Here Be Monsters

When a group of broke college students start throwing lavish feasts, HBM host Jeff Emtman begins to wonder at the source of the food, initially assuming it was stolen.  But he’s soon corrected.  Confronted with the shocking amount of food waste in the local dumpsters, he quickly turns into a freegan dumpster diving evangelist , but is often thwarted by an angry employee of a local produc...

Season 9 will be here soon!  We’ll bring you ten new episodes about fear, beauty and the unknown.   We’ll see the fight for survival and beauty of the microscopic world.  We’ll learn how balloons can be used to capture the souls of doomed buildings.  We’ll listen for alien transmissions on a reserved shortwave frequency.  We’ll luxuriate in the scent discarded cocoa b...

For the last five years, Here Be Monsters has been a part of KCRW .  And in those years, we’ve put out a 100+ episodes under KCRW’s imprint.   However, moving forward, HBM will no longer be associated with the station, instead continuing as an independent production.  This departure leaves HBM entirely unfunded.  So for our upcoming ninth season, we’re seeking community sp...

There used to be a neighborhood in Tulsa where Black people were wealthy. They owned businesses, built a giant church, a public library. Some Black Tulsans even owned airplanes. Booker T Washington called it “Black Wall Street. ” Others called it “Little Africa” and today, most call it “Greenwood.”  In the early 1900s, the neighborhood was prosperous and thriving, but Black Tulsans were still...

Hedonism seems pretty appealing right now—seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. On HBM137: Superhappiness , the hedonist philosopher, David Pearce imagined a future free of the systemic harms we currently experience: poverty, oppression, violence, and disease.  But David thinks that even an idyllic, egalitarian society wouldn’t ensure universal happiness. He thinks that the only way to make eve...

There’s a large cave in the foothills of Iraqi Kurdistan. It looks out over green and yellow fields and a river far below. Starting in the 1950’s, the American archaeologist Dr. Ralph Solecki led a team who excavated a trench in Shanidar Cave , discovering the remains of ten Neanderthals who died about 50,000 years ago.  Dr. Solecki’s discoveries helped ‘humanize’ Neanderthals, a species of e...

David Pearce thinks it's possible to end suffering. He’s a philosopher* who studies “ hedonic zero ”, the state of being which is completely neutral--neither good nor bad. He believes that, despite our momentary joys and sadnesses, most of us have a set point we tend to return to. And that “ hedonic set point ” falls somewhere on the spectrum of positive to negative.  For David, his set point...

In 2012, Jacob Lemanski started writing his autobiography a few words at a time when he signed his name on the digital card readers at the grocery store. He read somewhere that the credit card companies keep the signatures on file for seven years. He thought he might report his card stolen in 2019 so that some grunt at Mastercard would find the story of his life...or…more likely he thought it was...

We live in a culture of “death denial”. That’s what Amanda Provenzano thinks. She sees it when medical professionals use euphemisms like ‘passing away’ instead of ‘dying’. She sees it when funeral parlors use makeup to make it look like a person is not dead but sleeping. Most often she sees it when her clients’ loved ones insist their dying family member is going to pull through, despite all evide...

Searching for something to do during government-mandated social distancing, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman recently digitized his cassette collection, and re-edited them into blackout poems and proverbs.  While in the process of doing this, Jeff re-discovered a mixtape he made in 1999, the product of endless hours of waiting by the boombox in the basement with a hand hovering over the 🔴 b...

Bodies are odd.  Anyone who can see their own nose will tell you the same.  So will anyone whose diet changed their body odor.  And so will anyone who’s ever felt their phone vibrate in their pocket only to later realize it was a phantom ring .  Our bodies make stuff up constantly and do plenty of questionable things without asking our permission first.  It can feel disori...

Natalia Montes was a teenager living in Florida when Travyon Martin was killed .  She says his picture reminded her of her classmates, “It could have happened to any one of us.” The Trayvon Martin shooting, as well as subsequent high profile police shootings and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked an interest in Natalia for trying to understand one of the most difficult...

Bethany Denton has a long history of carsickness. Ever since she was a little girl, long car rides made her nauseous and gave her stomachaches. Once, when she was four years old, her carsickness was so bad that she made her dad take a detour to look for a cure at the grocery store. At the time, they were driving through Central Idaho, visiting all her dad’s favorite places from childhood.  Th...

Mother Pigeon says the wild animals of New York City are hungry.  So she feeds them. Each morning, a flock of about 150 pigeons waits for her at her local park in Bushwick.  She feeds them twice a day if she can afford it, and once a day if she can’t.  Peas, lentils, millet and other grains, and corn in the winter to keep them warm.  “When you go out to feed birds, you’re treat...

Lars Christian Kofoed Rømer claims his red hat is mere coincidence. He wears it because his mother-in-law knit it for him 15 years ago and he quite likes it. However, it also makes him visually match the mythical underground people he spent three years studying on the Danish island of Bornholm.  Bornholm folklore sometimes references “ De Underjordiske ”, a kind of people that live under the...

Colby Richardson ’s mom got leukemia when he was young. He has trouble remembering her. Soon after her death, Colby and his siblings wound up at a house in Hope, BC where he met Santo, a childhood friend of his mom’s. Colby remembers that Santo’s voice to be soft and extremely calm.  Santo told Colby that he had a beautiful, green aura, a glow that surrounded his body. Back when his mother wa...

Most of us want to help.  But it can be hard to know how to do it, and not all altruistic deeds are equal, and sometimes they can be harmful.  Sometimes glitzy charities satisfy the heart of a giver, but fail to deliver results . That’s the paradox: motivating people to give often demands glitz, but glitzy causes often don’t provide the improvement to people’s lives than their less glamo...

How familiar are you with the shape of the continents?  What about the shape of the seafloor?  If you’re unfamiliar with the contours of our planet’s underwater mountain ranges and plateaus and valleys, then you’re not alone.  No one really knows what’s down there; at least, not in any great detail.  That’s because, well, the water is in the way, and that makes it hard for our...

There’s a beautifully written speech that was never delivered. Written for President Richard Nixon by Bill Safire, the speech elegizes astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong of Apollo 11, who’d become stuck on the moon, and were left to die there.  In reality, Buzz and Neil made it home safely, but this contingency speech was written anyways, just in case.  Sometimes it’s called The S...

“Gene” says it started because he wanted to be a veterinarian. So he took a job as a research associate at a vivarium that studied cancer drugs. He was often alone in the lab at night with hundreds or thousands of research animals around him.  The monkeys were his favorite, especially the rhesus macaques . He loved to give them treats, play movies and Celine Dion for them. And sometimes he’d...

Some time in the 90’s, Kathy Emtman received a gift from her husband, Rick. It was a pair of bent metal rods, each shaped into long ‘L’. Nothing special, not imparted with any kind of magic, just metal rods. Colloquially, these rods are called “witching rods” or “dowsing rods”.  HBM producer Jeff Emtman (child of Rick and Kathy) remembers a scene that took place the night of that gifting: eac...

Mike Paros lives in two worlds. In one world, he’s an animal welfare specialist and mixed animal vet , meaning he works with both “companion” animals like cats and dogs, and large animals like horses, cows, goats, and sheep. He spends much of his time as a veterinarian working with animals that eventually become meat, and most of his human clients are farmers that lean right politically. In the ot...

Angels saved Here Be Monsters ’ host Jeff Emtman once.  They picked him up and took care of him after a bad bike crash.  It was just one of many times that Jeff felt watched over by God. Jeff used to think he might be a pastor someday.  And so, as a teenager, he made an active effort to orient his thoughts and deeds towards what God wanted.  In this episode, Jeff tells four sho...

In the fall of 1989, in Vancouver, Washington, a short, 29 year-old man named Westley Allan Dodd raped and murdered three young boys. The boys were brothers Cole and William Neer, ages 10 and 11, and four year old Lee Iseli. Content Note: Sexual violence, suicide and capital punishment A few weeks later, police arrested Westley at movie theater after he tried and failed to abduct another boy. He q...

The end of our seventh season draws near! Just one more episode until we hang up our podcasting hats for a few months. We don’t want you to miss us too much though, so on this episode, we’re tying up some loose ends, answering some questions, and sharing ways that you can stay connected with us even when our podcast feed is quieter. Content Note: Sexual references and bodily injury Five ways to he...