Here Be Monsters

HBM158: An Illusion

n the midst of a stressful move, HBM producer Jeff Emtman finds comfort in the phasing techniques developed by minimalist composer, Steve Reich.  Note: this episode contains sounds that cannot be accurately represented by speakers.  Please use headphones.   Steve Reich compositions excerpted in this episode:  Clapping Music, performed by Steve Reich and Wolfram Winkel Violin Phase, performed by Jonathan Morton  Pendulum Music, performed by Joan Cerveró, Víctor Trescolí, Isabel León, and...

HBM157: The Raw Whatever

Allen H Greenfield is a UFOlogist and occult researcher.  He’s also a father of three.   His first child, Alex was the subject of HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos.  In that episode, Alex tells stories from his childhood of chasing strange phenomena with his father.  In this episode, Here Be Monsters host Jeff Emtman talks to Allen to get the “fatherly perspective” on UFOs, black lodges, tarot, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and (most of all) how to be a good parent.  Allen Greenfield is cur...

HBM156: Heavy Load-Bearing Body

Berlin’s Schwerbelastungskörper is a massive concrete structure that, today, is hidden in plain sight between a railroad and an apartment building.  It’s one of just a dozen remaining pieces of Nazi Architecture in Berlin.  And it’s not much to look at. It was built in 1941 as a test structure for a triumphal arch that Hitler wanted to build in that spot.  The Schwerbelastungskörper (“heavy load-bearing body”) is the arch’s test structure.  It weighs about 12,650 metric tonnes, or about 28 ...

The HBM Art Exchange is Back!

The Here Be Monsters Art Exchange is back! It’s a really simple and wonderful thing where you, gentle listener, can mail a piece of art to a stranger and get a piece of art in return. It’s open to artists of all experience levels from around the world. The deadline to sign up is November 10th, 2022. Sign up and more info here: https://www.hbmpodcast.com/art The art exchange is made possible this year by HBM listener Devon Sherman, who’s offered her time and expertise to help with commu...

HBM155: Ghosts Aliens Burritos

Content Note: pervasive language, brief mentions of bigotry. Alex Greenfield says that there was no such thing as a normal day when he was a kid.  His dad (Allen H Greenfield) self describes as a “researcher in the shadow world.” And his mom soon grew tired of her husband’s lifestyle, which included a lot of time on the road: chasing rumors of cryptids, ghosts, and aliens.   But after his parents split up, Alex, his dad, and an ever changing cast of motorcycle gang members and step-moms ke...

HBM154: Ancient Roman Recipes

Sally Grainger was originally a chef, but in her 20’s, she was gifted a copy of an ancient Roman cookbook called Apicius.  Apicius is a bit of a fluke.  It shouldn’t have survived the 2000-ish year journey into the modern era, but it did.  And in this episode of Here Be Monsters, Grainger explains how Apicius persisted due to being a favorite text for monks-in-training to practice their gilding skills.  And thus, this fascinating book of recipes (featuring cooking instructions for boiled os...

The Straight and Narrow

In 2012, a street preacher walking three small dogs tried to convince Jeff Emtman of his way of thinking about gender and the afterlife.  In this Here Be Monsters brief, Jeff shares the short essay he originally wrote about the dinner party where they attempted to make an uneasy friendship.  Jeff re-edited the essay in 2022 and gave pseudonyms to the main characters (“Cliff” and “Sophie”).  Producer: Jeff EmtmanMusic: The Black Spot Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast supported by...

HBM153: Klänge from Berlin

The composer Pauline Oliveros thought there was a difference between hearing and listening.  She defined hearing as a passive act, something done with the ears.  But she defined listening as something active saying that listening happens in the brain.   Sam Parker is a recordist who takes inspiration from Oliveros’ words and work.  About six years ago, on an episode of Here Be Monsters called Sam’s Japan Tapes, Sam shared dozens of recordings he made during his first (and only) trip to Japa...

HBM152: Dirt Becomes You

What do you want to happen to your body when you die?  It’s a touchy topic where tradition, religion and death denial all come into play.  But across much of the world, there are just two options: burial and cremation, which both have substantial ecological impacts.  In 2019, Washington State passed SB 5001, which legalized several new options for deathcare.  In this episode, host Jeff Emtman visits Return Home, a facility in Auburn, Washington that’s using one of those new options, called...

HBM151: Blowgun Time Warp

Season 10 of Here Be Monsters starts and host Jeff Emtman hallucinates his adolescence while working long hours.  Scenes from middle school dances, dawn bus rides, the basement, and ( most crucially), a late-night raffle at a hardware store. Do you like Here Be Monsters? Tell your friends, support HBM on Patreon, and have your boss sponsor an episode. Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: Serocell and The Black Spot Sponsor: RadioLab Are you curious about the world, but also want to be surprised...

Season 10 is Coming!

Season 10 is nearly here!  The season starts on March 9th and episodes will be released on a rolling basis until all ten shows are published. Want to advertise on an episode? Fill out the sponsorship request form.  Want to support HBM with a small monthly donation?  Become a patron on Patreon.  Can’t wait to share the season with you.  More soon.  Producer: Jeff Emtman Music: The Black Spot

Leaving Spotify

I’ve decided to remove my work from Spotify.  It’s not just their recent controversies around Joe Rogan, it’s a much bigger problem with the way that Spotify treats the medium.   If you listen on an app other than Spotify, you don’t need to change anything, just stay subscribed, and you’ll get all the new episodes (Season 10 is coming soon!). If you do listen on Spotify though, you’ll need to download a different app to keep listening.  Personally, I’m a big fan of  Pocket Casts, but there...

HBM150: Cold Water

The origins of Julia Susara’s chronic fatigue are hard to pin down.  She still doesn’t know exactly how it started but suspects that a deeply broken heart had something to do with it.   She spent about three years going through some excruciating physical sensations: immense chills, brain fogs, pregnancy nightmares and the feeling that her blood was about to boil through her skin.  Doctors weren’t able to figure out what was wrong, nor were the array of alternative healers she visited. Feel...

HBM149: The Daily Blast [Neutrinowatch]

A short episode from the new show Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast.  Each episode of Neutrinowatch changes a lil’ bit every day.   This episode, The Daily Blast, features two computerized voices (Wendy and Ivan), who share the day’s news.  To get new versions of this episode, you’ll need to either stream the audio in your podcast app/web browser, or just delete and re-download the episode.  It’s updated every 24 hours.  Note: Due to Spotify’s policy of downloading and rehosting po...

So What Exactly is Episode 149?

Episode 149 is an odd duck for sure.  It changes every day due to some coding trickery that is happening behind the scenes.  That episode is a part of a bigger project, a new podcast project that’s potentially the first of its kind.  It’s called Neutrinowatch, and every day, each episode is regenerated with new content.  But this is a conversation between Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters’ host), and Martin Zaltz Austick (Answer Me This, Song By Song, Pale Bird and others) about the hows and w...

HBM148: Early Attempts at Summoning Dream Beings

As a teenager, HBM host Jeff Emtman fell asleep most nights listening to Coast To Coast AM, a long running talk show about the world’s weirdnesses.   One of the guests stuck out though; one who spoke on his experiences with lucid dreaming.  He’d learned how to conjure supernatural entities and converse with his subconscious.   Lucid dreams are dreams where the dreamer knows they’re asleep.  Some sleepers become lucid completely at random, but lucid dream training can drastically increase th...

HBM147: Chasing Tardigrades

With much of the world shut down over the last year, HBM host Jeff Emtman started wondering if there were smaller venues where the world still felt open.  In this episode, Jeff interviews Chloé Savard of the Instagram microscopy page @tardibabe about the joy of looking at small things, and whether it’s possible to find beauty in things you don’t understand.   Chloé also gives Jeff instructions for finding tardigrades by soaking moss in water and squeezing out the resulting juice onto sli...

Theodora is @hypo_inspo

A brief follow-up to last episode: you can now follow our AI-powered friend Theodora on Twitter! She tweets several times a day, giving bad advice, good advice, and some strange poetry. Her account’s called Hypothetical Inspiration. Give her a follow.

HBM146: Theodora

How does a computer learn to speak with emotion and conviction?  Language is hard to express as a set of firm rules.  Every language rule seems to have exceptions and the exceptions have exceptions etcetera.  Typical, “if this then that” approaches to language just don’t work.  There’s too much nuance.  But each generation of algorithms gets closer and closer. Markov chains were invented in the 1800’s and rely on nothing more than basic probabilities.  It’s a simple idea, just look at an i...

HBM145: The Juice Library

Like so many others, Amanda Petrus got a bit lost after college. She had a chemistry degree and not a lot of direction.  But she was able to find work at a juice factory in the vineyards of western New York.  Her job was quality control, which meant overnight shifts at the factory, tasting endless cups of fruit punch and comparing them to the ever-evolving set of juice standards that they kept in the “juice library.”  She calls herself and “odd creature”, especially for the time and place: ...

HBM144: Keeping A Place

HBM Host Jeff Emtman has always been afraid of losing his memories. Places he cares about keep getting torn down. In this episode, Jeff bikes around Seattle recording the sounds of a popping balloon to capture the sound of places he likes: Padelford Hall’s Parking Garage, The Wayne Tunnel in Bothell, his old house in Roosevelt, The Greenlake Aqua Theater, and his front porch on a snowy day.   The sound of a popping balloon can be used to re-create a space digitally.  These popping sounds a...

HBM143: Laughing Rats and Dawn Rituals

Animals sometimes make noises that would be impossible to place without context.  In this episode: three types of animal vocalizations—described by the people who recorded them.  Ashley Ahearn: Journalist and producer of Grouse, from Birdnote and Boise State Public Radio Joel Balsam: Journalist and producer of the upcoming podcast Parallel Lives.  Joel co-created a photo essay for ESPN about the “pororoca”, an Amazonian wave chased each year by surfers.  Kevin Coffey, Ph.D.: Co-creator of...

HBM142: The Vastness of the Universe

1,420,405,751* hertz is a very important frequency.  It’s the frequency that hydrogen radiates at, creating radio waves that can be detected far away.  And astronomers can learn a lot about the history and shape of the universe by observing this “hydrogen line” frequency with radio telescopes Extraterrestrial research astronomers also take a lot of interest in the hydrogen line...and it’s for the same exact reason, though the context is different.  It’s thought that if an alien species is c...

HBM141: Filthy Riches

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 produce stand.  An employee whose face is always hidden by a bright headlamp.  These encounters rattle him, maki...

Season 9 = February 17th

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 bean husks. and you’ll get quick-fixes to all your problems from the all-knowing, hyper-dimensional entity that sometimes advi...

HBM Continues as an Independent Podcast

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 sponsors.  HBM would love to promote your business or project or just say some words that are meaningful to you.  Become a...

HBM140: The New Black Wall Street

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 a racial minority in a young city that already had a reputation for vigilante justice. A local chapt...

HBM139: Acceptable Pains

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 everyone blissfully happy is to use technology and genetic engineering to make physical and emotional pa...

HBM138: Did Neanderthals Bury their Dead?

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 early humans often thought of as the brutish, stupid cousins of our species. In sharp contrast, Soleck...

HBM137: Superhappiness

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 is negative. He’s always been melancholic and he has depression. He remembers his interest in philosoph...

HBM136: Jacob's Lost Biography

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 a project destined to evaporate and never be seen by anyone.  His inspiration came from an emai...

HBM136: Jacob’s Lost Biography

Jacob Lemanski tries to write an unreadable book.

HBM135: Dying Well

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 evidence to the contrary. Amanda is a death doula, someone who provides practical, emotional, and sp...

What Can You Hear? (Love Me)

A wonderful episode of a wonderful podcast: the CBC’s Love Me.  Subscribe on your favorite podcast app. 

HBM134: Questionable Hobbies of the Socially Isolated

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 🔴 button.  And on this old mixtape, a 10 year Jeff attempted to make a fancy edit: swapping out the intr...

HBM133: Prey of Worms

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 disorienting, especially due to the fact that being our sole points of reference, they’re hard to see outside of.  So, people i...

HBM132: Moral Enhancement

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 elements of human psychology: implicit bias.  Natalia calls implicit bias “the cognitive monster.”  ...

HBM131: A Cure for Carsickness

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.  They drove to Kooskia and Kamiah, two small neighboring towns where Bethany’s dad lived for some time ...

HBM130: Mother Pigeon / Sister Marta

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 treated like a criminal, so I like to call myself ‘The Pigilante.’” Mother Pigeon considers herself a press agent for t...

HBM129: The Underearthlings

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 many ancient burial mounds that spot the landscape. Lars sometimes calls the people “subterraneans”, “...

HBM128: Seeing Auras

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 was alive, Santo had been able to see her aura too, the same green, but with a deep purply violet mixed...

HBM127: QALYs

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 glamorous charity counterparts.  GiveWell is a organization that quantitatively evaluates charities by the acti...

HBM126: Sounding the Deep

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 mapping satellites to see down there.  Even the seafloor maps we now have, the ones that include prominent underwat...

HBM125: Deepfaking Nixon

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 Safire Memo and is sometimes called In Event of Moon Disaster. The latter title share its name with an ins...

HBM124: Banana Softies

“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 lean up against the cages to let his monkey friends groom him. He knew the work would be hard, but he ...

HBM123: Water Witches

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: each family member taking turns holding the rods, testing who had the gift of water witching. Each pers...

HBM122: Should Cows Have Names?

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 other world, Mike is a college professor at the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Th...

HBM121: True North

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 short stories about faith (and the lack thereof) through the metaphor of declination, or the distance in angle between...

Season 8 = October 2

HBM120: Own Worst Interest

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 quickly confessed to the three murders. The prosecution sought the death penalty, and Dodd ple...