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>> Rogue, R-O-G-U-E.
That's the one. >> No, I [bleep] it up.
That was a valiant attempt to save it.
[laughter] You get 10% at checkout.
>> It's real close.
>> [chuckle] That's going to be in, isn't it?
[laughter]
What sexual fetishes do you think zombies have?
[laughter]
No, pretend you're alive.
Oh, you are alive, Susan, aren't you?
Look at you breathing, even though you don't need to.
Haha, it's so dirty.
>> How does a zombie pretend to breathe?
You just move your shoulders. [laughter]
[static]
>> So in popular culture,
I think most people think of the beginning
of the American infatuation with zombies,
with 'Night of the living dead'.
Would you say that's right? >> Yeah.
That not only changed America's awareness of zombies,
but introduced them into pop culture.
That changed horror movies,
>> And on the flip side,
we have the current infatuation,
I think we're wrapping up as we record this,
near the end of 'The Walking Dead'.
>> Oh right, yeah.
>> Two things both of them have in common?
Neither of them use the word zombies.
Neither of them acknowledge the idea of zombies
as a pop-cultural meme. >> Yeah.
I've gotten into many, many nerd arguments about this,
where I have argued, "Well in '28 days Later', name,
"they're not zombies" >> Right.
>> "Technically they're not zombies,
"they're ghouls or reverences" >> Look at 'Game of Thrones'.
Those are clearly zombies.
Ain't going to call them zombies, they're definitely zombies.
>> Okay, so what do you think the story of zombies is?
>> I didn't even watch the movie
'The Serpent and the Rainbow',
what was that, mid 80s, late 80s?
>> Yeah. Something like that.
Wes Craven.
>> That's supposed to be
the definitive real story of zombies,
and tell me how much I'm getting right and getting wrong.
First of all, what we call voodoo,
is actually vodun,
which is an official religion that involves voodoo dolls,
more spell craft practices?
>> Kind of, without getting into the weeds,
It was Vodun in Africa,
and then when they brought it over to Haiti,
as part of the African Diaspora, it became voodoo.
>> Blended with Catholicism?
>> A lot of the Catholic influences there,
like with any religion, as they start to spread out,
there's a lot of syncretism and copying,
and you see the edges start to blur.
>> I know there's something about a, what, a bokor?
Or also like paralysis,
something like when they waked up,
they belonged to the bokor?
Is any of this right?
>> That's actually, in broad strokes, pretty close.
The bokor, in voodoo, is actually a witch or a sorcerer,
and they serve the Loa, the deities, basically,
with both hands, the evil left hand, and the right hand,
so they're often like sorceress for hire.
So they're kind of the evil guys, they're the bad guys.
>> Is this a case where somebody happened to have died,
from a bear attack or something,
You go to the bokor and say, "Bring him back",
and now they belong to the bokor,
or is the bokor the one that gives them some kind of toxin,
and then makes them look dead,
and then they bring them back?
>> That's where our story really starts.
In 1980, a man walked into a Haitian village,
claiming to be Clairvius Narcisse,
a man who had died 18 years prior.
He looked a little worse for wear.
He was little disoriented and everything,
and everyone check them out,
and he knew answers to questions
that only close members of this guy's family
would actually know, and he claimed to have been
killed and resurrected by a bokor.
So he was now a zombie.
>> Did he perceive that he belonged to the bokor
at this point?
That he was a spiritual slave?
>> Now keep in mind this is all myths and legends,
but what you're describing is generally
how the zombification process worked.
>> So somebody becomes the undead living reanimated
property of mysterious sorcerer, the bokor.
>> They are delirious,
some have been diagnosed
with having catatonic schizophrenia.
>> This is a good point,
because there are some people
who almost certainly would have genuine medical conditions,
what we would perceive the psychological illnesses,
other people, and there are stories
of bad actors who continuously keep,
essentially people under enslavement,
with constantly giving them drugs
that keep them susceptible to suggestion
or unable to have the energy to run away,
or any of that stuff.
So as we talk about all this,
it feels like
we're kind of dancing around a cultural minefield.
Do you think that's the reason
nobody wants to use the word zombie
in any of the pop-culture representations?
>> Maybe so, because there could be
some accusations of the cultural theft
from people pretending to be a zombie,
because it is something that is inherently tied
to Haitian culture.
>> This story that we're talking about
took place around the early 80s.
Was the word zombie used before then?
>> Oh yeah, you can see movies dating back to like 1932,
I believe, with Bela Lugosi's 'White zombie',
which was, in fact,
about the sugarcane plantations in the West Indies,
and Bela Lugosi using voodoo magic
to raise an army from the dead,
but they're not flesh eating,
they don't roam after people,
seek out brains or anything like that.
>> What a good point,
because we've been talking about
a very particular story archetype
of somebody who is made to be dead
then brought back from the dead,
and is now essentially under the thrall
of a witch or a wizard.
Where did all the ideas of the eating the brains
and the human flesh?
>> That just traditional folklore from ghouls.
The entire world has myths about
ghouls and revenants and things that rise up from the dead
and feast on the flesh of the living at night.
It just wasn't zombies.
>> For the story we're talking about,
is there anything to the science of any of this?
I want to say something about
poison dart frogs and puffer fish.
That's all I know.
>> You're actually kind of close.
In the 80s, a Harvard ethno-botanist, named Wade Davis,
went out to Haiti
and spent a long time indoctrinating himself
and immersing himself
in all of these cultures in secret societies.
Up in the hills of Haiti and underground,
he was dealing with hive of scum and villainy,
in some cases,.
He found what he believed
was the recipe for koo- poodrey,
I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing that right,
but it's the white powder.
It's the zombie powder that bokors would use on people
to start the process.
>> Dude goes down south, comes back says,
"I found it.
"This is the magic powder that makes people into zombies."
>> Pretty much.
He studied with a bunch of the bokors,
and he took several different recipes
from all over the island,
and then went and studied them,
and he found, out of seven of them,
four of them had the same components.
>> Okay, so this feels like a story where somebody goes
and brings back to Western medicine,
something unusual, and says, for whatever reason,
this seems to be a thing,
and then Western medicine eventually studies it,
and makes, I dunno, Botox 2.0.
>> Something like that.
What he was trying to do is
track down someone's recipe, right?
And it's all passed down by oral tradition.
"How do you make this chicken casserole?"
Okay, well, this guy over here makes it with this.
>> I make it from the corpses of my enemies.
>> Right.
There were these four common ingredients.
Something from the Hilar tree frog,
which is just an irritant., all right.
>> I'm going to call that a hit. >> Cane toad,
>> I said frog, that sounds like a frog.
>> Yep, got lotsa toxins in there.
>> Tetrodotoxin. >> I don't know what that is,
but I'm going to assume I was right.
>> Puffer fish. >> Oh, I was definitely right.
[laughter]
>> And human remains.
>> Okay.
That last one's gross.
It also would make sense if---
So, we've talked about how there is a nocebo effect.
The witch doctor shakes the bone at you,
says you're going to die,
because you believe you're going to die,
you get sick and you die.
I would imagine that if what you want
is power in your community,
yes, you would want pharmacological elements
that would actually do something,
but it seems like psychologically speaking,
it would be very, very powerful
for there to be something gross in there
like the idea of human remains.
>> And also, if you're using it to people
who have grown up hearing about
the actual real legend of zombies,
It's going to work on them a lot more
than if you or I got--
>> Think about how it builds your legend
when you get an assistant,
and you send them out and you're like,
"No, no, no, I'm going to need you to dig up a few bodies."
and you're like, "Because it's ingredients."
Then somebody has to do it,
then other people hear about it
and the legend grows taller >> Exactly.
>> For this witch doctor.
>> The tetrodotoxin is the key one, right.
That puts people ina state, near death,
to where even doctors sometimes look at them and go,
"Yeah, they're dead."
and so they will actually get buried in some cases,
at which point the bokor goes back out
and gives them a second powder.
Digs them up, gives them another powder that revives them,
and keeps them in a constant state of delirium
and dissociative identity.
>> So at that point they're on the hook pharmacologically,
and you just keep them in that zombie-like state.
>> If you think about the cultural underpinnings here,
they're raising someone from the dead.
They're digging someone up who is freshly buried.
These people are thinking, "Oh, I'm a zombie now"
and they're hit with this secondary powder,
which is full of stuff like scopolamine,
which is made from detorra,
and so they're disoriented all the time,
they're hallucinating,
they're dissociating from their identity,
and they think,
"I just got pulled up from the ground,
"so this guy owns me now."
>> So, at this point with a mysterious something
that has some kind of benefits,
and so I assume they found out all the benefits?
>> Well, after all of the testing,
Mr. Davis was emphasizing that yes,
the tetrodotoxin is the main ingredient.
They found very little in those samples,
and all of the doctors that were working with him,
all of the scientists started to get really skeptical
until a big movement started calling him out
and saying, not only is this bad science,
some of them were accusing him of fraud.
>> Of straight-uo making everything up?
>> Yeah.
So we have this fascinating Indiana Jones horror story,
and then he comes back,
and the science doesn't hold up.
>> As you know, I'm a hard-core skeptic, a magician,
and whenever I hear a story
that becomes just a little bit too 'just so',
all the alarms go off,
and I'm just like,
"Too on the nose, everything's too perfect,
"there's got to be something..."
This sounds like a classic case of that.
>> Here's what makes me think that,
"Yes, it was, in fact, a con.
"This is just my opinion",
but he did receive pretty substantial
fame and fortune afterwards.
He benefited from this directly.
>> Yeah
>> It's got a lot of earmarks of a con, right?
>> Man, so now you're saying zombies aren't even real?
What's next? Frogs?
You're going to tell me frogs ain't real?
>> We're going to make some powder and try it out.
>> Nope, nope, nope >> On the next modern rogue.
>> Nope, nope, nope >> Let's do it.
>> Dude, I got a problem. >> Again?
Is it the weird, the rash thing?
Because I don't want to see it again.
You're not going to show it me, are you?
What's the problem?
>> I had a nightmare.
I had a dream that we could get our
word out to the world.
That I had an amazing message
that the whole world needed to hear,
and I was afraid for a brief moment
that I wouldn't be able to get it out
because I'm not, I'm not artistical,
and then I had a dream that it was possible
to have award-winning designs for my website.
But then in a nightmare scenario, all of a sudden,
I couldn't get my word out
because it was too popular all at once,
and I couldn't do anything
and then, all of a sudden, I realized,
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thanks to their beautiful artistic design,
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It was a beautiful dream,
that became a nightmare, that became a dream.
>> Okay, I'm confused and I might need,
maybe some sort of flowchart or something,
but its--- >> It was about butts.
>> It was about butts. >> It was about butts.
>> Okay, I knew.. >> It was butts the gathering.
It was a card game.
So okay, so okay, it's on a cheek system.
Some butts that have three cheeks
and some have five. >> Okay.
Sometimes you have to tap that ass?
>> Well, okay [laughter]
You can never ----
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[laughter]
What is up with everybody refusing to say 'zombies'?
They all have these euphemisms.
>> Yeah. >> They're Walkers.
>> They're shamblers. >> And Cleveland Steamers.
>> They're the walking sleepy.
>> Oh, euphemisms for the word zombie?
>> Yeah, I didn't even listen to what you said
until just now.
What the [bleep] is going on?
>> I dunno what kind of zombie movies you're watching, man.
You brought it up.