The Underwater Episode

From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events.

You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know.

A production of iHeart Radio.

Hello, welcome back to the show.

My name is Matt.

My name is Noel.

They call me Ben.

We're joined, as always, with our super producer, Dylan, the Tennessee pal fake, and most importantly, you are you.

You are here.

That makes this the stuff they don't want you to know.

And, uh, guys, I gotta tell you, super excited about this one.

I don't know, uh...

I'm sure it's a common experience, but one of my foundational memories has always been visiting aquariums.

You know, when you're in the dark and you've got these huge glass panels of nothing but blue and creatures you would never see otherwise.

We've got a good aquarium in Atlanta as well.

And it's funny, my girlfriend's coming to visit, and I suggested we go to the aquarium, and she said, absolutely not, I'm an adult.

I said, no, really, it's good.

I promise.

It's like

the best.

It's

a good one.

Especially for us curious folk that remember being a kid.

Guys, I have... super fond memories of going to the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga.

That was the place to go to before Atlanta built that giant one with the whale sharks and stuff.

That was the place.

And if I recall correctly, isn't there a river area in the Tennessee Aquarium where...

Gosh.

Yes.

I specifically have memories of that, but I couldn't like, I couldn't describe it to you right now, but my brain, when I think about fish goes to that aquarium, they have otters

and otters.

Yes.

And you, you start at the top and you went your way down.

Uh, the Atlanta aquarium is wonderful as well.

We know that some aquariums can be pretty problematic, right up there with zoos, but the, uh, The Chattanooga and the Atlanta Aquarium are exceptional, and you can visit these things to have a kind of encounter with the ocean, with the ink, with the brine, with the deep, and you probably won't experience anything Thalassophobia, our word of the day, thalassophobia.

It's something we talked about before without the specific definition.

It is the persistent and intense fear of deep, vast or dark bodies of water like open ocean, sea or lakes.

And I think, Noel, not to put you on the spot, but I remember a few years back, you said this was one of your big fears.

Oh, yeah, just massive things, you know, lurking beneath the waves.

I have recurring dreams about not necessarily like being devoured or being attacked or anything or shark attacked or whatever, but something about a thing that is so huge that you can't see really freaks me out.

It's our imaginations, right? A lot of those fears that we talk about end up being our own imagination playing out across whatever the thing is.

That's why Jaws is better when you don't see the shark.

Yeah, Hitchcock was right.

It's the monster off screen, right? You're imagining will almost always be more frightening than the thing that you see because seeing something is very close to defining it, right? So the unknown carries such weight and for thousands, thousands of years, even before the written word, Humanity had a very strange relationship with the water.

It continues today.

It's beautiful.

It's vast.

It's poetic.

It's dangerous.

It's terrifying.

It's unpredictable.

And recently, in our strange news program...

We learned about some collaborative and technological breakthroughs that have revolutionized human understanding of the world beneath the waves.

That's what we're doing tonight.

Put on your cryptic cap, folks.

Hop in the aquarium with us.

Hold your breath.

Hail Cthulhu.

Let's dive in.

This is an iHeart Podcast.

Guaranteed human.