The Science of Godzilla, Zombies & Other Monsters, with Charles Liu

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We had to do an episode on the physics of monsters.

We had to.

Oh my God.

I've learned so much.

And I don't look behind you right now, but I think there's something creeping up on you.

And it's not just the physics, but the biology of monsters, the chemistry of monsters, all that coming up on Star Talk.

This is Star Talk, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

Today we're talking about the physics of monsters.

I got with me Matt Kershan.

Hey, how you doing?

Professional comedian?

Yeah,

that's the job title.

That's the system of tax return.

You're on tour now.

I am on tour.

I'm on a couple of tours at the same time.

Well,

I'm opening for Sarah Millikan, who's a fantastic UK comedian, and we're doing some lovely theaters around the country.

And then I'm doing, kind of off the back of that, I'm doing some club headlining sets where I'm telling, you know, her many, many audience members, like, hey, if you enjoyed me for 15 minutes,

I am shamelessly, I'm shamelessly siphoning off some of her success.

Oh my God.

So, yeah, MattKirshan.com for all of the dates.

I'm going to be around the country.

Plus, you have a podcast,

sometimes science.

Probably science.

Probably science.

I know you do this on purpose.

I know you do this on purpose, but every time.

I've only ever been on once.

I'm waiting for my next.

Oh, we've got it.

I think we're talking about because you've always got another book coming out, and I think we're going to try and

again, shamelessly piggyback off of your success on that one as well.

Call me, Matt.

So we'll get you on for the definitely science episodes.

So, this monster subject, you know, I have some interest in the physics of monsters, but when we hit topics like that, we've got to call the geek in chief.

I'll let you introduce him, but I've done one other episode with our guest.

With the geek in chief.

It's lovely to see.

It's lovely to see you be topped on this subject.

It's lovely to see someone outnudier.

I'm not worried.

Charles Liu, welcome back to Star Talk.

Thanks for having me, Neil.

What a pleasure.

Hi, man.

It's lovely to see you.

You're a professor at CUNY, Staten Island?

Yes.

CUNY City University of New York.

Yes.

Many campuses

in the city.

Five.

Oh, my gosh.

Quarter million full-time students.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's a great system.

Troy.

Wow.

And

you have a podcast that started a few years ago?

Yes.

The Luniverse.

The Luniverse.

I see what you did there.

It wasn't me, okay?

My family did.

I'm proud to have it as the name, but I always thought it was a little bit weird to put your name into the universe and claim that you had a real name.

Almost everybody's podcast has their own name in it.

So don't be afraid of that.

Okay.

Okay.

But when I heard how clever this was, the universe, I started thinking other, like Lunatic.

Oh,

I could fit that description.

There's a lot of lew, you know.

Oh, yes.

And then there is the lu.

Yep.

The lu, yeah.

The British lewd behavior.

It's all about

lewd behavior.

Yeah.

So the physics of monsters.

Yes.

Gosh.

That topic has no end.

No, it has no end whatsoever.

And monsters, there may be actual animals in our environment that

we didn't know much about and only showed up at night, maybe had beady eyes and people, maybe they worked their way into legends as monsters.

Yes.

And one of my favorite was, is it the Triceratops skeleton that was coming out of some eroded cliff face?

It was like, what animal is this?

That's right.

Is this a dragon?

Before anyone had any understanding of dinosaurs or extinction or anything.

Yeah.

There's a famous, I don't know, human nature.

makes us think about monsters because when we have something that's unknown and we fear it, we want to explain it.

We want to put it in a context.

And so with me, as a professional scientist, I still am driven by the unknown and the creative and the strange things.

As you must be if you're going to be a good scientist.

Yeah, I love comic books.

I love science fiction and fantasy and everything like that.

And what we did as a species centuries or millennia ago, anything we didn't know, didn't understand and feared, we tried to personify or put into this concept of a monster, make it more accessible to us.

And then years later, as we have learned more about our natural world, we see that those monsters aren't monstrous at all.

In fact, they're very natural and it's scientific.

And that kind of connection and learning about these creative things makes us feel cooler and makes us feel better about the whole universe.

So do you have a favorite monster?

We all do, presumably.

At the moment, my favorite monster is Godzilla.

That's almost too easy.

It is.

Godzilla is classic.

It is the longest running movie franchise of all time.

Is it really?

The first Godzilla movie came out in 1954.

So it's been 70 years of Godzilla.

So you're not counting train coming towards you as a monster?

Oh, in the original silent movie.

In the original silent movies.

It's all slowly galloping.

Well, those are monsters of a different kind, right?

Those are the monsters in our imagination.

Right.

Things that we think are frightened and scary.

They must be a monster, but then turns out it's just a train.

It can still smoosh you, but it's just a train.

My niece, who grew up in Pennsylvania,

came to New York for the first time.

I think she was seven or eight.

And we're about to take the subway

and we start walking down the stairs

and this sound of a train comes in.

And she doesn't know what it is, but it's coming from that direction.

And she runs back up the steps.

That's right.

And would not go down the stairs.

It is a very, like the, the New York subway particularly is an aggressively loud sound.

Yeah, and it rumbles.

And so that was her, that was a train, which she'd never seen before, a subway train.

But that, why fear it unless you think it's a lot of fun?

It's kind of monstrous.

And it's coming out of the darkness.

You don't see first, first there's the noise, then the lights.

Right, right.

And there's a tunnel and it's a

whole of the above.

And so humans will do that.

Okay.

Now, the thing about Godzilla, which is extra special to me, is that it can be that kind of subway monster, loud, scary, and it burns you with its atomic breath and everything like that, right?

But culturally, when it came to the United States, it took on a different kind of life.

You see, in Japan, monsters since time immemorial have not necessarily been these evil, scary creatures.

They are just a non-human creatures.

And as a result, they can be different from humans in ways that you can find in literature, in stories, in mythology, that allows you to tell things, much like the gods of Olympus did, say, in ancient Greek times, about things that we don't understand and are trying to understand, not just of nature, but of human nature.

Going back to Greece and Rome, are you suggesting, for example, that in our 88 constellations of the sky, there are non-human creatures up there that you might think of as a monster.

We have centaurs and

Draco, the dragon.

Draco the dragon.

Around the North Star.

Yeah, and we have a Minotaur, which is like half bull.

That's right.

If one of those showed up at my front door, I'd be scared.

Those are pretty monstrous, too, right?

But they're not portrayed as scary.

They're just non-human things.

Yes.

And that is precisely how I see monsters based on that kind of cultural thing, right?

You have Asian heritage from

Taiwan.

Yes, absolutely.

So our exposure to the Asian, if I may group it that way, dragon is very different from the European dragon.

100%.

The European dragon is a menace.

That's right.

Whereas the Asian dragon is just a playful thing.

Not only playful, but noble and very helpful and so forth.

The constellations of the Chinese zodiac that you know, right?

The dragon is kind of in the middle.

The story is very long, but to cut it short, the reason it's number six, as opposed to number one, because it's such a powerful creature, is because it saw a rabbit in trouble crossing a river.

And so he went back to help the rabbit cross the river and let the rabbit finish in the contest before he did.

So the rabbit comes before the dragon.

That is some kind being

in real life, by the way, if any rabbits are listening to this, you shouldn't actually trust dragons because that is just a myth.

That is a public service announcement.

I just need to get that in before you get into lawsuits.

But if I remember correctly,

from my Chinese zodiac, the dragon is the only non-actual animal of the 12.

It is the one truly mythological creature.

That's right in the zodiac.

And indeed,

dragons are considered particularly successful, particularly smart, particularly potentially wealthy.

So people will actually change their birth dates of their children so that they are born in the year of the dragon.

They will delay C-sections, they will wait and so forth, just to make sure.

This is the kind of thing that I want people to think about when it comes to monsters, right?

They're not necessarily good or bad unless we project those facts in.

In fact, aren't the true monsters we humans ourselves?

I think it was a deliberate act of naming that on Sesame Street, the puppets, Muppets, were all called monsters.

She is for cookie.

That's good enough.

So, but they're lovable and playful and colorful.

And so I think it was

intended to

a monster in the eyes of small children.

Yes.

These are lovable monsters.

And so now you're going to talk about a monster.

I'm just going to laugh at you.

That's right.

Because monsters are.

Monsters teach you the alphabet.

Yeah, absolutely.

They save rabbits and they teach you how to count.

100%.

No, that was the count who taught you how to count.

That's a good point.

Get your character straight, dude.

You're from the UK.

What do you know?

Is a vampire not a monster?

I don't know.

There you go.

Right.

Is a vampire a monster?

Absolutely it was, right?

When the original Vlad, right, the impaler, right, and was later on died.

And then people in Transylvania area, not Transylvania itself, but that area of Eastern Europe wanted to scare their kids.

They said, be careful, because Vlad will come get you, even though he's dead.

Right.

And the concept of the undead, which had been around for thousands of years in folk mythology, got embodied in this one guy, right, Count Dracula, which was then brought into modern times by Bram Stoker and then into the movies with Bela Lagusi, right?

And you kind of went from the camera.

Tom Cruise.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, that guy.

Don't forget Tom Cruise.

Interview with the vampire.

There you go.

Let's start.

Yes.

So that kind of monstrosity, right, is literally a human being that has become something non-natural.

So the evil comes from not the fact that he's not human, but because he used to be a really bad human.

Right.

Right?

The count.

Just count.

Ah, ah, ah, ah.

He wasn't scary at all, but he was a vampire.

He was a monster.

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Hi, I'm Jenny Slate.

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This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

I was simultaneously enlightened and disturbed when I came to this realization that Godzilla

in Japan,

within 10 years

of the dropping of the atomic bombs

shows up

as a radioactively influenced

created

the radioactivity created him.

I was thinking to myself, Japan is the only country against whom atomic weapons have been used.

This is not a coincidence at all.

That's what I want to affirm here that

it became part of their storytelling culture.

What are we going to do with this?

How are we going to come to terms with it?

Yes.

So again, it's a way of sort of embodying your fears and the worst things that have happened to you.

That's right.

And personifying them.

Think about environmental degradation, right?

The Godzilla was the result of, according to the mythology, atomic testing and the radioactivity that basically awoke a sleeping giant or transformed something that was large and powerful, but

you didn't even have to give the specific details of that.

Just that there was

turned it into this terrible thing that destroyed humans.

In other words, what did we create?

What did we do?

There's city code.

Humans are collateral damage.

That's a great point.

We are, but minor.

But you see, what happened was other monsters like Gamra, okay, big giant flying turtle, by the way.

Very cool.

Very similar to Godzilla in size and shape, but different kind of things.

This is also from

that Japanese tradition.

What's the name of this one?

Gamra.

How come I know?

I don't remember Gamra.

Oh, I remember Mothra.

Mothra, yes, who attacked Gamra also would sprinkle little things onto Godzilla and confuse him.

But my favorite, can I say my favorite?

Yes.

But I want to keep telling about Godzilla.

I just have to get my favorite out of it.

Get your favorite.

My favorite was Rodan.

Rodan.

Oh, big flying guy.

Basically, it was basically just a pterodactyl.

Big pterodactyl issue.

It's because it was supersonic.

Okay.

It would like fly and

trucks would tumble

in its

weight.

And I said, if I were a supermonster, I want to be.

Well, before Mothra became a butterfly, Mothra was a caterpillar who flew snow.

I thought Mothra was a moth.

Mothra became a moth after.

But originally, Mothra was larval.

And like nature, right?

Wait, wait, butterfly

come from caterpillars.

Or moths come from caterpillars.

But they're not the same.

Moth and a butterfly are not the same thing.

My bad.

My bad.

Mothra is a moth.

Thank you.

Butterflya is a butterfly.

But yes, Mothra, before achieving the flying state, was a caterpillar.

A silkworm, literally.

Oh, that blew out.

Silkworm again, you get stuff.

Regional culture.

That's right.

And so there was actually one of the great monster movies of all time.

It was a collab.

They had Godzilla, Mothra, and Rodan together to fight King Ghidorah.

which had three heads and was very, very dangerous and was like brought in from aliens.

King Ghidorah was not a product of Earth.

It was an evil monster.

Wasn't there an episode?

Wasn't there one of these movies where

Mothra as

a caterpillar spins a coon

to trap the enemy monster?

Oh, many episodes.

Oh, many episodes.

Many things like that.

Yes.

And in fact,

there are episodes, we keep calling it episodes, but they're just individual movies, but the franchises have become so huge that they're almost like individual episodes.

But at least in one movie that I saw a long time ago, I don't remember the exact details of it.

When Charles says he doesn't remember the exact details, that means he doesn't remember every single detail.

Come down to the syllable, but it just has the kind of like broad stroke.

Okay, yeah.

Okay, just clarify.

And the eggs hatched, and there were two new mothras.

The scientist says knowingly, yes, multiple births are common in the natural world or the insect world or whichever world it was was talking about.

But that kind of connection between these monsters being representations of nature, something like King Ghidorah, which is the representation of evil and conquest, right, wound up coming against each other.

And monsters like Godzilla, which wiped out cities in early episodes or early movies, wound up saving humanity more than once, including ironically, against humans creating a new monster because of environmental degradation, not nuclear, but pollution.

Famous movie, Godzilla versus the Smog Monster.

The Smog Monster.

The Smog Monster.

Why do you not be

Charles?

There's also

Godzilla agrees to bike to work a couple of days a week.

Godzilla cuts down on meat consumption.

That's just like very

Godzilla goes, does Viganyuri.

That's right.

Well, Godzilla's difference from just a big dinosaur is his atomic breath, right?

And the physics of the atomic breath have been retconned over and over again.

How does he breathe fire, right?

How does he breathe this terrorist?

There weren't dragons breathing fire before Godzilla did.

Yes.

But this is a different account.

And also, presumably, the myth of dragons breathing fire long predates any human knowledge of atomic energy.

That's right.

That's right.

And so the idea that this fire comes from that is very important and it's atomic in nature.

But Gamera,

that turtle guy I was referring to earlier.

A flying turtle.

Yes, actually.

Turtles must go to the drive-ins all the time to see.

Turtles are great.

Yeah, they love that stuff.

Because they're the slowest moving thing.

That's right.

If you have a flying turtle, they go flying, they got ninjas.

They're very well.

And Master Ugwe from Kung Fu.

They're batting above their average in

turtle.

Ugwe is turtle in Mandarin Chinese.

And Master Ugwe is the turtle.

Stupid.

Did you know that?

Yeah.

I'm more of a Cantonese speaker.

am.

Are they different?

They're different languages, right?

I haven't seen that one.

They're linguistically different, even though they share the same written forms.

Good.

Yes, absolutely.

It's nice to have my job fact checked.

In real time, I like that.

I'm just glad turtles get some love.

That's right.

Get some love there.

Gamra not only catches a child that's falling, like, he eats fire.

It was figured out in the first Gamra movie that the reason he was destroying cities is because he was seeking fire.

And he wanted to eat it because he needs that.

That's his nutrition.

And so when he knocked over a structure where a little child was watching and it was like the child was going to fall to its death, Gamra caught the child, put it down.

It then literally was willing to leave the world to save Earth.

What happened was the humans said, you know, we want Gamer to survive.

Gamera's obviously not evil, but he can't come around and knock down our cities and eat our oil refineries.

And so they created something called Plan Z.

He eats fires.

Yeah, he eats fires.

Plan Z.

Okay.

And they

had him stalled at a train depot and just kept sending trucks and train cars full of gasoline onto him so they would catch fire.

And so he'd eat the fire.

And then they cut that off when they got plan Z ready.

They had all these flares that would slowly get him up a mountain and they'd walk up the mountain.

Okay.

But unfortunately, a hurricane came, a typhoon.

and blew out all the flares.

And so he was like, oh, blasted typhoon.

It was going to, he was going to head back down to the city, but then the volcano erupted.

So he kept going up toward the volcano.

Is this Fujiama erupted?

I don't remember which mountain.

How many volcanoes are there in Japan?

Right.

But you know, this is just an amazing coincidence.

You have a typhoon coming and a volcano erupting at the same time.

And then he slowly went up to the top and then he got into

an area which had a lot of fire.

And then the area closed up and turned into the top part of a rocket, which then sent him to Mars.

Wow, okay.

Yeah.

Isn't that cool?

The whole list, but so in terms of the science of monsters, many of these are derived from actual life forms

that are important to us, what we think about in the world.

Dinosaurs, for example, in the case of Godzilla.

One thing I've always had an issue with was

to be that large,

yet that nimble.

You can't do it.

You can't do that.

You can't do it.

No, it's physically impossible.

Yeah, so talk about that.

Well, the scaling of volume and surface area and height, right, goes at different powers.

Mathematical powers.

Yeah, mathematical.

Not physical powers.

Well, that kind of too, right?

So

if I double in height, I'll actually increase by a factor of eight in volume.

right two times two times two length and width and height so i would be eight times larger in volume and thus presumably all of the stuff inside me is made of the same material.

I'm eight times heavier.

That means my legs have to support eight times the weight, right?

Now, if I get bigger, it gets worse.

If I'm 10 times taller and wider and thicker, then I'm a thousand times more massive.

My legs are increasing in surface area, in cross-sectional area, only by a factor of 100 in that case.

So my bones have to be 10 times stronger to support my weight.

Well, because your strength goes not as the volume, but as the area

of the muscle.

And your muscles have to be 10 times stronger to propel them.

That's absolutely right.

So if Godzilla being 400 feet tall or so in the first movie, Godzilla would weigh a billion tons.

Yeah, so much that all known bone would shatter, right?

All known muscles would tear.

He would just be a blob of protoplasmic stuff.

uh because he couldn't support himself never mind walking with that cheerful little gait that he has right it's yeah he's nimble Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The same way, like, actually, with real things, that like a cricket can jump many times its own height, whereas humans can.

That's right.

And so, um, if the cricket were outsize, it would just collapse under its own wings.

Yeah, it's legs.

That's always

a spindly little leg.

Because when you read about it as a kid, they'll say, like, oh, a flea can jump however many times its own height.

And if that were a human-size, then it would be able to jump over your

Empire State Building or whatever it is.

And that's actually, no, it wouldn't.

It would just kind of lie flat on the floor.

Like, kill me, kill me now.

These are people who don't know physics who are giving those animals.

this is where that creation of monsters like Godzilla get exciting to us because we do see animals,

insects, things like that that are smaller than us do amazing superhuman things if they were scaled up to size.

So we imagine that if they're even bigger than we are, they'd be even more amazing and powerful.

But the physics prevents that.

That doesn't make them any the less cool.

And so modern monsters

are looking

more and more friendly and cuddly, right?

Less Less and less evil and scary.

You're very helpful there.

And so I just realized we had a monster earlier than our version of a monster, earlier than Godzilla, and that would be King Kong.

Yes.

King Kong.

That's 20 years earlier.

That's right.

1930s.

And a giant monkey ape chimp type creature.

who was benign and perfectly friendly and was living on a skull island and doing great

until humans decided to take him to New York and show him off as the eighth wonder of the world.

And only then did he become bad and harm people.

The movie, now that I'd forgotten this, it was quite sympathetic.

It was very much so.

It was, some people think that it was a way that the movie makers were trying to say, hey, don't hurt the environment, guys.

Take good care of nature lest it comes back and bite you or bite you in half, which was one of the scary scenes of King Kong, where he actually had a human being in his teeth

dangling while he like bit down on it.

And he was like, yeah, yeah,

that's scary, right?

But that was sort of nature unfettered if humans messed it up, right?

And he wound up being in love with Fay Ray,

the girl, climbed up the Empire State Building, and then airplanes came and shot him and killed him and he fell down to earth.

And the last line of the movie, T'was beauty killed the beast.

As he's laid their dead on the side.

As he laid their dead on the beast.

It wasn't.

It was the airplanes, right?

That's right.

Or

it was humans that killed the beast.

The beast was, oh, this beast was actually a very friendly guy.

I mean, he treated the humans with perfect

kindness and normal behavior until he was put in this environment.

And,

you know, one of the things also was the humans losing control of nature, right?

Because when

reveal of Kong happened in New York City and the flashbulbs were popping and he was getting upset and he was pulling against his restraints, right?

Well, the

impresario said, Don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, those shackles are made of chrome steel.

There's no way he can break out of those, right?

And then he breaks out of them because humans underestimated the power of nature in our hubris.

And we overestimated the power of our chrome steel.

Which back then in the 1930s was like, oh, wow, chrome steel.

That's why they made car bumpers out of chrome steel.

That's right.

Before your day.

I've seen chrome before.

Before my day.

I don't know about your day.

But yes.

So

another sympathetic monster.

Yes.

But you have to remember that you were sympathetic to him is Frankenstein's monster.

Yes, absolutely.

You know, I felt sad for the thing.

Yes, considered by many to be the first true science fiction novel in the European tradition, Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife, Mary Shelley, wrote this book, Frankenstein.

It went through several editions in the early 1800s.

But the monster was the creation of Dr.

Frankenstein, who was trying to write.

Frankenstein.

That's the Gene Wilder version, which I liked very much as well.

Yes, and Igor instead of Igor.

But

it was an allegory about what happens when you try to violate nature because he was a man trying to reproduce, trying to create life.

Trying to be God.

That's right.

Trying to be a woman,

trying to give birth to life.

And so the combination of just defying nature and defying God caused Mr.

Frankenstein, Dr.

Frankenstein, to lose control of the monster and the monster winds up becoming this bad thing.

So comment on the details of how he accomplished this.

So the idea, so he went to graveyards and got body parts that are long dead.

That's right.

Which at that time was also social taboo.

Yeah, of course.

You weren't supposed to mess with people.

Since Da Vinci's day.

That's right.

Where else is he going to know where all the muscles are because he digs up cadavers in the dark of night?

You're not supposed to do that.

Yeah, and would presume, and yeah, there were grave diggers, grave robbers who they would

employ on the flight.

Well, no, they wouldn't care about your body.

They wanted the jewelry.

But there were people who would then brave rob steal for the medical for the cadavers right for the artists or for the for the dimensions yeah even so they got a third party to steal well that came later sort of in the late mid late 1800s so what i'm getting at is the idea that the body is absent some life force yes okay and you can't have electricity in your novel until electricity has been discovered that's right as a thing that you can harness and so do you remember the exact year of the

1817, 1818, I think is the first edition.

Okay, so Ben Franklin was active with electricity.

By then, Ben Franklin had already figured out plenty of electricity.

Yeah.

And at that time, guys like Galvani, right, Alessandro Volta,

these guys had started attaching electrical connections to like frogs' legs and things like that and made them twitch.

Right.

Yes, yes.

I therefore realized that there was a connection between human or animal movement and electricity.

Correct.

And so now you have Frankenstein with these

body parts that no longer have a life force, whatever that was understood to be in the early 19th century.

Reanimated by electricity.

When he stitches it all together,

now you take the best source of energy you have available.

That's right.

That's going to be a lightning bolt.

That's right.

And it goes into the electrodes and he becomes animated.

Even at that time in the 1800s, although folks like Benjamin Franklin had already figured out that lightning was electricity, you still had most of the people in Europe and America thinking that lightning was an act of God, that it was the divine something.

And you can go back to the ancient Romans and the ancient Greeks who thought that Zeus or Jupiter was throwing thunderbolts down at us.

But now that we know that it's lightning and so forth, you kind of remove that monstrosity of Frankenstein being unnatural.

It was perfectly natural for that to happen.

Another idea of physics eventually informing monstrosity.

Right.

So, what I like about it is, given the other experiments, like you said, with the frog leg,

this is not such a far-out idea.

Not at all.

Not at all.

At the time.

That's right.

And today, what do we do?

Your heart stops.

I throw electricity into it.

That's right.

To bring it back.

Get it started.

Mary Shelley was actually very

Percy Shelley was the

Percy Bysshe Bishelley was an author, a poet, actually.

That's what I mean.

Yes.

But Mary Shelley was actually, perhaps in

sort of retrospect, the more talented of the two.

And Mary Shelley, aside from writing Frankenstein, also wrote an apocalyptic novel about a pandemic that actually killed everybody except a few people.

I think it was called The Last Man.

I have to check that.

I'm sorry.

I don't remember exactly the name.

At that point, she was speculating about science fiction, about how people could travel from London to Cambridge in a matter of days by balloons that had wings attached to them that were flapping like birds.

You know, really neat ideas.

But then

a horse gets you from London to Cambridge.

It does.

Maybe it was to Glasgow.

It was, you know, like somewhere.

That's about 60 miles.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so it was airships.

You know, the idea of airships.

So she's, I mean, really, because I knew of her as being considered the sort of form

formation of science fiction just from Frankenstein.

I didn't know that

all these other

books.

That's right, that's right.

So she has really good stuff, and she did this all before Jules Verne started doing things like Journey to the Center of the Earth and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, and, you know,

Journey to the Moon.

But he did it louder and in a deeper voice.

So that would help.

That would have helped back then, unfortunately.

Frankenstein comes back from the dead.

Yes.

The undead

is a, there is no end

rich rich area why is it so rich i i was never as enchanted by the undead as so many other people have been that's right and nowadays uh

just to sort of contextualize your your question

zombies

and undead things are indeed the monster du jour right on our right whether it's the walking dead from from past years now there's the last of us

uh um even

zombified by fungus 28 days 28 years later and that kind of thing whether the causes of virus or that's right fungus or whatever that's right things that are not alive fascinate us simply because we're not dead right think about this things that are not alive fascinate us because we are alive and we don't understand them we have no idea unless you're religious and you have a strong belief that's right ethic in that that's right we have no idea what happens after death that's right nothing can be spookier that's right and and even those belief systems cannot be confirmed in any sort of experimental strategy.

Right, right.

People have tried, as you know, they're even expressed in fiction, like Dan Brown's novel, Angels and Demons.

There supposedly was an experiment where they had somebody who was about to die and weighed him, and then he died, and they weighed him again, and it's a little lighter.

You know, some sort of physical thing.

They even tried.

Right.

And you got to give him credit for doing the experiment.

They even try.

Yeah, yeah.

So if everyone thinks you have a soul and there's science that can test things, why not test your soul?

So right after Ronchin, Wilhelm Ronchin, discovered x-rays, x-rays can see through your body.

No one else ever saw through your body.

Right.

Now x-rays.

So they get somebody dying on the bench and they waited for him to die to see if they saw something leaving his body with the x-rays.

And they didn't.

They did not.

That's right.

So there have been continuous experiments to try to understand what it is that makes something alive versus not alive, right?

Because a living and a dead person, uh, seconds apart, for example, right?

Um, one moment they're talking, they're breathing, they're whatever, they're holding your hand, next moment they're not.

And we can't get into their brain to figure out how that works.

An important feature of the Walking Dead, yes, in my judgment, yes, was if you were dead for a long time, so your body was putrefied, you're not going to come back to life.

That's right.

So, they recognized that

your organs are dead.

You have to be mostly dead.

You have to be not so dead that your organs would not be harvestable

by the card that you signed

on your driving license.

Right.

And so, and that's where the transition comes when you become a zombie.

And one other thing about the Walking Dead was that everybody was infected, whether they were dead or alive.

The moment you died, you became a zombie.

So what's the point of even trying to stay alive when you know you're going to become a zombie anyway?

But that's sort of the existential question of what makes a monster and what makes a human, right?

If you've died, you automatically become a monster?

Or do you become inanimate?

Are you different from a rock or a stake?

Did you see the Key and Peel skit with the zombies are taking over the suburban town?

No.

And it's like a Saturday afternoon.

People are barbecuing.

Yes.

And there's a black family over on the side.

Okay.

And the zombies avoid the black people.

These are racist zombies.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And of course, you can do something like what happened in World War Z, where the author said, we actually don't know why these zombies violate the laws of physics so completely.

And yet they do.

I didn't like World War Z because the zombies ran.

You can't.

Oh, yeah.

You can't.

If you're a zombie, come on, you got to drag a foot.

Drag something.

Don't be chasing me down the street.

In the movie, they ran and they were very fast.

In the book, they were actually quite slow.

You read the book?

Of course.

The Battle of Yonkers?

Did you not see that?

No.

Oh, incredible story.

Without ruining or spoiling the story for everybody, basically, the army wants to make a big show of force to stop these zombies.

And so they bring the soldiers over and they have all this firepower.

Turns out that...

they're routed by the zombies because the army has not thought through how to stop them.

And so again, humans in our hubris thinking that we can control a force of nature when in fact nature comes back and tells us, uh-uh, it's not going to happen.

So one feature of sci-fi, which is, I think, its finest feature when well done, is it's taking place in another place.

And yeah, there are aliens and there's rockets and it's in the future, but there's some

story element that's a reflection of the time in which you live.

Absolutely.

So that there's a lesson in there.

Yes.

Either a moral lesson or a philosophical lesson.

Yes.

So in the zombie storytelling, the zombie genre, I'm almost fatigued wondering, is there more lessons that they can teach him?

What lesson was there to start with?

Let's use The Last of Us,

which was built originally as a video game, but now has been turned into a very successful game.

As so many television things have.

That's right.

Remind me to tell you about Monster Hunter.

Okay, that is a great

game franchise, but that's in a moment.

Right now, we would say that the reason that The Last of Us happens and humans are threatened, global warming is the culprit in The Last of Us.

I did not remember that.

Yes.

Mushrooms or fungi, okay, particular group of fungi, cordyceps, is there are hundreds of species of this particular fungus.

Let me remind people, fungus is an entire branch in the tree of life.

It's a kingdom.

It's a kingdom.

It's a kingdom.

Yeah.

The animal kingdom.

When I grew up, there were only two kingdoms.

That's right, animal and plant.

And plant.

The fungus is its own kingdom.

That's how badass we are.

We now understand that's the case, right?

But see, fungi, they can't survive parasitically in humans because we are warm-blooded.

We have a higher body temperature than most fungi can tolerate.

So fungal parasitism or infection happens all the time in the cold-blooded world.

Okay.

Ants,

wasps, they are parasitized by fungus all the time.

There's a famous zombie ant fungus that causes the ants to go up and then the fruiting bodies grow out of their antennae and then they pop and then the fungi continue to reproduce.

That is nasty.

It is nasty stuff, but it is actually, we believe.

How about you say that better?

That's nasty.

Right.

But it's natural, right?

And we consider that to be very scary because that doesn't happen to humans.

When we get diseases, it's from viruses and bacteria most of the time.

Not from fungus.

But not from fungus.

We get skin-to-skin fungus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We get little things.

But what happens in the Last of Us mythology is that because of global warming,

funguses or fungi start to evolve to be able to live in warmer temperatures.

And eventually one of those parasitic

fungi, the cordyceps, whatever, whatever.

Jump species, they are.

Jump species, and is able to live in humans, even though our body temperatures are 98%.

Not just on the skin.

That's right.

Where it's not inside.

And so we basically become parasitized by this fungus.

And the fungus is not evil.

The fungus is just a fungus, right?

There are fungus substitutes.

It's not to make more fungi.

It's a fungus among us.

There is nothing of

evil stuff.

But what happens when humans are now threatened as a species by the fungus?

You find out we humans do monstrous things like kill and oppress and push away and isolate and so forth because we are afraid of what we have created from the global warming and from the natural reaction of nature, fungus, evolving to

thrive in what we create.

For whom the bell tolls?

That's right.

The monster bell tolls for us.

Stop ringing that monster bell.

We've told you so many times.

I don't even know why we have a monster bell, to be honest, but the fact that just stop it.

Stop it.

Monster.

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Hi, I'm Jenny Slate.

And believe it or not, someone is allowing us to have a podcast.

I'm Gabe Leidman.

I'm Max Silvestri.

And we've been friends for 20 years and we like to reach out to kind of get advice on how to live our lives.

It's called I Need You Guys.

Should I give my baby fresh vegetables?

Can I drink the water at the hospital?

My landlord plays the trombone, and I can't ask him to stop.

You should make sure that you subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

I need you, girl.

You would give zombie storytelling high grades for

continuing this tradition of science fiction to hold up a mirror

of what we are.

Absolutely.

Nowadays, right, we can't see these things, these biological monsters.

They're microscopic, right?

Unlike the macroscopic.

Smaller than we are, rather than bigger.

So they sneak in and they are as unknown and as unknowable as ghosts and spirits and so forth.

So it's the frightening part of it is that what we don't understand and what we don't know.

This has been true for all monsters throughout all of history.

Okay, what about Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

Yes.

That was interesting because the monster was just another spore.

But it was a complete other human being.

They didn't look weird.

They didn't look scary.

That's right.

But they were

co-opted by

interstellar or non-human spores.

So instead of a fungus that had evolved from our Earth, they had dropped in from somewhere in space.

But you would come out of a pod.

Some have said those are some of the most terrifying scenes

ever.

Yes, because we have the closeness to humans and recognizable things,

but just a little bit off, and we can imagine ourselves in that prediction.

That's where it is.

Well, that also kind of reminds me a bit of the uncanny valley and that effect with humans, if you certain animations or certain models of humans or

realistic human

that looks yeah, and it is that thing of something that if it's a long way from human, if it's very cartoony, we're fine with it.

If it's completely human, fine.

But if it's just a little bit off, then we find that uneasy or something.

If an animation of a human is just a bit too real, but not perfectly real, that's

I haven't verified this, but I was told this, that in the humans that are portrayed in Finding Nemo

are a little bit sort of clunky.

Yes.

But they did that on purpose.

Because if they were too real,

it would just be weird.

And we wouldn't be able to sympathize with the fish.

You could.

Because that's the goal.

That's right.

And so the irony is, again, who are the monsters in Finding Nemo?

Not the fish, not the shark, the humans.

One of the most, I'd say, top five famous episodes of the Twilight Zone has the word monsters in it.

So this episode, I forgot the exact name, the monsters are due on Maple Street.

Yeah.

I think that was it.

That's right.

In one of the homes, the lights start flashing.

Their car automatically turns on.

And the neighbors wonder, what's wrong with the Joneses over there?

Why are they, why is their house doing this?

And, you know, are they,

you know, they're monsters or they're, they start to fear them because things are happening to them.

We're your neighbors.

We're your this.

And then, and then it doesn't happen.

It goes to another home and weird things happening.

The garage door opens and closes.

And then they start turning on each other.

Yes.

And this continues.

And oh my gosh.

And then it ends.

I have to do it because it's, the show is 60 years old.

I'm allowed to give up.

It watches out to the aliens.

It comes out to the aliens.

And the two aliens observing Elm Street.

And they said, does this happen every place we do these experiments?

They said, yes, the humans will turn on themselves just by the.

He said, so they will be easy to conquer.

Yes.

We don't have to.

100%.

We are the monsters.

That's right.

That's right.

Period.

We are the monsters.

The monsters in space, in monsters.

by Godzilla, the monsters that infect us with their fungal mycelium spores and stuff.

I know, right?

They're just forces of nature.

The thing that makes them bad is we, is us.

And this is the commentary about monsters.

Once we become familiar with monsters, they're not so evil anymore.

Buffy the vampire slayer, right?

The angel.

They have monsters now that are friendly, or the Twilight books, right?

The vampires are just love-struck teenagers and stuff.

And they're friendly and they glisten a little bit.

And they're handsome, right?

that's right and the aerial monster is unrequited love

you got to watch out for those things that's right bella will come for you if you're not careful with the monster hunter video game it's so popular that when it was coming out other video game makers kept their new products off the shelf until there was enough dis

until there was enough time for Monster Hunter to penetrate the market, right?

The monsters coexist with the humans.

They're just part of the ecosystem.

And that the monster hunters are just the people who have to keep the balance.

Like the monsters go a little wild.

They're a little too violent.

There are a little too many of them.

You have to take care of them.

You have to like control them.

But then you have to figure out why those monsters went out of control.

And in almost all cases, it's because somebody who was not one of those monsters tried to do something unwise and lost control.

So I'm reminded of Carl Sagan's one of his several famous books, The Demon Haunted World.

When I saw that title, I was like, oh my gosh.

Yes.

Tremendously important.

It's the fears, the monsters embody our fears.

Yes, very much so.

And also,

what Carl did in that book was to make very clear the difference between a scientific and a non-scientific monster, right?

Something that you could actually touch and feel and confirm and explain as opposed to one that you...

That's right.

Do you remember in that book the

parable of the dragon in my garage no ah tell me real quick the idea is that I tell you I have a dragon in my garage and so you say oh let me see it it's like oh no it's invisible it's like well okay so it you I might be able to hear it right oh no it's completely quiet it's like oh well it flies right so I can hear wind it's like oh no it flies so quietly you can't tell and you can keep telling you that there is a thing that exists there but I keep telling you why you can't prove that it's there is it actually there?

In that case, this is an attempt to obfuscate or to prevent you from actually learning reality.

I felt the same way about the guys testifying that they have aliens in a locked box.

If you're not going to show us the alien in your locked box,

that's the same thing as not having an alien in your locked box.

That's right.

It's the same thing.

I'm feeling kind of embarrassed now about the amount of money I paid for a dragon.

Well, it's on your shoulders right now.

Well, I mean, And I feel comforted by that, but now I'm starting to feel maybe I've been had.

When children have imaginary friends, adults laugh at them.

They don't laugh, but they know

they're bad.

Yes.

They won't outgrow this.

Right.

Yet, as adults, we have a suite of things that are just that, again, reflect our fears and desires.

That's right.

That things that

we wish.

You're exactly right, Matt.

And we laugh to some extent, right?

You can prey on them in your comedy shows, right?

And you make people laugh at themselves at the kinds of things that we hold in our bodies that are not physics, that are not scientific, and yet they rule our lives.

And so there is nothing wrong with something that's unscientific, right?

Like a ghost idea or a monster idea.

It's only when you are trying to use that in a negative way or to control or to be otherwise whatever, negative toward people that those monsters become truly monstrous.

And I find interesting that

just as a physicist, there are fewer physics monsters than biological monsters.

At the moment, that is true.

At the moment, right, right.

And I don't know what a physics monster would even be when I think of it.

A black hole, maybe.

But

it would have to have agency.

When we first thought of black holes, we thought that they were like, you know, ooh, scary.

But now it's just like, oh, it's a monster-like cookie, right?

Yeah.

It's not that hungry, but as long as you keep your distance,

that's right.

And he lives in its own trash can, you know.

They're self-contained.

Don't lift the live.

But there's a litany of science fiction stories, movies, books, novels, et cetera, that had black holes as evil, scary places for a long, long time.

And then now they're

not.

Because we fully understand them.

Because we understand them.

Yes, yes.

Because black holes really came in in the 60s.

That's right.

And yeah, as long as you don't understand something, it's ripe for monsterizing.

That's right.

And so the best way, I think, to help us all deal with the monstrous ideas or fears in our lives is just to learn more about them.

Best song ever about monsters?

Which one?

You tell me.

Otherwise, I'll tell you.

Monster Mash.

Come on, guys.

They did the Monster Mash.

You mean that one?

Yes.

Yes, that's true.

The Monster Mash.

The Trip to Keep Graphite.

Yes, yes, brilliantly.

It was very one-hit wonder, but all the rhyming was perfect for Halloween.

So, Charles, thanks for bringing your expertise to meet me.

What a pleasure.

Man,

we have so much left to talk about.

Now, Matt doesn't respect me anymore because

I'm his geek friend.

Yeah.

No, but here's the dude.

The real story here is that however geeky you think you are, there's someone geeky.

There's always another.

There's an infinity of

infinity.

It goes to infinity, okay?

So it's just Charles is very far along that infinity scale.

It's not linear,

you got lots of dimensions, like a Hilbert's hotel of geeky.

There you go,

infinite number of human funny things.

So, let me see if I can reflect on this subject.

I'm a fan of science fiction storytelling, of

how inventive a next monster can be, as portrayed in that storytelling.

And

I value anything

that can bring insights

to ourselves,

brought to you by others, brought to you by your own introspection.

And it's pretty clear that if all you do is tell stories about humans interacting with humans, it's going to miss an important dimension of how we might behave on the edges of ourselves.

And a monster.

will take you there.

And let me add a little bit of bias.

If you've earned the psi in the sci-fi label of your story and you put a little bit of biology, chemistry, physics, material science in your monster, take it wherever you want beyond that.

And we're going to be watching because in the end, the monster will teach us about ourselves.

And that is a cosmic perspective.

Matt, thanks for coming.

Thank you so much.

Visiting us from LA.

I really appreciate you having me.

Yeah, yeah.

Charles, I want you more often.

I want you every time.

I just like it because I learned something every single time.

Oh, and the same is true for me, too.

And I boost my geek

street friend.

I can say I spent an hour with Charles today.

Back off.

Thanks, Neil.

Always happy to be here.

All right.

This has been another installment of Star Talk Monsters Edition.

Until next time, keep looking out.

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That's a Big Mac, medium fries, and an ice-cold Coke, all for $9.

Score the classics at Mickey D's.

They're classics for a reason.

But up, up, up,

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Hi, I'm Jenny Slate.

And believe it or not, someone is allowing us to have a podcast.

I'm Gabe Leidman.

I'm Max Silvestri.

And we've been friends for 20 years.

And we like to reach out to kind of get advice on how to live our lives.

It's called I Need You Guys.

Should I give my baby fresh vegetables?

Can I drink the water at the hospital?

My landlord plays the trombone and I can't ask him to stop.

You should make sure that you subscribe so that you never miss an episode.

I need you, girl.