500 Days Underground | Flashback Friday

Astonishing Legends Network. It's Flashback Friday, and you know what that means. A classic episode of Scared All the Time's fan-favorite bonus show, New Fear Unlocked, is out of the vault and on the main feed. This episode originally aired on Patreon January 1st, 2026, but is being played by you right now. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me. You can't take a week off Not when the people need content So it's time to fill the trough With something halfway decent That only sort of rhymed Which is about halfway to decent So we're doing. Fine You're doing fine. Hey, everybody. Welcome back to New Fear Unlocked. This is. The first New Fear Unlocked of the year. Yeah. It's going to be a great year of totally bizarre stories on this show, many of which Ed has never heard of, and we intend to keep it that way so his reactions are always fresh. If you listen to New Fear Unlocked on a regular basis, you may know that this show is a little bit less fear-based. Not every... episode is good as scary as our main episodes which yes some of you some of you uh may be extra happy about um but today's episode i think if you are claustrophobic you might want to sit this way it doesn't involve anybody dying but i got a little bit of the willies uh thinking about what this woman went through so. It's not john mclean yeah. No, it's not John McClane. And it does, unlike some of our episodes, but like other of our episodes, it does tie into one of our main episodes, in this case, caves. But this involves caves and kind of time travel, weirdly. So, Ed, the headline for this article that we're covering today is, did time tick slower for a woman who spent 500 days alone in a cave? 500 days is almost two years. That's almost as many days as there are in summer. Well, come on now. I don't know. I know that that's a horrible situation. I know if I was stuck in a cave, I would also beg for time travel. If you can just fast forward to my death, that's what I would be. The kind of time travel I'd like to use. Well, this is not a woman who is trapped here. She did this of her own free will, which is almost. She's like roof man. Crazy. She's the roof man of the cave. Yeah, she's cave man, woman, cave woman. This article is in Scientific American, and it begins, A year and a half alone in a cave might sound like a nightmare to a lot of people, but Spanish athlete Beatriz Flamini emerged with a cheerful grin and said she thought she had more time. To finish her book. What? So there's lights in the cave? So, yes, there are lights in the cave. This was not a... She was not imprisoned in a cave or thrown in a cave. This was an experiment. She had almost no contact with the outside world during her impressive feat of human endurance. For 500 days, she documented her experiences to help scientists understand the effects of extreme isolation. One of the first things that became apparent on April 12th, 2023, when she emerged from the cave. Is that she would not be paid for this. And how mad she was. One of the first things that became... One of the first things that became apparent on April 12th, 2023, when she emerged from the cave, was how fluid time is, shaped more by your personality traits and the people around you than a ticking clock. When talking to reporters about her experiences, Flamini explained she rapidly lost her sense of time while in the cave. The loss of time was so profound that when her support team came to retrieve her, she was surprised that her time was up, instead believing she had only been there for 160 to 170 days. That's someone I think who you either started putting the X's on the calendar late or you like ran out of ink. I don't know if you, cause if you, if you just, well, I guess if you don't see the sun, then you don't know, and you don't have a clock. Well, then I guess it doesn't matter. I don't know if there was a clock. She definitely couldn't see the sun. In which case, I guess you start counting like to 60 and then you draw that that's been a minute, but you can't do that forever. Well, you would definitely, you would definitely just forget. I, yeah. And I think if you're in this situation and you know that you're in this situation and Like, it's one thing if you're trapped in a cave and you want to start writing X's on the walls to kind of keep track of, you know, how long you've been down there, so you know how much food you have, whatever. But in this sense, I think she probably was not looking to memorialize every day below ground. You know what I mean? Yeah, she's not waiting for rescue. There's a support team somewhere. Yeah, but also, and in that case, I think time would pass slower, I guess is what I'm saying, if you were marking each day down. Whereas here, it seems like The isolation was so extreme that she somehow experienced time in fast forward, basically. So you're thinking she was having fun because it's the only time that I know time moves faster. Time flies, they say, when you're having fun. That is a saying that I hope is not owned by anyone or we'll have to remove it from our monetized streams. Sure. But I think Yeah, I don't know if she was having fun. I think she was maybe disassociating. I think she was, you. Know, maybe... Passed out for three, four days. Yeah, passed out for three, four days at a time. Maybe she was intensely regretting her decision to do this at all. Just running into a cave wall every day until they get knocked out. Yeah. They're going to murder their whole family later because they have, like, CTE issues. Yeah. I mean, yeah, the issues that you might emerge from 500 days underground with, I think, extend far beyond CTE. Maybe you only get that if you're bonking against the wall to lose tracks of time. True, true. The big question here was, why did she lose her sense of time? Our actions, emotions, and changes in our environment can have powerful effects on the way in which our minds process time. For most people, the rising and setting of the sun marks the passing of the days. There you go. Was this written in the 1200s? Also, yeah, for most people. For most people. Who's still out there being like, I don't even pay attention to that ball. That ball is nonsense. It goes around us. The rising and setting of the sun for most people marks the passing of days. And work and social routines mark the passing of hours. In the darkness of an underground cave without the company of others, many signals of passing of time will have disappeared. So Flamini may have become more reliant on psychological processes to monitor time. So in other words, she was instead of sitting down there and being like, oh, my social routines are marking the passing of an hour. She's sitting down there, uh, just losing her mind more. That's how she's keeping track by how insane she's gone. I thought about peanuts today. I feel like every time I have a thought about peanuts, it's probably an hour. It's probably once an hour I'm thinking about how much I miss peanuts outside of the cave. I wish I had chosen a word that doesn't sound as much like penis. But I'm sure if it's sped up, it's insane. I'm down here missing peanuts so much. Oh, my God. Yeah, it just starts to blur at a certain point. The things that I've tried with these rocks. She is playing telephone with herself. It's a sentence that's getting more and more insane as she just kind of forgets what she even said. That's wild. I guess you would. 500 days, dude, without a sense of time. I don't know if I've ever gone 24 hours. Do you think she was jacked? Like, she got out, like, she did her push-ups. She was an athlete when she went in. She was an athlete. Invalid leaving, maybe. But I'm saying, if she, like, worked out every day, because you used to be so bored, you might as well. In prison movies, they're always, like, taking out books from the prison library to, like, do deeper push-ups. So you think she was doing the trapped in a cave version of that? I think maybe. Yeah. She came out just ripped. Hold on. I am looking up Beatrice Flamini. Dude, there's not even a frame she can fit in. She's so huge, so muscly. Would you believe she's actually quite thin in this photo? Well, maybe they didn't give her food in the cave. Here, hold on a second. Okay, I'm opening it now. I'm sharing the screen. Here is a person. Here is a person who was in a cave. For 500 days. 500 days. Not what I was expecting. In some ways what I was expecting, but not at all what I was expecting. More like 500 days of bummer. Oh, my God. This is a person who for sure says the word bummer. This is a person who's maybe surfed into the cave. Possibly. This also could be Rob Zombie. Yeah. I don't know if she got those cave miles a little bit on her, maybe. But I'd like to know what type of athlete was she prior? Because I'm thinking like marathon runner or mountain climber. Yeah, she's a mountaineer. Okay, that tracks. Also, for some reason, I thought this happened in like the 70s. This happened in 2021. Yeah, this is her modern outfits. Yeah. There's some more information in this People Magazine article. She began living 230 feet below ground in November 2021 as part of a project called Time Cave. Oh. She spent 500 days down there. And I will say. This photo really does her dirty. The moment that she comes out of a cave after 500 days. Do you think that's what this is from? Is that what it said this was? That's what that's from. I would look worse. I looked like that this morning. And that's just after shoveling the driveway. I guess she went down there. Because in this photo, people are wearing masks. And I was like, she would have come out being like, why is everyone wearing masks? But she went down in the middle of COVID. Maybe that's why she went there. She went underground to escape COVID. She had pre-existing conditions. She was like, just send me to the cave. She was like, I would rather not breathe in the cave than breathe. Well, I mean, so this, what year did she come out? Let's see. So she entered the cave in Southern Spain on Saturday, November 20th, 2021. Okay. Instantly, I don't give a shit anymore. It's not interesting to me. I mean, we want to know for the listener, but I thought, to your point a moment ago, if she went in like 2019 and then came out to like a totally different world, everyone's wearing masks, that's insane. Yeah. But yeah, the fact that like COVID-19 Is fully out. You know, COVID has been released. Yes. At this point. And then she goes into the cave. It's kind of, you know. So she was down there. 500 days was from November 20th, 2021 to April 14th, 2023. Okay. Those were. I mean, stuff happened. I mean, I don't know. Do they give her... No, she doesn't have computers. Like, do they have to give her a bunch of old newspapers? You wouldn't believe what you missed. She said she passed the time by exercising. So, Ed, there you go. Reading books, drawing, painting, and knitting. In fact, I didn't want to come out, she said. I will say that it seems like they weren't maybe sending food. Am I a dick here? The woman in the only photo I've seen of her, she seems a bit... Not frail, but thin, because I thought she was going to be ripped. But I guess if you get ripped and you don't eat, then you're just going to look like, you know, fucking, I don't know, some character in a movie that I can't think of right now. Well, this says that during the experience... They should send out some protein. She was monitored by psychologists, researchers, and spolologists who study caves. I don't think any of those people know about protein and macronutrients. They never made contact with her. They would if they, well, I guess they wouldn't, but they'd probably run in if it flatlined. Well, yeah, I assume being monitored must include, like, a physical degree, because that's part of what you would be monitoring, I would imagine. Well, I mean, I imagine she would probably have a couple, like, you know, those little things, those little circle things they put, like, on EKGs. Right. Whatever, I'm only going off of what I remember from the movie Alien, though. So I don't, you know what I mean? It's like the little screens where you see, I guess that's aliens, but. Either way. Yeah, monitored, though. They have it. It's an alien, isn't it? Oh, no, maybe it is an alien. It might be. I don't recall. This woman might have met an alien down there. In which case, don't let her come out. She lost track of time after two months and thought she'd been underground for. A hundred years. After an egg was implanted in her. When they came in to get me, she told reporters, I was asleep. I thought something had happened. I said, already? Surely not. I've only thought of peanuts three times. Yeah, there's no way. It's been more than six hours. But based on her basal general body shape, I mean, she might not be like me, just thinking of food all day, like counting sheep. No, I think you have to be insanely disciplined to. Even imagine doing this. That's probably why they went for athletes. Yes. Athletes are some of the most disciplined people I would imagine in the world. Well, I think... Not in terms of, like, crime. There's always, like, so-and-so killed their wife. But I'm saying, like, disciplined in terms of, like, following a pattern every day, even when you don't want to. I don't think they went after athletes. I think this was her idea. Wait, what? She says, I'm still stuck on November 21st, 2021, Flamini told reporters the day she emerged. I don't know anything about the world. Oh, she was a baby on November 21st? What do you mean. You don't know anything? She might not be fresh in sense of freshly born like a baby. But I imagine maybe a fresh divorce or something would get you in this mindset. Right. Some sort of. Time passes. You're running from something. Yeah. Right? Yeah. But the reason I say I think this is her idea, the next paragraph is, Flamini may have set a world record too. Her team believes she holds the record for surviving the longest time while underground, though the Guinness Book of Records has yet to confirm. So her team believes makes me think this was her. We don't know. I mean, the team might just be the person that she was assigned to. I don't know. I don't think they, it doesn't sound like. Also, it's almost cruel to submit this to the, for the world record of surviving the longest time while underground, because this was done safely as part of the experiment. The person, the person who's going to get knocked off the top who, who, you know, got their arms stuck in a boulder 127 hours style is going. To be like, what the fuck? Of course she's... That also sounds dangerous. It sounds like a dangerous precedent. I feel like the Guinness Book of Records shouldn't award or reward shit that's survival stuff, maybe? That way it keeps other people from trying to beat it. Right, right. You know what I mean? If it was like... That's why there's no Guinness World of... As far as I know, there's no Guinness Book of World Records of biggest mass shooting... Suicide attempts. Yeah. Like maybe it's to, or like, you know, followers of a cult. Like, I think they should not reward certain things to try and make people one up them. True. But there's gotta be, I mean, how many things in the Guinness Book of World Records are things that if you tried to one up them would probably ruin your life somehow. No, you're right. I mean, maybe not criminal. I think there was an episode of VR I was watching where they were convinced this girl was a victim of child abuse from her father. But the reveal was that they are both trying to win Guinness World Record attempts, but going through the book to find ones that they might be able to do. And so many of them are dangerous, and the girl keeps getting hurt. And so they have to bring in all these videos of them juggling and riding on unicycles to be like, I swear my dad doesn't beat me. I just keep falling off unicycles or whatever. That was like season five. We've all heard that one before. Yeah. I have to close this photo of this woman on the other monitor though, because it's staring into my fucking soul. So let me close that. That's the stare she developed during 500 days underground. She said. Also, by the way, does she need special like coming? I don't, in my mind, she's in the dark, like in a dank cave. It's probably not the case. But she'd come out like a mole woman where she could see totally different. She could see infrared. She's been in the dark so long. No, there's... Hold on a second. One of these articles had a... Here we go. Let's see. If it's a studio apartment, I'll be so pissed. It's just fully built in. Fluorescent lights. The guy who had previously held the record for surviving the longest underground is like, God damn it. It's not the same. I mean, she'll be so mad if this is the case. I'm going to build a privatized prison that's just underground. And then everybody ends up in the book. All these criminals. So this is a photo of the general setup. That's not a prison at all. This is someone who tried to throw a party in a cave. gave up pretty early on. Yeah, no one showed up. She was like, fine. I just actually wanted to be here by myself anyway, so it's fine. I don't care. I don't even care. I'll just stay here. I love it so much that this didn't affect me. I actually did, in fact, want to be here on my own so much that I will, like, I'll see you when I get out because I love whatever. Now, I'm going to quickly try and put this up on the screen, but also, you know what this is giving? This is giving the spiders episode where like certain spiders are endangered because people keep throwing parties in caves where those spiders live yeah yeah yeah yeah and so like just through their human trash it like fucked up these spiders ecosystem killed she killed the last living cave spider in this yeah she just sat on him trying to kiss it because she'd been alone so long in this cave she was in. Love with it and thought that this is gonna be her second husband. And then accidentally stepped on it and it was like oh my god i killed my best friend and lover why. Does it look like she's sleeping on legos i think she is she's sleeping on a mattress made of legos the most uncomfortable looking covering i. Think that's her workout area because it's like the shoes are off in the middle there are two little lego mats and she's got her elastic band so there must be a separate sleep section there's no way she's sleeping on this as well as work but i say no way having no idea for all i know this is this is they were like we looked at the list of things you said you need this seems like not enough and she's like it's fine this is how i live in my apartment this is how i'll live in the cave. Hey, are you enjoying this old episode of New Fear Unlocked? If so, don't forget that you can stay up to date with brand new commercial-free episodes of it every week the main show's off. Now here's one of those ad breaks you could be avoiding. Well, she said she never considered pressing the panic button she was given. She even pressed on through a fly invasion, which left her covered in bugs. So there's fear number two, being trapped online. underground in a cave covered in bugs. Which not only covered in bugs but covered in bugs in such a way where it's not even a big deal like that's insane to me like not only that the number of like fear factor things that she's not concerned. If i if i found myself covered in flies i would be worried that i was dead. I would be more worried that the panic button is just a staples that was easy button that they've taped to the wall and it doesn't actually go to anything because I would be hitting it so many fucking times. That is a very funny, horrible trick to play on a person. Hey man, we've got a panic button down here. So if you need to get out, you just hit that button and it's like, that was easy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's also what the person who installed it thought when they just taped it to a wall. So, yeah, she spent all this time down in a cave. At her party gym. She said, yeah, in her party gym. The extreme athlete also experienced auditory hallucinations while in the cave. She needed assistance standing up while speaking with reporters because of balance issues. Still, Flamini was thrilled by the experience, which she called, quote, excellent. And, quote, unbeatable. You have to remain conscious of your feelings, Flumini said. If you're afraid, that's something natural. But never let panic in or you get paralyzed. Oh, I mean, she's not wrong. I do have a couple of questions about the wobbly legs, can't stand up thing. Is it because she refused any kind of protein or food to be thrown down here with her fucking weird Lego mats? Or is it maybe maybe if you're in like you never see the horizon, like you have a hard time. Like, adjusting, like, whatever the, you know, shit in your brain is. Like, if you just never see the horizon, you don't really know what straight across is. I don't know. That's a stupid thought, maybe, but... No, that's true. I mean, there'd have to be times underground where you'd, like, find yourself wondering if you were, like, upside down. I think gravity would prevent that, but... Well, no, no, no. But, like, you know, that idea that, like, on the curvature of the Earth that you would be... Well, I guess you'd always be right side up. That's what I'm thinking too, but I don't know. I think it's probably more to do with the fact that this lady is working out all day and consuming no protein and drinking no water. Yes, more likely that. I found a Reddit thread about her experience, and this one guy, Vlade B., asks, So many questions. What did she eat? Did she have a source of clean water? One would assume yes. How many batteries did her headlight require? Where did she go to the toilet? Did she not require medical attention at any moment? Did someone check up on her from time to time? And so much more I'd like to know. Like, did she ever marry that spider? Did she at least attend its funeral? Yeah. Did she both cause its death and attend its funeral? You know it. Absolutely. I mean, these are genuinely decent questions because the only photos you've shown me so far are her... post you know i'll never unsee that picture because her eyes for some reason go through the lens in that picture because she has super cave eyes now yeah that's what the mutation was yeah the only other picture you've shown me is this like fucking cave workout disco and uh there's nothing that person asked about present in any part of this frame. No, I mean, most of the other photos of her underground are also disco oriented, which does make me think that maybe that was the only room. There's this sort of like selfie of her. Oh, my. OK, so this is why I am not a still from the descent. No, but there is. This is, I think, maybe week one. So this is a person who was like, here I am in my cave, you know, get ready with me video in the cave. Hey fam, I'm in my cave. What up? I'll never tell you how many batteries this headlamp takes. And she does have some sort of like Scorpion or Sub-Zero type mask. Yes. So there must be something where they were like, You know, don't worry about the gas coming out of that cave wall. She is dressed like a character in a fighting game. And she has the background for it, too. This could be a Mortal Kombat level. Sure. And some... I don't know. I have nothing more to say about that. But it is... She looks wet here, which I don't know if that's just years of grease without showering. I would hope they picked a dry cave. You can pick whatever cave you want, so hopefully you pick a cave that's not leaking on you all the time. I don't know if there's a dry cave. I don't know if this, before they sent this... That's true. I don't know if it's, like, lit entirely by silkworms. Well, if you have to. I mean, I guess maybe her water is getting pumped down there, but I guess I was gonna say, if you have to drink water, I guess it can't be a dry cave. There has to be a. I don't even know the distribution of stuff to her. I don't know if it's, like, in the... Whatever season of Lost it is, or they're in the bear cage, and they gotta, like, solve a riddle to get, like, a bear cookie... That, like, fish cookie? I don't know if it's that system where she has to, like, press a button and a fish cookie comes through her chute. Or if it's like, hey, it's Wednesday. Please step away from the entrance to the cave. We're going to bring in your stuff. This is the opening paragraph for the New Yorker's profile on her. And, Ed, tell me if any of this is surprising to you. When Beatrice Flamini was growing up in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. I really liked being there, she says. She'd read books to her dolls and write on a chalkboard while giving them lessons in math or history. As she got older, she told me she sometimes imagined being a professor like Indiana Jones, the kind who slipped away from the classroom to be, quote, who he really was. Oh, wow. In the early 1990s, while Flamini was studying to be a sports instructor, she visited a cave for the first time. She and a friend drove north of Madrid to El Regu... Regu... Regu... Oh, my goodness. Read it. Spell it. I thought it was El Reguero, but it's spelled R-E-G-U-E-R-I-L-L-O. So Reguillo. I see how you're saying it. It's tough because you've got to get to that double L-Y sound, but there's a whole two kind of up and downs in there. So anyway, she went to a cave. She went to a cave known for its Paleolithic engravings. She says, we stayed until Sunday and came out only because we had classes and work. It sounds like us at film school. Sure. Sure. She recalls that it was dark but cozy, and inside its walls she experienced an overwhelming sense of love. This is all tracking. Has an association of being her own self in the darkness of a cave. Gotta get back there. Has a huge imagination anyway, talking to dolls, what have you. This is a person built for this. This is a single... They couldn't have found a better person for this. After graduating, Flamini taught aerobics in Madrid. She was admired for her charisma and commitment. Everyone wanted me for their classes, she says. They fought over me. Okay. Well, by the time she turned 40 in 2013, she had a partner, a car, and a house. She felt unsatisfied. She didn't really care about financial stability, and unlike most people she knew, she didn't want children. She experienced an existential crisis. Quote, You know you're gonna die. Today, tomorrow, within 50 years, Flamini told herself. What is it that you want to do with your life before that happens? The immediate answer, she remembers, was to grab my knapsack and go and live in the mountains. Okay. Which is different than a cave. It's actually, one might argue, the opposite. Of a cave. Sure. But mountains have caves. They do. They do. Might be easier to walk into a cave than climb up a mountain. Part and parcel. So yeah, I mean, I'm not going to read the whole New Yorker article. It's very interesting, but it's very long. So what we take from all of this, to go back to the original Scientific American article. Is be yourself and be yourself out in the open. Don't associate being yourself with being in a fucking cave. Or else this is what's going to happen to you. Or marrying a spider. Well, the spider was not the person she needed, but it was the person who was there. Yeah, he was there for her. Can you imagine? He puts one of his eight hands on her knee. Yeah. Tell me more. Don't kneel up. Crush. And I need you guys to send me down a matchbox so I can bear it. this she had. That's what that's what caused her to hit the panic button they were like oh my god what's going on she's like guys they need a matchbox and i. Need it immediately i can't give up one of my crocs to uh bury it. In One way in which we keep track of the passage of time, according to Scientific American, is memory. If we don't know how long we've been doing something for, we use the number of memories formed during the event as an index to the amount of time that has passed. So she wouldn't be thinking of peanuts, she'd be thinking back to each time she ate a peanut. The more memories we form in an event or era, the longer we perceive it to have lasted. Busy days and weeks filled with lots of novel and exciting events are typically remembered as longer than more monotonous ones where nothing noteworthy happens. For Flamini, the absence of social interaction combined with a lack of information about family and current affairs, at this time that would have been the war in Ukraine and the reopening of society after COVID lockdowns, may have significantly reduced the number of memories she formed during her isolation. The loss of time may also reflect the reduced importance of time in cave life. In the outside world, the busyness of modern life and social pressure to avoid wasting time mean many of us live in a perpetual state of time stress. For us, the clock. I do feel that, dude. I do. We live in time stress. And the answer is to do cave life. Fuck, man. I can't. Is there a second answer I can do? Because right now, if that's the only solution, I have to just continue to live in time stress. For us, the clock is a gauge of how productive and successful we are as adults. Interestingly, Flamini is not the first to experience a change in her experience of time after a change in environment. Similar experiences were reported by French scientist Michel Siffre during his two- to six-month-long cave expeditions in the 60s and 70s. A loss of time was consistently reported by adults and children who spent prolonged periods isolated in nuclear bunkers The article adds in parentheses for research purposes. Oh, okay. At the height of the Cold War. Yeah. It is also frequently. Reported by people. Sounds like for preparation purposes. Yes. It was also frequently reported by people serving prison sentences and was widely experienced by the general public during COVID-19 lockdowns. I wonder if they've ever asked like miners, like coal miners who can do like 16, 18 hour shifts underground, not see the sunlight. Yeah. Like how that, what the, how long those shifts feel. Do they feel fast? Do they feel, if you're doing like, you know, you know, I'm putting in a double this day and you're going in when it's still dark, you're coming out when it's still dark potentially. Or those people who live in, you know, Alaska and stuff where it's like 30 days of night, 30 days of sun. I guess there's clocks and events and you have to go to work. So I guess that, you know. Yeah. There are like some things or maybe you can get similar results without living in a cave. That would be wild if in Alaska, the 30 days tonight or whatever, no one had to work. They were like, I don't know. The sun disappeared and we don't know when it's going to come back. So you're off. You're off. We can't pay you. We can't pay you. We can't pay you. No one has to come in. Yeah. We can't figure it out. I was laughing so hard the other day. Ed, as you know, I'm a 90 day fiance watcher. Sure. And this, this, I was watching 90 day fiance the other way with Anna and And this guy brings his parents from very, very rural Oregon to meet the woman that he's been seeing in the Philippines. And when they land, his dad seems like a pretty. So he's in the Philippines and they're coming to him. And, no, well, they're with him. They all go together. All three of them travel together. Oh, okay. But the dad, it mentions, has never been on a plane before. And there's a shot of him looking out the window, like, almost crying at how beautiful it is. Oh, okay. We don't know. I don't know the storyline. He may be crying about what's going on in other parts of his life. That, too. That, too. But he's, like, wowed by this. And then they get off the plane. And if I was watching him in the background of a lot of shots and he just has this look on his face, like what happened? And I couldn't stop laughing about a season of 90 day where one of the people who's flown just can't even focus on the relationship because they're like so astonished by air travel. What they've just done. Just someone, just some guy from Oregon who's like, wait, does anybody else know about those things? Yeah. How did this happen? I've been walking everywhere for years. You're saying these things will just take you to love? You just get on, you go in the tube and then you come out and you're married. You're married. Anyway, it reminds me of that. Yeah, everywhere he's been traveling took 90 days. Until now. This article ends by noting that caves, nuclear bunkers, prisons, and global pandemics share two features which seem to create an altered sense of time. Well, not a roof, because... One of those is just like an event. They isolate us from the wider world and involve confined spaces. So I guess, yes, on the broadest, broadest imaginable level. Yeah. Should they share? They take place during time on the planet. Yeah, where maybe you might make a decision you otherwise wouldn't have made, like to be cooped up. Yeah. For people who become confined against their will, Time can become a prison itself. Prisoners of war and people serving prison sentences often report that monitoring the passage of time can become an obsession. It would seem that we are only really able to let go of it when we are in control of it. Right, so that's what I was saying. She's less concerned about how long she's going to be down there. The article concludes, Flamini's freedom may make leaving civilization behind for the caves look like an appealing prospect. However, life underground is not for the faint-hearted. Survival depends on your ability to maintain a high level of mental resilience. So hey, screenwriters could sign up for this. I still wouldn't get anything done. Even with zero distractions in a cave, I wouldn't get anything to hand it in on time. If you have the ability to remain calm and composed when things get tough, nope. A strong belief that you're in control of your own behaviors, nope. Known as an internal locus of control and become easily absorbed in your own thoughts, That one... Don't do this. You might have the fortitude to succeed. Oh, okay. I guess I was hearing those wrong. Yeah, they're saying if you can do those things, I'm just saying I cannot do those things. Oh, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. Except become easily absorbed in my own thoughts. However, you might find it simpler to switch off your notifications, clear the calendar, and get lost in a bit of me time. Okay. I think Beatrice probably took a lot of me time. Yeah, I was about to say, I couldn't think of two things that are more different. than, you know, her version of me time and literally anyone else. Yeah. Well, I'm happy she found something she loved. The spider. She loves the spider and the cave. She found two things. But here's the thing. I mean, it is a particularly, I imagine all over the world, like an insane, just insane time. So I almost wonder if she came out of the cave and was like, hey, is everything still a fucking dumpster fire? And they're like, yeah. And she's like, I'm going back in the cave then. Yeah, she's like. Call me when shit's like normal again. She's like, she comes up and. There is still a pandemic, so she went back down. No, it's not. She's not. I heard it was, though. So I'm going to go. It's long COVID. Yeah. This is long COVID. It's long COVID. Hey. No one should support that, what I said. We've lost three Patreon listeners immediately. That brings us to the end of our new Fear Unlocked. In this case, I think I've unlocked a number of different fears, mostly revolving around being covered in bugs and Hundreds of feet underground. I don't like how they kind of cruised past that too. And also one day she was covered in bugs. And it was like, what? That's the end of that era of her time down there? I need to know more about that. But also it bothers me. It just bothers me because it's so different how I would do it. But it bothers me that the way they wrote it, the way you'd read it to me, it almost sounds like they came to bring her something and were like, oh my gosh, you're covered in bugs. Yeah. And then she's like, oh, I didn't want to bother anyone with this. Oh, these? Yeah, this isn't... It's like Temple of Doom when Kate... Not Kate Capshaw. Oh, yeah, Kate Capshaw. She puts her hand into the thing? Yeah, she's got the bugs all over her back. No, that's... Isn't that Alfred Molina in the first one? You're right. I'm conflating the two bits. She puts her hand into the wall and there's bugs in there. Right, right, right, right, right, right. And he. She married Steven Spielberg, so that almost feels like their negging phase where he's like, yeah, put your hand in that... He's always fucking with actors and stuff. She's like, weirdly, this is exactly what our first date was like. Yeah, this is working. So yeah, that's what I'm saying. The fact that she didn't bother anyone with it, she didn't hit the panic button, is so, to me, that's crazy. Crazy. I mean, it is a feat deserving of being placed into the Guinness Book. Of World Records. Or, I don't know, actually, I also don't know how observed she was, because it could be a thing where She's like fully observed, like a Star Trek thing where it's like, we don't, we don't interfere. And in which case some guy's like listen she gets a peanut butter sandwich today you're gonna enter the cave you're gonna think she's not there it's the pile of bugs that is actually her so just leave the sandwich by the pile of bugs and he was like should we do something about the bugs and he's like that we just are here to observe our hands are tied our hands are tied her hands are. Covered in bug bites but our bugs are tied we're tied in other ways i mean we we discussed around the office tying a bunch of brooms together to make one long broom. To brush the bugs off but we didn't have enough. Rooms and also it was time to go home it came down from the top can't do it yeah she didn't hit the can't do it we don't have a broom budget just here to observe nothing we can do. We're just here to observe well she has to live like this ed and i are here to create We're here to create content that you guys like. Now, if you're listening to this, you're already signed up for the Patreon. You should check out the higher levels of the Patreon if you haven't yet. There's some crazy good stuff in there. Why not? But otherwise, I'm Chris Colari. And I'm Ed Ficola. And this is New Fear Unlocked, part of the Scared All the Time Network, part of the Astonishing Legends Network. Part of the Topside Explorers Network. We will not be found underground in any way, in a cave. And we will see you next time. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. The theme song may say this show has no name, but as you know, it actually has a name. New Fear Unlocked. The thing you guys always say, that's the name. The name is New Fear Unlocked, but now it's over. There's nothing more after this Thanks for coming