Latest / The Infographics Show Podcast / Creatures people thought were myths until they appeared

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Creatures people thought were myths until they appeared · The Infographics Show Podcast

• 0:12
  Speaker 1: Picture the scene. It is the sixteenth century. You are
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: standing in the grand, dimly lit halls of an English palace,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: and you're looking at Queen Elizabeth. First, she is at
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: the absolute height of her power. She commands fleets, she
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: commands armies, but.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: She's also utterly paralyzed by paranoia.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: Exactly. Assassins are quite literally.
• 0:34
  Speaker 2: Everywhere, because back then, you know, poison was the ultimate
• 0:37
  Speaker 2: political weapon. It was silent, it was deniable, perfect tool, yeah,
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: the preferred tool for shifting the entire balance of power
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: in Europe.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: She lives in this, in this constant, suffocating fear. Every
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: servant is a threat, every single wine goblet is compromised.
• 0:52
  Speaker 2: It's terrifying.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: So to combat this terror, she drinks exclusively from a
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: highly prized, completely magical cup.
• 0:58
  Speaker 2: She genuinely believes it's hard from the horn of a unicorn.
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: Right, She trusts it with her very life. Yes, she
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: thinks it will violently explode if even a single drop
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: of poison touches its surface.
• 1:08
  Speaker 2: It is a beautiful, desperate superstition.
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: But here's the massive secret, the reality behind the magic.
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: It is not a unicorn.
• 1:16
  Speaker 2: Horn, not even close.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: It's the tusk of a nar wall, a real breathing,
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: warm blooded marine mammal swimming in the icy, crushing waters.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Of the Arctic, an animal that has been completely mistaken
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: for a myth.
• 1:30
  Speaker 1: It's wild. Welcome to Beyond Infographics. I am absolutely thrilled
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: you're here with us today.
• 1:35
  Speaker 2: We have an incredible journey ahead of us.
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: Today we are exploring that razor thin line, that shifting
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: border between myth and reality.
• 1:44
  Speaker 2: We are going to investigate legendary.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: Cryptids, creatures of folklore that suddenly, shockingly turned out to
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: be entirely real flesh and bone.
• 1:53
  Speaker 2: We'll descend into the crushing, lightless depths of the ocean
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: to track down a literal dinosaur fish.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: Will confront what vocals called demon lemurs and the dark
• 2:02
  Speaker 1: forests of Madagascar.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: And then we're going to explore an intense modern debate,
• 2:06
  Speaker 2: the clash between ancil indigenous traditions and the rigorous methods
• 2:10
  Speaker 2: of Western science.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: It's a spectacular lineup. We're going to challenge everything you
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: think you know about the natural world.
• 2:16
  Speaker 2: But before we take that leap.
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: Yes, I need you to do something for us. Pause
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: right now. Rate the show five stars on whatever app
• 2:22
  Speaker 1: you're using.
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: It takes exactly two seconds, but it truly.
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: Helps the show uncover more incredible mysteries just like this one.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: It helps the algorithm share these amazing stories.
• 2:33
  Speaker 2: Okay, let's unpack this. We need to define our terms
• 2:36
  Speaker 2: right out of the gate.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: What exactly is a cryptid?
• 2:39
  Speaker 2: Well, when I was looking into the origins of the word,
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: I found it comes from the Greek root cryptos, meaning hidden,
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: exactly a secret. A cryptid is an animal living entirely
• 2:50
  Speaker 2: in the shadows. It exists in local folklore, it exists
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: in whispered, unverified eyewitness accounts, but.
• 2:58
  Speaker 1: It remains entirely unrecognized and unconfirmed by formal institutional.
• 3:03
  Speaker 2: Science until it isn't right.
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: What happens when the hidden actually steps into the light.
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: When a myth leaves a physical footprint.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: In the mud, it shatters our neat little categories.
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: I had this realization when I was prepping for this exploration.
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: I stumbled onto some of the early original sketches of
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: the platypus.
• 3:19
  Speaker 2: The Ornithorynchus anatinus.
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and honestly, it looks utterly absurd, I mean truly ridiculous.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: If you didn't know it is real, you would laugh.
• 3:27
  Speaker 2: It really does look like a joke.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it has a dux bill, a beaver's tail, it
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: has venomous spurs on its hind legs, and to top
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: it all off, this furry mammal lays eggs.
• 3:37
  Speaker 2: It breaks every conceivable rule of biology, and it broke.
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: The minds of nineteenth century European naturalists.
• 3:44
  Speaker 2: What blew my mind when researching their immediate reaction was
• 3:47
  Speaker 2: the absolute impenetrable wall of denial.
• 3:50
  Speaker 1: They didn't believe it at all.
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: They didn't just doubt it, they actively tried to debunk it.
• 3:54
  Speaker 2: They literally took magnifying glasses and scissors to the first
• 3:58
  Speaker 2: pelts shipped back from Austria.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: Wait, they searched the fur for stitches.
• 4:03
  Speaker 2: Yes, they thought it was an elaborate hoax. At the time,
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: there was a really lucrative market for fake monsters.
• 4:10
  Speaker 1: Like sideshow gaffes.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: Exactly, they believed pranksters or skilled taxidermists in Asia had
• 4:15
  Speaker 2: taken a duck's beak and stitched it onto a rat's
• 4:18
  Speaker 2: body just to make a quick profit off gullible European collectors.
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: That is amazing. They refused to believe their own eyes.
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: But from their perspective, was there a scientific reason they
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: rejected the platypus so fiercely.
• 4:29
  Speaker 2: It wasn't just pure snobbery. It was about preserving order.
• 4:33
  Speaker 2: Western science had just established these incredibly neat, rigid taxonomic boxes.
• 4:39
  Speaker 1: The Linnaean system.
• 4:41
  Speaker 2: Right, mammals give birth to live young, birds have beaks
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: and lay eggs. The rules were set. Nature was supposed to.
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: Be orderly, and the platypus completely refused to fit into
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: any of those boxes.
• 4:52
  Speaker 2: It was a biological anarchist. So the initial scientific consensus
• 4:56
  Speaker 2: was the easiest one available. It must be a fake.
• 4:58
  Speaker 1: The arrogance of that assumption is astounding. But what's wild
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: is that they did it again and again.
• 5:04
  Speaker 2: They absolutely did.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the gorilla. For the longest time, the
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: halls of Western science completely dismissed the gorilla.
• 5:11
  Speaker 2: They called it a mythical beast of the jungle.
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: A wild man of the woods. They heard these incredible
• 5:16
  Speaker 1: stories from returning explorers about giant, muscular hairy men living
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: in the deep canopy of Africa.
• 5:23
  Speaker 2: And local indigenous populations knew exactly what the animal was.
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: Because they lived alongside it. But the scientific establishment sat
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: in their comfortable leather chairs in Europe and scoffed. They
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: dismissed it as a fanciful local fable.
• 5:36
  Speaker 2: Until they finally secured a physical specimen in the mid
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: nineteenth century. Suddenly the myth was breathing.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The wild Man of the Woods was placed right on
• 5:45
  Speaker 1: their examining tables. Nature just keeps throwing these curveballs. It
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: loves to defy our expectations.
• 5:51
  Speaker 2: Like the King of Saxon Nerd of Paradise.
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: Oh, this bird is astonishing. When I first saw a
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: video of it, I thought it was cgi.
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: I had the exact same reaction when I dug into
• 5:59
  Speaker 2: the d tales of this creature. I found its native
• 6:02
  Speaker 2: to the deep mountain forests of New Guinea.
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: And it possesses bizarre, almost impossible features.
• 6:08
  Speaker 2: It has these extravagant, massive plumes trailing from its head,
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: but they don't look like feathers. They look like scalloped
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: plastic wire.
• 6:16
  Speaker 1: They have this enameled synthetic sheen. They honestly do not
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: look organic.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: And the mating call it doesn't sound anything like a bird.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: If you close your eyes, it sounds like pure radiostatic,
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: like a mechanical screeching rattle or a broken chainsaw.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: Sir David Attenborough himself noted that there is nothing remotely
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: like it in the entire Avian world.
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: It sounds alien, it looks alien, but it is a living,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: breathing reality.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: Then we have the ultimate hidden creature, the Congo Anomaly.
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: The Okapi. I was captivated by the story of the explorer,
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: Sir Henry Morton Stanley.
• 6:52
  Speaker 2: Imagine the scene.
• 6:53
  Speaker 1: He's hacking his way through the dense, unforgiving, sweltering rainforest
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: of the Congo Basin, the deepest, most impenetrable jungle on Earth.
• 7:02
  Speaker 2: The heat is oppressive, diseases everywhere.
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: And as he's traveling, he starts hearing whispers. The local
• 7:09
  Speaker 1: indigenous tribes, the Pygmy people, tell him about a creature
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: hiding deep in the foliage.
• 7:14
  Speaker 2: They describe it very specifically.
• 7:16
  Speaker 1: They say it's like a donkey, but with stripes on
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: its legs, like a zebra.
• 7:20
  Speaker 2: And here we hit that profound psychological barrier again. European
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: scientists back in London heard these detail accounts.
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: They dismissed them entirely.
• 7:28
  Speaker 2: They threw the account straight into the bucket of bestiary myths.
• 7:31
  Speaker 2: They assumed it was just a local fairy tale, or
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: that these seasoned locals had somehow misidentified a normal zebra
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: wandering into the.
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: Forest, which is incredibly insulting to the people who.
• 7:40
  Speaker 2: Actually live there precisely, but the indigenous people were completely
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: factually accurate. The ocopy is real. It's a biological fact.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: It's a forest draft covered in dark velvet fir, with
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: stark white zebra stripes on its legs, perfectly evolved to
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: blend into the dappled shadows of the deep forest.
• 7:58
  Speaker 2: It makes you wonder, doesn't it? What else are we
• 8:00
  Speaker 2: casually dismissing right now?
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: What else is hiding just out of frame? Which brings
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: us to a biological phenomena that honestly gives me chills.
• 8:07
  Speaker 2: The Lazarus taxi back from the dead.
• 8:09
  Speaker 1: Literally. These are species that the global scientific community declared definitively, absolutely,
• 8:15
  Speaker 1: without a doubt.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: Extinct, gone forever, written off the ledger of.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: Life, and then, against all odds, they turned up alive.
• 8:22
  Speaker 1: The most famous, the most jaw dropping example of this
• 8:25
  Speaker 1: is the colacanths.
• 8:26
  Speaker 2: The dinosaur fish.
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: I'll want you to set this scene in your mind.
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: Think about seventy million years. That is an incomprehensible amount
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: of time.
• 8:33
  Speaker 2: Continents shifted, mountain ranges rose and fell.
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: That is how long the scientific community thought this massive
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: fish was extinct. It was known entirely exclusively from fossils.
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: Fossils dating back four hundred million years, long before the
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: first dinosaur even walked the Earth.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: It was nothing more than a relic trapped in the rock,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: a literal.
• 8:54
  Speaker 2: Stone ghost until nineteen thirty eight.
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: Nineteen thirty eight, South Africa. Imagine the smell of salt spray,
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: diesel fumes and decaying fish. A local trawler pulls its
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: heavy nets up from the depths of the Indian Ocean.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: They dumped the catch onto the wooden deck.
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: And there, thrashing among the normal fish is a ghost,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: a living, breathing cola camp.
• 9:16
  Speaker 2: The museum curator who found it in the catch, Marjorie
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: Courtney Latimer, couldn't believe her eyes.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: She said a crude sketch to an expert.
• 9:23
  Speaker 2: Who famously said he would have been less surprised if
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: he had seen a dinosaur walking down the street.
• 9:27
  Speaker 1: It was one of the greatest natural history finds of
• 9:30
  Speaker 1: the twentieth century. The West Indian Ocean species Latimeria chila may.
• 9:34
  Speaker 2: It's a massive, brooding creature.
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: It has heavy armor like blue scales. It has these
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: bizarre lobed fins that move almost like the legs of
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: a trotting horse. It is a living, breathing fossil.
• 9:45
  Speaker 2: And sadly it is critically endangered today. But the incredible
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: story of the colacanth doesn't stop in nineteen thirty eight.
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: No, it's still unfolding. Fast forward from the wooden decks
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: of nineteen thirty eight to right now October twenty ti,
• 10:00
  Speaker 1: twenty four, the Muluku Archipelago in Indonesia.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: I want to paint a vivid, terrifying picture of modern
• 10:06
  Speaker 2: deep sea exploration for you.
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: It is an incredibly hostile environment. Space travel gets all
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the glory, but the deep ocean is just as deadly.
• 10:14
  Speaker 2: We're talking one hundred and forty five meters down, that is.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: Nearly five hundred feet straight down into the black abyss.
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: At that depth, the sunlight is completely gone.
• 10:23
  Speaker 2: It is pitch black, The water is.
• 10:24
  Speaker 1: Freezing ye and the pressure, the pressure is crushing. It
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: actively wants to break you. This is the perilous domain
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: of the Unseen Expedition's team.
• 10:31
  Speaker 2: They are backed by the dive Watch specialists at Blank Pain.
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: These explorers are pushing the absolute ragged limits of human
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: endurance and physiology. Laurent Bilesta made history back in twenty
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: thirteen with his groundbreaking deep dives.
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: Now in October twenty twenty four, a diver named Alexis
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: Chaphuis is making history.
• 10:48
  Speaker 1: When I was researching the sheer logistics of this dive,
• 10:51
  Speaker 1: I had a massive realization about what these divers actually endure.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: It is insane.
• 10:55
  Speaker 2: They cannot use standard scuba gear.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: Normal air would kill them. Instead, they use complex closed
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: circuit rebreathers. They have to breathe what's called trimex breathing gases, right.
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Because physics becomes your enemy down there. If they use
• 11:08
  Speaker 2: normal air at five hundred feet, the oxygen would literally
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: become toxic and poison their nervous system and the nitrogen.
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: The nitrogen would cause severe narcotic effects like being blackout
• 11:19
  Speaker 2: drunk underwater.
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: So they swap it out. These a highly calculated, precise
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: mixture of helium, oxygen, and nitrogen just to survive the toxicity.
• 11:28
  Speaker 2: Of the pressure and the time constraint is absolutely brutal.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: They spend hours preparing, they descend into the terrifying dark
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: and they get just five to eight minutes at the bottom.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: That is it a tiny handful of minutes to do their.
• 11:40
  Speaker 2: Work, and the price they pay for those five minutes
• 11:42
  Speaker 2: hours literally hours of floating in the open ocean, suspended
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: in the freezing water column doing mandatory decompression stops.
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: If they get impatient and surface too fast, the gases
• 11:53
  Speaker 1: in their blood will expand and their blood will literally boil.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: But the payoff for that risk. In October twenty twenty
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: four was monument.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: During those precious fleeting few minutes at one hundred and
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: forty five meters, using heavy underwater camera rigs, they captured
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: the first ever footage of the Indonesian Coela camp in
• 12:11
  Speaker 1: its natural habitat.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: The Latimia menadoensis.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: A completely different species of the dinosaur fish, hiding quietly
• 12:18
  Speaker 1: in the deep rocky reefs.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: I looked at the scientific implications of this, which were
• 12:22
  Speaker 2: published in the journal Nature. They are massive.
• 12:25
  Speaker 1: This discovery confirms that suitable debrief habitats exist all across
• 12:30
  Speaker 1: eastern Indonesia.
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: It proves these ancient fish are out there hiding in
• 12:34
  Speaker 2: plain sight, and Shaphoo suggests a revolutionary next step, non
• 12:39
  Speaker 2: invasive DNA sampling.
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: What exactly does that mean for the fish. How does
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: that change the game.
• 12:45
  Speaker 2: It means the future of scientific discovery doesn't require a net.
• 12:48
  Speaker 2: It doesn't require dragging a hook across a delicate reef.
• 12:51
  Speaker 1: We can collect what is called environmental DNA and DNA
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: straight from a water sample exactly.
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: Animals leave genetic traces behind them, like floating fingerprints. We
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: can track them without ever touching them.
• 13:01
  Speaker 1: It is a stark reminder we have to protect these
• 13:04
  Speaker 1: hidden marine biodiversity hotspots from human activity. Deep reef ecosystems
• 13:09
  Speaker 1: are incredibly fragile.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: So we go from the crushing, wet, freezing dark of
• 13:14
  Speaker 2: the ocean to a totally different extreme.
• 13:16
  Speaker 1: The dry, cracking, violently harsh environment of the Choco region
• 13:20
  Speaker 1: in South America, the Grand Choca.
• 13:23
  Speaker 2: A brutal, thorny landscape. It's one of the hottest, driest
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: places on the continent.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: And here, hiding in the scrub, we find the tagua,
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: also known as the Choco and peccary catgo and Swagneri.
• 13:35
  Speaker 2: Now, for decades, science knew this animal exclusively from fossilized
• 13:39
  Speaker 2: bones found in caves.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: It was categorized as a long extinct relative of a pig,
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: a ghost of the plcessine era that died out thousands of.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: Years ago until it wasn't exactly.
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: It was found alive, breathing, running through the thorny, impenetrable
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: scrub of Paraguay.
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: Now the local indigenous hunters knew about it, of course,
• 13:56
  Speaker 2: they had a specific name for it.
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: But the global scientific community was absolutely stunned. It's a
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: literal walking fossil. But now it faces a totally new threat.
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: Not climate change from the ice Age, but modern deforestation.
• 14:08
  Speaker 1: Bulldozers clearing the scrub for agriculture. It is a frantic,
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: desperate race against time to stave his vanishing home.
• 14:16
  Speaker 2: It survived a mass extinction once. Now conservationists are trying
• 14:20
  Speaker 2: to ensure it survives us.
• 14:22
  Speaker 1: This brings us to another phantom, a creature so elusive,
• 14:26
  Speaker 1: so delicate, and so beautiful it sounds entirely made up.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: We are traveling away from the dry scrub and into
• 14:31
  Speaker 2: the dense, wet emerald forests of Laos in Vietnam.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: A mountain chain called the Anamite Range.
• 14:37
  Speaker 2: We are looking for the Soola.
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: Often referred to as the Asian unicorn. When you look
• 14:42
  Speaker 1: at rare photographs of it, it has these incredible long straight,
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: perfectly parallel horn.
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: A sweet back over its neck.
• 14:49
  Speaker 1: It has these striking, brilliant white markings on its face.
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: It genuinely looks magical, like something out of a fantasy.
• 14:55
  Speaker 2: Novel, and it is practically a ghost. Scientists have only
• 14:58
  Speaker 2: documented it in the wild a handful full of times
• 15:00
  Speaker 2: since its discovery in the nineteen nineties.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: While I was digging into the efforts to save this animal,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: I read a quote that sparked a profound realization about
• 15:08
  Speaker 1: conservation for me.
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: It was from a biologist named William Robishaw.
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: He noted that the saola has absolutely no economic value.
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: Think about that for a second.
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: It's a really powerful point. We are so conditioned to
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: value things based on utility.
• 15:23
  Speaker 1: Exactly. It doesn't hold the cure for a rare disease
• 15:26
  Speaker 1: in its blood. It can't be domesticated or farmed for meat.
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: It doesn't provide a revolutionary new genetic material for agriculture.
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: It has zero economic utility to human beings. But Robishaw
• 15:38
  Speaker 1: says it is breathtakingly beautiful, and that beauty alone, that
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: sheer existence, justifies its right to exist.
• 15:46
  Speaker 2: You don't need a corporate spreadsheet to validate saving a species.
• 15:49
  Speaker 1: You don't need a financial return on investment. The wonder
• 15:52
  Speaker 1: of the natural world is enough.
• 15:54
  Speaker 2: I completely agree with that philosophy, But the practical problem remains,
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: how do we find an animal that is virtually ghost.
• 16:00
  Speaker 1: It hides in some of the most rugged, impenetrable terrain
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: on the entire planet. Human eyes are not enough.
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: Even remote camera traps aren't enough.
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: So what do the researchers do?
• 16:10
  Speaker 2: When I was looking into how conservationists actually track these things,
• 16:13
  Speaker 2: I stumbled on the most beautifully low tech solution imaginable.
• 16:16
  Speaker 1: We use dogs, scent detectives.
• 16:18
  Speaker 2: Precisely, I dug into the incredible work of Amy Hurt
• 16:22
  Speaker 2: and Paul Bunker. They are experts who train working dogs.
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: They train them to sniff out the impossible, to find
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: the invisible.
• 16:29
  Speaker 2: They ran a major expedition in late twenty twenty two
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: deep into the wet forests of Lause, partnering with the
• 16:35
  Speaker 2: Sola Foundation.
• 16:36
  Speaker 1: And the terrain there is an absolute nightmare. Extreme sweltering heat,
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: crushing humidity that makes it hard to breathe.
• 16:44
  Speaker 2: Steep, slippery, muddy ravines, and leeches everywhere.
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: It physically breaks human beings down, but the dogs thrive
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: in it. It's this amazing poetic paradox.
• 16:55
  Speaker 2: We bring out cutting edge GPS technology, satellite mapping, advance
• 16:59
  Speaker 2: logistical and we pair.
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: All of that high tech year with the ancient, primal
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: power of a dog's wet nose, a sense of smell
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: that has been millions of years in the making.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: The dogs are sniffing for solid dung, for any tiny
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: biological trace left on a leaf.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: They are literally hunting a unicorn with a hound.
• 17:15
  Speaker 2: And the fact that scent dogs are still finding ghosts
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: in the remote jungles of Southeast Asia makes you wonder
• 17:20
  Speaker 2: about our own backyards.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: We assume North America is fully mapped, but the discoveries
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: never stop.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: Just a couple of months ago, in January twenty twenty six,
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: a quick dramatic detour.
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: Here, yes, right here, in the United States, in.
• 17:33
  Speaker 2: The Great Salt Lake of Utah, researchers discovered a completely
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: never before seen microscopic creature.
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: In a harsh hypersaline environment that we thought we thoroughly,
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: entirely understood.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: It is incredible. When I read about that Utah discovery,
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: I had this sudden thought.
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: The Earth is still actively holding secrets. We do not
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: know everything.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: We act like the map is fully drawn, colored in
• 17:56
  Speaker 2: and laminated, but there are blank spaces everywhere, even in
• 18:00
  Speaker 2: in Utah.
• 18:00
  Speaker 1: And if we connect this to the bigger picture, it
• 18:03
  Speaker 1: completely changes how we view folklore.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: When a local legend describes a monster or a strange
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: creature in the woods, we shouldn't just laugh, We should
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: listen carefully, which.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: Perfectly transitions us into the darker side of things, the
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: terrifying legends folklore in the flesh, demons and dragons.
• 18:20
  Speaker 2: Let's travel to the island of Madagascar.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: We need to talk about the ei. Do Bentonia matagscuariansis.
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: This animal has a literal horror movie aesthetic.
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: If you were a Hollywood director designing a monster for
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: a nightmare, you would just draw the eye. It's a
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: primate technically a lemur, but it looks demonic.
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: It has these massive, bulging, unblinking yellow eyes that stare
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: right through you.
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: Huge leathery, oversized ears like a bat, constantly growing rodent
• 18:48
  Speaker 1: teeth that are strong enough to chew through solid living wood.
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: It's hands, the hands are deeply unsettling.
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: It has this skeleable, incredibly thin, elongated middle finger. It
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: looks like a dead, dried up twig attached to a
• 19:02
  Speaker 1: ball and socket joint.
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: It uses this creepy finger to rapidly tap on tree
• 19:06
  Speaker 2: trunks in the dead of night.
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: It listens with those giant ears for the hollow echo
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: of a grub tunnel deep inside the wood. Then it
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: chews a hole with those teeth, inserts that bony finger
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: and hooks the wriggling larvae out.
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: Biologically, it is a masterpiece of evolution, a specialized niche,
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: but its horrifying appearance carries a deadly price.
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: When I was researching its conservation status, I discovered a
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: deeply entrenched cultural concept in Madagascar called fatie yes strict
• 19:34
  Speaker 1: unyielding cultural taboos. Many Malagassy locals firmly believe that encountering
• 19:40
  Speaker 1: an EI brings terrible bad luck.
• 19:42
  Speaker 2: It is considered an omen of severe sickness, an omen
• 19:46
  Speaker 2: of death.
• 19:47
  Speaker 1: Some villages believe that if the eye points that skeletal
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: middle finger directly at you, you are marked to die.
• 19:52
  Speaker 2: That is terrifying. If you genuinely believe that, you'd be paralyzed.
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: With fear, and consequently the reaction is violent. They're often
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: killed on site. It's not out of malice. It is
• 20:02
  Speaker 1: a desperate protective measure against what they perceive as a
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: literal demon.
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: How widespread is this fear practically speaking? Is it just
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: a few isolated cases?
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: I looked at a massive anthropological study on this exact
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: issue to understand the scale. Research has conducted two hundred
• 20:18
  Speaker 1: and nineteen deep immersive interviews across thirty six different remote
• 20:22
  Speaker 1: villages in eastern Madagascar.
• 20:24
  Speaker 2: They found that a staggering thirty eight percent of the
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: people interviewed had personally seen an ei.
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: So this isn't an abstract myth. It is a very real,
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: everyday presence in their lives.
• 20:34
  Speaker 2: So how do you actually stop the killing. You can't
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: just fly in, walk into a village and say, hey,
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: your ancient, deeply held spiritual beliefs are wrong.
• 20:42
  Speaker 1: Stop it exactly. That Western centric approach completely fails. It
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: breeds massive resentment. The study highlighted the actual workable solution.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: You cannot lecture. You must engage with deep, authentic cultural respect.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: How do you do that on the ground.
• 20:59
  Speaker 1: Through empathy and connection? Conservationists are using educational short films
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: shown in the village squares.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: They use animal portraiture that specifically highlights the eye's vulnerability,
• 21:09
  Speaker 2: showing a mother with a baby, rather than its strangeness.
• 21:12
  Speaker 1: It is all about storytelling. You have to weave a
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: new narrative where the ai is a vital, necessary part
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: of the forest's health rather than a harbinger of doom.
• 21:21
  Speaker 2: Conservation requires deep cultural respect. You literally have to change
• 21:25
  Speaker 2: the story to save the animal.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Story is everything. It shapes reality. I want to share
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: a beautiful piece of local folklore that proves this point perfectly.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: Let's travel from Madagascar to East Nusa Tangara, an island
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: chain in Indonesia.
• 21:38
  Speaker 2: The ancestral home of the Komodo dragon, the.
• 21:40
  Speaker 1: Largest living lizard on earth, a massive, heavily armored, venomous reptile.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: When I was looking into their history, I discovered the
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: story of Epa, a woman from a village called Compung Najo.
• 21:53
  Speaker 2: According to the ancient legend, Epa is pregnant, and per
• 21:56
  Speaker 2: local tradition, she undergoes a terrifying surgical operation with the
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: arup and bamboo knife to deliver her children.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: She gives birth to twins.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: But they are not identical twins, not at all.
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: One is a normal human boy, his name is Garrong.
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: The other twin is a lizard, a Komodo dragon named.
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: Aura, and Aura simply means lizard in the local language.
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: Yes, now they are raised together in the village, side
• 22:17
  Speaker 1: by side. But Aura, the lizard grows aggressive as he
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: gets bigger, he becomes a true predator.
• 22:23
  Speaker 2: He starts attacking the village livestock.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: The villagers can't handle the destruction, so Aur is exiled
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: to the deep forest. But the familial bond remains. Aura
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: still visits his human brother Garrong. They are family, they
• 22:36
  Speaker 1: share a mother.
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: What is fascinating here is how this specific myth entirely
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: dictates modern reality on the island.
• 22:42
  Speaker 1: It dictates absolutely everything. Think about the contrast to outsiders,
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: to a Western tourist watching a documentary, the Komodo dragon
• 22:51
  Speaker 1: is a deadly apex predator.
• 22:53
  Speaker 2: A monster with serrated teeth and venomous saliva that stops
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: blood from clotting. A literal walking dinosaur. You run from it.
• 23:02
  Speaker 2: But to the locals who live there, the locals, they
• 23:04
  Speaker 2: are literal siblings. They are direct descendants of Aura. They
• 23:07
  Speaker 2: share a bloodline.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: Because of this story, the dragons roam freely under the
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: stilted wooden houses in the village. The people do not
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: fear them. They respect them, they give them wide birth,
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: but they don't eradicate them.
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: There is a profound sustainable harmony there.
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: There's even a beautiful ritual to maintain it, the aru
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: jail ritual. The villagers gather and pound they could bang fruit.
• 23:29
  Speaker 2: It is a solemn, quiet ceremony to honor the ancient
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: ancestors who had to forage to feed both the human
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: child and the lizard child.
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: The myth actively protects the beast.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: Which brings us to the ultimate crossroads of our investigation today,
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: the great debate ancient wisdom versus modern science.
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: This is where it gets incredibly intense and frankly a
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: bit uncomfortable. For centuries, Western science aggressively, often arrogantly, dismissed
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: local legends.
• 23:57
  Speaker 2: They called them fairy tales, ignorance, superstitions.
• 24:00
  Speaker 1: Now, as we've just seen with the ocapi, the gorilla,
• 24:02
  Speaker 1: the komodo, the platypus, we are realizing that many of
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: these myths were just corely translated biology.
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: The locals knew the empirical truth long before the European
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: microscopes arrived exactly.
• 24:14
  Speaker 1: But how far does this actually go? Does indigenous traditional
• 24:17
  Speaker 1: knowledge equal Western science? Are they the exact same thing,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: just with different vocabularies.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: This raises an incredibly important question. It's a highly charged
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: debate right now in academic circles. I want to present
• 24:29
  Speaker 2: both sides of this argument vigorously with absolute neutrality. Let's
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: look purely at the ideas without taking a side.
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: Okay, let's start with the staunch defense of the scientific method,
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: the case for Western science supremacy.
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: I analyze the philosophical arguments of Thomas Wells. He teaches
• 24:45
  Speaker 2: philosophy in the Netherlands. His core argument is incredibly straightforward.
• 24:49
  Speaker 2: Knowledge is knowledge.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: The origin of the claim, whether it comes from a
• 24:52
  Speaker 1: tribal elder or an Oxford professor, doesn't matter.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: What matters is the strict method of verification. And he
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: argues that but the scientific method, hypothesis, testing, pure review
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: is the superior universal tool for verifying what is true.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: So he strips away the romance entirely completely.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: He fiercely critiques what he calls the Noble Savage trope.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: He argues that romanticizing indigenous ways of knowing is intellectually lazy.
• 25:19
  Speaker 1: It treats Indigenous people as mystical, magical guardians of the
• 25:22
  Speaker 1: earth rather than practical flawed humans trying to survive.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: But surely he acknowledges they have useful data, right, like
• 25:30
  Speaker 2: knowing which plants cure a headache.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Yes. Absolutely. He concedes that indigenous knowledge of local medicinal plants,
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: animal tracking patterns, or seasonal weather shifts can be highly useful.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: But he argues this practical data is almost always entangled
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: with unverified religious origin stories.
• 25:46
  Speaker 1: The practical, useful data and the mystical beliefs are mixed
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: together in one package.
• 25:50
  Speaker 2: So the role of science is to extract the hard
• 25:52
  Speaker 2: data from the myth, to separate the plant from the
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: magic spell.
• 25:55
  Speaker 1: It's exactly. Furthermore, Whales heavily critiques modern political movements and
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: recent UNESCO reports. He argues these massive organizations are pushing
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: a political agenda that elevates indigenous knowledge to the exact
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: same epistemic status as the rigorously tested scientific.
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: Method wait break down epistemic status for us, it.
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: Basically means the level of trust we give to how
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: a piece of knowledge was gained. Wells believes that saying
• 26:20
  Speaker 1: a traditional story is just as scientifically valid as a
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: double blind, peer reviewed study degrades the universal standard of science.
• 26:28
  Speaker 2: He believes science is the ultimate arbiter of truth.
• 26:31
  Speaker 1: Okay, that is a strong, uncompromising stance. But I had
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: a massive realization when I looked at the counter arguments
• 26:38
  Speaker 1: because the case for Indigenous traditional knowledge is equally powerful,
• 26:41
  Speaker 1: and it exposes a huge blind.
• 26:43
  Speaker 2: Spot present the other side. How do Indigenous scholars respond?
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: Indigenous scholars point out that Western science is incredibly young.
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: For thousands of generations, local knowledge was the science.
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a cute hobby or a campfire story. It
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: was a brutal matter of life and death required intense
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: empirical observation over centuries.
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: So they essentially have the ultimate longitudinal studies data collected
• 27:07
  Speaker 1: over millennia.
• 27:08
  Speaker 2: Yes, let me give you concrete, mind blowing examples. Look
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: at the High Andes. Indigenous communities living high in the
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: mountains can predict the massive, complex climate shifts of El
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Nino and Lenina, and.
• 27:22
  Speaker 1: They do it with more accuracy than billion dollar modern
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: climatology models.
• 27:26
  Speaker 2: How is that even possible without satellites?
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: Simply by observing the clarity of the stars and the
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Plats constellation and reading subtle cloud formations at highly specific
• 27:36
  Speaker 1: times of the.
• 27:36
  Speaker 2: Year, Western science didn't understand the mechanism at first, but
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: it works. It is predictive, verifiable, actionable data that is brilliant.
• 27:45
  Speaker 1: I found another stunning example in the Sawtoo region of Canada,
• 27:48
  Speaker 1: the frigid Northwest territories.
• 27:50
  Speaker 2: Indigenous hunters there have an incredibly deep, nuanced understanding of
• 27:55
  Speaker 2: caribou ecology.
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: Their granular knowledge of herd movements, disease patterns, and population
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: dynams is currently being used to actively enrich and correct
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: flawed Western biological models.
• 28:05
  Speaker 2: The scientists with the PhDs openly admit the locals know
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: the caribou better.
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: And perhaps the most profound example is Australian Aboriginal fire management.
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: That is a completely different paradigm of interacting with nature exactly.
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: Aboriginal Australians used highly controlled cultural burning cool burns for millennia.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: Their intimate granular understanding of bush foods, shifting weather patterns,
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: and ecology sustain human life in an incredibly brutal environment
• 28:33
  Speaker 1: for one hundred.
• 28:33
  Speaker 2: Thousand years, one hundred thousand years of ecological balance.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: And you compare that to the modern track record. Modern
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: industrial civilization, armed with the almighty scientific method, is currently
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: struggling to manage a mere few centuries without triggering catastrophic
• 28:49
  Speaker 1: climate collapse and apocalyptic megafires in Australia.
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: So indigenous scholars ask a very pointed question, whose system
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: is actually superior at sustaining life?
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: It is a devastatingly effective point. If we connect this
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: to the bigger picture, we see a beautiful convergence, a
• 29:05
  Speaker 1: place where the ancient myth and the hard day to meet.
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: Perfectly tell me about the Hokioi.
• 29:09
  Speaker 1: This is a legendary creature from Maory folklore in New Zealand,
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: the Hokkioi or the Puakai. The ancient legends described a giant,
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: terrifying man eating bird.
• 29:19
  Speaker 2: A bird with wings so wide it blotted out the sun,
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: large enough to swoop down and snatch a human child
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: right from the ground.
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: To a stiff collared Western scientist in the eighteen hundreds,
• 29:30
  Speaker 1: that sounds like pure ridiculous fantasy, a campfire story just
• 29:34
  Speaker 1: meant to scare kids in disdaining close to.
• 29:35
  Speaker 2: The village, A total myth until modern science started digging
• 29:39
  Speaker 2: in the dirt and they discovered the massive fossilized bones
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: of Host's eagle.
• 29:44
  Speaker 1: An extinct raptor with a staggering wingspan of nearly ten feet,
• 29:48
  Speaker 1: It had talons the size of tiger claws. It was
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: a legitimate apex predator, absolutely capable of taking down a
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: human being.
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: The myth was completely real.
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: The myth was a cultural memory passed down flawlessly through
• 30:00
  Speaker 1: hundreds of generations, a vital survival warning encoded into a
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: story so it wouldn't be forgotten.
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: And this is the ultimate takeaway for me. Data cannot
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: be isolated from the land, It cannot be isolated from
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: the people who live and bleed on it.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: Indigenous knowledge wraps the hard data in a compelling story
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: to ensure it survives the test of time. And Western scientists,
• 30:21
  Speaker 1: if you really think about it, they are ultimately storytellers too.
• 30:25
  Speaker 2: They write dense papers and build complex mathematical models to
• 30:28
  Speaker 2: tell the story of how the universe works.
• 30:31
  Speaker 1: Two entirely different languages trying to describe the exact same reality.
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: So why does all of this matter to you, the
• 30:37
  Speaker 2: person listening to this right now on your commute or
• 30:39
  Speaker 2: while doing the dishes.
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: Why should you care about a giant extinct eagle or
• 30:43
  Speaker 1: an invisible forest giraffe, or a debate over the scientific method.
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: Because we live in an era of suffocating information overload.
• 30:52
  Speaker 2: We stare at glowing rectangles all day. We honestly, arrogantly
• 30:56
  Speaker 2: think our smartphones hold all the answers to the universe.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: We think the world is fully apt, neatly categorized, and
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: entirely conquered. We think the mysteries are gone, but.
• 31:05
  Speaker 2: The world is still incredibly, wonderfully wild.
• 31:08
  Speaker 1: The boundaries of reality are still expanding every single day.
• 31:11
  Speaker 1: Whether it is a seventy million year old dinosaur fish
• 31:14
  Speaker 1: swimming silently in the pitch black, crushing ocean, or a
• 31:17
  Speaker 1: highly trained scent dog tracking an Asian unicorn through a sweltering,
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: leech filled jungle, the lesson is exactly the same.
• 31:25
  Speaker 2: Science is not a finished, dusty text book.
• 31:28
  Speaker 1: No, it is a living, breathing, chaotic detective story, and
• 31:32
  Speaker 1: we are barely on page one.
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: There is always always more to learn.
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: Absolutely, Before we wrap up this exploration, I want to
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: gently remind you one last time to rate Beyond Infographics
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: five stars. Your rating acts as a beacon. It genuinely
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: helps the algorithm share these amazing stories with other curious minds.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: We deeply appreciate your support, and as.
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: We sign off, we want to leave you with one
• 31:54
  Speaker 2: final deeply provocative thought, something to chew on long after
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: this audio stops.
• 31:58
  Speaker 1: Lay it on.
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: Us spent centuries looking outward, staring deep into the dark forests,
• 32:04
  Speaker 2: pairing into the crushing, terrifying depths of the oceans. We
• 32:07
  Speaker 2: were terrified of the mythical cryptids. We couldn't understand.
• 32:11
  Speaker 1: The beasts hiding out there the shadows of the world.
• 32:13
  Speaker 2: But look at what humanity is building right now, technology,
• 32:17
  Speaker 2: artificial intelligence, massive recursive neural networks. We are rapidly creating
• 32:23
  Speaker 2: impossibly complex black box.
• 32:25
  Speaker 1: Systems, digital brands so dense, so intricate, that even the
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: genius engineers who built them cannot fully scientifically map or
• 32:33
  Speaker 1: explain how they arrive at their decisions.
• 32:35
  Speaker 2: They are hidden systems from the Greek cryptos. What if
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: the most terrifying, elusive cryptids of the twenty first century
• 32:42
  Speaker 2: aren't hiding in the dense, rainy jungles of the congo
• 32:46
  Speaker 2: or the freezing deep trenches of the sea.
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: What if the new monsters are hiding inside our own.
• 32:50
  Speaker 2: Servers, a digital cryptid. That is a truly chilling thought.
• 32:54
  Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us on this investigation. Keep your
• 32:56
  Speaker 1: eyes open. The world is welder than you think. See
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: you next time on Beyond Info Graphics.