Here Be Monsters

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 “Natural Organic Reduction” (NOR) which is commonly called “human composting”.  

Return Home has built the world’s largest NOR facility to date, with 74 available individual vessels.  Their process (which they’ve trademarked as “Terramation”) takes about two month to complete, and involves dressing a deceased person in a pressed cotton gown and placing them a bed of organic material, and left to naturally break down using active composting techniques that bring the contents of the vessel to well above 100° Fahrenheit for much of the composting period. 

The techniques used by Return Home were largely inspired by Katrina Spade, a death activist and the owner of Recompose, another NOR facility located near Seattle.  Spade was one of the people who strongly advocated for the passage of SB 5001.

There’s currently one other NOR facility in Washington State: Herland Forrest in Wahkiacus.  Currently two other states, Colorado and Oregon have legalized NOR.  

NOR’s future isn’t known.  It’s new and still relatively rare. Do enough people want to be composted to have it be a viable business model? Each of these companies have different approaches to their process.  

Return Home’s model relies on scale.  They wouldn’t disclose the exact cost of building their facility, or how many simultaneous descendants they’d need in their facility to be profitable.  As of publishing, they charge $4,950 for their process and they have 15 of their 74 slots occupied.  

And in some ways, the full ecological benefits for Return Home’s process also rely on scale.  In a follow up email, CEO Micah Truman stated that “We calculate our inputs as follows. Our electricity bill each month is about $1,700, and is sufficient to Terramate 74 bodies. This comes to $22 per body. In current gas terms ($5 a gallon at present) that is roughly 4 gallons of gas, which is about 1/8 the amount of gas used for cremation. The number is actually quite a bit better than that, as our electricity bill also powers our entire facility, not just the Terramation equipment.”

When asked about the relative emptiness of the facility, Katey Houston (Return Home’s Services Manager) said, “The funeral industry is so slow to change. When cremation became a thing, it took sixty years to become mainstream.  The fact that we’ve served just over thirty families now in four months, is quite amazing.  And we’ve continued to grow month-over-month, and that’s all I can ask for.”

Thank you Hannah Suzanna for help with research for this episode. 

Here Be Monsters is an independent, listener supported podcast.  Consider supporting the show on Patreon. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman

Music: The Black Spot and Serocell

Sponsor: Sleep With Me Podcast

Sleep With Me is a podcast that helps you fall asleep.  Host Drew Ackerman tells tangential stories, reads old catalogs, makes metaphors about washing machines, and does other calming things all in pursuit of slowing your mind down and letting you drift off to sleep more peacefully.  Subscribe to Sleep With Me on any podcast app.

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, and even moved? Radiolab experiments with sound and storytelling allowing science to fuse with culture, and information to sound like… well, music. Join hosts Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser for an experiential investigation that explores themes and ideas through a patchwork of people, sounds, and stories. Listen to Radiolab

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

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 are a lot of good options out there. 

Direct links to HBM’s listing on several podcast apps: 

Apple Podcasts

Stitcher

Google Podcasts

Pocket Casts

Castbox

Deezer

Podcast Addict

RadioPublic

Amazon Music

PodBean

There’s a million more too :).  If you can’t find HBM on your favorite app, please send an email or a tweet.  

Last thing: If you’re a podcaster and you’re interested in removing your own work from Spotify, I just published an article called “How to remove your podcast from Spotify without losing (all) your listeners”.  Perhaps an overly bold title, we’ll see..  

Thank you for all the support for all these years.  I really appreciate it.  Season 10 will be here soon. 

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot

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. Feeling that no one was able to help, she was at the edge of giving up. 

But, at her brother’s suggestion, she reluctantly visited a hypnotherapist who gave Julia instructions to swim daily in cold water.  So she started jumping in the ocean each day and felt a strange and near immediate change in her symptoms.  

If you’re feeling suicidal, here are some numbers you can call to speak with someone who will listen. 

USA Suicide Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255

UK Samaritans: 116 123

Canada Crisis Services: 1.833.456.4566

Japan Tell JP:  03-5774-0992

Australia Lifeline: 13 11 14

Denmark Livslinien: 70 201 201

Other countries: check the list available at suicide.org

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This episode marks the end of Season 9.  Season 10 is coming, but the date is currently unknown.  Stay subscribed!  And keep an eye on the HBM Patreon page for an upcoming message with a season debrief and some musings about the show’s future.  That post will be public, so no need to be a member to read it.  Also, please note that due to some summer busy-ness, Jeff will not be able to run an HBM summer art exchange this year.  Sorry about that.  Thank you for all your support through Season 9.  It is such a pleasure to make this show. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: Julia’s choir group and The Black Spot
Sponsor: Animasus

Emilius Martinez is an illustrator and designer who runs Animasus.  Animasus can help you design email campaigns, websites and improve the overall branding for your business.  

Speaking of which, Emilius designed the new HBM t-shirt, which is wonderful. Thank you Animasus for sponsoring Here Be Monsters!

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 podcast audio, this episode won’t work very well on Spotify.  Most other podcast apps should handle it well though. 

Neutrinowatch is a project of Jeff Emtman (Here Be Monsters’ host), and Martin Zaltz Austick (Answer Me This, Song By Song, Pale Bird and others). 

If you’d like to know more about generative podcasting and the story of Neutrinowatch, listen to So What Exactly is Episode 149? and Jeff’s blog post called The Start of Generative Podcasting?

Neutrinowatch is available on most podcast apps, and as of publish date, there’s currently 6.5 episodes available.  Each updates daily. 

Producers: Jeff Emtman and Martin Zaltz Austwick

Music:The Black Spot

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 whys of Neutrinowatch: A Daily Generative Podcast (available now on most podcast apps 😉)

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 the frequency of their occurrence.

Months ago, Jeff put out a call for dream prompts on social media.  He asked if anyone had questions for an all-knowing being to be conjured in a forthcoming lucid dream.  Some of the questions are heard in this episode.  

While training for this episode, Jeff used two approaches to trigger lucid dreams.  The first was an audio recorder by the bedside.  Each morning, Jeff recorded his dreams (lucid or not).  The second method was a series of “wakefulness checks” throughout each day, stopping at random times to test reality, and to make a determination on whether he’s currently awake or asleep.  This tactic is useful as it may eventually trigger the same behaviour in a dream.  

In this episode, Jeff attempts to lucid dream to answer listener questions, but finds the progress slower than he hoped.  

Here Be Monsters is an independent podcast that is funded entirely by individual sponsors and donors.  You can become a donor at patreon.com/HBMpodcast

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot, Phantom Fauna, and Serocell.
Sponsor: Sleep With Me Podcast

Sleep With Me is a podcast that helps you fall asleep.  Host Drew Ackerman tells tangential stories, reads old catalogues, recaps old Charlie Brown specials and does other calming things all in pursuit of slowing your mind down and letting you drift off to sleep more peacefully.  Subscribe to Sleep With Me on any podcast app. 

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 slides.

Producer: Jeff Emtman
Music: The Black Spot
Sponsor: Pod People

Pod People is an audio production and staffing agency with a community of 1,000+ producers, editors, engineers, sound designers and more.  

Pod People helps audio professionals find amazing job opportunities, and they're also  building a network of support that connects their members with other audio producers, educational workshops, events, and more.

Pod People is free to join. After a short onboarding process, Pod People will send you clients and work opportunities that are a good match for your specific skills and interests. Join Pod People

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.