[RADIOLAB INTRO]

RODNEY FOX: December the 8th, 1963, was the exact date. I was just drifting in really quietly with my gun in front of me, and I was just caressing the trigger and I was just about to pull it. It's a funny thing, you know? I thought I'd been hit by a train. And I don't know, I'd never been on a train, but it was such a big, powerful whack. Knocked the mask off my face, knocked the gun out of my hand, thumped me into the bottom. And then I was being hurled through the water faster than I'd ever, ever, ever swam.

LULU MILLER: This is Radiolab. I'm Lulu Miller.

LATIF NASSER: And I'm Latif Nasser. And that voice was Rodney Fox.

LULU: Who our producer Rachael Cusick talked to—why, Rach?

RACHAEL CUSICK: Yeah, so I went to go visit Rodney because for people like me who love the ocean, his story is something that I try to tell myself would never happen—but it did.

RODNEY FOX: Of course, it couldn't be a train. It had to be a shark, a big shark. And instinctively, I gouged around its head with my fingers, and my arm went into its mouth over its teeth and ripped. And the shark seemed to let me go, and I fell out of its mouth where my chest was in its teeth. And I instinctively pushed it away. And then I realized I'm still holding my breath 60 feet underwater and I'm gonna drown. So I headed straight up towards the surface.

RACHAEL: Rodney makes it to the top, takes a huge gasp of air. But then ...

RODNEY FOX: I looked down, and there through pink water, which I realized was my blood, there was this great big head, these big white teeth coming with the mouth wide open straight towards me. And ...

RACHAEL: Just before the shark got to him ...

RODNEY FOX: Bang and thrash!

RACHAEL: It turned, grabs these fish Rodney had tied to his belt and dragged Rodney back down.

RODNEY FOX: Deeper and deeper and deeper. And then a miracle happened: the line snapped.

RACHAEL: And Rodney began floating up towards the surface.

RODNEY FOX: Like a leaf drops down from a tree in a waving sort of a way.

RACHAEL: Rodney gets to the surface. There's blood everywhere, and he shouts for help.

RODNEY FOX: Yelled out, "Shark! Shark!" And a boat came over. They dragged me into the boat and raced me to shore.

RACHAEL: So the reason I went to go talk to Rodney is because this Friday is the 50th anniversary of the movie ...

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jaws trailer: There is a creature alive today ...]

RACHAEL: ... Jaws.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jaws trailer: ... who has survived millions of years of evolution ...]

RACHAEL: The original summer blockbuster, but also a movie that taught the nation—if not the world—to be terrified of sharks.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jaws trailer: It lives to kill.]

RACHAEL: It's the seed that bloomed countless nightmares.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jaws trailer: A mindless eating machine.]

LATIF: Yeah.

LULU: Mm-hmm.

RACHAEL: Yeah. And I mean, I'm in the ocean all the time. Like, I'm a volunteer lifeguard, I do open water swimming, I surf. Like, an absurd amount of my life is built around the ocean. And I realized though, like, the only—the only time I think about sharks is when I think about shark attacks.

LULU: Hmm.

RACHAEL: And I didn't know anything about sharks. And so I called you guys up because you're kind of the only ones who answer these kinds of calls that I make.

LATIF: [laughs]

RACHAEL: And—and I was like, "Let's do some shark stories."

LATIF: And then you came back with a—with a school of stories.

RACHAEL: I brought back quite a haul. [laughs]

LULU: Brought back so much we were like, "You know what? We're not doing a shark episode."

LATIF: We're doing a week of shark, a non-trademark-infringing week of shark, completely different than Shark Week, of course.

RACHAEL: [laughs] Yes.

LULU: Absolutely it's a different thing. We have got a shark story coming every day this week, starting this morning. Some are scary, some are beautiful, some are adorable. We got sharks that fly.

LATIF: Sharks that glow in the dark.

LULU: Sharks that might cure cancer.

LATIF: And we're gonna start with the great white shark. Not only the shark from Jaws, it's also the shark that attacked our guy Rodney Fox at the beginning of this episode.

RACHAEL: Yeah. And the reason we're actually starting with Rodney's story and the story of this shark is not just because it's my literal drop-dead nightmare, but because his story and how he responded to this attack afterwards, it is intimately tied up in our collective fear of sharks.

LATIF: Okay, so—so go on. So go on. What happened?

RACHAEL: Okay. Okay. So Rodney gets to the hospital, and the doctors are like, "Dear God, like, this guy is a mess."

LULU: [gasps]

RACHAEL: I actually got to see the wetsuit he was wearing at the time.

RACHAEL: There's just a giant slash, like someone took a bread knife and sliced him in half.

RACHAEL: Rodney had lost a huge amount of blood.

RODNEY FOX: Every rib in my chest broken.

RACHAEL: The tendons in his hand were severed.

RODNEY FOX: A lung punctured as well.

RACHAEL: I mean, he really almost died. But obviously, he's here. He didn't.

RODNEY FOX: I woke up. I didn't know whether I was in heaven or hell. Thank goodness the walls weren't painted black.

RACHAEL: He was alive, but he was in really rough shape.

RODNEY FOX: I had a temperature of 105°. I couldn't lift my head off the pillow.

RACHAEL: He was in a ton of pain.

RODNEY FOX: Horrific. It was just unbelievable.

RACHAEL: He says he would just lay there in bed, his eyes fixed on this big clock on the wall.

RODNEY FOX: And you could see the second hand tick, tick, tick. I was watching this tick. I remember it so much.

RACHAEL: He was in the hospital for a week, then two, then three. And at some point he had what I would consider to be kind of a baffling thought.

RODNEY FOX: Of all the things in the world, I love my family first and I would never give up diving.

RACHAEL: "I want to get back in the water."

LATIF: What? Why?

RACHAEL: Yeah. So Rodney had always loved the ocean. He would go fishing with his dad. And his dad would always just be pulling these fish out of the water. But when Rodney was, like, 10 or 11, he decided he wanted to see what was down there for himself.

RODNEY FOX: I decided—I'd heard about masks and I made my own mask.

RACHAEL: This was before you could just go to the store and buy a pair of goggles. So Rodney found, like, a tube from a tire.

RODNEY FOX: And I got some glass.

RACHAEL: Strapped it around his face.

RODNEY FOX: It was the wrong size for my head. It was rough as guts.

RACHAEL: And he jumped in.

RODNEY FOX: I saw my first beautiful fish underwater—a box fish.

RACHAEL: It was little, like the size of a softball.

RODNEY FOX: Really boxy body, and a tiny little tail. Deedle deedle deedle!

RACHAEL: It was just sort of levitating in front of him.

RODNEY FOX: And colors, the colors were so bright.

RACHAEL: Orange with, like, iridescent blue stripes and spots all over it.

RODNEY FOX: And it was so cute. And I just never forget that first sight from underwater.

RACHAEL: Just imagine that, when you've never seen a YouTube video of the ocean. There was no Blue Planet, no David Attenborough. Jacques Cousteau was still years away from doing his thing.

RODNEY FOX: We really didn't know very much about the oceans.

RACHAEL: So seeing this fish and all these other fish swimming around down there ...

RODNEY FOX: It was like going to the moon. It still brings, you know, warm shivers to my—my heart.

RACHAEL: And then pretty much as soon as it was there, his goggles fall apart. Water rushes in. And it was gone.

LATIF: He got a glimpse!

LULU: Oh, I love that.

RACHAEL: He had this little taste.

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: But he—it got him hooked. Rodney started diving all the time.

RODNEY FOX: And we never knew what we were going to see.

RACHAEL: By the time he was a teenager ...

RODNEY FOX: Goggles came for the first time, and my mother, for Christmas, bought me my first pair of goggles. And, ah! It was a new world.

RACHAEL: He started spearfishing with some friends, made a little club.

RODNEY FOX: It was called the Octopus Club.

RACHAEL: And by the time he's in his 20s ...

RODNEY FOX: 23, 24 years of age.

RACHAEL: ... he's entering competitions.

RODNEY FOX: And we trained. We used to run around the block together. We used to do push ups against each other.

RACHAEL: They'd practice holding their breath for as long as they could.

RODNEY FOX: And this is a really bad thing. At the time, I was driving an explosives truck. And to practice, I would hold my breath and count telegraph poles. I could have blacked out.

RACHAEL: I would not have wanted to be on the road behind you that day.

RODNEY FOX: No! No!

RACHAEL: Rodney says he loved the fishing and the competition, but really it was all an excuse to just go down there and look at stuff.

RODNEY FOX: The beauty of the underwater scenery was so intense.

RACHAEL: And so after the shark attack, when people would come up to him and say ...

RODNEY FOX: Give up diving and never go back in the water again.

RACHAEL: ... he thought, "Are you kidding me? And never see that beautiful world again? No way."

RODNEY FOX: My first day back in the water was only, like, four—three or four months after my attack. And it was the first outing by all the clubs again down at a local beach where they were going snorkeling. My wife actually paddled me out on a big surfboard in the middle of all these other 10 or 15 heads of divers going up and down on this reef. And I went into the middle of them because I thought the shark won't be there. And I put my mask on, and a funny thing happened: the sun shining on all of the riplets of the water were sending diamonds down into the sea, and I saw them as little sharks. And I said, "They're all coming at me."

RACHAEL: And so he pops out of the water.

RODNEY FOX: And I shook my head and all the sharks went away.

RACHAEL: But this experience this day, it really rocked him. He wants to be there, he loves the ocean more than anything.

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: But he's still so afraid. He's in this, like, fight with his mind.

RODNEY FOX: If you look at the statistics of it all, how many people are actually killed or bitten per year, it's quite minimal, to the amount of people that go diving out in the water.

RACHAEL: Like, Lulu, if you had to guess for 2024, last year ...

LULU: Mm-hmm?

RACHAEL: Do you want to guess, like, how many people died from shark attacks around the world?

LULU: How many people died?

RACHAEL: Yes.

LULU: I don't know. Like, maybe 970.

RACHAEL: Okay, so take that number and subtract 963.

LULU: Seven. So seven. Seven people.

RACHAEL: Seven people.

LULU: Seven singular people.

RACHAEL: Seven confirmed fatalities from sharks last year.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: So just to put that into perspective.

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: These are a few of the things that will kill more humans than sharks every year.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: So at the beach alone, the things that are way more likely to get you ...

LULU: Yeah.

RACHAEL: ... at the beach are rip currents.

LULU: Water itself.

RACHAEL: Water itself.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: Skin cancer—huge one. And actually, surprisingly, holes that little kids dig in the sand.

LULU: Holes? Really?

RACHAEL: Well actually, those holes are about as likely to kill you as a shark. And those are just at the beach.

LULU: Okay.

RACHAEL: Zoom out a little bit.

LULU: Yeah?

RACHAEL: Lightning strikes.

LULU: Are more than sharks?

RACHAEL: Yeah. 24,000 people a year, apparently. Selfies.

LULU: That's so sad.

RACHAEL: It's a really bad way to go.

LULU: Okay, so you're saying—you're saying, like ...

RACHAEL: Wait a second. One more. One more. One more.

LULU: Yeah?

RACHAEL: The one stat that I just love as a New Yorker is that you are ten times more likely to be bitten by a New Yorker than you are to be bitten by a shark. [laughs]

LULU: I kind of believe that.

RACHAEL: Which honestly stacks up.

LULU: I get that. I get that. Okay.

LULU: But but but but but but but but but but but ...

RACHAEL: Yeah.

LULU: Sharks, man! Like, they are so fast and so big and, like, I can hear these statistics, but if we're at the beach and you tell me there are sharks in the water, I'm not gonna go in. Could it be analogous to a snake kind of fear, where it's just like—or I don't happen to have it, but a spider fear where it's like, we come out ready to be afraid of these things because it would've served us?

RACHAEL: Yeah. Well, according to this scientist I spoke to named Chris Lowe ...

CHRIS LOWE: Professor of marine biology and the director of the shark lab at Cal State Long Beach.

RACHAEL: ... that is totally true for some animals.

CHRIS LOWE: There are land animals that we co-evolved with that we have innate fear.

RACHAEL: But not for sharks.

CHRIS LOWE: Psychologists have done studies where they've shown babies pictures of snakes and spiders, and they react with fear. Then they show them a picture of a shark and there's no reaction.

RACHAEL: Really?

CHRIS LOWE: Yeah.

RACHAEL: Chris pointed out the obvious fact that ...

CHRIS LOWE: We're not an aquatic animal.

RACHAEL: ... for most of human history, people had very few interactions with sharks.

CHRIS LOWE: It was this beast that people were told about that they rarely get to see.

RACHAEL: And Chris says when all you have are stories ...

CHRIS LOWE: What happens is it allows people's imaginations to take over.

RACHAEL: Like, we didn't have goggles until, like, the 1950s, so we didn't—we knew that things were taking us—we never actually ever saw these creatures. Like, the most we might see is the fin.

CHRIS LOWE: We're given a few pieces of information, and then we begin to develop this image of what these animals are like. We make the monster in our head.

RACHAEL: And in a way, that is exactly what was happening for Rodney. Like, yes he had been attacked, but what he really feared was what he couldn't see.

RODNEY FOX: You have no idea if there's a shark within 10 meters or within 10 miles. And so you give the sharks the benefit of the doubt and you think, "They could be right there waiting for me." And it's really one of those things that you have to mentally overcome.

RACHAEL: Which is what Rodney's gonna try to do right after we take a quick break.

LULU: Lulu.

LATIF: Latif.

RACHAEL: Rachael.

LULU: Radiolab.

LATIF: And we're back with the story of Rodney Fox, a man who was brutally attacked by a great white shark, desperately wants to get back in the water but is terrified of being attacked again.

RODNEY FOX: Seven or eight months after my shark attack, my wife took my young niece into the zoological gardens in town for a wander around. And as we were looking at the different animals, we came across the lion's cage. And as we walked up to the lion's cage, it started to roar. You know, lions, when they roar, it starts back at their tail and it goes right up through their body, up through their chests and out through their mouth. And the roar is incredible. It really takes you over and shakes you.

RACHAEL: And it strikes Rodney like, "Oh, these lions are kind of man eaters, exactly like sharks."

RODNEY FOX: With his mouth wide open, with big white teeth there.

RACHAEL: "But when I can look at it in a cage, it feels safe."

RODNEY FOX: And I thought, well maybe I could reverse the role. Maybe I could get in the cage myself and drop the cage over the side where all the—where some sharks are, and I can have a look at these great whites, and make up my own mind if I want to go diving with them again.

RACHAEL: And so again, Rodney cobbled together some materials.

RODNEY FOX: A steel mesh that they made for putting in concrete.

RACHAEL: And built a shark cage.

RODNEY FOX: A two-man cage that we could stand in, with little holes in the front that you could look out and maybe put your camera out from.

LATIF: Oh, so, like, this is the shark cage, like, that you see on National Geographic or whatever?

RACHAEL: Yeah, yeah. But actually Rodney is one of the first people to make and use a shark cage like that.

LATIF: Huh!

RACHAEL: So for him, this was like this original idea to overcome his fear.

LATIF: Huh!

RACHAEL: So Rodney has this cage, and then he decides he wants to try it out. So he finds a boat, gets a crew together.

RODNEY FOX: And so we went out on this trip, and ...

RACHAEL: They took the boat out to this place called Dangerous Reef, for a reason.

LULU: Great name!

RACHAEL: Little bit of a great white hotspot. They—they head out to these waters, and eventually they see a fin. So Rodney rigs up this cage.

RODNEY FOX: Lowered it over the side, jumped in the cage.

RACHAEL: And then he's just waiting, peering out into the dark water. Some fish dart by, the sunlight flashing off their scales. And then, he says ...

RODNEY FOX: I was looking and I just saw shadows.

RACHAEL: Drifting past the back of the boat.

RODNEY FOX: Just shadows down the end—or down again. And then all of a sudden I turned to my right and there's this submarine swimming past with eyes. And it swam only about three meters or ten feet in front of me, and almost looked like it was man-made, because it was so big.

RACHAEL: Rodney feels himself recoil.

RODNEY FOX: I moved to the back of the cage.

RACHAEL: And with his back pressed against the back of the cage, he looks at the shark for the first time. Just stares at it.

RODNEY FOX: This great big silver-gray great white shark.

RACHAEL: And as he's staring at it, he realizes the shark's not even really looking at him.

RODNEY FOX: It didn’t take any notice of me in the cage at all. It just was more interested in the fish. And that certainly was a big help for me.

RACHAEL: After that first day in the cage, Rodney found that it got easier and easier to return to the ocean.

RODNEY FOX: I spent thousands of hours in the water.

RACHAEL: His fear of being attacked, it never completely went away.

RODNEY FOX: But if I had worries about sharks ...

RACHAEL: He would just tell himself ...

RODNEY FOX: Generally sharks don't like humans.

RACHAEL: And he'd think about how indifferent that shark was to him when he was in the cage. And not only that, like, how beautiful it was. And so pretty soon he started sharing that experience with other people. Like, they would call him up and say they wanted to go out and see the sharks, too. Because that was the only way you could see a great white shark.

RODNEY FOX: Nobody had filmed or photographed great whites underwater.

RACHAEL: So Rodney started bringing filmmakers out there.

RODNEY FOX: One from Italy, and then one from England.

RACHAEL: And more people want to see it, and more people want to see it.

LULU: Wow!

RODNEY FOX: And I got this call from Hollywood.

RACHAEL: Somebody working with a 27-year-old filmmaker named Steven Spielberg.

RODNEY FOX: They were making a big budget shark film.

LULU: Oh! The Jaws people call him.

RACHAEL: Yes. Yes!

RODNEY FOX: Nobody knew it was Jaws at the time. They said they wanted to try and get some realistic footage in there. And I was pretty excited about this. And they wanted to come out for six weeks.

RACHAEL: So Rodney brought them out, and they shot hours and hours of footage. And then that crew, they went back to Hollywood. Fast forward a little while, and the movie comes out. And as we all know, monster shark terrorizing beachgoers.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, Jaws trailer: A mindless eating machine.]

RACHAEL: Hunting them down, never giving up. But the weird thing is when you watch the movie ...

CHRIS LOWE: You really didn't see a shark very often.

RACHAEL: ... you get an hour into the film without seeing a shark.

CHRIS LOWE: Yeah, you really don't see a lot of shark footage in that movie.

RACHAEL: Chris Lowe again, the shark scientist from before.

CHRIS LOWE: And I think that was actually the brilliance in the movie.

JEFFREY COHEN: The best monster movies always work by withholding the thing that you're supposed to be frightened of. And that really amplifies fear by causing this cognitive uncertainty. What is it? What can it do?

RACHAEL: This is Jeffery Cohen.

JEFFREY COHEN: Professor of English and Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University.

RACHAEL: And he studies monster stories.

JEFFREY COHEN: Godzilla.

RACHAEL: Frankenstein.

JEFFREY COHEN: Vampire movies, you name it.

RACHAEL: And he says in all these stories ...

JEFFREY COHEN: It's really when the monster is continually just at the edge of vision, those are the moments that—that just keep you on edge. And that is one of the reasons I think Jaws is so effective: it waits.

RACHAEL: Instead of showing you the shark, you just hear that iconic score.

JEFFREY COHEN: And you very quickly learn in that film that the soundtrack takes the place of the monster. Once you see it, it's actually not quite as scary anymore.

RACHAEL: Which is kind of like the exact thing Rodney learned for himself when he went down into the cages, and the thing he wanted to share with other people. And so when Rodney saw the movie ...

RODNEY FOX: I was embarrassed. I had no idea at the time that it was gonna frighten so many people out of the water. I didn't even tell people for 10 years that I really worked on it, because it was totally against what I wanted to do. I wanted to get people to understand and like sharks better. This made them hate sharks.

LULU: Well, yeah. I mean, it's like he invented this whole contraption to see it more clearly, and then ended up being complicit in this—this kind of, like, infection in our minds of seeing it as something so scary.

RACHAEL: Yeah. Like, he was able to kind of like, paint this masterpiece of—of a shark, and then we kind of wiped away all of these beautiful details, and all that was left was this outline of this creature that just feels so ominous. And that's not actually the version of the white shark that Rodney knows, it's just kind of the one that got handed to us. And so I decided I needed to see the sharks Rodney wanted us to see.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Okay, everybody. All right, regulators in.]

RACHAEL: For myself.

[ARCHIVE CLIP: Stand back. Okay guys, welcome to the cage.]

LULU: That's tomorrow, on day two of our week of sharks.

LATIF: Yeah. Join us as we come face to face with what I think still is one of the scariest things in the ocean. This episode was reported and produced by Rachael Cusick, with production and editing by Pat Walters. Mixing help and sound design by Jeremy Bloom, and it was fact-checked by Diane Kelly.

LULU: And one more thing: we want to give a huge thanks to everyone who supports Radiolab, especially right now. Everyone who's part of The Lab, our membership program, your support makes big projects like this possible, and we are so grateful.

LATIF: And if you aren't a member yet, or are thinking about giving more, this is the perfect time to take the plunge because if you join or re-up now, you will receive a really cool gift.

LULU: A limited edition Week of Sharks hat designed by the awesome Maine-based artist and surfer Ty Williams. It's so beautiful and fun, and it gives you a chance to show the world you support public radio in the form of Radiolab.

LATIF: And support sharks! It's available to everyone who joins The Lab this month, even for as little seven bucks a month.

LULU: You can join at Radiolab.org/join. Existing members, check your email for details. And thank you so much.

LATIF: This is "Swimming With Shadows," a Radiolab Week of Sharks.

LULU: We'll see you tomorrow.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Teddy, and I'm from Berkeley, California. And here are the staff credits. Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad, and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes: Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W. Harry Fortuna, David Gebel, Rebecca Laks, Maria Paz Gutiérrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neason, Sarah Qari, Sarah Sandbach, Anisa Vietze, Arianne Wack, Pat Walters, Molly Webster and Jessica Yung. With help from Rebecca Rand. Our fact-checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, Anna Pujol-Mazini and Natalie Middleton.]

[LISTENER: Hi, I'm Danielle from Madrid. Leadership support for Radiolab's science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

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