[Carpe Diem by Kevin MacLeod plays]
JACOB: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Me/Us/U. Today, we take a little trip into the dark side of human nature. We hope you’re not afraid of the dark—
LIN: I am!
HAYLI: You’re in the wrong place!
JACOB: That would be unfortunate. We want to explore the “hows” and “whys” of the human condition, get under the skin and see what really makes us tick. Are we flesh and bone as we have for so long been told, or, beneath our flesh, does there lurk something a little more…sinister? We don’t know, we’re not doctors! Take a journey with us as we scrub between the brain folds and flush out all the weirdness lurking there. I’m Jacob.
LIN: I’m Lin.
HAYLI: And I’m Hayli.
JACOB: And hopefully somewhere along the way we’ll make you say, “huh.”
LIN: That’s…
HAYLI: Weird.
[Sci-fi riff]
LIN: You are a patient at Narconon. You’re here to do the Purification Rundown for the next several weeks. You were told that will help you clear your body of various toxins by sweating them out. The people there put you in saunas for five hours every day and have you do light exercise. They have you take lots of vitamins and oils and claim they will help you. You develop tremors and you’re treated with more purification. You have seizures in the sauna and are taken to the hospital and diagnosed with severe hyponatremia, which comes from low sodium in your blood. You develop hallucinations and insomnia. People who run the clinic say that this is just a sign of the treatment working.
LIN: Now the scenario I’ve just proposed to you probably comes off as very weird and you may be thinking why would I stay in this program if it’s so obviously harmful? Do I have an answer for you? Not directly. People are fascinated with cleanses and diets that are quick or easy way to become the pinnacle of health. People are doing all sorts of crazy and dangerous things claiming they’re actually healthy when they’re obviously not. They’re doing stuff like not having vaccines, doing coffee enemas, or drinking raw water. Also don’t look up coffee enemas. Today we’ll be looking at one particular cleanse. That is extra weird, the Purification Rundown.
LIN: To put it into very simple terms the Purification Rundown is a program that believes it can remove harmful toxins from your body by making you sweat them out through sauna time and exercise and then you can replace them with good vitamins and oil. And it’ll make you a healthier happier more spiritual person.
LIN: In more scientific terms, the Purification Rundown relies on the idea that you can sweat out toxins through your fat cells and that you can replace them with lots of vitamins and minerals throughout several weeks to make you sweat by making you be in a sauna for several hours every day and do light exercise. This goes up to around five hours of sauna time per day. To replace all the liquids you lost during that you have to take a whole lot of stuff: pure oils, massive amounts of multi vitamins that mostly contain with one called niacin and you also need to drink this specific drink they’ve made called calmag up to three times a day. What is in this drink is? It’s described as being a solution of calcium gluconate, magnesium carbonate, and vinegar in water. Now I’ll be honest I know next to nothing about chemistry and that sounds like it tastes probably pretty disgusting. Also it’s hard to say. Now you may be thinking when the world came up of this thing? Which is a great question listener who I know nothing about’s thoughts. Well the rundown is also known as the Hubbard method. As in Ron Hubbard as in the jerk who invented Scientology.
UNNAMED INTERVIEWER: Mr. Hubbard, many millions of words have been said and written about Scientology but I think there’s still quite a lot of doubt in many people’s minds as to exactly what it is. What is Scientology. How would you describe it?
RON HUBBARD: Well it’s very interesting. You’ve just asked a question like What are the contents of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Answer in one word.
LIN: Now if you’re like me you may know about Scientology and its sketchy reputation, but not what they really specifically believe in. So I decided to do a little digging, just for like background information. dictionary.com defines it as a noun meaning a religious system based on seeking of self-knowledge and spiritual fulfillment through graded courses of study and training. The clip I just played for you as well was from an interview with L. Ron Hubbard himself back in 1966. I watched the full 50 minute video on YouTube and I can’t say I understand it any much better. On Scientology.org’s “What is Scientology” page, they say quote “Scientology is a religion that offers a precise path leading to a complete and certain understanding of one’s true spiritual nature and one’s relationship to self, family groups, Mankind, all life forms, the material universe, the spiritual universe, and supreme being.” Now that may just seem like a bunch of garbled mess and I have to agree with you. There is more on the page but it mostly consists of disjointed phrases of information about how mankind has potential beyond expectation and yada yada. Interestingly they claim that the church doesn’t expect people to function on faith alone and that people should learn that Scientology is right by basically practicing Scientology, which just sounds kind of silly.
LIN: And as we probably all know the Church of Scientology has a great number of controversies surrounding them including stuff like lying, stealing, wiretapping, brainwashing, Ron Hubbard straight up admitting he made the religion for money, and loads of other things. But we’re not here to talk about literally everything Scientology has ever done. Frankly I don’t have time for that and neither do you.
LIN: The prototype for the rundown started in the 1960s as a supposed treatment to remove harmful drugs, like LSD, from your body by sweating them out of your fat cells. This obviously doesn’t work as most drugs are removed from the body through the liver, kidneys, lungs, or you just kind of like pee it out.
UNNAMED: Pee it out!
LIN: No amount of sweating can help with that. Before this they tried to come up with something similar to their special diets used in the rundown that they said could help people with radiation sickness. This was around the Cold War and everyone was afraid that we’d all die in a nuclear hellfire and that the few survivors would die slowly from the radiation. Fortunately Hubbard’s niacin based vitamin supplements that he claimed were preventative radiation sickness cures were opposed by the Food and Drug Administration and shut down. Since then branched out on what it claims to help with now including the following lowering cholesterol, improving memory and focus, pain relief, stress reduction, AIDS, heart issues, Kidney failure, lung damage, obesity, and of course cancer. Some even claimed that the raise your IQ by 15 points.
LIN: Despite all these supposed amazing health benefits no properly run peer reviewed study has confirmed any of these actually happened due to the rundown. In fact it’s shown to be unsurprisingly very harmful. The multi vitamins especially, niacin, are given to participants on a scale much higher than it is recommended. This could lead to liver damage, gout, gastritis, and other side effects. People have been hospitalized because of this and a few have even died. A lot of these side effects people in the program have tried to dismiss by saying that it’s just doing a very good job at cleansing you and that’s why you feel bad. When people were hospitalized they tried to claim the participant just wasn’t trying hard enough or that they had pre-existing conditions that were the true cause of this. And I found at least one case where they claimed a woman who was hospitalized for this that she was already cured by the run down and it was her fault for not letting them know. Another example I saw where a woman in the program was found on the ground hemorrhaging. Instead of calling an ambulance or a doctor the people who ran the program claimed that she was just bleeding there because radiation she had supposedly absorbed from an ultrasound years ago had been re-stimulated.
LIN: Now you may be thinking when is Scientology going to come back into this? Well a lot of places that do the purification rundown claim they have nothing to do with Scientology while Scientology claims that the rundown was never meant to be used by people for medicine and it’s supposed to be just for spiritual reasons. You can still see a lot of connections. One of the biggest being Tom Cruise famed Scientologist, who started a program called The New York Rescue Workers Detoxification Project which provides the rundown to public sector workers who had been exposed to toxins during the aftermath of 9/11. Some people in the program have said that they had positive results while others were concerned over the fact they were encouraged to give up conventional medical treatment, and to, of course convert to Scientology.
LIN: Now my hypothetical listener you may be thinking why on earth would anyone do these kinds of programs? Well if we’re going to be looking at the medical side as opposed to the whole cult mentality thing, that can be pretty hard to answer. I don’t have a medical degree or a psychology degree. I’m just a creative writer, so I decided to turn to someone who is much more qualified to answer that question.
DR. POLIN: My name is David Polin. I have an M.D. and an MBA and my field of medicine. My primary field is physiatry, which is physical medicine and rehabilitation. I have, two subspecialty board certifications. One is in neuro-muscular Medicine; study of muscles and nerves mainly, and the other is in pain medicine. I also I’m also certified in electrodiagnostic medicine.
LIN: One of the things that I asked Dr. Polin about was why does he think people keep on taking to these suspicious weird things for their health.
DR. POLIN: Well this has been going on for a long time that people have looked for special diets that will kind of beat the system for them. A lot of times it has to do with trying to lose weight or maintain a low enough weight.
LIN: I also asked him his thoughts on alternative medicine which is kind of a catch all term for it a lot of unconventional medical practices.
DR. POLIN: So I have some experience with alternative medicine that are practice at one point offered acupuncture. And you know there are a lot of benefits to alternative medicine. Some of what we do is higher risk than it should be in medicine. And so there are low risk alternatives that could be quite quite helpful. The research behind alternative medicine is variable. You know some things are proven to work. Some things are just speculation, or word of mouth, or what we call all of one studies where you know it worked for somebody so basic that’s going to work for everyone. I think it’s really important when it comes to alternative medicine to look at the cost because there are people out there who will charge a lot for things that aren’t really proven to work. And so just be cautious about that.
LIN: I also, for fun, asked him what he thinks the future is going to look like for dubious medical practices and products.
DR. POLIN: so far as trends are concerned I think that unfortunately we’ve seen some dangerous trends. You know, raw milk for example. You know raw milk’s probably OK if you’re getting it straight from the cow and it’s an hour after the cow was milked. But Pasteurization is for a reason. I’ve seen people who have listeriosis from drinking raw milk or from eating cheeses that aren’t from pasteurized milk, soft cheeses, and it could be a very dangerous disease, so we nearly eliminated that disease by pasteurizing milk. So you know unless you’re standing next to the cow, if you let the milk sit it’s going to grow stuff that can be very dangerous. And then the raw water thing is really dangerous and so I think that unfortunately seems to be going in that direction. Maybe the next trend will be raw meat. I know that, once again you know if you’re careful about it is probably Ok to eat raw meat. You know it’s all from one cow. And you know and it’s and you know the cow. But if you are looking at meat that comes from a CAFO that, confined animal feeding operation, and it’s all being ground up and put together from different cows that you’re just you know you just putting yourself at risk for getting E. coli or some other strain bacteria that can harm you.
LIN: If the question of why do people do all these dangerous health things they’re even proven to work hasn’t been cleared up yet. I’m going to present a theory. Fear people are afraid of dying. People are afraid of what they don’t understand the real science behind the beneficial treatment can sound a lot more complicated and scary. So I’m telling you that sitting in a sauna every day will cure your LSD trips. Next we’ll be looking more into fear and when it’s time for me to sign up. It’s been a pleasure rambling to you all.
[Heavy footfalls coupled with heavy breathing; someone is running. A jacket is zippered.]
JACOB: The sun beats heavy on the cracked pavement. The nameless figure crouches, cloaked in a heavy coat, in the shadows of a thin alley. A hood is drawn up around its face, and it takes care to stay within the darkness surrounding it. The sun rises ever higher in its arch through the sky, and as its pounding rays encroach further and further down the narrow passageway, the figure claws its way deeper into the abyss of blackness swallowing it.
It knows the hungry fire of the sun; it has felt the sun’s angry glare before, and will not do so willingly again. A furtive glance from underneath the deep hood of the coat reveals skin so pale it’s almost white, and dark eyes ringed by equally dark circles. A cough wracks the figure’s body as it casts a glance at the sun. It huddles deeper into its coat as the sun continues over its hiding place.
Hours have passed, the pale figure huddled in the alleyway as the light from the sun fades into the horizon. As the last vestiges of light disappear, and dusk settles in the sky, the figure bounds to freedom in the night air. It moves carefully, but quickly, as though it is made of glass. The hood falls back in the gloom of coming night to reveal starkly pale skin and sunken, hollow cheeks. The figure trundles down the street, never glancing at the sky. The sun has set, after all.
It will come as no surprise to the careful listener what the subject of this story is. It is a tale that deals with a very real fear that affects hundreds, if not thousands, of people worldwide: heliophobia, or the fear of the sun.
Specifically, this story deals with someone suffering from porphyria cutanea tarda, an acute sensitivity to sunlight that results in burning and blistering very quickly from exposure to sunlight.
Those of you that thought this was a story about a vampire shouldn’t feel ashamed that you got the answer wrong. Vampirism and heliophobia go hand in hand, historically. Sufferers of heliophobia exhibit many physical similarities to your common garden variety vampire: sparkly skin, teenage angst well into their thousandth year of life, and a great hatred of tan, shirtless werewolves who are way better looking than them.
All jokes about everyone’s favorite time of night aside, a huge percentage of Americans–not to mention the world over–suffer from a phobia of one variety or another. These range from things as commonplace and–dare I say–accepted as arachnophobia to as weird and incredibly specific as omphalophobia. And although I doubt I need to tell anyone, because obviously everyone knows what that is, it’s the fear of belly buttons. Although I’m sure any ancient Greek scholars out there would’ve been able to figure that one out, because apparently “omphalo” is literally just belly button in ancient Greek. #totallynotlamehistoryfacts.
I would like to take this time to make a brutally abrupt segue into another topic of discussion, a fear I am sure many of you are much more familiar with: trypophobia. But first, a history lesson.
Trypophobia is, oddly, not an “official” fear; that is, the APA (the American Psychiatric Association, because we have two APAs in America for whatever reason) does not recognize it as a specific fear by name. Instead, weirdly enough, all sufferers are self diagnosed, and many people turn to internet forums as a way to find others who suffer from trypophobia.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. There must be someone out there who has no idea what the heck trypophobia even is! Well, my wonderfully adventurous consumer of possibly-but-probably-not-wrong information (I did my research, don’t you worry), I have some meaty knowledge fruit for you to chew on. We must take a trip through time, to the ancient year of 2005. There we will find the origin of the mysterious trypophobia, hidden away on a message board on the internet somewhere maybe.
The word comes from the Greek word for fear–phobia–and the other Greek word trypo, which means ‘punching, drilling, or boring holes’. There is inconclusive evidence to date the origin of the term, but the idea of people being disgusted by images was examined in a 2008 psychological experiment performed by Dominic Fernandez and Arnold J. Williams.
It is–for those of you fortuitous enough to have been blessed with the mental capability to link the two translations I gave you before–the fear of holes. More specifically, the fear of close groupings of holes. For example, the seed pods of the lotus plant. Horrible looking thing. absolutely disgusting. Don’t Google it.
It is this plant, actually, that is the basis for many of the trypophobia-triggering images floating around the internet; sick twisted people find a terrible kind of enjoyment in photoshopping pictures of these seed pods onto human flesh. Obviously, I am not a fan of these images, as they elicit in me the exact feelings and emotions Geoff Cole and Arnold Wilkins were looking for when they conducted an experiment in 2015 to examine specifically the way people reacted to trypophobia related images, and to determine how widespread this phenomenon is.
Before we examine their findings, however, I would like to turn to my wonderful cohosts and ask them to look at this image. What does this make you feel?
LIN: I want to kill you right now.
HAYLI: Oh God. No. What is that? Why?
JACOB: Those of you lucky enough to not be sitting here with us as we look at this picture may be feeling left out, so I’ve decided to take pity on you and use my incredible description capabilities and…um…describe to you what this image looks like. Picture a finger. A thumb, I think, or maybe just a really wide index finger. embedded in the skin of this thumb-slash-wide-pointer-finger is a series of irregular circular holes, all of which are filled with smaller circular objects. Now, I know this is just the seed pod of the lotus plant, but there’s this voice in the back of my head that’s saying “those seeds sure look a lot like living creatures. Would you feel them moving in your skin?” And on that note, I’m going to delete this image, and my search history, cause I feel sick.
But why is it these sorts of images make people react this way?
First, we want to highlight a distinct difference between classically recognized phobias and trypophobia. Reactions in line with those described by sufferers of trypophobia–one user in an online forum reported, “‘[I] can’t really face small, irregularly or asymmetrically placed holes, they make me like, throw up in my mouth, cry a little bit, and shake all over, deeply'”–only show up when someone actually looks at images. Classic object phobias can be triggered in the presence of the subject of fear, even if that object cannot actually be seen.
That is not to delegitimize trypophobia, of course. Just because something doesn’t have official recognition doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. And in case that’s not reassurance enough, we turn to our benevolent celebrity overlords for commiseration. Kendall Jenner has trypophobia! Take away from that what you will; I refuse to make a statement on the current state of celebrity culture in America.
But! Back to the point at hand: what is trypophobia? Cole and Wilkins would have us believe that it is a genetic aversion to specific patterns, citing an earlier study conducted by Wilkins. The two researchers make the claim that trypophobia is the result of an historic desire to avoid plants and animals that possess similar patterns. Because they’re dangerous. It makes sense, then, that people are disgusted by the seed pods of the lotus plant; after all, according to the Odyssey, consuming the fruit of the lotus plant will result in the loss of desire to do anything but eat the fruit. I don’t know about you, but that kind of makes me want to try it. Just to see what would happen.
I suppose the argument doesn’t really come down to whether or not trypophobia is a real fear–people will believe what they want to believe, and with fears like heliophobia being officially recognized, well–but rather what really causes it. Perhaps it is totally reasonable to accept Cole and Wilkins’s explanation. There certainly are examples of animals and plants that have obvious physical warning signs as to how dangerous they are, and maybe trypophobia is just a learned aversion to these sorts of things so ingrained in our culture it has become unconscious.
The thing with trypophobia is, even if it doesn’t deserve official phobia status, if Cole and Wilkins are correct in their assessment, it certainly isn’t something to just brush aside. The idea of instinct is a hotly contested topic; it is not scientifically viable to claim that fear of a certain natural pattern in a creature’s scales or fur can be encoded in and passed down through DNA, but certainly there are things that people know without really ever actively learning it.
And maybe people with trypophobia have an instinctual advantage over those who don’t react negatively to what are inherently distasteful images–I actually want to unironically track someone down who reacts positively to these sorts of images and find out what makes them tick. How can you like those pictures?! There are plenty of people who engage in obviously dangerous activities over and over and over, without regard for their own personal safety, or even after getting seriously injured doing said activity. Sure, being disgusted by the scale patterns on a slithery snake is a bit different than being scared of free falling three and a half miles–that’s eighteen thousand feet–but the concept of having a built in mechanism to avoid dangerous things is still present. Personally, avoiding dangerous things and situations sounds like a smart thing, but that’s just me. Who am I to tell you how to live your life?
[wind whistling behind the sound of labored breathing and boots crunching in snow]
HAYLI: When you were kid, you liked standing on top of the snow-crested hill more than you really cared about sledding down it – except that once you reached the bottom, you got to hike back up again… This is the moment you’ve longed for your whole life. After years of dreaming and years more of research and years yet of rigorous training, you’re finally here. Mt Everest.
[the footsteps pause, but the breathing and wind continue]
HAYLI: And you won’t fail.
[footsteps continue]
HAYLI: You won’t be another one of those people who gives up and turns around halfway. You’re going to make it to the summit, just like Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. [pause] But it is getting a little harder, now, isn’t it…? Suddenly you start feeling a little… tired. You kind of want to lay down—just take a quick break. Yeah. That’s all. A five-minute rest so your heart can settle. [heartbeat begins, getting louder] You can feel it banging against the inside of your chest, like it’s trying to get out, like it doesn’t want to summit the mountain.
[heartbeat fades away]
HAYLI: So you find a rock to sit down on in the snow. You can hardly keep your eyes open. Even with your supplementary oxygen, it’s a little hard to breathe up here.
[coughing in the background]
HAYLI: All you can think of, now, is taking a nap, except in the back of your mind you know that would be a bad idea. You stretch your eyes open, trying to stay present, and as you do, you catch a burst of green against the snow….
HAYLI (cont): You think you’re imagining it at first. Neon green? Up here in the barren white? But then you crawl over to investigate, and you realize you’re looking at a pair of green boots half-buried at the edge of an alcove.
HAYLI(cont): “Boots?” you ask yourself. “What kind of madman would take off his boots this high up the mountain?”
HAYLI (cont): But then you realize it’s not just a pair of green boots, but a pair of hiking pants, a coat, a backpack… a dead hiker half-buried in the snow drift, frozen solid, looking… oddly… as if he’s just laid down for a quick rest before continuing up the mountain….
[wind and breathing continue for a moment before fading away]
HAYLI: It’s generally accepted that Green Boots is—or, you know, was—an Indian Constable who died from exposure during a blizzard in 1996. That means he’s been on the mountain for over 22 years! But because it’s so damned cold up there, he still looks as if he might have died yesterday. Sometimes he’s hidden by the snow, but other times, when the wind blows it away, he’s fully visible to anyone else who hikes by.
JACOB: Huh, that’s quite the extraordinary case!
HAYLI: Well, in fact, he’s just one of over two hundred dead bodies estimated to be on Everest.
LIN: What!!
HAYLI: Um, excuse me, is this your segment or mine? Yeah, there’s no exact count, because it’s hard to keep track of the roughly 800 people a year who attempt to repeat what Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay achieved in 1953—which is to say, summit the tallest mountain in the world. It’s a treacherous climb, freezing, temperamental, and as hard as climbers train, sometimes it’s just impossible to get around the natural danger of the mountain.
HAYLI (cont): Actually, in 2006, an English climber named David Sharp died right beside Green Boots in his alcove. David Sharp had been an experienced climber who took on Everest before, but never managed to summit. So he kept coming back determined to get to the top. But on this third expedition, he opted out of climbing with a Sherpa and brought an insufficient amount of supplementary oxygen bottles, figuring, I think, that he could rely on the partial ones left littered all across the mountain?
JACOB: Well, that was stupid of him.
HAYLI: Hey, be nice. Do you have any idea how expensive it is to climb Mt. Everest? We’re talking in the category of $45,000 for hikers from the Western world.
LIN: So what you’re saying is… college students can save thousands of dollars by dropping out to fly over to climb the mountain with a professional team and high grade equipment—
HAYLI: That’s neither here nor there—
JACOB: Yes.
HAYLI: Look, this isn’t an economical criticism podcast. I know we’re college students—we’re obligated to complain about the tuition, but, like, let’s get past it for now, okay? I’m talking about dead bodies on Everest. And, anyway, the death toll at University isn’t 7%. Except maybe at finals week.
HAYLI (cont): All right, all right, now I got a good one for you. That English climber, David Sharp? He was passed by up to forty other hikers while he lay there dying. Most of them assumed he was dead already, and even those who stopped to check on him—well, they figured there was nothing they could do, so they left him there to die.
JACOB: Ouch, that’s a little harsh.
HAYLI: No one even knows whether he summited or not, because his camera was lost, and no one saw him on the top of the mountain. But, then, no one saw him not on the top of the mountain, either.
JACOB: Yeah, no, he died on the way up.
LIN: Yeah, he never sumitted.
HAYLI: Oh, wow, okay, well I can see the two of you won’t be writing Disney movies any time soon.
HAYLI (cont): Apparently, before he left England, David Sharp told his mother not to worry because, “You’re never on your own. There are climbers everywhere.” It’s pretty sad, but… she didn’t blame them—I would have—but she just thought they deserved to save themselves. Except…. Some of them just wanted to summit. And there were Sherpas at camp about an hour away who could have gone up to rescue him if anyone had told them. So… were they all just saving themselves by leaving David? Or were some of them just more interested in the climb?
LIN: Probably. People suck.
HAYLI: Edmund Hillary himself thought so, too. He was furious when he heard about all the people who left David Sharp up there—especially those who left him in favor of summiting. He said that he would have quit his famous expedition like that [finger snap] to save somebody’s life. He said that human life is way more important than reaching the top of the mountain.
JACOB: Well, duh!
HAYLI: Oh, j—just get outta here! Who even invited you? You didn’t let me hang around this long in your segments! Yeah, just—just go! Go!
HAYLI (cont): Okay, now let’s play devil’s advocate here. I already said that it costs—at the lower end, mind you–$45,000 between all the training, equipment, transportation, teammates, teachers, Sherpa guides, and so on to climb the mountain. So turning around is more than just an emotional blow; it might be worth all your life savings.
And by the time some of the other climbers saw David next to Green Boots, his legs were frozen from the knees down, his arms from the elbows. His nose had gone black, and his lips and cheeks were turning the same. He had no oxygen mask of his own, meaning that he would have needed to use your oxygen, when a lot of hikers didn’t have much left for themselves at that point, let alone anybody else. I mean, let’s be clear: David Sharp and Green Boots weren’t near the bottom of the mountain. They were almost right underneath the summit.
This was a very, very dangerous place on the mountain to decide to do something crazy. Even if you found him before he’d gotten such bad frostbite, he’d probably have had to be carried, as he couldn’t stand on his own after a while. And the way back would have been even more treacherous with an unconscious man as dead weight. So I ask you… would you have really tried to save David Sharp? Or do you think you would have walked past him like everyone else?
Honestly, whatever Edmund Hillary thought when he heard about it, don’t feel bad if you really think you might have just walked past him. Some people were running out of oxygen themselves, like I said, and… David Sharp really didn’t take the proper precautions. He didn’t bring oxygen, he had a lack of proper equipment, he didn’t even bring a radio or phone for contact, he had no guides, no companions…. That’s why no one knew he was in trouble until it was just about too late.
He didn’t take any of the precautions he should have—but he was obsessed with getting up the mountain! On one of his previous climbs, he lost parts of his toes because of his carelessness. None of it mattered to him. He just really, really wanted to get to the top of this mountain! [pause] And so many people do.
So many people, every year, try to get to the top of the mountain—and why? It’s so dangerous, it’s so deadly, there’s no real… payoff except to say that you did. And yet people do it. Year after year after year, guaranteed, no matter how many people die: 7% of everyone who’s tried. David Sharp was hardly the first of his kind.
In fact, he chillingly resembles another famous mountain climber, who even came before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. George Mallory was obsessed with climbing Mt. Everest. He tried three times—just like David Sharp—and just like David Sharp, he died on the third.
Before he set out on that ill-fated last attempt, a New York Times reporter asked him why he wanted to do this crazy thing. And George Mallory answered with what would become a famous phrase: “Because it’s there.”
There was no other reason to climb the mountain besides the fact that he could. But unfortunately, in 1924, he died on the mountain. 1924. [breathy laugh] And in 1999, his frozen was body was found by climbers.
So maybe there is no rhyme or reason for why people want to climb Mt Everest—or do anything insane and dangerous, for that matter. No reason besides the fact that they can. And you know, that in itself is pretty scary, but… I can kind of understand it, too. I might not be mountain climbing, but I am gambling my fate away on a creative writing degree, so there’s that to say about taking risks in life.
Just because we all take different risks in life, because we all see risk differently, doesn’t mean human beings don’t all share that same weird thirst for proving ourselves. Maybe it’s against a mountain, maybe it’s against people’s expectations of us, maybe it’s just against ourselves.
They can’t recover all the bodies on Mt Everest. It’s dangerous enough just to climb the mountain in the first place, let alone to go up there and collect hundreds of dead bodies, often buried in the snow or stuck at dangerous points at dangerous crevices. And so I guess the hikers will just be up there. Hikers like Green Boots, hikers like David Sharp, hikers like George Mallory. People who looked at that mountain, and instead of seeing all the danger along the way, thought to themselves, “God… I bet the view is beautiful from up there….”
Because, you know, out of everything in the entire world—the entire universe—the weirdest thing of all, bar none, is a friggin’ human being. I mean, God, what is wrong with us?
[music fades in]
HAYLI: Well, that’s it, I guess, and thank you all for listening. For anyone interested, the music that we used was “Carpe Diem” by Kevin MacLeod, and the information that Lynn used was taken from Scientology.org, Delish.com, Business Insider, L. Ron Hubbard’s 1966 Intro to Scientology Interview, and the Sawbones podcast. My information was taken from BBC.com, the Associated Press, Encyclopedia Brittanica, and the wonderful Josh Gates. And if anyone is interested in more strange stories and wonderful mysteries from history, I recommend checking out his show, Expedition Unknown, on Discovery Channel.