and then you keep going.

SPEAKER_03 16:42

Look at me getting us back on track. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:45

So that's there's a rumor that some of the people who are listening to this may have heard this guy died from drinking urine because there was a person who like thought you were peeing your life force out.

SPEAKER_03 16:56

Dude, there are nut bars that are doing it right now.

SPEAKER_00 16:58

Yeah. Really wild shit. And so, and there's this idea that we found phosphorus because the person died from like a phosphorus overdose or something like that. That's not true, that's not what happened. There was a guy that thought you were peeing your life force out. That's like Galen's humor theory that you were getting rid of too much of one kind of bile. So he was trying to add it back in.

SPEAKER_03 17:20

No, you are you are pissing out all of the toxins your body said, I don't want this.

SPEAKER_00 17:24

Yeah, which even goes against Galen's theory, because Galen's theory was like, oh, you're peeing. That's getting rid of a certain kind of, you know, like a certain kind of bile. Yeah. You should be doing that. You know, like his thought was that if you were sick, maybe you needed to pee more. Some of these various things are mentioned as like the waters of eternity or something like that, right? We we have specifically the conquistadors were looking for a fountain of youth. Um, you have And they thought it was in Florida. Yeah, right. And yeah. Boy, were they wrong. It's quite the opposite. That's gonna become kind of relevant here in a moment.

SPEAKER_03 18:05

No, you found the swamp of doom.

unknown 18:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:09

Meanwhile, at the Justice League. Uh-huh. Uh there's there's so that was so that's a that's a big theme in all these, actually, is that like what they're looking for, they end up doing the exact opposite of. They look for these like waters of life and then they die. The uh Ishkabaha is the Irish word, the Gaelic word for water of life, uh, which is what they call whiskey.

SPEAKER_03 18:42

As you should.

SPEAKER_00 18:44

Yeah. And for for at least that one makes sense, right? When you drink, you feel more alive, right? So people see the next morning. There's that consequence. There's a lot of things like that. They're like, oh, this is the water of life. Because waters and these kind of like fluids are thought to be more like infused with life. Their shine seems to make a a certain amount of uh a certain amount of of weight into this, at least in Europe.

SPEAKER_03 19:13

That tracks for mercury, because that was part of the reason that it was considered one of the like I I hesitate to say holy, but it was like it was considered like super magical.

SPEAKER_00 19:24

So let's uh circling back, right? We talked about how they were looking for liquid gold.

SPEAKER_03 19:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:29

Right? What's the uh liquid mercury called?

SPEAKER_03 19:31

Quicksilver.

SPEAKER_00 19:32

Quick silver.

SPEAKER_03 19:33

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

So they they have liquid silver, yeah, which they don't know is not silver at all. No, they're gonna learn that pretty quick.

SPEAKER_03 19:40

Once again, highly toxic.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah, still gonna kill you. All these things are like really bad. Moving back to China, it was this quest that led monks in the ninth century to develop a new substance. Instead of liquid gold, it was black. The color of charcoal uh used as its base. This new elixir new elixir was the culmination of a rich alchemical history throughout China, combining potassium nitrate, sulfur, and charcoal. Sorry to disappoint everyone, but this will not make you immortal. Uh, in fact, it will make you very sick if you eat it. Uh, and if you put a cap full of it into a big metal tube, you might be able to make other people die rather quickly. Uh, but of course, I'm talking about gunpowder. Gunpowder came out of the search for in a a elixir of immortality. Um, so did many, many, many things throughout the Chinese alchemical tradition. But I that's one of like to me in the place of fireworks. Yes. And in bomb arrows, we have a diagram that I looked at while looking up all of this stuff. That it it's an arrow with like a round catchment, like a ring that you put gunpowder in. It's a flame arrow, so it's a big like bodkin-tipped arrow. You dip in the pitch and shoot, and when it lands, the flame, of course, burns up, hits the gunpowder, and explodes.

SPEAKER_03 21:08

Jesus.

SPEAKER_00 21:08

That's some Assassin's Creed shit.

SPEAKER_03 21:11

It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Ancient Chinese weapons are awesome.

SPEAKER_03 21:14

Yes. Like for real, straight up. The OGs.

SPEAKER_00 21:19

Yes. Fucking, yeah. Like direct artillery, arrow launchers, all kinds of shit.

SPEAKER_03 21:25

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

So we've got like looking through all of these things, it's amazing to have how many of them are like, oh, this we're looking for eternal life. What did you make?

SPEAKER_02 21:35

A bomb.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Bomb. We're looking for eternal life. What did you make? High proof of alcohol. We're looking for eternal life. What did you make? It's a drink, it's fillful of cyanide. Like it's every time What if you got there?

SPEAKER_02 21:55

Death? No.

unknown 21:59

Every

SPEAKER_00 22:00

Single time. Dude, it it cracks me up because this is kind of like my morbid Monday for this week. Is that I was looking up things of like, oh, wouldn't it be cool to look up? Like, I thought about the guy that like found distilled urine into phosphorus. And I had heard about that rumor of him like drinking it to death because he thought he was like leeching his own life. There was a guy that did that. It wasn't him, it was a different guy, and these two stories have been conflated. Uh, he was way more of a like a legitimate alchemist, and he was trying to do stuff. He has several uh uh elemental finds attributed to his name. He kept this all secret until he sold them to other people, and so we have like a record of when he officially released the discovery of phosphorus, businessman, yeah, in 1680. Yeah, and I was like, way to go, you man.

SPEAKER_03 22:52

Yeah, for real.

SPEAKER_00 22:53

We've got a a recipe with gunpowder. We've got a recipe from uh bacon, not Francis Bacon, the other one. Um Sir Bacon. Uh no, I forget, I forget what his first name was, but um he has a recipe for a mixture, uh, because it's a mixture of various things to make gunpowder, uh, for gunpowder in like the 1300s. And so this is like handgone, you know, H-A-N-Z-G-O-N-N-E, handgone. Like it's a stick with a fucking pipe on it, era firearms, right? This it's really crazy stuff. And we're still kind of doing this today. So you mentioned earlier there's like people drinking their urine for some reason because they think it's healthy for them. I don't know why.

SPEAKER_03 23:41

Every now and again they cross my feed, and like it'll I'm not I'm not even kidding when I say this. I'm scrolling, as one does, doom scrolling, on like Instagram or Facebook or something, and it'll be one of those text posts. And it'll be like, I need some advice. My urine has been blah, blah, blah, blah, and it's not working for blah, blah, blah, blah. What can you advise me to drink to fix this? And I'm like, stop using your piss for medicinal shit. Go to a doctor. Please.

SPEAKER_00 24:15

Yeah, we are we are well past the uh it there's a kind of funny thing about like, you know, herbalism, which is like a legitimate study of like, hey, how do you use like stuff that you can grow to make medicine, and also like as a functional daily health thing of just kind of like, you know, like what can you eat, for instance, to maybe slightly increase your vascularity. That's a thing. There are foods, you don't uh have period cramps. What can I do about that? You can put ginger in your tea.

SPEAKER_03 24:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

That's a thing that really does work, uh, and is prescribed to people to do as a regular thing. So, um, and has been done for like a thousand years. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:56

There there is a legitimacy. Like, I I have never in my life, like raised raised in a medical household, obviously. That is a well-known fact about me. Both of my parents were in the medical field. I have never once in my entire existence experienced a medical professional turning their nose up at herbalism.

SPEAKER_00 25:13

But homeopathy is different, right?

SPEAKER_03 25:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:17

Homeopathy is like the idea of taking a trace amount of something uh and having it in your daily life and and saying that it's gonna do something kind of miraculous. Originally Colloidal silver. Yes.

SPEAKER_03 25:31

I got beef with colloidal silver.

SPEAKER_00 25:33

And also here's here's some insider stuff. This is kind of part of the eternal life thing. Homeopathy gets its roots around the same time the sky is discovering phosphorus.

SPEAKER_03 25:44

Of course.

SPEAKER_00 25:45

Not in name, like there nobody's going, this is homeopathy. That's more like an 1800s thing. But the there's there's there's a couple of basic beliefs that that people have, and some people still have these. That one is that whatever ails you, there is a fix for it in earth. In other words, like this comes out of a belief that God or nature itself would have placed a plant to solve whatever problem. If this disease exists, there must be a plant that will cure it. That's not true in any form or that you know what I mean? Like that's simply not true. Um there's not like a plant you can eat for like a broken leg.

SPEAKER_03 26:28

Wouldn't it be nice though?

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Yeah, it would be great if like the Harry Potter shit was real.

SPEAKER_03 26:32

But like the closest thing you can get for for a plant for a broken leg is gonna be a poppy. Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 26:38

Yeah, I eat this heroin, it'll make you feel better. But yeah, that's kind of the thing.

SPEAKER_03 26:44

About the closest you're gonna get. And even then, you've got to process the absolute fuck out of it.

SPEAKER_00 26:49

And then the other the other big idea is that, well, if you take something that's poisonous, um, and then you take a very, very small amount of it, your body will counteract it in some way. That is only true with very specific things and mostly allergens of like small exposure, exposure therapy. Minor allergy.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

Yeah, exposure therapy is a thing. However, you are not ever going to be immune to a lethal dose of arsenic.

SPEAKER_00 27:21

Right.

SPEAKER_03 27:22

That's not how that works.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah, there's no this this is not iocaine powder. It's not, yeah, it's not, you know, that would be more akin to inconceivable. Yeah. That would be more akin to like, you know, dying from an overdose of like a very specific kind of like narcotic or something you might build up a resistance to.

SPEAKER_03 27:40

But yeah, I mean you can you can build a resistance, you can build a um what's the other word I'm looking for here? Tolerance.

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Tolerance.

SPEAKER_03 27:48

But you're never, you're you you um listen.

SPEAKER_00 27:51

There's a low dose that you simply will never be able to overcome. There's no, there's no you're gonna become immune to it. Um and and taking us into the modern era of elixir of eternal life. We've got the current one is peptides, right? Like Jim Bro is taking peptides and make you, it just makes things work better, you know, that kind of stuff. Um, and some of them actually do work. There's some like or or there is some legitimate science to some of these. Well, they're collagen ones. Yeah, they're not gonna make you 20 again. No, are they a good, you know, like the what are they called? NNMs? Um that's Brian Johnson, the the vampire guy. Yeah, he's big into those. Um, so is Kim Kardashian. They seem to work to some degree.

SPEAKER_03 28:40

Collagen will help your body, but it's not it's not a cure-all. No, it's not it's not gonna a miracle anything. It is a vitamin.

SPEAKER_00 28:49

Yeah, some of these like prescription peptides and or rather highly designer peptides might slow aging. And what I mean by that is like the effects that cellular decay has on the body.

SPEAKER_03 29:03

Well, the problem with that is that we're breathing oxygen.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Well, we're just the big chemical engine. I mean, like our whole body is a giant chemical engine. Here's where I want to talk about why we die, because that's something that is not really discussed a lot in modern day take this, it'll make you live for a hundred years type thing, right? We die by and large, if you don't die from quote unquote natural causes. Everything is a natural cause. But like if you if you're not hit by a car, if you don't have a heart attack, if you don't have cancer, right? Like a truck cutting doesn't kill you. Yeah, if you're not suddenly isekai to another world as a refrigerator. Oh man.

SPEAKER_03 29:46

Bless you. Thank you for understanding my sense of humor.

SPEAKER_00 29:50

But even if nothing happens in your body, nothing happens wrong. You don't have any like clogged arteries, you never get cancer, you never get hit by a viral load that stops all your processes, there's no bacteria that kills you. What inevitably will happen is that your your cells will degrade, your DNA will degrade. And at the end of our DNA, we have these little caplets called telomeres that try to fix that problem. They come in and they try to repair broken and and degraded DNA. Your body also has several functions in it to destroy cells that are mischief.

SPEAKER_01 30:24

That's why we get gray hair.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

Yeah, we we all that we just we gradually change, and that is good if you stayed the exact same, like it would be wonderful if we could stay the exact same for a very, very long amount of time. And we do, for the most part, for decades, stay more or less the same. They did, I remember about a decade ago, I remember reading a study about rats. They were attempting to get that telomere length to be really long so that the rats just lived longer, right? Essentially exp extending their lifespan. Never gonna make them immortal, but it might make them live double or triple the amount of time. Easier to do in rats than it is in humans. Well, I mean we require, and one of the reasons is you talked about oxygen earlier. We are big calorie burning machines. Yeah, we simply require a lot more calories, and also um because we are larger, we have more cells, there's more shit to go wrong.

SPEAKER_03 31:27

Yeah. And that's not including like just random free radicals. Also, I read something that like you have cancer all the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

All the time.

SPEAKER_03 31:35

It's just that your body destroys it.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

Well, it if it didn't, so there's there's we we can go two ways with this, right? The rats, they they were able to introduce uh some changes to their DNA that gave them longer telomere length. They developed cancer almost immediately.

SPEAKER_03 31:53

Called it.

SPEAKER_00 31:54

All of them. Leukemia, hands down. You know, like and so um because their cells just start growing out of yeah, growing like crazy. So you have cancer all the time, or rather, you have the potential. Yes, your body destroys cells that you know, you're you have cellular mitosis, your your cells split all the time. When a cell comes out wonky, your body destroys that cell. There's there are protein markers in your body that go like identify that and kill it. Because they don't want it to keep your body doesn't want to keep replicating the broken or mutated cell, because those broken and mutated cells largely are what cancer is. And so, like it it's mutated, it's growing out of control, or it's growing in a way it shouldn't be, or it's growing way too fast. There are structures like your bones that grow constantly and have to be cut down constantly. There are unfortunately bone spares. Well, there are there is a genetic illness where your body doesn't know how to stop the bone growth. Oh, you just turn into a statue.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

That's unfortunate.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

Horrendously. Yeah, like every time you bruise your arm, the bone wants to grow into that space.

SPEAKER_02 33:09

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 33:10

There's a Sid Myers exhibition for Body Worlds that has a couple of these skeletons, and they're just like, it's like their bones are covered in thorns. It's a horrendous way to go.

SPEAKER_03 33:21

And I imagine painful.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

Yeah, and it it's very rare most because it's once they spread into your lungs.

SPEAKER_03 33:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 33:26

Right? Like you can't really survive that. So uh it's it's really while it's super, super rare. Um, but you do have that. You also have diseases like Harlequin, I think it's called Harlequin Symbrosis. Yes. Uh, where your skin grows without stopping constantly. And that they lose all their hair because their skin overgrows the follicles. They have to exfoliate their body every day. It's I'm pretty sure they've got that one licked. They're they've they've started working on like DNA therapy to stop that. Fingers crossed, that nobody ever has to deal with that again. There's a great like BBC documentary about a family of little girls that have this heartbreaking, because they're so sweet. Like all of them are so sweet. And uh, but but that's like that's all those things that we just discussed are why you really can't have an elixir of eternal life. Yeah. Because even if you did, even if you could somehow stop your body from aging, you can't stop arterial buildup. You can't stop, you know, like a bus from hitting you.

SPEAKER_03 34:33

You can't like you know, like there's the there's certain things that and you have the random mutations that your body is that your body is spitting out all the time.

SPEAKER_00 34:43

Right. If you lived for 10,000 years, then you have a lot more chances to develop something new and interesting in your body. So like yeah, there there is that. And then there's also just like um you mentioned like you know, free radical buildup or just just build up. You know, like if I we we have no idea what would happen to you if you really did live for a thousand years. We don't know. My guess either well, skin cancer is almost spontaneous mutations, yeah. Nothing.

SPEAKER_03 35:16

And then because that's simply Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:18

We're we're kind of assuming, let's assume that if you could live for a thousand years, that most of that a thousand years, your cellular repli replication is spotless. Right? So you don't um and you're you never stop creating collagen and you never stop, you know, um, you don't become sensitive to a certain kind of testosterone or whatever, right? The the myriad of things that happen as you get older. Imagine if you lived in a place, right, where some small element was just building up in your system. Just tiny amounts of mercury or something like that in your brain just higher than what your body could get rid of.

SPEAKER_03 36:02

Oh, oh, you'd be crazy in like 150 years.

SPEAKER_00 36:07

That's like, yeah, because you have so much time. Um and to kind of like because this is a very short episode, more or less I'm just talking, but to kind of wrap up why I wanted to talk about this and what makes it a morbid Monday for me, anyways, is the great irony of all of these health potions that their most famous outcome has killed more human beings than probably anything else. So black powder largely, we think, made it into great parts of Eurasia and other parts of you know outside of China because of Genghis Khan.

SPEAKER_03 36:50

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 36:51

So like the movement of weapons across the world, the movement of signal rockets, the movement of like because fireworks didn't start off as just like pretty displays. Yeah, they started off as weapons. We know, like, for instance, uh Genghis Khan uh employed um shock troops from Korea that would basically throw grenades at you. You know, like that's they were like the first people to do this, right? You've got this movement of gunpowder across the world. Once it gets to Europe, it it starts getting refined into rifles after like the Archebus eventually gets after the handgun gets made. You all throughout the Middle East, people developed really outrageous cannons for some of which were big enough to just blow holes into castle walls.

SPEAKER_03 37:34

I love that in the pursuit of the of of immortality, the waters of life, we created fucking gunpowder.

SPEAKER_00 37:42

And you know, the brief mention of uh the waters of life out of Ireland, right? The the whiskey, the potine, and all that stuff. Um, when you look at modern gun violence, alcohol is almost like alcohol's involved a lot.

SPEAKER_02 37:56

So goodbye inhibitions.

SPEAKER_00 37:59

Yeah, it's the greatest irony of history is like out of all of this eternal life seeking, we get phosphorus, we get gunpowder, we get um booze. We get booze, we get like and and I think uh really uh stilled booze.

SPEAKER_02 38:15

Yeah, let's put it that way.

SPEAKER_00 38:16

I throw that into the Irish one. I don't think that that's uh in fact, I'm almost positive that's not how that came to be. I think that's just a different technology that they were just using to make what they were using. I don't think anybody was trying to be like um alchemical about it, but probably there's a little bit of that in there in history.

SPEAKER_03 38:34

Um alchemy is shockingly prevalent in history, and like there it goes through these odd phases where like it's cool, it's cool, it's cool, it's really, really not cool, it's really not cool. Don't do that. Oh, nope, we're cool again.

SPEAKER_00 38:47

Right.

SPEAKER_03 38:47

What?

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Yeah, it was like witchcraft, and then suddenly it became like the cool kids thing in the church. Yes. It was like, oh look, it's science.

SPEAKER_03 38:55

You had you had random like noble ladies reading tarot cards in the salon.

SPEAKER_00 38:59

Yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_03 39:01

There's I'm sorry, 50 years ago, you were you you were hanging like local midwives because their birth rates were too high.

SPEAKER_00 39:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 39:09

What?

SPEAKER_00 39:10

Yeah. It's really, it's really crazy because I I wonder what the next iteration of secret elixir of life will be.

SPEAKER_03 39:20

Creatine.

SPEAKER_00 39:21

Yeah, oh, that's the current one. Yeah, so many. It's just it's a cheat code for your genetics.

SPEAKER_03 39:26

I'm telling you, I did like four ads for creatine because I've been looking for a new protein supplement.

SPEAKER_00 39:32

Yeah. You know what's crazy though? Creatine really does work.

SPEAKER_03 39:35

Really?

SPEAKER_00 39:35

Yeah, I take it all the time. It like if if you take, if you now granted, the whole like it'll make your brain work better and all that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 39:42

There isn't designed to do that.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Yeah, there is actually some indication that that is true, that there's a low dose of creatine that act that does make your bodies function better. There's been a lot of studies on this.

SPEAKER_03 39:55

It's because it's uh a vasco vasodilator.

SPEAKER_00 39:58

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_03 39:59

Vasco restrictor.

SPEAKER_00 40:01

Better blood flow improves most things. Yeah. And so uh also it it it fixates water into your muscles better.

SPEAKER_03 40:08

Oh, I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_00 40:08

Yeah, that that's why like bodybuilders take it, is that it just it it's for the pump. It it actually just makes your for the gains and it gives you more energy. Like it really does. Like it, I can tell it there's a clear difference when I'm using creatine and when I'm not using creatine when I work out.

SPEAKER_03 40:23

That's cool. I said it as a joke, but I mean here we are.

SPEAKER_00 40:26

If you don't, though, if you don't take enough water with it, you get creatine cramps and they suck.

SPEAKER_03 40:33

It's like a Charlie Hoy Charlie Hoyce.

SPEAKER_00 40:35

Yeah, the cheese.

SPEAKER_03 40:36

Shout out to horses. Um Charlie horse on steroids.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

It's yeah, it's uh John got one in his uh hamstring last time I talked to him. That he was just like, we were we were out, uh we were out doing some like stick or sword stuff, and he was saying like he was taking it light, he didn't want to sweat because he had taken a lot of creatine that day, and he was like, I'm really nervous that I haven't had enough water. They're that bad. That like you like if you get like a really if you take a lot of creatine and and you get a cramp from it, they're so bad that you get like where you haven't had enough water.

SPEAKER_03 41:14

They're itty bitty.

SPEAKER_00 41:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:16

So like that's clearly one of the I don't even know what to call that. Is it like a supplement? Is it a compound?

SPEAKER_00 41:22

Is it it's a supplement. It's it's uh so that the little ones specifically are like a um like a pre-buffered um higher concentration. So you can get them in like the big tubs, and that has like a lot of filler to it. So you put like a big scoop or whatever. The little ones is like a tiny little cap. And you put like two of those into a bottle of water, and that's it.

SPEAKER_03 41:44

And prey, apparently.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Yeah, it I mean it they've got it to where it tastes like lime and shit now. But I remember for a little while it was uh resveratrol. Do you remember that push? Yeah, yeah. Resveratrol will cure everything. Fucking keep you from having cancer. It'll it'll it'll remove free radicals.

SPEAKER_03 42:04

And then it was um ketones?

SPEAKER_00 42:08

The raspberry ketones. Yeah, yeah, whatever the fuck those were even supposed to do for you.

SPEAKER_03 42:14

It it can't it was it we written. I remember I remember I worked in the pharmacy when this when this push on the ketones was happening because it was supposed to be like the the new ultimate, oh my god, weight loss thing, and then they found out that it was like good for ever, or they allegedly found out that it was good for everything, like anti-aging, and I'm just like eat raspberries.

SPEAKER_00 42:36

I yeah, which is legitimate health advice. They're like handful of red berries, handful of blue, like dark blueberries because of the cyano, whatever they're called.

SPEAKER_03 42:43

Yeah, not not to mention all the vitamins in them.

SPEAKER_00 42:45

Yeah, right, because it's chock full of B vitamins.

SPEAKER_03 42:48

Oh, delicious.

SPEAKER_00 42:49

Yeah, that's so I remember the ketones thing was also heavily, heavily connected to the keto diet.

SPEAKER_02 42:56

Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:57

People were doing that, and so I was like, okay, like uh Emily did it for a little while, and it does work. It sucks when you yes, I remember.

SPEAKER_03 43:05

I remember vividly because she was like in a full I love my little sister to death. I love her so much. She's my baby sister. I love her. She was in the middle of doing the the the keto thing with a couple of other people, like as support and stuff, and she came over and I'd fixed, I had it was one of the nights that I had cooked for both of our households, and she came over and we had dinner, and I'd like specifically set aside for stuff stuff for her, and I made her her own dessert, and then we had German chocolate cake on the side, which in in in retrospect was kind of mean.

SPEAKER_00 43:44

Straight carbs. Oh my god, straight carbs.

SPEAKER_03 43:47

She went, she ate the icing off of my cake, off of my slice of cake, and then I was like, You are gonna be so sick, do not do that. And she's like, I'll be fine ten minutes later.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Full flu.

SPEAKER_03 43:58

Yeah, oh my gosh, did you get a flu?

SPEAKER_00 44:00

Like you keto flu from like you you get like you ran to the bathroom and puked.

SPEAKER_03 44:04

That's crazy. I was like, I told you so. Do you want some water?

SPEAKER_00 44:09

I wonder like because I think about this sometimes, right? Of like, what's the next big thing? Is it gonna be these guys were looking for like the philosopher's stone and liquid gold, and they were looking for things that don't change a lot and hoping hoping that those properties would infuse into us if we ingested them in the way that like we eat muscle to gain muscle, right? Like in that kind of sense. I wonder, like, is we're kind of out of that stage. And I wonder if the next big breakthrough to try or big attempt rather to try to make people live a lot longer will come through maybe viral means. And what I mean by that is like a retrovirus that changes the way that our DNA works and what it looks like, or if it will come anti-aging thing going on right now because there is some model.

SPEAKER_03 45:04

I want to say he's Korean, I could be wrong, but who who apparently just turned 65 and looks like he's like maybe 30. And everybody is is like, what are you doing? What's your routine? I'm telling you right now, that's genetics.

SPEAKER_00 45:20

Yeah, that is the biggest thing of just like I know people who have looked like they were 40 since they were 20. I went to high school with a guy that had like a full beard, like five o'clock shadow every day, and tired eyes, and he was 16. And he looked like an old man. Now, the thing, the good thing about him is that he also looked like he looked exactly the same for the next 40 years of his life. So, like, that's you know, he didn't change any, right? Uh but I've met people like your your centenarians, you're you're people that like live to 105. They ask him, like, well, what do you do in your daily life? Or, you know, what do you what's your diet like? And there's a guy that's in like Mississippi, I think. He lived to be like 110. He was a World War II veteran.

SPEAKER_03 46:12

Period.

SPEAKER_00 46:12

He ate ice cream, drank Dr. Peppers, and smoked cigars every day of his life.

SPEAKER_03 46:16

Let's fucking go.

SPEAKER_00 46:18

And he was like, What do you what do you think makes you live so long? He's like, Well, first, I don't stop, I never stopped doing anything.

SPEAKER_03 46:24

Dick Van Dyke.

SPEAKER_00 46:25

Yeah, he's uh constantly moving, right?

SPEAKER_03 46:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:27

That was a big thing. It was like I've always got something to look forward to. I make sure I have something to look forward to, and I do what I like to do. So his stress levels are low, and he always had a purpose. But then he just flat out said it. He goes, I think it's just I think I'm just lucky. And that is probably more true than anything else. Is that like genetics? He just gotta he got a good lucky role and will live and live to be 110.

SPEAKER_03 46:53

Now I do I do agree with you that I think that our next bid for for this this elusive, unchanging immortality is probably going to be something viral. Yeah. Because there there are there there have already been forays into it.

SPEAKER_00 47:08

Yeah, custom, custom, essentially custom retroviruses that slightly changing your DNA for the better, basically, or your cellular structure for the better. I agree that it's probably gonna hit like that, and then there's it or horrifically, maybe horrifically, maybe not. There's a young kid uh in Europe, I forget what his name is, he's one of those super geniuses that's like like a nine-year-old who just graduated from college. And um, his whole thing, he he asked them, they were asking him in an interview, what what does he want to work on? He was like, I want to work on making sure that a human being lives to be like a couple hundred years old. And he goes, How do you figure on doing that? He goes, machines.

SPEAKER_03 47:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 47:50

He's like, replace all your organs with machines.

SPEAKER_03 47:53

Hello, cyberpunk.

SPEAKER_00 47:55

Yeah. You can walk around like a adeptus mechanicus model. But like that's kind of horrific to me because the the thing about some of that is like when they put in the false heart, the old one's still in there. Like when you have a mechanical heart, you have two hearts. Yeah. You have the the new one and the old one is still because they can't cut it off. There's too much blood in it, right? You will die.

SPEAKER_03 48:20

Your your heart is in fact a sack, in case you didn't know.

SPEAKER_00 48:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 48:24

So and it's filled with blood, like all the time.

SPEAKER_00 48:26

Yeah, even if it's not pumping correctly, it's still moving a lot of blood around. Yeah. And so there's that, and then there's like, what do you do about brains? Because he even, even this little super genius kid was like, well, there's nothing you can really do about the brain. It's not through machines, anyways, unless you're gonna like, you know, figure out some way to put a hard drive in your head. But fucking, what was that movie called? Which one? Damn it, Ghost in the Shell.

SPEAKER_03 48:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 48:51

That it fascinates me to see what our next big elixir of life, our our our Xi'an Dan, as they called it in China, will be. If it's mechanical, if it's retrovirus, if it's uh medicinal in some way, if somebody figures out a medicine that just causes us to work better.

SPEAKER_03 49:11

I I completely agree with you. I think that humanity is going to continue to strive for the philosopher's stone, as it were, immortality, because humanity's greatest fear is death.

SPEAKER_00 49:23

Yeah. Well that's like the last thing. Like we we we do this thing that I find so fascinating, which is that we create monsters. That's because nothing is scary enough anymore.

SPEAKER_05 49:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 49:37

Lions aren't scary. I own a tin gauge. You know what I mean? Like lions are scary with my hands, you know what I mean? Like against my hands. But like once you get to the like level of if you were holding right now a small machine gun, there is not a lot that can hurt you.

SPEAKER_03 49:56

Yeah. Provided your aim is is good enough.

SPEAKER_00 50:00

Yeah. It's just like, you know, we we were uh a lot of our early monsters were things that really do exist in nature, right? Like one of the things that Hercules fought was a lion with with impenetrable skin, but their monsters were largely things that just happened in nature. A whirlpool was a monster, right? Like um in Norse mythology, Narwhales. Yeah, uh Scylla's the one with a bunch of heads with the wall. Yeah, that bites you've got Charybdis. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:31

Ooh.

unknown 50:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 50:33

Whoa, pulled that just out of wow.

SPEAKER_00 50:37

Out of 90s made for TV fiction.

unknown 50:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:42

The Odyssey. Yeah. But like in Norse mythology, right? Some or or rather, I shouldn't say Norse mythology, in Beowulf, one of the things, the monsters that shows up in his race with Brecka, it's just a narwhal.

SPEAKER_03 50:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 50:55

It's just a narwhal. There's no like the the crack.

SPEAKER_03 50:58

The concept is Urmangander is uh big sea snake.

SPEAKER_00 51:02

Yep. Yeah, like it's what's scarier than a snake? A big snake. You know? That's basically what a dragon is. A wolf. Big, yeah, Fenrill, giant wolf. Um, Ursa, giant bear. Yeah. You know, like there's there's all that kind of stuff, right? Giants, giant people.

SPEAKER_03 51:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:19

That's pretty much it. Like, what's scarier than a big warrior? A big giant warrior.

SPEAKER_03 51:23

I love I love that it's it's entirely possible that the concept of a cyclops came from somebody finding a mammoth skull.

SPEAKER_00 51:30

Right. And just going, that's a crazy looking face.

SPEAKER_03 51:33

Like where the rest of your face at?

SPEAKER_00 51:38

Yeah. And then like our modern day monsters, we have to be so crazy with them because nothing's really scary anymore. You know what I mean? Like, like vampires aren't in our modern day, vampires represent things.

SPEAKER_03 51:58

Listen.

SPEAKER_00 51:59

They're not just, oh, it's a guy that bites you. It's now a concept, like greed or something like that, right?

SPEAKER_03 52:06

I come from the Anne Rice school of vampires. Thank you. So I I happen to know that they can be whiny bitches. But I I get it. Like humanity has to create its own monsters, like Cthulhu.

unknown 52:21

Right.

SPEAKER_03 52:21

The unknowable, the madness, the the undefined.

SPEAKER_00 52:25

And even some of like some of his stuff. It was like the the people of Innsmouth.

SPEAKER_02 52:30

Fish people.

SPEAKER_00 52:31

Fish people who I'm gonna, for those of y'all who who aren't super uh aware of HP Lovecraft, Puerto Ricans.

SPEAKER_03 52:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 52:40

HP Lovecraft was like really racist.

SPEAKER_03 52:42

So racist. Oh my terrified of women.

SPEAKER_00 52:45

He lived in New England and around he lived in New York for an amount of time, even though he was a terrible agoraphobe. And so people who are moving into the coastal um the coastal parts of like some of the the the the waterfront parts of New York and and the other places that he lived, which were like he lived in Chicago for a little while, I think. And then I what was the other place?

SPEAKER_03 53:08

For a shut-in, he got around.

SPEAKER_00 53:10

Living in like Concord or something, like some little place.

SPEAKER_03 53:13

I I don't remember where it was, but some smaller My fascination with his horror stories kind of fell off once I realized what a piece of shit human being he was. And I was like, mmm.

SPEAKER_00 53:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:23

You suck. It's a shame your stories are kind of great. God damn it.

SPEAKER_00 53:29

Yeah, it's like his universe is so absolutely wonderful. But what flying space cats. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 53:35

One of that's one of my favorite stories. It's so fucking random.

SPEAKER_00 53:39

Well, one one of the big bads of the Lovecraftian unit, because it wasn't just him writing, it was a ton of things. No, no, no.

SPEAKER_03 53:45

It was it was a collaborative effort. But like create the universe.

SPEAKER_00 53:49

There is one person that's like the mother of monsters, and I cannot say her name on this. No, because that's real mythology.

SPEAKER_05 53:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 53:58

This is uh it starts with Shub, and if I say the second part, I will have to clip it because it's basically just an alliterated N-word.

SPEAKER_04 54:08

Really?

SPEAKER_00 54:09

And most people do not realize it because they don't say it out loud. They're reading it in books.

SPEAKER_03 54:14

I'm totally looking that up right now.

SPEAKER_00 54:17

Pause for effect. No, it's S A S H U B.

SPEAKER_03 54:24

What now?

SPEAKER_00 54:24

S-H-U-B.

unknown 54:26

S-H-U-B.

SPEAKER_00 54:27

And then it starts with an N.

SPEAKER_03 54:29

Dead air.

SPEAKER_00 54:30

Yeah. Oh Yeah, I told you. See, people, you can see how people don't realize what that is.

SPEAKER_03 54:39

Yeah. Because it sounds like Oh my god, the black goat of the woods. Get out, you racist piece of shit.

SPEAKER_00 54:46

Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's a ever-pregnant monster that has the N-word for her last name.

SPEAKER_03 54:52

Dude, and you don't even understand the way that like before I I went in to understand, like, you know, Lovecraft and all of that. I was I was in for the horror. You know I love horror stuff.

SPEAKER_00 55:05

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:05

Cthulhu was like Pieds d'Arlis Nels for for like high-end horror for me. And then I got to and then I Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:14

Then you read the rest of it and you're just like.

SPEAKER_03 55:16

And then I read about HP Lovecraft, and I was like, you're awful.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 55:20

And once you know and now I feel bad that I ever like enjoyed all of this.

SPEAKER_00 55:27

To to be fair, like to be fair to Lovecraft, Lovecraft was a weird dude.

SPEAKER_03 55:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:33

Is he publicly hated Jewish people? His wife was Jewish.

SPEAKER_05 55:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 55:38

He publicly like one of the guys that published his works that saved his works when he died was one of his best friends who was a Jewish man. He is a weird guy. Where like his his friends would say that about him. They were like, he was incredibly conflicted as a person.

SPEAKER_03 55:54

Clearly.

SPEAKER_00 55:54

Like he would say one thing and then act completely differently. Like he was he was in a like he he really had problems talking to people. He was an agoraphobe, really didn't understand people. Massive pen pal network. New people all over the country.

SPEAKER_03 56:08

Well, on the list of people that we can be glad didn't find the elixir of life.

SPEAKER_00 56:12

Yeah, right. He would have just gotten worse.

SPEAKER_03 56:14

Um can you imagine him crazy after like 200 years of life and mineral buildup in the brain?

SPEAKER_04 56:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 56:22

To tie it back to what you were talking about earlier, disinfect this mic when we're done with this. I pulled my I pulled my mask down to take a drink, and then you got me thinking.

unknown 56:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 56:33

But it is like, I I don't know where where we'll end with that. I as much as I want to say it's something really cool, like a new machine that helps like that a nanobot that goes through and cleanses all of your arteries.

SPEAKER_03 56:47

Nanotechnology would be so cool, but I've watched enough Stargate and fucking Star Trek that I'm like, hmm, I know where this goes.

SPEAKER_00 56:56

Yeah. Or like, give me the worms. Give me the worms from Futurama, where he eats that egg salad sandwich and the worms are like suddenly like ripped and super smart on the bottom. Yeah, I remember that. I remember that episode. The dumbest thing Fry ever did in Futurama was to get rid of those worms.

SPEAKER_03 57:13

Yeah. I was just like, I mean, it's Fry.

SPEAKER_00 57:16

It's really stupid. He was like, I can never be sure if she really loves me. I was like, You're still you, Jackass. You're just a better version of you. Your brain still works the same.

SPEAKER_03 57:26

There is a show.

SPEAKER_00 57:28

Your personality didn't change.

SPEAKER_03 57:30

This this ties hilariously, this ties into exactly what we're talking about. There is a show that just kind of began, I want to say, uh, this year. It's called The Beauty. It's got Ashton Kutcher in it, and it is very, very, very on brand with what we were talking about with uh the a viral cure for aging. Um, if you have not watched it, I suggest you check it out. It is very graphic and like some people would would consider it a bit vulgar. Um, I personally think it's an excellent and a brutal mirror into where where our where science and and and uh are kind of like barreling towards. It's horrifying. It's definitely a horror show. It's uh it's also got the actor that plays Tate from American Horror Story, Evan Peters. Uh it it has it has a fantastic cast, and the premise of it is very on brand with what we're talking about. It is a virus that could that basically infects you, overtakes you, and then turns you into the best version of you before it makes you explode.

SPEAKER_00 58:41

Oh shit. Because it's just ca like you just melt.

SPEAKER_03 58:46

I don't want to give away too many spoilers for anybody that's like interested in watching the show.

SPEAKER_00 58:50

You know, we were we were hypothesizing about the next step in I was like, how do you yeah, how do you improve your genetics?

SPEAKER_03 58:58

The fountain of youth.

SPEAKER_00 58:59

There's only a couple of things that we know that really do that. And uh they can they can also reach every part of the body. Because the thing about like the stem cell resurgence where people are like, well, maybe if a part of the case is a couple of things.

SPEAKER_03 59:09

See, that's what I thought it was gonna be was the stem cell stuff.

SPEAKER_00 59:12

The problem is is that you can't inject them enough. Yeah. Right? You would have to figure out some way to like make enough new cells in your body to replace the aging cells.

SPEAKER_03 59:22

Like the closest thing you can get is the stem cells that a fetus uh that a that a woman is pregnant with can send the mother if if there is something that goes. It's a very rare instance, but like if for example, a friend of mine has been deathly allergic to strawberries her entire fucking life. Like, I've known her for years, years and years and years and years. And I I was also her babysitter when we were out at bars or out at a restaurant or something. And if I like I would double and triple and quadruple check, is there anything strawberry in this? She will die. And uh, she got pregnant with her second child, is no longer allergic to strawberries.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:02

That's fucking crazy.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:03

It's nuts.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:04

Yeah, just from the sheer amount of growth hormone and stem cells present in a pregnant woman.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:10

So that that's that's the closest we've gotten so far.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:12

But it's also like the most traumatic thing that the human body knows it will do.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:16

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:17

You know what I mean? It's like it's not like the getting hit by a truck thing. Like you're designed, like you've evolved to do this, right? Like, so that that's it's such an amazing process. But there's a great episode of a show that's on Netflix called uh Love, Death, and Robots. Yes, there's one about a detective that hunts down people that have children. And and the reason why he does this is aging has stopped. Aging has stopped. And so, like, in in the words of his girlfriend in the show, we can't keep inviting people to the party.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:50

Because the world's only so big, and they end up in this weird kind of population collapse because everybody's living too long.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:59

Yeah. And so, like I remember that episode, it was excellent. Also, good memory. That's from like four years ago, dude. Dude, yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:07

That was a hell of an episode, and uh he hunts these people down who have kids illegally, because presumably some people are still having kids, but they have to like go to the kids. Yeah, but they're like in the slums and stuff, yeah. Yeah, and so he hunts down people who are illegally having kids, and then he goes and he finds this woman, and and he's asking her why she does it. And she goes, uh essentially she says, I've lived so long that nothing is new except for like when she looks at her daughter, everything is new through her eyes. And it it's massively impactful because you're like, I remember that that theme um of death being necessary for for mental health, you know, like and all that stuff, because people just can't really take it uh to be alive that long.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:01

Sorry, I'm like actually looking it up now because I remember that episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:05

And a kind of dark thing uh about like the possibility of living that long is that imagine the amount of societal stagnation.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:13

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:14

Like you think your job's going nowhere now. Imagine your boss never gets old. There's never you know what I mean, there's never an opening unless the company expands or you start your own thing, right? Like it it it would force society to change. You would have to.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:34

It is season two, episode three. So if anybody wants to like hop in to that show and just watch that episode, because he is correct, it is remarkably impactful to watch it.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:47

Excellent CGI.

SPEAKER_03 1:02:48

Oh yeah. Meanwhile, I was like, where's the rest of the werewolf story?

SPEAKER_00 1:02:52

Uh yeah, right. There's also one in in Love, Death and Robots where a guy is immortal. Yes, his cells replicate perfectly every time, which means that he also heals extremely well.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:06

And and the and the the the robot one, the robot fighting one.

unknown 1:03:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:11

Where her brain, where she is the robot. She is the robot.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:13

Well, that's yeah, it's the same episode. Oh, it is? Yeah, because it's the only I don't want to ruin that one. Yeah, because they're after his nuts.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:21

Oh, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:22

Yeah, like God, this is gonna sound so weird. Somebody just didn't know what they're talking about. They're after his testicles because he heals perfectly. What? That doesn't make sense. Yeah, that's also an excellent episode. Also, that lady looks like that in real life.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:38

Does she really?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:38

Yeah, that's a mocap model. She really looks like that. Yeah, I was just like, her face is insane to me. I'm just like, it's so she's otherworldly pretty. That's our episode on kind of episode on.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:51

No, no, no, no. This was this was a fantastic uh discussion episode. I really, really, really enjoyed this. Like, I don't often get to talk about subjects like this because you know, uh the the concept of immortality and or death or like exploring these themes is often taboo in conversation. People don't want to talk about that shit.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:09

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:09

Uh like nobody nobody wants to contemplate their own mortality. Whereas like it makes people uncomfortable. I know.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:17

I I same I've been I've been asked that by like doctors and stuff. Like, do you ever think about death? I'm like, yeah, at least once a day. And then they look at you like, are you terribly depressed? I'm like, not really. I just think about it a lot. You know, it's like I read a lot of dark history. I think about death constantly.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:34

I don't know. I I I I in particular really enjoyed this episode. But that is really cool. And I I it it is deeply amusing to me that like once again, in in the pursuit of eternity, of eternal life, a fountain of youth, a way to reverse aging and or stop death, we found gunpowder.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:53

Found gunpowder and trying to find the fountain of youth, we annihilated probably millions of people because we don't know how like far those diseases went out.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

You know, like once they once they made it to a population, they showed up like smallpox spread around. We really have no way of knowing. Native American trade routes went like across the country.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:15

Right? Like we have obsidian knives that have been found in New York. There are no volcanoes near United States. There is no reason. There's no obsidian in New York. Uh those knives came from Mexico.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:25

And so obsidian knives are fucking cool.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:27

Yeah, they're awesome. And they made it up the Appalachian Trail. So like the trade networks went all the way up there. And so, like, we don't know how many people that killed in the search for eternal life. Or the city of gold or whatever.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:44

Fucking nothing but death.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:45

Nothing but death, dude. Like gunpowder, like the the discovery of phosphorus. Um of pure phosphorus.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:52

I am recording.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:55

Also led to better, bigger and better bombs.

SPEAKER_02 1:05:58

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:58

You know, because they're not just Gunpowder anymore. Now they're like nitrogen and phosphorus. And now we have all this crazy stuff that's come out of an industry that's designed to keep you young forever. Right. I would say to some degree the modern day fountain of youth is the cosmetics industry. I mmm You know, like that's our that's our new thing. It's like we're the you know 17-step Korean skincare or listen, we're we're not gonna look at my dresser or my bathroom counter.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:28

Do not.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:29

I as a I I have no room to speak. As a person who does, in fact, work on uh uh not genetically good skin or hair and have to like constantly maintain to attempt to look I I would say somewhat successfully younger than I actually am, but like it that's what I I will be perfectly honest with you.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:55

I often forget that we are not the same age. So anyway, so thank you for that. I appreciate this episode. This was this was great. Oh, thank you. Well done.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:07

Oh, also, also good news um to stave off death. Uh not not really at all. One of our uh videos is about to break 150.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:18

What?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:18

Yeah. The syphilis episode.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:22

I fucking knew it.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:24

I don't know why.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:26

People are fascinated with venereal diseases, bro.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:29

I get maybe that's our that's gonna be our marketing secret for the future is we just find a hot button topic. We don't talk about that, but that is the title of the video.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:39

People spend an hour waiting for it, and then we're ending the episode.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:43

Yeah. Funny titles of just like you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:46

But we were talking about gonorrhea.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:47

Yeah, we'll talk. Well, we'll we'll we'll talk about the human trafficking industry one day, and I'll just call the video why I hate Andrew Tate. Get a million views overnight.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:58

Oh shit, and a cease and desist.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:01

Yeah, no joke from a highly litigious individual. Jeez. All right. Well, y'all have a great day.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:07

That was so much fun. Thank you for that. And thank you for joining us on this honestly, like really spectacular episode, at least from from from my perspective, because I got to join in on it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:17

Tell us, uh uh, yeah, get in the comments. Tell us, tell us your recipes for eternal life. Um, maybe it's begonias. Uh that's random. Uh begonias. I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:31

Fucking begonias.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:32

I don't know. Uh whatever you got, you know.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:34

I I do know that mental elasticity is uh is is increased by video games. So, you know.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:41

That's right.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:42

Points to the gaming track.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:43

Drink pure cacao nibs like Montezuma II play video games. No, they were like, he drank it for health. I was like, yeah, it's just that's a fuck ton of caffeine. He's drinking this by like the the jug.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:58

No. Once you go past 200 milligrams of caffeine, you are the name of don't do it. Looking at you, Anderson.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:08

And like chili spice and everything else that they used to put in actual, like original hot chocolate.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:13

Man, I bet he was. I bet he was healthy as fuck, dude. Every every like uh description of him ever is like, and he was seven feet tall and jacked as shit. I was like, yeah, dude.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:26

A clean diet on top of that, too. All right, we're we're fucking done. Now we're just riffing. All right, we love you guys. We'll see you next time. Bye.