How to Outrun Dinosaurs and Escape the Titanic | Cody Cassidy

25:40How would you survive just reality? Forget about disasters. How would you survive reality of a thousand years ago? Like there's this famous Mark Twain book, Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. And this guy from Connecticut gets transported back to King Arthur's court, but he like builds telephone networks and guns and all these things that they found incredibly useful. Like I can't build a telephone network or a gun. Like, I don't know anything except how to turn on my computer and, you know, log onto the internet. Like, what would you do to just survive reality a thousand years ago? I think surviving your fellow man would be one of the biggest steps.

26:18There's sort of quite a bit of xenophobia going on in a lot of ancient times. Being an outsider would be very dangerous in and of itself. So I think step one is try to blend in as best as possible. Bottled water too. We talked about what you should bring back in time. I would be very concerned about my water supply, particularly, depending on how far back you go, but 14th century or 15th century, the water is very, very dangerous. So I would be careful about my water sources. well do you know how to filter water do i know how to filter water yeah no is it involves a charcoal right i think you can i think you can self-filter this would be a good uh a good thing to learn if you're going back in time i was i guess you could boil water absolutely yeah that's that's a fair point that's a fair point you can boil water i um yeah i sort of in the in the introduction of this book i sort of go over the various things that i don't really address um just because they're so pervasive that I'd have to bring them up every time.

27:17And bottled water and sort of avoiding violent encounters are two of the primary ones. Yeah, like let's say you got into a violent encounter, like just somebody started pushing you around or mugging you in the streets of London in the 1500s. What would you do? I would personally probably just run. I don't have a lot of confidence in my ability to survive that. So maybe if you're... Maybe you need to take a gun though. If you time travel. Yeah, that would be, I suppose that would be an option. Maybe you'd be accused of witchcraft or something though, and that would be dangerous as well. But who's going to approach you if you've got a gun?

27:52True, yeah. Maybe if you have a lot of bullets. And there was a famous essay with somebody wondering if they could have beaten the Roman army with one gun. I think I read that one time, although I don't remember the solution or what this conclusion was. That's fascinating. So people study these things. They get PhDs in these things. Someone got a PhD thesis proving that one gun let's say would be enough to, or not enough to hold back the Roman Empire. I am actually not surprised about that. I know people who would totally nerd out about something like that. Maybe me being amongst them. Sort of go into the whole battle.

28:26Have you considered going and getting a PhD? No, I think I sort of tapped out of my educational career a long time ago. I sort of enjoy what I'm doing. I don't know. I always thought when I graduated that I would go back into school, but then I never did. So now you kind of just explore all these like weird historical topics like your other book, who ate the first oyster? Who did eat the first oyster? Like, I always wonder about this. Like, who would think to crack open some disgusting little thing in the bottom of the ocean, like a rock on the bottom of the ocean and eat what's inside? Like, who was the first person to do that?

29:03So it was, the oldest oysters were found in this cave in South Africa almost 160 ,000 years ago, which is right about the time that they think sort of humans became cognitively human. And then we sort of got into some speculation about who it might have been. But I think oftentimes it's women who gather resources that are in the ground. And men generally go after the game, the resources that run away in these old societies. So that's what I presumed. I assumed it must have been somebody. There are some other animals that eat them. Baboons eat oysters. so you could watch a baboon eat an oyster and then sort of presume that it was safe although that isn't that isn't always true some animals eat uh some plants that we certainly uh cannot so you could uh you could have simply just tried it and then and then probably would have cooked it i prefer my oysters raw but it's always safer to cook your food so i would have assumed they certainly had fire so she would have cooked the oyster and then you could have assumed a little bit more, it would be a little bit more safe.

30:12And then probably how the sort of hunter gatherer survivalist advise you to try new foods is to sort of eat a little bit at a time on an empty stomach and then wait a while and see what happens and then eat a little bit more if you feel okay. That's interesting. So let's say something's poisonous. It's probably not so poisonous that if you eat just a little bit, it would just like kill you. Yeah, probably. That's pretty unusual. So So usually if you eat something poisonous, you eat a small bit, it'll just, you'll have a bad night. So you can just, if you need it, and if you try it on an empty stomach, you can sort of eliminate the other variables and assume that if you feel okay, or if you don't feel okay, that that piece of food or this oyster was responsible.

30:52You know, one thing you don't cover in the book is how to survive like a nuclear bomb. Like, let's say I was in Hiroshima and I knew in 10 minutes a nuclear bomb was going to hit because I time traveled there. so I know the exact moment. And what would I do, do you think, to survive a nuclear bomb? Ducking and covering. I don't like that old TV commercial advice. I don't think that would work. I think that it's a similar strategy to the asteroid would be to try to find a deep cave, right, is the best means. But the reason I didn't get into too many of the sort of disasters that could, at least any modern disasters, is I sort of wanted to keep a little bit of it of a distance from i sort of like to write it in a little bit more of a fun uh way and i sort of felt like if i got into too many disasters that i suppose some of these could happen i write about tornadoes and earthquakes and such that certainly could repeat themselves but i sort of write them about them in the context of history so as to keep a sort of psychological remove from the from the events so we can all sort of look at it a little bit more clear-eyed without quite as much emotion tornadoes though you do write about like you write about the worst tornado in american history like how how does one survive a tornado like i see a tornado coming i don't know if it's going to hit me or not what would i do well the first step is to see whether you can get out of its way um and i as as a someone from the west coast not familiar with tornadoes i would have thought you should run away from it but that's of course once you think about it foolish it's sort of like running away from a train by running down the tracks.

32:32You need to run perpendicular to its path. And fortunately, even if you can't tell which direction it's traveling, they nearly always travel either east or east-northeast sort of following the jet stream. So it's better to run north or south. Usually, that's sometimes... That's good advice. Sometimes they deviate, But usually that's how they go. And most tornadoes move forward 30 miles an hour, give or take. This one was called the Tri-State Tornado. It's March 18th, 1925. It sort of sped through Illinois. And this one was moving at 73 miles an hour. So in this case, this is the fastest forward speed ever recorded for a tornado.

33:17In this case, getting out of its way would probably not have been an option. in which case your best bet is to get into a house you sort of want to get as many walls between you and the outside as possible because really the most dangerous thing about a tornado is the things that it's throwing around trees and in this case even locomotives were being tossed about so you want to get as many walls or protection around you and as you can so you go into the into a house into sort of the lowest room at this time they didn't have tornado shelters this tornado was actually sparked the construction of tornado shelters.

33:50And tornadoes were actually so difficult to predict that the meteorologists were forbidden from even using the word tornado. They would, because they were so, it never really sparked anything more than panic and were so inaccurate at predicting them. So they would just sort of use euphemisms, sort of like strong shifting winds. So you really have, would have no warning other than this sort of black cloud appearing on the horizon. I advise getting into a bathtub because there are no tornado shelters. And then maybe grabbing like a cooking pot or something and putting it over your head and and ducking and covering and that'll give you your best shot i would be worried the walls would cave in on me though when the tornado hit it's a it's a fair it's a fair concern a lot of the walls did did cave in but it is probably better than being hit by a tree traveling at at 30 miles an hour and it's certainly no guarantee that you're going to survive it's just sort of the the best option Has anyone ever been like sucked into a tornado and thrown like 50 miles away and survived or thrown 10 miles away?

34:50Yeah. Well, I mean, this was certainly capable of that. They found items in other states from this tornado. And as I said, they found a locomotive that was tossed almost half of a mile. So it was certainly capable. But could anyone survive being sucked up into a tornado? I don't know if I've ever heard of that. It seems... Like Dorothy. That's true. I have heard of that. It seems implausible, but I suppose possible if you found... I mean, there's nothing dangerous about winds per se. If you're in a 300 mile an hour wind, you're going to be flying. But it's really sort of either what you hit or what hits you that's going to be the danger at that speed.

35:34And it seems likely that something would hit you if you're in a 300 mile per hour rotating tornado, but it's not, I suppose, not impossible that something doesn't.

35:59Now, one chapter of the book, you talk about the Donner Party, which is this one particular group of people traveling from the east to the west. But just in general, during that time, like let's say in the 1800s, it seems like an insane thing to want to go from East to California. Because not only is it just treacherous, they didn't really know the trails, they didn't really have a safe way to get across the country, but everybody was like killing everybody. There were various groups that would try to kill traveling parties going from East to West. It just seemed like an insane venture to try to move to California.

36:32Totally. This was the beginning of the gold rush. So there was all sorts of pamphlets and rumors about sort of the wondrous treasures that you would find in California. Overstated, of course. But they were sort of moving from nothing to sort of promised riches. And it was a powerful sales pitch, I suppose, if you had very little. So people certainly started coming. And this group was in 1846, so the very beginning of the gold rush, and were enticed by rumors of riches. how did how did your family end up in california i suppose we came i have some some swedish swedish and irish heritage but we we came after the gold rush we were uh i think our history i've never really dove into it to be honest i think really we were farmers from i think my ancestors were sort of farmers from the midwest but not we didn't come over in the gold rush it was sort of in the uh 20th century at some point we moved over it was it was safer then yeah I think we took a train which is that was safe which was totally safe but it was safer hard to take a wrong turn in a train like the like the Donner party did but it seems like travel in general is causes more trouble than it's worth like you know you you mentioned Magellan who didn't and he died right like on his trip around the world so and I I like how you mentioned what clothes you should pack like what what clothes you should pack in the 1500s for a trip around the world yeah well i i uh you didn't have you couldn't pack too much but they they sort of recommend uh you should wear a hat called a bonete so just sort of fit in again this was it was a hat that the the portuguese wore on there or this is the spanish were on their uh voyages and then you should wear a really thick coat because you really only get one or two pieces of clothing and so something that would withstand the sea air And it also has to last you about three years.

38:24So it needs to be pretty sturdily made. This was a pretty desperate trip. But even more important than the clothing, I think, is the food that you bring. Because scurvy was the real killer on this voyage. And so they had obviously no idea what the cause of scurvy was or the cure. But the officers, including Magellan on that trip, received something called quince, which is basically like a jam. and the regular crewman did not. And it sort of had nothing to do with scurvy. It was just about giving the officers a bit of sugar. But it has just enough vitamin C in the quince to keep you alive. So the officers survived on the Pacific crossing and the regular crewman did not.

39:11So I would suggest using your packing space to get a little quince in there and keep you alive. Now, do you think the officers, because they probably couldn't figure out why they were surviving and other people were not. Do you think they thought that just because they were officers, they were surviving, they were just better humans? It's easy to think. Yeah, I think probably so. Scurvy was a complete mystery, although it's a little bit hard in retrospect to understand why they didn't realize what was causing scurvy, the lack of fresh food. It's sort of on the very first voyages, actually, there's evidence that some of the sailors were demanding fresh food to help cure the disease.

39:49And so it would have thought that it would have been solved right there. But there's some interesting aspects of vitamin C and why it doesn't always survive these long voyages. Sort of a lot of like pasteurization, for example, will destroy the vitamin C in juices. So you can easily imagine sailors pasteurizing or heating up their fruits and juice to keep them alive and then it not working. And so them sort of dismissing that this supposed cure as a sort of superstition of the sea. So even though the cure is seemingly obvious, it killed more than 4 million sailors for more than 100 years before they figured out what was going on.

40:30And so again, like if you were transported back a thousand years, like you mentioned, you know, you have to have skills in avoiding violent encounters, bring bottled water, stuff like that. But like what knowledge do you have now that could help you convince kings to let you survive? Let's say you were brought into the court of some king in the 1200s. What could you say to them? And let's assume, for instance, you spoke the same language or you could communicate in some way to them. What would you say to them that or what could you do that would convince them to let you stay alive? You mentioned toothaches.

41:00I always thought flossing would be a good way to prove that you were from the future and having good to save you from toothaches. perhaps. The problem, that would take a little bit while, that would take a while. So you'd have to, I don't, it's hard to imagine anything that you could say right away that would keep you alive. But I would recommend flossing. And that way, if you could stay alive for a little while, you could prove that you could save yourself from quite a lot of pain. Yeah, that might not be like spectacular enough for the king to, like, he might think that's a bad thing. Oh, are you trying to, I'm going to cut my teeth off by digging into the gums like this.

41:35He might not know. I wonder, can you make a fire? Like, what skill can we, it's sort of a modern skill, could we have that could show these people we're interesting, we're interesting enough that they should be curious. And I think you'd probably have to spread a bit of a needle there too, because if it were a little bit too spectacular, you might either draw, maybe draw some unwanted attention. Yeah. Be accused of being some sort of witch or wizard. So I don't know. I'm sticking with flossing as being unspectacular, unspectacular but practical, unaffected advice. You probably have a better idea though.

42:10Yeah, I know. I have no idea. Jay, what do you think? What can you do? What would you do? Probably bring glasses. What about glasses? People are like, hey, you're wearing this thing. Oh, you mean glasses for vision? Yeah, for vision. I'm sure back then there's no glasses, right? People are like, oh, I can't see this thing. And then I'm like, hey, check out my this cool little transparent thing you put in your eyes and you can see a lot of different things. Oh yeah, Cody, what about nearsightedness? Did people get nearsighted back then? Certainly, yeah. There was nearsightedness. And glasses weren't a thing until they invented, sort of Venetians invented a way to make perfectly clear glass.

42:50So glasses would be great. There was not a lot of reading back then, of course. So there was sort of, it was less of a hindrance to be nearsighted. Oh yeah, how did people figure out actually how to make glass? Actually, I was just reading this. Well, of course, natural glass occurs. They found some natural magnifiers dating all the way back to the Assyrians and probably before as just sort of ground rock crystal can magnify a little bit. But real glasses couldn't occur. Telescopes, stuff that Galileo used, couldn't happen. And so they learned how to make perfectly clear what they call it. The glass is called cristallo glass.

43:30It was made by some Venetian glass makers going back to the 15th century. And it was, they learned a sort of technique. They used different types of sand, hot furnaces to create this sort of perfectly clear glass. And it was a secret. The Venetians were so secretive about how they did it, actually, that they quarantined all glass makers to an island and forbade foreigners from working on glass and sort of imprisoned anyone who even tried to leave the country. So it was a secret. So wait, if you were a glassmaker, was it just sort of sudden? All of a sudden the Venetians like rounded up all the glassmakers and put them on some island?

44:10I think they were the glassmakers. And then as they sort of developed this guild and perfected this sort of glassmaking, it sort of became more and more secretive. But the exact process by which these glassmakers were roped into living and working on an island with very little freedom is a little bit perplexing to me. And like, did they bring their wives? Did they have kids and then have on the island or did just glassmakers die off there? I certainly hope so. But they were very successful in keeping the secret. It was more than a hundred years where this sort of cristal or glass really just came out of the Venetians, the island.

44:50And how do they figure out in the first place? Like if you get like a bunch of sand, how would you figure out in the first place? oh, I'm going to turn this into a window. How would you even guess that? It seems like creativity was immense back then as opposed to now. Yeah, just sort of continual experimentation, right? Gradually discovering a particular better material, a better technique. It probably wasn't one moment of a eureka. It was sort of a long developing process by which they were making glass long before they were making this glass good enough to for telescopes and microscopes so it was probably had they even think to like heat up sand and do something with it like like were they just was a bunch of kids playing like sitting sand on fire like what what happened you think well there was certainly a lot of like uh super hot furnaces for making uh weapons and and and bronze and metals.

45:48So it's just speculation, but maybe, you know, near the furnace, some, some sand melts, it creates a type of glass right there. So you could see somebody finding that kind of interesting and, and, and we're playing with that. Yeah. I wonder if like the first glass makers were, you know, sort of making swords or something like that. And just sort of this, saw the side effect of, of making swords is that this glass like material was appearing. Yeah, I sort of dove into this in the Oyster book, how these innovations started and wondering how metal workers first realized that you could create better metals by melting rock.

46:29Because the temperatures that are required for smelting metal are much higher than a regular campfire would produce. So it's sort of interesting to speculate as sort of a super windy conditions or something, how they could possibly have arrived upon that discovery. Yeah, I always wonder like, it's similar to the thing of like, oh, this food looks disgusting. How would anybody start eating that? But it reminds me like, let's say you were picked up by a UFO and you go to another planet and you land at their spaceport or whatever. And now they're taking you into the city and they offer you a glass of liquid and it's completely opaque white, the liquid, would you drink it?

47:11Would you think, oh, this looks like milk, it might be good? Or would you think, boy, this is just a clear white liquid. That's disgusting. Well, I would certainly think it's, I guess I would think it was disgusting. But yeah, if they were offering, I don't know, I would go back to my advisements for the first oyster eater, take a little bit and see what happens. Yeah, it's always so fascinating that really interesting questions of history are not like, oh, when was the Declaration of Independence signed? But all of these kind of more subtle things of how people actually really lived. I mean, there's many more chapters in your book.

47:44People definitely read it, How to Survive History by Cody Cassidy. It's just fascinating, all the questions it raises and the things it made me think about while reading it. I really envy you that you have this life where you kind of research all these quirky but really fascinating questions about history that force you to dig really deep to understand not only kind of the technically the chronological events that are happening, but how to actually survive and live through these things because people did survive them. And so it's just a lot of interesting stuff that you explore. So how else can people find you?

48:19Obviously they should buy the book, How to Survive History, Cody Cassidy, but how else can people find your stuff? Well, I'm doing a few book events here in San Francisco. And then I've been, funnily enough, at the encouragement of my publisher, I've been making sort of little TikTok videos that have actually been fun of little, trying to sort of illustrate by video and how to escape different ancient disasters. And how's that going? It's been kind of fun. I found, unlike a lot of social media, I found it to be sort of a positive environment, which was sort of refreshing. Yeah, I think TikTok honestly is great.

48:58Like, you know, depending on what you're searching for or looking at, because then the algorithm changes So for each person's feed is different. But it's just like, you basically see all these people with superpowers on TikTok. Like people who are doing this parkour jumping that's amazing or magicians who do unbelievable things or people like yourself who have all this knowledge that you're sharing. YouTube videos would be great also. But I think, I bet you the TikTok algorithm really favors you because people probably spend time, like you pose the question, how to survive a dinosaur age. And then people are going to stick around for just enough seconds that the algorithm picks it up and starts spreading you further.

49:36Have you noticed that? Yeah, you have to be sort of incredibly entertaining within like three seconds or at least post something interesting and within three seconds or people sort of swipe by it. So it's a different method of storytelling than I was used to. But you sort of get a hang of it. And then you can see as other people do and the algorithm learns you. It's sort of incredibly addicting as everybody out there is sort of learning how to suck somebody in within two seconds of time. So you can find yourself wasting a lot of time on it, too, if you're not careful. In some sense, TikTok is the predator and we're like the prey.

50:14We have to have just enough balance where some of us get sucked in and it ruins our lives with addiction. But others can just go through and be entertained for a while and then move on. So I hope I'm in the latter category, but I tend to be addicted to these things. Yeah, it's easy to be chased down by the, for your attention to be chased down by the predator that is TikTok's algorithm, that's for sure. Well, you should do YouTube videos too because these are like perfect for YouTube. Yeah, I should. It's much easier to create 60 seconds of content I've found than a YouTube video, but I would absolutely love to delve into that as well.

50:52Yeah, well, Cody, Cassie, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's really just fascinating stuff. I love this stuff. So the book is coming out, How to Survive History. You get it on Amazon or your local bookstore. And I'm going to get, I haven't read Who Ate the First Boy Store. So I'm going to get that book as well. And there's one other book you wrote, right? Like what's, what was that? The first one is called And Then You're Dead. It's, I sort of wrote it, I co-wrote it with a physicist friend of mine. And we sort of tried to answer questions like what would happen if you fell into a black hole or sort of shot out of a cannon and sort of tried to answer them as sort of seriously with as much sort of physics and real life experiments and examples that we could find to actually answer those questions.

51:40All right, I'm going to read that and then you should come back on the podcast. Absolutely. All right, well, thank you so much, Cody. Cody Cassidy, How to Survive History.

51:55Thank you.