The Great White Shark Bite Heard 'Round the World

Strange Familiars is a weekly podcast which explores the weird corners of the world. From Bigfoot and other cryptids, to ghosts, UFOs, folklore, and forgotten history. We don't just talk to authors and researchers, we talk to actual witnesses of the paranormal. As he came in, the power flickered off again. I don't think I had ever been as scared of anything. It flickered back on and he was right beside me. And he got really close to my face and he said, Stay away from things you don't understand. We don't just talk about haunted places and spooky forests. We go there and we take the listeners with us. It's like it's right up on us but there's nothing there. I know. Did you just hear that? Yeah, I totally heard that. It was right there. Strange Familiars, coming to you from SpectreVision Radio, wherever you listen to podcasts, strangefamiliars.com. I'll be an honest king. Particularly black bears? Sure, yeah. Polar bears are the bear I've spent the most time working with. King of polar bears. King of the North. Not doing such a good job as king. No, I'm not. People keep saying they're in trouble. Okay, yeah. Who else do we have? I'm Wes's younger brother, Jeff. Let's see, what's some of my accomplishments? I made two shots out of five at the fair and won a big stuffed animal once. Okay, that's cool. We have Mike Smith. He broke Colorado's long jump record but then he foot faulted but then he might not have foot faulted but they said he did so he didn't break it. It's still under review. Yeah, I appealed it. It's been 20 years. No one's beaten you since. It stands not in my record book. And then we have a special guest. We do? Yeah. Who is it? A ghost? Yeah, a ghost. I wish. The ghost of Timothy Treadwell's with us today. He probably is. If he's going to haunt anyone, it's us. He's not going to talk it off. Yeah. All right. I'm excited about today's episode because it's one of our favorite animals. It's an animal we all got to see together in Australia. You got any guesses what that might be? Koala. Cassowary. It's neither of those. Kangaroo. We saw it. How did we not see a kangaroo? Isn't that like the craziest thing that's ever happened to anybody? We saw wallabies which is kind of similar. How do you go to Australia for like a week and a half and not see a kangaroo? I know. And focus on wildlife too. Pretty much everywhere we went, we were trying to see wildlife. I don't understand. But we did see an animal that not many people in Australia see. You have to travel to see it. It's not easy to see. And we almost didn't even get to have the experience we had because of some weird complications that we ran into. But that animal is the great white shark. Or an Australia. Welcome to the locations. We almost didn't get to see it in the cage because we were the first group in and the shark. No, they were always going to get us. It didn't really show up. Yeah. But I mean, it could have like disappeared after a few more groups and then we never would have seen it. So I was really happy with our experience. Beautiful animals. I think a top, definitely a top 10 animal for all of us, I would say. Is that right, Jeff? No. I'm not sure about you. Okay. For me, it's a top three. Mike, it's top three for you. It is number three for me. Yeah. Okay. It's a top ocean animal for you, Mike. And it's top three. Not quite. Yeah. Wow. Top ocean animal for Mike is... Holy cow. You're probably saying? I don't know. What's your top ocean animal? It's an orca. Spot of the eagle ray. Orca. Orca. Okay. I do love spotted eagle rays. Yeah. But I was thinking, you know, when I was trying to think of the subject for this episode, I was thinking, oh, we should do a shark. It's been a minute since we've done a shark. And I was thinking back, it's actually been a while since we've done a gray white story. I can't even think of our last one. Can you guys? Ooh. Yeah. Was it the Jaws three-parter? I mean, yeah, like the 2016 one, or I mean 1916 three-parter one. Yeah. It could have been. It's like two years ago. That might have been our last one. Yeah. So it's been a minute. This is one of our favorite animals. It is the shark responsible for the most bites on people and the most fatalities on people. So this is our top dog when it comes to shark bites. What about unsealed? Yeah, I would say without a doubt it's responsible for the most bites unsealed because most of the other sharks don't eat seals. So yeah. That's like a doubt. Without a doubt. Wow. That's an interesting, because I didn't have anything interesting to say. Continue us. Do a lot of seals in the world. This is like enemy number one. This is their biggest threat is gray white sharks. So we're lucky we're not seals is what I'm trying to say, but not so much our victim in this story. She thinks on the board. So you know how you always pin up like the pictures of the top 10 most wanted for the seals board? Do you think it's a profile shot of a shark on the picture? Is it straight on face first? I think profile. I think they look cooler as a profile and a little scarier. It's a little scarier. Yeah. If you have like a straight on shot of a shark, the seals are probably just like, when you see a bald eagle straight on, you're like, that's kind of a goofy looking animal. Yeah. But then you turn it sideways and you're like, that's the symbol of a nation. I bet you nine of the 10 are all just different great whites. And then there's like one really bad seal in there too. Like the Epstein of seals. Yeah. Well, when I was looking into this story for the episode today, I actually stumbled on another story that happened recently that is very similar to our main story. And I'm going to start with it because there's some interesting parallels and I think it'll set the scene nicely for our main story today. So you guys ready? Yes. Yes, sir. All right. In 2024, a German tourist was aboard a United Kingdom flagged catamaran. So this is like a German person, but on a British boat. And she was enjoying the beautiful weather and clear blue seas south of the Canary Islands and directly to the west of Western Sahara, which is a country in Africa. A few days prior, she and her companions had left the almost unbelievably idyllic town of Las Palmas on Grand Canaria. And I did look it up. It is a gorgeous place that is now on my radar for places I'd love to visit. And they're headed south in their catamaran. They're straddling the western edge of the African continent. It's a particularly hot day. That's the big legs. Straddling. Yeah. That's not, that doesn't need to mean that you're straddling with legs, Mike. That's what it means to me. Yeah. It's a particularly hot day on September 16th, 2024. And as they're sailing. Africa's got some nice humps. You know? Oh yeah. You squeeze right in because you know it has like the big bump on the western edge. Yeah. Right in the saddle there. Oh man. Dude, that dump. That dumper on Africa. Big old gig of dumpy. As they're sailing, they decide to come to a stop and they take a quick dip in the ocean to cool off. And what they didn't know is that they're actually sharing that particular patch of water with the ocean's most refined and most feared predator. Both of our stories today are going to be stories of people getting in water quickly in places where there shouldn't be a great white shark, but they just have the bad luck to finally decide to jump in the water in a place where there's a great white. And as this German woman dove into the cool water, she's splashing around. This commotion and vibrations are traveling through the ocean and they peak the interest of a large great white shark. It's open ocean. Food is scarce and any potential meal needs to be investigated. So the shark slices through the water effortlessly, picking up a bit of speed as it approaches the sound and these vibrations. The woman swimming right next to the catamaran and staring up into the clear blue sky when suddenly something large bumps her from below and tugs on her leg. She hardly has time to scream before she's pulled underwater and then another tug on her leg. She's once again above the surface reaching for the boat and babbling in fear. And as she comes out of the water, she looks down in horror to see that her leg is missing and there's a huge amount of blood that's already coursing from the stump where her leg had just been. Man, that'd be so crazy. Just like in seconds your leg is just not there. Yeah. An emergency call is made. She does her best to stem the bleeding, but she would have to wait almost six hours before the helicopter would arrive. By the time she's loaded into this aircraft, she's already on the brink of death. She would end up dying from heart failure on the way to the nearest hospital. Hearts need blood. Hearts do need blood. They need pressure. You need to have enough blood in there to pump that heart. Yeah. And so do legs. So do legs. Yeah. When your leg comes off, a lot of blood falls out. It keeps that pressure in there. That's true. That's some good medical insight there, Jeff. If your leg comes off, a lot of blood falls out. You've probably been watching the pit, haven't you, Jeff? Yeah. That's how I learned about how you need a leg. Or at least that it's actually pretty useful. Yeah. Yeah, they are useful for a lot of things. But that's actually not our main story for the day. It's just one that's very similar to the one I'm going to tell, but ours has a better ending. We're going to call that a sad first course. So you know the Olympic divers? Yeah. You think that they could dive into the ocean and the shark doesn't sense it? Just because they make such a calm, nice splash. Like, they don't splash at all. I know you're kind of saying that as a joke, but it's true. The less splashing you do in the water, the less commotion you're making, the less you sound like potential prey to a shark. So yes. It's interesting because I think Greg Luganis, that's how he got hurt was a shark. It's not. He actually hit his head on the diving board. He also got hurt from AIDS. That's true. All right. I don't know that reference, but it's still funny. Yeah. All right. So for our story, we're actually going back to 1994. I just want you guys to know when we started the podcast, this was one of the two great white shark stories that I had top of mind. The other was Rodney Fox. This one was the other one. So this is a very famous great white shark incident. It is one that a lot of people know about, and there's a good reason for that, and we're going to get to it. But we're in for an interesting story today. All right. All right. March 1994 was a hard time for a lot of people. Do either of you have any guesses why that might be? I mean, it's been a whole year since Jurassic Park came out. What are we all doing out here? What's there to do for fun? That's right, Mike. Jurassic Park was no longer in theaters, and the home VHS wouldn't be in stores until that fall. So there really wasn't much to do in March of 1994. So they did play it in theaters a lot in 1994. I don't, they didn't. It's theatrical run was over. I was looking, they did. I don't think they did. I promise you. Okay. All right. Because you have a category coming up, and I was looking what all was in the theater, and Jurassic Park was in the theater. All right. Okay. That's not totally shocking. Big movies back then would just go for a year. I remember this time pretty well, though, because I remember there was this big long period in between the theatrical run and the home VHS, where I was starting to forget the movie, even though I'd seen it five times in theaters. And it was in mid-1994. That's probably your dad was tired of taking you there, so he just told you it was no longer in theaters. That could be true. I was only nine, so I would have been pretty dumb. So Heather Boswell might have been bored in March of 1994. I don't know. But she decided to join earlier than that, the NOAA, the National Oceanographic Research Vessel Discoverer for six months at sea. Heather's job is in the galley, which is essentially the kitchen of the ship. She's 19 years old. It's not necessarily the most glamorous job aboard the discoverer, but she's gaining valuable experience. She's seen parts of the world that not many 19-year-olds, especially in 1994, had ever seen. This ship went around through Antarctica, up through the Chilean coast. It was a really interesting route that she got to see some really cool places. She'd graduated high school in 1992. She's now on the adventure of a lifetime before heading back to normal life and kind of starting her adult life. She's straddled the coast at Chile. She's straddled the coast yet and then she's going to have to get over that term. Nice. However, in March of 1994, a few months into the journey, her adventure would turn into a nightmare that would change the trajectory of the rest of her life. You want to know what one of my favorite things in the world is besides whale sharks? It's saving money and not losing quality. I like being able to save my money. Unfortunately, big wireless carriers think that I shouldn't be able to do that and they want to keep my money. That's why everyone needs to switch over to Mint Mobile. Stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. 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The crew aboard the ship had been working all day, it's midday, they're stifling heat and they beg the captain to take a break so that they can swim in the ocean. So the captain and the crew decide to slow down the ship, they discover to a stop and they allow the crew to take a dip in the clear blue South Pacific Ocean. The water is about 80 degrees so it's just kind of one of those days where it's super hot outside and you're jumping into the water to get a break essentially. You guys know what that feels like, getting a break every once in a while from the heat. Not with you in charge. Yeah, right, fair enough. Listen, you have no idea Wes, oh my god. Not a good guy. He holds your feet to the fire. He's just like, do you check your emails? I'm like, no. I think my like bar is check your email twice a week or something. All right, so hard. We talked a bit about the open ocean and how you really don't find a lot of life in these big stretches of warm ocean water. We talked about it as recently as the story of the Whaleship Essex. When you're in especially warm, big, open, pelagic ocean, there's not much life there. It's kind of considered a desert. And that might have been the thought process for the people in charge of the ship when they decided to stop in this spot. But what they might have not known or understood was that they were actually in one of the most biologically significant areas of the entire Pacific Ocean because actually extending from the coast of Chile and running for over 2000 miles, there are two large underwater mountain ranges called the Salas Igómez and Nazca ridges. These mountains have hundreds of peaks that either come very close to breaking the surface or actually break the surface and are important habitat for tons of different animals, including corals, whales, turtles, and roughly 25 species of shark. So it's kind of this big oasis in this huge expanse of marine desert. And it's also where Easter Island is found. It's found in these ridges. Cool. What do you guys know about Easter Island? Then big old heads. Then big old heads. I want to see those. I know. I like those heads. It's cool. There's all sorts of conspiracy theories about them too, Jeff, so you'd be into them. Like did aliens put them there? I'm not into alien stuff. That's stupid. Yeah. Okay. That's right. So maybe the crew knew that they were in this biodiverse hotspot. Maybe they didn't. But honestly, even if they did know that, they probably assumed that there wasn't any real risk in swimming in the ocean. Because honestly, 9,999 times out of 10,000 times, there isn't going to be any risk when you enter the ocean. We all know that. It's probably a much bigger number than that even. You can, you know, I wouldn't think twice before jumping into this water if they wanted to stop and go for a swim. But this day was actually an exception, and it was a really big exception at that. And that's because the boat had happened to stop in the same general area as an especially large and especially curious great white shark. Uh-oh. Uh-oh. So just what the heck is this great white doing so far from shore and out in the middle of the ocean? Well, we've talked about this before, but basically even though the majority of great white sharks are going to be found relatively coastal and in, you know, straddling the coast, you guys. What? Uh. They don't have legs? And even though the sharks straddle something, Jeff, hold on. I definitely straddle the African coast. I know that you've said that. Uh, but basically even though they're mostly found coastal and in areas that have these good feeding opportunities like lots of marine mammals, lots of fish, they are a migratory species and you could essentially find a great white shark just about anywhere in the ocean outside of the Arctic and Antarctic waters. Oh God, don't start with this. With what? These dinosaurs now great white sharks are birds? I'm not saying they're birds. Other animals can migrate. They said they migrate. Yeah. Birds don't own migration. Humans migrate. Where? To the McRib at McDonald's in your case. Is that an annual thing still? That doesn't happen like every other thing. No. New York City to Florida. Aren't they done with the McRib? Isn't that over? They said that. Yeah. And they brought it back again. I'm done with it. Are you? Mike ruined it for me. Oh, I apologize for nothing. For nothing. All right. So we've talked about this a little bit, but each year great white sharks will leave their relative hotspots. These hotspots include places like the western coast of the US, the eastern coast of the US, southern Australia, South Africa, and they travel long distances before returning to their original locations. There's still a lot that we don't know about white shark migration, but the discovery of the white shark cafe really helped shark biologists start to put together some of these puzzles. And we've talked about it even a little bit. Do you guys remember what the white shark cafe is? No. Basically, it's a spot between the western coast of North America and Hawaii where adult white sharks congregate and they do these really deep dives every night. And we had no idea that this existed before they started tagging and tracking white sharks. And then they saw that a bunch of these white sharks were going out into the middle of the ocean. There's a big group of them out there and they're doing these deep dives. And researchers were kind of like, you know, what the heck is going on? And they have since done research expeditions to this area to kind of figure it out. And they think that these white sharks are actually taking advantage of a really exceptional ocean oasis where there's lots of fish and squid and maybe mating opportunities as well. So it's kind of like a spot where they can get some different types of food and maybe even mate. And a cool thing about great whites. What's like the human equivalent of that? Las Vegas, maybe. Yeah. I was going to say like cafes aren't usually where you go to just like find, well, I guess to find opportunities to mate, but you're not mating in the cafe usually. No. But you might go there to meet like, you might go there like, hey, maybe I'll bump into someone that Zendaya think is cool. Like in the drama. Exactly. Blue Williams, when he like left the NBA bubble to go to a strip club and he said they have really good chicken wings. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So basically the mating thing though is more of kind of a hypothesis. And that's because, and this is one of my favorite things about white sharks or great whites is that we really know nothing about their mating behavior. It just has never, it doesn't happen in front of us. We don't know where it happens. We just don't know about it. And I think that's so cool that they've been able to keep that secret from us for so long. It reminds me of the Lord of the Rings, like, go ahead, keep your secrets, Frodo. Yeah. You know, I just think it's neat that this is such an iconic animal that's so studied around the world. And we still don't know anything about this really important part of its life. Kind of cool too that they mate under intense pressure. Yeah. What do you mean? And they can still perform. Yeah. What do you mean intense pressure? Well, then you say they go deep in the ocean. We don't know if that's for mating. That's probably to get squitted and stuff. Yeah. But it could be for mating, but we have no idea. Because the deeper you go, the more pressure you get. That's true. Yeah. But they think that's probably them looking for food and most likely squid. But they're very private, kind of like Mike. We don't know anything about Mike's reproduction either, do we, Jeff? You don't know. I know a little bit. A little bit. I think it's... I leave it to your guys' imagination because in that scenario, I am whatever you want me to be rather than the disappointing reality. You kind of are the premier Mike researcher too, Jeff, out there. Let's just say, as far as eating and mating goes, he's good at eating and mating at the same time. Okay. I get what you're leading toward. We're just going to leave that though. Thanks, Jeff. That's like awesome wingman behavior right there. That's so good. A similar thing happens with white sharks on the eastern coast of the US, and many of them leave their summer hunting grounds in New England and travel all the way to the Gulf of Mexico during the winter. Again, researchers think this may just be the sharks following productive food sources, potentially looking for mating opportunities, or even just trying to stay in their preferred water temperature range. Basically, the important thing here, to sum this all up, is that we know we have these robust populations of white sharks around the globe, like the ones off the coasts of North America. We know they travel long distances, and we think that a big reason for those migrations is feeding opportunities. Up until somewhat recently, we just thought white sharks were coastal, and now we know that they're highly migratory. Gotcha. Like birds. Like birds, exactly. All right, so the white and maybe dinosaurs yet, that's probably true. Maybe Palingt all just know that. I don't know. So the white sharks on the western coast of South America are pretty understudied because there isn't a large, reliable group of sharks that you might find there, like you'd find in California or Cape Cod, but there are white sharks that do call that coast home, and they're likely to be migratory as well. And to me, it makes sense that a shark leaving the coast and heading out into the open ocean might want to follow an undersea range of mountains that have higher productivity than the rest of the surrounding ocean. So basically what I'm getting at here is that while you really are very unlikely to run into a great white shark in this part of the world, if you were to find one, it would likely be in an area similar to the one that these people are about to swim in. And you know what? There was a white shark there and she was huge. Yeah, we don't know the sex of the shark, but we do know that it was about five meters or 15 feet long. And that's a really big, great white. So therefore, in my opinion, this is probably a female white shark because they do get quite a bit bigger than the males. And as this big shark cruise through the cooler water, a few dozen meters below the surface, her highly tuned sense of hearing picked up on the splashes and vibrations a few hundred meters away, she gradually started to climb up through the column of water toward the sounds. We really can't undersell the importance of sound for sharks. When you guys learned about sharks growing up, what was the sense that people always talked about with them, like their famous sense? It's blood in the water. Yeah, blood in the water. And if you guys remember, we talked to Dan in one of our Indianapolis stories who was on all the sharks and is an amazing shark guide and cameraman and stuff. And he mentioned that human blood doesn't really even have any biological significance to sharks, so they tend to ignore our blood. So that whole blood in the water thing is kind of overblown in media. But the thing that we probably should talk about even more is how important sound is for sharks. Essentially, their whole body is set up to detect and analyze vibrations in the water. And without going too much into the physiology of it, a shark kind of experiences sound in the way that you feel the base vibrating from a big amp at a concert. You actually feel it in your body, like, you know, kind of buzzing in your body. And they can they can sense vibrations like that. Their whole body is tuned to pick up on those vibrations. So I'm really oversimplifying that. But basically, you just should understand that this sensitivity to vibration can help them pick up on sounds that are especially interesting and the splashing and thrashing and generally kind of erratic sounds that an injured like an injured or incapacitated fish or marine mammal might make are really similar to the types of sounds that people make when they jump and swim in the ocean and they're trying to cool off. I think especially if you're just kind of chilling in the ocean and like splashing each other and just kind of having a fun time relaxing, we tend to make a lot of those really erratic types of sounds. Don't each other. Duncan, if you dunk someone. Yeah, it's weird how if you get dunked under water by someone, like in two seconds, you feel like you're about to run out of air. But if you just like put your head under and try and hold your breath, you can go for like a minute and a half or whatever. You know, isn't that strange? Very strange. Pretty strange, huh? Yeah, it's worth thinking about more. Yeah. Imagine how much trouble you'd be in if there was a great white shark in a dunk take at the county fair. You'd be, oh my gosh. You know what? I don't think I'd throw the ball at the target. Yeah, I don't think I would either. What if Epstein was sitting on that little well, then I'd probably. Maybe I would because I just assumed like they knew like something I didn't know. What do you mean? They put that person up there for a reason. Like I would assume that like they didn't think the person would get killed by the shark. So I'd throw it at the target and then he'd get eaten. I wonder if you could request that's your method of execution you want to die by if they'd honor that. Because like, you know, sometimes you'd be like, I want firing squad. But like 20 people throw the ball at once. So no one knows. Yeah. They famously don't do well in captivity. So you have to have like a pretty fresh shark in there or else it wouldn't probably bite you even. They got Ace Venture. That's true. He just wanted to go to the bathroom. Or no, someone else wanted to go to the bathroom. Right. I can't. He said he's going to the bathroom. That's right. Right. He's like, do not go in there. All right. So the discoverer had lowered a cargo net into the water and they also launched a Zodiac skiff to provide support to any of the swimmers in the water that might get tired or for whatever reason need their support. They also had people up on the deck watching the swimmers. And I think that's mostly just because ocean currents and waves can be really unpredictable. And even though the water was pretty calm on March 23rd, 1994, they really didn't want to take any chances. So as Heather Boswell jumped into the warm water of the South Pacific with her shipmates, she feels immediately refreshed and totally alive. And I know that feeling like jumping off a boat into a big body of water on a hot day. It really hits like nothing else. Like that is a top 10 sensation, I think. And her newfound friends are really just like splashing and yelling and having a great time as they swim around the ship and they're shadowed by these people in the skiff and up on the deck. And they spend about an hour in the water total. So they're in the water for quite a while. You don't think that's a top 10 sensation, Jeff? I'm just thinking cold water on a hot day. Sensations now, you know, we have this little I've talked about it before, but we have a little swimming hole in the creek near us. And on like a 90 degree day here, walking over and jumping in that little swimming hole is like maybe my favorite thing to do all year long. You know, it made it seem like it would get top 10, but then wasn't was any different. Those advertisements for five gum, just those whole commercials. There's all these like sensory things and like blue colors and stuff, you know, that's true. It's just normal gum. But then you just eat it. And it's like, well, yeah. As the 15 foot great white near the splashing, the sensitive lateral line running down the length of her body helped her to more fully pick up the vibrations and understand that they were unique and interesting. She's now only a few meters away from the splashes and almost all of her senses are firing. Smell, sound, sight are all sending the exact same message that there's something struggling on the surface and that it might be food. But she really only has one way to know for certain if this is actually worthwhile food. And her mouth opens as she approaches the closest of the crew of the discoverer swimming in the water. This guy would be a top 10 sensation for sharks. Mouthing something new. Sensing food on the splashing. Yeah, it probably is. Probably number one or probably number two. Mating is up. Yeah. Yeah. Orgasm. We don't know. We have no idea. We don't. But we really painful. Yeah, that's true. So these nine swimmers have been swimming for quite a while and one of the people up on the deck that was watching them had a camcorder, which he had already turned off. He had kind of filmed some of their just rough housing and whatnot. But then suddenly someone on the deck is yelling and screaming shark and pointing toward the water near the swimmers. The swimmers and the safety team kind of laugh nervously thinking it has to be a prank. And then the person yells, No, I'm serious. There's a shark. And as these people are pointing toward the water, this crew member turns on the camcorder, points it out towards the swimmers and presses record. Oh, wow. So there's a video of the shark bite and I want to play it for you guys. It's probably the most famous video ever captured of a shark bite and really up until the death of Simon Nellis. A few years ago, it's probably the only time a white shark bite had been captured on video. So I'm going to play it quickly. Our audio audience is going to be able to hear it. Our video audience will be able to see it. That's how that works. And after we play it, I'm going to break down exactly what happened in the water. So we're going to play it first and then we're going to go through what happened. And I will warn you guys, there's a little bit of graphic language and then obviously a little bit of graphic imagery in this. Nothing too insane though, as far as the imagery goes, the F word comes up a couple of times though, so just be ready for that. Yep. Word. One other thing, I could not find the original video anywhere. I searched Noah archives. I thought about doing like a FOIA request for it. I could not find it. So every single one of them I found had some sort of narration and music overlay on it. This one was the best one. It's the least offensive and it plays the most of the video. I think it's probably from the nineties. So here you go. Do a different kind of predator seven miles off the coast of Chile. Oceanic research students enjoy a dip in the ocean to cool off. Unfortunately, they weren't alone. And now you can see the big big Oh my god. There's my head. I fucking made Heather's leg off. It took her leg off. It took her off. It's gone. Alright, so that's the video. It is one I've probably seen a hundred times. This was on a lot of animal attack shows back in the 90s, early 2000s. It's very famous because even though the camera person kind of loses the, you know, drops the camera during the most intense part of this. He's no Spielberg. You do see a large great white shark bite Heather. And you see blood in the water and it's pretty nuts. Alright, so we're going to go through what actually happened. So what a lot of people don't know is that Phil Buffington was actually one of the swimmers in the water. He had been treading water near the whole group with his girlfriend when the massive shark materialized out of nowhere and bites into both of his legs with a single bite. This bite was so quick and initially painless that Phil was just kind of in a bit of a daze before he starts yelling shark along with the people up on the deck. And the shark swims away from him, I think because of all the commotion and the fact that there's other people right around him. And at this point, the panic swimmers start swimming toward the cargo net that's dangling in the water and the three people on the Zodiac are pushing in closer to try and help pull people out of the water. You also can hear the boat horn like firing because they're trying to just get everyone out as quickly as possible. 19 year old Heather Boswell had been swimming a bit separated from the rest of the group and was about 25 feet or around 8 meters away from the nearest swimmer when the shark turned toward her and focused in on the only isolated target. Heather immediately understood that she was most likely about to be bitten by the shark and she had this certainty of this realization and it gave her actually a strange sense of calm and you see her in the video flip over onto her back and she's kind of doing this calm backstroke toward the ship. When the shark gently bites into her right ankle and lower leg on her right side, pulls her beneath the water while shaking her back and forth. And I say gently because that's how she described the bite. She said it was gentle, kind of like a puppy, mouthing you with its teeth. And from what we've learned about great white sharks on our show is that's exactly what they do on these exploratory bites. They don't have hands. They don't have something that they can reach out and touch and decide, oh you know, is this food, whatever, they actually do that with their mouth. So that's what this first bite is. It's probably what the first bite on Phil was too. And I'm guessing the first bite on Heather was that too. Just the shark kind of deciding is this worth eating. But for us that can be devastating. And horrified friends are watching from all angles as Heather's blood starts spreading through the water as she desperately tries to swim away from the shark. In the video the white shark then releases her leg. That's the part that you actually see the shark like in the water biting her and it bites her right leg and then releases it. That's when the camera drops. And what we don't see is her swim frantically toward the zodiac while the crew is holding out a wooden pole for her to grab onto. But as she grabs onto this pole, the shark bites into her left leg, once again pulling her under the water. Two of the crewmates on the zodiac reach down, grab her under the arms. The third is hitting the shark with the pole. And they have this brief moment of a tug of war with a 15 foot great white shark. And then Heather feels a pop in her leg. Suddenly the people on the zodiac say she was incredibly light and easy to pull out of the water and into the boat. And that was because the shark had bitten her left leg completely off at the lower thigh. She's in shock as she looks down in the zodiac and sees that her left leg is completely gone. The best part of life may very well be what goes on in the bedroom. And at some point you gotta stop blaming stress, sleep, or just getting older. 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No, it would probably sink. Where so would that be in the brain? Where would the bullet have to hit probably kill a shark like that? Yeah, yeah, probably in the head. Yeah, who knows? And I think it's unfortunate actually that that happened because they had had pretty much everyone out of the water at this point and it's not like the shark is ever going to see another person. I feel like if it floated, they could have maybe got her leg. That is, I did have that thought too. Like if the shark had been on top of the water, they might have been able to retrieve her leg. Yeah, just sew it on real quick. So meanwhile, both Heather and Phil are pulled aboard the ship. They're taken to the med bay for emergency care. Phil had a lot of puncture wounds and cuts on both legs. He would ultimately require 50 stitches on his wounds, but Heather's in much worse shape. The ship had like pretty extensive medical equipment and professionals on board, so they immediately start working on Heather. They do a tourniquet above the stump of her leg to stem the bleeding. And her really big lucky break is that her femoral artery had been severed. But I think this has happened in some of our other stories. Either the shark closed it when it bit, or it kind of snapped back and closed itself. But it did close and she wasn't losing blood out of her femoral artery. And had she been, she almost certainly would have died. But the majority of her bleeding was from other veins and vessels and her blood loss had been extensive, but it wasn't enough to kill her yet. Her blood pressure was really low though and her heartbeat was slow and thready. So one of the first things they had to do was just start an IV and put a lot of fluid into her system to try and keep her blood pressure up. And they're hoping- And why is that, Wes? I told you earlier. Yeah, if your blood falls out of your leg, then you die. Because your heart needs blood. It needs blood and that's blood pressure. Yeah. But they were putting so much fluid into her blood that was just the point of that was to keep her blood pressure up. That toward the end of this ordeal, her blood platelet, like her red blood count was so low that it was like a third of what it should be. Because her blood was mostly just this IV fluid that they were putting into her. She's like a third of what she was too. No, I think she's like probably five sixth of what she was. I don't know. I don't know how much your left leg is of your total mass. How much blood? So she's five. Yeah. No, you're right, Jeff. A third seems like too much to survive through. Yeah. The thing I've learned is that obviously like red blood cells and white blood cells are really important for carrying like oxygen and nutrients and whatnot through your body. But in a trauma situation like this, the main thing is keeping your blood pressure up because otherwise your heart fails and you go into cardiac arrest. So like they mostly just needed fluid in there to keep the pressure up. And then later you can worry about it actually being blood because they're able to give her oxygen and stuff. So they aren't too worried about oxygen transport and whatnot. Does that make sense? Yeah, it still just seems like bad. Yeah. And it is like you can't do that for very long, but it is a good way to keep someone alive in a situation like this. They're also doing the best to keep her calm because she is going through some like big mental struggles too. And the crazy part about all this is that they had to get the ship all the way back to Easter Island in order to get her to real help. And that's a 20 hour journey. Oh, wow. So they just had to keep her stable during that 20 hours like manage her fluids, her blood pressure, her pain, her mental state. She was really starting to like think about all the things that were going to change in her life. And it was really important that she keep fighting because she had this long journey ahead of her and fill. We shouldn't leave Phil out of this. Right. And they're also worried about the the tourniquet killing important tissue on her stump because you need a stump to have a good prosthetic. Like if you lose your leg, like right at the place where it joins your body, it's hard to have a prosthetic. But if you have a decent stump, there's a lot more that you can do. So they really didn't want her to lose her stump. So what they would do is they would take the tourniquet off for a little bit, let blood like push back into her stump. And then they'd reapply the tourniquet and they just had to keep doing that. Yeah, over and over and over again. And I think someone told us once that you shouldn't do that. But it may be on like a 20 hour journey. It was worth it. And this was a doctor. I wonder how close to dying she was though. Yeah, they think that she lost letting out a lot of blood to do that. Well, they would stop it before it would like start to ooze out of the end again. OK. But yeah, who knows? At one point they turn her onto her side and she almost goes into cardiac arrest, which just goes to show you that she's really just holding on by a thread this entire journey to Easter Island. When they get closer to Easter Island, a MedVac team arrives on the ship and this team takes over her care at the island. They keep her on the ship until they're absolutely ready to transfer to the aircraft. Both she and Phil are flown to the hospital in Panama, where they finally receive full medical care to try and clean and stabilize their wounds. And Heather's family was actually waiting for her there in Panama. Oh, I wanted to read a quote from one of the medics that worked on her leg in Panama. He said, when we got the bandages off, there was about two and a half to three inches of her femur sticking out that was prominent. The rest of it was just like ground hamburger meat in a fishmouth type of configuration. So just picture that fishmouth type of configuration. It's going to be hard for her to straddle any more coastlines. If there's a stump in the prosthetic now, I mean, they could give her an even bigger leg and it'll be easier. That's true. Or like one that is like real grippy, you know? Yeah, right. Just rattling. After a few days in Panama, she's transferred to a hospital in her hometown of Seattle. And one little footnote is just about every article or video that I read or watched made no mention of Phil. And it kind of sucks to get both legs chomped by a great white, get 50 stitches and still be a footnote. Like that kind of blows. Yeah. But real Togo Balto situation. Yeah, that is a Togo Balto situation. It's a good point. So a tricky thing about Heather's injury was that the exposed femur was really valuable for a prosthetic. But it was just this chunk of bone sticking out and she needed to have tissue and skin over that bone in order to use it. So what doctors did is they put her stump in this torsion device for like 15 to 20 hours a day that basically pulled on her skin and stretched it out so it could finally be pulled over the end of this femur stuff. Geez. Mike, you have a device that you use to stretch something out, right? I was going to say it's a good thing they didn't put her testicles in the torsion device. She doesn't have testicles. I don't. Yeah, I, what? That would have hurt. I had no idea they could do this. They could just like over a matter of days or whatever. I don't know how long she was in this device, but they could stretch your skin that much. Did you just say how long she was? Yeah, I said how many hours per day, but I don't know how many days total. But yeah, so anyway, that's something they could still be going on now, you think? Yeah, it still might be happening. I would keep it going to like 12 feet tall. Wemby. Yeah, it would just be skin though. You'd have to like fold the skin up into long legs. They'd be like, now just tell us when you're back to like your original length and be like, no, I was a little longer before. Like really? You're 12 feet tall. I don't know. So it's actually one of the sources I used was this show from like the very early 2000s called, Did You See That? Which is a great name for a show. Yes, I just watched it on your show. But I actually, I think this clip is going to be helpful to explain what this looked like. And it's kind of an interesting animation from this time. So I'm going to share this clip too. I mean, I guess it makes sense in that like, you see it with people that have extreme weight loss, like people who get up to 600 pounds and then get down to 200. Yeah, there's a lot of skin. They have like a lot of excess skin that had stretched out. Yeah. And they just had to force the skin to stretch a few inches, I think, in like, in pretty minimal time. So this is, this kind of shows how that happened. She was in an awful lot of pain, especially undergoing the search race. It almost caused the lame pain. All right. So pretty crazy. Something I didn't know that was possible before we did this story. But like her dad said, incredibly painful. She's released from the hospital after three weeks. She's confined to a wheelchair. And once she's fully healed and her stump was strong enough, she is fitted with a prosthetic leg and she immediately starts the process of re-learning how to walk with this prosthetic leg. And she's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. She's also been in a lot of pain. So because of that, I didn't really dig into what she's up to these days. Alright. Pretty crazy story. The skin stretching... I mean, I just didn't think about that quite properly until I saw the little animation. That would be awful. That'd be absolutely terrible. And however many hours, for however many days, it just seems like... She hurts down the spine. She's a bit off too. Yeah. Both of the parts don't sound great. The 20 hours in the boat before you get to real intensive care is pretty insane too. Alright. I did want to talk quickly about the motivations of this shark. It's impossible to say for sure, but kind of from what we've learned about Great Whites, what I've learned doing a few episodes about them. One kind of... I don't want to call it a myth, but a common thought for people with Great White Shark attacks is that it's mistaken identity. And we've talked about this a bit, where they think that something might be a seal or whatever. And once they realize it isn't, they stop attacking. And I really don't think that could be the case here. This is clear water. I think we need to give sharks more credit than that. That they know that this thing that they're approaching isn't their typical prey that they've already seen like a thousand times in their lives. So I don't really buy the mistaken identity thing that often. I think maybe in really murky or low light water or whatever, it's a possibility. But what I think this shark was doing was investigating. It just decided, you know, this might be food. I'm going to check it out. Maybe the first bite on fill, it still didn't know. The second bite on heather, it still didn't know. And then when it got into something like a little bit more meaty, like the upper thigh, it was like, you know what, this actually is going to work. Because Great Whites really need like that dense, like meaty, blubbery kind of food. And I'm not saying that like Heather's thigh was blubbery, but I'm saying it probably felt a little bit closer to food than like an ankle or a lower leg, you know? Yeah. So I generally, when people say, oh, like a shark was trying to eat them, if a Great White Shark is trying to eat you and it's already decided that, do you guys remember in Australia when we saw the shark actually really go for the bait that they were trying to bring it in with? What did that look like? It went hard, like jumping out of the water. Yeah. It was fast and hard. Exactly. It wasn't slow and methodical. It was like fully committed. And if that's how they were attacking people, we would have a lot more fatalities. Cankels. What do you mean? Well, you're saying you wouldn't want to bite an ankle because it's too bony, but cankels, maybe they would? Yeah, cankels they might be a little bit more into. They might bite off your legs with that bite then. But every once in a while you see an attack where it does seem like fully predatory. I brought him up already, but Simon Nellist, who died a few years ago in Australia, there's a video of his as well and it's explosive. It's not like a slow kind of bite and then the shark comes back in. There's a lot of splashing and it just seems like a shark that decided it was going to eat someone. We talked about a woman in Australia, I think in the 80s, that was like bitten in half by a Great White. And that's a shark that's probably predatory. So, I don't think this shark... It was like two... Those two people, obviously I still think they should have done it, but those two people trying to help her into the raft provided resistance against the shark and what it was doing and made it have to bite harder into her to keep a hold of her and keep investigating. Yeah, you might be right and I had that same thought. And I also agree with you that they still did the right thing because it might have already decided at that point that it was going to try and eat her and had they not pulled her out of the water, it might have killed her. Maybe it investigates her head next. Yeah, exactly. You never know. But I do think that was the motivation of the shark. I think initially it was investigating and I think by the time it took her leg, it was probably in full predator mode. And the other reason I think that is because after it left her, it still went to check out more swimmers. So I think it was really considering feeding at that point. 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Maybe got seasick a little bit though. Yeah, got a little rumbly tumbly. Could have been seasick. Yeah. When someone, actually someone asked her if she'd ever go out to sea again and she brought up like 30 foot swells is one of the reasons she wouldn't. So. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to give it an eight. Eight out of ten. I think there's a little bit more room for more pain, but I think it's pretty bad. Yeah. And she actually didn't feel any pain in the bite. Like once they pulled her onto the boat and everything, she wasn't feeling any pain. It was only once she was in the med bay that it really started to kick in. And then they had, they had morphine for her. The crazy thing with, I've said before, but with like losing a limb is like the phantom pain where like you're missing your entire foot and it will still like tickle at night or whatever. Yeah. I've heard breaking your femur is the worst kind of break you can experience. I wonder how this, it's somewhat comparable. I guess it is just in a technical aspect, like it is a broken femur. She did break it. Yeah. And like all the way down. It's a bad way to break it. Yeah. Yeah. So I might go with a nine with like all the post attack recovery stuff and then that 20 hour ride. It just seems like about as bad as things can get as far as recovery. Well, not as bad as things can get possibly, but pretty close to as bad as things could get. I'll go with a nine. Yeah. I think I'm going with a nine as well. I think the torsion machine, like having to learn how to walk again, all the mental language, like being a 19 year old and losing your left leg has to just be so devastating. And I know she was talking to one of her friends saying like, I don't know if anyone's ever going to like me again. I'll never be able to dance again. All those kinds of things are running through her head. So yeah, I'm going to give it a nine. I think, I think like short. You could do the worm. Well, yeah, you probably could do the worm. That's true. It's a good point. Someone should, that's what her friend should have said immediately. All right. Okay. What's the guy's name? Phil. I'll give Phil a 10 because he got both legs bit. Both legs bit and just was like a footnote for everyone cares. Yeah. Yeah. That's pain. That's true pain. All right. I'm going to give Phil a six. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. Okay. This episode is brought to you by Storyworth. I have a pretty amazing dad and I'm sure a lot of you out there do too. And I feel like every time I talk to him about growing up or when he was young, he always has new amazing stories that make me think about him in a whole new light. But here's the thing. Most of the Father's Day gifts that we give them end up in a drawer somewhere, totally forgotten gathering dust. Storyworth doesn't. It gives your dad a year long experience and gives your family a book full of stories he'd probably never think to tell on his own. 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But Jurassic Park came out in 93, so we're not counting that in this discussion. Yeah, no. I have a few to shout out, but my favorite, I would have to just go with Shawshank Redemption. Great movie. Like, it's a top five movie all time for me. Just like the idea of someone who's in prison for life, but then spoilers, but then he's actually not guilty, and then he's able to still find a way out of it is just so cool to me. Yeah, great. He gets to have a good time in prison first too, you know? He makes his best friend every day. Yeah, exactly. And there's Romance. There's also a little bit of Romance. That's a good pick. I don't know. This is such a long list of incro. I mean, Chunking Express is probably my favorite, the Wong Kar-Wai. Three colors by Kizlowski, the blue, white, and red. Liberté, Galité, Fraternité. Check it out. It's good. The Crow. How about the Crow? My pick, I actually zagged a little on this and decided to go with my favorite movie when I was like, what, 10, 10 and 11 that came out in 1994, and it was Dumb and Dumber by like a long, a long shot. No, it's a great pick. Yeah, I don't think I ever laughed harder than when I saw that movie in theaters with my friend Adam Swartley. Probably a top five comedy for me. I love it. It's so funny. Yeah. I think that's one of my real pick. Jim Carrey came out with Dumb and Dumber and the Mask in 94. Yeah, there's a big ace fanciara too, right? If not, it was just like very slightly before. Yeah, I think it's peak. There's all three movies and you got paid like a billion dollars. Peak, Fairly Brothers. I think if I had to pick like Desert Island type thing and I can pick all the movies for one year, I think 94 is in the running for what I would pick. There's like three in my top 20, which is Shawshank, Speed, and then Lion King. I love Pulp Fiction. There's Legends of the Fall. Great movie. And then there's like some lesser movies that I really love too, just like not as big, but I love the movie Above the Rim. I think it might have my favorite soundtrack of any movie. And then like Tupac's just so good in it and the plot is so ridiculous, but it's fun, you know? And then Drunken Master Two's, one of Jackie Chan's best like older movies. It's great for movies. Yeah. I feel like there's like a five year stretch from like 93 to 98, maybe even 99, where like a lot of my all time favorites are from that stretch. Yeah, for sure. All right. Next category. Just crazy people were just like going to the movie and seeing Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction and like ignoring Shawshank Redemption. Yeah, I know. Okay, bringing back an old category because of another movie that came out in 1994. The movie Speed came out in 1994. So let's pretend that this animal is the bus from Speed. Are we surviving? Man. How did we ever get rid of this one? This animal is the bus from Speed. We don't die. It can't get to 60. Because the bomb never triggers at 55. Yeah. Or it can't get to 55 miles an hour. Great White Sharks top out at about 35 miles per hour underwater. And that's when they're launching like a sneak attack. So we do not blow up if this animal is the bus from Speed and we're aborted. Yeah. That's really interesting. So Michael Phelps could out swim a great white. No. He swims at what? Like eight? 18 miles per hour or something. Yeah, not even that. Not even. Yeah, you're right. It's like fiber-serial. I think. Yeah. All right. There is a species of shark that we would blow up with. Do you guys know what species that is? If we're the bus from Speed? I guess a Thresher. Mako? It's a Mako. Shortfin Mako. Yeah. I'm curious and I asked Jesse this question too. What reward would you have to get to wake up with no left leg tomorrow? And we'll say that you have a stump, but you have no left leg. What would you have to get? Dude, I'm going to be so freaking sweet tonight. Just get, you get a right leg prosthetic on your left leg. So then you have two right feet and you're like the most coordinated person in the world. Think about that. You could be a professional soccer player. I'd give up every so like my left arm. I'd give that one. My left eye is a little worse. So you would like trade something to be missing your left leg. Right. Yeah. I'd pay money. You'd have a good excuse for the rest of your life. Like if you didn't want to do something. Having good excuses to get out of stuff. There's like, no, that's a top 10 sensation in the world. Right? I told you gosh. Saka one's interesting. Like if you just had a huge fake prosthetic leg and you could like put the entire ball in your leg and then just like shoot it like a cannon at the go. Yeah. Like Planet Terror where she has machine gun as a leg. That'd be good. That's true. But yeah, that's why I'd want like a billion dollars so that I could do all that stuff too. Yeah. I think my honest number is like $20 million. I think if someone came to me tomorrow and said I'll give you $20 million but you're not going to have a left leg. I would think that. Where do they cut it off? Like mid thigh. Mid thigh. And you don't have any pain. Yeah. To me it's like all about value. There's not too much like material things I would do for it. Maybe this is an incident question. Because like a huge house it's like you still got to pay the bills for it. Yeah. Yeah. I would do it if I got first class flights for free everywhere I go for the rest of my life. Okay. How about that? Okay. First class or business class? Just the nicest. Like the nicest seat on the plane. Yeah. That's the one. The pilot seat. Somehow I misread what you gave us though. And I just read would you trade for waking up for like a left leg tomorrow? So I was thinking like what would I give up that I have to be able to keep both my legs? Oh. That's a better. So I answered it that I would give Shanks other front leg up too. So he has no front legs. He's just got to just scoot with his back legs. It's like. I could get a little chair for him. The most I would give up. Yeah. I think I'd give up just about everything I own to not lose my left leg. Yeah. I don't know. Okay. I'm not too attached to it. Except for in a literal sense. Would you give up the podcast? Oh yeah. Are you kidding me? Probably yeah. In a hard way. I don't think I would. I would. That's like the one thing I would. Mike would do that to like not get hit in the left leg hard. I got a couple just quick. It came from Quora's. One question I found. Mostly just these are questions. Not so much responses. If a shark had human teeth, could it bite someone's leg off just as easily? What happens to a human leg when it is bitten off by a shark? Why are great white sharks considered dangerous? And there's an answer to that one. And this guy says, I watched a great white bite a guy in half when I was just a little kid. Jump ahead 23 or so years when I was in the Navy and watched through the ship's big eyes binoculars as a great white took off a surfer's leg, killing him. Don't believe me? Go to YouTube in quotation marks where there are at least three videos documenting a particularly nasty attack on a young woman enjoying a swim party at sea. Heather Boswell. The short answer is they are considered dangerous in quotations because they are dangerous. Funny how that works out. This guy's seen two people get killed by sharks. Wow. Yeah. I believe him 100%. Okay. New category came up. If you don't look at that YouTube link. Yeah. It wasn't a link, but there's only at least three videos of this. He just said YouTube. He said YouTube in quotation marks. Go to YouTube. All right. New category that came up with, I want you to rate the top song that came out on the date that this incident took place. And the top song on March 23rd, 1994 was Ace of Bass, The Sign. Oh, that's a 10 out of 10. That was almost on my 16 favorite songs list. Yeah, me too. I think it is on mine. Yeah. It should be. That's a 10 out of 10. Do you know the song? I saw the sign and opened up my eyes. I saw the sign. You know that song. Yeah. That's a tell you give me. I'm like, I'll give it a five. Five out of 10. Bad. Perfect song. It's incredible. It was also the first song in my life that I felt like I found it before my friends did. And so I was like very proud of it. Mike, you just won the argument though about five being completely neutral because West just said bad when I said five. Yeah, because it's not a neutral song. It's a bad choice is what I'm saying. I'm not saying that's a bad rate. Well, it is a bad rating for this because this should be a positively held song. You're saying I rated it as a bad song and I was just rating it neutral. No, I'm saying that neutral is a bad rating for this particular song. Right. Because it's incredible. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for your. Yeah. Thanks for that though, Jeff. Yeah. Appreciate that. Because West is ultimately still wrong in that argument. I'm not wrong in that argument. Five is neutral. Five is zero. That's the baseline. But it depends on how you're talking about it. Okay. Another new category I came up with for this one. How hot is this animal? How hot do you guys think great white sharks are? Very. I think they're physically fit. They are very confident and skilled at what they do, which is an attractive trait, I would say. Yeah. Great set of teeth. Beautiful teeth. Beautiful teeth. Good teeth. Yeah. Okay. I like a little streak of danger in a girl. Yeah. One that could beat me up in a fight. I've said that before. I kind of like that. I also agree. I think this one of the hotter animals out there. Sleek, beautiful, confident, perfect little color pattern. One of the animals that when I saw in real life, I was like most taken aback by how beautiful it was. It's a hot animal. Me too. I don't think they're one of the hottest animals. I put that they're similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Doth Lagerin, and that guy from the Green Mile, the big Doth Lagerin? What's the guy? Oh, Doth Lundgren? Doth Lundgren. Okay. He sounded like a Sith Lord. The big huge guy from Dodgeball and Green Mile and stuff. Michael Clark Duncan? I just like someone so big and strong looking that you have to stare at them and it's like they're not bad to look at, but I also don't think they're like cover people's hottest man alive type of thing. Okay. I feel like they're so sleek and sexy though too. I think a tiger shark's hotter than a great white. Really? Interesting. Yeah, I think a great white's hotter for sure. I think they're the hottest shark personally. Wow. I think you might be right. Yeah. A short finn mako's up there, but their teeth kind of, they lose some points with those teeth that jut out. Blue sharks are pretty hot. I just don't think, I think you have to have some handsome in you too. I don't think that they have any handsome in them. I think they're just like physically overpowering. Okay. Okay. Huh. It's not what I expected, but you know, that's why I'm not saying they're ugly. Do you think Arnold Schwarzenegger's ugly? That's what you're saying. No, but I don't. Sounds like. I think that he is like a rough looking person and I don't think sharks look like rough and tumble. I think they look like sleek and beautiful. I think a great white looks rough. No. Not really. No. I think it looks like. You can see how crazy and shit. Really sleek. I think it looks like fluid. When I think of a rough animal, I'm thinking of like a warthog. Yeah. That was like rough. If I touch it, that's a rough sensation. Bottom-ton sensation. Maybe they're like one of those people where they're like really hot, but then have just like a really ugly smile. Yeah. You know, like when they open their mouths, they look like way scary and like, you know. Like Arnold for me is like a rhinoceros or like a cake buffalo. That's Arnold Schwarzenegger. For me, this is too handsome for that. This is maybe if I had to do like a big buff guy, it'd be like that Alan, what's his face? Or Henry Cavill. Which one? Yeah. Yeah, Reacher. Like they're both very handsome. That's a great white. But they're also like big and strong. Jason Memorial. I'm getting worked up talking about how hot these animals are. I want to hear a spring gripe from you guys. Something that you just, I think spring is generally considered one of the better seasons. What's something you don't like about spring? I'll go first. Those come trees. I know we talk about them sometimes. I hate the smell of, I think they're called Bradford pears. I like hate that smell. I think it smells disgusting. It's bad. Come trees are something I don't like about spring. It's not calorie. It's the one that Max named his Instagram and his band. They're Bradford pears, but I'm not sure. Calorie. Yeah. Calorie pears. Oh yeah. It's known as the Bradford pair. Okay. Yeah. We're both right. Look at that. That's fine. For me, it's like once it starts getting hot, I really get the itch to go fly fishing. And then it happens to be when like all the rivers are flooded. So the fishing is like at its worst and it's like frustrating to me that I can't fly fish well yet. That is annoying. For me, baseball season starts and there's always that glimmer of optimism that your favorite team is going to do well. Padres on nine straight. They're doing great, but it's a retroactive bad thing about spring because by the end of the year, the Dodgers will win and it'll just be like sweet. There was like a two minute window there where some hope. Pirates are doing good too. Good for them. Shout out pirates. Got to go to that ballpark. It's on my list. Rather than do listener questions, we're going to do some nice advice with suffice. Jeff asked our listeners to give us some advice or no, for us to give them some advice. So Jeff, what do you got for us? Okay. From Beth E SKX going to have my third daughter next week. We have no idea what to call her. So open to suggestions. Penelope. Ooh. Uh, June bug. First name June, middle name bug. I like, yeah, I like June bug. What's your name, Jeff? Let's go with the first guy I dated, Miyunghee. Miyunghee. Loved him again. Good name. Yeah. Hopefully she's Korean, but you know, we should be able to name whoever Korean names. Should we? Okay. I don't know. I don't know. It would be very confusing. I'm not ready to co-sign on that one. Yeah, that might be appropriation, huh? Yeah. I don't know. I just don't know. Brianna Cooney says, how to get over an ex who initiated the breakup but also won't leave you alone now. Restraining order. Block him. Gotta beat him to it. I think people might be more, like more willing to use the block button on social medias. Just block them. I think the problem is a lot of times when you were broken up with, you still want to be with the person. So like when they message you, it's really hard not to respond. My method was to just torch it all down. Go crazy. It worked for me. Like really just lose the thread and yeah. Like it's like, all right, I'm going to make it so you don't want to talk to me anymore. That is a good method. You were pretty good at that for a while. Especially just one time. Yeah. I'm going to get out. All right. So I had to ask for more detail here and I'm going to actually leave the name out. But it starts out, I found out my mom almost or did bone my 18 year old crush when I was 16. So let me start from the beginning. So when I was 16, I had a crush on a boy who was 18 or 19. Let's call him Ty. And I know he liked me too because he would text me every day, compliment me, etc. Our parents were friends so we would always hang out and be at his house. But for whatever reason, he wouldn't settle down with me. In like 2021, Ty's old friend ended up working with my husband. At the time, let's call him Dan. Dan told my husband, Ty had sex with blanks mom. But you can't tell anyone. Imagine not telling anyone that. I'm going to change her name to Daisy. I'm Daisy. But to keep it private, you can refer to me as Marie. All right. So the friend said, Ty had sex with Marie's mom but you can't tell anyone. To her husband. Right. So then of course her husband told her. But I reiterated that I couldn't tell anyone. I being completely freaked out called my mom and confronted her. She denied it of course. So I brushed it off as Dan was being weird and lying. Years later, literally yesterday, I messaged another old mutual friend of ours and asked about it because he and her were best friends at the time. And I knew he'd be reliable source because I trust him even all these years later. And he said this, I actually do remember he is talking to her a lot. And at one point he said he is going to meet up with her, but they didn't go through with meeting up at that time. So Mike, what's your advice there? I don't understand. What is she trying to accomplish? Like getting her mom to apologize? I don't really understand. Like what the dealing with that. Like I see what the problem is. But how do you deal with that? What would you do? How do you deal with it? I actually would just be like, you know what mom props and move on. Well, we all know what you did with your mom. Yeah, just kill her. No, that's pretty messed up. To have your mom like hook up with your crush. But also it's not like it was her boyfriend. You can't call it Ibs. It's kind of crazy too, because if he had gotten with her, that would be illegal. But him getting with her mom is legal. Yeah, that's true. That is. Maybe her mom was just saving her from an illegal situation. I think it's the same advice Wes just gave. Just use that block button. On who mom? Yeah, probably. It's like you've moved on already. Your mom gave you this crazy story. He doesn't seem like he would have been that great of a choice considering what happened. Flirting with someone's daughter and mom at the same time is not the best behavior. Yeah, she got the point. So maybe it is just like, you know what, props to those guys for doing something crazy in their life. Yeah, it's funny that she wasn't supposed to tell anyone and now we're telling hundreds of thousands of people. Who is the basketball guy that slept with LeBron James mom? Barnes? Yeah, Devonte West. Oh, Devonte West. That's right. He's homeless. That's cool. Yeah, he's going through it. That's not cool, but it's cool that he slept with LeBron's mom. All right, so we're going to move on now to our final quick category, which is conservation corner for great white sharks. One of our favorite animals. They are listed as IUCN vulnerable. They're not quite as at risk as some of the other species of shark, but we really don't have a good idea how many are left in the world. Scientists think there could be anywhere between 6,000 to 20,000 great white sharks in the world. And their biggest threats are bycatch in fishing nets. So like they happen to get tangled up in a fishing net. Some of the nets that keep sharks off of beaches and places like Australia, they get tangled up in those two. That's the way that they die. And then probably their biggest threat is just loss of food sources through overfishing and poor management of different marine places. So like places where seals are dying off or fish that they eat are dying off will then end up having an effect on great white sharks. So as the ocean changes, we would expect to lose more of the shark. But most of the places where they used to be fished or hunted or whatever else, there are now moratoriums where you can't kill great white sharks. In the US, they are a legally protected species. You're not allowed to fish for them on purpose or kill them or anything. You're only really allowed to kill them if they kill a person? Yeah. I think if one was killing a person and you had a gun and you shot it, you'd be okay. But you're not allowed to like target them fishing. Or I mean like if one kills a person, people can go out and try to kill it. I don't think so. Not me. Oh, is? Yeah. Because you're probably not going to get the right shark. It's very unlikely that you'd get it unless you can kill it right then and there and save the person. I kind of don't think they got the right shark in the movie Jaws. Yeah, they must not have because he comes back. They just got a big one. Yeah. Sure. All right. The Duke killed Queen. But I mean at that point they were messing with it. Could have been a different shark. Self-defense. Yeah. All right. Well, that's it for the story. This is one that I've wanted to tell for a long time. I'm glad we got to tell it. Heather, if you're out there, I hope you're living a wonderful life and fill you too. I hope you guys are both doing well and able to get past the trauma of this incident. And don't forget, guys, be really careful about your seafood choices because a lot of sharks die to go into the seafood industry. So you really have to be careful about it. Look for sustainable seafood that's harvested ethically or else you are really contributing to shark depopulation. Yeah. All right. And Jeff's random animal fact is great whites can swim 35 miles an hour. Perfect. Where'd you hear that? I'm going to reach your main to the episode. See you guys. I had it prepped. You just happened to say that. Mike just did a fun episode on Moths too on our Patreon channel if you want to check that out. Like that doesn't sound exciting when you say it. But like. I thought it was such a fun episode. It was great. Yeah. Vampire Moths. Have you guys ever heard of that? You better subscribe if you haven't. Mothman. Did you know Mothman's all caked up? God, I better listen to our episode. Shapely Rump. That's a fact. Oh, I'd straddle Mothman. All right. How many monarchs could beat one Atlas Moth? I mean, we get really do the hard hitting science on that one. Jeff did. Yeah. Love you. Love you. Love you.