Humans have a problem. We're a little too soft. When you actually stop and think about how vulnerable you are, it's miraculous that you're able to survive a day. Just think about your neck for a moment. Your carotid arteries, your airway, these things are completely essential to your survival,

and yet they lie underneath less than an inch of material.

Material that is about as robust as a banana peel,

this is what stands between you and death at any given moment.

Now, quote-unquote, in the wild, in our ancestral state, that maybe wasn't such a problem, right?

You could even view the fact that we exist as evidence that maybe it's not such a problem under natural human conditions,

but in our more recent history,

in our post-agricultural era, this has become a bigger and bigger problem for almost every successive

generation. You come up with swords, now you need shields. You come up with steel-tipped arrows,

you need steel armor. You come up with steel-tipped arrows, you need steel armor. You come up with

bullets, you need bulletproof vests. You come up with machine guns, well, you're going to need a tank

for that, and so on and so forth. Our recent ancestors have had to repeatedly solve the problem

of our banana-like existence.

Now, unless your police or military, which some of you are, this may not feel relevant to you.

Our innate squishiness may only seem like a problem for the very narrow band of humanity

that has to deal with bullets and knives on a regular basis.

But it's a problem for you, too. In fact, you're surrounded by the solutions other people have

come up with for this very problem. To take just one example, every time you get into a car,

you are stepping into a collapsible exoskeleton with built-in airbags and

seat belts to keep your squishy body alive, in a world where we can now move at highway speeds.

Today, we're going to talk about an animal who doesn't have this problem.

In fact, they solved this problem so thoroughly that our speedy exoskeletons can drive right over them.

...