Pod Insights Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks Juliane of the Jungle About this episode in 1971, 17-year-old Juliane Koepcke was sucked out of an airplane after it was struck by lightning. Wes tells the story of what the next 10 days trudging her way through the Amazon looked like after miraculously surviving the fall.
Watch here: https://youtu.be/2ohwutlKyb8
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Transcript 18,324 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:13 Jeff Larson? Hello earthlings, welcome back to another episode of Tooth and Claw Podcast. We have our bear biologist Wes Larson, he's doing great, he's just in Montana.
0:25 Wes Larson? Negative 10 degrees, baby, in my shed.
0:28 Jeff Larson? Oh.
0:29 Wes Larson? Yeah, just getting the full test today.
0:31 Mike Smith? Getting small, you know what I'm talking about.
0:33 Wes Larson? Oh yeah.
0:34 Mike Smith? Already there dude.
0:35 Jeff Larson? That's your first thought. Then we got our producer Mike Smith. And then I'm Jeff Larson, Wes's little brother, and I've kinda messed around with bears a little bit, but not to the degree Wes has.
0:48 Wes Larson? You've probably messed around with them more than I have actually.
0:52 Jeff Larson? I wouldn't say that.
0:53 Wes Larson? Yeah. Jeff, I got a question for you.
0:55 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
0:56 Wes Larson? How the fuck are you, man? How you doing?
0:58 Jeff Larson? Oh dude.
1:01 Mike Smith? Skip 10 minutes ahead for anyone listening.
1:05 Jeff Larson? No, I don't know, I'm doing alright, doing as good as you can, you know? Cause I had to go to India soon. I think my brain might be broken. Like I just don't know things anymore. I thought I knew things and now I feel like I don't know any things at all.
1:20 Wes Larson? World's all topsy turvy.
1:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I just like, you can tell me anything right now, be like, yeah, maybe you're right, you know?
1:27 Mike Smith? You should, we should maybe get that checked out. So, yeah, we do, we really, we really ought to. I watched a YouTube video recently about a guy who got diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. Important, go get checked out if you think you're actually struggling. I guess that goes for you too Jeff, if you think you are. But he had such a positive outlook on life and I was like, dude, this guy just got maybe the worst diagnosis you could ever get. He was like 38, not much older than me, and he's like a thousand times happier than me. What's going on?
1:57 Wes Larson? I, it's crazy.
1:58 Mike Smith? Those guys, those people are just amazing.
2:00 Wes Larson? Those people are the best, those are the people that need to be making decisions for like countries and peoples and stuff.
2:06 Mike Smith? Right.
2:07 Jeff Larson? Because me. I mean, we had one in there, in the office, in America.
2:11 Mike Smith? Biden?
2:11 Jeff Larson? He's gone now.
2:13 Mike Smith? That was, that was late onset.
2:15 Wes Larson? Late onset, that's a good point. No, I like
2:19 Mike Smith? Forgot how to ride a bike.
2:20 Wes Larson? I twisted my ankle the other day.
2:21 Mike Smith? You never forget how to ride a bike. Sorry.
2:24 Wes Larson? I twisted my ankle the other day. I was just like, maybe I should myself, you know?
2:30 Mike Smith? It's tough out there.
2:32 Jeff Larson? That's how I feel whenever the NFL season's over. God, man, 200 more days.
2:39 Wes Larson? We got a long story today, so I'm just gonna get us started here. I'm gonna get us going.
2:43 Mike Smith? Let's go.
2:44 Wes Larson? Yeah, you know, when we decided to go weekly, uh, which we'll see how long that sticks. I think like in my head, the first thing that was scary was like, oh, man, we're gonna burn through so much stuff. It's gonna be hard to find like really good stories and and more and more I learned that, you know, people are out there creating content for us all the time.
3:04 Mike Smith? Thank you for your service.
3:05 Wes Larson? Part of what I Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we appreciate it.
3:08 Jeff Larson? And if you're listening and you haven't been attacked by an animal yet.
3:11 Wes Larson? Get on it.
3:12 Jeff Larson? Throw us a bone.
3:14 Wes Larson? Don't actually. That's actually antithetical to the purpose of this podcast. But what I was trying to get at was that I kind of, and we all three talked about this. This wasn't just me. We kind of want to experiment with some different formats. We did the Revenant review. And today is somewhat different too, in that it's a really good story, but it's not one that necessarily centers around wildlife, even though there is wildlife in this story. It's more of just a crazy story that happened to someone. It is nature focused. So just so you know, it's a little bit different, but I'm really excited for it. It's one that I really put a ton of time into and I'm excited to tell.
3:50 Mike Smith? We'll give you five minutes to hook us. Otherwise I'm cutting the recording short.
3:55 Wes Larson? All right. Well, here's the, this is the story of the girl that fell from the sky. The story of Julianne Kopke and it's a crazy one. So we'll get ready for it. Put on that air, air seat or airplane buckle, seatbelt, whatever. You know, it's all right. Sure. Okay.
4:13 Jeff Larson? I didn't know.
4:14 Wes Larson? No, it's fine. All right. So the sources for today are the book, When I Fell From the Sky, which is Julianne Kopke's autobiography. Wings of Hope, which is a Werner Herzog documentary. We're back on Werner, which I love. Happy to watch his documentary on this. And then a bunch of articles and I've kind of learned that when I do these ones, I end up reading their book twice. Because I read it once to kind of know what I want to include and then I have to read it again to actually write my story out. So I I feel very close to the story now and I'm excited about it. Okay.
4:47 Jeff Larson? That's why I had to do Hunger Games.
4:50 Wes Larson? Yeah, you had to read it and then watch it and then read it.
4:54 Wes Larson? To understand what you read and then what you watched.
4:56 Jeff Larson? Tracker checkers again?
4:57 Wes Larson? Yeah, you feel very close to Hunger Games. Yeah, seventeen year old Juliane Kopke is in shock. It's Christmas Eve nineteen seventy one. The plane she's in just got hit by lightning. And from her seat at the back of the plane, she can see all the way down into the cabin and into the cockpit. As this plane is plummeting toward the earth. Everyone's screaming, suitcases, Christmas presents are falling out of the overhead compartment. She hears her mother calmly say, now it's all over. Over the deafening sound of all these screams, the turbines, everything. And then suddenly, her world is a lot quieter. Now, all she can hear is the sound of rushing wind.
5:38 Wes Larson? She's still strapped to her seat by her seatbelt, but she's left the plane. Or the plane has left her. She's spinning freely through the air in her seat. The rest of the plane is completely gone. This overwhelming green of the Peruvian Amazon is rushing up to greet her and seal her fate. She turns to the camera and says, now you might be wondering how I got here.
6:01 Wes Larson? That part, that last part maybe didn't happen.
6:04 Jeff Larson? I feel like people are gonna like rewind a bunch right there. They're gonna be like, wait a second, why am I in the middle of this story?
6:14 Wes Larson? Alright, so we actually are gonna rewind, Jeff. I'm glad you said that. And we're gonna go back to the beginning of Julianne's life. Because it is kind of crazy to learn how she got to this place. And what's much crazier is what happens afterward. So she was born in Lima, Peru in October of nineteen fifty four to German parents. Both of whom were zoologists working in Peru and their names were Maria and Hans. William Kopke. They're both pretty famous people in the scientific community. Maria was a really accomplished ornithologist by the end of her life. And Hans Wilhelm did a lot of work on both ornithology, herpetology, so that's birds and reptiles, plus just general zoology. These are very accomplished scientists.
6:58 Wes Larson? Hans Wilhelm got his doctorate in nineteen forty seven in Germany, and immediately began looking for countries with high amounts of biodiversity to do his studies.
7:06 Jeff Larson? What was going on in Germany in the nineteen forty's?
7:10 Wes Larson? Yeah.
7:12 Mike Smith? What do you think a couple of German expats are doing in South America around this time?
7:16 Wes Larson? We're just gonna, we're not gonna cast any judgment. I don't, well, we would if we knew anything about these people. I had that same thought, Mike, when I read this. These are Germans that immigrated to South America directly after the war. But I did a really thorough search to see if there was a nefarious reason for that. I couldn't find anything.
7:38 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
7:39 Wes Larson? But I couldn't, I couldn't find anything really about their lives up until this point either. So we're just gonna let people kind of do their own research there. All right. I genuinely think that they wanted to go to Peru because of the biodiversity, not because of asylum or anything. I really do.
7:56 Jeff Larson? Yeah, no, there's a lot of German people who, Germany was a tough place to be in right then and.
8:02 Mike Smith? Yeah, yeah, they left.
8:03 Wes Larson? Okay. So he got his doctorate in nineteen forty seven, and he settled on Peru for a place that he wanted to work. And he just wrote a letter to the university in Lima and their natural history museum and said, hey, I'm German, I have this doctorate, I want to come work there. And they were like, sure, yeah, come on over. This ended up being really hard to do that. He was already engaged to Maria, or they were dating in Sirius. She was gonna follow him once he got over there. But he didn't have a passport or a visa. Apparently, after the war in Germany, no one really had a legal way to leave the country. So what he ended up doing was hearing that he could go to Italy and get a boat from Italy. So he hitchhiked to the Italian border.
8:46 Wes Larson? He crawled over the fence, got hurt, and then ended up recovering and crawling under the fence. Got to Genoa, Italy, just missed his boat. So then he went to Rome. He got a Red Cross passport, but was told that he would have to wait weeks or even months for passage to South America. He didn't want to do. So he heard, maybe I should go to Naples. He went up to Naples and there he got thrown into a prison camp.
9:10 Mike Smith? Whoa.
9:10 Wes Larson? In the prison camp, he prayed and prayed and prayed that he could get out somehow. And one night it rained so hard that the walls of this camp literally crumbled. He escaped and hid in a.
9:21 Mike Smith? No way.
9:22 Wes Larson? He hid in a bush for 24 hours. And then he spent a while longer in Italy, just kind of like staying in farmhouses and stuff and working for food. But then he finally was like, I gotta get out of Italy. This isn't working. So he headed to France. Once he got to France, they were like, the country's full of minefields. Don't even try hiking through France. But he's like, I'm gonna hike through France, which he did. He hiked all the way to Nice and Provence.
9:49 Mike Smith? Nice.
9:49 Wes Larson? And honestly, like, this goes on and on and on.
9:51 Mike Smith? No, it's Nice.
9:53 Wes Larson? He gets.
9:53 Mike Smith? That's right. You just said that.
9:55 Wes Larson? Yeah. He gets thrown in prison more. He gets robbed. All of this stuff happens. But finally, in Spain, he's able to sneak onto a cargo ship that's carrying a ton of salt to South America. And he literally burrows into salt with another guy. And that's their plan.
10:15 Mike Smith? No way.
10:16 Wes Larson? Weeks in the salt container.
10:18 Jeff Larson? Wow, that's crazy.
10:20 Mike Smith? Preserved. He'd live forever.
10:22 Wes Larson? After three days, the salt has absorbed into their skin. They can hardly breathe. They're just miserable. And the other guy is like, hey, I'm, I'm done. I'm gonna let the shit know that we're down here. And he's like, no, just wait longer. Wait until they can't turn around. And the guy's like, no, I'm over this. So he tells them that they're in there. And they get thrown into prison in the Canary Islands. But then he manages to get out and get passage to Brazil. Once he's in Brazil, he literally hikes across Brazil, 3,000 miles to get to Peru.
10:53 Mike Smith? Dude.
10:54 Wes Larson? So he finally gets to Peru, two years after they said.
10:58 Jeff Larson? Yeah, they're like.
10:59 Wes Larson? This job is yours. Yeah. So he shows up at the museum and he says, hey, I'm here. And they're like, oh, this job's been filled for like a year.
11:07 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
11:08 Wes Larson? So he has to just kind of take whatever jobs. Maria manages to get over to Lima finally.
11:13 Jeff Larson? Did she like do the same path?
11:16 Wes Larson? No. She has a pretty easy path by then. They're married and they have Julianne in 1954. They do end up working for the Natural History Museum in Peru. And they spend a lot of their time in the Amazon. And while they're in the Amazon, uh, they bring little Julianne over. And she gets to spend a lot of her childhood in the Amazon, like raising wild animals. Just having a really incredible childhood. And her parents teach her a lot about the natural world, about surviving in the jungle. About all these different things that you have to learn if you're spending a lot of time in the Amazon. All right. So she's kind of growing up there and the Peruvian government gets wind of that. And they're like, hey, she needs to actually go to school.
11:59 Wes Larson? So they send her to high school in Lima and she learns German, she learns English, she learns Spanish. She really likes high school in Lima.
12:06 Jeff Larson? What language did she grow up speaking?
12:09 Wes Larson? I think she grew up speaking German and then she learned English and Spanish.
12:13 Jeff Larson? Okay.
12:14 Wes Larson? I think she probably grew up speaking German and Spanish, actually.
12:17 Jeff Larson? Because you said you learned German in school.
12:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, sorry.
12:20 Mike Smith? Sometimes people do that though, you know?
12:22 Wes Larson? Yeah.
12:23 Jeff Larson? Yeah, like we had to learn, we had to go to English class.
12:26 Mike Smith? I majored in English in college and I still suck at it. What's that all about?
12:32 Jeff Larson? You know who sucks at it is freaking my iPhone, dude. I just change words that are like real words when I'm like hitting send on my text.
12:43 Wes Larson? Yeah, mine always changes wheel to well, and that drives me up the wall. Like this is a word that I use every day. Yeah. All right. So during this time, her parents actually established a research station in the Peruvian Amazon, and they name it Panguana. And her mom, who's primarily an orthologist, so birds, and her dad, who's doing all this general kind of zoology, they spend a lot of time at the station. They're pretty much living there for a good part of the year. And their, their hope is that this little preserve, that's like a few hundred acres, will grow to be this huge conservation area where a lot of research is done, which is a really noble pursuit. So in December 1971, Juliana is 17, she's
13:26 Wes Larson? about to graduate, and there's some really fun ceremonies that she wants to do at her school. And her mom Maria is in Lima to pick her up and take her to Panguana in the Amazon. And their plan is to leave on like the 22nd or 23rd to kind of skip the Christmas Eve rush to get home. And Juliana says, you know what, Mom? There's all these fun ceremonies for, for graduation that I want to do. I really want to do all that. It's important to me. Her mom understands, and she really pushes her mom. And her mom finally says, fine, we can leave on Christmas Eve. That's something that Juliana, her entire life, would regret and kind of feel guilty for. When they get to the airport on the 24th
14:07 Wes Larson? in Lima, it's absolutely packed with people trying to get home for Christmas, and all of the flights are either sold out or selling out quickly. And they managed to get a spot on Lonsa Airlines, L A N S A, Flight 508. And they call their dad, Hans Wilhelm, and their husband, to let him know that they're coming. And he says, do not get on that flight. Do not fly Lonsa Airlines. It's not worth it. There's a reason for that. Lonsa Airlines started in 1963, and during that time, they were operating, they had 19 different planes. In 1971, when Juliana and Maria were about to get on this flight,
14:47 Wes Larson? Lonsa had one operating plane left. And that's because all of their planes in this like, less than 10 years, had either crashed or been grounded because they were not able to fly anymore. The first crashes.
15:02 Jeff Larson? They're like good plane then.
15:03 Wes Larson? This is their good one. This one's run the gamut.
15:08 Wes Larson? That's, you know, that's not, that's not a terrible way to look at it, but um, it actually is. Pretty good.
15:14 Mike Smith? It might actually be a pretty bad way.
15:15 Wes Larson? Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of funny because I think I'm, I love flying and I've never had a fear of flying. Jessie does, and I kind of always have to give her pep talks as we're going to the airport and stuff. And Mike, I know you have like a, a semi fear of flying.
15:30 Mike Smith? Yeah, 10%.
15:31 Wes Larson? Yeah.
15:32 Jeff Larson? It's like a recent experience that kind of gave it to you.
15:35 Mike Smith? Yeah, we did like a barrel roll coming into the tarmac once. It was insane.
15:40 Wes Larson? And that does happen.
15:41 Mike Smith? Screaming.
15:42 Wes Larson? That kind of stuff can really alter your, your feelings about it. Like Julianne's mom had a really scary thing happen to her when she was flying to the United States. So she's not excited about flying on this day. To me, it seems like taking this flight, you have like a pretty good chance of crashing. And the reason for that is that the first crash that they had was in 1966. And it was Lanza Flight 501. And they just crashed into the side of a mountain like 10 minutes after takeoff. All 49 people on board were killed.
16:11 Jeff Larson? Mountains are pretty huge.
16:13 Wes Larson? They are big.
16:14 Jeff Larson? Be hard to avoid it.
16:17 Wes Larson? I think people do it pretty, pretty regularly. They manage to avoid these mountains. This next crash was in 1970 when Lanza Flight 502 crashed outside of Cuzco, Peru. When one of the engines stopped working, 99 out of 100 people on board died and two people on the ground were killed.
16:37 Mike Smith? A llama got sucked into the engine probably?
16:39 Wes Larson? Uh, it could have been. Cuzco, you know, lots of llamas around there. Actually, that's not what happened.
16:44 Jeff Larson? It's a Emperor's New Groove.
16:46 Wes Larson? Yeah.
16:46 Jeff Larson? Joke.
16:47 Mike Smith? He was a llama, right?
16:48 Wes Larson? Yeah.
16:48 Mike Smith? That's.
16:48 Wes Larson? He was a llama.
16:49 Mike Smith? Okay.
16:51 Wes Larson? All right. Lotsa was famous in Peru for being a really unreliable airline. People joked about how their planes were always belly up. They discovered that some of the repairs that were done on the airplanes had been done by motorcycle mechanics and some of their pilots never even completed their training before they were put in the air. So this is like a nightmare, nightmare airline. This doesn't happen anymore, at least not that I know of. I thought you were gonna say they hadn't completed their training because they crashed before they died. Yeah, crashed and died before they could.
17:25 Jeff Larson? It's crazy too, because other airlines have such a high standard of care and like being ultra safe. So then like you attribute that to just all the planes that you're getting on, you know?
17:37 Wes Larson? Totally. And what I think had happened with this airline is ownership had kind of switched hands a few times. And when that happened, they kind of slipped under the radar of some of these safety protocols and stuff.
17:48 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
17:49 Wes Larson? Because of this reorganization. So for whatever reason, they were able to get away with this for a while.
17:54 Jeff Larson? It's like the Dallas Mavericks. They switch ownership and just like get rid of their best player for someone who gets hurt in their first game.
18:03 Wes Larson? I wonder what their on-flight attendance were like, if they were good at their jobs or if they also sucked. They're like, they're all just wearing like spilling peanuts all over you and stuff. Yeah. They all had parachutes on. If you've spent much time in the West, you know that every ski town has a brand that the locals are gonna wear before the rest of the country catches on. In Jackson Hole, that brand is Steel. Steel is designed and tested in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, right at the base of the Tetons by locals who ski, bike, climb, and fish there every day. I've spent a lot of time in Jackson Hole. I know that they deal with a lot of different weather there, a lot of different things. And so Steel really has to hold up in a ton of different
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21:35 Wes Larson? dog's new year off right with Ollie. So Julianne and Maria are pretty nervous when they talk to Hans Wilhelm and then they see their plane and their plane actually looks really good. It's a pretty new looking Lockheed L 188A electro turboprop and they feel a lot of confidence. Jeff, you know, you know a lot about planes.
21:58 Jeff Larson? I know the sound of those more than the look, but those are good sounding planes.
22:04 Wes Larson? When one flies over, you're always like, oh, that's a Lockheed turboprop. Yeah.
22:10 Mike Smith? 17.8 gigatons of torque. Or whatever.
22:14 Jeff Larson? Billion horsepower.
22:18 Wes Larson? So they decide to get on this plane and what they didn't know was that this particular plane was actually built in the US for specifically for travel over the desert. It's not really built for the kind of turbulence that you often encounter in the mountains. And luckily they're just flying over the Andes, which, you know, the Andes aren't much when it comes to mountains.
22:39 Jeff Larson? I mean, air is air though, right? You're just in the air.
22:43 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's not true. Not true at all. I flew once from Santiago, Chile up to Ecuador and you fly over the Andes and then the Amazon and it is just really stark how much it changes, both in the bumpiness of the flight and just the terrain when you're crossing the Andes and then you get over the Amazon basin. It's a really cool flight. Kind of a funny aside here. At the time Werner Herzog was filming the film Aguirre Wrath of God, which is a crazy film, a crazy story. And he was actually in the airport that same day and he was trying to get on Lanza Flight 508, but couldn't get it. A ticket for him and his flight crew.
23:24 Jeff Larson? No way.
23:24 Wes Larson? And he was really pissed about it, like he threw a little fit in the airport because they couldn't get on this flight. And the fact that not getting on that flight spared his life is part of the reason he was so interested in Julian's story. And ended up filming a documentary about it.
23:39 Jeff Larson? That's crazy. It's like Jackie Chan was supposed to be on the Twin Towers when they on nine eleven.
23:45 Wes Larson? Really?
23:45 Mike Smith? Is that true?
23:46 Wes Larson? He's supposed to be in the towers or on the flight?
23:48 Jeff Larson? I always heard that you're supposed to do like a stunt on top of the towers.
23:52 Mike Smith? That would have been a bad day for that.
23:54 Wes Larson? Could have been a cool stunt, though.
23:55 Mike Smith? Amazing. He would have lived through it.
23:58 Wes Larson? If he pulled it off.
23:59 Mike Smith? Yeah.
24:00 Wes Larson? Like runs across the top of the plane.
24:01 Mike Smith? Probably shouldn't say that.
24:03 Jeff Larson? No, it's an interesting thought, though. I'm trying to figure out what he would have done.
24:08 Wes Larson? It is interesting, too, that Herzog was in, I mean, another German born in South America. I'm not saying anything. Yeah, this, yeah, this feels different in the seventies when he's there to film a movie about.
24:19 Jeff Larson? I'll just say too, before the correction corner, I bet the Jackie Chan thing is like wrong, but it's like been said a lot.
24:28 Wes Larson? Right now, there's someone that was about to type an angry message to you, Jack.
24:33 Wes Larson? I did hear Jimmy Kimmel was supposed to be on a flight. I don't know. There's a million rumors. I'm sure they're all probably false.
24:39 Jeff Larson? It's too bad Mark Wahlberg wasn't on.
24:42 Wes Larson? Yeah, he would have stopped that shit. Alright, so these two do get on the plane and they do take off. Unfortunately, Marky Mark is not on the plane with them. Julian and her mom are in row nineteen, second to last row from the back, and Julian's in nineteen F by the window. Her mom's in the middle and a man she describes as an overweight Peruvian man is sleeping in the aisle. Not in the aisle, in the aisle seat. Yeah. So the flight's really bumpy and like I mentioned, Maria doesn't really like flying because she's already had a scare before. But it's not bumpier than normal for flying over the Andes and into the Amazon Basin. And the first forty minutes of this flight are pretty normal. And then they hit a big storm front and I probably should have done this kind of trigger warning at the beginning.
25:25 Wes Larson? But we are going to talk about some scary flight stuff. So if you have like an intense fear of flying, you might just want to skip this part. But um, it's really interesting. So they hit this storm front and the pilot at this point has two choices. He can either divert and add some time to their route and go around this storm, or he can just plow through it. And every other plane that day was diverting around this storm. But because Lonsa had had some canceled flights and because people were behind, he just was like, I need to keep to my schedule. We're just going to push through this storm.
25:57 Mike Smith? Send it.
25:58 Wes Larson? Yeah, which I listened to an aviation podcast about this story. And the guy that's an aviation expert says this is called get thereitis, which is a really bad thing that pilots do sometimes where they'll take, they don't really do it anymore, but back in the day they would take risks. Now there's so many people in their ear telling them what to do that they can't really do this anymore, which is good. This guy made the point that every time something terrible happens on a plane, it makes flying safer for people, which is true. So he goes into this storm. It gets really dark in the cabin and Julian remembers seeing pretty constant flashes of lightning outside the plane. And the plane starts shaking harder than her or her mom had ever experienced. Hard enough for stuff to come spilling out of the luggage compartment.
26:43 Wes Larson? Uneaten food and drinks are flying all over the cabin. And people are starting to scream and cry. Suddenly a blinding white light hits the entire cabin. And Julian looks out the window to see a flash of light hitting the wing. They've been hit by lightning. And unlike modern planes where that energy is diverted, in modern planes, they have things that absorb the, the energy from the lightning. So that doesn't affect the plane at all. And these old planes, especially this Lonsa plane, this plane is just raw dogging this lightning. Like it's just taking it and it essentially shuts down the turbines. It shuts down everything.
27:21 Mike Smith? It would be useful to put like a big rubber around the wing though, because those, that would negate the lightning strike, right?
27:28 Wes Larson? Yeah.
27:28 Mike Smith? So maybe you don't want to raw dog that.
27:30 Wes Larson? Sure. All right. So suddenly this plane falls steeply forward and Julian can see all the way down the aisle and into the cockpit, but it's like she's looking down, not across. And she can hear the roaring of these turbine engines as they're failing, the screaming of the passengers and crew. And somehow over everything she hears her mom say, now it's all over. The loud noises around them get louder. They enter into a free fall. Suddenly all these screams, all these noises are cut off and all she can hear is rushing air. She looks around and her mom and this big Peruvian guy are gone. She's strapped to the bench of three seats. So it's just her in the one seat and then the other two are empty. And
28:12 Wes Larson? she's just completely alone, 10,000 feet above the jungle, free falling through the air.
28:18 Jeff Larson? Oh, man.
28:19 Wes Larson? Yeah. And again, I really like that she says,
28:21 Jeff Larson? What would you?
28:22 Wes Larson? Yeah, we're gonna do a what would my conjecture? Werner Herzog actually kind of said this to her and she really liked it. She says that she didn't leave the plane, the plane left her. Like this plane just disintegrated around her and suddenly she's falling through the air. So she's spinning through the air, her seatbelt's pinching her stomach so tightly that it really hurt. And she loses consciousness and then wakes up again. And now she's upside down and she can see the forest rushing up toward her. She says the tops of these trees look like broccoli heads. And then she passes out again. During that time, she has two dreams. One where she's running through a low, dark space and trying really hard not to hit a wall. And there's this really loud noise that sounds like a turbine. And then the second dream, she just feels really dirty
29:07 Wes Larson? and sticky, like she's covered in filth, but she can't wash it off. And in that dream, she keeps telling herself, all you have to do is get up and go to the bathtub. And when she finally does get up in the dream, she wakes up in real life.
29:20 Jeff Larson? That's like the reverse dream. Like when you're sitting in class and you feel like you're falling and about to hit the ground and you wake up and like shake everything around. This one, you're like all calm and then you wake up and you're like, oh shit.
29:36 Wes Larson? That's a good point.
29:37 Jeff Larson? Shake everything up.
29:38 Wes Larson? She literally was falling through the air and then fell asleep right when she was about to hit the ground.
29:43 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
29:44 Wes Larson? So when she wakes up, she these bench of seats are kind of like forming a V over the ground and she has crawled under them. So at some point she had waken up, taken off her seatbelt and crawled under these seats, but she doesn't remember that at all.
29:56 Jeff Larson? That's crazy.
29:57 Wes Larson? She lays there for the rest of the day and the night. And in the morning, she's completely soaked and covered in mud. So it must have rained a lot through the night.
30:04 Jeff Larson? Wait, did you say she hit the ground? When did you say that?
30:08 Wes Larson? We're no, she doesn't remember hitting the ground at all.
30:10 Jeff Larson? She just woke up on the ground.
30:12 Wes Larson? The last thing she saw in the air was the forest rushing up to her.
30:15 Jeff Larson? Broccoli.
30:16 Wes Larson? And then she woke up on the ground and we're going to talk about what could have happened there. So now she opens her eyes. Finally, she realizes what has happened. She looks at the canopy of the forest and she realizes I was in a plane crash and I'm completely alone. Her mom's gone. She has concussion. One of her eyes is completely swollen shut and the other one is open, just a little slit. And she's lost her glasses too. So she really can't see much at all. She looks back down or she lies back down and she does an inventory on her injuries. She doesn't really feel any pain at all. She says it feels like her whole body is packed in cotton and that's because she has a spinal injury that she doesn't know about, one that would actually give her headaches for the rest of her life. But the first thing she feels that's wrong, she feels her clavicle
31:00 Wes Larson? or her collarbone and it's broken in half. And the two pieces are are kind of overlaying each other, but they haven't pierced the skin. So it just feels like she can feel the loose bones in there kind of scraping on top of each other, but she feels no pain whatsoever. The next thing she notices is she has a ragged about two inch long cut on her calf that looks like a little canyon that's pretty deep and open. And then later she finds a big puncture wound on her, the back of her arm that's deep, but really not that big. And we're actually going to come back to that one. And you guys aren't going to like it. That one's going to get pretty gross. That's where our wildlife is going to come into play. So the search has already been launched. She can hear the planes flying above the canopy.
31:45 Wes Larson? But this is such thick canopy that there's just absolutely no way they're gonna see her. And she knows that. She starts yelling and screaming to see if anyone else is around. No one answers. She's obviously screaming for her mom. No one answers. She can't see any other wreckage. And it finally hits her like, how am I alive? How did I survive this? How did I plunge two miles down to hit the planet? And Jeff, it wasn't a fire ant colony this time.
32:12 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
32:13 Wes Larson? Cause Jeff told a really fun, Jeff told a really fun Patreon story, which I think we shared wide about a woman who fell out of a plane, hit a fire ant colony and somehow survived. But that's not what happened to her.
32:24 Jeff Larson? But she did get bit by ants.
32:26 Wes Larson? She does get bit by a lot of bugs. Yeah.
32:28 Jeff Larson? No, that lady in my story, she got bit by the ants.
32:32 Wes Larson? So did you.
32:33 Jeff Larson? Can't just say that she didn't get bit by the ants.
32:36 Mike Smith? Well, the ants are what woke her up, right? That's like the, the whole story.
32:40 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah. It like, it like revived her.
32:42 Wes Larson? Yeah. So she, when she talked to Werner Herzog, they kind of came up with a theory of how she had survived this fall. And there's three things. First of all, these kinds of storms often have really powerful updrafts that could kind of cushion you as you're falling. Cause you have a lot of wind blowing up against you. And the second thing that was probably related to that is she had this bench of three seats sticking out from her. And so she kind of likened it to one of those seed pods when they fall, they spin.
33:12 Mike Smith? The helicopter spin.
33:13 Wes Larson? Yeah, it really slows down their descent. And she thinks that's kind of what her row of seats was doing as she was falling too. Cause she does remember spinning. The final thing, and I think this is probably the most important thing, is where she happened to land, there's a dense network of leonovines. And these are really woody dense vine that you see in the Amazon. They're much more, they feel almost more like tree than they do vine. But if you were to hit a canopy that's full of those, they would soften the blow enough to where you could like, kind of get slowed way down as you're coming to earth. I think if you were just to hit a tree or a big tree branch, it would probably kill you instantly. And she agrees with that.
33:55 Wes Larson? But if you were to hit these vines, there is the chance they would kind of function like a net. And that's what they think happened with her.
34:01 Mike Smith? Hmm, that's not what happened to Clayton in Tarzan though.
34:04 Wes Larson? No, he didn't do so great.
34:06 Mike Smith? Yeah, they got, the vines got him.
34:09 Wes Larson? And a lot of the videos Jeff has sent me from the dark web of people trying to jump into trees. It doesn't go so well for them, right Jeff?
34:17 Mike Smith? You just need a three seat bench tied to you, I guess is the key.
34:21 Jeff Larson? Sometimes it works though.
34:23 Wes Larson? Sometimes it does work. That's true.
34:25 Jeff Larson? If you jump in a tree from really high up.
34:27 Wes Larson? Yeah, we talk about this almost every episode now. We're gonna have to do it at some point. When she finally does get her wits around her, she feels really abandoned, but she doesn't panic. And I think this is the key to her survival. When I heard about this story at first, I always thought, oh, this is someone who like thrived in the jungle because she knew so much about it. It's not that. She has a really hard time, which we're gonna talk about. But she doesn't panic, like she doesn't lose her wits. And I think that is what her experience in the jungle really helped her with. Uh, she feels really confident about the flora, the fauna, and just how to make it out. A lot of other people would probably panic about dangerous animals, about the different threats that you would think are in the jungle.
35:11 Wes Larson? But she knows that if she's gonna die, it's probably gonna be from either starvation or from exposure.
35:17 Jeff Larson? What are the animals that could have got her?
35:20 Wes Larson? What do you think?
35:21 Jeff Larson? Jaguar?
35:22 Wes Larson? Yep.
35:22 Jeff Larson? Uh, mountain lion? Puma?
35:25 Wes Larson? Puma, yeah.
35:26 Jeff Larson? Giant anteater?
35:28 Wes Larson? Nope.
35:28 Mike Smith? Pink river dolphin?
35:29 Wes Larson? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of things that could potentially hurt her, I guess, but the ones you would probably be most concerned about are the two big cats Jaguar and Puma. And then
35:38 Mike Smith? Cayman?
35:39 Wes Larson? A few others like black caiman, piranha. Really, the two that she actually has to worry about, and I was gonna talk about this later, but we can get into this now, and she knows this. She's probably spent her whole life in the jungle and never seen a jaguar at this point. I'd be surprised if she had. So she's not worried about big cats, which is smart. She shouldn't be. The two that she's worried about are freshwater stingrays and venomous snakes. And those are the two that she should be worried about, because she doesn't have protection. She doesn't have boots. She's wearing, she has one sandal and she's wearing like a light mini dress and that's all she has. So she's not very well prepared for snakes or stingrays. And these stingrays, they are the, a certain type of freshwater stingray, they're called the oscillate stingray, I believe.
36:24 Wes Larson? And they have a really venomous barb, just like any other stingray. And it really can do a lot of damage if they get you. People sometimes take months to recover from these stings. And you're pretty immobile during that time. So they can also kind of push dirt and bacteria in when they sting you. And that can lead to infection and whatnot. So that is kind of her main thing that she has to worry about. Because she, as we're gonna get to, she's gonna spend a lot of this time in water. That was a good question, though, Jeff. But I would say those are two things that she really has to worry about. And those are the two that she's most cautious with. So she's really thirsty, she runs around, she drinks a bunch of water that's on plant leaves and stuff. And she, one thing she immediately remembers is how disorientating the jungle can be.
37:09 Wes Larson? So as she's running around drinking, she's focusing on one tree. So she doesn't get turned around while she's doing this, because she wants to remember where the crash site is. There's no wreckage or anything nearby, but she does find a bag of sweets is what she says. So like little candies and then she finds this Peruvian fruitcake. That's so mushed up in the mud that she decides not to take it with her because it just tastes disgusting. She probably should have, but she doesn't. And these little candies, she she limits herself to four a day. She sucks on four of them a day. And that's, that's honestly the only food she'll have during this entire thing. So just keep that in mind. She's going to be in the jungle for 11 days and that's all she ever has.
37:48 Mike Smith? I used to steal the hard candies out of the survival kits. My mom used to make for us when we were little. Just put some Jolly Ranchers in there. I was eating more than four a day, I'll tell you that.
37:58 Wes Larson? Was your mom a prepper?
38:00 Jeff Larson? You would be so mad if something had happened.
38:03 Mike Smith? That's true.
38:04 Jeff Larson? You're just like, damn, I ate all those.
38:06 Mike Smith? I needed Jolly Ranchers. I guess she was kind of a prepper, yeah.
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40:08 Wes Larson? So when Julianne kind of gets her wits about her, she remembers something from her past. When she had spent time at the research station, a group of scientists from Berkeley were visiting, and they went on an expedition up into the mountains of the Amazon. And on this expedition, one of the leaders accidentally shot himself in the leg. When that happened, he was so big that they couldn't carry him out. So they sent a student to go get help and he immediately got lost. And when that happened, he was smart enough to know, I'm gonna follow water. So he found a creek, he followed that to the river. And once he got to the river, he just waited because there was boats that were going to pass on this river. And sure enough, he got to help, he got back to the research station.
40:51 Wes Larson? And that was a story that really stuck in Julianne's mind. Plus, her dad had always told her, if she gets lost in the jungle, follow the water. So while she's sitting there, she's listening and she realizes that over all the different sounds that she was hearing, she could still hear the turbines in her mind, all these different things over the yelling she was doing. She hadn't noticed the soft babbling of a tiny brook nearby. And when she finally did hear it, she found out where it was, she started walking along it. And that brook quickly turned in to a larger creek. Meanwhile, her dad's in Pukalpa, which was the city that this plane was supposed to get to. And he heard about the crash, but he's like, oh, I told them not to go on this plane. There's no way they're on it.
41:35 Wes Larson? But then he's crestfallen the next day. Yeah. He's crestfallen when he sees a list of the people that were on it. On this plane and both Maria and Julian's names come up. So he's waiting for them and he's, he's pretty sad.
41:48 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that sucks because he can't even do like the I told you so.
41:52 Wes Larson? Right. That's the worst part.
41:57 Jeff Larson? Damn, I was right, but they will never know.
42:00 Wes Larson? No one's gonna know how right I was.
42:02 Mike Smith? He probably took solace. He's like, in those last moments of their life that was so tragically cut short, they knew I was right.
42:13 Jeff Larson? And like you can tell your, the news or your friends, like, yeah, I told them not to go on it, but it just doesn't hit. Like they won't care as much.
42:20 Wes Larson? Yeah, they'll be like, oh, um, that's kind of a weird thing to say right now. So she's walking this stream and at night she would find some kind of thing behind her, like a tree or a riverbank or something that she could lean up against. So that at least her back was protected. You might be saying protected from what, Wes? Well, the main thing that was a problem at night were bugs. She was getting torn apart by mosquitoes. There's these gnats that were always on her. It was awful. And then when it would rain, the bugs would stop. But it would get so cold when it was raining. She said every raindrop felt like a pinprick and it was excruciating. So it was either a miserable night from the rain or a miserable night from the bugs, mostly mosquitoes.
43:05 Wes Larson? So she did her best to protect as much of her body as she could at night, but the nights were definitely the worst for her. Each day she would get up, she would keep moving along this stream. At one point she sees a goliath bird eating spider. But doesn't really give it a second thought. You guys ever heard of this spider before?
43:20 Mike Smith? I have, yeah. They're cool.
43:22 Jeff Larson? They're sweet.
43:22 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's the biggest spider on the planet. It's a tarantula. So like all the tarantulas, it's not really that dangerous. If you were to get bit by the spider.
43:32 Jeff Larson? The hairiest spider on the planet? Like it would have the most hairs?
43:36 Wes Larson? I would guess so. It's cause it's so big and then it also just is really hairy.
43:40 Jeff Larson? Yeah. Isn't that the one that like sheds its hairs and then it gives people a reaction?
43:46 Wes Larson? A lot of, most of the tarantulas do that. So they'll raise their abdomen up and they, they scrape their hairs off and kind of throw them at you. And it's like fiberglass when you get them on you. I've had that happen before and it's terrible. Sometimes those hairs will stay for months or even years. It's pretty miserable.
44:01 Mike Smith? If they gave, if scientists gave Jeff a similar name, he'd be the Goliath McRib eating human probably.
44:12 Wes Larson? Anyway, she sees this spider and she knows-
44:14 Mike Smith? You're not that big Jeff, you're looking pretty good actually.
44:16 Wes Larson? You are looking good. Both of you are looking great.
44:19 Mike Smith? Thanks, man.
44:21 Jeff Larson? No, that's a good dip. I had like nothing. I still can't think of anything.
44:25 Mike Smith? You shut them down. I'm sure you could have, but I wanted to keep things a little polite, I'm sure.
44:29 Wes Larson? So she, um, she sees this spider, she knows, if I get bit by a tarantula, it's pretty much just like a bee sting, which is true. They're not dangerous spiders. In fact, when we go to Brazil, if I see a tarantula, I'm gonna pick it up so everyone can handle it because they just are, they are kind of the puppy dogs of the spider world, in my opinion.
44:47 Mike Smith? Cool.
44:48 Wes Larson? So the stream gets bigger and it's deep enough now to wade in, but at that point, her main worry does switch to this oscillate river stingray. We talked about them, they have a venomous barb and you really don't want to get stung by one of these stingrays, especially if you're way out in the middle of nowhere by yourself. So she gets a stick and she's very careful to try and probe the mud in front of her as she moves down this stream. On her third day, she finally finds her first piece of wreckage, which is a big piece of one of these turbines near the creek. And each night, she's just finding new places to sleep. She's going through this misery in the nights and then she's just moving as far as she can in the day down the creek.
45:27 Wes Larson? On the fourth day, she's walking in the creek and she hears long, slow, heavy wing flaps of a big bird. And this is one of the first things that makes her really scared. Why do you guys think that might be?
45:40 Jeff Larson? Uh, she's, like, it reminds her of the plane.
45:44 Mike Smith? It's a good guess. PTSD? That's, that's really the only thing that came to my mind.
45:48 Wes Larson? When you think about, when you think about the biggest birds in the jungle, what are they probably gonna be?
45:53 Jeff Larson? In like, the Amazon, like an eagle.
45:55 Wes Larson? Even bigger.
45:56 Jeff Larson? Even bigger than an eagle. A vulture. She thinks she's dying.
46:00 Mike Smith? Pterodactyl?
46:01 Wes Larson? Oh, Jeff got it. So she hears the wing beats of king vultures, which are incredibly beautiful birds. Look them up if you have a second. They're one of my favorite birds to see in the tropics, but they are carrion eaters. These are birds that eat dead things. And when she hears them, she knows that she's probably close to something dead. She rounds a bend in the creek and she sees a three-seat bench, just like the one that she had been on, except the force of this bench hitting the earth has rammed it headfirst, three feet down into the dirt. And unfortunately, all three passengers are still strapped into their seats.
46:39 Mike Smith? Oh, no.
46:41 Wes Larson? They're three feet buried in the ground and just their legs and part of their torso is sticking up.
46:47 Jeff Larson? So they're like, super excited to see her.
46:50 Wes Larson? They are not excited to see anything at this point. Yeah. She checks on one of them. She knows they're dead, obviously. I think it's been.
46:59 Mike Smith? That would've been crazy if they were, because that would mean they're like zombies. And that's just another layer of danger for her, you know?
47:07 Wes Larson? I'm, I'm just gonna say this now, not, I was gonna say to the end. At least 14 other people, they think, survived this fall.
47:13 Mike Smith? Wow.
47:14 Wes Larson? But they were so injured and strapped into their seats that they just died slowly over a matter of days.
47:20 Mike Smith? Oh, man.
47:21 Wes Larson? Including, including her mom.
47:23 Jeff Larson? No way.
47:23 Wes Larson? Yeah. So that was kind of a hard pill to swallow for a lot of, a lot of the people that were related and for her and everything. Okay. She, even though she like, deep down knows this isn't her mom, because her mom had been on the same bench as her. She checks the woman in these three to see if it could be her mom. And she sees that she has painted toenails and she realizes, my mom never painted her toenails. This isn't her. And she leaves the site. But this is like a really hard moment for her. It makes the whole thing very real. So most of her days are pretty alike. She just keeps moving down the stream, putting one foot in front of the other. Uh, she finishes the candy. She's too afraid to eat anything else. Um, and she's really not hungry, which is crazy. She really doesn't want to eat anything poisonous.
48:07 Wes Larson? But she is drinking water from the river and there's so much silt in that water that it kind of fills her up as she's drinking it. This is clean water. It's clean. I mean, it's probably has some stuff in it, but it, she's drank it kind of her whole life. So she's not too worried about it.
48:22 Mike Smith? Okay.
48:23 Wes Larson? On the sixth day of her trek, she hears a sound that makes her hopeful. And it's the strange wheezing call of a Hawatson. Uh, Hawatson is a really strange bird. It kind of looks like an archaeopterics. Do you guys know what an archaeopterics is?
48:36 Jeff Larson? No.
48:36 Wes Larson? It's like a prehistoric kind of midpoint between birds and dinosaurs where they have a very reptilian looking face, lots of feathers, and it's kind of this weird meeting point between reptiles and birds. And that's what a Hawatson kind of looks like. They have a really reptilian looking face. They have these kind of barb-like feathers. They're really cool birds. I see a lot of them in Ecuador. But the thing that makes her so happy about hearing a Hawatson is they almost always hang out by larger rivers. That's where you find these birds. So when she hears this call, she knows I'm closer to a river than I thought. And she immediately diverts and goes toward that sound. And sure enough, she finds a larger river. It's about 30 feet wide. There's
49:19 Wes Larson? some current moving and she's pretty thrilled. But something that does dampen her excitement is she sees this river is full of logs and driftwood and stuff. And she realizes people aren't navigating this river on boats. It's too clogged with logs. So she's not going to run into like a fisherman or something, probably. At this point, she realizes I'm probably not going to be rescued. So I have to get myself to civilization. She's also in a more open area now. So she's thinking if there were planes, they might see me. But the planes aren't searching anymore. They've been searching for days now. They haven't seen a single thing. So they pretty much called off the search at this point. And that's really a hard pill for her to swallow because she feels now like maybe they rescued everyone else and
50:02 Wes Larson? they just kind of gave up on her and she's abandoned. Aside from those three people, which definitely did not get rescued. So she keeps moving along the edge of this river. It's really slow going, though, and it's prime for stingrays. So she decides she's going to go out in the middle of the river and basically swim. And one thing that I really like about her is she's not freaked out about animals. She knows there's piranhas out there. She knows there's caiman, anaconda, and she knows that none of those animals are going to bother her, which I really like. She's seen a lot of caiman in her life and caiman can be kind of scary when you're in the water. Because if you scare them, they come out into the water toward you. But that's just because they're trying to get into the water to get away. They're not coming at you. They're just coming at the water. They always go into the water.
50:46 Wes Larson? And so if you're in the middle of the river, it looks like they're coming at you, but they're not. They won't make contact with you. Yeah. These are mostly spectacled caiman. So they're a mid-sized species of caiman. They don't attack people unless you harass them. I've actually caught one of them in Florida, an invasive one to remove it. And they're very strong, but they don't try and bite you unless you're doing something to them.
51:10 Jeff Larson? Yeah, it just feels like crocodile and you're in trouble, you know?
51:14 Wes Larson? Yeah, but with caiman, that's just really not the case. When we go to Brazil, you guys are gonna see thousands of yacare caiman and they just try and get away when you see them. They just don't care about you at all. Aside from trying to get away.
51:27 Jeff Larson? That's kind of messed up.
51:28 Mike Smith? Yeah. Do they exhibit the same behavior as other, like, do they do the gator rolls and are they pretty much similar?
51:35 Wes Larson? They're, they're fish eaters, so they don't really ever get prey that where they have to really gator roll like that. I think if they did get larger prey, they probably would, but they're almost exclusively eating fish. So they really don't have to.
51:49 Jeff Larson? So she's just kind of floating downstream?
51:52 Wes Larson? Floating downstream, yep. And she's pretty confident that if she floats down river, she'll sooner or later hit something. And she's getting weaker and weaker by the day. She's drinking water, but that's it. And she does her best not to think about her mom because that's the one thing that really fills her with a lot of despair. But during the next few days, there is something that starts to worry her quite a bit. If you're eating, as we talk about this, you might want to pause and finish your meal and then start the podcast back up.
52:23 Wes Larson? So we talked about that ragged cut on her calf. It's been underwater this whole time, so it's getting that like really white kind of ragged flesh all around it. And that makes her a little nervous, but what's really making her nervous is that dime-sized puncture hole on the back of her arm. Because she's starting to feel a lot of pain there and she feels something else that makes her even more worried. And that's movement. So she twists her head around as far as she can to see this wound. And when she does, she's shocked to see that it's absolutely full of big writhing white maggots.
52:59 Jeff Larson? No.
52:59 Wes Larson? It's bigger, it's deeper than it was, and she can see like masses of maggots moving underneath this thing inside of her arm.
53:08 Jeff Larson? Geez.
53:09 Wes Larson? Some of them are poking their heads up through her wound, kind of like little asparagus heads. And she knows that this is like a really bad thing. So at some point, a screw worm fly, or maybe a blowfly, has laid its eggs inside of her arm. Female screw worm flies can lay up to two hundred and fifty to five hundred eggs in exposed flesh. And what they do is they hatch and burrow into the surrounding tissue. And because their name, their screw worm name, is because they screw down as they're eating. So they actually like screw down into the flesh. And they're capable of causing severe tissue damage and even death in their hosts.
53:48 Jeff Larson? Dude.
53:49 Wes Larson? So like a lot of flies lay their eggs in stuff that's already dead. Screw worm flies or blowflies will lay eggs and botflies in stuff that's still alive. I don't think this was a botfly because they usually just have like bumps for each larva. This was probably a screw worm or a blowfly because there's like a writhing mass of maggots in her arm, which is awful.
54:13 Jeff Larson? It's crazy that there's just like flies out there, just like ready to go once they see a wound too.
54:19 Wes Larson? Yeah, they saw that wound and that fly is just rubbing its little hands.
54:23 Jeff Larson? This is what I've been waiting for.
54:25 Wes Larson? Licking its chops. I'm gonna pump so many eggs in that thing.
54:30 Mike Smith? What recourse do you have? Like, what did she do about it? You're probably gonna get into it, but.
54:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, no, that's a perfect segue.
54:36 Mike Smith? Do anything about that?
54:37 Wes Larson? She knows it's serious. She'd had a dog that had an infestation like this. And what she does is she has a spiral ring around her finger that she kind of opens and bends apart. And she uses the end of that to try and pry some of these maggots out. Whenever she gets close to them, they dip down and they dig deeper into her arms. She can feel them like burrowing deeper. And she's like, okay, this isn't working. I have to stop. But she remembers this dog, and what her dad had done was poured kerosene on its wound, which really hurt, but it did. Did kill all the the larva. They come to the surface to escape and then you can just pick them away. So this is like the thing that I think is most impressive about her is she just kind of puts a pin in it.
55:20 Wes Larson? She's like, you know what? There's nothing I can do right now. I'll deal with this when I can deal with it. And I don't think I could do that. I think I would only be thinking about the writhing mass of maggots in my arm. I don't think I could focus on anything else, but she's able just to kind of say, all right, I'll get back in the river. Brutal.
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57:37 Wes Larson? Rocketmoney.com/Claw. So she's back in the water. She's just gonna worry about these maggots later. One thing she does notice that also makes her a little discouraged is all the wildlife is really unbothered by her. She's seeing brockett deer, she's seeing martens, she's seeing howler monkeys, all these things right by the water that just don't really give a shit about her. And she, that makes her realize, I'm not in a place where people spend a lot of time. These animals haven't seen people.
58:07 Jeff Larson? That's interesting. I don't know.
58:08 Wes Larson? Yeah.
58:10 Jeff Larson? Because like.
58:10 Wes Larson? I don't either.
58:11 Jeff Larson? Animals get accustomed to people and then they'll be like more.
58:15 Wes Larson? Yeah, they could be habituated. Yeah, I don't fully agree with that either, but I do like how much she's paying attention to her surroundings. I think she's a really smart person.
58:24 Mike Smith? Vin Diesel in Triple X, when he realizes the waitress was wearing high heels but doesn't have blisters. That's the kind of like analytical mindset she's got.
58:32 Wes Larson? Exactly. The CIA should hire her after this.
58:35 Mike Smith? Exactly.
58:36 Wes Larson? Another really concerning thing for Juliana, she's getting super weak and everything is getting really hard. She's floating in the water a lot. She's kind of cycling in and out of different stages of consciousness. At one point, she feels a really sharp pain in her back and she realizes she's so sunburnt that she has blisters. But she just keeps swimming and floating. She's having these miserable nights and she knows that if she stops, she'll die. She knows she doesn't have much longer left. She also knows that she has to eat and at that point, there's lots of frogs around, but they're poison dart frogs. She's trying to catch them and eat them.
59:08 Jeff Larson? I was wondering about poison dart frog.
59:10 Wes Larson? Yeah. She's trying to catch them and eat them and she knows that she runs the risk of getting really, really sick. Luckily, she can't catch any of them because this specific type of dart frog that she's trying to catch probably wouldn't kill a healthy adult, but might kill someone that hasn't eaten for like eight days and is fighting a bunch of infections and stuff. So it's a good thing she didn't catch any of them. Okay, we're getting to the end of this. Don't worry. On the 10th day, she's so weak that she's about to give up and she's drifting motionlessly in the water and bumping into logs and stuff. She finds a sandbar that evening and she crawls up on it to sleep. She's pretty delirious, totally weak, probably not far from death. And then she thinks she's hallucinating when she looks down the sandbar and sees a boat.
59:54 Wes Larson? She rubs her eyes. She does like the cartoon, rubs her eyes a few times. And she still sees the boat. So she crawls over to it. She touches it. And then she realizes that there's also a tiny little trail going up the riverbank and some kind of earthen steps that have been carved into that trail. So she crawls up there and it's really hard. She has no energy. So it takes her hours to crawl up. But when she gets to the top, she sees what's called a tombo. And a tombo is like a really makeshift hut made from poles and like a thatched roof. It's about 10 by 15 and she goes into this tombo. And inside there's an outboard motor for that boat that's been stored there. So she knows that people have been in this area and it gives her a lot of hope.
1:00:38 Wes Larson? Another thing that's in there is a can of gasoline. And she remembers that dog. So she finds a tiny hose. She sucks out some of this gasoline and she drips it on to her wound with all the maggots. And sure enough, it kills a bunch of them. It hurts really bad. But she's able to pull 30 maggots out with her little bent open ring.
1:00:57 Mike Smith? Oh, nice.
1:00:58 Wes Larson? Wow. She'd find out later, she's just kind of scratching the tip of the iceberg here with the number of maggots in her arm. But for now, she's really pleased with herself. And the wood floor of this tombo is actually really uncomfortable. She takes a tart from the tombo, goes down to the sandbar, wraps up like a little burrito and finally has a good night of sleep. The next day she crawls back up there and she considers taking the boat. But she's worried that if she does that and there's like a wood cutter or something out in the jungle. If he comes back and his boat's gone, she's kind of doomed him to a similar fate. So she doesn't want to do that. She starts trying to catch frogs again. She can't do it. So she just passes out one more time.
1:01:35 Mike Smith? That's nice of her. I like that mindset.
1:01:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, she's a good person. She really is.
1:01:39 Mike Smith? Be real hard not to just
1:01:41 Wes Larson? Take the boat.
1:01:42 Mike Smith? Instinctively just take the boat and get yourself to safety.
1:01:45 Wes Larson? Yeah. And I think at some point she probably would, but she decides to wait longer. And really part of what's pushing her forward at this point is just that she knows if she dies, she's not going to be able to tell this story to anyone of like her incredible journey through the jungle. And she starts thinking she's probably gonna die. And then right at twilight that night, on the 11th day, she hears voices. She can't believe it. She thinks she's probably just imagining it. When suddenly three men walk out and they stop in shock. And she immediately says, I'm the girl who was in the Lanza crash. My name is Julianne.
1:02:19 Mike Smith? Hmm. She probably memorized that like Indigo Montoya.
1:02:24 Wes Larson? Saying it over and over.
1:02:25 Mike Smith? And the Princess Bride, yeah.
1:02:26 Wes Larson? These three men are Beltran, Paredes, Carlos Vasquez, and Nestor Amasufun. His name's hard. They take care of her, they feed her, they tend to her, they take about fifty more maggots out of her arm. They admit to her, when they first saw her, they thought she was the water goddess Yakumama, because of her blonde hair and her eyes. And she thinks they just are saying it's because her eyes are light, but what she doesn't know is that every single blood vessel in her eye has burst. There is no white visible in her eyes anymore, they are completely red. Even her irises are red. And, this is funny, because I saw a bunch of photos of her, her rider, after a rescue, and I was like, why does she look like an alien? Because they're all in black and white, and her eyes are completely dark and red.
1:03:11 Wes Larson? Like, you can't see any white whatsoever. So she looked really fucking scary. Wow. Yeah. Alright, I'm just gonna quickly sum up the rest, because there's a ton left in her book at this point. We're not gonna go over all of it, obviously. But she gets taken to a small village. They don't really have appropriate medical personnel there, so they treat her. And then she has to fly, which has to be terrible, to the closest city where there are some doctors. And when she gets there, they pull even more maggots out of her arm, some out of her leg. They tend to all of her injuries, and her dad finally shows up, and they're able to have this really big emotional reunion. She's able to give the search crew a lot of context for the crash site, and over the following days and weeks, they find that the plane is scattered over about fifteen kilometers,
1:03:55 Wes Larson? and they're able to find a lot of these deceased passengers. Uh, they do make this terrible discovery that a lot of them survived the crash, but died in the following days, including her mom. The crazy thing is, when they finally find her mom, she's missing like the top half of her head. So it's kind of like, they don't know when that happened. I wonder if some scavenger got her, like maybe a jaguar did show up, who knows? All right. She would grow up to become a famous mammologist, mostly focusing on bats. After her father's death, she would actually take over as director of Panguana, the rainforest reserve. Under her care, it would grow tenfold to over 4,000 acres. She's an amazing scientist, an inspirational person, a hero to a lot of people, including me. And I just think her
1:04:40 Wes Larson? story is amazing. I got a couple of quick tidbits that are really interesting. I watched that Herzog documentary, and he actually flies her back to Pukalpa, the city, and then to the crash site, which was her first time going back. And he puts her on the same flight from Lima to Pukalpa, and he makes her sit in the exact same seat that she was sitting in. And she's visibly nervous. And then when it showed that he made her sit in the same seat, I like vocally was like, "Verner!"
1:05:12 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:05:13 Wes Larson? Because she's like shaking as she's talking to him. It was crazy. Also, a kind of crazy thing is, he was prepping for this documentary, he sent out crews to find as much wreckage as possible, because it was still all out there in the jungle. And one of the people he sent out were one of her original rescuers. And while this guy was out, he got stung by a stingray. And it was a really bad sting. And he was about to like, die himself on the side of the river. But he finally manages to flash, to flag down a boat. Not flash down, that'd be different.
1:05:44 Mike Smith? That'd be...
1:05:45 Wes Larson? Flag down.
1:05:46 Jeff Larson? It'd be effective.
1:05:47 Mike Smith? Interesting.
1:05:48 Wes Larson? Yeah. The boat pulls up, and they say, "Hey, we're only gonna take you if you have some money." And he didn't have any money.
1:05:55 Mike Smith? Oh, man.
1:05:55 Wes Larson? And then, he had a rifle, and they're like, "Well, we'll take your rifle." So it was like his treasured rifle. This guy's pretty much Hugh Glass.
1:06:02 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:06:03 Wes Larson? But he gives it to him. And they take him to safety. And when Julianne visited, he was still recovering from this sting. And she went and tracked down these people, bought his rifle back, and gave it to him.
1:06:13 Mike Smith? Oh, no way.
1:06:14 Wes Larson? Which I thought was really, really cool.
1:06:15 Mike Smith? That's great.
1:06:16 Wes Larson? Yeah. She was really hesitant to do much press afterwards, but when she heard that Herzog wanted to make a documentary, she knew him, she was a fan of his work, so she did it. And one of my favorite things, and this is Kind of my final thought is that when people said, you know, about this ordeal and like conquering the jungle and how she did it, she would always treat the jungle as if it were her savior, not her enemy. And a quote from her that I really like is she said, "The jungle caught me. It saved me. It's not its fault that I landed there," which I really like.
1:06:49 Mike Smith? That's great. Yeah, that's awesome. I really like that mindset. Much like XXX.
1:06:54 Wes Larson? She's cool. Yeah, a lot like XXX.
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1:08:53 Wes Larson? Do you guys have any questions about this story before we get into our categories? Feel like I know it pretty well now at this point.
1:09:00 Jeff Larson? So she didn't eat anything that whole time?
1:09:03 Wes Larson? Nothing, just those candies.
1:09:04 Jeff Larson? Isn't there, it feels like in the rainforest, you could find food.
1:09:08 Wes Larson? She didn't know that aspect well enough to where she felt confident to eat anything. Because she knew, and I think this is really smart, she knew that the one thing that would really mess up her entire plan is if she ate something poisonous.
1:09:24 Wes Larson? Yeah, like a dart frog, yeah.
1:09:26 Jeff Larson? That's like the one thing, she's like, okay, I'll eat this.
1:09:29 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's also the wet season when she was there. And so a lot of the fruit and stuff that you find isn't on during the wet season. It's a lot harder to find food. And she didn't have a machete or anything to cut down palm and eat the inside of palm or anything. So there's actually a really funny part in the documentary. Where Werner is like, if she had a machete, here's all the things she could have eaten. And it's just like a montage of them cutting down and eating all these different things that she wasn't able to eat. It's really good. I love this documentary. It's great. It's all in German, but it was really good. Mike, you got anything?
1:10:03 Mike Smith? No, I was curious a little bit about the recovery after the fact, but you kind of covered the headaches that she would go on to suffer. But it seemed like the clavicle, whatever it was she broke, it seemed like a lot was bad that she needed some pretty significant help with.
1:10:17 Wes Larson? Yeah, it's crazy how minor her injuries were considering she fell 10,000 feet.
1:10:22 Jeff Larson? Yeah, just like to be able to move.
1:10:24 Wes Larson? Yeah, but I would recommend her book, When I Fell From the Sky. It is about 300 and something pages long. So we obviously glossed over a lot of that, but it's really interesting. It's interesting to hear about her recovery, about kind of everything that happened to her after this. It's a great book. All right, well, let's move on to our categories then. My first one for you guys is against the odds, survival story that you love. It can be either pop fiction or real life.
1:10:53 Mike Smith? You know, this story actually did remind me of one. I wasn't planning on going with this one, but in the third Uncharted game, Nathan Drake, the plane goes down over the Sahara, I think the Sahara Desert. And that's a really fun sequence, but I actually wanted to talk about Sharami, the messenger pigeon. I actually talked about her in a bonus episode a while ago, but she was delivering a missive to save a platoon from some friendly fire that was planned and scheduled to happen. And it was like within the hour that she arrived and like warned people to not bombard their allied forces. And she like got shot through the chest and the eye and one of her wings was like barely hanging on. She somehow made it all the way. It was just like, it's a really cool story of survival.
1:11:37 Mike Smith? And there is moments where she actually, he or she, it's actually kind of up for debate what gender this pigeon was now somehow. She got the dick in Metal West. You remember that, I'm sure.
1:11:46 Wes Larson? I do remember that.
1:11:47 Mike Smith? She was like running across the ground at a certain point because she couldn't fly anymore. And it's just funny to think about a pigeon running across a field of battle to deliver a message.
1:11:57 Jeff Larson? That is funny. Like 1917 where he runs across the field. That's a pigeon.
1:12:03 Mike Smith? The dick in metal, Jeff.
1:12:07 Wes Larson? Jeff, what's your answer?
1:12:09 Jeff Larson? I was thinking, uh, the Netflix show You. The name of the show is You.
1:12:14 Wes Larson? Yeah, interesting.
1:12:15 Jeff Larson? Just that Joe from it keeps falling in love with the wrong girls and they really mess his life up. And he's been stabbed a bunch of times. Has to like relocate to different places, but like the same pattern kind of happens all over again. And he's just still alive somehow.
1:12:36 Wes Larson? Is he supposed to be kind of the hero of that or is he more kind of a villain?
1:12:41 Jeff Larson? He's just a guy who wants to find love, you know?
1:12:44 Wes Larson? Sure, sure. We can all.
1:12:46 Mike Smith? Relate.
1:12:47 Wes Larson? I kind of my my initial thought was to do the Louis Zamperini story that's in that book Unbroken. Who.
1:12:53 Jeff Larson? Oh, that's a good one.
1:12:55 Wes Larson? Yeah, he's Drift at Sea and then he was in a prisoner war camp in World War Two. Yeah, I'll do that. Sure. There's another one I thought of, but I'll do that one.
1:13:02 Jeff Larson? Well, I didn't do a real one, so you can do two and get away with it.
1:13:06 Wes Larson? Sure. So that was the first one I thought of. It's incredible story. I thought the book was amazing. Um, the movie was kind of pretty mid. But the the other one I had was Jose Salvador Alvaranga, who is in one of my favorite survival books called Four Hundred and Thirty Eight Days. And it's about he's a Salvadoran fisherman who just drifted away from Mexico and was adrift for fourteen months in the ocean before he was rescued. And he survived longer than anyone else. And just like a little ponga in a tiny boat. And he he like thrived. It's crazy. It's a crazy story. It's it's a great book. It's super inspirational. Cause he maintains a pretty positive outlook the whole time somehow. So I love that story.
1:13:49 Mike Smith? What would your first question be? Once you got recovered? Would you ask like who won the Super Bowl or like? I was doomed to as good as I was hoping it was gonna be. I guess you'd probably just go see it. I don't know.
1:14:00 Wes Larson? But yeah, he was two thousand twelve to two thousand fourteen.
1:14:04 Mike Smith? Oh, I didn't know it was that recent. Wow.
1:14:06 Wes Larson? Yeah, it was pretty recent. I don't know what my first question would be. That's a good question.
1:14:10 Mike Smith? Food like when Tom Hanks they give him like a seafood bladder.
1:14:14 Wes Larson? Food. Yeah.
1:14:15 Jeff Larson? Oh, yeah. That was a good. He's just like some FedEx dork like you didn't expect him to be able to make it and he figured it out.
1:14:24 Wes Larson? He did. It was great. Yeah.
1:14:26 Jeff Larson? No, a real one that you reminded me of is from Hacksaw Ridge Sergeant Daz Desmond Daz. Just like I thought it was really admirable that he like felt the need to serve his country, but wouldn't fire a weapon. And then just like the fact that he was so useful was just running around like. It's crazy. What's the what's that YouTube video? Uh, when the guy just charges?
1:14:54 Mike Smith? Uh, Leroy Jenkins.
1:14:56 Wes Larson? Yeah, Leroy Jenkins.
1:14:57 Jeff Larson? He's kind of just Leroy Jenkins out there just like running around saving people and.
1:15:04 Jeff Larson? I like the movie, but I guess the actual story is almost even like more extreme type. One of the things in the movie that I was like, okay, that's stupid is when he kicked the grenade out of the air. And then I like read that that actually happened.
1:15:18 Mike Smith? Really?
1:15:19 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:15:19 Mike Smith? That's crazy. So sweet. Just bicycle kick it back at the enemy. All right. Our next category is going to be what would Mike and Jeff do? You get to pick. You're either plummeting through the air toward the earth on these seats. Or you're waking up in the Amazon jungle by yourself.
1:15:38 Jeff Larson? If I was falling, I don't know. I almost feel like I'd go with like the same advice as like if you're being attacked by a grizzly bear. Just kind of fetal position. Play dead.
1:15:52 Mike Smith? Yeah, I do. I think part of what helped her was that she was unconscious when she hit. Because she was so limp that she wasn't like bracing against anything.
1:16:00 Jeff Larson? Supposedly like if you're about to get in a car accident, you're supposed to go limp and stuff, dude.
1:16:05 Mike Smith? Yeah, just pass yourself out.
1:16:09 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I don't know. Like as far as her in the jungle, I feel like she did pretty good. I would have maybe tried to just like turn that turbine she found on.
1:16:18 Mike Smith? Fly that out of there. That's a good, that's a good move. Yeah, she should have done that. Uh, have you guys ever read Angels and Demons, the Dan Brown book?
1:16:28 Jeff Larson? No.
1:16:29 Mike Smith? So it's a, it's kind of a follow up to the Da Vinci Code. And I was having admittedly, you know, I'm not the foremost Dan Brown hater out here, but there are moments in those books that are real, real bad. But there's one at the end, near the end of Angels and Demons where Langdon falls out of an airplane. And to this point, Dan had done a pretty good job of creating crazy scenarios, but then also offering a pretty plausible way for Robert Langdon to get out of them. But this one, he is falling thousands of feet out of the air when he got like thrown off a plane or something. And he used his jacket as like a parachute, his tweed jacket.
1:17:06 Jeff Larson? Poppins.
1:17:07 Mike Smith? Yeah. And it was just one of those moments where it's like, all right, you've, you've, you've pushed me.
1:17:13 Jeff Larson? Jumped the shark.
1:17:14 Mike Smith? Just a little bit too far on this one. I still, I think that book has its merits. I'm, again, I'm not just like a baseless hater, but that was, that's what I would do, I guess, is what I'm saying. I'd use my jacket as a parachute.
1:17:26 Jeff Larson? As a parachute, that's my.
1:17:28 Mike Smith? This apparently works.
1:17:29 Jeff Larson? If I was Werner, I would like recreate the plane crash. I'd like make a crash again.
1:17:34 Wes Larson? Like full cinema verite. I thought one of you would say like blow really hard as you're falling to try and stop your fall.
1:17:43 Mike Smith? Yeah, that's a good one.
1:17:44 Wes Larson? Jeff, I li- I like the turbine one. Maybe when she was in that hut with the gasoline, she could carry it all the way back to the turbine.
1:17:50 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I just feel like if you find a turbine, you gotta find some way to use that to help you.
1:17:56 Wes Larson? That's what Tony Stark would do, probably.
1:17:58 Jeff Larson? It's very Bear Grylls of her, though.
1:18:01 Wes Larson? Yeah, she's tough.
1:18:02 Jeff Larson? What, in Bear Grylls, like Montana one, that's what he did, was just find a river and float down it forever.
1:18:09 Mike Smith? It's great advice, like that honestly is great advice.
1:18:13 Jeff Larson? Things too, like he was at hotels at night.
1:18:15 Mike Smith? I'm wondering if he ever really drank his pee now. I don't know.
1:18:19 Wes Larson? I saw him drink his pee out of a dead rattlesnake, which for me was like, okay, he can sleep in a hotel if he's in that.
1:18:25 Mike Smith? Okay, yeah, sure.
1:18:26 Wes Larson? All right, so I have a would you rather? Would you rather have close to a hundred maggots in your arm? Or get stung in both feet by one of those river stingrays?
1:18:36 Mike Smith? Maggot, maggots, I think.
1:18:38 Jeff Larson? Well, I mean, so do I need to have like a huge wound in both my arms?
1:18:42 Wes Larson? No, it's just one arm. And we'll say with the stingrays, you're gonna get help, but you're gonna get stung in both feet.
1:18:49 Jeff Larson? But like, what's my wound in my arm?
1:18:52 Wes Larson? It's the size of hers, dime sized, but deep. And they're, they're kind of carving out a little hole in there.
1:18:58 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I, I'll take the maggots.
1:19:01 Mike Smith? Me too. I just think having your feet be operational is such a big deal in a survival situation.
1:19:07 Wes Larson? I think I'm with you guys, but I would say, uh, I Googled, there's a specific term for a maggot infestation. It's called like myiasis or something. And I Googled that and it is rough. There are some rough pictures of people with maggot infestations on the internet, so, but I do think I, I think I kind of would love to tell people I've had that experience.
1:19:30 Jeff Larson? One of my like biggest regrets in life is just that I'll never be able to give birth to a human.
1:19:37 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:19:37 Jeff Larson? So at least like I could give birth to like a bunch of maggots and kind of feel a little bit of that.
1:19:44 Wes Larson? That's true. The miracle of life.
1:19:46 Mike Smith? Is that like a regret that you can't? I don't know if that's the right term. I understand what you're trying to say though.
1:19:53 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:19:53 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I wish I could just be popping kids out.
1:19:56 Mike Smith? It's not like you ever made a decision somewhere along the way that stopped you from being able to give birth, but whatever.
1:20:03 Wes Larson? I actually, I remember once I was following this story, this guy online who had a botfly larva in his arm. He just had like one. And they form a little kind of like lump and you know it's in there and it gets really inflamed and stuff. And he chronicled it over the weeks that it was maturing. And he felt a sense of loss when it finally erupted and left. He like felt like, like abandoned.
1:20:27 Jeff Larson? Yeah, that's how I would be.
1:20:29 Wes Larson? Yeah, so you'd be a great mom, Jeff, to those little flies.
1:20:33 Jeff Larson? Probably not to like a human, but to the flies.
1:20:36 Mike Smith? Postpartum blues for 70 maggots.
1:20:38 Wes Larson? So one more main category for you guys, just something you recommend this week. I had a couple of things come up that I really wanted to recommend, so I wanted to include this category. Maybe I'll go first, since I have them. The first is the movie Companion, which was produced by the guy that directed one of my favorite horror movies of the last few years, Barbarian. I forget the name of the director, but it stars Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher. It's a great little kind of sci-fi horror movie that I just loved. I wouldn't even say sci-fi. It's kind of like a little bit futuristic, maybe 10 years in the future. And I really liked it. And I think people complain about how movies are all based off of existing IP or their sequels or whatever these days.
1:21:22 Wes Larson? This is an original, really good movie done for a small budget. And it's a unique idea, so go out and watch it. I think you'll really like it. And my second one was a show called Common Side Effects, which is Mike Judge. And then some of the people that made Scavengers Reign, which is like my favorite show for a long time. It's got similar animation style as Scavengers Reign, but kind of mixed with like a Beavis and Butthead animation. I love it. I, I, there's three or four episodes out and it's so good. And I'm just already really hooked, so I really, really recommend that show. Those are my two recommends, recommendations.
1:22:02 Mike Smith? Great.
1:22:02 Wes Larson? I like Jack. People say he's a nice guy, too.
1:22:05 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:22:05 Jeff Larson? I really like this new Netflix show Wyatt Earp and the Cowboy War. Tombstone's one of my favorite westerns, but it's hard to really know with Tombstone like how much truth you're getting in it. And it ended up being a lot more than I expected.
1:22:22 Mike Smith? Huh.
1:22:22 Jeff Larson? The Netflix, it's like a documentary with like historians telling the story, but actors acting it out. It's almost like drunk history, not really funny. It's more serious. But yeah, I just thought it was really interesting. And I think that time period, it's just like crazy where there is like laws, but then they only mattered if someone made them matter. And I don't know. It's just really interesting.
1:22:47 Mike Smith? I'm gonna recommend uh FKA Twigg's new album, Usexua. I think Usexual, Usexua, something like that. I love it. I, I was very lukewarm on a first listen. And then I just couldn't stop thinking about it. I took a, a long walk, listened to it a couple of more times in a row. And it really feels like, I came up with a description. It's not gonna make sense to anyone, but like five people out there. There's this weird window when PlayStation was offering out these demo discs. And it had this very particular aesthetic of mercurial futuristic, blue twin tinged like futurism. But in like a very specific kind of way. And the sounds that this album makes kind of make me feel like I got sucked into one of those. And living there for like forty minutes or so. Uh, just really cool soundscapes.
1:23:32 Mike Smith? Maybe a little monotone, like it never gets like outside of its little sonic box that it uh first establishes itself in. But sometimes you just kind of want a good moody piece of music to listen to. That doesn't shake you up too violently, but just really cool. I just love the way she uses sound in her voice. One kind of a dud song on there, but other than that, I think you're gonna have a great time listening to it.
1:23:58 Jeff Larson? Alright, that's cool. That's it.
1:23:59 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:24:00 Jeff Larson? Did you know I drove her for a little bit at Sundance?
1:24:02 Mike Smith? No way, did you? I didn't know that.
1:24:04 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:24:05 Mike Smith? She's great.
1:24:05 Jeff Larson? Like she was dating Shia LaBeouf and I was Shia's driver.
1:24:09 Mike Smith? Not so great.
1:24:10 Jeff Larson? Didn't end up.
1:24:11 Mike Smith? Memories for, yeah.
1:24:14 Jeff Larson? She was always just like easily the coolest person in it, whatever group she was in.
1:24:19 Mike Smith? Oh, for sure. Yeah. She's rad.
1:24:22 Jeff Larson? What do you think of the halftime performance at the Super Bowl?
1:24:27 Wes Larson? I really liked it. I was watching it with like with our with our parents and our family though. So there was a lot of people there that did not understand it or like it at all.
1:24:36 Jeff Larson? He is hard to understand.
1:24:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, that's not, but that's not the point necessarily, you know?
1:24:41 Jeff Larson? No, but like I understand a lot of people just like not understanding a single word that he said. What if you haven't listened to Kendrick before?
1:24:49 Mike Smith? Even in the best of listening circumstances, it's pretty lyrically dense and tough to follow. So.
1:24:57 Wes Larson? I really liked how strong of a message it was in one that you kind of have to think about. Like how Sam Jackson was kind of almost playing like a minstrel character. And then you had all this imagery relating to like America and how, you know, people of color have been subjugated. A lot of like how, you know, I don't know. I've read a lot about it since even just like Serena Williams out there. Crip walking, which was something that she was awesome. Yeah. And she'd gotten a lot of flack for doing that at like Wimbledon or something too. And now she's like on the biggest stage in the world and it's kind of a big middle finger. So I thought it was amazing.
1:25:34 Jeff Larson? Didn't like it.
1:25:35 Wes Larson? Yeah, well, I know.
1:25:37 Jeff Larson? Just kidding. Mike, did you like it?
1:25:40 Mike Smith? I did. I, so I'm not the hugest Kendrick fan. I just find it a little impenetrable. You have to sit down and really focus and start taking notes if you're really going to appreciate him for all he's worth.
1:25:50 Wes Larson? Think? I'm just. He's my favorite rapper.
1:25:52 Mike Smith? I mean, he's great.
1:25:53 Wes Larson? That's fine.
1:25:53 Mike Smith? I mean, he's got some very mainstream bangers that are very accessible, but like his, his most celebrated work. I mean, he's like a Pulitzer Prize winner for, I think to Pimp a Butterfly. He's awesome. I just don't find it the kind of music I return to like daily. It's not like a fun listening experience to me per se, but I think he's really important. I think he's an incredibly important and even like a unifying force in regards to where he comes from. I liked, like you were talking about the, the Crips and the Bloods. There's a lot of like red and blue symbolism happening in halftime and kind of bringing everyone together. I'm not an expert, but yeah, I enjoyed it. I thought it was very worthy of the biggest stage in America.
1:26:34 Jeff Larson? I was having a real hard time deciding if I liked his outfit. His jeans were like.
1:26:39 Mike Smith? The bell bottoms.
1:26:40 Jeff Larson? Distracted.
1:26:41 Wes Larson? Jeans were so awesome.
1:26:43 Mike Smith? Yeah.
1:26:44 Jeff Larson? Like it, that felt like Mike after like a trip to the thrift store for the next week.
1:26:50 Wes Larson? Hell, yeah. I saw this tweet because he was like, obviously just slamming Drake when he played that song and everything. And there's this tweet that was like, what if you got this destroyed in a beef by someone that looks like a little cutie patootie in blue jeans?
1:27:08 Wes Larson? Yeah, anyway, I thought it was great. Yeah, we're just gonna do a couple subscriber questions today. So the first one is gonna be from Brendan. He says, I just saw the new Jurassic World rebirth trailer. I thought it was interesting. Would love to hear y'all's impressions about it. You guys saw that trailer, right?
1:27:24 Mike Smith? Oh, yeah.
1:27:24 Jeff Larson? Yeah, you know what I mean? I'm gonna give it a chance.
1:27:27 Wes Larson? Sure, I'm gonna give it a chance. My excitement level definitely went down.
1:27:31 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:27:31 Wes Larson? When there's like mutant dinosaurs and a lot of really, a lot of CG, it looked like a lot of green screen. But I'm excited still. I can't not be excited.
1:27:41 Jeff Larson? There's like a little girl as part of the group.
1:27:43 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:27:44 Jeff Larson? And you just know that like, she's gonna do some like brave things and make it out.
1:27:51 Wes Larson? Right.
1:27:51 Jeff Larson? Uh, there's like a little part of me that thinks like, maybe they'll have the kid get eaten. And I'm, I'm hoping.
1:27:59 Wes Larson? You gotta make one of these movies where the kid just gets torn apart by a velociraptor after like first 10 minutes.
1:28:04 Jeff Larson? World. That's the best part was the kid getting caught by all the copies, you know?
1:28:09 Wes Larson? Yeah. Mike?
1:28:10 Mike Smith? It felt very pain by the numbers to me. I'm act- the fact that Scarlett Johansson was so excited to be in it gets me excited because at least we know we're gonna get one fun performance out of it. Probably Mahershala is gonna deliver another fun performance. I don't know. It just felt like here's the nerdy scientist, here's the hot girl, here's the bad guy who's obviously bad and chewing. I don't know. It could be fun. It could be great, but I'm not holding my breath exactly for it.
1:28:37 Wes Larson? It was written by the, the writer that did the original movie, Gareth Edwards, great director, directed Rogue One, um, one of the Godzilla movies. And his cinematographer is really good too. I forget his name, but so I, I do think there's some pieces that could make it good, but we'll see. All right. This one's from Ruby. Ruby says, describe a scar you have and how you got it. I'll give you guys a second to think because I knew this question already. But I've got one on my hand that's on the top of my right palm and then on my middle finger. And it was in high school. I was in this class called leisure sports. But one of those sports was lining up on opposite ends of an ice skating rink, skating at each other as fast as we could.
1:29:21 Wes Larson? And whoever was left standing won. And it was the rugby coach that taught this class. And I fell and someone ice skated over my hand and shaved all the top of the skin off my top of my hand and then cut my middle finger wide open and cut all the tendons and I had to wear a cast for a while after that.
1:29:40 Jeff Larson? You got, you kept getting like mad too because you had your middle finger in a cast and like everyone was saying you're flipping people off.
1:29:49 Wes Larson? Everyone made that joke to me because my middle finger was extended all the time. Yeah.
1:29:54 Mike Smith? It's not a very leisurely activity in my honest opinion.
1:29:57 Wes Larson? We didn't do many leisure sports in that class. They all turned into full contact sports.
1:30:02 Jeff Larson? I had a finger one, but I'll, since you did that and yours was worse. You know what one I find interesting is my eye right here? So when I was like two or three, our oldest brother Cyrus, we were just like playing and he pushed me into a couch and a spring cut me like right on the eye. But what's interesting to me about it is that I kinda didn't know I had it until like four years ago and someone was like, huh, what's that scar on your eye? And then I had to like ask my mom and she was like, yeah, Cyrus pushed you into a couch.
1:30:38 Wes Larson? Yeah, I don't think I'd ever heard that story. That's cool. It's cool you did that.
1:30:42 Jeff Larson? Yeah, I like face scars, you know?
1:30:44 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:30:44 Mike Smith? Let's see if we can, it's too bad I didn't do that little perfect one through your eyebrow and across your eye.
1:30:50 Jeff Larson? Like Zorro.
1:30:51 Mike Smith? Or scar.
1:30:53 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:30:53 Mike Smith? And you just never open your eye.
1:30:55 Jeff Larson? Yeah.
1:30:56 Mike Smith? I have a scar on my knee from when my brother Nate and I were just playing football out in front of our house on the street and I fell and a sharp rock jabbed like right underneath the, what is it, the patella. And that one's just memorable to me because it really hurt and I was crying, but I was really surprised to look up and see my brother Nate, who's like, you know, he's like the tough guy, the big guy. And we were maybe six and eight at the time, maybe even younger, but he was crying maybe even harder than I was. And he was so worried for me and he like kinda helped me back to the house and he explained to my parents what happened. It was just like a really touching moment and I don't have a lot of those memories with Nate.
1:31:38 Mike Smith? Like I know he loves me and he loves us, but he doesn't very emotionally express himself that way very much. So it's just a good memory to have that, you know, when things get tough, he's gonna be there.
1:31:48 Jeff Larson? I wish my brothers had done that for me at least once.
1:31:51 Wes Larson? Cried over you? Yeah. I definitely did at some point. I'm trying to think though. I don't know. Huh. A bald eagle's flying by right now.
1:31:58 Jeff Larson? Or just like shown me once, like, you know, we care about this guy.
1:32:03 Wes Larson? Jeff, I did that all the time. Alright. Okay, we're just gonna do those two questions for now. We're gonna wrap this up. Thanks for listening, guys. Julianne, thanks for, you know, surviving and telling your story. What an incredible story. What an incredible woman. And to this day is making big changes for conservation, for biodiversity. So someone definitely look up to.
1:32:26 Mike Smith? Still alive. Yeah. Let's go visit her.
1:32:29 Wes Larson? Alright. We'll have to have Werner Herzog with us.
1:32:31 Mike Smith? I'd like to shake her maggot-riddled hand.
1:32:33 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:32:35 Mike Smith? They probably removed those by now.
1:32:37 Wes Larson? I think they're gone. Yeah. Alright. Well, thanks, guys. We love you. If you want more content, check out our Patreon or our Apple Grizz Club. We're always putting out bonus episodes there. They're really fun. We have a good time over there.
1:32:51 Mike Smith? Also, check us out on YouTube. We don't do this very often. We don't talk about it, but we are posting every main episode there and it's growing. It's been pretty fun to see little community over there build, so.
1:33:03 Wes Larson? If you're interested in seeing what we look like, it's a good place to do it.
1:33:06 Jeff Larson? Oh, actually Wes, give me one second.
1:33:09 Wes Larson? Okay, one. Alright, we'll talk to you guys later.
1:33:12 Mike Smith? Pwned Jeff. One second, he got you.
1:33:15 Wes Larson? I got him.
1:33:16 Mike Smith? Oh.
1:33:17 Wes Larson? That's pretty much as bad as Kendrick and Drake, how bad I just got Jeff.
1:33:21 Jeff Larson? What is it?
1:33:22 Wes Larson? Can never show his face again. Dude, we're at like thirty seconds.
1:33:26 Jeff Larson? As, as promised too. So a five star review on Apple Podcasts.
1:33:32 Wes Larson? We did say that.
1:33:33 Mike Smith? That's right.
1:33:34 Wes Larson? Yeah.
1:33:34 Jeff Larson? My three year old has an ocean animals puzzle that comes in a shark, or in a shark shaped box. If I had to compare Wes to a cardboard box, that would definitely be it. This is my top five podcasts of all time. Wes, Jeff and Mike are smart, funny, silly and thoughtful. We don't even read the rest, but your shark puzzle box, five stars.
1:33:56 Wes Larson? Thank you everyone for your very kind reviews comparing me to boxes.
1:34:00 Jeff Larson? Yeah, we'll do a couple more five star reads of Wes as an inanimate object.
1:34:08 Wes Larson? It was very nice to read. Um, just so you know, we don't, we don't take negative reviews that personally. I was okay, but it was nice to hear from people that, that really like us and that compared me to boxes. So appreciate it. Alright, love you guys.
1:34:22 Jeff Larson? Love you guys.
1:34:23 Wes Larson? Bye, see ya.
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